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The future Liberals want by Noah Smith on substack. It’s not that interesting a vision really: the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant with oh thanks an olive branch for conservatives.
I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.
What strikes me about it is a vision of total anomie and dissolving of any sense of common culture and this is supposed to be good. Each nations singular (or maybe 2-3 tops) religion replaced by anything or nothing. Each national ethnic group replaced by a multicultural hodge podge with inclusion and acceptance for all. Diversity of income (inequality). Imagine there are no countries…
I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision — or indeed if they really exist. Is a world of radical self invention fuelled by technology compatible at all with human flourishing as its always been known: freedom to choose the burdens we bear for maximum meaning. What if blank slatism wasn’t a description of the world, but a challenge!
It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).
On that note, I couldn't get passed his bit on Lizzo and the crystal flute. Everything about an obese woman in a skinsuit twerking with an American historical artifact seems like such a ridiculous parody of repulsive decadence that I literally cannot understand casting this as a form of "inclusive nationalism". This looks so clearly like triumphant mockery of the downfall of America's heritage that I'm baffled at an apparently sincere view of this as a Good Thing.
I guess you're also of the opinion that The Beatles violated the Budokan?
There's actually a really fun (or !!fun!!) set of philosophical questions, here, when it comes to the sacred and the profane.
As an example... have you ever heard the Johnny Cash song Hurt? It's fairly well-regarded -- not unusual to see in top fifty of all-times list -- but if you've not, it's worth listening to. It's a haunting song of depression, self-destruction, and mistaken choices that still can bring a tear to my eye; while I'm not especially attached to the genre, the singer takes the genre to the limits of its emotional range. Shelly's Ozymandias put to song, in a way, and made more impactful by how its framing interacts with the mortality of the leads and even its setting: the singer and his wife, who feature heavily in the music video, were already in poor health at the time of recording, and died not long after, while the abandoned Johnny Cash museum that they perform in
would burn to the groundEDIT: would get turned into offices and a cafe within the decade, and the singer's mansion would burn down a few years after the song's release.I don't have much interaction with the sacred, but that's pretty close, for me.
There's many other versions, as one might expect for such a popular song, and while some feel very much like they're using the song rather than treating it respectfully -- Rick and Morty used it as a season finale closer, in the same sense that Shrek used 'Hallelujah' -- perhaps the best-known is the Nine Inch Nails version. It's not bad, from a genre and technical sense... but it feels profane, compared to the Cash version. Part of that's a matter of context: a seventy-year-old Cash's needles aren't the same as a thirty- or forty-year-old Trent Reznor's. Some of that's just that the gimmicks Reznor's video uses (an atomic bomb, a decaying animal played in reverse) happened to become dated where Cash's didn't.
But the overarcing piece is just so heavily opposed to the themes of the Cash version that it's jarring. Cash's version starts slow and gradually builds across the entire piece to its final crescendo, before the inevitable fading conclusion. NIN clamors cymbals throughout points, sometimes interrupting or overriding the lyrics and the rise and fade of action. Razor used the song as an opener, and the music video (and at least some radio cuts) end in applause.
There are two lyrical differences: Cash focuses on "the pain" and wears a biblical "crown of thorns", NIN focuses on "my pain" and dresses its lead in "a crown of shit". Cash's song is a ruler mourning the rampage of time and unavoidable mistake across an empire that no longer even remembers its once-master, resigned that even could the man regain his station, that he can not help but hurt those who still care for him with his own death. Reznor's vocals are angry, a drug addict searching for the next high, driving away everyone he once loved, moaning all the time about those hurts and knowing errors, offering and threatening anything for that next rush. It's not that the Reznor version is wrong, but it's coming to a deep subject without the earnest seriousness you'd expect or hope.
Of course, Cash's cover came seven years after Reznor's original.
/needle scratch/
That's an extreme example. Reznor thought Cash made the song more of his own than NIN had, and Reznor had hesitated to allow the cover precisely because it was so close to Reznor's heart. But I have no doubt that there are people that think of NIN's message as Sacred in the way I react to Cash's -- someone's pain being driven by addiction and hubris and anger makes it no less real.
((Presumably, someone that likes The Magician's.))
I'm sure, as well, that there are versions that go the other direction : Christian or 'Christian'-themed songs that only took a serious effort at resonating with virtue when put into other framework (Cohen's 'Hallelujah' was actually popularized by John Cale... and Shrek), and I expect the majority of Sacred works are more sacred in their original tellings to their original audiences than the shoddy repackagings.
Which is a long story to say that this feeling exists, and it doesn't necessarily mean we've got to respect it... (and even argues against, to some extent)
But there's an awkward bit, there. We have decided that we're going to respect some sacred matters. Indeed, there's a pretty sizable list: socons might mock them as 'hurt feelings', but whatever you call it, there's a wide variety of discomforts where we allow massive social force and, in many jurisdictions, employment impact and direct legal impact. Yet it's hard to have this conversation without mentioning Serrano: it's not just that the profane must be allowed, but that it must be accepted and the state actively funds it and its shallow pretenses. Or to contrast varying responses to different sorts of public statue iconoclasm.
I don't know that this should fit in this category. It's very easy, as socons point out, once offense is a tool, to make being offended your core. I don't think a lot of the people raising objections about this care about flutes, or twerking, or the Library of Congress. The closest parallels I can think of -- protests being photoshopped least they offend politicians and children, at the risk of repeating myself, the outrage over the McDonald's meals at the White House -- aren't quite the same.
But this dismissal seems like a failure to engage with the problem. The Beatles did their Budokan show in 1966. Nevermind that most people here don't know anything about traditional Japanese martial arts competitions, or that the venue did get transformed into a music hall and pro-wrestling show house; none of us know this Sacred nature, if it exists, and very few people here would be old enough to have been exposed to it even had we been born in immediately-post-WWII-era Japan.
Thanks for introducing me to a whole bunch of things I'd not previously been aware of. I hope your won't mind a small correction: if I have understood Wikipedia correctly, it was Cash's private mansion that burned down, while the House of Cash was turned into offices and a cafe.
Ah, thank you. Corrected.
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