In left (or progressive or modernist) culture, a closed door is, by definition, an intolerable provocation to the human spirit. To open—and keep open—all existing doors is a categorical imperative, even if they open directly onto the tracks of a moving train.
Jean-Claude Michéa.
The quote couldn’t be more apt to what I discussed in the previous post. But it’s also relevant to the post about the 5-year boyfriend. The people who defend him might think they are on the right, but their guiding philosophy is profoundly leftist. They don’t understand the crucial importance of a firmly closed door. The concept doesn’t even occur to them. They believe that fluid lifestyles are the norm and keep feeling shocked by the consequences of the fluidity that they promote.
The only reason why Rapinoe has an athletic career is that men’s and women’s team exist and don’t play against each other. She would not have a job if the boundaries between men’s and women’s sports weren’t strict and impermeable. But then she says these things, and I think she’s completely sincere. The human capacity to hide from reality is limitless.
Forget Rapinoe. This is a widespread phenomenon among academics whose 2-days-a-week full-time jobs are only possible for as long as nations exist. Yet they do everything to argue themselves out of existence. I’ve never been able to understand this. I’ve asked this question many times. But nobody says anything. They make faces at me but there’s never a reply.
I have received complaints from readers that the blog organization has become weird. One person says that the posts no longer appear in chronological order. Another pointed out that if you are not signed in, some posts are not even visible to you.
I want to reassure everybody that this is not happening in response to anything I did. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t introduce any new settings. I’m doing exactly what I’ve always done. WordPress routinely has these moments of strange experimentation where they mess up a well-functioning system in order to justify the existence of their team of employees.
This is very annoying. I hope it goes back to normal soon. I have been wondering why some good posts receive no comments, and now I realize that people are probably not even seeing them. The logic behind the suppression of some posts by WordPress is completely incomprehensible. I haven’t added any tags to posts in a very long time, so it’s not that. If anybody observes any logic behind this madness, please let me know.
The French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa says that the goal of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was “the abolition of all cultural obstacles to the unimpeded reign of economic relations.” What is the sexual revolution, after all, if not the belief that people can be reduced to objects of consumption to be used and discarded at whim?
Michéa says that once we repudiate the “obligations associated with family, group membership and linguistic, moral, and cultural heritage”, the promised utopia of complete freedom does not arrive. Instead, we become subjects to the “tyranny of the unconscious.” We turn into the slaves of the desires we cannot even articulate.
It is my very strong opinion that “a boyfriend of five years” deserves everything that’s coming to him. He strung this poor woman along for half a decade. She owes him nothing. Yes, the famous soccer player will discard her in a couple of weeks. But she’ll get a lot of expensive outfits out of him, which will help her in her search for a normal guy who might actually offer something beyond the status of a forever girlfriend.
Seriously, it’s like people who are commenting on the situation are incapable of hearing themselves. “A boyfriend of five years!! How could she?” Imagine the daily humiliation of that young woman. Everybody raising their eyebrows and giggling. What was she supposed to do? Wait around for five more years? Maybe then the dude would finally choose her? Or not, who knows.
Curiously, it is the exact same people who keep bitching about low birth rates that think this is a great life plan for a young woman. Sit there waiting for God knows what until it becomes way too late to have children.
Before I left for Florida, I had dinner with a friend who is the mother of a 24-year-old woman. This friend is politically very, very liberal. She is a fellow college professor. She said, “Josh proposed last week. Of course, they’ve been seeing each other for almost two years. There is no chance Emma [her daughter] would continue the relationship if a proposal was not coming at this point.” My friend might be as liberal as they get, but I know her well, and she would have personally made beef hash out of Josh if he had tried to turn her daughter into “a girlfriend of five years.” My point is that you don’t need to be a reactionary to notice that this is a bad situation for a young woman.
“Women delay childbirth until it’s too late. How horrible!” Yeah, because “faithful boyfriends of five years” are wasting their lives. It’s exactly like that character in Jem Calder’s new novel. After a twelve-year engagement, he kicks the fiancée to the curb and picks up an eager twenty-year-old at a bar.
And by the way, I’ve seen a variation on the posted comment in my feed on X in five different languages from at least three dozen accounts, all run by men. Who are either clinical morons or putting on a very convincing imitation.
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. . . His ideal society… incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business.
In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure—on the immediate gratification of every desire, no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral.
Enormous crowds of people waving the national flag came out to celebrate in every city of Spain. In Catalonia and the Basque Country, thousands of young people are chanting “We are Spanish” in a gesture of complete rejection of separatism. The narrative that the ruling Socialist party has tried to promote (“we won thanks to mass migration”) is mocked and rejected by the people. The winning players give interviews about their love of God, family, and the monarchy. The player who scored the winning goal in the final is making public appearances in a MAGA hat.
The problem in my current project is that the three volumes of Chirbes’s diaries are thick and heavy. I work in different places, such as:
– my office on campus – my bedroom – the library – the other library – a coffee shop – and so on
I have to lug these volumes everywhere because I need all three at all times when I’m writing. I read gladly on Kindle, but for work, I need paper books. I can’t imagine having to find my way around the digital versions. Every scholar I’ve talked to agrees very enthusiastically that it’s impossible to work with digital copies. There is something in the structure of the human brain that requires a physical book you can touch and leaf through.
For the longest time, I thought that people who patronize this place are insane. It sells pickled cucumbers steeped in Kool-Aid or jam. I once accepted a sample while queuing up for another stall. One lick of a pickled cucumber smothered in maraschino cherry goo almost sent me into a hyperglycemic coma. To say that it tastes bad is like saying that the sun is warm. I’m from the USSR. I have tasted the most bizarre gastronomic concoctions. Plus, I adore pickles. But that candied pickle was atrocious beyond my scariest imaginings.
Finally, after a random YouTube segment, I figured out this place’s mystery. It’s an African-American tradition, a cultural thing. Twenty-eight years in North America, and nobody bothered to explain. Far be it from me to criticize anybody’s culinary traditions given that I’ve seen people look in horror at the Soviet-style buckwheat we chomp up like it’s nobody’s business. But I would have appreciated a hint.
Speaking of culture-specific foodstuffs, today I bought five 1 lb tubs of this:
I would have gotten more, but that’s all they had. People of my cultural background are dedicated to this thing. I had it for dinner today with plain kefir and cinnamon. We use it to make pies or quiche sort of dishes. A Kool-Aid pickle it isn’t, but it’s an example of a culture-specific food.
People are clueless. The pro-life ethicist in question is as unhirable as a mega-feminist, one who believes in abortion until kindergarten. Nobody’s getting hired. Gender studies programs died a very long time ago. This is a war over the gnawed-down bones of a long-expired dinosaur. None of this is remotely relevant to what is actually happening in higher education.
The idea that anybody cares about anybody’s opinion at this point is so quaint as to border on deranged. If we get permission to hire, we receive it so late that all we can squeeze into the search process is one rushed conversation with a candidate. In the humanities, and especially in gender studies, there are no tenure-track jobs. There are not even instructorships. We’re talking about lecturer positions for which universities almost invariably conduct hiring without a formal interview. Neither lecturers nor instructors are expected to conduct research, so their opinions do not come into play at any point during hiring.
I’ve been hiring for six years. The idea that I would have time or interest to inquire about any candidate’s opinions on any subject is downright outlandish.
I can imagine approaching the person who heads our gender studies program. She is, of course, untenured and directs this program as a sort of a volunteer gig on the side. If I were to address her with a sentence starting with the words “In your hiring process,” she would think I’m experiencing a severe neurological event. She has less likelihood of ever getting to hire anybody than I do of walking on the Moon.
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