Opinions, art, debate
We voted 3 times today at the faculty senate. Twice mine was the only voice that said “nay.” Loudly. The third time, I was joined by one other voice.
The upside is that I voted my conscience and that’s always good. The downside is that every time this happens, people want to become my friend. And I have even less time for that now because my cat expects me to play with her every evening. Today she chased me off my bed when I tried to abbreviate my playing duties.
This is the weirdest commercial. The company is openly saying that they no longer make cool cars.
“See this incredibly cool car? Well, you can’t get it. We don’t make it anymore!”
I really thought they’d reveal something cool at the end.
Losers.
At a soporific faculty meeting, I was granted an unexpected pleasure of sitting next to an extremely entertaining professor from India who told the most hilarious stories about “all those fucking nice white liberal ladies with their fucking DEI”. I don’t know how he knew that I’m a nice white lady who is not liberal but it means he’s good at his profession because his field requires that you should know how to read people.
I haven’t had this much fun at work since…. I don’t even remember since when.
These guys with body counts treat women like toilets, and women treat them like toilets in return. Then both sides pout at each other because everybody wants to feel extremely special but can’t be assed to be decent to other people.
These are all stories from the world that no longer exists. These “tiger” parents are preparing their children for a long-gone economy. I don’t care if they are Chinese, American, or Alpha Centauri. They are behind the times. They have already lost.
The world that currently exists requires internal motivation. The disciplinarian society is gone. We can debate if that’s good or bad but the fact is, it’s now an anachronism. These tiger moms are chasing a dead dragon.
Everything today is about inner motivation. You have to have the fire inside for whatever it is you do. There’s no demand for obedient, quiet drones. You need to have a very strong sense of self. We are in the economy of selfhood.
I spent all evening yesterday telling my kid to be done with the studying already and just go and play. She refused and at bedtime showed me a timesheet of her own design where she recorded how much time she had spent on each field of study. This is not assigned at school. I have never asked her to do this. I have never asked her to study at all. I’m not doing anything to foster it. But I do intuitively know how to raise for inner motivation. You do it by pursuing the exact opposite strategy from tiger-momming.
We live in an extremely permissive, self-indulgent society. Maybe I wish it were less so. But it won’t be. The boundary between happiness and unhappiness in such a society lies inside everybody individually. You need to build an inner caparace for your fire and police its boundaries maniacally in order not to spill like a puddle of grey misery. Everybody will have to do it for themselves or they are majorly screwed. As a parent, you need to foster inner strength, not break it.
This is the problem with the socialist mentality in a nutshell:
In the hours before he wrote this post, Senator Sanders (or his aide) spent money on whatever he wanted to spend it on. And he didn’t spend money on whatever he didn’t feel like. Yet when Jeff Bezos did the same, it’s supposed to be a problem.
It’s his money, little dude. It’s vulgar to bitch about how people spend their money. Raising the issue of jewelry Bezos bought for his wife is extremely vulgar. Stop counting other people’s money. Stop trying to tell them how to spend it. If somebody is willing to donate to the causes you care about, show gratitude. If they aren’t willing, it’s their prerogative.
I’m not a huge fan of Bezos but I despise these attempts to spend somebody else’s money.
My friends, if you are into the mystery / mommy lit genre, you need to be reading Alice Feeney. She’s the best on the market right now. Her new novel My Husband’s Wife is excellent. There are surprises on every page. The novel is very well-plotted and hammers home the idea that there’s nothing more important than family. Don’t be a stupid workaholic. Don’t cheat. Don’t be a prima donna who’s jumping from bed to bed in search of excitement. Go home and be with your family, the novel says. Hold your child close and thank heavens that you have a child.
Feeney writes a lot about the children scarcity. This is a common thread among her books but My Husband’s Wife is her best. It’s really a perfectly plotted mystery. Scorned wives, betrayals, a shady tech company that promises to predict the date of your death. Massive amounts of enjoyment.
I don’t have a work husband, although I’m not as opposed to the concept as many people are. But I do have work daddies. My Associate Deans are usually my work daddies, and I’m already on my third one, with the exact same kind of relationship with each of them. I activate protective feelings in them. It’s a good thing because it makes for a great work process.
Many people at my department treat me like their mom, including much older colleagues. I hate it and can’t wait to rehome them to somebody else.
A thinker who made interesting contributions to the discussions of conservatism is John Kekes. He makes a very important point which is that conservatives define what it means to live a good life based on how one’s course of actions corresponds to the existing moral order. This moral order exists in reality and outside of individual wishes of human beings. To a conservative, “lives are good if they conform to this moral order and bad if they do not,” says Kekes.
A liberal also looks for a path to a good life. His compass, however, is moved from the external reality into his inner world. The measure of good and bad is not external to him. It is, on the contrary, completely internal. Things are good if they emanate from the from the desires of his authentic self. His goal in life is to reveal this inner self as fully as possible to himself and others. The external moral order is, to him, not a good and wonderful thing. It is, rather, an absolute horror that places limitations on the manifestations of his inner authentic self.
This is a great way to draw a defining line between conservative and liberal worldviews. Does the idea of a moral order to the creation of which you did not contribute attract or repel you? Should there me external moral limitations on the desiring self? Yesterday we talked about the over-reliance on the concept of consent. This is precisely what happens when we do not accept an external moral order (whether it comes from God, tradition, history, or anything else) and try to resolve every moral issue by appealing to the desires of individuals.
Here is how Kekes puts the contradiction between inner desire and outward goodness:
Good lives must be satisfying and beneficial, but these
requirements often conflict because satisfying lives may
not be beneficial and beneficial lives may not be satisfying.
This raises the question of which requirement should
be dominant, and it has far-reaching political consequences
how it is answered.
Are the “Iwannas” of the desiring self the most important thing in the world? Or should there be limitations placed on ways in which individuals seek satisfaction? Should “social authority prevail over individual autonomy”? Or vice versa? And in what areas of life?
Let’s stop here for the time being but I will have more about Kekes later.
Conservatives are a lot more intellectually adventurous than their opponents these days. On the negative side, this sometimes leads to nuttiness and conspiracy theorizing. On the positive, it creates interesting ideas.
There was a lot of exciting thinking coming from the left until mid 2010s. Zygmunt Bauman wrote his best stuff in the period between 2000 and 2006. Dardot and Laval published The New Way Of The World: On Neoliberal Society in 2013. Sennett’s The Culture of New Capitalism is from 2006. Jim McGuigan came out with Cool Capitalism in 2009. Patricia Ventura published Neoliberal Culture in 2013. César Rendueles’s Sociophobia is also from 2013. But that’s it. 2013 was the last good year for leftist thinkers. Since then, bupkes. There’s such fear to run afoul of the increasingly severe speech codes that nobody is saying anything interesting or insightful at all.
This vacuum created a lot of space for conservative thinkers to come to the fore. Diego Fusaro, Renaud Camus, Jean-Claude Michéa, Patrick Deneen, Byung-Chul Han, Paul Kingsnorth, Curtis Yarvin. There’s a lot of great stuff coming out. All of it points away from liberalism. Ideas are brewing.
I have no idea if the left can come back from its self-imposed terror of words. It would be great if it did. I wouldn’t be anywhere without the philosophers I listed above, and I want people to think and explore in different directions. But the current stage in the evolution of thought is what I described. Great ebullience on the right and complete silence on the left.
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