Opinions, art, debate
One particularly enjoyable exchange at the meeting yesterday was this.
Me: Your proposal is based on the idea that change is always good and that our goal should be to pursue change, any change, at any cost, all of the time. That is not true, however.
Administrator: It is! Change is good. It’s great, in fact.
Me: Any change is good?
Administrator: Of course!
Me: Including climate change?
Administrator: Oh.
The only argument that the administration was able to advance in support of its proposed measure yesterday was an appeal to emotion. We were asked to vote yes on the measure because several people had worked hard to prepare the text of the proposal. No other argument was advanced. Nobody even tried to claim that the measure was good for students or the university.
It is a strange argument because adult people should have emotional distance from the products of their labor. They should have an even larger distance from the others’ response to the products of their labor. It’s cruel to tell a 5-year-old that you don’t like her drawing of a Christmas tree. She is not at the stage of her development where she has a strong sense of self and can separate herself from something she created. She’ll think you are rejecting her if you reject her work.
An adult self, however, exists separately from its products. If your husband says, “honey, I don’t like this soup, is there anything else to eat?”, the child says, “mommy, I don’t want to talk right now, I prefer to listen to music,” and the publisher says, “unfortunately, we will not be accepting your book Neoliberal Love for publication,” it’s mildly disappointing but not crushing or deeply painful.
The administration wasn’t infantilising us with its appeal to “but we worked so hard, and you are hurting our feelings.” Children are immune to arguments based on this form of empathy. The administration was infantilising itself. It was asking us to take on an enormous amount of extra bureaucratic work out of… compassion for the administration.
We are seeing this in everything, including politics. It’s fashionable to say “vote for me because I have this identity that has suffered historic indignities.” We often respond by getting into an argument over whether the suffering the candidate claims is real. But that shouldn’t even be part of the discussion. Let’s say it’s real. So what? We are not your mommy.
It’s often said that people in power talk to us like we are kindergartners. I’m not seeing that, however. To the contrary, they are talking to us like they are kindergartners. We are supposed to be compassionate and kind to their poor results because we are supposed to see them as small and helpless. At a time when systems of power in politics, academia and everywhere else are consolidating to crush any form of dissent, the very people to whom increasingly more power accrues every day put on an act of being small, defenseless children.
This is how you know who has power these days. It is whoever can afford to take on this childish, highly emotional persona.
Friends! Citizens! Today I have found my true calling. It’s a bit late to change professions but I experienced democratic politics, and I’m in love.
It’s funny that I started the day debating democracy on the blog, and then immediately life tested my declared love for democracy.
What happened is that I was elected to the Faculty Senate. I was very reluctant because I’m busy and had no interest in academic politiquing.
Boy, was I ever wrong.
Being a senator is the bomb. Today we had a very long session of the Senate. The administration is trying to bring forth a very neoliberal measure. Enough of the faculty members are able to see through it, so there was a huge battle in the Senate. I was leading the charge, making enormous efforts to avoid saying the word neoliberalism because I noticed that people don’t like it to be named.
The other day my mother called me a conflict-avoidant, appeasing Jew. I would love it if members of our administration could hear this characterization of me because they’d have fits of hysteria.
So we are arguing, people are running out in tears, insulting each other, impugning each other’s motives and vilifying each other’s characters.
One faculty member tells everybody that he damns us all to hell.
The administration tries to guilt-trip us into approving the measure, saying things like, “we’ve put a lot of work into it, and you don’t seem to appreciate everything we’ve done. How do you think it makes us feel?” Which is exactly what my mother said after calling me a conflict-avoidant, appeasing Jew, so that didn’t have much effect.
Finally, we vote. Yelling increases.
Then, a melancholic professor gets up and says, in a beautiful Louisiana drawl, “Folks, I counted several times, and we don’t have a quorum. We can’t vote.”
Two and a half hours of this, and in the end we couldn’t vote. The administration will be livid.
I love democracy. At this rate, this horrible measure will never pass.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Marxist. He had a lot of piss-poor ideas. He was against national borders and very supportive of mass migration. I have no idea how he managed to make that particular kind of raving lunacy coexist with the rest of his ideas but there you have it.
In reading Bauman, I discarded all of the stuff that doesn’t interest me and used what does to develop my own ideas. That’s the approach I recommend to everybody.
Rafael Chirbes, my favorite writer, was a Communist. Michel Foucault was a raging pedo. But Foucault came up with the expression “entrepreneurs of the self” which laid the foundations of the thinking on neoliberal subjectivity.
What I’m saying is that we can give ourselves over to the outrage that other people are not perfect and sometimes downright shitty, or we can resist this self-righteous impulse and find nuggets of value wherever they exist.
It is very appropriate that the thread on AI is sprouting great questions. We are humans, we think, we create. The discussions you can have with AI are not really discussions. They are exercises in narcissistic mirroring. When people say that they talked to AI for an hour, it’s as off-putting as if they said they stared in a mirror for that amount of time.
As for equality, this is an important point. People often confuse “equal to” and “equal as.” For example, is the person who asked this question equal to serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? Morally, not a bit. Dahmer is absolutely 100% inferior to this reader in terms of morality. But in spite of this very obvious moral inequality, should they have equal rights under the law? Of course. We realize how immoral and inferior to us in every way Dahmer was but we still respect his human dignity. We don’t support him being tortured, starved, or violated in jail. We respect his right to legal representation and trial. Remember those students who hounded a professor because he acted as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer? I’m sure we all agree that they were wrong. Every criminal, no matter how disgusting, deserves legal representation. That’s the beauty of a civilized society which punishes crime while respecting equal rights under the law for everybody.
Is everybody intellectually equal to everybody else? Obviously not. But should the law treat the dumb and the brilliant equally? Obviously yes. I’m clearly enormously intellectually superior to Candace Owens (or the persona she exhibits in her videos). But both she and I should have the exact same right to free expression. I’m horrified by the crap she spouts on YouTube. But I’m adamantly opposed to anybody censoring her or her show in any way. That is what true respect for equality looks like. If I were to pretend that Owens is not 3 standard deviations below me on the IQ scale,* that wouldn’t be respect for equality. That would be myth-making in service of ideology. It would make a mockery of the very idea of equality under the law because the most important thing about that concept is not that everybody is the same but that everybody is guaranteed the same rights in spite of being very much not the same. Equal rights for unequal people is one of the highest achievements of our civilization, steeped in the foundational ideas of Christianity.
I do not support trying to impose or export or promote this way of organizing society to anybody else. Different cultures do things differently. All I said here has to do with our nation-state. Great Britain, for example, has clearly chosen the path that leads away from these principles. I will continue mocking the Brits for this but I don’t support invading them to stop their slide towards authoritarianism.
*Once again, it’s possible that Owens is not actually a moron but plays one on YouTube as a moneymaking strategy. Let’s accept that when I refer to Owens, what I have in mind is her public persona and not anything else.
This is an important question because it rests on a fallacy which haunts us in many aspects of life.
Correctly describing something doesn’t mean you hate what you describe. Identifying flaws in something, or somebody, doesn’t mean you hate them. My husband states correctly that my singing is atrocious. It’s truly very bad. But does his clear-eyed evaluation of my ridiculously poor singing skills mean he doesn’t love me? Of course not. He loves me profoundly. But it’s not an imaginary, perfect me that he loves. It’s the real me whose terrible singing is the least important of my very many flaws.
Often we hear honest descriptions of things or people being labeled as hate. As if love consisted in shrouding the object of this emotion in utterly unrealistic perfection. But love is the exact opposite. You don’t love your friends, your country, or your relatives because they are perfect. Love is patient and love is kind because it understands, accepts and tolerates the flaws.
Your love of democracy is not really love if you idealize it and don’t see its enormous flaws. Ask yourself if you can still love it if you fully accept what these flaws are. Some of these flaws are what I outlined yesterday:
If you can’t get excited about a system of government that accommodates millions of excitable, undisciplined, and low-intelligence Candace Owenses, if you can’t see the rightness and the beauty in such a system, guess what?
You don’t love democracy.
This is another problem with democracy. It doesn’t pay to have a long-term vision. Doing things today that are oriented towards anything beyond the next election, which is always a few months away, makes no sense.
As a result, nothing stands between the love of “societal disruption” by people like Pichai and all the rest of us. Politicians are chasing the happy pill that will bring instant gratification, and future be damned. This is why no political force in the country has even attempted to take a position regarding AI. Politicians will do so when it’s too late. Then they’ll run around like headless chickens, promising harebrained schemes to solve everything in one fell swoop. And will end up solving nothing.
Sure there’s no comparison. Fuentes is Socrates in comparison with these Heritage hacks. They can all stick their considered thoughts, with the piss-poor results those thoughts brought us, very deep into their anal cavities.
I despise this whole “guardrails on discourse” crowd. They’ve been pearl-clutching, denouncing, condemning, disavowing and repudiating for weeks while everything is falling apart around them.
The imagined community of a nation needs a story of itself that is positive and inspiring. Look at the American story. The Pilgrims, the frontiersmen, the Wild West. We achieved, we built, we overcame. That’s a great, positive story. And look at the results. Excellent results.
Unfortunately, Latin American countries locked into a miserable narrative of themselves. We were conquered, genocided, victimized. The results match the narrative. And it’s dumb because the Latin American “we” is not the indigenous “we.” It’s the mestizo “we”. Latin American “we” of necessity includes Spaniards because Latin America speaks Spanish. But that is not reflected in the national narratives where the “we” is always an utterly vanquished, robbed and immiserated victim suffering at the hands of Spaniards first and Americans forever after.
This is why it’s important to have good, high-quality elites. Who else is going to create the shared story of the nation, which is always a complicated process involving many people and occupying a long stretch of time? The Latin American elites have failed abysmally. They continue failing because they are still pursuing the victimhood angle.
Historically very recently in Great Britain people were arrested for being gay. Today, a woman is charged for using the word “faggot” in a private communication without any reference to anybody’s sexuality. This happened within a blink of an eye. From one extreme, it went to another.
I have a very sincere question to people who support censorship. How do you know that tomorrow your beliefs, which are completely normal and run of the mill today, won’t be declared chargeable offenses? How do you know that this morning you didn’t send a text message or write anything on social media that tomorrow will be used to deprive you of your livelihood and even freedom? What gives you this complete certainty that it won’t touch you?
This is not a rhetorical question. We’ve seen this happen to so many people so many times. Old statements that at the time they were made were considered normal and acceptable are used to destroy people today. Why wouldn’t it happen to you? What is the mechanism you use to reassure yourself that you will be immune?
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