October Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote at THE ZONE about the return of neoconservatism, animal welfare, adult ennui, Nick Cave and the religious implications of popular music, reparations, Piers Morgan, young men growing more right-wing, “the global majority”, the meaning of conversation and Jordan Peterson and the problem with “content”. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if that sounds interesting.

I wrote for The Critic about middlebrow political books, the attraction of extremes, landfill indie, Boris Johnson, Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Chris Kaba verdict, “tropes”, political comedy and the Conservative leadership race.

I wrote for the American Conservative about pro wrestlers and the US election.

Finally, my dog reviewed a philosophical book about dogs.

What a busy month.

Golden autumn. Typical. The year where I wrote a piece bitching about the end of the summer has been the year with the crispest and sunniest autumnal weather I’ve experienced. The best season? No. But its pleasures have been undeniable.

Two weeks ago, a friend and I went mushroom picking in the forest near our town. At 6.30, the morning was cool and bright and the forest floor was littered with pickable fungi. We reflected that a few years ago, there would have been a 90% chance that we would have been asleep with a day of pain and nausea ahead of us.

Well, there’s still always a chance of that but it’s good to have some diversity.

The Joe Rogan Inexperience. I’m not going to hold forth on who Americans should vote for because I’m not American, I’ve never been to America et cetera. One thing I know a lot about from America, however, is The Joe Rogan Experience. (I’ve been watching since before Rogan has his own studio.)

Donald Trump appeared on the podcast this month — in an episode that has been viewed more than 40 million times — but Kamala Harris insisted that Rogan travel to her and that the interview last for no longer than an hour. I don’t think Rogan has ever done an interview outside of his “home base” and I only recall one episode — out of more than 2000 — being an hour long.

My point is simple: either Harris’s team are delusional enough that they think Rogan is actually a hard right demagogue and not an easygoing interviewer who would bend over backwards to show how non-partisan he can be, or her team have such a lack of confidence in her abilities that they don’t trust her to have a long-form interview with an easygoing interviewer who would bend over backwards to show how non-partisan he can be.

The only other possibility is that they think his scandals make him morally untouchable. But Harris has already done an interview with Howard Stern — a man with a long career of demeaning women, the disabled, the dead et cetera.

If she loses, in other words, it has been an astonishingly poorly run campaign.

The resurrection of Francis Fukuyama. This month I was briefly taken in by a rather cruel online hoax which held that the author of The End of History was history. Professor Fukuyama soon assured the world that he was very much alive.

An Italian prankster, Tommaso Debenedetti, turned out to the culprit. Debenedetti, indeed, turned out to be the architect of various rumours that people had died — attempting, in his words, to “show how easy it is to fool the press in the era of social media”. Alright, a valid goal, but couldn’t it be done in a manner that doesn’t entail the risk of giving someone’s wife a heart attack?

Ironically, Mr Debenedetti himself died days afterwards…

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Kidding.

Scientized angels. I really enjoyed this piece by Sam Buntz, for Athwart, on the philosophical implications of UFOs:

In essence, aliens are scientized angels who herald an inverted revelation. Rather than choirs who sing of the grace given by a transcendent moral order, the aliens are messengers of a scientific equivalent: the power to seize control over cosmic processes.

Symbolic capital. Oliver Traldi insightfully reviews Musa al-Gharbi on wokeness and status:

[At] times al-Gharbi seems to suggest that the desire for more symbolic capital, for more social status, is a more essential human drive than the desire for more money; financial gains hit a threshold of diminishing returns and baseline satisfaction, whereas symbolic gains don’t seem to. And “because status is intrinsically relative . . . status competition much more closely approximates a zero-sum game.”

The theoretical and the real. Philippe Lemoine makes a case for pessimism in Ukraine:

A key lesson of that discussion is that, as Obama said in 2015, statesmen should pay attention not so much to their theoretical capabilities but to their real capabilities, given the political constraints they face, and only make commitments they are truly prepared to honour. Unfortunately, I don’t think that Western officials have heeded that lesson in dealing with Russia and Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, a mistake for which the price has already been high and will be much higher by the time the war is over.

I got various tweets about how I must love Putin for republishing this piece, as if one must always be optimistic about the things one supports. I’d love to see a substantive response.

Actually existing postliberalism. At one point on my intellectual journey — the sort of journey that ends not a point of serene enlightenment but at the point of death — I thought the dominant trend of our age was individualism. Well, there are certainly atomising phenomena in the modern world. But the concept is inadequate for describing modern politics, which, for all the rhetorical focus on individual choice, is quietly shaped by a strange managerial collectivism. Nathan Pinkoski writes for First Things:

The central drama of the last three decades has been the fusion of state and society. The ’89ers ushered in actually existing postliberalism, a society in which governmental power, cultural power, and economic power are coordinated to buttress regime security and punish the impure. 1989 heralded not the triumph of liberalism but its downfall.

Gut feelings. Becca Rothfeld considers digestion:

Richardson is interested in the gut’s workings, but she is also interested in its symbolism — in how it “came to be understood as an organ under threat from the forces of the present.” In other words, she is interested in why we are all sick to our stomachs and what exactly the epidemic of digestive disquiet portends.

An unwelcome guest. Russell T. Warne reflects on IQ:

One of the reasons that news on intelligence research is so often negative is that some of the field’s most robust findings are unwelcome to the general public. The intelligence researcher is like a tactless party guest who tells his companions that some people are unavoidably smarter than others, that there are real-world consequences to IQ differences, and that there is not much that can be done about any of this. Such a guest would probably not be invited back

Joan and Eve. Philippa Snow writes on Joan Didion, Eve Babitz and public personae:

Being around Babitz in real life seemed to negate some of her magic for Anolik; in Didion and Babitz, the author’s realization that she might have known “the wrong Eve” all along recasts the spell. There is a third way to react to a persona: to appreciate it for the work its maintenance requires. Doing so is a form of respect, perhaps even an expression of love. What is it they say on social media? “A crush is just a lack of information.”

Have a lovely month,

Ben