I want to start with a key observation, without which much of the rest of this will not make much sense: rituals are supposed to be effective. Let me explain what that means.
We tend to have an almost anthropological view of rituals, even ones we still practice: we see them in terms of their social function or psychological impact. Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (the Sci-fi miniseries; I can’t find the quote in the text, but then it’s a lot of text) put it wonderfully, “Ritual is the whip by which men are enlightened.” That is, ritual’s primary effect is the change that takes place in our minds, rather than in the spiritual world. This is the same line of thinking whereby a Church service is justified because it “creates a sense of community” or “brings believers together”. We view rituals often like plays or concerts, experiences without any broader consequences beyond the experience of participation or viewing itself.
This is not how polytheism (ancient or modern) works (indeed, it is not how most modern Christianity works: the sacraments are supposed to be spiritually effective; that is, if properly carried out, they do things beyond just making us feel better. You can see this articulated clearly in some traditional prayers, like the Prayer of Humble Access or Luther’s Flood Prayer).
Instead, religious rituals are meant to have (and will have, so the believer believes, if everything is done properly) real effects in both the spiritual world and the physical world. That is, your ritual will first effect a change in the god (making them better disposed to you) and second that will effect a change in the physical world we inhabit (as the god’s power is deployed in your favor).
But to reiterate, because this is key: the purpose of ritual (in ancient, polytheistic religious systems) is to produce a concrete, earthly result. It is not to improve our mood or morals, but to make crops grow, rain fall, armies win battles, business deals turn out well, ships sail, winds blow. While some rituals in these religions do concern themselves with the afterlife or other seemingly purely spiritual concerns (the lines between earthly and spiritual in those cases are – as we’ll see, somewhat blurrier in these religions than we often think them to be now), the great majority of rituals are squarely focused on what is happening around us, and are performed because they do something.
This is the practical side of practical knowledge; the ritual in polytheistic religion does not (usually) alter you in some way – it alters the world (spiritual and physical) around you in some way. Consequently, ritual is employed as a tool – this problem is solved by a wrench, that problem by a hammer, and this other problem by a ritual. Some rituals are preventative maintenance (say, we regularly observe this ritual so this god is always well disposed to us, so that they do X, Y, and Z on the regular), others are a response to crisis, but they are all tools to shape the world (again, physical and spiritual) around us. If a ritual carries a moral duty, it is only because (we’ll get to this a bit more later) other people in your community are counting on you to do it; it is a moral duty the same way that, as an accountant, not embezzling money is a moral duty. Failure lets other people (not yourself and not even really the gods) down.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.
January 31, 2023
QotD: Religious rituals
January 26, 2023
Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?
Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:
His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.
But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.
And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.
It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.
The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.
This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.
They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.
They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.
Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)
At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.
Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.
A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)
And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.
But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.
On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)
We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.
A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”
The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.
Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.
QotD: Non-commissioned officers
Your ideal “delta” is something like a lifer noncom in a non-pozzed military. Back in the days, I’m told, new recruits and civilians used to call crusty old gunny sergeants “sir”, to which the gunny would reply “Don’t call me ‘sir’, I work for a living!” That’s the attitude. Those guys with all the stripes on their sleeves aren’t officers because they lack “command presence”; they’re not officers because they don’t want to be officers. They know themselves, and, crucially, they know where they best fit into the organization’s overall mission. “Get in where you fit in” is, in a very real sense, their identity.
Examples of that kind of guy are tougher to find in the historical literature, which is why we need to develop, and pump up, the archetype. […] the ideal is the centurion, the backbone of Marcus Aurelius’ army. A soldier, a Stoic, a leader … but one who knows, and values, his place in the organization above all things.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
January 22, 2023
The Scientific Reason Your Wife Is Always Right. Don McMillan
A Little More Dry Bar
Published 23 May 2022The scientific reason your wife is always right as presented by Don McMillan in this clip from his first ever Dry Bar Comedy special. Whether you’re someone who appreciated power points and graphs, or you just enjoy a good laugh, this clip form Don McMillan’s Dry Bar Comedy special is sure to have you laughing from start to finish.
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January 20, 2023
How to evaluate character
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia is in an advice-giving mood so he’s sharing his own eight techniques for evaluating character:
I wish somebody had told me these things when I was younger. I now practice them when I need to get a fast assessment of people I don’t know well.
1. Forget what they say — instead look at who they marry.
This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse — or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner — is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.
This advice is diametrically opposite to what I was taught as a youngster, but I think Ted is probably right here. I’d go further and say that observing how the person interacts with a spouse or significant other will tell you much more about that person’s character. If they’re abusive or dismissive of their nearest-and-dearest, how will they treat you?
2. See how they treat service workers
People reveal their true natures when they deal with others who have no power and can never return a favor. They feel immune and free of all consequences — so they let it rip. Their true self comes to the forefront.
This is one I figured out for myself in my first few jobs. Bullies and sadists just can’t help themselves when they find themselves in a situation where they can lord it over an underling with no repercussions. It’s disgusting to watch this kind of performative power imbalance and should be a red flag for anyone you hope to do business with.
3. Discover what experiences formed their character in early life
This is another CEO story, but with a positive lesson in this case. I met this particular corporate power broker when he interviewed me for a project, and we later became quite close.In the interview, he started by asking me about my earliest experiences — entirely focused on what I did before reaching the age of twenty. I thought this was just small talk, and eventually he would change the subject in order to inquire about my qualifications and plans for the project.
But he never changed the subject. We spoke for more than one hour, and solely about my childhood, my teenage years, and how I grew to adulthood.
Later he explained to me that he lets other people in the organization worry about boring things like credentials. His belief is that people’s character and ability to handle challenges are almost entirely formed during the first two decades of their life. It’s an unusual case, he said, for people to change in any substantive way after that point — not impossible, but very rare. So those early years were always the focal point for his inquiries.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this in the working world. Occasionally, I might have been asked a little bit about my early life, but never to this kind of extent. I suspect such questioning today would be very likely to raise hairs in HR or even provoke lawsuits if pursued to this degree.
7. If they cheat at small things, they will cheat at big things.
I recently heard a man complaining about a bad business deal. His partner had robbed him, and he should have known better.When they first met, they had played golf. Afterwards his wife told him: “I saw him move the ball when you weren’t looking — don’t get involved with this guy.” He had laughed at this. Why get worked up over a tiny thing like this? It’s just a few inches on the golf course.
But, of course, if someone will break the rules for something as unimportant as a game, what will they do when higher stakes are involved? In this instance, he had a useful warning, but didn’t take it — because he thought it was so small.
I think this is excellent advice in business and in life. Character revelation in the smallest of details.
January 17, 2023
How ideological programming in British schools make men like Andrew Tate inevitable
To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Andrew Tate before his legal troubles in Romania hit the headlines, and I’m not well-versed on his achievements (such as they might be). Janice Fiamengo also admits that Tate wasn’t on her radar before then, but she’s done some work to try to put him into perspective:
What has Tate got to do with UK education, except perhaps as a telling symbol of its unintended consequences? Why not just model and enforce ideals such as courtesy, self-restraint, and hard work, while upholding high academic standards? The article demonstrates how deeply committed schools have become to ideological programming. Some schools have drawn up “entire lessons focused on Tate” (!!!) while others deal more generally with “misogyny and gender stereotypes”. Whatever the particulars, the general message is unvarying: “We’ve all got to work collaboratively and collectively to support young men to reframe masculinity—away from this toxic ideology that’s presented by the likes of Tate.”
No one who’s been following the feminist narrative over the past decade or two will be surprised by the dogmatic reference to “toxic ideology,” now standard in any discussion of “reframing” boyhood. There is just one problem for the concerned teachers: Tate is five steps ahead of them, having already made clear to his millions of followers why injunctions about “reframing masculinity” are just code for the continual marginalization that most boys naturally want nothing to do with. The moment Tate and his allies expressed their scorn for the project, it lost its power overs the millions of boys forced to sit in feminist classrooms across the UK. Tate confirmed what boys intuitively knew: having their masculinity “reframed” will prevent them from pursuing masculine dreams, from being proud of themselves as male, admired by their male peers, and able to attract the interest of pretty girls. Teachers can keep on telling boys that peer approval through masculine moxy isn’t important, but that won’t make it true.
The point is not whether Tate’s (“I’ve got 33 cars“) program is an unalloyedly good one; the point is that it is manifestly better than the recipe for self-loathing and irrelevance being offered by the schools. The school’s program is the same that has been tried for years without any enthusiastic uptake because it offers nothing affirmatively male for young men to be and do (see especially White Ribbon UK, which has been trying for years to turn boys into handmaidens of feminism). All the normal things that centuries of boys in every major civilization on earth have cared about—competitiveness, status, toughness, mastery, knowledge, self-reliance, stoicism, high-jinks, displays of ability, and male bonding—are now frowned upon and must be replaced by feminine traits like empathy, egalitarianism, conformity, verbal display, and tone-policing. It doesn’t take a gender studies specialist to see that the life being offered these boys is one of deference, self-suppression, and self-contempt. No boy should want that.
In case you doubt my characterization, take a look at the Global Boyhood Initiative’s report on The State of UK Boys: Understanding and Transforming Gender in the Lives of UK Boys, published in 2022. The report was written for “teachers, youth workers, early-years practitioners and other professionals” to achieve “gender equity and social justice”.
Incidentally, the report includes a section attacking an alleged “overemphasis” on research showing boys and men as victims of intimate partner violence by women. While the report enthusiastically promotes the end of “gender” through transgenderism and social constructivism, it emphatically does not support the end of gendered norms about which sex is violent. On this front, the report laments that “even young boys” now believe that male persons can be victimized by female persons, citing the case of Johnny Depp’s abuse by Amber Heard. Nothing could more clearly signal the report authors’ chagrined awareness of the difficulty of controlling boys’ thoughts in the internet age.
The rest of the report explores pathways to weaken masculinity. On a number of occasions, it takes aim at “simplistic notions that boys require male ‘role models'” because such notions “frame women as inadequate to parent and teach boys”. Taking for granted that “gender is not tied to sex organs, hormones, or biological traits” (one wonders, then, why trans persons elect to take hormones and to change their sex organs), the emphasis throughout the report is on “realigning” masculinity to highlight gender fluidity, transgenderism, and inclusion of girls. The document has absolutely nothing good to say about masculinity, which it describes, variously, as “a seductive form of power”, “hegemonic”, and “oppressive”. It even uses the derogatory term “boysplaining” to stigmatize boys’ alleged way of talking.
Even such seemingly benign behaviors as “laughter, banter, and entertaining one another” are said to be “laddish” and linked to the exclusion of women and homosexuals. Taking pleasure in being good at sport is also given a negative valence by being associated with bullying.
As in all such feminist propaganda, the report seeks the evacuation of all positive content from masculinity. “Realigned” boys are to anchor their sense of self mainly in not being what boys have always been. They are to shun the allegedly “hegemonic” characteristics of “physical, sexual, and mental prowess; being action-oriented; ‘knowing’; having autonomy […]; and being emotionally tough.” It is surely no coincidence that modern boys and young men have fallen well behind their female peers in educational attainment, economic status, and performance on the job market. “Prowess” is out, knowing is out, being active is out, toughness is out. No wonder so many boys feel lost, disaffected, and resentful, and no wonder some see Andrew Tate as a hero.
January 10, 2023
Repent, wrongthinker!
Neeraja Deshpande outlines the demands of the College of Psychologists of Ontario to send heretic wrongthinker Jordan Peterson to the re-education camp:
Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.
Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch.
I don’t blame him.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy — sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist — it may revoke his license to practice psychology.
What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.
According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm”.
In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
Among those comments: Calling an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik”. Snarking at environmentalists for promoting energy policies that hurt children in developing countries. Using female pronouns in reference to the transgender actor Elliot Page. Declaring a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated “not beautiful”. (This Wall Street Journal editorial has a good rundown.)
With perhaps one exception — a comment Peterson made calling a former, unnamed client “vindictive” — the public statements that triggered this whole affair are political snipes that have nothing to do with his capacity as a psychologist. Nevertheless, the College is demanding that Peterson not only go through a re-education program, but also that he sign off on the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”
Now, no one who has followed Peterson — presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario — seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know.
The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood.
QotD: A useful life lesson
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
January 6, 2023
QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”
Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …
… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?
Money laundering seems like a live option.
My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?
I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …
… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?
(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).
Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.
January 4, 2023
QotD: Hate speech
However he who will attend to the motions of his own mind (to use Doctor Johnson’s wonderful, but sadly disregarded, formula for real and searching self-examination) will discover that hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow-countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.
Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.
The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, The Salisbury Review, 2011-06.
December 31, 2022
If Hell is “other people”, then the deepest level of Hell must be “other high school students”
Tom Knighton on a recent post from FEE about the awfulness of the school experience for a lot of students:
“Leaside High School entrance Toronto Ontario Canada” by ammiiirrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
.
I was never a big fan of school. While I always thought education was important, I never liked school itself.
Part of that was because I was the kid most likely to get picked on, but even when that wasn’t happening, I still didn’t like it. Learning boring stuff while not getting to delve deeper into interesting topics just made it a chore to be endured.
Couple with the fact that cruelty is such a part of the “educational experience”, it’s no wonder that I didn’t like it.
Hell, even when everyone was being chill, the fact that I didn’t fit in did a number on me, including a time when I genuinely wanted to end my own life. I don’t talk about that kind of thing much, but it was a stark reality of that time.
[…]
Granted, I always chalked my difficulties at the time — and I’m much better now, I should note — with a number of things besides the structure of school itself. Mostly the fact that it was a small school, I was the weird kid, and while I had friends, I never felt like I really fit in.
Yet I can’t rule out that the structured nature of education at the time contributed greatly to the problem.
As noted in the original piece, the patterns for suicidal behavior in teens don’t match up with adults. That tells us that there’s something at play other than just the weather, the temperature, or whatever.
Regardless, it raises serious questions about our schools as an environment. Teachers and administrators would tell you that they strive to create a nurturing environment for students of all ages. I’m pretty sure most of them mean it, too.
Yet these studies suggest that they’re failing. Miserably.
But let’s not ignore the possibility that much of this may well be because, frankly, kids can be little sociopaths. They’re mean. They’re cruel. Someone will seek out those they perceive as weak and victimize them while others get to enjoy the show, even while being glad they’re not the target.
Then there’s the fact that it’s impossible to hide from any deficiencies you might have, including social deficiencies just as good fortune with finding romantic partners of your preferred sex and that’s going to play a role as well.
December 27, 2022
QotD: Pedantry
I suppose one is either born pedantic or not, though of course there are different degrees of pedantry. Just as one may be mildly or cripplingly obsessional, so one may be slightly or fulminatingly pedantic. I daresay that one day neuroscientists will put pedants in scanning machines and discover the part of their brains that lights up when they discover an error in a text, and then claim that they have found the pedantry center in the brain.
Theodore Dalrymple, “To Err Is Human, to Detect Divine”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-01-19.
December 24, 2022
The abiding influence of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
So many of our fading-but-still-fondly remembered Christmas traditions seem to come back to Victorian times, and especially those featured in Charles Dickens’ most famous Christmas story (certainly helped by the popularity of the Alistair Sim film adaptation):
Even in our supposedly rationalist secular era, we find one of these thin places or times in the unlikely guise of Christmas and its rich repository of ghost stories. The supernatural was not banished by the developments of modernity but rather it evolved and adapted, moving from enchanted woods to gothic houses to the streets and rooms of Victorian cities. Just as in earlier times, they found their place where it is dark, in the dead of winter, when the nights close in and fireside stories cause the mind to play tricks and shadows to seemingly change their forms.
Among the many writers who have tried their hand at yuletide ghost stories, none loom larger than Charles Dickens who, with A Christmas Carol (subtitled Being a Ghost Story of Christmas), fundamentally influenced the way we perceive and celebrate the festivity. To fully understand how and why Christmas became a thin place and remains so, we have to delve into a scourge at the very heart of Dickens’s story and our society still — loneliness.
Christmas is one of those times when, as a much earlier writer, Dante, put it: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” And what time is happier, or more melancholic when irretrievable, than a childhood Christmas? Victorian writers knew that when we are alone at Christmas, a time that seems intrinsically meant for loved ones congregating (the perpetual renewal of the Nativity scene), our ghosts, borne by memory, absence and regret, would instead arrive.
Dickens knew the power of myth, and how the beautiful lie might reveal the hidden truth. Determined to speak out about the horrors of child labour and poverty he had directly experienced and witnessed, Dickens first toyed with writing a strident but fairly unwieldly political jeremiad until he realised, correctly, that there was a much more seductive approach available, through the Trojan Horse of storytelling. It was all too easy to turn away from a lecture or respond with platitudes and fallacies, but a heart-stirring tale had the ability to get under one’s skin. His characters and settings were constructed not just from satirical observations of the powerful but from encounters Dickens had had with the powerless, during his lengthy night walks around London. He was also deeply inspired, and haunted, by macabre tales that his cockney nursemaid Mary Weller used to delight in telling him as a child — full of Faustian pacts, treacherous innkeepers, poisons “distilled from toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees”, the Black Cat and Captain Murderer. To add to the unease, Weller would claim the horrors were true and she had witnessed them herself or had heard them from relatives who were eyewitnesses. As Dickens later recounted, in The Uncommercial Traveller, she “took a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan”.
A Christmas Carol has this oral tradition feel, albeit delivered in a short, and affordable, novella form. It also rebalances Dickens’s heavy lean towards sentimentality (the pitiable figure of Tiny Tim, for instance) with the resolutely unsentimental tactic of terrifying child readers. This was necessary for reasons of veracity — existence was unsentimental in those days — but also as a myth-making technique. There are few lessons that stay with us longer and deeper than those which strike mortal fear in us and then propose a way out.
At the heart of the story and its extraordinary legacy is loneliness. Rereading A Christmas Carol, its power initially comes from its status as a social tract and a fable. What is crucial, however, is its existential quality. It shows that the system then in place, and perhaps still, not only oppresses and squanders but it also alienates. Dickens takes the traditional Christmas theme of visitation (the announcing angel, the wandering star leading to the Christ child, the shepherds, the Magi) and makes it sinister. Salvation can come only through the painful process of facing the truth (“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread”). It can only emerge from Scrooge seeing that he has betrayed and marginalised not only his fellow human beings but himself, acknowledging that he belongs to the Malthusian “surplus population” he castigates, that he is alone and bereft (“Will you not speak to me?” he begs the final phantom), and the only precious hope he has left is to be found through gratitude and selfless communion with others.
December 21, 2022
QotD: The Spoon Theory
Since then, the theory has ballooned into an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online stores with spoonie merch. In the past few years, spoonie-ism has dovetailed with the #MeToo movement and the ascendance of identity politics. The result is a worldview that is highly skeptical of so-called male-dominated power structures, and that insists on trusting the lived experience of individuals — especially those from groups that have historically been disbelieved. So what do spoonies need from you? “To believe; Be understanding; Be patient; To educate yourself; Show compassion; Don’t question”.
Spoonie illnesses include, but are not limited to, serious diseases like multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, but also harder-to-diagnose ones that manifest differently in different people: polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), endometriosis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, dysautonomia, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, gastroparesis, and fibromyalgia. Another spoonie illness is myalgic encephalomyelitis — or chronic fatigue syndrome — which has now been linked to long Covid.
These illnesses are often “invisible”: To most people, spoonies may appear healthy and able-bodied, especially when they’re young. Many of the conditions affect women more frequently, and most are chronic illnesses that can be managed, but not cured. A diagnosis often lasts for a lifetime, while symptoms come, go, morph, and multiply.
Spoonies find community in having complicated conditions that are often hard to identify and difficult to treat. That’s why a lot of spoonies include a zebra emoji in their social media bios, borrowed from the old doctor’s adage: “When you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras.” In other words: assume your patient has a more common illness, rather than a rare one.
The spoonie mantra might be: I am the zebra.
Although the term is relatively new, the spoonies fit into a long history of women having amorphous, hard-to-diagnose conditions. Since ancient times, women who were diagnosed under the general category of “hysteria” were prescribed treatments such as sex, hanging upside down, and the placement of leeches on the abdomen. Then, in the 19th century, the new field of psychoanalysis concluded that women with hysteria were not suffering from physical disorders, but mental ones. Whether the women’s inexplicable pain was a function of their brains or of their bodies — or of each other (see mass hysteria), or of the devil (see Salem, 1692) — has always been a fraught subject.
And then the internet arrived and created a 21st century version of Freud’s Vienna, in which everyone was always on the couch, perpetually the patient.
Suzy Weiss, “Hurts So Good”, Common Sense, 2022-09-06.
December 17, 2022
QotD: The female murderer
The woman who murders her husband has nearly always ceased to think of him as such, and cannot really believe that he ever stood in that relationship towards her. It is only a tiresome insistence on the part of the law that makes her drastic step necessary. She loves another man who is her husband “in the sight of God”, and it is to her both unreasonable and indecent that the first man should be obstructing her path.
Jesse writes things that I think would nowadays call down upon her all the anathemata of which right-thinking intellectuals are capable. In describing the trial of a Mrs. Carew, who poisoned her husband in order to join her illicit lover, Jesse says:
Her counsel made a point that did not succeed in weighing the scales in her favour … but which shows him to have been a man of some penetration in the matter of female psychology. He said: “It must be borne in mind that a woman never thinks it wrong for a man to be in love with her”, and when he said that he said something profoundly true. A woman may think it shows a lack of pride, utter shamelessness, complete lack of all decent feeling for another woman to be in love with her husband, but she will always feel convinced that it is a sign of something nice and perspicacious in a man for him to be in love with her.
This was written in 1924. Subsequently, it seems to me, male psychology has — in this regard, anyway — become feminized; what once applied specially to women now applies equally to men.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Quiet Evening’s Reading: Notable British Trials is as complete an inventory of human depravity as has ever been assembled”, City Journal, 2018-06-24.
