The Dostoyevsky Reader and the Protestants

As Ukrainian forces continue their campaign into the Kursk region of Russia, we’re starting to see the sort of video footage we saw in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – distraught Slavic girls weeping over the loss of their homes and villages, talking with special pain about barely getting their beloved pets out. And yet compared to their Ukrainian counterparts, these Russians are treated by the commentariat with rather less sympathy.

The top comment: “Welcome to your special military operation.” And if anything, the other comments were harsher.

Even as cynical a fuck as I can be, there seems to be something uniquely horrifying about gleefully cheering on the suffering of civilians in combat. It’s nothing new, but it remains awfully grim. But while the media has long assumed this kind of sadistic glee to be standard in the Global South, what I find particularly bleak here is that most of the enthusiastic rubberneckers here are from the heart of the metropolis of the Global North, and would likely describe themselves as broadly liberal in their outlook. So I have to wonder why that is.

I won’t try to draw a full genealogy of how liberal political theories and ethical systems emerged in sync with the Age of Reason, but tl;dr, ethics were no longer exclusively seen as being concomitant with personal virtue or divine grace. Rather, nifty new systems – consequentialism, Kantianism, and so forth – were presented (correctly in my book) as more reasonable and humane approaches, and became standard among the more liberal elements of society.

Yet a certain Puritanism remains, and I use this word very deliberately not in its usual sense (i.e. being a fucking buzzkill) but to mean a certain kind of Protestant attitude manifested in the various religious strands that draw their lineage to the writings of John Calvin. One in which, lacking the possibility of salvation through the institution of the Church, it ultimately fell on the individual to demonstrate their salvation or lack thereof, and among the New England Puritans and the Dutch Calvinists, this was manifested in both the form of a rigid theology and a full-throated enthusiasm for mercantile capitalism. The two go hand in hand – demonstrations of value on both the spiritual and material planes.

While not many people would call themselves Puritans or even Calvinists per se anymore, but the specter remains strong in the Anglosphere. You are either a good person who believes good things and whose works are by definition good works, given your moral virtue, or the opposite is true.

And so this girl becomes a proxy for the moral failings of her nation, rather than an individual suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict.

It’s not just her, either. It’s hard to ignore a larger-scale demonization not only of Russia’s illegal invasion, but of its people and history. Western symphony orchestras refuse to play the Russian classics, and Russian artists and filmmakers find their work so often no longer welcome in the NATO member states. A certain bitter irony, considering how many of these musicians, artists, and filmmakers have risked their livelihoods and even their lives in support of those very Enlightenment values of personal freedom, secular and egalitarian governance, and resistance to the authoritarian pall that has so long been over Russia. At least back during the Cold War, dissident Russian writers who made it stateside could count on the Western establishment to wax rhapsodic over Pushkin and Tchaikovsky while they feted them at Ford Foundation events. Now even the dissidents – who, in contemporary Russia, are all the only ones making decent art – are too often given the cold shoulder at best.

And this irony is doubled when you consider how many of those calls for the exclusion of Russian culture seem to be from my fellow Americans – where were the calls for the boycott of our culture during our pretty damn unspeakable and illegal invasion of Iraq, for instance, or any of the horrors of American empire that persist to this day?

This isn’t to say that a mass boycott of my own nation should have been done – it would have been moronic. Because people are not their nations. And especially in the sphere of art and culture, that is where we should find our solidarity and common humanity, rather than conflating people with the nations they happen to be citizens of. A liberty-cabbage attitude isn’t going to get us very far.

I say this particularly as someone who has always adored Russian art, and the many strange forms it has taken on the creepy and ragged edge of Europe, always peering into the core of Western civilization from just outside. In the early years of the 20^th Century, Scriabin, in his peculiar and dissonant compositions, sought to explore the secret mystical codes that undergirded human behavior. Across town, Malevich looked for forms that evaded representation and which captured pure feeling, and Vertov chopped and screwed the language of cinema just as Eisenstein was inventing it. 

But my first and greatest love is for Russian literature. Because what I have always adored is the transcendence and cruelty and absurdity and individuality and nuance and experimentation of it all, often in the same paragraph. Raskolnikov kills the old woman for barely any reason, because everything is awful and life sucks. Dead souls are sold on the steppe for crisp brand new rubles. How can one not gasp at an opening line like the following…

“Once upon a time in Russia, there really was a carefree, youthful generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea, and the sun, and they chose Pepsi.”

- Victor Pelevin, Generation Pi

Pelevin wrote those lines in the chaotic period around the breakup of the USSR, when the economy cratered under shock-therapy programs while Western talking heads still chirped on about freedom, when the authoritarian Old Guard effortlessly transitioned from devout communists to devout Orthodox conservatives, interest quietly accruing in Swiss bank accounts. What better to read in a time of hopelessness and weirdness and outright grifting?

In the mid-1980s, Paul Simon, despite the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, went to Johannesburg, fascinated by the cassettes he’d heard of black musicians in the townships. Rather than shutting out artists merely by dint of their nationality, he used his star power to champion the voices of those suffering under apartheid, listening to their songs and stories, discovering their unique musical idiom. And with them, he put out Graceland, which, while it’s easy to deride as your mother-in-law’s favorite album, remains one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the decade, and one of the few later albums by a ‘60s titan that is actually good. He chose not to excommunicate, but to engage.

I don’t have his connections, but I can engage. And what could give me greater pleasure, on this rainy night, than a little Shostakovich before bed?

I Don't Hate People Anymore

Some version of dedicated dismissal of the human species has always stalked the official narratives, whatever they may have been, from Diogenes the Cynic in the ancient world barking at Alexander the Great, all the way forward to the dedicated neurotic fuck-yous of Richard Lewis and Janeane Garofalo in the Comedy Cellar in the ‘90s, with countless stopovers and loops on the way. Maybe the draw was Nietzsche writing his little zingers in his garret, maybe it was Lou Reed flipping off all you guys, and all you girls with all your sweet talk. 

Because the official institutions and their associated narratives that constituted mainstream opinion in whatever form they took – religious orthodoxy, civil society, the reassurances of the Hollywood ending – allowed the misanthropic alternative to thrive as an omnipresent shadow figure. Alceste, the original titular Misanthrope of Moliere’s play, was a serious pussy-getter who got exiled for being too real, man. 

But that was then. Religious orthodoxy continues to flare up, but not as an all-encompassing weltanschauung, but rather as a series of reactionary fevers. Civil society and the prospect of a commons or a shared destiny are memories at this point. And to find an unironic Hollywood ending, one has to go to the emerging and shamelessly populist morality-play cinemas of Bollywood, Nollywood, and the dopey nationalist action movies coming out of Shanghai and Moscow.

So I can't help but feel that some form of misanthropy has gone from a subcultural current to a mainstream opinion. This is regrettably logical. If we live in a world of unprecedented loneliness, that loneliness is stalked by an unprecedented misanthropy. In the era of climate change, information overload, future shock, panoptic social media, and the levers of power being gripped onto by alternating teams of psychotic nationalists and psychotic neoliberals, it is difficult not to be pessimistic – like I said, a natural and reasonable response, if sad. But that pessimism needs an outlet, and it has an unfortunate way of manifesting itself as a contrast between one's own ego and the repulsive mass around us.

“In spite of everything, I still believe people really are good at heart” – Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl

“They should be rewarded for not being people. I hate people.” – Aubrey Plaza as Depressive Pixie Dream Girl re: cute aminal friends, Parks and Recreation

The various figures of the contemporary commedia dell'arte reflect this widespread attitude. Facebook boomer dads with receding-hairline opinions think they're the heirs to George Carlin, autistic teenagers without relationships or hobbies can dedicate themselves to self-flagellating as they demonstrate their correct opinions, and viral TikToks show imaginary arguments between a random 32 year old creative and himself with slightly different hair. He, of course, wins that argument.

In the atomized space of online communication, it is comforting, a guaranteed win. In your Madison Square Garden of the soul, you will always be the Harlem Globetrotters, they will always be the Washington Generals.

Because in this world, everyone is an idiot but me. Crying-laughing emoji crying-laughing emoji.

Unfortunately, this is not too far from my own natural state of being. Any smart, oversensitive kid quickly learns that many things sucked. And now, let's run some teenage hormones over those existential-angst default settings, add the usual edgy boy inputs (the complete discographies of Nirvana and the Dead Kennedys, repeat viewings of Fight Club and The Usual Suspects). That gets one to the usual teenage fuck-you, the kind that comes with a bottle of Fireball that rolled under the passenger seat of a 1995 Ford Tempo.

Now add high-art texts, chosen pretty much at arm's length, one leading to the other. Kierkegaard seemed like a high priest of anxiety and isolation, and after listening to Nevermind and taking a swig of that Fireball, I accepted Sartre's proclamation that hell was other people more or less as a prime directive. L'enfer, c'est les autres. Fuck the normies, pass the Doritos bitch, I got hella munchies.

But when Sartre said that, he didn't say that other people were hell -- the vision of the hell he didn't believe in that he puts forth in No Exit consists of anxieties, fears, conflicts, resentments, and projections, not the people themselves. And even then, this most famous quote was not a philosophical statement – it’s a quote from the character of Garcin, and, well, he's a bit of a dick. So it's no different than the other teenage boys who took Tyler Durden (or for that matter Eric Cartman) at his word. It’s a natural desire to be known as a heretic with an unforgiving vision.

And yet while I said as much... I didn't hate people, not truly. Sure, my fellow man disappointed me more often than not, but at the end of the day I found people more frightening and confusing than worthy of contempt. Some might have called my attitude misanthropic, but perhaps the better word is weltschmerz, the “world-pain” engendered by the inability to account for the cruelty of the world.

Many years ago, my beloved high school Western Civilization teacher (hard to believe such a thing still existed) asked us where we were on the scale of belief in the capacity of humans – were we John Locke, optimistic believers in tabula rasa and the liberal democratic politics to follow, or were we Thomas Hobbes, inveighing against the nasty, brutish, and short life of the uncultivated man? As a wee edgelord, I of course agreed with Hobbes more, but… I didn’t like the implications, the belief that therefore man must be steered by a tyrant. Nor should I have.

And misanthropy does lead to reactionary politics, whether that’s Hobbes’ Leviathan, or the puritanical belief that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, or the strict delineation of a dar al-Islam as the only locale in which peace may reign. I clearly didn’t vibe with that, because, well, I liked things like democracy. And being free to smoke a bowl whenever I damn well pleased. I may have disagreed vehemently, albeit purely intuitively, with my teacher at the time, but that may have been a moment when doubts were sown as to my contempt for the human species. My pessimism existed because I felt bad for my fellow man, not because I hated him.

Furthermore, the misanthropy itself was also infinitely more charming when it was an undercurrent. Diogenes and Heraclitus and Lucian, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Stirner, Richard Pryor and Dave Attell and John Kennedy Toole, they all spoke their truth, and sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but they at least felt like original and necessary interpretations and counterpoints.

So the older I get, the more my love and empathy expand. I’m not in a childhood bedroom or grotty college dorm anymore, and I’ve somehow against all odds managed to live a life of travel and art and letters. And when I flaneur around, staring at the infinite sea of faces, all I can think is how utterly fascinating they all are. So when I feel hopeless about the brave new world we inhabit, it’s more that, well… I just feel bad for all of them. I still think I’m trapped on a burning planet with a bare minimum of hope, but I feel lousy for even the most pigheaded and deluded of my fellow prisoners.

Now I can already hear certain protestations. This could itself be a new version of the contrarian hipster attitude -- I was misanthropic before it was cool.

Perhaps that is true, but if so, I’d like to think this isn’t me being even more of a dick. Rather, it’s a generalized sadness at no longer being the canary in the coal mine. All the humans followed me down, even as I gasp and flutter my last as the white damp sets in.

So, dear reader, let it be known that this canary loves you, even if he’s wondering why the fuck he’s here.

The Horror of Positive Thinking

 A few weeks ago, one of the leading lights of the American left, Barbara Ehrenreich, died of cancer. She would have preferred that wording – “died of cancer,” I suspect, and not the euphemistic “passed away,” as she was a bitter opponent of all forms of bullshit, particularly those delivered with sanctimony. She's probably best known for her masterful journalism about life at minimum wage in Nickel and Dimed, but real heads will also know she coined the term “professional managerial class,” or about the brief fracas after she said about Marie Kondo's heavily accented TV English: 

“It’s OK with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower.” 

… precipitating a histrionic response by a purple-haired chick with a mermaid emoji in her name, who then gave us one of the world's silliest copypastas (sing it with me!):

“You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't even understand the intersectionality of the multiplicity of your offenses.” 

But to me, the thing that Barbara Ehrenreich did that resonated the most was not her Wigan Pier-style reportage, it was her writing about the ways in which the American ideology of positivity damages the soul and reflects an atomized society.

To sum up, Ehrenreich got diagnosed with breast cancer, a particularly cruel twist considering that she didn't have any of the major risk factors. However, instead of empathy with suffering, what Ehrenreich found, over and over again, was an attempt to turn rain into liquid sunshine. She was repulsed by the way she wasn't suffering, she was “fighting,” she wasn't a victim, she was a “survivor,” all of which at the end of the day made her feel lonelier, more isolated, and more shushed, discouraged even from feeling panic and grief at the very real chance of her own imminent mortality. It didn't help that with her particular diagnosis of breast cancer, the pink-ribbon capitalists were among the people she had most vigorously criticized.

This is something I'd suspected for a long time, wet blanket that I am. My 7th grade science teacher liked to remind us moody tweens that a frown required us to work more muscles than a smile. I cannot think of a more crystal-clear example of sunny idiocy.

Of course, back then, I didn't know why I felt the way I did. I just knew that something about my teacher's comment seemed very fundamentally wrong-headed.

Yet the examples hit like a barrage, again and again, throughout my adolescence and afterwards. George W. Bush's premature-cumshot mission accomplished? The runaway success of The Secret and the revival of “positive thinking,” more or less a glorification of how four year olds see the world? The 2010s influencers preaching positivity and wellness against a millennial-pink and sage-green background? They all seemed to be indicators of that same sunny idiocy I encountered back in the piss-reek corridors of my town's middle school.

It wasn't just that it was cringe (although cringe it was). But as Ehrenreich elucidated, there really is a dark side to all that positivity – it does preclude empathy, it does gloss over actual problems that may exist in the world and with oneself. And this in turn makes it the handmaiden of a social doctrine whereby every problem one has is one's own fault, whereby any misery is just laziness, an ideology that is, like so many others throughout the Anglo-American world, the descendant of some of the worst parts of Protestantism.

I'm glad the term “toxic positivity” has gained some traction over the past year or two, as shit has seemed more fucked. Because facing down the twists and turns of a global pandemic, the inevitable threat of climate change, spiraling wealth inequality, revanchist nationalism, and other assorted general bad vibes, how can anyone not be experiencing some kind of angst?

And in those moments, if you're anything like me, you don't want someone to say you're looking at the world with tired eyes, or that you can start by going vegan and not using plastic straws, or – and this is truly some hellworld shit – that you need to start practicing mindfulness and (that sickliest of words) gratitude. You want someone to pass you the joint and simply say “I feel you, man.”

Which is what I got when I read Barbara Ehrenreich's books and essays. And to you, dear reader, no matter where you are – I feel you, man.

Hail Satan

Yeah, I clickbaited. Click my bait, bitches.

I've seen a sort of revival of sorts, over the past few months, and particularly in the light of the Dobbs decision and the takeover of the American court system by glazed-eyed and cross-clutching dipshits, of the Internet atheism of my teenage years. All those words I hadn't seen in any meaningful way since then – “sky daddy,” “fundie,” and all the rest – have come back, and by golly, we're just one rage comic away from a Flying Spaghetti Monster and it's 2006 all over again. It was a simpler time. The transcendental evil was still Dick Cheney, and Kanye was still dope, when a great many of my high school classmates could still see their penises.

But the thing is, I hated that shit back then. It's only with the revival of Christian nationalist nonsense of the sort I thought had been left behind in the Dubya years that the thought has crossed my head, again, that organized religion is a pox upon the planet.

Unlike many who think this, I never had any kind of grand epistemic break with God. I was fortunate enough to have been raised in a household where the desert faiths that informed what we loosely call “Western civilization” had largely been left behind, leaving only a body of literature, art, music, and architecture that could and should be appreciated on its own merit, absent any faith. I was the product of a socially Christian father who didn't believe in much of anything, and a mother who had fully turned her back on an upbringing rooted in the frigid and haunted form of Catholicism that thrived on the banks of the Moselle before being exported to the Kansas prairie. So I was pretty much left to figure out what faith meant to me, personally, and the whole god-or-gods thing never made much sense. My faith in Santa Claus lasted much longer – at least he provided evidence.

The main religious influences on me in my childhood were the rites and prayers of my still deeply Catholic extended family, which never made any more sense to me than Egyptian or Greek myth, and those stories were way, way cooler. After all, how could the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross compare to a jackel-headed god of the dead, or to the celestial Days of Our Lives playing out among the pantheon of Mount Olympus? Furthermore, the religious beliefs of my classmates, many of whose parents had instilled in them the full-bore Satanic Panic of the late '80s and early '90s, seemed downright creepy, as if El Diablo could be summoned by a game of D&D.

I did my best to respect other faiths – growing up in Middle America, where the vast majority around me were Catholics or Protestants of a predominantly Lutheran flavor, I certainly saw plenty of decent Christians around, even if Christianity writ large seemed remarkably indecent. And of course I knew that despite the Falwells, Netanyahus, and Khomeinis of the world, there were plenty of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who wanted nothing to do with their weaponized bullshit. And those who were informed by their faith to do good works and advocate for a more just and peaceful world.

Which is a big reason why the fedora atheists of the late oughties did nothing for me. Richard Dawkins' evangelism on the subject just seemed like an earnest effort to kill everyone's buzz, Steven Pinker is/was the smuggest man on the planet (and I'll bet he was even smugger on his trips to Epstein's island), Christopher Hitchens was a master rhetorician whose distaste for religion overcame his erstwhile left politics, leading him to Bush and Blair's field of rakes in Iraq, and Sam Harris revealed himself to be very, very, very dumb, whose books – even then – felt like they were written by a smart 8th grader.

Which is to say nothing of any of their army of interlocutors and stans.

A remarkable number of online atheists of the era discovered that they hated feminists just as much as Jesus freaks, and were shockingly willing to get into bed with drooling Christian nationalists, given their shared revulsion at not just Islamist militancy, but ordinary Muslims. Only a handful of the professional le skeptics and le rationalists of the era managed to escape this idiocy, and the few I can think of were all associated with The Young Turks to some degree. This handful – Ana Kasparian and Kyle Kulinski coming immediately to mind – truly had a commitment to the higher virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity (as opposed to just dunking on slackjawed yokels), and this manifested itself in a commitment to democratic socialist politics.

I'd like to think that I've matured concordantly. As I've said a million times before, the oughties were a particularly bovine time. Maybe it's because I was a snotty smartypants teenager at the time, with a more or less universal contempt for mainstream culture, but solidarity seemed like a waste of time when compared to reading Foucault and doing all the drugs. My copout may not have been Dawkins, but it absolutely was Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil saying “if God had chosen to write the Bible in Greek, why did he choose to do it so poorly?” Just as edgelord, but the hipster version. The Pitchfork Festival version as opposed to the Comic-Con version. I was probably a dick – cue cloying reality TV voice – but I just need you to like, respect my jourrrrrrrrrrrrrney.

The wave of course receded. I grew up, and for a time, the Christian right became less of a threat compared with the numerous other stupidities.

Which brings us to now.

So I have to ask. How many adamant new atheists I see cropping up were cognizant humans in the original wave, and how many are simply teenagers? How many fellow oldheads are out there, still somehow immature? How many are still meme'ing on r/atheism like it's 2007?

My stance is the same, assholes gonna asshole, no matter what. I'm sure that dude who stabbed Salman Rushdie would have had no trouble finding some other god than Allah to glom onto.

Because the root of the problem is, I maintain, the authoritarian personality, the personality that commits to a higher figure and will do anything to defend its honor, submissive to those in higher positions but dictatorial towards those in lower positions – whether that is the yahoo with a Don't Tread on Me flag back home, or the sage and peaceful Buddhists who feel at their duty to participate in the genocide of Rohingya next door in Myanmar.

But there is a flipside for religion for me, one I find truly appealing. The idea of faith not as a submission, but as a painful struggle. When I read the mythologies of the world's religion, what appeals to me is the Jewish prophets who screamed at and cursed out God, or the long dark night of the soul of Saint John of the Cross fleeing the Inquisitors. It is the gloomy Paul Tillich, standing in the ruins of his native Germany after the Second World War, pointing out that to ask whether God exists is an absurdity – a question meaningless to God, who is beyond such trite distinctions. The gentle and loving god of the Precious Moments coloring books my grandmother tried to give me as a small child never appealed to me. The idea of an unknowable other, a hope beyond all hopes... well, that I can relate to.

However, what I don't have is faith. All I have is that grand agnostic question mark.

The only thing I know is what I oppose, which is that very same authoritarian attitude, whether it clothes itself in the language of nation or religion or whatever. And I know what the appropriate response to the authoritarian personality is at all times: to raise my middle finger and tell all y'all to suck my motherfucking dick.

In Dark Times

There's something reassuring about all things teleological. Sure, we'd like to there's the tidy ending. Not necessarily Cinderella and Prince Charming living happily ever after, but we'd like to think that even after Rick convinces Ilsa that she can only be happy if she gets on that plane, he can still turn to Louis and tell him that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship.

And yet paradoxically, the teleology doesn't have to be positive to be appealing. Hell, there's something more appealing, in our time, to a more fatally pessimistic mode of thinking. The firm belief that apocalypse is inevitable, or civil war, or some other catastrophe. The belief that we are coming to an end of some kind, whether it is the redemptive, millenarian, phoenix-from-the-ashes kind, or a final nail, an endpoint for humanity – the conclusion that a species unfortunate enough to attain consciousness will inevitably self-destruct.

Apocalypse is – so the think pieces in the Atlantic tell me – a deeply seductive thought process, and one to which I've always been prey. Perhaps this planet, it always seemed to me, deserved a mercy killing.

It's a pretty typically teenage, typically edgelord way of evaluating the world, and in the angst of adolescence, against the background of Iraq and the Patriot Act and the rising seas, apocalypse presented itself as the only logical conclusion. This thought pattern was reinforced by the way in which I saw the general populace, rightly or wrongly, as optimistic on the balance. And so to think the opposite is to imply that one has access to a sort of divine gnosis, a realization that you see the world how it really is. Wake up, sheeple, and all that. I read Nietzsche. I pored through the various 9/11 and JFK conspiracies. I ate magic mushrooms and watched televangelists in rathole apartments, burrito wrappers fallen behind the radiator, because at the end of the day, we're ALL fucking hallucinating, aren't we, man? 

Yet it seems that this strain of thought has become more and more widespread, even among the ostensibly adult among us. Find the pattern of your choosing, erect your own mind palace – and since the Internet has become all-pervasive, more and more blueprints for individual mind palaces have become accessible. Boom, you're one of the few whose third eye is on its way to opening.

And naturally this extends to apocalypse.

This kind of nihilism on principle is generally though of as something that ought be put away along with the other childish things. It is expected that one grows older, one grows wiser. One gets some actual skin in the game, learns to love, raises and protects children, and then it's not a mercy killing anymore. It would mean the death of the creatures you brought into this world, whose cribs you look down on in your darker moments and in whom you see light, whom you want nothing more than to protect, mind, body, and soul. And so it is a thought that must be banished. Life must go on, because it simply must. Sure, plenty of people operate from a default cynicism, but when I talk to be-child'd friends who have that same default cynicism, a lot of them have taken a sort of Pascal's Wager or William James will-to-believe approach. Even if this is not my natural cosmology, I choose to believe it.

One is an asshole if one cites the problems with both Pascal's and William James' theories in these situations, so since I'm not in one of those situations, I can air a simple version now. Both nihilism and anti-nihilism are, of course, irrational positions, which does not mean they are bad, but simply that they are not rational. Rather, they are articles of faith, sets of axioms that one uses to frame and interpret everything else.

It would be the height of arrogance to assume I'm somehow exempt, a 2014-era Youtuber presuming to be an infinitely and supremely rational individual thinker. So I have to ask what my articles of faith are, what axioms I use. I am another nightcrawler struggling in the polystyrene cup, fighting in the mud and shit and praying that I'm not the next one on the fishhook. Just like you.

And so if I take everything I see into consideration, the only thing I can anticipate – to the extent I can anticipate anything in this tesseract – is a long trudge towards oblivion, no totalizing wars, no grand epistemic shifts, just everything slowly, almost imperceptibly falling apart, the pain and insecurity of previous eras reintroduced, without the Medieval sense of community and purpose, or the Enlightenment sense that things must get better, to palliate the suffering and horror. Destruction as a slow loss of radio signal, without the ever-so-satisfying clarity and certainty of Gehenna.

The sense is omnipresent. The other day I saw two girls of maybe seven or eight, running along the street in front of their mothers, giggling hand in hand and I suddenly felt awful for them, and for what future lay ahead of them.

The only thing that remains is hope, which is in and of itself irrational too.

That's why it's always been the hero of fairytales, from the last creature in Pandora's box to the Disney canon, hasn't it? It's almost an overarching truly irrational and truly universal thing. In one part of the world it's a hope of liberation from being bounded to the endless entropy of the world, in another the promise of undying love. Even Emily Dickinson found it in her morbid heart to pinch its cheek and call it a “thing with feathers.”

Am I the only who's a bit bummed that there's a clinical Adult Hope Scale?

Like so many psychological tests, it's a bullet-point list of statements, each of which one is supposed to agree or disagree with on a sliding scale, and the clinician is supposed to tally up the scores in a particular manner. It's not hard to predict what's on there.

• I energetically pursue my goals

• My past experiences have prepared me well for my future

But notice the trick? The minimum score (0) would be a confident disagreement with all statements, while a maximum (64) would be a confident agreement. A middling “kinda sucks” would be right in the middle, even if that might seem just as painful, a condemnation to eternally kinda sucking.

Never mind the fact that this purely focuses on personal perspective, and more strangely goal-setting. Never mind that one having not done something in the past does not necessarily dictate their future outlook. Never mind that there might be very real problems of poverty, war, environmental destruction, and legitimate terror.

Is there anything more of a bummer than being told about how dark it is before the sun rises, how everything happens for a reason?

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

- Anne Sexton, with whom I have a parasocial relationship, Cinderella

Because to me the truest of hope is that which is fundamentally irrational. That which only exists as a vague and barely held notion, one that you try not to interrogate too much for fear that it might disappear. Not a light at the end of the tunnel. Not a rainbow shown to Noah to indicate his covenant. No. It is the flicker of a face in the crowd, half-seen, on the long subway ride home.

The Fable of Jonah Peretti

It's an inevitable product of aging that one starts to wonder what the representative cultural products of the present era will be, what will be remembered, what will be reflected upon. And when thinking about the 2010s, I'm sure I'll be suspected to some nostalgia film in 10 years in which the bride and groom dance to Happy or Blurred Lines or Get Lucky at a wedding.

And few organizations captured the ethos of this time more accurately than Buzzfeed, to the point where it became almost a shorthand for the preciousness and stupidity of the decade. And a brief glance at it, as of a recent date, revealed itself to be the same sort of bullshit they've always done, to the point where it's almost a portal to 10 years ago. "This Couple Had a Sensory Friendly Wedding and I Could Almost Cry at How Beautiful It Is." "33 Products That Work So Well You'll Be Taking (sic) About Them All Year." You know. Clickbait bullshit for people who want to have weddings at Disneyland. Barf. Pass. You'd have thought we'd have moved past this sort of thing in an era where the problems of the world have become that much sharper.

But what is fascinating to me is the story of its origins and of its founder, Jonah Peretti, who, aside from being the dude with the most white-California of all possible names, had a decidedly strange arc, one that reflects the shifting priorities of a century.

Like so many Gen-X'ers, he came of age in the heady days of critical theory, in which American theorists willfully misinterpreted their French masters to make correlations between particle physics and Lacanian psychoanalysis (which another Gen-X'er theorist, Joe Rogan, would later extend to a connection to his DMT trip in the desert), and he even published a piece heavily informed by the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in one of the at the time very au-courant, pre-Sokal Affair journals that adopted a purely "cultural" anticapitalism at the end of history, Negations.

To wit:

"My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities." 

A sensory friendly wedding. Almost crying at how beautiful it is.

Several years later on his bildung, Herr Peretti entered a room with a former follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh named Arianna Huffington and a plucky young Brentwood posh lad with a passion for uppers and thinly veiled fascism named Andrew Breitbart to start a certain news aggregator site that would come to be known for its quippy responses to the foibles of the Bush Regime.

And from that particular smug vomitorium came the worst of the American political culture that has dominated discourse within my own country, and owing to cultural imperialism, the world at large ever since. It's been a while since I'd even thought about HuffPo, but it laid the template for Breitbart and Buzzfeed, and Internet discourse more broadly.

The thesis was set forth in the "Breitbart Doctrine," that politics lies downstream from culture. Despite the right-wing origins, this is a sensibility that has come to dominate both liberal and conservative approaches to ideology. And it reflects the fact that both Perretti and Breitbart -- as representatives of a certain generation and a certain upper middle-class caste -- drank from the same streams, those of cultural studies, in which the legitimate insights of Western Marxism and the mid-20th Century "cultural turn" were placed in the service of late-stage capitalism.

A brief overview: the dissident Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci came to realize that a major part of what kept people in a state of false consciousness was "cultural hegemony," whereby the institution and powers that be insinuated a deep-seated ideology of which the subject is not even aware, which is normalized as common sense. But Gramsci and the Frankfurt School philosophers further north sought to articulate a truly emancipatory path for human development beyond the failures of capitalism and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But when this program is applied without a strong critique of capitalism, the end result is disastrous.

Peretti and Buzzfeed largely mirrored the tone of the Obama years. The voice the editorial board championed was cheery, triumphant, inclusive, effusive. For a reference point, think about Parks and Recreation. Sure, all is far from well in Pawnee, Indiana, but Leslie Knope and Co. want to do their best to put people on the right path. Things were going to get better. And the vibe of Buzzfeed matched this, hoping that by giving people the right culture, they would give them the right politics. Never mind the economic recovery that wasn't.

Well, let's see how that turned out.

Meanwhile, Breitbart and friends, funded by an increasingly cantankerous right, managed to capitalize, conversely, on a visceral disgust, which is of course a much more powerful emotion. The 2016 election demonstrated that the culture that the liberals had tried to foster had failed to produce a downstream politics of any meaning, given that the political message was essentially "cheer up and be grateful, we've got it covered." To which the right responded by producing rage responses, which helped, in its way, to pave the way to a rage-response presidency.

What you see are two attempts at placing culture downstream from politics. In the first, a kindly, liberal culture fails to produce a kindly, liberal politics. In the second, a negation of culture feeds into a political worldview based entirely around antipathy. To put it in less academic terms, it's the Wario version. Wantonio Gramsci.

Something tells me that this color-inverted Gramsci will be less likely to be a friendly and rather goofy opponent in tennis- and kart racing-themed games.

Perhaps it should be no surprise, as well, that Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in a mass purge of actual news in 2019, followed by another 47 without warning -- most of them unionized -- in 2021, via a virtual meeting using the insanely on-brand password "spr!ngish3r3."

What I am reminded of, more than anything else, are the haunting lines at the beginning of one of the masterworks of cultural theory, Theodor Adorno's 1951 text Minima Moralia. Subtitled "notes on a damaged life," Adorno, in these strange little micro-essays, traces the ways in which all hope had been extinguished, made impossible in the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, made all the more personal to Adorno through his own exile, through the ways in which his closest of friends were subject to expulsion at best, gas chambers at worst.

"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that since time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."

And I see the sighs of this long-dead German reflected in this engine of meaningless content. In the horror of the screen glowing in the dark.

The Mask of the Red Death

As an American abroad, it's again one of those times when I'm expected to explain my countrymen.

This usually isn't asked out of any genuine concern, but out of bemusement. After all, it's understandable why there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world suddenly brought to its knees. But as someone who is at the end of the day an American, what it means is greater immiseration for those with whom I share a passport and a flat accent, and after the bodies are swept away, as a man more perceptive than I once said, “everything stays the same, but worse.”

I try to stay off social media, but I couldn't help but notice the ongoing arguments over masks that are apparently the topic du jour back home. Given the social stratum of which I am a part, the opinions I see are naturally far more pro-mask. I will say up front, that this is a complex issue, and I don't see one side or the other as explicitly, 100 percent right – rather, it's dependent on a lot of material-world questions, all revolving around what mask you use, how you use it, and what other measures you're taking – but that kind of nuance doesn't translate online. What seems worth interrogating as a layman, rather, is the social climate surrounding the issue, which can be as interesting as the scientific and epidemiological reality.

When I see pro-mask Facebook posts and memes, the touchstones are the standards of liberal discourse – the importance of looking out for one's neighbor, “believing science,” a nod towards success stories in other countries, and a palpable disgust at those for whom convenience = freedom. Now, those are basically good sentiments. I, too, like being kind and educated and cosmopolitan, and I, too, dislike puerile American conservatism.

The reason shit like this drives me absolutely nuts is that it is – yet again – the American reduction of what should be a cold-blooded and scientific issue to yet another goddamn, motherfucking culture war.

Like all culture wars, it is predicated upon individual and ultimately consumer action (paired, of course, with plenty of online scolding) rather than any kind of collective effort. As far as I'm concerned, if you think that consumption choices can function as a form of activism, you're as big a fucking rube as the upper middle class cunt who goes to a protest so he can take his wife to The Cheesecake Factory again – the difference being is that the plastic straw-eschewer and the mask-reminder don't do active harm.

I can empathize. You're probably stuck at home, either laid off or working from the living room, stuck with your family members who grate on you, or stuck alone, trying desperately to stay positive, trying to not feel helpless, trying not to feel like you're on a rocket to the sun, and no one is offering any valid solutions. Whether you're aware of it or not, the complete neoliberal evisceration of public services has probably fucked you, and the political and executive classes as a whole don't give a shit about you. So you click a button in the vague hope that something, anything will happen, and it feels like a measure of taking control.

The desire to act, even if your actions are purely performative, is of course not limited to American soil. At my neighborhood market in Bangkok, staff were diligently requiring masks and temperature checks. Never mind that people were rubbing their mitts all over their faces, that the cheap thermometers were likely unreliable (and irrelevant for incubating cases), that there wasn't even a semblance of social distance, and that people were, y'know, eating. The performance was to be followed.

For what it's worth, given that it's a social norm in this part of the world, I've been wearing a mask in enclosed spaces, even though I know that given the way that the humidity accumulates and the fact that it's an ordinary cloth mask, it's probably more of a risk than wearing nothing, and even though I'll probably have to remove it to communicate with a cashier (you try speaking your third language through a thick cloth mask, my dudes). I follow the performative role, simply to reduce friction. Which is why we do a lot of things, really.

The sudden spike in popularity of Contagion points to the fact that in trying times, people need metaphor systems and structures in order to not feel like their clawing at the padded walls. I haven't watched it, and I don't particularly care to.

However, I did watch Roger Corman's 1964 masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death, with gorgeous cinematography by Nicholas Roeg (who would later go on to direct, fucking my mind with the one-two punch of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don't Look Now), and starring Vincent Price as the leader of a coterie of wealthy perverts who try to lock themselves behind palace walls doing shits-and-giggles Satanism and having weirdly joyless orgies, trying to hide from the plague ravaging the countryside. Villagers seeking refuge are shot, plots are made, survivors are few, and the Red Death comes for everyone.

This is the metaphor I prefer. Death stalks us all – you are fundamentally powerless as an individual in an impassive universe, and to deny the existence of death is to make yourself a grotesque. The illusion of control is a great lie, and the courtiers, merrily letting the people die, concerned with saving their own skin, suffer the same fate. Salvation is a fool's errand, whether from God or Satan, and heavens and hells are human creations.

Granted, this is pretty much textbook existentialism – something conspicuously absent from contemporary film, when you come to think of it – but it was somehow comforting to feel a bit less insane. Which, in turn, means that this was my own balm, my own narrative comfort. As was writing this.

Mark Fisher and the Haunted Present

In 2017, Mark Fisher took his own life. This was something that was little-noted at the time. Like all too many people, it was only in death that he got the renown he deserved, especially outside his native Britain. 

Like most people, I was late to the party. I only read his landmark work, Capitalist Realism, last year, and found it to be a flawed but ultimately prescient book that described so much of the contemporary cultural landscape, even if obliquely. And it was just recently that I read Ghosts of My Life, a collection of essays on politics, music, film, and literature that describes our cultural landscape so perfectly, less through any kind of overarching vision than by hitting various touchstones, each of them with an elegant and precise critical eye.

If there is a theme, it's his notion of hauntology, a term he cribbed from Jacques Derrida, whom he admits is a frankly impenetrable writer, but which can loosely be described as a nostalgia for a time when a future seemed possible. In a world of incipient climate change, increasing global political uncertainty, and an economic recovery that seems tenuous at best, we are ultimately haunted by the futures that could have been.

This seems like a pretty abstract, even abstruse notion. And yet the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that we live in an essentially hauntological era.

What we as a public are offered as a route forward is cold comfort. Neoliberal capitalism seems to suggest that progress is purely therapeutic, with physical wellness, self-care, positivity, and mindfulness offered as personal panaceas, an Instagram mentality that means next to fucking nothing when you look at how little is in your bank account. The only social thought given is a sort of woke neoliberalism in which it doesn't matter if you're gay, trans, whatever, as long as you keep buying, keep clicking. In which public shaming of the problematic and cancel culture are the only accessible avenues of justice.

Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies in the form of Trumpian conservatism, Putinist traditionalism, Salafist Islam, and Hindu nationalism allow for a sort of cathartic, collective rage, permitting solidarity, so long as that solidarity is done in the name of the oppression of others. And on the eastern edge of the Asian continent, Xi Jinping's China and Singapore under the People's Action Party (along with authoritarian governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the essentially-colonized petits régimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) marry exploitative economic theories with brutal political repression and icily efficient technocracy, suggesting that the only way out of the world's current quandaries is through state capitalism.

What Fisher suggests is emphatically not that the past was better (we all know it wasn't), but that the hope that the future would be more enlightened, more rational, more equitable has been decimated. The examples he cites include the music released on the Ghost Box label (Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, etc.) with its samples from 1970s educational films and hypnotic analog synths, or William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, a series of minimalist electronic samples played on modern machinery until they quite literally destroyed themselves as they played.

This same hauntology, Fisher believes, is found in older media too – in films like Memento and The Shining, in '90s jungle music, in the novels of J.G. Ballard which show the human tendency towards base violence triumphing over technological intervention, in the Joy Division albums made when Britain seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

And I see it in the contemporary trends towards ambient music and lo-fi hip-hop. Being an American, my points of reference are more likely to be Ariel Pink, Danny Brown, Death Grips, Laurel Halo, Earl Sweatshirt, Chromatics, or SZA, all of whom seem like their frantically trying to assemble something out of the disused, analog bits of a not-too-distant past. Or in the viscerally disgusting and eerily familiar VHS world of Adult Swim shows like Tim and Eric, or the work of filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Alex Garland who conjure up the imagery of '60s and '70s sci-fi.

 

You could say I'm cherry-picking examples from my own cultural sphere. But isn't it a major feature of the top of the charts too? Really, what's that different about The Weeknd, Drake, or Lana Del Rey, and all of their pop songs composed of distorted fragments of past hopes? Or all the Soundcloud rappers for who try to palliate their anxiety with Xanax and MDMA, only to be left as isolated and fucked up as ever? What's different about the way that young-adult dystopian novels and their filmed versions depict the tragedy of inheriting a world in which promise has been destroyed?

When there is hope, it exists purely in the realm of the magical, the unknowable. We watch Marvel movies because hope on our Earth seems so alien, witchiness and astrology trend because the world around us seems so grim, and mediocre young men buy into the Jordan Peterson bullshit because his brand of pop-Jungianism seems to give them a secret code, and gives them any easy target for blame in feminists and academic postmodernists.

People still have their dreams, after all.

And the horror of the failed present is never stated outright, it is merely alluded to. It is haunted. 

It strikes me as no coincidence that the last golden age of the ghost story was in the late 19^th Century. It was likewise a time of ultimate transition, as the Western world moved from an agricultural to an industrial basis of production, as the urban proletariat became cemented as an entity, as the basis for empire-building were transformed from a primitive, irrational desire for brute conquest to a coldly rational expansion of state and market power.

And in our new Gilded Age, we too are surrounded by ghosts.

The American Political Book

All books have a half-life, but political books seem to have the shortest half-lives.

I reached this conclusion upon deciding not to read grand magister of American journalism Bob Woodward's latest installment in the "Why Trump Sucks" book series (reports on which have been dominating my news feed for the past year or so), Fear. Part of this is simply that I need no reminder that the current commander-in-chief is an illiterate, reactive oaf. This is pretty fucking self-evident. And part of the reason that I don't pay attention to my news feed anymore is that I need no further reminders of this, nor do I have much patience for the various encomia to only marginally less repulsive figures (looking at you, Comey).

But political books have, by and large, always been awful, given that they are usually designed to either rouse up the base or address hyper-specific moments rather than engage in the sort of deep, long-term analysis and study of historical, cultural, social, economic, environmental, and indeed political trends that make up any kind of real look at the world in which we live. They seem to come into two types.

- Type 1: The Airport Bookstore Version

This version seemed to be omnipresent in the Bush years, both in its liberal versions (such as those by well-meaning amphibian Michael Moore) and its conservative versions (by Sean Hannity or any other American flag lapel-pinned slug-humans who blather on about freedom while happily taking it in the ass from whatever loathsome authoritarian comes their way). You know the type, with the picture of the smiling pundit on the glossy cover and the supposedly incendiary title, jeremiad prose, and lots of floating-block insets of text with glib asides that make the whole damn thing look like “Talking Points for Dummies,” ideal for the sort of reader who buys books not because they enjoy reading but because it was written by their favorite cable news talking head.

- Type 2: The Insider's Approach

These books usually have a plain-ish cover and a tasteful font, I guess to indicate that these are Real Books, and quite often have forewords by US senators. Extensively footnoted and decorated with fleurons at the beginning of each chapter, these are longer-form versions of the sorts of articles that appear in the Atlantic or National Review that address specific policy issues, and extrapolate to reach the conclusion that resolving this one particular issue will, in some way, fix everything. The authors are largely DC types for whom the lanyard is the equivalent of a teardrop tattooed under the eye, and who spend a lot of time talking about “healing America's political divide,” whatever that means.

What connects the two, other than the subject matter, is their intellectual myopia. By failing to examine the breadth of history or ask the necessary and uncomfortable deep questions about the nature of the discourse which we conduct, what we are left with are the hollow cheers and boos of the political class at one very specific moment in time, and they are painfully out of date within months of their release.

But this is to be expected, given the denigrated nature of the public sphere (although “denigrated” makes it sound like there was a golden age, which there wasn't, and if you don't believe me, read Dwight MacDonald's “Masscult and Midcult,” a thorough skewering of the middlebrow faves of the 1950s). Blowhards and Ted-talkers like Jordan Peterson, Thomas Friedman, or David Brooks have the right appearance of authority (elderly white men in suits, frequently bespectacled) and the right jargon to be anointed as serious intellectuals by a public that has, by and large, never bothered to understand the humanities and social sciences in any meaningful way. Sure, there's a lot of very justified frustration nowadays with the rise of Internet conspiracy theories and clickbait journalism, but so many of the same people who get in a tizzy about these things are just as likely to be taken in by these fucking hucksters.

For a long time, I felt the need to keep up with these things in the spirit of being an informed citizen. But then again, I don't go to Marvel movies because, no matter how big a part they are of the dialogue at large, I don't care about how the magic man feels sad even though he's magic. And likewise, I don't care to read some commentator's painfully oversincere takes on the past week and what it means for America.

But when I read a book by David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Joan Didion, then everything becomes crystalline, and it does so because, while very much of a time, it is ruthless in its analysis. Or if I do want to read something explicitly political, I'll have a look at any article in the Jacobin, which in one issue contains more wisdom, insight, and analysis than the complete oeuvre of a mediocrity like Chris Hedges or Bill Maher.

And therein, I think, layeth the path to liberation. Not in any political sense, mind you, but psychically. To be both more able to comprehend the world around me more clearly and to engage in a more meaningful dialogue, I have to turn off the white noise, and while the world is not necessarily any prettier, it is freer of artifice. And damn, the clouds are nice this afternoon.

The Fascist Writer

In recent weeks, largely due to a New York Times article, the name of Julius Evola has been circulating around the world of political magazines and blogs, a name that I would have thought would mostly be forgotten, at least outside of a handful of far-right groups and vaguely new age spiritual sects. And yet, it seems that the mostly-forgotten Evola has now gotten something of a reboot, thanks to his influence on the policies and thought of current reichsleiter Steve Bannon.

I shouldn't be too surprised. Apparently, Bannon is quite the fellow bookworm, not surprising, given his generally haggard and unkempt appearance. He bears a remarkable similarity to the monastically bearded, anti-Western propagandist of Putin's Russia, the sociologist Aleksandr Dugin.

But given the remoteness of Evola's ideas from the folksy anti-elitism, evangelical Christianity, and free-market enthusiasm that act as the main lodestones for the American right, it makes for quite the contradiction in terms. Rather, Evola is the sort of thinker that has long been popular among members of the European right, who have a tendency to express things in terms of peoples that have existed since time immemorial. If you look to the neo-fascists that currently plague France, Hungary, Greece, and Russia, it's not too hard to find Evola and his fellow travelers.

You may quite likely have never heard of him, but this philosopher (if you can call him that, he'd likely have shunned the term) and ideologue was one of the handful of post-Nietzschean thinkers whose stars rose brightly in the early years of fascism, only to come crashing down almost immediately after World War II. Strongly favoring tradition over progress, elitism over egalitarianism, mystical immediacy over analysis, organic over historical notions of culture, and myth over theory, Evola was one of those rare thinkers who actually put his concepts into practice, in both a vaguely pagan esotericism as well as providing an intellectual basis for Mussolini's rise to power.

Like many of his fellow right-wing intellectuals in the early 20^th Century, he couldn't escape lingering associations with fascism, and his last major work, Ride the Tiger, published in 1961, implored those with “noble souls” to survive what he believed to be the destructive onslaught of a modern society in which the traditional formations had largely been obliterated.

Most of those far-right thinkers who did survive World War II with their reputations tattered but intact framed their arguments in terms of poetic and literary writing. Emil Cioran, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, all were outspoken fascists for whom analyses of their work would inevitably have to include a reconciliation of their thought and their artistic production. And yet, despite their violent distaste for modern society, all four used the most intense of modernist techniques to convey their desire for a more traditional existence. As in the poems of T.S. Eliot, as in the novels of Yukio Mishima, modernist experiment is used to illuminate the nature of modernity, in the hopes of pushing people back into the primordial.

The ideas of a handful of more philosophically inclined thinkers managed to continue, albeit in a reduced form. Oswald Spengler continued to have a lingering if largely negative influence, largely due to his discontent with the Nazis who claimed him as a prophet. Carl Schmitt, by casting politics in terms of theology, managed to lecture and write for years after the war, providing a tool for political analysis across the spectrum. And of course Martin Heidegger, while he disavowed his Nazi past and his tendency to give lectures in full brown uniform, still carries an obsession with immediacy, intuition, and authenticity that makes it remarkably easy to see why he drew his profoundly anti-modern conclusions.

There's an undeniable allure here.

If I go back to my late teens, I'd heretofore received my intellectual development on a steady diet of positive science and liberal democratic theory, which went together in John Locke-step. When I idolized rebels against the system, it was because the system itself was behaving in a corrupt and irrational fashion. My punk icons hated the simpering middle-class, Protestant politics of the Reagan era, my lost-generation icons revolted against the loneliness and phoniness of the newly moneyed America in the years following World War I. The good things were science, social democracy, the natural world. The bad things were organized religion, capitalism, artifice.

But when I began to examine more ardently anti-Enlightenment perspectives, they were bracing. I read Nietzsche, of course, as every snotty, smart teenage boy with an authority problem does, and loved the sheer flippancy of a “philosophy” delivered entirely through aphoristic zingers. Then out into Emil Cioran, Rimbaud, Mishima, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, none of whom much cared for the systematic qualities of the modern world. And then onward to Heidegger. At his most brilliant, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger was like a hairy black spider crawling up my neck, telling me my reality was false. Following Heidegger, I read Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Marxist who wrote on how concepts like “common sense” and “common knowledge” disguised the political agenda of the bourgeoisie.

For a brief moment, it became easy to swallow all of this whole. The rejection of the individual subject as an invention of Western metaphysics, the full-throttle rejection of Enlightenment ideals, the primacy of subjective experience over any supposedly objective experience, and the all-encompassing power of mythic narrative.

The ideas are so much sexier than their rivals, more radical, somehow more dangerous than the staid alternative.

Yet, at the end of the day, I couldn't shake the fact that these were an equally rigid system, and one which led the mind to some awfully dark places. Without any kind of reconstructive technique, these critiques – and they were primarily designed as and should be interpreted as critiques, not signposts – lead to a particularly dull helplessness. The way that so many of these romantically inclined, more intuitively driven writers and thinkers tried to find out was through a supposed transcendental authenticity. And that is the road that leads to fascism.

Throughout all my hemming and hawing, the “authenticity” factor always seemed to me to be total bullshit. Sure, modern America was a disingenuous, holographic state held together by false hopes and run by a loose-knit assemblage of squabbling financial elites via mass surveillance, but the horror seems to be everywhere, across time and space. Unlike the fascists, I see no nobility in Medieval or Confucian hierarchy, or in a figurehead representing the popular will, or in a world in which scientific method is subordinated to a unified and symbolically rich semiosphere under a beneficent godhead.

That yearning for some kind of anti-modern transcendence remains among the general populace, whether the ideologically committed or the terrified, and I suppose it's largely because the modern world can be an awfully scary place.

And so, periodically, people are tempted to return to a womb of supposedly eternal truths, to follow primeval myth or nationalist flag-waving rather than undertake the challenge of analysis. And I shouldn't be too surprised when I find that the leading scholars of the fascists have been reading the same books as me.

Textbook Knowledge

Not long ago, I read Andrew Gordon's “A History of Modern Japan,” considered one of the definitive texts on how Japan, from the Meiji Revolution to the present day, has transformed from hermit kingdom to economic power. And I can safely recommend it for anyone who's looking for a solid source of meat-and-potatoes history about that particularly much-misunderstood nation.

But what I thought about the most in the days following was not so much what I had read, but how long it had been since I'd read a book that was even remotely similar – a book full of straightforward, narrative history. Here is how things happened, how event X paved the way for event Y, without any kind of explicit theoretical or ideological framework, without much of an argument, per se.

I suppose this is what you would call “textbook” or “encyclopedia” knowledge. Now, having read my Marx and my Gramsci, I know full well that this kind of knowledge is by no means “neutral.” There is an ideology in what is and is not told, how it is narrated, no matter how light Gordon attempted to make his fingerprint. Perhaps some more hard-core postmodernists or phenomenological thinkers would say that such a history says nothing about the events in question, and only says something about the author and his or her prejudices, contexts, and perceptive faculties, but I'm not quite that isolated.

Yet it is undoubtedly that kind of skepticism that prevents me from reading books full of just-the-facts. To me, it seems infinitely more honest when authors lay down their cards and cop to their stance, their context, whether or not I agree with their approach, before they get to the subjects of their argument (and yes, I know the hardline perspective would deny the “subjectness” of the supposed subjects, but let's all be William James about this and say that there is indeed a subject there, until a decent argument is made to the contrary).

This isn't to say that I avoid this kind of writing entirely, but I contain my experience of it to shorter form work, to scientific journals (when I'm feeling rigorous), Wikipedia articles (when I'm not, which is more than I care to admit), and those standard-issue publications that have best resisted the temptation to become clickbait.

Because a book seems to serve a different purpose for me – it is something more totemic, regardless of whether it is “fiction” or not, to the extent that distinction has merit (leave that topic for another day). To read a book is to dissolve myself.

And yet, up until my early teens, it was quite the opposite. On the contrary, I just wanted to sponge up knowledge, and it frustrated me when the text failed to act as a neutral medium, a sort of agar gel for ideas to grow in and express their true, absolute form. Which I suppose makes sense – children aren't exactly renowned for their sense of nuance, and that probably goes double for annoyingly precocious children.

There is a certain irony that I seek those sorts of fact-driven arguments in the world of the shorter form, considering the fractured media landscape which we inhabit. In which that framework has to such a great degree swallowed the facts themselves, whether the media outlets in question are mocking the very notion that a statistic in a major American newspaper could be true (a practice of both the sorts of entities that come charging in with their ideologies, banners waving, and those that conceal their ideologies under a veneer of “nonpartisanship”), or whether the media outlets in question are telling us how to feel about an article before we even read it (number 8 will make you CRINGE!!!).

However, these are stupidities that, in my reading life, I can safely and comfortably ignore, even if I feel the need to occasionally check the cesspool to perform a stool-sample analysis on the hive mind's feces. When I read something as simple as a research report on primate behavior, I'm a bit less frazzled. And when I shut off my computer, and look up at my bookshelf, and see the possibility for something more measured, I am again approaching contentedness.