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Great Untruths And Cynical Theories

August 7, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 5 Comments

“This is a book about wisdom,” is the very first line of The Coddling Of The American Mind, How Good Intentions And Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure by social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, and attorney, Greg Lukianoff

The book is a deep dive into some contemporary shifts of university campus culture over the past decade, and it attempts to explain, from a predominantly psychological perspective, the presence of three great “untruths” that are behind these shifts in trends and behaviours.

The great “untruths” are:

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
The Untruth of Us Vs Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

According to Greg and Jon, these are called “untruths” because they meet three criteria: they have to contradict ancient wisdom, they have to contradict modern psychological research and well being, and they have to harm the individuals and communities that embrace them.

And although The Coddling is specifically aimed at dissecting the small subculture of upper-middle class university students born 1995 and later, I think the issues it raises can be applied much more broadly.

I think it’s through the lens of these untruths that we can better understand the social justice movement that is defining our current cultural zeitgeist, as well as the political divide that seems to be widening at an increasingly alarming rate.

I’ve spent the last few months reading several non-fiction books regarding these general topics, which will hopefully allow me to paint a more encompassing picture of the whole.

I’ll also attempt to highlight some of the more troubling aspects and potential consequences of one movement in particular by exploring some concepts and ideas that are imbedded in it’s aims.

I apologize ahead of time for the length. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about these ideas for the past 6 months or so, and I’ve been incredibly reluctant to write about them. But as time went by, I noticed I was just accumulating information that I wanted to include and was faced with the monumental task of trying to parse through it all and put it together in a cohesive manner. I’m not sure I accomplished that, but I got a lot off my chest and it feels good to be done.

I hope you get something out of it.

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

I’ve written about the antithesis of this untruth before; the ideas that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and that we actually benefit from shouldering adversity instead of avoiding it. The Stoics are known for this type of thinking. But as opposed to merely reciting quotes from the ancients, The Coddling gives numerous real world examples of what happens when there is an absence of this time-tested principle.

To help illustrate their point, they use one example that I’m sure everyone has heard about, or even had to deal with in the last few decades: the rise of peanut allergies in children.

The authors show how school administrators and parents – with the good intention of protecting children from harm – have actually made the problem much worse over the years.

According to one survey, peanut allergies were rare prior to the 1990’s, affecting about four out of a thousand children. When the same survey was done again in 2008, the rate had roughly tripled to fourteen out of a thousand.

In 2015, a study called LEAP, or Learning Early About Peanut Allergies, found some surprising results.

640 infants (aged four to eleven months), who were a high risk for developing allergies, were split into two groups. The first group’s parents were told to follow the standard advice, that is, avoiding exposure to peanuts; while the second group’s parents were given a supply of a snacks that contained peanut butter, and were told to give it to their children three times a week.

“Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy. Peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers were trying to protect children from them.”

That’s because the human body needs exposure to foods and bacteria in order to develop an immune response to them. We are what the author and polymath Nassem Nicolas Taleb would call Antifragile.

In his book of the same name, Taleb categorized three types of things: things that are fragile, that can break easily and cannot heal themselves; things that are resilient, that can withstand shocks but do not benefit from such shocks; and finally, things that are antifragile, meaning, things that require stressors, shocks, and challenges, which are needed for them to grow, adapt, and learn.

Antifagile things include some of our political and economic systems, our immune systems, and our muscular systems.

Taleb provides us with an image to help with his idea: wind can extinguish a candle, but it can also energize a fire. He encourages us not to turn our children into candles, but rather: “to be a fire and wish for the wind.”

And there is no shortage of wisdom that corroborates this idea.

“Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.” -Shakespeare

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” – Seneca

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” – Rumi

“He who sweats more in training bleeds less in war.” – Greek Proverb

“A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a person perfected without trials.” – Chinese Proverb

“Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.” – Thomas P. Johnson

But despite all that, it still seems like our society is doing exactly the opposite.

Helicopter parenting, safe-spaces, microagressions, call-out culture, trigger warnings; these are just a few of the recent ideas to emerge that are based on the assumption that we are fragile and need to be protected.

Greg and Jon show that despite the good intentions of protecting people from emotional or psychological harm, these ideas are having unintended negative consequences on our social, emotional, and intellectual development and well being.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

To help discuss the second untruth and how it relates to the first, Greg and Jon break down something called “concept creep.”

To explain this idea they cite the influential paper: “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology” by Nick Haslam.

They use the example of “trauma” in the book and show how its definition has changed over time. (Other concepts that also apply include bullying, prejudice, abuse, and addiction.)

They note that in the first editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM, “trauma” was used only to describe physical damage or injury. But in the 1980’s, in the DSM-3, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, became recognized as a mental disorder.

However, at that time, the criteria for a diagnosis was still measurably objective. To qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience,” with things like war, rape, or torture, for example.

But in the 2000’s, the concept began to slide into subjective territory. “Trauma” now meant “anything experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful… with lasting effects on the individuals’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

This meant that anything from a break-up to the a death of a loved one could be considered traumatic. It evolved into an individuals perceptions of an experience that defined whether or not trauma had occurred.

This shift in diagnostic criteria, from objective to subjective, poses a problem for the authors, because they know that we, as humans, are often terrible at assessing our own feelings.

That’s because many of the feelings we have are influenced by what are called cognitive distortions. They include:

Emotional reasoning: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
Catastrophizing: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
Overgeneralizing: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives based on a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
Dichotomous thinking (also known as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
Labeling: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
Mind reading: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
Negative filtering: Focusing almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom noticing the positives. “Look at all the people who don’t like me.”
Discounting positives: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do – so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “The successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”

The “cure” for this type of thinking is called cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, and it has proved to be an effective method of treating mental disorders by helping us become aware of these negative thoughts and thought patterns. In many studies, CBT has been demonstrated to be as effective as, or more effective than, other forms of psychological therapy or psychiatric medications. ²³

It’s like a modern form of Stoic philosophy.

“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
Epictetus

Another issue that makes our subjective judgments notoriously unreliable is our common use of logical fallacies. Whether we deliberately use them or not, fallacies are deceptive or unsound arguments that we may use to justify certain behaviours and decisions we make.

A few common examples include: rejecting an idea based on the person supporting it, as opposed to the idea itself. (Ad Hominem); believing that something is wrong, for example, because it is against the law, and assuming it must be against the law because it is wrong (circular reasoning); drawing conclusions based on too small of a sample size (hasty generalization); a greater tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made (sunk cost fallacy); the erroneous thinking that a certain event is more or less likely, given a previous series of events (gambler’s fallacy); a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument (appeal to authority); claiming a proposition is true because a significant amount of people believe it (bandwagon fallacy); and an attempt to protect a universal generalization from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly (no true Scotsman fallacy). We will encounter this last one shortly.

There are many more, and they are more common than you might think. If you really pay attention, you’ll start to notice them everywhere.

Unfortunately, if everyone had a healthy skepticism regarding their own reasoning capabilities, feelings, and emotions, Greg and Jon wouldn’t have felt compelled to write a book about the pitfalls of always trusting them.

On the other hand, it’s also not healthy to completely disregard our emotions and feelings when assessing situations either.

The point is that we should strengthen them, and because we are antifragile, we need to challenge them sometimes, and not always take them as truth.

That is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
Ernest Hemingway

The Untruth of Us Vs Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

To help explain this last untruth I need to explain a few complicated ideas, so bear with me.

In Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories, they trace the lineage of Postmodern philosophy to its roots and identify some underlying principles of postmodernism that are driving the social justice movements like Critical Race Theory, Post-colonial Theory, Gender and Queer Theory, and Fat and Disability studies.

They explain that these critical theories are connected to two fundamental principles that were first developed by two french philosophers in the 1970’s: Michel Foucault and Jaques Derrida. The former, according to google scholar, has been cited 1,248,139 times in academic papers (468,931 times since 2016 alone), which gives you an idea of the scale and velocity of these movements. ⁴

Their ideas are: the postmodern political principle, which holds that “the social construction of knowledge is intimately tied to power, and that the more powerful culture creates the discourses that are granted legitimacy, and determines what we consider to be truth and knowledge.”

And the postmodern knowledge principle, which “rejects whether objective knowledge can be obtained” and assumes that “knowledge is a socially constructed cultural artifact.”

Right away we can see how these ideas relate to the second untruth; as the Critical Race Theorist Charles R. Lawrence writes in “The Word and The River”:

“We must free ourselves from the mystification produced by the ideology of objective truth, we must learn to trust our own senses, feelings, and experiences, and to give them authority, even (or especially) in the face of dominant accounts of social reality that claim universality.”

Since they reject the idea of objective truth, many of the critical theorists who cite these philosophers also reject the idea of “value free” knowledge. Which means that the knowledge that a given researcher might have discovered using the scientific method or reasoned debate, for instance, will always be tainted by the researcher’s identity, biases, emotions, and values, and should therefore, not be considered more valuable than other ways of knowing.

Many of these ideas are rooted in the Marxian conception that all human behaviour can be explained as the struggle for power between groups. Karl Marx applied these ideas to criticize capitalism by arguing that the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie would inevitably lead to a revolution of the working class, who would develop “class consciousness,” and establish a communist utopia.

Today, scholars apply Marx’s conflict theories to explain power dynamics within other forms of identity as opposed to just class differences.

Which brings us to something called standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology (Epimitomology meaning the study of knowledge). It’s an idea rooted in the postmodern political and knowledge principles which claims that people within the same identity group, like race, sex, or gender, for example, will have the same experience as others within the same group, (assuming they are authentic) and that their place in a given power dynamic (intersectionality) dictates what one can or can not know.

Thankfully, Pluckrose and Lindsay explain it simpler terms:

“Standpoint theory can be understood by analogy to a kid of colour blindness, in which the more privileged a person is, the fewer colours she can see. A straight white male – being triply dominant – might thus see only in shades of grey. A black person would be able to see shades of red; a woman would be able to see shades of green; and a LGBT person could see shades of blue; a black lesbian could see all three colours – in addition to the greyscale vision everyone has.”

The idea of intersectionality was first developed by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, who used it to point out racial and gender discrimination in company hiring practices. The idea was that a business, for example, could make an effort to hire more black people and more women, and they could hire more black men and more white women to meet their goal, but ignore black women in the process.

I don’t deny that there are useful ideas in critical theory, and I must admit that I am little aquatinted with the actual philosophy beyond a surface level understanding. But that’s not to say that what has emerged from these theories and ideas requires a deep understanding of them in order to see how some of their interpretations are unwise, and are likely to do more harm than good.

When referring to the same subject in The Coddling, Greg and Jon state explicitly that:

“Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself. It is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The human mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality have the potential to turn tribalism way up. These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions…”

They provide a helpful tool for understanding standpoint epistemology and intersectionality.

They continue:

“Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

The Three Untruths and Critical Theory In Practice

One of the theories to emerge from postmodernism and critical theory is something called Critical Race Theory, or CRT.

It’s defined here by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

“The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

On the surface, it sounds pretty harmless, except the last part, but I’ll get to that later.

What CRT actually looks like, is something that Pluckrose and Lindsay write about in Cynical Theories:

“…it puts social significance back into racial categories and inflames racism, tends to be purely theoretical, uses the postmodern knowledge and political principles, is profoundly aggressive, asserts its relevance to all aspects of social justice, and – not least – begins from the assumption that racism is both ordinary and permanent, everywhere and always.”

It should be mentioned that CRT in the purely academic sense is just that, a theory, and it undoubtedly belongs in the market place of ideas, but to reiterate, some of the interpretations, the practices, and the rhetoric that are emerging from its teachings can be incredibly destructive and disempowering.

Broadly speaking, some of the major claims CRT makes is that America is an irredeemably racist country, and that racism is embedded in the very fabric of society. It also claims that “racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy, while rejecting any “claims of meritocracy or “colourblindness.” “¹⁷

Additionally, CRT scholars insist that all white people are racist, are inherently privileged, and are all given the moral status of oppressor.

The scholar and activists Robin DiAngelo, summarized her interpretation of CRT in one of her speaking events by declaring: “The question is not ‘Did racism take place?’ but rather ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'”

And to help answer her question, the author of the New York Times best seller, White Fragility, composed a list of “Common White Patterns that obscure and protect racism,” which included, among others, “a focus on intentions over impact”, “defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism,” and “seeing ourselves as individuals outside of racial socialization.”³

This contains some alarming messages, first, she’s arguing that denial or pushback is proof of racism, second, she’s rejecting individuality in favour of a form of collectivism based on some immutable characteristics, and third, she’s teaching the great untruth of always trusting our feelings by explicitly stating in the same document that “intentions are irrelevant.”

Apply the last claim to the idea of microagressions, for example, which are defined as statements, actions, or incidents regarded as instances of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination.

Some common examples of microaggressions include saying: “I’m colourblind, I don’t see race,” “All lives matter,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” or “I’m not a racist. I have several Black friends.” Even the concept of personal responsibility, or just being a white person who waits to ride the next elevator when a person of colour is on it are considered offensive.⁶

Microaggressions, much like how we diagnose trauma today, work by assuming if you feel offended, or marginalized, or a victim of prejudice, then therefore, it must be true.

Except the problem is, what if that particular person of colour on that elevator was your friends talkative ex girlfriend? Or she smelled bad? Or was eating spaghetti with too much parmesan cheese?

There could be a million reasons of not getting on the elevator that aren’t racially motivated, and thinking that way is both dangerous and unhelpful.

Instead of training oneself not to interpret the world by catastrophizing or mind-reading, as Greg and Jon point out, DiAngelo is encouraging people take the least generous view of events, and to constantly view others with a sense of hostility and paranoia.

Wisdom tells us that behaviour like this will not lead to charitable, well-educated, confident, and open-minded people.

Furthermore, if saying “The most qualified person should get the job,” could somehow be misconstrued as meaning that people of colour are generally not as intelligent as whites, CRT is guilty of its own logic by attributing (I would argue) objectively positive things to “Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture,” in the infamous infographic by the Smithsonian Museum. ¹⁵

Among the list were rugged individualism, self-reliance, family structure, emphasis on the scientific method, protestant work-ethic, justice, competition, planning for the future, delay of gratification, and the following of rigid time schedules.

Like Greg and Jon have stated, because we have placed racial identities on a moral axis of privilege and oppression, these examples are both harmful to the people of colour who have been told that these things aren’t a part of their culture, as well as implying that they are oppressive if you’re white. It’s condescending and divisive.

I found a few posts on Twitter that will give you an idea of the type of language and behaviour that is being influenced by some of these ideas.

She’s triggered by the American Flag pic.twitter.com/ycjoIFHEOU
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) September 13, 2021

Teacher claims that encouraging students to behave is white supremacy pic.twitter.com/DCBdcuMitg
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) September 13, 2021

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1438244327478595584

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1441545679449378818

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1442558221017702403

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1441202362073239553

And this stuff is happening in high-schools and corporate settings too.

A Las Vegas high-school student named William Clark “received a failing grade in a critical race theory course after he refused “to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious and sexual identities” and “to confess his white dominance.”¹⁶

Even in Canada, the new grade 9 math curriculum in Ontario has been changed to address the issue that: “Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges.” ¹⁹

Similarly, in a well-intentioned racial sensitivity training session at Coca Cola, employees were explicitly told to “Be less White.” ¹⁸

And these aren’t rare occurrences either, Christoher Rufo, a filmmaker turned CRT critic, has collected hundreds of such examples throughout Canada and the United States. His work ignited widespread support from conservatives after he called on Donald Trump to ban Critical Race Theory from schools, which he did (something I don’t agree with). This inevitably led to responses from left wing media outlets criticizing the political right of not being on the side of social justice, and of opposing it’s central of tenets of diversity, inclusivity, and equity, among the typical accusations of racism.

But rather than talk about the political ramifications of critical race theory here, I want to stick to the psychological consequences of the CRT’s rhetoric for now.

In her open letter titled, “Why Im leaving the Cult of Wokeness,” Africa Brooke writes:

“... for ME, (this language) does nothing but give me false reminders of my supposed oppression…which rubs me the wrong way entirely because I AM NOT OPPRESSED. I think it’s key that we begin to accept that black people don’t all share a singular experience, nor do we share the same brain.” ²³

In response to CRT, a student at the University of Alabama remarked, “As a black college student, I’m certainly not paying to sit in a classroom and be told that I’m a helpless victim – that regardless of how hard I try, or how hard I work, it’ll never be enough because racism will always win.” ²⁰

Another name for this is called the soft bigotry of low expectations, and it relates to a psychological concept Greg and Jon discuss in The Coddling called “locus of control.”

They explain that that people can be trained to either have an internal locus of control, or an external locus of control. An internal locus of control means that people have learned to expect that they could get what they wanted through their own behaviour. On the other hand, an external locus of control means that people have learned to believe that nothing they did mattered.

According to Greg and Jon, “a great deal of research shows that people with an Internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.”

Instead, CRT is teaching people the opposite, and the consequences of which could be directly harming the very people it’s meant to be helping.

However, as we saw earlier, not everyone is as reluctant to accept the victim label.

In Bradley Cambell’s and Jason Manning’s book, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, they point out our society’s transition from dignity culture, and honour culture, to a one of victimhood, where being a victim comes with its own “natural moral currency.” Victimhood offers a sort of status, one that generates sympathy, and gives the victim support from third parties, and also “increases the incentive to publicize grievances “

The attention and sympathy that victimhood provides is so desirable for some, that there have even been a number of hoaxes perpetrated in order to gain victim status for personal gain.

In Gad Saad’s book, The Parasitic Mind, he calls this phenomenon of feigning victimhood: Collective Munchausen Syndrome (CMS). The name comes from the mental disorder called Munchausen syndrome, where a person feigns an illness in order to get sympathetic attention from a caregiver.

One of the most famous examples of CMS is the story of the Empire actor Jussie Smollet. As Saad writes, “(he) was unhappy with his “meagre” salary (more than $1 million per year)”, and was “undoubtedly displeased with his lack of fame” so he paid two Nigerian-Americans to orchestrate a hate crime on himself in order “to ascend the victimhood hierarchy.” He told police that the two attackers wore MAGA hats and used racial slurs, poured an unknown substance on him, and put a noose around his neck.

Smollett was eventually charged for filing a false police report and came to an agreement to do community service and to forfeit his $10,000 bond. Later, the city of Chicago filed a lawsuit against him claiming the investigation of the alleged attack cost them over $130,000. He then countersued, saying he was a victim of “mass public ridicule and harm.”

The journalist and professor of political science Wilfred Reilly wrote an entire book about events like these called Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. He documents hundreds of such incidents that have happened over the last five years.

If people are willing to go to such extreme lengths to be a victim, it’s no wonder why the combination of always viewing life through the lens of racial identity, constantly being encouraged to be on the alert for microagressions, and placing oneself on the binary of oppressor vs oppressed, might be potentially harmful, and could actually do more to inflame racism rather than overcome it.

You might be thinking: “well, none of this really affects me, I know I’m not a victim, or, I know I’m not racist.” But Ibram X. Kendi, the author of the book, How To Be An Antiracist, goes even further and says that if your aren’t actively fighting against racism, then you are in fact, a racist. “I don’t think people realize that when they self-identify as ‘not racist’, they’re essentially identifying in the same way as white supremacists…”²

He makes the additional assertion that: “The only remedy for racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.” And declares: “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”

If that’s not alarming enough, the New York Times called his book, How to Be an Antiracist, “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”

The economist Thomas Sowell, in his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, when referring to racial disparities, points out the potential harmful effects of Kendi’s ideas:

“To say that some people have less probability of achieving a given income or occupational level is too often automatically equated with saying that society puts barriers in there path. This precludes ‘a priori’ the very possibility that their might be internal reasons for not doing well economically as other people. Moreover, this is not just a matter of abstract judgment to the extent that there may in fact be internal reasons for not achieving as much as others, directing attention away from those reasons has the practical effect of reducing the likelihood that those reasons will be addressed and the potential for advancement improved. In short, those who are lagging are offered a better public image, instead of better prospects.“

Systemic Racism?

DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s rise to fame, and the popularity of Critical Race Theory in general, was undoubtedly galvanized by the murder of George Floyd last year, and the massive protests that erupted in response.

Racially motivated police brutality became under close scrutiny and a narrative was pushed by the mainstream media which produced some surprising results.

In his article titled, “The Good News They Won’t Tell You About Race in America,” Reilly writes:

“Skeptic Research Center found that 31 percent of individuals who identify politically as very liberal believe that “about 1,000” unarmed black men were killed by police just during 2019, and another 14 percent believe that “about 10,000” such men were killed. Conservatives did a bit better, but, among ordinary mainstream liberals, the equivalent figures were 27 percent and almost 7 percent.”

The real number was 13.

But even 13 is too much. And the overwhelming consensus was that these killings were racially motivated. In an interview with the writer and podcast host Coleman Hughs, Reilly points out why that is.

In the U.S., about 14 percent of the population is black, and 23 percent of the police killings were black, therefore, one might conclude, the 9 percent representative difference would be proof of racial bias. The problem is that that’s assuming that the police encountered individuals of the different races at the same relative rate, which is not true. To put it in perspective, the most common age of white people in the U.S. is 58, and is 27 for blacks. So it’s not so surprising to expect more black encounters with police given the correlation between age and crime. Another possible correlation could be attributed to differences in class, which also has a major correlation to crime, and also to age, neither of which are issues of racial bias. And when these statistics are adjusted to take in the rates of encounters, the disparity vanishes. ⁷

The economist Roland Fryer wrote a paper in 2016 that supported these conclusions.

The Writer and cultural/political commentator Leonydus Johnson posted the same argument on his Twitter feed, Here.

Another journalist wrote about it Here.

Hughs made an alternative argument on his podcast suggesting it was George Floyd’s killing that became the fuel for a sort of proxy by which marginalized groups were able to express frustration against lesser forms of non-violent racial bias. Which would no doubt have been inflamed by the rise of the social justice movements and the divisive rhetoric of CRT.

Elsewhere, in his article titled, “The Racism Treadmill,” Hughs cites another example of how mainstream media commonly commits the fallacy of attributing disparities to discrimination:

…a recent study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau found that, “[a]mong those who grow up in families with comparable incomes, black men grow up to earn substantially less than the white men.” A New York Times article attributed this disparity to “the punishing reach of racism for black boys.” But the study also found that black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, and higher incomes than white women, conditional on parental income. The fact that black women outperformed their white counterparts on these measures, however, was not attributed to the punishing reach of racism against whites.“

The linguist John McWhorter had this to say about the idea of “systemic racism” while discussing the disparities present in test scores on Glen Loury’s podcast at bloggingheads.tv:

“It’s unusual to say the reason that these kids aren’t doing well on the test is not something that can be gracefully called racism, maybe it’s traceable to something racist in the past, but we live in the present. So that’s what worries me about the term, because it always implies that that animus you have against bigotry is the same feeling you should have when black people aren’t as good as something as white people for some reason. You’re supposed to have your lower lip poked out and your supposed to have that same feeling that ‘it’s racism’. But usually that’s a simplistic solution that doesn’t end up helping anybody. It’s a very elementary way of looking at how human beings operate in time and space. So the term makes me uncomfortable. If somebody says ‘is there systemic racism?’ and they mean ‘are there these inequities?’ Yes. ‘Are these inequities due to racism in the past?’ Yes. ‘By the past do I mean only in black and white in 1914?’ No. I know about redlining, and it goes even beyond that. But is the solution to problems due to this thing were calling ‘systemic racism’ to undue the racism?… it seems to me that that leads us down some paths that no civil rights leader, even 50 years ago, would have seen any sense in. It is my least favourite expression in the english language at this point. It’s distracting.” ¹⁴

The truth is, neither Reilly, Hughs, Johnson, Sowell, Loury, or McWhorter would deny that racism exists, or that it’s a problem, but they all seem to agree that it’s not reached the alarming proportion of “systemic.”

And neither would they agree that they way to end racism is through divisive ideas like Critical Race Theory. McWhorter even wrote a piece in the Atlantic about Robin DiAngelo’s book, titled, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility.”

But Critical Race theorists have an answer for opposing viewpoints coming from black intellectuals like these: according to standpoint epistemology, they would not be considered authentically black, rather, they would have just internalized their racism. (Remember the “no true Scotsman fallacy”?)

Their argument is basically one of race essentialism, or in other words, racist. And it’s usually accompanied by the typical accusations of “sellout” or “uncle tom.”

That’s just one of the ways in which Critical Race Theory is unfalsifiable.

It’s like a conspiracy theory. If a white person criticizes it, it can be disregarded as evidence of racism with the claim that a white person is only attempting to uphold “white supremacy”; if a black person criticizes it, it can be disregarded by saying that they have just been socialized by the “white” dominant discourses.

Another aspect that makes it difficult to criticize is that, in doing so, it’s assumed that its detractors are against the teaching of black history (this is the most common defense). They are purposely conflating the two ideas as if they were synonymous. Which is completely untrue. Kimberlé Crenshaw, the founder of Critical Race Theory, is even on record saying that the term “Critical Race Theory” can be “used as interchangeably for race scholarship as Kleenex is used for tissue”

They are using the fallacy of false equivalence. Here is a perfect example from Reuters:

“The poll showed that a bipartisan majority of Americans say that high school students should learn about slavery and racism in America. Yet respondents were more opposed to teaching critical race theory, which maintains that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racial segregation laws continues to create an uneven playing field for nonwhite Americans.” ²⁴

They didn’t bother to explain how, or why, or even bother mentioning that perhaps it’s because they are not the same thing.

But, an important criticism, just like how the peanut allergy backfired for the well-intentioned parents and teachers looking to prevent peanut allergies, is that, according to Cynical Theories, certain interpretations of CRT could be unintentionally “undermining antiracism activism by creating skepticism and indignation and thus producing a reluctance to cooperate with worthwhile initiatives to overcome racism.”

Like the indignation and skepticism that might arise from the blatant double standards present in this story:

During a lecture at the Yale University of Medicine, the psychiatrist, Dr. Aruna Khilanani said, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favour,”

She also said that she stopped communicating with her white friends as “there are no good apples out there” because “white people make [her] blood boil.”

I’ll leave it up to the reader to imagine what kind of backlash might have ensued had an influential white person at a prominent university said that about any other race.

Backlash from criticizing Critical Race Theory

According to the Angus Reid Institute public opinion poll, 70% of Canadians said they self-censor to avoid offending others. 87% say they’re being polite when they self-censor, rather than trying to avoid judgement. And 80% say it “seems like you can’t say anything” without offending someone these days.”

Partly the reason why it took so long for me to write this post, and why I was so reluctant to do so, was because I’ve seen how people respond to criticisms of CRT, or even of racial discussions in general.

We live in a world where people can lose their jobs by making contentious observations,¹² and where university campuses are censoring speech they find offensive or inappropriate^.29 Even academics who write contentious papers are forced to redact them, and are ridiculed and shamed. ²⁸

This fear of being on the wrong side of public opinion is a very real phenomenon that gives these social justice movements so much power.

I have a feeling that what’s happening is something that social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance.” Put simply, it’s described as: “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.” A common example of this is when young people drink in excess, even to the point of puking. Privately, most will admit that they don’t like the idea of heavy drinking, but since they believe everyone else enjoys it, and since they don’t want to show any signs of disapproval, they continue to do so. (see the story of “The Men Who Couldn’t Stop Clapping”.)

Because, by publicizing my disapproval of CRT, I have no doubt that if this post gained popularity I would be called any combination of bigot, racist, nazi, fascist, or white supremacist, despite not making any definitive or controversial declarations of my own. Name calling is one of the go to defences coming from the left. Or in other words, as Sowell likes to say, “arguments without arguments.”

Or as the author Christopher Hitchens calls it:

“…the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.”

Even while I was doing research for this post, I saw how many left-wing media sites who were covering CRT in the news were saying people like me were only trying to “stir up hysteria” in order to prevent “a fuller inclusion of more people and an expansion or rights.” ¹³

It’s gotten to the point now where political affiliation is more important than reasoned debate. They throw accusations like that as if to shepherd their readers away from engaging in the opposition’s ideas.

It seems to me, as Sowell once put it, “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.“

Because once more people on the left latch onto the idea of Critical Race Theory, and once more people on the right respond with attempts to ban it from schools and corporate training sessions, more people will support CRT simply because it signals that they are on the morally righteous political side, without having to do any thinking on their own.

That’s why these self-censorship statistics are so alarming to me; as well as why I don’t think the right should be banning CRT. Both are preventing necessary and thoughtful discussions about meaningful topics. If anything, I think CRT needs to be better understood so we can separate the wheat from the chaff.

But above all else, the claim that an idea like CRT cannot be criticized because of my skin colour is something that I’m willing to stand up against, and not only does that give me courage, it actually inspired me to put pen to paper in the first place.

Silencing opposing ideas, whether they’re contrary, offensive, or abrasive, especially if those ideas are coming from a good place, is wrong, no matter how you spin it.

We are not fragile. Being offended is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. It allows us to strengthen our arguments, or maybe even see the merit in others. It allows us to grow, adapt, and learn, and to be more open-minded and charitable individuals.

As John Stuart Mill put it:

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Collectivism vs Individualism

Remember the definition of CRT by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic?

“…critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

In addition to the points I made earlier, I want to unpack this a little bit and make a few more arguments against CRT.

As opposed to the civil rights movements of the past that focused on the principle of individuality, shared humanity, and mutual respect, CRT centres around the principle of common enemies, and stresses the importance of collective group identity, as shown by DiAngelo’s claim that “seeing ourselves as individuals outside of racial socialization” is “a pattern of whiteness that obscures and protects racism.”

This push toward collectivism over individualism also relates to the general direction of CRT toward the advocation of centralized state power to implement the concept of equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity, as suggested by Kendi’s assertion that “The only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.”

As Lindsay points out on his website, New Discourses, “Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equal”, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.” – this is what the Critical Race Theorists mean when they aim to question equality theory.

For example, the CRT scholar Mari Matsuda believes that the victims of racism should be able to sue both the “perpetrator’s descendants and current beneficiaries of past injustice” for reparations.” Because all whites “continue to benefit from the wrongs of the past and… should be “taxed” for the sins of their race, even if they and their ancestors had nothing to do with racial oppression. ³¹

The problem with this however, according to Milton Friedman, and from what we learned from the atrocities of the 20th century by those who adopted Marxist ideologies, is that:

“A society that puts equality–in the sense of equality of outcome–ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

In The Gulag Archipelago, the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented his countries fate, confessing that: “We didn’t love freedom enough. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.“

That’s because freedom is directly tied to individuality, as the writer John Pos Passos put it: “Individuality is freedom lived.”

Collectivism on the other hand, places a group’s priorities over those of the individual. And by subjugating the individual, groups can monopolize a sense of moral righteousness that favours the in-group, at the expense of the out-group. Taken to its logical extreme, collectivism will always end up treating the out-group poorly.

In predominantly collectivist cultures, people are more likely to be tied together by common ethical principles, share the same religion, and have the same goals, customs, and values. Unfortunately, in some countries this can translate to less individual rights for women, minorities, or even gay people, where homosexuality, for instance, can be punished by death.

Studies have revealed that even arbitrary distinctions between groups, such as preferences for certain paintings, or the colour of their shirts, can trigger a tendency to favour one’s own group at the expense of others, even when it means sacrificing in-group gain. ³⁰

Additionally, the famous social experiment of the “Robbers cave study,” showed how quickly hostility can arise when groups are pitted against one another.

In contrast, individualists cultures tend to be more economically prosperous, which also tends to be correlated with their citizens enjoying more personal freedoms. In a study published by the APA, according to the meta-analysis of 63 countries, researchers “observed a very consistent and robust finding that societal values of individualism were the best predictors of well-being.”³²

The economist Friedrich Von Hayek once distinguished between the moral principles of individualism and collectivism: “That the ends justify the means in an individualistic perspective is the denial of all morals, but to a collectivist, it becomes the supreme rule.”

The reason why I’m making these points is because, as Lord Acton once said, “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.“

And it’s this belief in individual liberty that helps define Liberalism in its classical sense of the word – Liberalism that is being attacked by proponents of CRT.

Classical Liberalism

Liberalism is a not an easy concept to explain in a few words, but some key tenets include: skepticism, the fallibility of man, that idea that subjectivity is a recipe for error, personal autonomy, an attempt to seek certainty, commitment to reason, the scientific method, universal human nature, and the psychological commonality that we are all reasoning beings.

Among the literal countless benefits to humanity that these ideas have endowed to us, Steven Pinker argues in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that it was because of this humanitarian enlightenment that we “saw the first organized movements to abolish slavery, dueling, judicial torture, superstitious killing, sadistic punishment, and cruelty to animals, together with the first stirrings of systematic pacifism.”

It was the human capacity for reason that enabled us to see these things for what they were. Much of the unthinkable violence committed throughout human history can be summed up in this quote:

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire

Pinker also points out that the progress made in the past of the rights of women, minorities, and gay people, have all been made possible by the ideas rooted in individuality and equality founded in humanitarian liberalism.

He concludes that these ideas have helped make the present day we live in right now the most peaceful in all of human history.

Furthermore, the neutral principles of constitutional law allowed justice to be distributed by rules, instead of rulers. We learned earlier about the dangers of subjective interpretations, which is why, for example, we’ve made the necessary distinction between manslaughter and murder; because intentions matter.

And objective truth matters.

Capitalism is another benefit made possible by liberalism that is frequently attacked by CRT.

As Kendi remarks: “The origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism. The origins of capitalism cannot be separated from the origins of racism…In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to be anti-capitalist.”

What people like him seem to forget is that hundreds of millions of people have been raised out of poverty under capitalism in various countries around the world.

In 1820, 94% of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty. By 1910, this figure had fallen to 82%, and by 1950 the rate had dropped yet further, to 72%. However, the largest and fastest decline occurred between 1981 (44.3%) and 2015 (9.6%).²⁶

Competitive free enterprise also enables and fosters incentives for work, saving, and investment. The common misunderstanding that capitalism is a zero-sum game – meaning that I can only do better while making someone else worse off – is demonstrably false. The old saying that the rising tide lifts all boats is an accurate descriptor. It’s a positive sum game – a two thank-you system; you say thank-you when you get your coffee, and the barista says thank-you for your payment.

So when these scholars say they are questioning the very foundations of liberal order by applying their postmodern political and knowledge principles, and concluding that these ideas are “white,” and that they uphold “white supremacy” just because they were written about and implemented by white men, it’s extremely concerning.

It’s concerning not only because attributing these ideas to one race might alienate others from viewing them as part of their own culture, as opposed to the whole human species, but the very ideas themselves, which contain the methods of criticizing other ideas using skepticism, reason, and science, are being viewed subjectively as unimportant, or racist in and of themselves.

For arguments sake, even if these things could be considered part of white culture, Sowell offers a poignant explanation of the dangers of rejecting them based on issues of cultural identity:

“If the dogmas of multiculturalism declare different cultures equally valid, and hence sacrosanct against efforts to change them, then these dogmas simply complete the sealing off of a vision from facts – and sealing off many people in lagging groups from the advances made available from other cultures around them, leaving nothing but the resentment-building and crusades on the side of the angels against the forces of evil – however futile or even counterproductive these may turn out to be for those who are the ostensible beneficiaries of such moral melodramas.”

I want to be clear, our world isn’t perfect, and there is more work that needs to be done. But our “incrementalism and step-by-step progress” that the Critical Race Theorists criticize, is just that, progress. So when I occasionally hear the word revolution, or the idea that America cannot exist if racism is ever going to end, I feel like people really have no idea what a miracle it is that we live in a society like we do. And it’s all made possible because of the concept of individualism. It’s also ironic because in a less free society, people wouldn’t even be able to voice those opinions.

Going Down A Familiar Road?

It hasn’t been that long since the 20th century where learned what happened when Nazi Germany rejected liberalism by dividing people into groups based on their nationality, or when Soviet Russia did the same based on class.

So when these CRT scholars say that all white people are privileged and racist, it’s incredibly controversial considering that the Jewish population is the most persecuted minority in European history, (a group that was also blamed for capitalism in Nazi Germany). Are they part of the privileged group? It doesn’t seem likely considering many of the real hate crimes committed today target people of Jewish descent. ²⁷

Even in China, during the years of 1952-1968, communist leader Mao Zedong collectivized the agriculture industry with what he called “The Great Leap Forward.” It led to widespread famine and has been estimated to have caused around 30-40 million deaths. In 1966, in order to prevent his people from growing weary of communism, Mao started the “Cultural Revolution”. It sought to destroy the four “olds” of traditional ideas, cultures, habits, and customs, as well as purging the country of any traces of Capitalism and traditional values of Chinese society.(sound familiar?) Street names were changed, books were burned, Marxist propaganda depicted Buddhism as superstition, and dissenters were harassed, tortured, or murdered. Estimates of the deaths during the Cultural Revolution range from hundreds of thousands, to 20 million. ²⁵

Lei Zhang, a University professor in North Carolina who lived through the revolution, has raised some alarms about the similarities he sees in America today: “The ideology, the CRT, I thought, this is very bad because it is the same as in China under Mao,” Lei proclaims. “The only difference is, in China Cultural Revolution it is your status in community, your class, but in CRT it is your identity, your race.” ²²

He continues:

“When they tell kids, kindergarten, 5, 6 years old, that they are bad because they are in this race, or they are oppressed if they are in this group, and children cannot disagree, this is very bad because they cannot change their skin color or where they are from. They did not choose to be this race or that race, they are Americans…” “This is what happened under Mao and the Cultural Revolution. All the kids from very young are always told every day about you are in this status so you are low, and they teach to only love Mao and revolution. If you disagree or say something different they punish you, but not like men and women who may get punished, but they re-educate you to believe in Mao. You have no free thought.”

And although I admit some of this might seem a bit like fear mongering, many of these examples are eerily similar to some of the language coming from the social justice movement and critical theory today.

Here are a few examples of what a country veering in the direction of totalitarianism looked like to Hayek from his seminal work, The Road To Serfdom:

“Facts and theories must thus become no less the object of official doctrine than views about values. And the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge, the schools and the press, wireless and cinema, will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.”

Spooky right? How about this one:

“The word truth itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief: it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of organized effort, and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.

Conclusion

I realize I went on a book-length tangent here, but I want to tie it together with the last untruth of The Coddling.

The point I’m trying to make is that of all the well-intentioned things we are doing as a society, the social justice movement could end up making things astronomically worse.

The untruth that life is a battle between good people and evil people leaves us blind to the dangers posed by those intending to make things better.

Hitler, Marx, and Mao, didn’t think of themselves as evil. Hitler believed that his “heroic sacrifices” would bring about a 1000 year utopia. The Russian Revolution was started in an attempt to usher in a communist utopia. And Mao likely only wanted the best for his country.

So when people begin to divide individuals into categories of moral worth by classifying one as born with collective guilt, while the other is born with collective innocence, and they believe in the collectivist ethics that the ends justify the means, it’s easy to see how one might rationalize harmful behaviours and attitudes by thinking that they are acting for the greater good.

And even if I’m guilty of blowing this way out of proportion, I’d rather be embarrassed about being wrong than be right and not have been honest.

I’ll leave you with one last quote:

“Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn’t just happen; we have to make it happen.”
Bill Moyers

Thanks for reading.

SOURCES:

Gumption and Nostalgia In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind

May 3, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 1 Comment

“Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven’t realized that today is tomorrow’s nostalgia.”
Zeena Schreck

Nostalgia is defined as the wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition. The word is a compound of the greek words nostos, meaning “return home” or “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “pain” or “ache”.

It was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hoffer, who noted signs of anxiety and melancholia in a handful of Swiss soldiers who were fighting away from home. He called it a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause.”

Early sufferers claimed to hear voices and see ghosts, and in addition to the feelings of homesickness, other symptoms of the so-called “disease” included malnutrition, brain inflammation, fever, and cardiac arrest.

Physicians of the day theorized that the phenomenon was due to ear and brain damage caused by the clatter of the cowbells in the pastures of Switzerland.

Modern theories however, suggest that the emotion could be a sort of coping mechanism for psychological threats, such as existential dread, despair, or loneliness.[1]

And far from being the net negative “disease” that it was once considered to be, recent studies are now linking nostalgia to beneficial feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, positive mood, and optimism for the future.

But most of these studies rely on the flawed and unreliable data of an individuals subjective experiences as opposed to something objective and measurable. Who’s to say a study’s participant is telling the truth, or not exaggerating certain feelings or memories?

That’s also what makes nostalgia such an interesting emotion. Because we’re really good at convincing ourselves that our past was more pleasant than it really was. We might look back with rose coloured glasses on a fond memory and ignore everything else except the warm and fuzzy feeling we associate with it.

For example, just the other day I was driving home with my windows rolled down. The warm air was blowing through my hair, I had the music turned up, and I had just finished work for the day. Each of these things combined to inspire in me an eerily familiar sensation. I felt this unmistakable recollection of my youth that I remembered feeling so often before; back to a time when I was ignorant of so much, and responsible for so little, when I was just a tiny speck of dust staring into the massive potential of life. The whole experience felt so vivid and surreal. My heart was beating faster as I tried to search for things that defined that feeling in order that I might preserve it, or understand why it was happening.

Then it was gone in an instant.

Something had drawn me back to the present. I felt like I had time traveled only to be forced back into my regular trajectory, stinging with the subtle pain of losing those feelings of freedom and potential.

This is how nostalgia plays tricks on us. Because the truth is, that none of our memories are as good as we remembered them to be. I was not always a happy person at the age. The chaos of too much choice and freedom were overwhelming to me. I was single, broke, unsure of my future, and I was still trying to discover who I was.

In the particular memory I was remembering, I might have been happy, sure, but overall, I was lost, lonely, and ignorant. And I can say now, from having experienced them both, that the sense of order and security I feel in this moment are much more preferable to the unbounded independence of my youth, however carefree it might have been.

This is something the research professor Brené Brown discovered as well:

“Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.”
Brené Brown

Furthermore, when I get together with old friends, I’ve often noticed that our conversations will inevitably turn to the “good old days” of nostalgic recollection — and with some friends, it’s the entire conversation.

It’s like we have grown apart in the present, and our past and our memories are the last bits of thread holding our fading friendship together. Maybe we are both reluctant to accept this painful severing by acknowledging the emptiness in the present moment, or by realizing that we’ve planned a future that doesn’t include one another.

That’s why I’ve often felt nostalgic musings are largely negative. Reminiscing with friends about “the good old days” can be fun occasionally, but it’s the malignant longing to live that life over again that can be so insidious. Not to mention I always feel so sad afterwards.

So what does any of this have to do with Gone With The Wind you might ask?

Well, as the novel’s title suggests, “gone with the wind” refers to the end of a part of America’s history; the culture of Antebellum south – meaning the period before the Civil War.

The narrative centres around a young southern woman and her experiences before, during, and after the war, and the subsequent period of Reconstruction that followed.

I should note here that some consider the book to be problematic today. It’s often criticized for white-washing and downplaying the horrors of slavery, while at the same time romanticizing and glorifying the pre-civil war way of life.

And last year, HBO sparked a controversy when they removed the popular 1939 movie of the same name from its platform. They commented that “the film’s depictions don’t align with the company’s values.” It was removed mainly due to its racist stereotypes, its heroic depiction of the KKK (although not explicitly named), and the way serious issues of plantation life and slavery had been glossed over.

That’s actually why I wanted to read the book in the first place, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about myself.

But I’m not going to get into that discussion here. I only want to dissect some bits of wisdom that this novel can give us, regardless of its subject matter.

I will say though, that I believe that censorship is not only wrong, but it’s foolish.

This is from the philosopher well aquatinted with the word “liberty”:

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
John Stuart Mill

Because despite the questionable nature of Gone With The Wind, It’s still a piece of art, and of history. And whether we look back on it with a lens of moral relativism or not, we can still discover aspects of humanity that transcend the changes in our culture and society.

For example, when asked what the book was about, the author, Margaret Mitchell, said this:

“If the novel has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn’t.”

So what does gumption have to do with nostalgia?

I’ve collected some quotes from some of the novel’s characters; some who have ‘gumption’ and others who don’t. And I’ve found these quotes can help us understand nostalgia and its benefits and disadvantages by analyzing how Mitchell’s characters think about the past, present, and future.

One of the character’s, Rhett Butler, describes the people without any ‘gumption’ and what effect the war had on their lives:

“It isn’t losing their money, my pet. I tell you its losing their world – the world they were raised in. They’re like fish out of the water or cats with wings. They were raised to be certain persons, to do certain things, to occupy certain niches. And those persons and things and niches disappeared forever when General Lee arrived at Appomattox.”

Rhett is speaking to the main character, Scarlett O’Hara, both of whom would be considered chock-full of ‘gumption.’ They are talking about another character names Ashley Wilkes, who represents the gumption-less majority.

“…He is down and he’ll stay there unless there’s some energetic person behind him, guiding and protecting him as long as he lives.” He adds, “I’m no mind to have my money used for the benefit of such a person.”

Scarlett interjects, saying, “You didn’t mind helping me when I was down”

“You were a good risk, my dear, an interesting risk.” He responds, “Why? Because you didn’t plump yourself down on your male relatives and sob for the old days. You got out and hustled and now your fortunes are firmly planted on money stolen from a dead man’s wallet and money stolen from the Confederacy….They show you to be a person of energy and determination and a good money risk.

…But Ashley Wilkes-bah! His breed is of no use or value in an upside-down world like ours. Whenever the world is up-ends, his kind is the first to perish. And why not? They don’t deserve to survive because they won’t fight – don’t know how to fight. This isn’t the first time the world’s been upside-down and it won’t be the last. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. And when it does happen everyone loses everything and everyone is equal. And then they all start again at taw, with nothing at all. That is, nothing except the cunning of their brains and strength of their hands. But some people, like Ashley, have neither cunning nor strength or, having them, scruple to use them. And so they go under and they should go under. It’s a natural law and the world is better off without them. But there are always a hardy few who come through and given time, they are right back where they were before the world turned over.”

In the next few lines we get the perspective from Ashley himself. We get a glimpse into his character as how he uses his positive memories as a sort of coping mechanism to deal with the hardships of life. He is speaking to Scarlett here.

“I’ll always remember you as you were that day of our last barbecue, sitting under an oak with a dozen boys around you. I can even tell you just how you were dressed, in a white dress covered with tiny green flowers and a white lace shawl about your shoulders. You had on little green slippers with black lacings and an enormous leghorn hat with long green streamers. I know that dress by heart because when I was in prison and things got bad, I’d take out my memories and thumb them over like pictures, recalling every little detail– “

Clay Routledge, a social psychologist who spent over a decade studying nostalgia, echoes Ashley’s sentiment:

“If you’re feeling lonely, if you’re feeling like a failure, if you feel like you don’t know if your life has any purpose [or] if what you’re doing has any value, you can reach into this reservoir of nostalgic memories and comfort yourself…We see nostalgia as a psychological resource that people can dip into to conjure up the evidence that they need to assure themselves that they’re valued.”

Consider the conflict between the previous passage and the words from the great Italian poet Dante Aleghari:

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
Dante Alighieri

Ashley continues:

“We’ve come a long way, both of us, since that day, haven’t we, Scarlett? We’ve traveled road we never expected to travel. You’ve come swiftly, directly, and I, slowly and reluctantly...He sat down on the table again and looked at her and a small smile crept back into his face. But it was not the smile that had made her so happy a short while before. It was a bleak smile.“

Here Mitchell includes the “bleak smile” that’s so characteristic of the bittersweet feeling of old, happy memories.

Ashley’s remarks subtly in the following lines about the connection between the lack of “greatness” and his stubborn clinging to the past:

“…the seeds of greatness were never in me. I think that if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone down into oblivion — like poor Cathleen Calvert and so many other people who once had great names, old names.”

He states outright his yearning for this irrecoverable condition of his old life:

“I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

He continues his conversation with Scarlett by encouraging her to remember their past together, but Scarlett, driven by her ‘gumption’, is reluctant to follow.

” ‘Do you remember,’ he said — and a warning bell in her mind rang: Don’t look back! Don’t look back! But she swiftly disregarded it, swept forward on a tide of happiness.”

The two share a beautifully descriptive memory together and Scarlett thinks to herself:

” ‘Now I know why you can’t be happy’ she thought sadly. ‘ I never understood you before. I never understood why I wasn’t altogether happy either. But — why are we talking like old people talk!’ she thought with dreary surprise. ‘Old people looking back fifty years. And were not old! Its just that so much has happened in between. Everything changed so much that it seems like fifty years ago. But we’re not old!...But when she looked at Ashley he was no longer young and shining. His head was bowed as he looked down absently at her hand which he still held and she saw that his once bright hair was very gray, silver gray as moonlight on still water. Somehow the bright beauty had gone from the april afternoon and from her heart as well as the sad sweetness of remembering was as bitter as gall.”

She regrets the bitter reminiscing and she captures perfectly how I feel when I’ve had too much nostalgic musings for my own good:

” ‘I shouldn’t have let him make me look back,’ she thought despairingly. ‘I was right when I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can’t ever do anything else except look back. That’s what’s wrong with Ashley. He can’t look forward any more. He can’t see the present, he fears the future, and so he looks back. This is what happens when you look back to happiness, this pain, this heartbreak, this discontent.‘ “

Later on in the novel, Scarlett experiences moments of nostalgia herself, but note the difference is how she lets them go, with the”satisfaction” and fulfilment of “closing a door.”

“And when Atlanta was covering its scars and buildings were going up everywhere and newcomers flocking to the town everyday, she had two fine mills, two lumber yards, a dozen mule teams and convict labour to operate the business at a low cost. Bidding farewell to them was like closing a door forever on a part of her life, a bitter, harsh part but one which she recalled with a nostalgic satisfaction.”

In the next passage, Scarlett doesn’t look back fondly on happy times but instead chooses to reflect on her hardships and thinks about how far she has come:

“It would be a comfort to sit with Maybelle, remembering that Maybelle had buried a baby, dead in the mad flight before Sherman. There would be solace, in Fanny’s presence, knowing that she and Fanny both lost husbands in the black days of martial law. It would be grim fun to laugh with Mrs. Elsing, recalling the old lady’s face as she flogged her horse through Five Points the day Atlanta fell, the loot from the commissary jouncing from her carriage. It would be pleasant to match stories with Mrs. Merriwether, now secure on the proceeds of her bakers, pleasant to say: ‘Do you remember how bad things were right after the surrender? Do you remember when we didn’t know where our next pair of shoes was coming from? And look at us now.’ “

That’s the difference between Ashley’s unhappy yearnings and Scarlett’s hopeful remembrances.

“Now she understood why when two ex Confederates met, they talked of the war with so much relish, with pride, with nostalgia. Those had been the days that tried their hearts but they had come through them.”

Throughout the novel, Scarlett repeats the phrase, “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” which gives her strength during her numerous trials. She doesn’t rely on the lost days of her youth like Ashley does, rather, she uses something like the serenity prayer as a maxim to encourage her to move forward, and to embrace the future.

“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow… After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Conclusion

After spending some time on the internet these last few years, and thinking about the rising levels of depression and anxiety among young people, I can’t help but feel there might be a connection between those trends and our current inability to let go of the past.

On social media, everything is laid bare for the world to see, at all times. Nothing is hidden behind a succession of doors that are laid out in a row like dominoes. Instead, our doors are placed side by side, all eagerly displaying our online personas in one glance. “Throwback Thursday”, the ubiquitous “take me back,” and some variation or other of the “90’s starter packs” are a few of the common nostalgic triggers that I see so much of.

And now, with Covid-19 especially, everyone is longing for life to go back to normal, to the way it used to be. But what if life never goes back the way it used to be? What are you going to do about it? Are you going to be an Ashley Wilkes? Or a Scarlett O’Hara? Are you going to be a survivor and show ‘gumption’? Or are you going to ‘go under’?

But I should be clear here, I’m not necessarily saying that nostalgia is either good or bad, I just think it depends on the individual and how they think about it. Perhaps we can think of nostalgia as a tool, just like a tool can be used to build a house, it can also be used to kill your neighbour. Are you letting nostalgia bring you down, or are you using it to push yourself forward?

We’ve come along way from the initial diagnosis of the “disease.” And back then, the diagnosis and symptoms were just as questionable as the supposed cures. Leeches, the purging of the stomach, and scaring it or shaming it out of patients, were just a few of the barbaric and outdated methods used for treating the “victims.”

But among them, a few relevant pieces of wisdom survived.

This is from the 19th century french doctor, Hippolyte Petit, who inspires us to let go of our pasts and to search for meaning and purpose in our futures: “Create new loves for the person suffering from love sickness; find new joys to erase the domination of the old.”

“The past is for learning from and letting go. You can’t revisit it. It vanishes.”
Adele Parks

Thanks for reading.

Featured image is a still from the 1939 film, Gone With The Wind. “Gone With The Wind – Victor Fleming (1939) by The Film Sufi 18 Jan. 2020, FilmSufi.com, http://www.filmsufi.com/2020/01/gone-with-wind-victor-fleming-1939.html

Gender And Feminism In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

April 11, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 0 Comments

“For prose is so humble that it can go anywhere; no place is too low, too sordid, or too mean for it to enter. It is infinitely patient, too, humbly acquisitive. It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind.”
Virginia Woolf

That passage, from the extraordinary English writer Virginia Woolf, perfectly captures why her 1927 novel, To The Lighthouse, is quickly becoming one of my favourite books of all time.

She truly embodies her words, and her impressive talent and intelligence continue to floor me.

I recently read a quote that I liked from the author Michael Cunningham (who actually wrote a book inspired by Woolf) who said that: “She was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with his guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.”

The truth is, I didn’t love To The Lighthouse immediately. It took a few days or even weeks of it marinating in my mind for me to realize that there was something about it that made it special; not one thing, but rather, a number of things – too many things in fact that I get overwhelmed when I think about them all.

Because the more I was thinking about the book’s language, the themes, the symbolism, the characters, and the context, the more I could feel the novel’s subtle but brilliant complexity unfolding. It contained all the makings of what I feel every great book should be, not just a piece of entertainment, or some story of a individual or experience; nor a difficult essay on some obscure topic. No. Like all great books do, To The Lighthouse contains both the universal and the particular, the themes are relevant and enduring, the language is beautiful, and the message is inspiring and affecting.

And not only that, but the authors life, the literary movement she belonged to, and the contribution she made to humanity, could each merit a blog post of their own.

That’s why this blog can be so difficult at times. I have so much to say about this book, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do it justice.

It’s also funny because these are the types of books that I wish I could recommend to all my friends and family. I wish everyone could see the novel how I see it. Learn what I learned. But I’m confident many wouldn’t enjoy it. Because the book’s not really about anything. Nothing really happens. But at the same time, it’s about everything; life, family, time, art, knowledge, gender, desire, society, war, you name it. And it’s all packed into 190 pages!

I guess that’s why I like writing these posts, it’s my way of sharing these great books without having to nag people to read them.

However, I should preface that I’m still learning as I write. The conclusions and interpretations I make about the novel might be wrong to some. But I think there are some relevant and worthwhile pieces of wisdom here regardless. I also tried to organize it in a somewhat interesting and approachable way to the best of my abilities. And I apologize ahead of time for the length, Woolf has so many amazing passages that I just couldn’t leave out.

Structure and Plot

The plot of To The Lighthouse – if one can even call it a plot – centres around a family vacationing in the Isles of Skye in Scotland sometime between 1910 and 1920.

The book is divided into three parts: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Woolf herself described the structure of the novel as “two blocks joined by a corridor.”

The first section, “The Window,” takes place in a single day as we follow the seemingly mundane lives and internal thoughts of a family and the various house guests staying with them. They plan a trip to the lighthouse that is eventually abandoned, the adults take walks, the children play near the ocean, a woman paints outside, a young couple get engaged, and they all get together for a dinner party in the evening.

On the surface, it’s about exciting as a baked potato. But the beauty is in the details.

The middle section, “Time Passes,” is exactly what it sounds like. Ten years go by in which we get the poetic and haunting descriptions of the slow decay of the summer house. In addition, World War One happens, and it’s here we learn about the deaths of some of the characters. (They are written in short parenthesis without much of an explanation, as if signifying that human life is nothing more than a footnote compared to the enormous span and breadth of time.)

It reminds me of a quote from Ulysses that I like, where Joyce touches on the incomprehensible concept of time in relation to our fleeting existence: “Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.”

Lastly, in the third part of the novel, “The Lighthouse,” we find some of the characters returning to the summer house ten years later, and who finally make the trip to the lighthouse. The characters wrestle with their internal conflicts, the young woman who was painting her picture finally finishes it, and that’s pretty much it.

Woolf’s “Subtle Labyrinths”

With the very first line of the novel, the reader is thrown into a conversation between a mother and her son. The woman’s name is Mrs. Ramsay and she is responding to her son James’ inquiry of a possible trip to the lighthouse the next day: “Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay.”

These first words in the novel are interesting. They are reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which her first and last words of the chapter are “yes”:

“… and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

According to her diary and letters to friends, Woolf had strong feelings about her contemporary. She called Joyce “Egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.” She also had this to say about Ulysses: “Never did a book so bore me.”

(Those are bold words considering Ulysses is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written.)

But her word choice is suspect, and I think, deliberate. It’s as if she is responding, in her opinion perhaps, to Joyce’s failed attempt at an accurate internal female perspective.

Because like the first one, the last sentence in To The Lighthouse also begins with “yes”: “Yes…I have had my vision.”

And if you think that might be a coincidence, chapter two begins with the word “No,” and chapter three begins with “Perhaps.” But we will discuss their significance later on.

Now, before I go any further, I think it’s important to discuss the literary movement both Woolf and Joyce belonged to; because I can hear a particular voice in my head of someone I know who might be thinking: “Well, what if she meant nothing by those words, or that image, etc?”

And maybe that’s true of some books and authors, but I don’t think we have the liberty of being that naive when referring to Virginia Woolf. And hopefully by the end of this post you will agree.

Literary Modernism

Both Woolf and Joyce belonged to the literary movement called Modernism. In fact, both of their novels serve as touchstones of the movement itself.

Broadly speaking, Modernism, which began in the late 19th century and lasted until the mid 20th century, had numerous manifestations in philosophy, art, and architecture. But in literature specifically, the transition away from reliable narration, the use stream-of-consciousness writing techniques, the use of symbolism, and the idea that form follows function, characterized the movements most prominent features.

Up until this point in literary history, most authors felt that narrative form was best suited to representing real life as accurately and as realistically as possible.

But now, by rebranding what a novel was capable of, these authors were able to explore and experiment with form and structure to more accurately represent an authentic response to the global catastrophe of world war, the disillusionment of a rapidly changing world, and the new sensibilities that accompanied the transition.

This is from Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

“A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.”

This “active role of interpreting the text” couldn’t be more relevant than with Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. She was keenly aware of the power of symbolism and allusions to convey meaning.

Symbols like metaphor, allegory, and archetypes, help the reader visualize complex concepts and simplify themes. They also allow writers to discuss ideas in an efficient and artful way which gives readers a chance to add to the story with their own subjective inputs. Furthermore, symbolism allows a writer to approach a controversial theme in a more delicate manner.

In her essay, On being Ill, Woolf reveals something significant about the inherent deficiencies of words alone.

“…words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other — a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause — which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain.”

The “knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas” is especially applicable here.

And keep that in the back of your mind, because I might not say exactly what I mean in the most efficient way possible, but I hope to leave some traces of intelligibility with which the reader can parse some kind of meaning.

The Theme of Gender

In To The Lighthouse, Woolf uses these metaphors and archetypes to weave a narrative around the gender norms in 20th century Britain.

She uses them to convey ideas about metaphysical concepts and how they influence and interact with one another; how through a lens of identity, for example, a person’s subjective views about life, death, art, time, and meaning, are interpreted.

The woman mentioned earlier, Mrs. Ramsay, is the archetypal representation of the traditional woman in Victorian England, and also, according to Woolf’s sister Vanessa, the perfect re-creation of their own mother.

Mrs. Ramsay’s encouraging words to her son at the beginning of the novel represent the conventional compassionate and nurturing tendencies that were expected of all women at the time.

But they are contradicted by the father, Mr. Ramsay, the stereotypical domineering, authoritarian, and masculine presence in the home.

“”But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.””

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent the reoccurring theme of the male vs female – objectivity vs subjectivity dichotomy in the novel:

“What he (Mr. Ramsay) said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with fact: never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising…”

Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, is willing to lie to her son to make him feel better: “But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine,” she says. And in response to his father’s contradictory words, six year old James thinks about grabbing a weapon and killing him. His mother, he thinks, is “ten thousand times better in every way.”

It’s early on in the novel that we experience the frequent perspective changes – which sometimes makes it difficult to know who is thinking and when. (Also, in case you missed it, Woolf uses James’ internal reaction to suggest that he has what Sigmund Freud would have called an Oedipal complex, where a boy competes with the father for the mother’s love. Woolf would have been familiar with the scientific theories of her day, and was often surrounded by some of the most prominent artists and intellectuals in England.)

When Mrs. Ramsay mentions the trip to the lighthouse again, Mr. Ramsay snaps at her:

“The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. “Damn you,” he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.”

Woolf continues with Mrs. Ramsay’s reaction:

“To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.”

Another example of this dichotomy can be seen later on in the novel when Mrs. Ramsay is putting her daughter Cam and her son James to bed. There is a decorative pig skull hanging on the wall in their room and Cam wants her mother to take it down. James objects, and Mrs. Ramsay compromises by covering it with her shawl.

She comforts Cam by saying: “how lovely it looked now; how the faeries would love it: it was like a bird’s nest: it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes…”

To James, she says: “see, the boar’s skull is still there; they had not touched it; they had done just what he wanted.”

Even at their young age, the children adhere to Woolf’s portrayal of the feminine qualities of comfort and subjectivity and the masculine qualities of truth and objectivity.

It should be noted here that Mr. Ramsay’s field of study is metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that deals with abstract concepts such as being, knowing, cause, identity, time, and space. He is concerned with the truth and nature of reality, while his wife lives her reality; one is concerned with reason, the other with being.

Woolf goes on to describe Mr. Ramsay’s mind in great detail. She explains how he thinks in a linear fashion, comparing his intelligence to the letters of the alphabet: “his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England reach Q… Z is only reached once by a man in a generation.”

But his intellectual pursuits make him dreadfully insecure. He continuously thinks about his legacy and is troubled by the idea of being forgotten, on never reaching Z. He made one meaningful contribution to philosophy when he was younger but he fears his best days are behind him. He laments: “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light…”

So as opposed to being portrayed as the strong, dependant, masculine figure, Mr. Ramsay appears weak and moody as he faces thoughts of his own mortality against the impending plague of time. “He was a failure, he repeated.” “He would never reach R. On to R, once more R…”

His response is to turn to his wife for emotional support:

“If he put his implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or high, not for a second should he find himself without her.”… “It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life…”

Mrs. Ramsay comforts him, as is her feminine principle, but she pays for it, much like Mr. Ramsay pays for his: “So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by: all was so lavished and spent…”

Mrs. Ramsay not only provides support for her family, but for the whole male population, which she felt was her duty. We see the same thing in her interactions with the other characters, like Charles Tansley.

Mr. Tansley is a young man staying with the family who looks up to Mr. Ramsay. He is one of his “great admirers,” even mimicking his sentiment regarding the trip to the lighthouse: “”No going to the lighthouse James,” he said.”

Woolf describes Mr. Tansley doing what “he liked best – to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, and saying who had won this, and who had won that, who was a “first rate man” at latin verses, who was “brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound”, who was undoubtedly the “ablest fellow in Balliol”…”

It’s indicative of the things Woolf likely would have been accustomed to in her own life. Men bragging about personal tastes and judgments, where confidence in conviction is the only work required, this masculine behaviour that almost seeks to be challenged.

Mr. Tansley, like Mr. Ramsay, is also insecure. Together, they represents the unpleasant qualities that Woolf attributes to masculinity. They are insensitive, egotistical, selfish, and totally dependant on other peoples’ high opinion of themselves – especially from the women, whom they rely on for emotional support and ego stroking.

The children all dislike Mr. Tansley, but Mrs. Ramsay, defends him, saying: “Yes, he did say disagreeable things…It was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him.”

Woolf explains why Mrs. Ramsay puts up with such male behaviour and how she justifies it:

“she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential…”

When Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Tansley take a walk together, for example, she goes out of her way to flatter him and show him compassion despite his shortcomings. In response, Mr. Tansley feels sense of pride in being near her beauty.

Mrs. Ramsay finds meaning in being kind and generous and by capturing the ephemeral nature of life in the small pleasantries it has to offer.

But she also exhibits some traces of the masculine qualities, and despite suffering under them, she is complicit with the traditional gender roles of her day.

She thinks all women should be just like her, she thinks that: “an unmarried woman has missed the best of life.”

We also get a glimpse into what motivates her:

“For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay . . . Mrs. Ramsay, of course! and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted…”

She relishes this attention and she organizes a dinner party where “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.”

She acts as the mediator, guiding the conversation, and dishing out the food. During the dinner she muses on the fleeting hours of the day and the way moment seems to transcend time:

“Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness…Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”

After the dinner is finished she ponders on the past and what it means to her:

“Yes, that was done then, accomplished; and as with all things done, became solemn. Now one thought of it, cleared of chatter and emotion, it seemed always to have been, only was shown now and so being shown, struck everything into stability. They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too.”

Parallels In My Life

As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but notice similarities to my own life. I think that’s part of the allure of reading; this discovery of our resemblance to the rest of humanity; this sense of belonging and realizing that there is likely nothing that you’ve ever felt or thought that hasn’t been felt or thought by someone else.

One of the reasons why I write this blog is to leave a legacy behind. The things that Mr. Ramsay struggles with – that he will inevitably be forgotten – is all too familiar to me. I often feel that some kind of preservation of my self is what gives my life meaning.

I also see other similarities concerning this masculine and feminine dichotomy.

I work in a male-dominated trade as a machinist. My work leaves no room for subjective interpretation. I’m forced to adhere to rigid tolerances where something is either right or wrong, without ambiguity.

My wife on the other hand works in a predominately female trade as a nurse. She’s a care-giver who’s proper bedside manner is a crucial part of her job. She is there to comfort her patients, and besides the actual medicine – which can most definitely be right or wrong – compassion seems like a requirement for her position.

Often I get so caught up in a book, or a piece of writing that I forget to smell the roses as it were. It’s usually my wife who reminds me to appreciate a sunset, or with a gentle touch draws my attention toward the beauty of a moment.

That’s why this quote from the novel, where Mrs. Ramsay is thinking about her husband, rang so true to me:

“Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view?”

In fact, most of the women in my life have embodied these tendencies more than the men.

I remember when I was younger my mom would sometimes sing that song, “We Are Family”, by Sister Sledge, but instead of singing “I got all my sisters and me,” she would say all our names in the chorus. I imagine I would have rolled my eyes back then, feeling embarrassed for the both of us, but now that moment feels extra special to me. It was her way of appreciating the fleeting moment of happiness, and she’s helped me remember it by doing so.

Another example is how my wife (and even the majority of women I know) enjoy shopping and making their homes beautiful. I’m always the one saying “we don’t need this, or we don’t need that.” But I’ve come to appreciate that the spaces they create and the things they surround themselves with gives their lives meaning. It’s about treasuring the moment and feeling inspired by the beauty around them.

But it’s interesting how we still adhere to some of these gender roles, despite most of them being arbitrary. Maybe it’s because they provide a path for us to navigate the complex social world we find ourselves in. It’s much easier to conform to them than risk the exposure of the great unknown; we find safety and security following the way others have paved before us.

But sometimes the bravest thing we can do is make our own path, and sometimes we find that others will follow in our footsteps.

Which brings us to Woolf’s character who embodies this message.

Lily Briscoe

In contrast to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who occupy the stereotypical gender norms, Lily falls somewhere in between. She represents the third option, the “perhaps”; the androgynous.

She also represents the person who Woolf tried to be in real life. Lily’s final words at the end of the novel after she finishes her painting,”Yes, I have had my vision,” can be interpreted as an allusion to Woolf’s novel itself.

Lily resists the rigid binary of male and female gender roles. She challenges the male hegemony and seeks to find a sense of her own individuality.

As an aspiring painter, she is aware of the restrictions placed on women who wanted to pursue a career in art or writing. The voice of Mr. Tansley echos in her mind throughout the novel: “Women can’t write, women can’t paint.”

She struggles to understand how Mrs. Ramsay can overlook the tyrannical masculine traits around her, something she can’t do herself. And as she sits and paints outside, she looks into the window at Mrs. Ramsay, who has the protection of her role as caregiver and comforter that surrounds her in her house, safe from the uncertainty that Lily feels outside by breaking from the traditional roles, insecure and fearful that someone will judge her.

Because of that, Lily is unable to finish her painting of Mrs. Ramsay, she is confused and unsure of her opinion of her.

In the last part of the novel, after which a decade passes in which we learn of Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Lily tries again to paint the picture. This time she suffers from interruptions from Mr. Ramsay, who embodies the dominating male patriarchy that is keeping her from truly expressing herself.

But she perseveres, trying to find her meaning, wrestling with ideas regarding time and being, and how to manifest them:

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience.”

She also questions her motives for painting. Here we can discern a faint echo of Mr. Ramsay:

“She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then…”

This next quote is my favourite of the novel. Here Lily has an epiphany about Mrs. Ramsay. It makes her realize that she was wrong about her, that she was only trying to make life meaningful in the only way she knew how.

“What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying “Life stands still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) — this was the nature of the revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stands still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay! she repeated. She owed this revelation to her.”

Mrs. Ramsay finds meaning in capturing memories to cherish in the future; Mr. Ramsay finds meaning in his work outlasting time, lingering as long as possible in the past; and together, they inspire Lily to embrace the present and capture the moment through art. She understands that it’s not about the end product, but the act in and of itself.

Lily discovers something that reminds me of a quote I read recently:

“Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Woolf’s Feminism

On the surface, we might think of the obvious symbol of “The lighthouse” as masculine, the phalic, the beacon of objective reality; and “The window”: feminine, the transparent, the subjective view of the beholder.

Additionally, the chapter “Time passes,” might be seen as a symbol of its own: the middle section, the Lily Briscoe, the corridor that connects them both. It represents the progression of society, the new woman; the evolution of culture and society into a more inclusive and balanced harmony.

But these symbols become more complex when we view them in light of Woolf’s deeper and more philosophical meanings.

In an article in The International Journal of English Language, Literature, and Humanities, titled, Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Theory and its Reflection in Her Work To The Lighthouse, Sunayana Khatter points out three classifications of feminism:

1. Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal Feminism, Equality.

2. Women reject the male symbolic order in name of difference. Radical Feminisim. Feminity extolled.

3. Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical.

Khatter argues that Woolf’s writing belonged to the third classification.

What does that mean?

This is what I think – Woolf knew that the cultural and societal norms and traditions regarding gender influence our understanding and expression of subjective metaphysical concepts.

To put simply, that gender is a social construct, and that it can restrict and oppress those that are expected to conform to their prescriptive roles.

Except Woolf felt that things didn’t have to be that way.

To clarify, as Khatter writes, To The Lighthouse is not an argument for “the flight from fixed gender identities, but a recognition of their falsifying metaphysical nature.”

So through the lens of time, say, a theme that permeates the entire novel, Woolf describes how the male and female characters find different modes of expression and meaning in the face of the tragic ephemerality of life, which are tied to their respective genders, but, according to Woolf, they don’t have to be.

The Androgynous

To prove that this dichotomy of masculinity and femininity was wrong, Woolf gives us these complex character sketches, and uses her stream-of-consciousness writing style to show us, in real-time, instances of the incongruous nature of the characters thoughts and actions regarding these rigid binaries.

Mr. Ramsay comes across as rude and short-tempered, but he’s insecure and dependant on others for support. Lily Briscoe points out these contradictions: “why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.”

Similarly, Mrs. Ramsay, who occupies the traditional role of caretaker and comfort giver, finds meaning in her life by creating memories and environments in which people are happy, supported, and encouraged.

We see Mrs. Ramsay as both submissive and subservient, putting the feelings of others above her own, and at the same time, we see how strong, capable, and somewhat selfish and authoritarian she really is.

Woolf was showing us that her characters are much more multi-dimensional than the gendered expectations society puts on them.

And we can think of the lighthouse in the same way, it’s not only an objective beacon, taken to be a symbol of the physical world, representative of masculinity. It also represents the feminine principles, it gives life. Just as the lighthouse serves to illuminate darkness and discover truth, it also, much like Mrs. Ramsay does herself, provides safety and prevents disaster.

Here Woolf gives us this symbolic marriage of Mrs. Ramsay and the lighthouse:

“…and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at – that light, for example…She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.”

Lily embodies this concept of rejecting the metaphysical as masculine and feminine most of all, not only in terms of her characters actions, but symbolically. She chooses to reject the idea that women can’t be artists and discovers her own identity and individuality.

By drawing a line in the middle of her paining at the end of the novel, she captures Woolf’s theory of androgyny and its nature of balance and unity.

In her novel, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf elaborates on the importance of this idea:

“that the androgynous mind is less distinguishing than the single-sexed mind; that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

And although she is specifically speaking about art in the next passage, I think Woolf’s words can help us better understand ourselves by questioning the lens through which we view the world, and ask ourselves if we are mindlessly adhering to unhelpful, arbitrary, or even harmful gender norms.

“It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly…Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

Contemporary Feminism

Woolf was considered to be a part of the first-wave of feminism. And her contribution to the movement, and the inspiration she had on the women of the second-wave of feminism of the 1960’s and 70’s, can still be felt today.

But as I was writing this post, I couldn’t help shake the feeling that feminism is a bit of a dirty, loaded word nowadays.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think everyone, regardless of gender, should be afforded the same basic human rights. And I also think feminism, especially during the first and second waves, was absolutely, one-hundred percent necessary.

Because of their efforts, our society has made incredible progress since Woolf’s time.

Domestic violence has dropped 67% in the last few decades, while sexual violence has been cut in half.

According to statistics Canada, women make up 47% of the workforce now. In 1950, that number was around 25%.

Women are also more likely than men to have graduated high school, and more likely than men to have college or university qualifications.

And despite the common misconception that women only make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to PolitiFact, research shows that number is closer to 94 cents. The initial figure was based on the average incomes of each gender, not taken from men and women with the same jobs. The jump from 77 to 94 is explained by factoring in men working longer hours on average, retiring later, and working more dangerous jobs.

There is obviously something missing to account for that 6% difference, but the data is weak. Discrimination, women’s reluctance to ask for raises, and other personality or biological differences might contribute, but they are difficult to measure.

In an article titled, “What Is The Problem With Feminism” author, Mark Manson, writes:

“Previous generations of feminists were willing to die in the trenches of getting women the right to vote, to go to college, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. This generation’s tribal feminists’ trenches are that of The Feelings Police — protecting everyone’s feelings so that they never feel oppressed or marginalized in any way.”

These new “tribal feminists” remind me of that episode of The Simpsons, where Lisa wants to play football.

“That’s right,” she says, “A girl wants to play football. How about that?”

The coach, Ned Flanders responds, “Well, that’s super-duper, Lisa. We’ve already got four girls on the team.”

Lisa asks, visibly disappointed, “you do?”

“Ah huh. But we’d love to have you onboard!”

“I dunno… football’s not really my thing. After all… what kind of civilized person would play around with the skin of an innocent pig?!”

Well, actually, Lisa, these balls are synthetic! And for every ball you buy, a dollar goes to Amnesty International!

“I gotta go.” she says, starting to cry.

Here’s some more wisdom from a cartoon character:

“Anytime someone calls attention to the breaking of gender roles, it ultimately undermines the concept of gender equality by implying that this is an exception and not the status quo.” – knuckles the Enchidna

Because today, women can be anything, and do anything. And I’m not saying there aren’t sexist, and misogynistic people out there – and there is an obvious problem with crime – but perhaps it’s not a systemic issue of the patriarchal society like it once was.

It seems to me like the people like Lisa, trying to fight for a meaningful change with the best intentions in mind, look up to people in the past who were brave and who stood up for what they believed in. The ones that are celebrated as heroes and remembered, much like how we remember Woolf now.

The problem is that these courageous figures of the past fought against measurable inequalities. Discrimination was black and white in many ways during the first two waves of feminism. But now, as Mannon writes:

“the hardest part about it is that there’s no easy metric in the social arena for what is equal and what is not. If I fire three employees and two of them are women, is that equality? Or is that sexism? You can’t say unless you know why I fired them. And you can’t know why I fired them unless you can get inside my brain and understand my beliefs and motivations.”

And what’s ironic about contemporary feminism, is that me being a man, and quoting a man while discussing these topics, some people will undoubtedly think that my opinion is somehow invalidated because of my gender. A feminist might claim my views are a symptom of the patriarchy and therefore discredit them. I might even be called a misogynist. But isn’t preventing discrimination based on gender the whole point of feminism?

If they cared about equality, wouldn’t the fact that men serve 63% longer prison sentences than women for the same crime be an appropriate topic to tackle? Or perhaps why over 90% of prison inmates are male? Or why men are more likely to commit suicide?

Instead, we get headlines like this one: “”Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky” – do cities have to be so sexist?“

The thing is, is that Woolf would have disagreed with that gendered type of thinking. Attributing singular masculine symbolism to an object would, in her opinion, have been a step backward for feminism.

I want to be clear, I’m not saying we live in a perfect word where discrimination doesn’t exist, it most certainly does. Also, I’m positive that there are activists, scholars, and thinkers out there making meaningful contributions to better the lives of women. But for every one of them, how many more are trying to find solutions to problems that don’t exist?

Maybe we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There have been plenty of brilliant minds in the past that have made much more meaningful (and relevant) contributions to ameliorating the suffrages of women than these “feminists” of today.

Like the extraordinary Virginia Woolf for example, who will never know how wrong she was when she said:

“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”

Thanks for reading.

The Polarization Of Jordan Peterson

March 28, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 5 Comments

It’s been a few months since my last post. I took some time off to try my hand at some fiction writing. It went well in the beginning. I was enthusiastic, doing it daily, even writing at least 1000 words a day, but I quickly realized how different non-fiction writing is from fiction writing. Grammar, voice, and research were tough for me as it was, now I was having to think about narrative structure, themes, character development, setting, and a thousand other things.

And if you haven’t already noticed by reading some of my other posts – or even the last paragraph for that matter – I’m not very good at writing. But I’m aware that if you want to be good at something you have to keep doing it no matter how hard it gets.

At least that’s what I had been telling myself everyday for the last year or so anyway. Quotes like this one would often keep me motivated to continue even when things became difficult:

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
Seneca

But there was a major flaw in my thinking. I was consistently hitting walls. I wasn’t getting anything accomplished. I felt like I wasn’t getting any better, nor did it feel that it was getting any easier. I had no small victories along the way, nothing to keep me motivated to continue except words like those previously mentioned. And they did for a while, maybe for a month or so, where I would force myself to sit down and write despite not wanting to. But discouragement is a heavy burden to carry alone. And our minds like to supply us with the most poisonous ideas if we let them. So as the days past I started skipping writing sessions, making excuses for myself, and worst of all, it was making me unhappy. So eventually I stopped writing altogether.

Then a few weeks ago, Jordan Peterson’s new book Beyond Order came in the mail. And I read this passage:

“If you make what you want clear and commit yourself to its pursuit, you may fail. But if you do not make what you want clear, then you will certainly fail. You cannot hit a target you refuse to see… Success at a given endeavour often means trying, falling short, recalibrating (with the new knowledge generated painfully by failure), and then trying again and falling short – often repeated, ad nauseam. Sometimes all that learning, impossible without failure, leads you to see that aiming your ambition in a different direction would be better – not because it is easier; not because you have given up; not because you are avoiding – but because you have learned through the vicissitudes of your experience that what you seek is not to be found where you were looking, or is simply not attainable in the manner by which you chose to pursue it.”

That hit me like a brick. It always seems like Peterson’s words have reached me when I’ve needed them the most.

He made me realize that I was on the wrong path, that I had made an error somewhere along the way and I needed to reassess why I was doing what I was doing, and where I wanted to be.

I still hope to write fiction on a regular basis, but he’s helped me understand the necessity of this blog for my mental clarity, happiness, and well-being.

Now, in hindsight, it seems like an easy fix, why didn’t I just start writing the blog much earlier? It’s because I was attached to the idea that giving up writing fiction would make me a failure. I had this vague conviction that someone would find out that I couldn’t do it, or that I was being foolish for even trying. I was forcing myself to prove to these phantom voices that I could and would show them otherwise. There is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that I’m reminded of now, he said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That was me. I was locked onto this unproductive trajectory and stuck in limbo, too stubborn to give up, but too blind to see that something wasn’t working.

Anyway, that’s my little intro to this piece. I often struggle with whether or not to include biographical information in these posts as doing so will no doubt alienate certain readers, but I think context matters here and personal anecdotes can be helpful to get a point across.

Jordan Peterson

I’ve written about Peterson’s first book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos, in a previous post. He’s since made a return in the lime light so I thought that writing about him might be a good way to get back on the blog writing horse again.

If you have been living under a rock for the last few years and are unaware of who Jordan Peterson is, I’d recommend reading my other post, here. I get into who he is and what he stands for a little more in depth in that one.

Peterson is an extremely polarizing figure, which still continues to baffle me. His critics accuse him of being a misogynist, a bigot, a grifter, and that he encourages dangerous “far right” political thinking that arms young dispossessed white men with weapons with which to defend their declining social status. They fear his criticisms of Marxism and Postmodernism give the aforementioned white men an excuse to discredit the victims of marginalized groups suffering from the oppression of perceived white supremacy, a male dominated patriarchy, and economic injustice.

But the degree to which people misunderstand his work really is mind boggling.

The following is a question Peterson was asked in an Interview with Politico Magazine:

“Most of the people you’d characterize as advocates of “identity politics” believe that men inherently have more power and value in society. It seems that much of your argument … is predicated on the idea that that is not necessarily somehow the case.”

This was his response:

“Well, it’s clearly not necessarily the case. I mean, men do all the dangerous jobs. They’re much more likely to be killed. They’re much more likely to be victims of crime. They’re much more likely to commit suicide successfully. They’re much more likely to be held back in school. They’re much more likely to get poor grades. They’re much less likely to be in university. They’re much less likely to graduate from university. The vast majority of the seriously dispossessed are seriously dispossessed men. Like, this whole split of the world into one privileged gender compared to the other is—I think the whole viewpoint is pathological. Like, I don’t even like to argue about it from within that confine—“Oh, well, are men more oppressed than women? Well, how about that’s a stupid question? That’s the right response to that question. Because as soon as you enter into the argument, you’re validating the question. It’s like, I don’t think we should be dividing up the world that way. That’s part of the pathological game. Both men and women suffer immensely in life. Both men and women suffer immensely in life. And not only that, they also contribute unnecessarily to that suffering as a consequence of their own unexamined malevolence and resentment. And then to say, “Well, who’s more oppressed?” or “who’s more malevolent?” is like—well, first of all, you shouldn’t be analyzing at the level of a group. You’re making a fundamental error right then and there.”

The way I see it, and the reason why I’ll continue to defend Peterson, is that his messages that address the “unexamined malevolence and resentment” we see in our society are extremely necessary and pertinent right now. He’s helped millions of people change their lives for the better, mine included, and his popularity speaks to the fact that people had been starving for his message.

But I won’t get into his ideas here, nor will I attempt to defend them – he can do that much better than I can – I only want to talk about his reception in regards to a much larger phenomenon I’ve been observing.

There is a movement present in our culture, a sort of unhinged religiosity regarding social justice and this idea of a utopian ideal of moral purity. There are unhealthy narratives and cynical theories being discussed right now which endanger objective scientific debate. Criticisms of these ideas, based on principles of logic and reason, appear discriminatory and offensive to some. And it’s their iron- fisted conviction of these ideas that makes an alternative view seem to them to be unworthy of debate.

In some of my previous posts, I talk extensively of stoic philosophy and the pragmatic wisdom it has to offer, but the truth is, is that Stoicism’s main proponents like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca, were all wealthy and privileged slave owners who justified their behaviours by claiming that slaves needed to accept their unfortunate place in life. I’m sure we can all agree that slavery is bad but it doesn’t mean we should disregard all the useful wisdom they’ve imparted either. But through the lens of critical race theory for example, these men are putting forth ideas of white supremacy and therefore should be ignored.

People have let their myopic view of the world shroud their ability to think critically.

In a similar fashion, but on a smaller scale, any description of Peterson or his past is bound to stir up talk of his recent issues with bezodiazapene dependence and the subsequent health issues that befell him because if it. His most vocal critics will say “how ironic and hypocritical it is that this man is preaching self-help advice while his own life is in tatters.”

They treat him as if he should be this morally perfect being capable of transcending humanity’s faults. But I don’t see why we have to judge an individuals message on the basis of their own adherence to it. If someone with bad teeth told you to brush your teeth everyday, would you disagree with that advice just because they don’t follow it? Is “practice what you preach” really the responsibitly of the preacher, or perhaps something that should be overlooked by the learner, especially when the lesson has been proven to have a positive impact?

Regardless, most of the criticisms Peterson receives are nothing but these thoughtless ad hominem attacks from people who likely never read his works anyway. This is how I see it:

“When you resort to attacking the messenger and not the message, you have lost the debate.”
Addison Whithcome

It’s as simple as that.

But no matter how much good someone might contribute to the world, our current culture is obsessed with finding and exploiting their faults, especially if they run contrary to their political ideologies.

Because that’s what this is all about: Politics.

People have forgotten what it’s like to think for themselves. Political discourse is about identity now more than ever. And once an individual aligns themselves with a certain group or a certain way of thinking, they don’t need to listen to or to read Peterson’s book for example, because they might have heard that he is associated with christian conservatism, or that he is pro-capitalist, and that’s enough for them to dismiss him as the opposition. Their minds are already made up.

All it takes is one thing he said or believes in for them to ignore his entire work. But by doing so they miss so much. I don’t agree with everything he says either, but I’m smart enough to parse through his work and find things that mean something to me, useful things that I can apply to my own life.

One of his rules from his last book: set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world – a rule that has since become a meme and joked about by many – has had a huge impact on me. I’ve taken it to heart and joined the Big Brother program because of it, hoping to be the change I want to see in the world instead of mindlessly criticizing it. He’s also inspired me to be open minded with regards to ideas I don’t agree with.

But what do I get in return for being a fan of his? I’m told that I’m being “groomed for fascism”, or that I enjoy his works because he’s a “dumb persons intellectual.”

And what’s motivating these people to resort to personal attacks instead of the genuine debate of his ideas? It’s because popular left wing media organizations like to write hit pieces slandering Peterson in order to push their political agendas. As Bret Weinstein put it on one of his podcasts recently, they are trying to create a stink around Peterson that is sufficient enough to drive people away from looking into who he is themselves.

And I can feel it, or smell it rather. A part of why I wanted to write this post was because I have felt the subtle pangs of embarrassment by publicly supporting Peterson. But I couldn’t quite figure out why. My response to his work has been overwhelmingly positive; I discovered the courage to leave a job I was unhappy with, my relationships are stronger, I’m contributing to my community, and I’ve become more open minded, so why should I be ashamed of that?

I can’t really blame the corporate media for vilifying him. They’re just gonna do what sells and I understand that. It’s the people who eat that shit up unthinkingly that bothers me.

But why?

There is a book called Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States. In it, author Dannagal Goldthwaite Young talks about how the political left tends to use irony and satire in their political discussions. That’s why most of the talking head programs on comedy central, for example, are predominately left leaning. And this is true of Hollywood as well as all the big social media companies.

And it’s by this mingling of entertainment and politics, that the influence of popular shows like Last Week Tonight With John Oliver or Saturday Night Live are unconsciously reenforcing political ideologies disguised as comedy. Our beliefs are constantly being validated and reinforced by the broader cultural forces around us.

Peterson, however, points to the flaws of misguided satire: “Most of the so-called critiques of my work from the left aren’t critiques of my work – they’re parodies of it, and then critiques of the parody.”

There is an interesting concept that could help explain why Petersons is such a polarizing individual.

The author David Foster Wallace, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, wrote that television “can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form.”

He continues: “television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability.”

This mode of psychosocial influence is not just perpetuated by television, I only used those shows as examples because of their popularity, it happens in all forms of media.

If you need further proof of this phenomenon, look no further than the Marvel comic book universe.

What the hell? https://t.co/CGkuztpEjq
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) April 6, 2021

The comic book in question makes an obvious allusion to Jordan Peterson and his ideas. Except the problem is that the character is a nazi named The Red Skull.

Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull? https://t.co/waFsAvWlfd
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) April 6, 2021

But this isn’t just happening to discussions surrounding Jordan Peterson either.

What Wallace was touching on is something that the intellectual polymath Rene Girdard was famous for: Memetic Theory.

Instagram Influencers, “blue-checks” on twitter, and popular YouTubers, all help contribute and define our socially acceptable modes of behaviour. They all encourage this internet mob mentality. Now all we have to do is pay attention to “upvotes” and “likes” to learn how to conform to public opinion. This is referred to as the informational mechanism of social influence. We’d rather just fit in rather than risk being vulnerable by betraying our honest values and emotions.

There is a famous study by Solomon Asch in which people were asked to identify which two lines on separate pieces of paper were the same length.

What Asch discovered was that there was an enormous number of people who lied about their answers in order to imitate others who had been planted in the study to give wrong answers on purpose.

Without the planted participants, less than 1% of people would get the wrong answer. With the added group pressure, people were wrong 36% of the time.

70% of the subjects just followed along with the group!

This could explain why some of the debates on social media surrounding Peterson are filled with the character assassinations that draw attention away from his claims, as if they somehow invalidate his arguments. They are keeping in tune with the rest of the popular narrative without thinking about it themselves. Just like how Petersons’s criticisms of identity politics are misconstrued as misogyny or racism. Or how many claimed that Trump was responsible for the 400,000 deaths in the U.S. from his mishandling of Covid-19, as opposed to the abnormally high death count being attributed to Americas high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. People will mindlessly follow any unsubstantiated claim as long as it adheres to their political stance.

What I see happening is that these uncritical minds are regurgitating the same old criticisms instead of risking the vulnerability of thinking for themselves and facing the backlash of public opinion – backlash that is not driven by objective truth and honest debate, but by subjective social grievances and fallacious red herrings.

Wallace touches on the motives of this Mimetic Theory in his own words and why we might choose to avoid taking a stand instead of following popular narratives:

“…to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self.”

Because if you do to choose to support Peterson and his work, you’re glossed over as a “die hard groupie” or “fan boy,” or even a nazi, who will blindly follow him anywhere, unhip and uncool. At best, you’re carelessly grouped into a category of identity that is used to minimize the effectiveness of his message somehow. At worst, your labeled an idiot, a fascist, or a misogynist.

I’ve also noticed that despite the thousands of people reaching out to Peterson thanking him for helping them get their lives in order by overcoming issues with alcoholism, drugs, and depression, his critics will still obsess over the fact that he said something inflammatory or contentious and judge his character solely based on that instead. There is no reasonable weighing of the good and the bad, it’s just strict adherence to political ideology.

It’s ironic because it runs directly counter to the message that people like myself have interpreted from his books.

He’s even publicly admitted that his goal isn’t to “defeat” the people on the other side of the political dialogue, it’s to negotiate them back into a peaceful discussion.

As our moral relativist and politically divisive society grows, the more polarizing Peterson will become. Because his lessons about personal responsibility, free speech, evolutionary hierarchies, and the embracing of masculinity as opposed to condemning it, is in direct conflict with the Postmodern ideas of subjective social grievances and today’s wokeness.

And the people hell-bent on ending Petersons career don’t want to educate themselves anyway, they only want to validate their existing beliefs. And people eat it up because they love when other people think for them.

But if they did think for themselves, they’d learn that instead of being labeled as extremely right-wing, in his new book, Beyond Order 12 More Rules For Life, Peterson talks about the characteristics of liberalism and conservatism in depth and the necessity of balance between the two in order to achieve political harmony.

It’s indicative of the swinging political pendulum that someone as centrist as Peterson really is, is now considered to be far-right. They are moving the goal posts.

My conclusion, if I have one at all, is to be mindful of the baggage that is associated with political bias. Think for yourself. Don’t get caught in the false dichotomies. Don’t be afraid to be question things. And be weary of cynical theories.

I’ll leave you with this unfortunate but incredibly relevant quote:

“All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.”
Albert Einstein

Thanks for reading.

Intellectual Humility: 30 Quotes Our Politically Divided World Needs Right Now

January 9, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 2 Comments

If you’ve spent anytime on the internet in the last few days, you might have noticed another momentous shift in the political divide in the U.S.

Instead of acknowledging the hypocrisy of opposing political ideologies, or even observing the similarities between them, the recent events at Capitol Hill have only pushed both sides further apart. Convictions are getting stronger, not weaker. And if we’re learning anything from these political divisions, it’s that people will accommodate any narrative to fit their belief systems, regardless of contradictions.

But why?

It’s because we live in a society with a humility problem; where admitting when we’re wrong is more painful than it should be; where we enclose ourselves in echo chambers, in which our ideas and values are continuously validated and enforced by others just like us; where we marry our identities and our egos to our world views, so that changing our minds is (wrongly) misconstrued as weakness; and where we lack the emotional and intellectual humility required to detect out own cognitive biases and blind spots, necessary to make meaningful change possible.

Thats why I’ve collected 30 quotes that I think everyone should read. It’s wise words like these that should be guiding our political discourse and moral compasses, not our emotions, egos, and ignorance.

I hope they are as helpful for you as they have been for me.

“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, “What else could this mean?”
Shannon L. Alder

“If there is doubt, don’t claim you are certain. It is amazing how relaxing it is not to pretend to know more than you do.”
Christopher Hitchens

“Man has both potentialities within himself (to behave like swine or saints); which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions”
Viktor Frankl

“(People in Western societies) have begun to realize that the difficulties confronting us are moral problems, and that the attempts to answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear arms or by economic “competition” is achieving little, for it cuts both ways. Many of us now understand that moral and mental means would be more efficient, since they could provide us with psychic immunity against the ever-increasing infection.
But all such attempts have proved singularly ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they (i.e., our opponents) who are wrong. It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our own shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation. As matters now stand, we lay ourselves open to every infection, because we are really doing practically the same thing as they. Only we have the additional disadvantage that we neither see nor want to understand what we ourselves are doing, under the cover of good manners.”
CArl Jung

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
Leo Tolstoy

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
C.S. LEWIS

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Baldwin

“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favour, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
Milan Kundera

The world is suffering from intolerance and bigotry, and from the belief that vigorous action is admirable even when misguided; whereas what is needed in our very complex modern society is calm consideration.”
Bertrand Russell

10.

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

11.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Leo Tolstoy

12.

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

13.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
F Scott. Fitzgerald

14.

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain

15.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
John Stuart Mill

16.

“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
Carl Jung

17.

“When faced with people’s bad behaviour, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.”
Marcus Aurelius

18.

“Resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you or for giving you a skewed worldview. Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong. In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.”
Hans Rosling

19.

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
Isaac Asimov

20.

“If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
Paulo coelho

21.

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
William Blake

22.

“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Oliver Cromwell

24.

“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
John Steinbeck

25.

“Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don’t understand.”
Megan Chance

26.

“When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible?

No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.”
Marcus Aurelius

27.

“The right to criticize someone else has to be won, deserved. If, in general, you treat another with hostility or contempt, your slightest adverse remark, whether justified or not, will be seen as a sign of aggression, much more likely to make him obstinate and unapproachable than to persuade him to change for the better.
Conversely, if you show someone friendship, sympathy and consideration, not merely superficially but in a manner that is sincere and felt to be so, then you may allow yourself to criticize with some hope of being heard, things about him that you regard as open to objection.”
Amin Maalouf

28.

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
Albert Camus

29.

“It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

30.

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
George Eliot

Moral Instruction In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

January 2, 2021 / Murraybarkway / 0 Comments

“It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”
Jane Austen

There is a common belief that Jane Austen is a woman’s novelist. There are some that even consider her books to be “chick-lit.” While it’s true I’m sure, that many of her readers are women that adore her books for their romance, marriage plots, and witty and humorous depictions of Regency England, Austen is so much more than that.

She provides her reader with a sort of emotional education. And perhaps I can only speak for myself when I say she draws your attention to the flaws of your own character, while at the same time making you conscious of the feelings of others around you.

I don’t know how many times I’ve related to one of her “bad” characters, only to have Austen show me why I might be in the wrong. Her stories are universal in that special way that makes the mundane seem astonishing, and the banal seem didactic.

Austen has shown us that her words are timeless, and that the human emotions she writes about: envy, pity, remorse, jealousy, and love, etc., are things we all feel, independent of race, class, age, or gender.

Compared to other great 19th century novelists, her books are largely devoid of the serious broader cultural and social events of her day. They occupy a vacuum of space, frozen in time, in which more strenuous and philosophical discussion is left to others. But that’s what makes them so relevant. It’s the lack of cultural context, the universality of their characters, and their relatable human behaviours that transcend temporal boundaries, that draws in new readers, generation after generation.

A few particular topics I’ve noticed Austen touch on with exceptional accuracy are Manners and Morality. The following quotes are from various characters in Mansfield Park. Each of them is unique in that they paint a particular moral picture. Each of them is defined by their value systems as opposed to more traditional descriptions of their character traits.

This is from Edmund Bertrum, one of the novels “good” characters:

“(A clergyman) has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally, which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence”

The following is referring to Maria Bertram, one of the “bad” ones:

“(she) was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.”

This next one is referring to Maria’s sister, Julia Bertram, who, like her sister, shows us why the “duty” and “obligation” the’ve been raised with are so hollow and superficial.

“The politeness which she had been brought up to practice as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.”

And this is from Mrs. Norris, who is not just “bad,” but quite possibly the most annoying and unbearable characters I’ve ever encountered in any novel:

“but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her— very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is.”

The “ungrateful girl” Mrs. Norris is referring to is Fanny Price, who was moved at a young age to live with her rich aunt and uncle to relieve some of the financial burdens on her own family. Fanny is considered lower class because of that, and is treated as such by her aunts and cousins. Even her uncle claims that Fanny and his children “cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different.”

Her cousin Edmund is the only character that treats Fanny with any respect and dignity. As we already know, he believed that manners (manners perhaps being defined as the expectations of social conduct) should be a direct consequence of morals, particularly those provided by religion.

Conversely, the others demonstrate that good manners, whether from cultural traditions, social norms, class distinctions, etc., don’t always correspond to what’s “right.” For instance, they treat Fanny worse than they would someone of higher social rank, and they don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

In Austen’s day, a certain decorum was observed by the upper class in order to maintain a sort of conformity and harmony within the community, and failure to respect that was considered uncivilized. In Mansfield Park, Austen was satirizing her society by showing how immoral these standard of propriety can be. She was illustrating how the established social conducts and customs of a given society don’t always correspond to sound ethical principles.

And nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than our own culture, where the line between right and wrong is razor thin.

I read an article recently from the New York Times that told of a young white girl who had been caught on video using a racial slur when she was just 15 years old. Years later, after she was accepted into university, the video re-surfaced. Consequently, she lost her spot on the cheerleading team, and she was forced to withdraw from the school. The man responsible for releasing the video, “wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word.” When the man was questioned about it, he said he had no regrets; he was glad to have had the opportunity to teach someone a lesson.

And these aren’t rare occasions either, read the comments on any controversial news story. You’d be amazed at the moral righteousness some people display. And often times it’s coming from people with compassion, empathy, and tolerance as their main ideological drivers.

It never ceases to amaze me how people fighting for tolerance and inclusivity can be so intolerant. Many of them are are vengeful, vindictive, angry, and unforgiving, and who feel other people deserve harsh punishments because of their ignorance, or some momentary lapse in their judgments.

Sure, they might be appearing to have good intentions, to combat racism or misogyny, for example, but they’ve been blinded by their own indignation for it to do any good.

Because shame works differently than guilt. When we are shamed, we look inward toward ourselves. We tie whatever it is we did to our identities. It’s an egocentric response to humiliation. Whereas guilt is an empathetic response toward others as a result of our actions. Do you see the difference? Guilt is positive, based on the responsibility of our actions, and shame is negative, based on unhelpful and often harmful self-reflection. It’s even been observed in this study, that people suffering from guilt are better at identifying the emotions of others than those suffering from shame.

Additionally, public shaming often results in the disproportionate punishment relative to the “crime” committed. And what’s worse is that whoever is doing the shaming is encouraged by claims of moral superiority. They feel good about themselves because they are behaving in a manner that conforms to their idea of a “just” society.

They’re just like the Bertram Sisters and Mrs. Norris, who believe they have moral high ground, despite not demonstrating the least bit of genuine goodness.

It’s like these people have been taught to identify right from wrong in some aspects, but not how to respond to them with tolerance or remission? How many of them would turn the proverbial cheek in response to some injustice? How many would voluntarily walk in the shoes of those being chastised, to seek forgiveness and understanding as opposed to retribution?

From what I can see around me, not many.

And I’m no saint either, believe me. Because this is where I had to stop writing. This always seems to happen to me; my pesky brain start to really think about what I’m saying. I was half-way through writing this piece when I realized that I was displaying the same righteousness and moral superiority that I was criticizing.

When I put myself in the shoes of the man who released the video, I learned that we have used the very same moral justifications for some things. He believed that the ends justified the means. He felt that a hard lesson learned was the price to pay for some positive change in the world.

And I know how he feels. The following quote is from none other than Jane Austen:

“There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.”
Jane Austen

I couldn’t agree more with her, and because of that, I have certain negative views regarding welfare and government aid. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they should be abolished, but I definitely think in some cases they are doing more harm than good. By minimizing welfare, there would undoubtedly be some human cost and suffering, but in the end I think our society would benefit greatly and be stronger because of it.

That’s not an opinion that’s received very well by the opposite side of the political spectrum. To them, I’m unsympathetic, immoral, and lacking empathy. But it’s the same moral reasoning as before.

Perhaps the only difference is that, I’m not married to my idea, nor do I have the intention of causing harm to anyone. I only want to help. I believe in the resiliency of human nature, and I believe that adversity and hardship lead to growth.

Austen would have agreed, she said herself there is “advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.”

In Mansfield Park, Mariah and Julia Bertram, lacked such an advantage. They were brought up to be “distinguished for elegance and accomplishments,” which led to them having “no useful influence… no moral effect on the mind.”

And for all you socialists out there in favour of a welfare state, Karl Marx even warned that “The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible,” thereby, placating the revolutionary consciousness and preventing a socialist overthrow.

I don’t want to start a political debate, I only want to point out how blurred this line of morality can get.

But when you try to understand someone else’s perspective, you can learn a lot about them. You learn about what they value. Because it’s our value systems that dictate our moral justifications.

It’s easy to say that the characters in Mansfield Park are “bad,” because we can see what they value. Things like money, status, and propriety, are more important to them than treating others fairly, or of marrying for love.

But things get complicated when the values become more nuanced. Lets go back to my idea of welfare. I place high value on individualism, liberty, and order, because I believe they are crucial components of any functioning society. A government with too much power, and effecting too much economic intervention, will inevitably lead to tyranny, because in my opinion, man is not morally perfectible.

The man who released that video on the other hand, values something different entirely. I don’t think it would be a stretch to assume that he, and people with similar views as himself, places high value on fairness, equality, and compassion. And maybe I would place more emphasis on them too If I had the same life experiences as them. Who knows. But it’s only by understanding each other and being patient and tolerant of different value systems, that we have any chance of making positive changes in the world.

A social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt, who specializes in moral psychology, proposed what he called the “Moral Foundations Theory.” He believed that the variations in our moral reasoning comes from six “modular foundations.” They are: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Haidt argued that our political views depend on where we placed our endorsements on such foundations. The following graph is a good visual representation of his ideas.

I think it’s helpful to identify what our foundations are, but the problem is, as I see it, is not what they are, but how strong our convictions of them are.

So what can we do about it?

Some of the most common solutions are to engage in social discourse, to talk things out. But that’s hard because people’s emotions get in the way of meaningful apprehension of opposing ideas. Many of us are reluctant to put in the effort to understand how and why people can think so differently than us. Not to mention, it’s difficult to try to understand another point of view, especially when we attach so much of our egos to our own.

That’s where literature comes in.

When you read, you’re disconnected from the world, and you’re able to observe life from wildly different perspectives; from the writers who have perfected the craft of conveying human nature to their reader. It’s just you and the author, no judgements, and no ego.

In addition, books offer us an alternative to the mindless superficiality of social media. We’re able to step out of our echo chambers, where we can be exposed to the thoughts and feelings of people we otherwise might disagree with.

Few things are more morally instructive than that.

And perhaps it’s from reading that Austen suggests we might “soon learn to think more justly, and not owe the most valuable knowledge we could any of us acquire – the knowledge of ourselves and of our duty, to the lessons of affliction…”

By doing so, we don’t have to let our own personal experiences dictate our moral foundations; we can learn from other people’s experiences as well.

And as for the people we’re unable to reform or encourage to see things from a different point of view, Austen recommends we let “their tempers become their punishment.” Because people who are angry, vindictive, or malevolent, probably aren’t the happiest of people.

Thanks for reading.

I’ll leave you with one last quote, but remember, these are Austen’s words, not mine:

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” …
Jane Austen

The Wisdom Of Infinite Jest

December 12, 2020 / Murraybarkway / 8 Comments

“Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands”
John Steinbeck

If you’re anything like me, you read like Tom.

I’ve always felt that if I didn’t truly understand a piece of fiction, I would be missing out on something important or significant. It’s like that feeling you get where you can’t remember something you know you know but can’t think of, and you’re unable to function properly until you remember it. Like a nagging feeling almost. A compulsive itch that needs scratching.

That’s how I felt after finishing Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A book that’s notorious for its complex plot, unconventional narrative structure, literary allusions, and – the topic of my last post – the social commentary surrounding it.

The book left me with more questions than answers. I found I was more disappointed in myself for not having understood it completely as opposed to being proud of myself for having finished it at all. It started to make sense to me why some people are so dedicated to analyzing the thing. The truth is, I had become just as obsessed as they were. I had spent the last two months of my waking life thinking of little else; consuming podcasts, reading articles, lurking subreddits, all in an attempt to better understand the novel and its author.

I think that to appreciate any great work of literature, a certain amount of research is necessary. For example, I think it’s helpful to immerse yourself into the context in which a book was written. What was the author’s life like? What experiences and ideas did they have that made their work special? What was happening in the world at that time?

A lot of the time there are subjects and ideas in these books that a reader is expected to be familiar with. Different periods had different ideas about science, technology, morality, race, gender, politics, entertainment, communication, family values, etc. They were written in a different time for a different audience.

Not to mention our language is constantly changing and evolving with our culture, which can make meaningful comprehension of old ideas require a lot of effort.

I even remember looking up all the different names for horse drawn vehicles once. It was something I felt was necessary in order to appreciate the nuance of 19th century literature. Recognizing these vehicles provided clues about the narrative. They could reveal information about a characters personality, their class distinction, and their wealth and status. A hackney for instance, was a taxi for hire. coaches were used for long distance travel, and a curricle was a small two seater that was popular with the youngsters.

When I read The Three Musketeers, I spent a significant amount of time learning about 16th and 17th century Europe. I must have read the equivalent of the novel’s length on wikipedia alone, learning about the Protestant Reformation, Cardinal Richelieu, and European Monarchies.

As I read Around the World in 80 Days, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I would enter the coordinates from the novels into Google Earth and follow along geographically with the story. I did the same with Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Travels of Marco Polo, and Robinson Crusoe.

I remember learning about European politics and “rotten boroughs,” and the British Reform Act of 1832, while I read George Eliot’s, Middlemarch.

I read A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s autobiography of his experiences in Paris, while I walked down the same boulevards and neighbourhoods that he so vividly described. I went to his favourite bookstore and walked along the river Seine as he did every morning after he worked on his writing.

During my six month adventure into James Joyce’s Ulysses. I listened to 368 episodes of a podcast called Re:Joyce, created by the passionate author and Joyce mega-fan, Frank Delaney. Each episode was around 15 minutes in which he deconstructed the novel a few pages at a time. Ulysses is astonishingly dense with biblical, historical, and literary references, which makes it almost impossible to read and understand without a guide. Unfortunately, Delaney died before he could complete his podcast. He estimated it would have taken him another 30 years to finish it. He was 74. I had to do my own research after that. But I had help from a website called The Joyce Project. Here is a link to one of the chapters titled Proteus. Every highlighted word or phrase contains a link to another page explaining the reference Joyce was alluding to. I even remember watching a ten hour documentary on Ireland one weekend. All to familiarize myself with Joyce’s references to his country and its complex and often brutal history.

And although some of the following books were written by men, researching them has given me an edifying glimpse into the historical oppression of women; novels like Charolette Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Gustave Fluebert’s Madam Bovary, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Dubervilles, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Nathanial Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

And yes, you’ll hear occasionally about how some of these “old white men” perpetuate the idea of a white male patriarchy, but some of them went on to inspire the pioneering women thinkers of the 20th century. Mary Sinclair, one of the early campaigners for women’s right to vote, wrote to Thomas Hardy in 1909, commending him for his advocacy on behalf of women.

I’m also aware that these stories are “made-up”, but the ideas, settings, cultures, and the actions of the characters were born out of truth. History gives you facts, but these narratives give you emotions to pair them with. If you can understand the general feelings of the day, and immerse yourself into the common ideas of the people, the books come alive, spirited with relevance.

I realize I went on a bit of a tangent there. And it might come across as some ego trip, but I was more intending to show the type of effort I put into literature. How passionate I am about it. I was tempted to leave it out because I didn’t want to come across as Mr. Braggy Pants, but I thought better of it. Partly because I have to remind myself why I write this blog. It’s so easy to get caught up into some vague idea of self-perception and identity. I’m continuously asking myself: What am I trying to accomplish? Do I want to dissect culture? Help people? Entertain? I always seem to forget the most important reason of why I’m doing this: to leave a part of myself behind when I’m gone. Which is a tad narcissistic, but my hope is to create some kind of personal connection between myself and my future children; to prevent the same emotional paternal void that I’ve been left with.

Another reason why I left it in, if you’re still reading and/or care, is that these books do a good job of representing the cultural movements that I had been steeped in, i.e., Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism.

So when I first picked up Infinite Jest, a novel set in the late 2000’s, I wasn’t expecting to have to do the same amount of research I had done with other classics. Wasn’t I living it? Wasn’t I sucking the air of the very epoch that DFW belonged to, was scrutinizing, and hopefully, was redeeming?

I learned however, that I was just as ignorant of my own culture’s ethos as much as I had been of an earlier centuries’. The novel demanded just as much socio-cultural exploration as anything I had read previously. I quickly discovered how unaware I was of the very phenomena that I had been surrounded by my whole life.

Researching this novel and its context has stretched my mind way beyond its comfortable limits. I’ve spent hours scratching my head, confused, ready to give up and move on; especially because most of the source material I was reading came from sites like JStor and other academic journals.

To be honest, this has been really hard for me. Learning’s not easy. And I don’t mean memorizing things or learning by iteration, I mean like heavy, laser focused learning. The grappling with difficult ideas that are barely hanging on by a thread in some dusty corner of your mind type learning. Because even if you grasp some abstract concept and understand it in your own terms; it’s a whole different story trying to write about it.

There is a quote from Thomas Wolfe who said something like: A writer writes to forget something, a reader reads to remember.

That’s what I hope this will be for me. The formulation of my thoughts. My attempt to parse some kind of order out of the chaos in my mind.

But before I get into it I should say, that if you’ve read the book and are interested in a much deeper analysis of it, this might not be what your looking for, because, after all, I’m just a machinist, and this isn’t an undergraduate thesis. I’m just here to find some pieces of actionable wisdom to share.

That being said, the wisdom of Infinite Jest, as far as I understand, is directly tied to the genre that it belongs – that being Post post-modernism. But in order to understand what that means, we need to understand what Post-modernism is, and in order to understand what that means, we need to know what Modernism is.

Bear with me, it’ll be worth it in the end.

Modernism

“…the term ‘Modernism’ is not a precise label but instead a way of referring to the efforts of many individuals across the arts who tried to move away from established modes of representation”
Peter Childs

This is from wikipedia:

“Modernism is both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war.”

Modernism can be defined by a few key tenets, those being: the rejection of history; the emphasis on progress; the rejection of God and faith; the belief in an individuals’ autonomous nature; and finally, the idea that science and reason provide us with objective truths, independent of individual and cultural factors.

One of the more interesting ideas that emerged with Modernism was Existentialism. Existentialists struggled with how to deal with the meaninglessness, irrationality, and absurdity of a world that lacked the moral framework of religion and society. They placed a new emphasis on the individual as the only one responsible for giving life any sort of meaning.

Absurdism was a literary off-shoot of Existentialism that explored the conflict between our tendency to search for meaning and our inability to find any in an inherently meaningless world.

Absurdists believed that there were only three options to escape this meaninglessness: Suicide, the acceptance of the absurd, or religious or spiritual belief. The last, according to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, required an irrational “leap” into the abstract and unprovable. Hence the term, “leap of faith”. Albert Camus, a popular Absurdist writer, considered that to be “philosophical suicide.”

Post-modernism

This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“(Post-modernism) can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

What the fuck does that even mean? Is “simulacrum” even a real word?

As far as I understand it – just like Modernism did before it – Post-modernism rejects certain aspects that defined the preceding cultural era.

This is from wiki again:

“Post-modernism (which began sometime in the 1970’s) is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism…Common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-consciousness, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.”

Essentially, Post-modernists refuse to believe in the idea of objective truth. Similarly, they don’t believe in any form of objective moral value either. To them, everything is subjective. Everything is deconstructed. And they argue that truth is dependant on historical and cultural contexts as opposed to universality.

In a nut shell, according to Mel Ramsden: “Post-modernism is Modernism’s nervous breakdown.”

But unlike the styles of art and literature that emerged in the Modern era, Post-modern artists refused to adhere to any definitions of what art should be. They intentionally blur the lines between so-called “high-art” and “low-art,” by using different genres and mediums interchangeably.

Here are a few examples:

Jeff Koons, ‘Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off)’ 1985 — Jeff Koons
*Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off)* 1985

Weird.

And some of the literature is even weirder. In 1990, The “author” Walter Abish, published a book called 99: The New Meaning, where the title piece is just a fragmented collection of the 99th page from 99 different books.

This is the American academic, Camille Paglia, on the Post-modern artists:

“Young artists have been taught to be “cool” and “hip” and thus painfully self-conscious. They are not encouraged to be enthusiastic, emotional, and visionary. They have been cut off from artistic tradition by the crippled skepticism about history that they have been taught by ignorant and solipsistic postmodernists. In short, the art world will never revive until postmodernism fades away. Post-modernism is the plague upon the mind and the heart.”

And Post-modernism isn’t just restricted to “art” and literature, it’s spilled into our broader cultural consciousness; specifically pop-culture and media. Television and the internet are overflowing with the ironic, cynical, and self-referential aspects that Post-modernism is famous for.

David Foster Wallace talks about this in his essay, E Unibus Pluram, about how television has created a viewer who becomes dependant on it to be their cultural lens through which they experience life.

“If television can invite Joe Briefcase (aka the average viewer) into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. The well-trained lonely viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to other eyes, makes riskily genuine human encounters seem even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution (to the problem it’s aggravated): further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.”

And that’s only what television does to us. Because he got the last part wrong; think about how social media and the internet are compounding his ideas. I found this in a comment section somewhere, it’s a good example of the ironic, in-gag, canny superiority that he was referring to:

Sincerity: Making fun of people who say “lit.”

Irony: Saying “lit” because its dumb and cringy.

Post-Irony: Starts saying “lit” out of habit.

Meta-Irony: When someone else says “lit,” you say it’s cringe.

“Irony tyrannizes us.” He continues, “the reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.”

In one of Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcasts, he echos DWF’s ideas by criticizing our contemporary forms of political satire. According to the definition, satire is meant to point out the follies, abuses and shortcomings by holding them up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. “Into improvement” is the key message there. Gladwell points out how Tina Fey, for example, the comedian on Saturday Night Live, satirizes the former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. He argues that this “satire” is not about actually doing anything about the possibility of an incompetent vice-president, it’s just, in Tina Fey’s words, “a goof;” meant to get laughs and to appear hip and cool.

I don’t think DFW, Gladwell, or myself for that matter, are anti-comedy. It’s like having an ice cream cone once in a while, it’s not going to kill you, but what happens when your whole diet consists of ice cream cones? Because, look around you, spend some time on the internet, everything involves this Post-modern idea of deconstruction and criticism. There is a meme now for almost every conceivable situation and emotion we can think of, and many of them contain the same useless elements of irony and sarcasm hidden just beneath the surface. We are losing the ability to be sincere, emotional, or enthusiastic about anything.

It’s interesting to think about how far this perverted movement has come, and what it’s doing to disconnect us. I wonder about the possible correlations to our society’s current mental health issues because of it. Not to mention the political and academic repercussions. I’ve written about this before. The movement has created a sort of unhinged religiosity regarding social justice and this unattainable utopian ideal of moral purity. I could write an entire post about that topic, but I’ll save that for another day.

DFW summarizes Post-modernism nicely here:

…the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party…. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown…. but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 a.m. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back…. Is there something about authorities and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually realizing that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back — which means we’re going to have to be the parents.

He’s referring specifically to fiction writing, but I think the metaphor can be applied more broadly to our culture.

I also found this short video on YouTube. I think he gets some things wrong; it was Modernity that “killed” God, not Post-modernity, but it still captures the essence of our transition from Modernity to Post post-modernity.

Post post-modernism

What now he asks?

An 1079 page Post-postmodern Magnum Opus is what.

The following is from Infinite Jest, I think it reveals DFW’s primary message:

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent…naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America….Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

But what is this need? I would say it’s authenticity, sincerity, enthusiasm, vulnerability, and goo-proneness, and maybe even – not trying so hard to be cool.

In another part of the book, DFW points out the harmful effects of our cultures’ distance from tradition, faith, and objective truth.

“Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.”

DFW is saying that maybe the things we’ve rejected during our culture’s progression through Modernity and Post-modernity were actually worth something; that perhaps we got a little excited, and threw out the gift with the wrapping paper.

“We, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.”
Leo Tolstoy

It’s no wonder someone like Jordan Peterson has become so popular over the last few years. He has restored faith to people that were starving for it. And not necessarily a faith in God, but of structure, of stability, and of meaning.

Part of what defines Post post-modernism in Infinite Jest is DFW’s very use of the irony he criticized. His characters do “uncool,” “un-postmodern” things, but they turn out to have redemptive qualities.

The following is from, “Re-fanging Irony: Infinite Jest and Capitalist Realism,” by Macon Holt:

“With Gately, we see an unresolvable contradiction in the ways in which he engages with the rituals of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that have helped him so much. In particular the task of relinquishing his will to that of a higher power. Gately does not believe in any sort of god, in fact, he finds the notion ridiculous, but every day he is one his knees next to his bed asking the ceiling to relieve him of his will. This is a moment of knowing and cynical surrender to the naive belief that this quasi-mystical system will allow him to escape his addiction. Ironically, for Gately, it seems to be working.”

Any readers familiar with Peterson might recognize similarities in the previous passage to the seemingly arbitrary actions he suggests to do in his book, 12 Rules For Life; stand up straight with your shoulders back, and clean your room, etc.

As I was thinking about this idea, I was reminded of another literary giant who liked to write 1000 page novels; Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy explored the deepest darkest recesses of philosophy and thought while capturing the human condition better than anyone else I’ve ever read. He was a genius. Like a capital “G” Genius. And he spent years trying to answer the Big Questions about the meaning of life. But after completing his major works, he fell into a depression and was at the point of suicide. Science and reason brought him knowledge, but not comfort. He then turned to religion, and for the next 30 years dedicated his life to pacifism and to the teachings of Jesus.

This is from Tolstoy:

“Faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.”

When I first read that I thought it was curious; the word Infinite in relation to faith, but then I saw this:

In an interview in 1993, DFW said: “(I’m) the only postmodernist you’ll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy.”

And then I remembered his This Is Water speech at Kenyon College in 2005:

“in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

The “everything else” he’s referring to, is everything finite: social status, money, power, knowledge, entertainment, addiction and substances, deconstruction, satire, and the products of Irony. And as Tolstoy said: “we do not see and recognize the illusion of the finite.” And because of that, “they’re eating us alive.”

Here is Tolstoy again:

“I began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom, and that I had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which reply to life’s question.”

When I think about the moral relativism of Modernism and Post-modernism, I think about how religion would have been one of the easiest things to condemn. It doesn’t exactly have a good track record; think about all the people who have died in the name of Christianity. Think about the atrocities committed by the Catholic church; The Spanish Inquisition, the selling of indulgences, the sexual abuse cases. I even think back to my own teenage years. Like most curious 14 year olds, I was beginning to question the beliefs of my parents. And I learned, as I imagine so many others like me did, that religion is fragile without faith. It’s the easiest thing to point out all the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the bible. It’s easy to be cynical and to transcend sentiment – all the while appearing hip and cool.

Even now, though I’m ashamed to admit it, a part of me is sympathetic with Albert Camus’ concept of spiritual or religious belief being “philosophical suicide.” Although now in our present day of hip cynicism, it might be called social suicide instead (notice the eye roll and the sarcasm next time someone refers to a “born again Christian”).

Still, I’m going to risk being the “not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool,” and say, the biggest piece of wisdom that Infinite Jest gives its readers, is showing them where wisdom might be found.

“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
2 corinthians 5:7

Thanks for reading.

Featured Image: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Infinite Jests And Finite Truths

November 21, 2020 / Murraybarkway / 4 Comments

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
David Foster Wallce

About a month ago, I wrote this piece defending a few books and authors that were on the receiving end of some of our cancel culture’s characteristic parochialisms. Number one in this reductionist’s tweet of the “Top 7 warning signs in a man’s bookshelf,” was the post-postmodern classic, Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (DFW).

I had read most of the other books she mentioned, so I was aware of their “problematic” reputations, but I had no idea why she felt Infinite Jest belonged on the list. So I did some digging online. I was immediately sucked into this hypnotizing literary debate that’s been going on since the books publication in 1996.

I learned that the massive novel usually falls into one of two categories: it’s either absolutely and unabashedly adored, or it’s the worst thing that anyone has ever read. There is no middle ground. One critic even suggested that it’s “not worth the paper it’s written on.” But what’s even more interesting is that some of these well respected literary critics have gone and totally reversed their hyperbolic chiding and switched sides. These were written by the same person eight years apart.

“(some elements in the novel) feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off.”

“(infinite Jest is an) enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition” (Wallace is the) “the best mind of his generation.”

So I decided to read the novel for myself. I’m only about half way through it so far, but I figured I would write a few consecutive posts about it as I go along. In this one, I want to peel back the layers of all this social commentary and see if I can’t get to the bottom of why the book is so polarizing. I’m not going to get into the literary merits of the book–perhaps only briefly to emphasize some key points– but rather, I want to focus primarily on the notorious reputation that the book’s readers get.

But before I get into it, there’s one thing that I want to point out that’s particularly noteworthy. Most of the articles that I’ve read so far, and everywhere I go collecting bits of this meta-narrative, I see that DFW is consistently regarded as a genius. No matter what side of the debate someone belongs to, it’s usually one thing they can all agree on.

And as you read Infinite Jest, you can’t help but see some truth behind those words. I wouldn’t say that the entire book is well written, because some of his prose is painfully dull and difficult to read, but it’s filled with these occasional flashes of an intoxicating brilliance that’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. He makes you feel like he has lived your life, only to have its most rudimentary moments read back to you in a way that you’ve never thought of before, but easily could have if you tried. The type of descriptions that make you think way longer than it probably took him to write them. All the while making it seem effortless, and remaining humble and shyly self-conscious throughout, by using terms like, “like”, and “and but so,” so frequently, that it makes you conscious of the idea that he was just a regular dude, no more intelligent than his reader.

Here are a few of my favourites, although I’m aware that they might fall flat being pulled out of context like this. It’s like trying to show someone your favourite song with the volume turned too low, it just doesn’t have the same kick to it.

“Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim lit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal.
David Foster Wallace

“…almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”
David Foster Wallace

Anyway, this is the typical narrative as far as I understand it. On one side of the stereotypical aisle, you find (mostly) men who treat this encyclopedic tome as a sort of boast-worthy accomplishment. One reviewer on Goodreads even said that finishing the book was one of the greatest achievements of his entire life; the other two being raising his children, and getting his MBA. All over the internet you’ll find numerous blogs and articles written by obsessed fans who tirelessly deconstruct the novel page by page. DFW himself had said that he modelled the book after a pyramidical fractal called the Sierpinski Gasket; saying that, “Its chaos is more on the surface; its bones are its beauty.”

It reminds me of a comment James Joyce made about his book, Ulysses:

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

I think that’s exactly what DFW tried to do.

And on the other side of the debate, you find (mostly) women who are fed up with dealing with the (mostly) 20 something year old college males who won’t shut up about the book. They have learned to associate it with arrogance and condescension. They condemn the book for it’s racism, misogyny, and questionable subject matter. The feminists in this group even argue that books like Infinite Jest are the unconscious extension of the male author’s phallus. They claim that writers like DFW are your typical male egoists, flexing their intellectual muscles to show off, saying: “look at me, look how good I am at writing.”

It’s sentiments like this that have inspired some of these women to make a certain variety of joke about Infinite Jest and its predominantly male audience.

Like this comedian, who was so tired of having the book recommended to her, she literally decided to eat it. Like as in sandwiches. And as far as I can tell, she is doing it out of spite, and this is her idea of refusing to read it…maybe?

Another funny lady wrote this article called, “5 Footnotes From Infinite Jest That’ll Get Him Rock Hard.” Here’s a little taste:

“So you’re in a rut with your amateur-philosopher slampiece. You’ve tried the lingerie, you’ve tried classic dirty talk…We’ve got the answer: David Foster Wallace’s 1996 magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Nothing gets your guy ready to bone like 1,079 pages of nonlinear metafiction. This enormous novel includes 388 footnotes that are ripe with sexual fodder.”

379 is my favourite. It had me laughing out loud.

“This steamy footnote cannot be used lightly—reserve it for those moments you’re desperate to get him hard. Footnote 379 is a footnote that references another footnote. (Um, what?! Are we even allowed to print something so nasty???)”

There’s no shortage of these jokes all over the internet, and yes, some are good, but most of them are the unfunny derivative of the same tired joke. And the total irony here is that the experiences of these people who complain about the ones who brag about reading the book, appears to me to be just as frequent, if not less so, than the prevalence of the people who never actually read the book, but make these jokes about the ones who do. Personally, I’ve only been on the receiving end of the one, but I imagine if you hear them long enough, they’re probably both equally annoying.

Either way, both sides fail to explain why this book has such an effect on its readers. Is it just because it’s so long and difficult? What about the hordes of people reading the Game Of Thrones series? As far as I know there isn’t a group of people hating on it’s fan base. And as for reading difficult books, I actually finished Ulysses, so if reading hard books is cool, consider me Miles Davis.

This article, titled, “Why Insufferable People Love Infinite Jest,” argues it’s something else. It claims that because of his easy and approachable writing style, DFW created a work of fiction that fools it’s readers into thinking that they’re more intelligent than they really are. The author compares it to confusing the strength one might feel while holding a handgun to actually being physically strong. Consequently, readers who love the novel tend to be arrogant, overbearing, and pretentious, hence the term “insufferable.”

It could be that DFW’s readers think they’re clever because they understand a piece of literature that is so highly regarded as being difficult to read. And yes, Infinite Jest is difficult to read, but not only because it’s long, at around 1100 pages, 98 of which are end notes, (some of which are 10 pages long and contain their own endnotes ;)) but because it’s narrative structure is extremely scattered and convoluted. It takes time, effort, and dedication to finish it; to finish something that comparatively few people will. That’s why it becomes an achievement to some, worn as a badge of honour.

The article continues, “…the best comparison for DFW is Hemingway: a problematic fave whose style deceived loads of men into thinking they could write like him and live his life. Infinite Jest invites in this projection.” He concludes, “We’re left with the remainders of a gigantic talent who got closer to greatness than self-awareness.”

Yes, DFW makes me to want to write like him, but what the author gets wrong is that, like most great artist, athletes, or successful people throughout history, they weren’t “deceived” by their heroes, they were inspired by them. You can’t blame Wayne Gretzky for every hockey player that didn’t make it to the NHL. If this author really thinks that great writers “deceive” people into thinking they could write like them, then his criticism belongs to every single author who boasts the “Classic” tag.

This theory, that Infinite Jest‘s readers feel a false sense of intelligence when they read it, seems pretty unlikely to me given the relative hate that the book and it’s fans receive. There are plenty of smart books out there that don’t have that type of fan base.

Luckily I have a few theories of my own, but it helps to understand a little of what the book is about first.

The novel is split into three interconnected narratives that deal with one of three major themes: achievement, addiction, and entertainment. The first narrative takes place in a junior tennis academy where the students endure rigorous training and discipline in hopes of making it to the pros. The second takes place in a half-way house and follows numerous characters who are in various stages of substance abuse problems. And the third, which is much more broad and complex, centres around a cross dressing C.I.A. agent and a wheelchair-bound French Canadian separatist. The two belong to different political groups that are trying to find a film called “the entertainment” that, when you watch it, you become so entranced by it that you lose the willpower to do anything else and eventually die.

Did I mention that the book is also hilarious at times?

Anyway, each of these themes has a common denominator that brings them all together; they all involve characters who are searching for happiness, meaning, or pleasure in things that end up being empty and hollow. The tennis academy is a microcosm of what the average person thinks success looks like; that even if you achieve all your goals, you’ll always be wanting something more. The addicts all attach a false sense of happiness to whatever substance they’re addicted to, and “the entertainment” (which in the book, is also titled “Infinite Jest”) represents the harmful potential of a cultures obsession with easy and mindless entertainment.

So what were left with is a genius articulating to his readers how misleading and empty our mindless pursuits of happiness are, via television, drugs, and success, on the one hand, and his readers, people who are already willing to forego instant gratification and hunker down and read a 1100 page novel on the other, put those two together, and you likely have someone armed with enough “insufferable” comments to make any casual television watcher weary of their company. Like this one:

“What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is “all it does”—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.”
David Foster Wallace

It’s like Infinite Jest is DFW’s diagnosis of everything that he felt was wrong with our culture, while the very act of reading it is the cure.

Can you see how someone would use that to feel superior to others?

I can, and I’m guilty of it myself.

Just the other day I was telling my brothers how I thought Grown-Ups 2 was stupid and it’s cheap humour pandered to a dumb and vague audience. Not only that, I tell my wife on a weekly basis that television will rot her brain. But these opinions aren’t new to me, I didn’t just learn them from reading Infinite Jest, DFW just says it better than I ever could. He validates my preexisting ideas in ways that compels me to have a stronger conviction of them, because I know he’s on my side.

That’s partly where I think this “Insufferable” idea comes from. It could be that certain fans of Infinite Jest are basically beefed up versions of literary snobs who, Instead of bragging about reading difficult classics, brag about reading this one particular difficult classic, whose message could be interpreted as: engage in more meaningful and noble pursuits, like reading difficult classics.

That might account for some of the book’s readers, but it still doesn’t explain why most of them are men.

If I had to guess, besides the obvious reason being that most of the characters are male, I would say it has to do with the book’s subject matter regarding depression, addiction, and suicide. It should be noted that DFW killed himself in 2008. He also suffered from addiction throughout his life. It could be that Infinite Jest talks about these difficult topics in ways that your average male reader, perhaps those that feel a stigma attached to opening up to others, can relate to. It’s like I mentioned earlier, DWF has a way of putting things into words that you might have never been able to articulate yourself. That might explain why these men are so passionate about the book. Maybe they feel like DFW knows them better then they know themselves.

Here is DFW on depression for example:

“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.”

He has a habit of making you uncomfortably aware of the fact that you’re not as unique as you think you are.

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
David Foster Wallace

That’s why I initially wrote these last few posts, I wanted to defend myself, and the book’s readers, from being categorized into some banal stereotype. It never feels good when someone paints you with sweeping and broad brush strokes; we all want to be thought of as unique snowflakes.

But I came to realized that there was some truth to their accusations. I’m really not that different from the “insufferable” people who brag about reading Infinite Jest.

I think like them, I just want to feel smart. I want people to think i’m interesting, and I care deeply what they think of me. It’s an incredibly hard thing to admit to myself, let alone put it out for the world to see, but it’s the truth. I attach so much of my identity with being smart that it affects my ability to be authentic.

It took me a while to finish this post because I was stuck, wrestling with that idea. It really made me appreciate these words:

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
David Foster Wallace

But it got me thinking about this whole idea snobbishness.

Even though I get a sense of superiority or self-congratulations while reading difficult books like Infinite Jest, does that really make me a snob?

It sort of reminds me of the proverbial vegan and the Crossfitter who get a hard time for talking about veganism and Crossfit too much. What if they just really enjoy those things, have benefited greatly from them, and feel like others could benefit from them too? What’s the alternative to them talking about it in a self-cogratulatory way? Telling a fat person to their face that they need to do Crossfit, or eat more veggies? No, because then they’d be assholes. But are you an asshole if you genuinely want to help other people? When does the potential for good, by telling a difficult truth, outweigh the risk of offending someone? Are interventions offensive?

And just like eating healthy and exercising, reading difficult books has shown to have objective benefits as opposed to other forms of mind-numbing entertainment.

So maybe the people who make the jokes about the Crossfitters, vegans, and even the ones hating on Infinite Jest are, like I was, unwilling to face some hard truths about themselves. Maybe the more outspoken ones don’t like to be reminded of their own shortcomings or poor life choices, and so they lash out and call people snobs in retaliation. It’s a lot easier to make the same old joke about a condescending Infinite Jest fan than it is to actually read the book for yourself. They sort of remind me of the “I hate morning people,” who can’t stand the fact that other people can be happy in the mornings because it forces them to acknowledge their own unhappiness.

Are morning people “insufferable”?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t criticize things. Constructive feedback is a healthy part of any functional discourse. But when people do it at the expense of others, charged with malicious intent, it gets a little more complicated.

How many of these people, the ones making these jokes, the ones attempting to reduce great art to its worst qualities, are lying to themselves in order to adhere to some false idea of how they think they’re supposed to be perceived? How many go to such extreme efforts to try and maintain an absurd consistency to their opinions; too afraid to veer off for fear of an identity crisis.

I only ask because that’s how I felt.

I think so much of our negative assessment of things we don’t like is nothing but the unconscious deflections of our own insecurities.

How many of us close our eyes and cover our ears anytime something violates the threshold of the comfortable lies we tell ourselves? How many of us are willing to look past being offended?

So to conclude, it might be a combination of both DFW’s writing style and content that are contributing to his fans being labeled as “insufferable,” but how much of that term, and this whole conversation in general, has been exaggerated by the accusers themselves?

I think in the end it comes down to the intentions of the fans of Infinite Jest. If they are using a genius’ mind to push their own agendas of appearing intelligent, then maybe they deserve the criticisms their getting. However, if they see truths that they think could enrich the lives of others, of the people they love, then they don’t deserve to get lumped into this broad category of readers; because by doing so we risk throwing out the baby with the bath water. Which is why we don’t need categories like that in the first place.

Or maybe this is all the elaborate scheming of a genius; some Infinite Jest.

Thanks for reading.

A Warning Sign Of A Culture In Crisis

October 26, 2020 / Murraybarkway / 9 Comments

I saw this trending on Twitter the other day.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf:
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. “Lolita is my favorite book.”
7. “‘Fathers and Sons’ Is my favorite book.”
— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020

Okay, so there is a lot I want to unpack here.

First of all, for those of you unfamiliar with the books or authors mentioned above, I’ll try to give a brief summary of why Jess considers them “warning signs.”

The post-modern classic, Infinite Jest, is known for being notoriously long and difficult-to-read. The book has garnered a reputation for being adored by rich, over-educated white men who brag about the herculean task of actually finishing it. Some argue that the book is racist, that it trivializes sexual assault, and that the female characters are portrayed in an overly-sexual way.

Hemingway and Bukowski are frequently put into a box labeled: “drunk white man,” and are often associated with sexism, and overly macho rhetoric.

Ayn Rand is a pro-capitalist, libertarian-conservative. A philosopher with strikingly contrary opinions to the average liberal-progessive type in North America today.

Lolita is a novel about a pedophile, not to be confused with the advocacy of pedophilia. It’s also considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written, acclaimed for its beautiful and poetic style.

Fathers and Sons, which I actually read sometime in the last year or so, is the most puzzling to me. I can’t think of the reason why it’s on the list. I enjoyed it, and I took from the novel a thoughtful and relatable narrative about the generational conflicts that exist between parents and their aging children. It’s also a good introduction to Nihilism.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read any Goethe, nor have I had the courage to attempt Infinite Jest just yet.

Anyway, this “joke,” as far as I understand it, is an attempt at creating a particular male reader stereotype. Specifically, the misogynistic, egotistical, and pseudo-intelectual “bro.”

And yes, I agree that some of these books might have less than ideal fan bases, contain poor subject matter, and have questionable authors, they’re also known for so much more than that. It’s sad to see them get pigeonholed into these overly-simplified conjectures, and worse yet, their readers along with them.

Hemingway isn’t only remembered for his manliness. He also inspired a whole generation of writers with his technique of writing called the iceberg theory. It was his minimalistic style of deliberately obscuring and omitting certain aspects of a story to give it meaning.

Bukowski’s books aren’t something that men should model their attitude towards women on, sure, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t an amazing writer.

Ayn Rand’s, The fountainhead, was one of the first “serious” books that I ever read. I will admit, most of it probably went way over my head. But I can still remember the main character, Howard Roark. He made quite an impression on me. I remember being inspired by his stubborn and passionate refusal to let society mould him into something he wasn’t.

Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, was trilingual. He published a timeless work of fiction, applauded for its lyricism and word play, in a language that wasn’t even his first! I’ve been speaking English my whole life and I can only just now understand a total of nine words from A Tale of Two Cities. I can imagine some people saying Lolita is their favourite book. Why is that a warning sign?

Maybe it’s due to Jess’s own failure to understand the unique complexities of individuals, those who are capable of extracting alternative meanings from a book, different from her own, that she assumes the people around her are as shallow and easily defined as she is. It could be that she just had some bad experiences with the men in her life. I don’t know.

She doubled down and responded to criticisms like mine by saying: “Oh white men…tis a beautiful thing to watch! Their willingness to angrily defend other dead white men over a twitter joke!”

Heres the thing, I’m not upset about some dumb joke about an author or a book that I like. If her goal was to bait people like me into defending something they enjoyed, congratulations, it worked. You got me.

But this goes deeper than that.

I’m upset and concerned with her reducing them to these disparaging anecdotes, for them to be defined by their worst qualities.

It’s cancel-culture at its finest.

She is vilifying them, discouraging their potential readers, and creating a shallow, surface level opinion to be gobbled up and emulated. 17 thousand people ‘Liked’ her tweet. How many of them, encouraged by the other 16999 people who also approved, will take her word for it as an authority on the subject?

How many will actually read those books mentioned and formulate their own opinions on them? Probably not many. But at least now they can have some vague conviction about them without having to actually read them. Maybe they can even crack some joke at a dinner party about how their ex-boyfriend read too much Bukowski and was a total asshole because of it.

A wise man once said that servitude is the enemy of reason. That’s exactly what we need to be reminded of right now. We need skepticism, not blind adherence to some influencer. We need to be able to make decisions for ourselves, not to be policed by public opinion.

Stuff like this is dumbing us down. Instead of creating a dialogue about why something is contestable, we just remove it. We avoid it, and we oppose those who disagree with us.

We attach our identities to something rigid and immovable, and we turn a blind eye to anything that the most woke members of our society deem unfit for our consumption.

We’re obsessed with finding faults with everything, with judging everyone based on some unobtainable moral purity.

Can we not acknowledge the bad in a particular thing, while at the same time appreciating the good? Can we not understand that times change, that public opinion changes? Should we really be holding the past accountable for the moral climate of the present?

I feel like an angry grandpa yelling at a crowd. I know, it was just a tweet. Get over it right?

Except its not just a tweet.

It’s a thinly veiled attempt at something that is happening on a bigger scale in our society. You watch, the next thing you know, we’ll be taking down statues of our first Prime Minister, Sir John. A. Macdonald.

Oh, wait…

I get it, he was an asshole. Actually he was worse than that. He was cruel, brutal, and heartless, specifically toward Canada’s indigenous population.

He also helped build the country we know and love today.

It’s like the people who toppled his statue can’t accept the fact that a person can do good things, while at the same time, not have them invalidated by their moral failings.

It reminds me of a quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sounds about right.

Maybe too much peace, freedom, multiculturalism, free healthcare, free education, clean drinking water, fair labour laws, and higher life expectancies made these people’s lives so bad that they were forced to be the first generation in years to finally do something about that asshole John A.

What about every individual prior to the 20th century who wasn’t actively fighting for a women’s right to vote? Were they all complicit in misogyny? Should we therefore discredit anyone prior to 1916?

Fun Fact! In the 1880’s, Sir John A. Macdonald was one of the first national leaders to attempt to grant women the right to vote.

The point is, can we agree not to celebrate him but at the same time not erase him from Canada’s history? Maybe we can put a plaque beside his statue that acknowledges his genocidal past instead.

I know Jess’s tweet is a little different, but the fundamental principles are the same. Most of us don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of public opinion, so we conform. It’s easier and safer that way.

Except it’s soft tyranny, and it’s cultural censorship.

What if instead, Jess chose to educate her followers, rather than criticize and stereotype? What if she, like so many people like her, chose to build something up, instead of tearing something down? What if we all spent more time appreciating the positives instead of obsessing over the negatives?

Read those books and authors for yourself. Understand that they have much more to offer than what our present moral climate considers problematic. Read a wide variety of books. Be skeptical. Come to your own conclusions, and be weary of public opinion.

Nietzsche has some good advice for us:

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

There, I’m done yelling now.

Thanks for reading.

Guest Post: On The Healing Power Of Writing

October 18, 2020 / Murraybarkway / 1 Comment

Illustration by Rika Otsuka

Post by That Anxious Dude.

He’s an incredible writer, and he captures how I feel about writing better than I could even articulate myself.

I hope you enjoy, and don’t forget to check out his website for more of his work.

…

I’m not super serious about a great many things.

I usually find humour in things other people consider awkward, dark, or straight up taboo. I’m frequently irreverent, cheeky and cynical, often to the point of making even myself uncomfortable – not because I’m striving to be edgy, but because I believe in the sublime power of humour.

But here’s the twist – I’m kinda serious about writing. As a matter of fact, let’s drop the “kinda”.

I am serious about writing.

Which doesn’t mean that I start behaving like a medieval monk as soon as the conversation turns to literature, but that the creative use of language occupies a special place in my heart – a fact I’m defensively proud of precisely because I’m so immune to other sacred cows of society.

My love affair with books began at the end of high school, when I became free of drab, mandatory class readings and suddenly found myself devouring novels like a castaway, frantically trying to feed his starved mind.

At the time, I couldn’t quite explain my explosive thirst, even though I was implicitly aware of the fact that there was something very unique about literature, something that made it stand apart from all the other forms of art. Unlike theatre or movies or even video games, literature went beyond immersing you in a different world – it had the ability to transport you into another person’s mind.

Even if you were reading a detached philosophical essay, the author’s formation of arguments, what she or he decided to omit, their choice of words, all of it betrayed the inner workings of a unique consciousness. This soul revealing quality held so much more true for the works of “pure literature”, for poetry and novels.

My already considerable respect for people who wrote grew exponentially when I started dabbling in writing myself. It quickly dawned on me that trying to put together anything remotely coherent wasn’t nearly as easy as the general public made it out to be. In fact, it was anything but.

And yet to this day most folks still believe that just because they use language every day, writing is a simple act of turning what’s on the inside out, like pouring corn flakes into a breakfast bowl…

The rest of us, those who’ve tried our hand at writing rarely make this blunder. For us it’s obvious that without serious dedication to both reading and writing, there’s little chance of anything valuable ever materializing onto the page…

Thus armed with a love of books and a deep admiration for the skill it takes to produce them, I began to establish the Holy shrine of the church of one true writing, a personal credo that stated that writing should be either done seriously, or not at all. I argued that by adding anything other than the desire to convey meaning or using language in a creative fashion, you were committing the sin of wasting everybody’s goddamn time, most of all your own.

In other words, I strongly believed we should let writing be writing, and that was the end of it.

It’s no wonder then, that if you’d ask me about my opinion on the therapeutic quality of writing back then, I would have exploded into a fit of pure toddler rage. When I encountered the term, I was convinced it was a sordid new age conspiracy designed to bring down writing, as well as therapy. I firmly refused to give this abomination a second thought. If you want to do writing, I thought, then do writing, and if you want to feel better, do therapy, but for the love of God don’t pollute one with the other.

But boy, was I wrong.

Because a few years, and one mental crisis later, here’s good ol’ me doing an outrageous 180, not only publicly acknowledging that I’ve changed my mind, but also outright urging you to write for the sake of better mental health.

Yeah, sorry about that.

…

Throughout the years I began observing the strange, yet undeniable fact that every time I began writing, I immediately felt better, which always left me mildly confused. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Wasn’t writing supposed to be at least somewhat jarring, even taxing on your system?

Staring at the intimidating whiteness of a blank page was unquestionably unnerving (and still is), but once my fingers started doing their little keyboard shuffle, the multitude of fears in my mind seemed to retreat like a defeated army.

At first I brushed it off as a byproduct of my ego, which becomes animated every time a task, no matter how small, is undertaken.

But then again, this type of nurturing focus never occurred when I was washing the dishes, cleaning my cat’s toilet, or going for a run.

It emerged exclusively when I began to type… As long as I let myself genuinely engage in the process of writing, even if I was merely scribbling some notes on a utility bill, I began feeling something.

Or should I say I felt an absence, as the weight of the world and it’s problems melted away like a puddle in the morning sun.

…

As part of my general de-programming efforts which aim to reexamine some of my more toxic beliefs, I began to ponder my attitudes towards writing again, quickly realising the giant discrepancy gaping at the heart of this relationship.

On one side, I still think of writing as a sombre process of bleeding onto the paper, but on the other, I can’t keep ignoring genuine relief every time I pick up the pen.

It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out that the first one operates from darkness, existing only to produce feelings of inadequacy (“Did you bleed hard enough? Is it even good?”).

The second one doesn’t make any demands, It’s simply there, whenever I choose to write, regardless of the format, or the medium, or the intent. The only condition it requires is my genuine presence.

This act of creation on the page, no matter how tiny or insignificant, proceeds to suck all the neurotic bits out of my mind like a celestial vacuum cleaner, before airing them out and letting them disintegrate in the open space.

In this, giving life to one’s thoughts resembles a proactive form of meditation – even when the words come slow, even when I’m struggling with syntax, even when I’m chasing a deadline and calm is the farthest thing from my mind, writing never fails to administer its medicinal properties onto my jumbled psyche.

…

Sometimes the biggest favour we can do ourselves is renouncing further analytic drilling, choosing instead to remain pragmatic. Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter how and why writing heals.

‍The important thing is that it does.

When I was younger, I thought that by “defending” writing from anything I believed impinged on its holy mission, I was protecting it’s most sacred attribute – the creative soul.

Little did I know that writing is powerful enough to accommodate different modes of being without needing me to foster silly, self-sabotaging beliefs. Whichever adjective I choose to describe it, therapeutic or not, is completely beside the point.

Because I’m finally at a point where I’m capable of brushing off the hubris, and doing what needs to be done.

Which is of course, to write.

Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 3)

Great Untruths And Cynical Theories

Gumption and Nostalgia In Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind

Gender And Feminism In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

The Polarization Of Jordan Peterson

Intellectual Humility: 30 Quotes Our Politically Divided World Needs Right Now

Moral Instruction In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

The Wisdom Of Infinite Jest

Infinite Jests And Finite Truths

A Warning Sign Of A Culture In Crisis

Guest Post: On The Healing Power Of Writing

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