Alan Jacobs

Here in McLennan County we’re experiencing a heat wave and a drought. Not altogether uncommon in Texas; and it will become increasingly common. We’re all being asked to reduce our water use, especially lawn irrigation, and to reduce our energy consumption in the peak afternoon hours. 

In my house, we’re doing it. (In fact, our standard thermostat settings and water usage would probably strike some of our neighbors as self-punitive.) But I wonder how many residents of the county will comply? I’d put the over/under at 3%. 

Americans in general are not good at self-limitation; and asking people to limit themselves is pretty much the only tool government has in these matters. This is the way it’s always been: you have electricity and water or you don’t. And when people have ongoing access to a resource they seem, almost inevitably, to think of that resource as infinite. 

If there’s a way to make sure that people who absolutely need electricity still get it, I’d be fine with scheduled brownouts — in fact, I think that would be good policy in times when the grid is stressed. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for the water system; but we need something, something that will conserve resources for a people who won’t voluntarily restrain their consumption. 

A provocative and disturbing essay by Josh Askonas in The New Atlantis:

Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the world of role-playing games. Video games of all sorts borrow concepts from them. “Gamified” apps for fitness, language learning, finance, and much else award users with points, badges, and levels. Facebook feeds sort content based on “likes” awarded by users. We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields. A Tinder profile that reads “White nonbinary (they/her) polyamorous thirtysomething dog mom. Web-developer, cross-fit maniac, love Game of Thrones” sounds more like the description of a role-playing character than how anyone would actually describe herself in real life. 

Justin E. H. Smith makes a similar point in describing some recent complaints about the behavior of the comics writer Warren Ellis: 

A website was set up for his proclaimed victims to share their testimonials. On this site, the author’s grooming behaviour is described as: “rel[ying] on subtle techniques that leverage ‘compulsion loops’, which are well-established in scientific literature and video gaming, and are commonly utilised by modern businesses to achieve addiction, AKA ‘user retention’. Examples include daily quests in games, getting a higher reward (more ‘XP’, etc.) for the first game of a day, more ‘karma’ for the first post of a day on a message board, etc. The main driver is a regular daily dopamine boost sustained over time.”

At issue here is the moral conduct of a person who in another era would have been accused of lechery, of being manipulative, of playing the cad. Here, the accusation against the comic-book author, however, eschews inherited moral categories, and blames him, effectively, for instantiating the same features we also know from our use of social media. The author has had programmed into him, it would seem, the same addictive hooks for which we rightly criticise Facebook. He now stands accused of “user retention”. 

These points seem to converge with one that Jaron Lanier made in You Are Not a Gadget: 

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. 

If machines, and the apps the machines run, cannot capture the fullness of our humanity, that poses a problem for the technocrats. They can try to make the machines better; but, as they do so, they can also use social engineering to persuade us to flatten and narrow our humanity to fit what the machines are capable of. (The quotes above suggest how easily many people can be convinced to redescribe themselves and their experiences in this flattened way.) Eventually the two projects will meet in the middle, and the story of humanity will effectively be over — except for the tiny handful who manage to sustain a dissenting independence. 

What Askonas adds to this distressing prophecy is this: As our remaking proceeds, we’ll think we’re having fun. 

Jemez River, New Mexico

Paul Kingsnorth:

Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us? […] 

The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments. 

How to prevent the coming inhuman future - by Erik Hoel:

There are a handful of obvious goals we should have for humanity’s longterm future, but the most ignored is simply making sure that humanity remains human. […] 

… what counts as moral worth surely changes across times, and might be very different in the future. That’s why some longtermists seek to “future-proof” ethics. However, whether or not we should lend moral worth to the future is a function of whether or not we find it recognizable, that is, whether or not the future is human or inhuman. This stands as an axiomatic moral principle in its own right, irreducible to other goals of longtermism. It is axiomatic because as future civilizations depart significantly from baseline humans our abilities to make judgements about good or bad outcomes will become increasingly uncertain, until eventually our current ethical views become incommensurate. What is the murder of an individual to some futuristic brain-wide planetary mind? What is the murder of a digital consciousness that can make infinite copies of itself? Neither are anything at all, not even a sneeze — it is as absurd as applying our ethical notions to lions. Just like Wittgenstein’s example of a talking lion being an oxymoron (since a talking lion would be incomprehensible to us humans), it is oxymoronic to use our current human ethics to to answer ethical questions about inhuman societies. There’s simply nothing interesting we can say about them.

Speaking of taste….

I don’t listen to many podcasts, but one I never miss is John Spong’s Texas Monthly podcast One By Willie, each episode of which features a guest talking about one Willie Nelson song that he or she especially likes. In a recent episode Buddy Cannon, who has ben Willie’s primary producer for the past decade and has co-written many songs with him, got into a conversation with Spong about the lack of radio airplay for Willie’s music these days — they discussed a song, “Something You Get Through,” that they both agreed would have been a big hit a few decades ago but remains largely unknown in this era of bro-country. Cannon said that he isn’t worried about that, that he believes that in the long run “the good will overpower the mediocre.” Maybe! We hope!

But what caught my attention was Cannon’s reason for being thus hopeful: He said, “People can only think they like something for so long.” I love that. People can only think they like something for so long. The power of mimetic desire, mimetic taste, isn’t infinite: sooner or later you’ll have to admit to yourself what you really like. And what a day that will be.

I draw breath; this is of course to wish No matter what, to be wise, To be different, to die and the cost, No matter how, is Paradise Lost of course and myself owing a death…. 

— W. H. Auden 

But of course, we are social animals and are drawn irresistibly to the Inner Ring, which means that to reject being a normie is not to be independent and free but rather to embrace the norms of a subculture. No one is more enslaved to norms than the person who is terrified of being a normie. 

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe there’s a more charitable way to describe this fear: as a worry about being sold a bill of goods, of having one’s tastes shaped in a way that maximizes profit for big corporations. This was the primary theme of the social criticism of Dwight Macdonald, who, in a famous essay, worried that one can escape the gravitational pull of Masscult only by being dragged into the orbit of Midcult — of philistinism. After all, companies are always ready to sell you identity markers of all descriptions; moreover, capitalism doesn’t care whether you’re wearing your hat earnestly or ironically; it usually costs the same either way, though sometimes people pay a premium for irony. And when the megacorporations control Masscult, well, that just offers opportunities for smaller businesses to do Midcult, and smaller ones still to do Weirdcult. (Or whatever.) 

Macdonald’s essay is still interestingly provocative, though its categories may not be directly applicable to our own moment, given how fragmented the media landscape has become and how hard it is to get reliable and consistent information. Nielsen will tell you how many people watch America’s Got Talent every week, but Netflix won’t tell you how many people watch Stranger Things — it only tells you about total hours viewed, a stat that makes no sense to me at all. I tend instinctively to think of anything on network TV as Masscult and anything on Netflix as Midcult, but that may not be adequate. We probably should invoke more complex generational and economic categories – though, if we want to achieve a view from 30,000 feet, we should see the entire media landscape as something controlled by a distributed technocratic elite that caters to a wide variety of tastes in ways that grow more precise as the algorithms get better. 

In such an environment — complex, but technocratically managed — the “normie” category might seem useless, but maybe we can still find a place for it. My reasons for wanting to salvage it will appear in a later post. But first, there’s an important element to all this that we haven’t inspected closely enough: the word (a word I just used in the previous paragraph) taste. Because don’t we think that people who predominantly watch network TV tend to have different tastes than people who watch a lot of Netflix? 

We still use the word taste but we don’t think about it much, I suspect, and don’t have a very clear sense of what precisely it means. The term may have had its heyday in the 18th century, with Hume’s great essay “On the Standard of Taste”; but it ought to be retrieved and renewed, because I think it’s essential for us, if we are going to develop into genuine persons of depth and character, is to figure out what we really like — what our own tastes incline us towards. To be a mature person is, among other things, not to be afraid of acknowledging what we enjoy. (Even if what we enjoy is mocked by others as “normie” — which often leads us, in turn, to talk about our “guilty pleasures,” which acknowledges a “standard of taste” as much in the breach of it as in the observance.)  

Achieving one’s own genuine taste is not an individualistic pursuit — not if it’s done properly. You develop your own taste in part by noticing what people you admire enjoy — though René Girard is wrong about most things, he’s generally correct to say that desire is mimetic. But it’s not indiscriminatingly mimetic: you follow the tastes of some other people, not all, and over time you can discern the pattern that your tastes are tracing, the form that they’re converging on. And I think that’s key to personal growth. 

I began with Auden, so let me conclude with him too, a passage from The Dyer’s Hand specifically about reading (though it applies to all the arts): 

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.

Chris Stirewalt:

There are species of bacteria that actually thrive in the toxic emissions from hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean. What would be killing sulphuric acid to most animals is food for them. We have created a similarly hostile climate in media and politics: high pressure, extreme temperature swings, and a toxic atmosphere. We should not be surprised, then, that unlovely creatures are the only ones who can thrive in this space. 

Decent people with dignity are easy marks for outrage mobs, cancel culture, and the clickbait press. But fools with no shame are impervious to such a climate. Men and women of character tend to stay away, and if they don’t, are much more subject to the extortionate pressures of the political world. If your reputation is already poor, you can chase celebrity, frolicking among the deep-sea plumes, while your more delicate competitors are floating on the surface, poisoned.

Bravo. Well done indeed, Economist. 

Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III: 

“Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a lazy, good-for-nothing n****r,” Parker wrote. And there was an incident that occurred one morning in Johnson's limousine while Parker was driving him from his Thirtieth Place house to the Capitol. Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, “suddenly lowered the newspaper and leaned forward,” and said, “‘Chief, does it bother you when people don't call you by name?’” Parker was to recall that “I answered cautiously but honestly, ‘Well, sir, I do wonder. My name is Robert Parker.’” And that was evidently not an answer acceptable to Johnson. “Johnson slammed the paper onto the seat as if he was slapping my face. He leaned close to my ear. ‘Let me tell you one thing, n****r,’ he shouted. ‘As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n****r, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you'll make it. Just pretend you're a goddamn piece of furniture.’” 

Parker found that incident in Johnson's limousine difficult to explain or forgive. Years later, as he stood beside Lyndon Johnson's grave thinking of all Johnson had done for his people, Parker would say he was “swirling with mixed emotions.” Lyndon Johnson, he would write, had rammed through Congress “the most important civil rights laws this country has ever seen or dreamed possible.” Because of those laws, Parker would write, he felt, at last, like a free man. “I owed that freedom to him.... I loved the Lyndon Johnson who made it possible.” But remembering the scene in the limousine — and many other scenes — Parker was to write that on the whole working for Johnson was “a painful experience. Although I was grateful to him for getting me a job I was afraid of him because of the pain and humiliation he could inflict at a moment's notice. I thought I had learned to fight my bitterness and anger inside.... But Johnson made it hard to keep the waves of bitterness inside... But I had to swallow or quit. If I quit, how would I support my family? I chose survival and learned to swallow with a smile.” And, Parker would write, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.” 

Here is Robert Parker’s book. 

Matt Yglesias:

And I’ve been saying for a long time now that we need to get out of this rut. You can shut things down for 15 days to slow the spread. You can even keep things semi-closed for a year until the arrival of vaccines. But you can’t just permanently impair the basic functioning of society due to a new respiratory virus; it doesn’t pass cost-benefit scrutiny. But that doesn’t mean there are no costs. We are living with lots of people dying of a virus that didn’t previously exist. We also have people going to the hospital and suffering long-term damage to their lungs or other organs. What the Covid hawks get right is that this is genuinely a very bad situation, and not just something we can declare ourselves “over.”

But the response we need is a pharmacological one, and that’s where we are failing.

The virus is evolving faster than our vaccines. And while scientists keep diligently plugging away at next-generation vaccination ideas, the idea of a whole-of-America effort to do R&D and production and fast-tracked regulatory approval seems gone and forgotten. That’s a disaster for the country, and we need to change course. 

The whole post is very good, and unfortunately accurate in its diagnosis. See also this Eric Topol post. I’m not afraid, but I’m concerned. 

A heartbreaking and powerful essay from Leah Libresco Sargeant:

A previous surgeon had told me to stop crying during a miscarriage, so this time my husband and I took a train ride to reach the hospital of a Catholic surgeon in New Jersey. We wanted a surgeon who took the loss of our child as seriously as the danger to my life.

The first person to see us was another ultrasound technician. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heartbeat. “It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,” she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice softened a little, “You don’t have to think of it that way.” For her, part of providing care was denying there was any room for grief. […] 

Doctors can’t value women more by dismissing our babies as worth less. Even women who support abortion access may find it jarring to have their child’s life dismissed when they hoped they would hold this baby. It’s better to be honest about tragedy and loss, than to pretend that only one person is on the table.

Vicente Manansala, Community

After all these years, I am finally getting around to reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and you know what? It is just as great as everyone says it is, maybe even greater. I’ve never read a better biography. What astonishes me is the skill with which Caro paces his story, considering its length, and considering how many digressions are necessarily embedded in it.

Caro is fabulously skilled at those digressions; he knows just how long they need to be in order to give the information that readers need if they are to grasp what LBJ was doing and why it mattered. In the first volume, his portrait of Sam Rayburn is a masterful mini-biography that tells us everything we need to know about that remarkable man in a dozen pages; it faithfully guides us when we see Rayburn’s actions later in the story. There are many such character sketches in this book, and each of them is a little marvel of lucidity, compression, and the art of the well-chosen detail. Thus we hear that W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, the supposedly populist governor, when told that some people thought that his policies were betraying his supporters, plaintively replied, “How can they say I’m against the working man when I buried my daddy in overalls?”

But of these digressions, the best one in the first volume, surely, accompanies the account of how LBJ brought electricity to the farms and ranches of the Texas Hill Country. Caro gives us a brief but brilliant history of the daily lives of people of that region in the years before electricity: how they got their water; how they cooked and cleaned; how they milked their cows in the dark, not daring to bring a kerosene lantern into the barn for fear of fire. (Also: precisely how much light kerosene lanterns of the time provided.) He tells us why many of them were afraid of the coming of electricity, and afraid that the government would cheat them, as it had so often cheated them in the past. And then he tells us just how the electrical lines were built:

The poles that would carry the electrical lines had to be sunk in rock. Brown & Root’s mechanical hole-digger broke on the hard Hill Country rock. Every hole had to be dug mostly by hand. Eight or ten-man crews would pile into flatbed trucks – which also carried their lunch and water – in the morning and head out into the hills. Some trucks carried axemen, to hack paths through the cedar; others contained the hole-diggers. “The hole-diggers were the strongest men,” Babe Smith says. Every 300 or 400 feet, two would drop off and begin digging a hole by pounding the end of a crowbar into the limestone. After the hole reached a depth of six inches, half a stick of dynamite was exploded in it, to loosen the rock below, but that, too, had to be dug out by hand. “Swinging crowbars up and down – that’s hard labor,” Babe Smith says. “That’s back-breaking labor.” But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and “pikemen,” who, in teams of three, set the poles – thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas – into the rock, and then the “framers” who attached the insulators, and then the “stringers” who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them – poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. “These workers – they were the men of the cooperative,” Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn’t have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to “bring the lights.” And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them – with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men – axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers – were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.

All of this comes not from reading books – there’s much here that no book has told – but from interviewing people who were present when the electrification of the Hill Country happened. (In the late Seventies Caro and his wife, though lifelong and happy New Yorkers, moved for a couple of years to the Hill Country, because it took that long to acquire the older folks’ trust.)

Eventually, twelve miles a day, the electrification was done, though not without strain of many kinds. Here’s how the chapter concludes:

Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren’t really going to get it. She recalls that “All their money was tied up in electric wiring” – and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend’s parents to leave: “You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don’t care to see you again.” They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.

But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.

“Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!”

But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”

They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”