Homework and Slop

"You used to have interesting ideas and now all you do is browse the Internet"

as they said in SNL, it really does look like earth getting dragged into hell

In episode 24 of the third season of The Simpsons, titled “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, Homer becomes sterile due to his exposure to radiation in the nuclear power plant he works at. Fearing a lawsuit his boss, Mr. Burns, offers him a $2,000 dollar check for a made-up prize (the “Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in The Field of Excellence”) provided he signs a legal waiver. To assuage Homer’s suspicion, Burns also throws a lavish ticker-tape gala in honor of the award.

Nobody was surprised that this episode came to mind last month, with Donald Trump being awarded the (until this year, non-existent) FIFA Peace Prize at the World Cup draw. The whole thing was generally an embarassment: to Trump, to FIFA, and to the noble sport of football. It just signals a new age: the age of overt genuflection to wannabe despots by all the most powerful people and institutions on planet Earth.

I feel like, at this point, it’s pretty much undeniable that liberal democracy as a system of government is in terminal crisis. The United States has seen, in the past few weeks, armed agents of the state murder two civilians. The government has, largely, defended it and blamed them for insufficiently obeying their orders. Even longtime opponents of the term are starting to describe the situation as “fascist”. On a much less serious note, the New York Times had an article saying Gen Z doesn’t like Harry Potter because they reject liberalism. What’s going on?

Liberal group non-think

Matt Yglesias has a recent article in The Argument I considered very thought provoking. The TL;DR is that it’s about “wokeness”, which has snuck in racially essentialist and culturally relativistic principles into policymaking, leading to bad outcomes - for example, worse education policies. He claims this comes from wokeness being a non-liberal an ideology built off postmodernism that replaces liberal individual-based rights with liberal-agnostic or outright illiberal groups-based ideas. The complicated part is that I think basically all the concrete claims he makes are right, at least as far as I know (I don’t know about progressive entryism). What I disagree with, or at least have caveats and clarifications to make, are the fundamental assumptions he starts off from: that liberalism is inherently about individual-based rights, and the notion (less discussed and less present, but important and related to the former) that free markets and capitalism are a constituent part of liberal principles.

Yglesias’s critique of “Woke” (I’ll use the terms woke, wokeness, and identity politics interchangeably; people use them that way in colloquial speech too) is not particularly new. In fact, he seems to be borrowing mainly from Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, which calls wokeness “the identity synthesis”. A synthesis of what? Well, postmodern gobbledygook: notably Michel Foucault (postmodernism - the idea that rather than truth, relationships of power define social norms and consensus), Edward Said (decolonial theory - challenging Western power through a critical analysis of how it represents “the other”), Gayatri Spivak (standpoint epistemology - that only marginalized people can represent themselves in public forums and other people must not just make room for them, but empower them to speak), Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality - the intersection of different forms of bigotry and oppression as being unique from each other), and Derrick Bell (Critical Race Theory- that one’s a doozy). The identity synthesis includes a rejection of grand narratives (postmodernism), the requirement for public figures to speak out on behalf of oppressed groups, a reification of identity categories, and a zero-sum vision of politics as a struggle between groups over power.

The idea of understanding people as members of groups is not per se illiberal; the question, rather, is how these groups are defined, understood, and employed. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson writes, in What is the Point of Equality? (1999), that there’s two kinds of egalitarians: luck-based, and “dignity-based”, who argue that true equality comes from the ability to fully participate as a full member of society. The luck egalitarians erred in not making clear, systematic distinctions between types of “bad luck”: the bad luck of being born a Jew in Nazi Germany does not seem comparable to being born a woman in a mildly sexist society, or to be born with expensive tastes and an inability to procure the objects of your desires. The interesting thing is that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to put luck egalitarianism in the individual-based rights bucket, and democratic egalitarianism in the group-based rights: she chastises luck egalitarians for fostering individualism and egotism, neglecting care and obligations for others; luck egalitarianism is based on individual conceptions of liberal rights, and democratic equality on a community-based one. Anderson makes this explicit in her discussion of racial integration and segregation: “When racial integration rather than diversity is the goal, the relevance of racial means to achieving it is evident; indeed, race-based selection is inherently the most narrowly tailored means to integration.”

In particular, Anderson criticizes defenders of “affinity-based” self segregation (what Mounk calls progressive separatism) also on group-based grounds; in her view, they do not consider the need for White people to (gasp) acknowledge their privilege; in Walled Shahid’s piece on the subject, he mentions coming to terms with his own lack of privilege relative to his classmates during a “check your privilege” college exercise. It’s entirely possible that, just as it was for him, it was a lesson for his wealthier classmates about working class life. Likewise, per Anderson, the progressive separatists ignore the fact that there are not just different group-based allocations of resources, but different allocations of social networks within and between groups. For instance, neighborhoods matter for future economic opportunities, with children growing up in “high-opportunity” areas developing far higher earnings as adults than those growing up in “low-opportunity” ones, and these locations tend to have lower racial, class, and social segregation. In particular, growing up in a community with more socioeconomic diversity is associated with higher socioeconomic mobility (that is, a higher chance of improving your lot in life relative to your parents), which in some level could be driven by inter-class friendships - and direct social contact is key, as shown in a famous study finding that a Starbucks opening in a neighborhood results in higher rates of entrepreneurship explicitly due to its functions as a third space. Of course, Anderson disagrees on core concepts of “wokeness”, but she does this without engaging in individualistic thinking - “My point is that neither justice nor democracy can be realized if the self-segregated racial group is celebrated as a more worthy site of identity and emotional investment than the integrated “us,” as multiculturalists would have it”.

In his critique of “identity politics” titled “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, writer and “thinker” (I’m not sure how to describe his background) Mark Fisher talks about the phenomenon that we now call “wokeness” at some extent (I’ve also written about it relatively recently). Fisher describes it as, basically, the progressive wing of neoliberalism: a profoundly self-obsessed movement driven by branding and self-promotion. Quoth Fisher: “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures.”. In The Conquest of Cool, which I’ve read recently, author Thomas Frank points out something quite disturbing: the counterculture of the 1960s was basically immediately cannibalized in its entirety by marketing and advertising. Companies saw the anti-consumer, anti-establishment, peace-and-love hippies, and what they actually saw was dollar signs. Their bohemian and alternative lifestyles weren’t just compatible with mass consumerism - they were even more compatible than the traditional “solid modernity” of a man, a woman, a dog, and a picket fence, with refrigerators and light bulbs that lasted a hundred years. Per left-wing conservative thinker (?) Christopher Lasch:

The “new tribalism,” which finds favor not only among postmodern academics but in the media, in the world of commercial entertainment, and in the cultural boutiques and salons frequented by yuppies, appears on the scene at the very moment when tribalism has ceased to have any substantive content. “Tribalism” is the latest fashion thrown up by a consumerist capitalism that is replacing neighborhoods with shopping malls, thereby undermining the very particularism that it eagerly packages as a commodity.

Wokeness as a movement had to balance two competing stakes: that speech and discourse can be harmful to the victims of oppression (Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”), and, at the same time. that it the ultimate right of self expression must prevail, to an almost pathologically narcissistic degree. This comes, as I’ve mentioned before, from Woke’s origins in Romanticism: a literary movement that emphasized self-expression, authenticity, and self determination in the face of a hopeless and oppressive world. Romanticism inspired both the liberal nationalism of the generation of 1848, but also the antisemitic blut und boden nonsense of Richard Wagner; both the greatest Spanish fascist writer (Manuel Sanchez Mazas) and the greatest Spanish antifascist (Federico García Lorca) were committed Romantics. The Romantics said, in effect, that all art is political and that all politics ought to be artistic; less than a century later, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin famously pointed out that turning politics into arts inevitably leads to war and reactionary totalitarianism. Today’s Romantics are both represented by progressive skeptics of the AI and big tech, and by the rancid unholier-than-thou edgelords of Dimes Square.

I stream therefore I am

This puts the concept of authenticity in a tough spot: it can both justify feelings of liberation and emancipation, and movements built on their opposite, frequently at the same time. To quote Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites:

Standards, we are told, refer to cultural hegemony of dead, white European males. Compassion compels us to recognize the injustice of imposing them on everybody else. When the ideology of compassion leads to this kind of absurdity, it is time to call it into question. Compassion has become the human face of contempt. Democracy once implied opposition to every form of double standard. Today we accept double standards—as always, a recipe for second-class citizenship—in the name of humanitarian concern. Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else.

This also opens the door to an even more interesting and even more important question: why are people incapable of achieving a “sufficient level of competence” to engage in thoughtful examination of harmful essentialist thinking?

The idea of “thoughtlessness” as a wellspring of illiberalism isn’t particularly novel: it’s a main feature of the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, particularly the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann in Jerusalem focuses on the role of thoughtlessness and carelessness in the rise of totalitarianism, notably, the tendency of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann to speak in cliches, soundbites, and canned, empty phrases - showing a lack of active reflection and consideration of his actions and their implications on his end. While not at all comparable in content or severity, the dilution of extremely sophisticated philosophical concepts into Instagram infographics and Buzzfeed listicles does provoke the same kind of empty, canned thoughtlessness - the “That’s the wrong question and it valorizes white institutions and white ways of knowing and being and structuring society in really problematic ways.” talking point coming up in a discussion about municipal bonds.

The question, then, is why was there such a proliferation of thoughtlessness in American and liberal culture? The subheader for this post reads "You used to have interesting ideas and now all you do is browse the Internet”, a quote from one of the latter seasons of Lena Dunham’s Girls; the line is said to Hannah, Dunham’s character, in a moment of tension with one of her friends. In the early seasons of the show, particularly the arc where Hannah works for GQ, this is a present theme: the challenge of balancing the ability to work creatively with the mundane drudgery of daily life. Philosopher Simone Weil went to go work in a Fiat car factory in the 1930s to understand the daily life of the proletarian worker (thus exploring the most alien subject to philosophers, “an honest day’s work”); she came up with the concept of affliction, a sort of spiritual exhaustion that reduces a person to only asking the question why (as in, why is this happening to me) over and over again. Similarly, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism makes the case that it was the economy - society became too bureaucratic to produce individuals capable of critical thought, and instead was churning out shallow narcissists who replaced deliberation with surface-level snap judgment. But why? Fundamentally, I think there’s two major factors. The first is technology. The second is education.

One of the best books I read this (not very long) year so far is The Digital Plenitude by Jay David Bolter. Bolter’s thing is that, since the 1940s, elite literary culture (the fine arts, the opera, the symphony, the great works) has declined and mass culture (movies, pop music) has flourished. He doesn’t really ask why but I think that’s a pretty profound philosophical question, tackled by Herbert Marcuse’s “Social Implications of Technology”. Marcuse, a Frankfurt School thinker, makes a similar argument to Lena Dunham and Simone Weil- that the regimentation of life under mass industrial society, and the exertion from regimented industrial labor was sapping people’s critical and rational faculties. These faculties had, in the past, been critical for eradicating superstition and creating science and technological advancements (Marcuse would call them technical advancements, since he does that annoying philosophy thing of not calling technology technology); however, living in a rationalized industrial society required extensive degrees of training, regimentation, and repetition, which fostered numbness, alienation, and social conformism, which in turn required lower and lower use of people’s higher cognitive faculties. Obviously worth pointing out that, if

I’m not going to gt carried away with Marcuse’s analysis, but “changes to the structure of society and of technology created a mass culture that supplanted traditional elite media” is kind of what Bolter implies happened. Bolter’s analysis goes a step further. Even mass media of the kind the Frankfurt School nerds hated (jazz, movies, etc) relied on the same psychological foundations of high culture: mimesis and catharsis, Aristotle’s core building blocks of drama. Particularly, if you go sit and watch a movie (say, Gone With the Wind), the film produces an identification between you and at least one of the characters, which in turn builds up and then releases powerful emotions. The center of Bolter’s book is that digital media uses a different psychological trick: flow. The concept of flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced six cent mihaly) refers to a state of profound, prolonged focus. Flow can only be achieved with small, procedural tasks that have immediate payoffs with a clear cause-effect and cost-reward relationship. Compare Marty Supreme, a dense drama about a huge asshole trying to go to a pingpong tournament, with scrolling TikTok: you pay attention for a little bit of time the whole time, if you don’t like a video you scroll down, and every video is optimized to make you watch it. Usually, this happens by inciting some instant emotional reaction - which happens to almost always be a negative emotion. This both means that people become less capable of relating to one another and, most importantly, that the “higher” forms of media (even the not particularly stimulating political television of the 90s and 2000s) gets replaced by lower and lower content. As a friend told me one time, it feels like all the stuff I can watch is either homework or slop. Added to the social aspect of social media, what you end up getting is a global network of brainrot, formerly woke brainrot that absolutely neutred left wing politics, currently right wing brainrot radicalizing them against democracy. Streaming television, probably the defining form of art for the 2010s and early 2020s, is now being made with the provision that the people “watching” it are not actually paying attention.

The case for education is, I think, a lot briefer. In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch also takes aim at universities - particularly, the fact that they don’t seem to place much weight on, well, educating anyone. Contrary to the stupid ass beliefs of one Curtis Yarvin, this isn’t because of some far-reaching Marxist plan to indoctrinate - it’s almost entirely driven by market and economic incentives. College graduation rates and grades have increased consistently since the 1990s without any real increase in student quality, institutional resources, or composition of the education sector. The phenomenon of grade inflation, the paramount example of this issue, is remarkably complex, but the fundamental question is cui bono - who profits. Since getting good grades is so important, students tend to choose classes where they can get higher grades; at the same time, universities are incentivized to improve numbers (retention, graduation, etc.) for basically financial reasons. And since stricter professors get systematically worse evaluations, then precarity in the teaching profession results in grade inflation, as see in the fact that schools with more untenured faculty also have worse outcomes. While the relationship between grade inflation and achievement is not linear, it’s obviously not good to have artificially low standards in order to boost metrics so schools can get artificially better stats in order to boost enrollment. This is Lasch’s entire point: that contemporary culture has commodified education, treating it as a labor certificate and not a civic responsibility to and for young people, to such an extent that the actual education itself is basically completely irrelevant. Parents want their kids to get good grades to get better jobs. Kids want easier classes. Schools want more students. And teachers can’t make a living unless they get good evaluations. The gravitational pull of low standards is just too strong.

Robinson’s Island

In God and Man at Yale, written in 1948, conservative legend William F. Buckley (the Charlie Kirk of the 20th century) accused the economics department of his alma mater of having a socialist and collectivist bias (lol). One of the textbooks he cited was Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, specifically the quote: “If free enterprise is not a basic freedom, then it must be justified primarily on the grounds of whether it has delivered the goods. Has it proved an efficient mechanism for producing the goods and services we want?.” Samuelson’s answer, needless to say, was both ommitted from Buckley’s book and also affirmative - capitalism had, in fact, delivered the goods.

The reason why Buckley found Samuelson’s quote so offensive wasn’t just that his book was an embarrassing endeavor that degraded its author’s intelligence by engaging in circular and sophomoric justifications of laundered far-right ideas. It was that Samuelson didn’t consider capitalism and free markets part of the telos of humanity (meaning, “purpose” or “end”), and that therefore he justified them on utilitarian and not natural law rights. In particular, if free markets were a human creation like refrigerators and wearing corsets, then they could just be abandoned at some point in favor of a more efficient system of economic production.

This was a huge deal. I’m currently reading Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists (I read it in 2018 and gave up 100 pages in because I didn’t like it) and, while he doesn’t necessarily put it in those terms, that’s a major reason why the “neoliberal” thinkers of the Mont Pelerin Society were so skeptical of democracy. In particular, those thinkers seemed to believe democracy was an unnatural system of human organization, created out of thin air by radical ideologues, while the market was a natural extension of the human telos, and therefore the sovereignty of the consumer mattered more than the right of the people to govern themselves. The interesting thing is that, contrary to popular belief, neoliberals didn’t want to put the free market above democracy. In fact, they wanted to put the global market above national economies, but to also exercise a tight control over “metaeconomic conditions”, particularly law and culture.

Every economics textbook contains the story of Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked man subsisting off fish and coconuts. By trading with Friday, some guy who was there, they can both maximize their wellbeing. Hence, the case for markets. However, as even the neoliberals would recognize, this needs a series of preconditions: it needs both Robinson and Friday to see market exchanges as fundamentally just and justified, it needs for both of them to be able to respect each other’s ownership of fish and coconut, and it needs for them to see each other as sovereign equals. Most European colonists in the Americas failed at this last one: Don Pedro de Mendoza’s colony of Santa Maria del Buen Ayre was burnt to the ground by local natives after increasingly predatory behavior by the Spanish, who saw the inhabitants of the area as their rightful vassals and not equal trading partners. A few decades later, Santa Maria was rebuilt by Juan de Garay, who had amassed superior force to Mendoza, under the name Buenos Aires.

Thus, the conditions for liberal democracy (even for its so called liberal skeptics) has three conditions: the market, democracy, and civic society. Culture is nothing else and nothing more than society - the values people hold. When discussing the creation of culture, things get really dark very fast. It’ll, nonetheless, be the subject of a future post, mostly because I want more space than I can give it here and it needs to be sensitively laid out. In real life, the debate devolved into a Hitler Youth member calling another German a Nazi for reivindicating the ideas of a former Nazi and the German calling the other guy a Nazi because calling people Nazis was a Nazi tactic. Regardless, I think you can talk about “values” somewhat comfortably, and if we’re being honest, most of them are going down the shitter. My whole thing is that support for economic growth, trust in other people and in impersonal mechanisms, and understanding others different than us as our moral equals is declining and that’s bad. It’s also, notably, declined as a consequence of lower economic growth, which is declining due to “neoliberal” ideology (very unhelpful term aside) itself, particularly the impact of globalization on blue collar communities (which, in the United States, have disproportionate political representation). Both Ezra Klein and his left wing critics are united in this: the economy has completely shattered enough working people that they have completely rejected core civic values fundamental to shared liberal life.

Law and government, well, that one’s much easier. Democracy legitimates itself primarily via higher economic growth. In this sense, positive experiences with democracy are linked with both of those through more universalist value systems, positive interactions in the marketplace shape a more universalist, high-trust, non zero-sum mindset, and positive economic performance was linked with higher support for democracy during the Russian Revolution - but only when democracy was actually strengthened. On the contrary, in the Weimar Republic, areas more closely harmed by Heinrich Brüning’s austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in later years. Political partisanship and partisan fragmentation, themselves economically determined, also limit the importance of core democratic mechanisms to people. However, a second issue is also worth mentioning: inequality. The most compelling case against inequality is also the most small-c conservative: Machiavelli (yeah, that one) believed that the power of the elites (the grandi) grew alongside their wealth, and that the grandi were a profoundly destabilizing force in democratic policies, given their endless hunger for power and prestige and their outsized ability to enforce it. The clearest example of this is the American (and global) elite’s complete disinterest in restraining the American imperial presidency: in a fully Rothbardian turn, they expect that an allmighty security state trained on left wing forces could never be, in turn, turned on themselves. There isn’t such a thing as private law - it’s entirely a state project (one defined by Hayek using extremely tedious and confusing Greek terminology), but one that can be captured, in essence giving greater and greater power in exchange for less regulation, less taxation, and less opposition.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the incompatibility between the current configuration of markets and the civic and political foundations of those market themselves is the biggest question in contemporary liberal politics. There are, of course, countless civic forms that lend themselves to non-democratic politics consistent with the desired economic order of at least some right wing elites. The wretched world of elite impunity is not compatible with popular sovereignty of any kind.

The whole manual for “winning back the working class” is, at this point, stale and tired. There’s approximately three ideas going around, each time with different formulations. However, looking outside the narrow hotbox of farts that is American elite discourse, there are much clearer, and brighter, paths:

What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador, and state terrorists in Guatemala. But they were largely indifferent to the abuse of power by non-state actors: the kleptocratic oligarchies that emerged in Asia, Africa and Latin America throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Nor did they have much to say about the terrible effects of the structural adjustment programmes implemented by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s. Human rights politics and law, Moyn argues, may have sensitised us ‘to the misery of visible indigence alongside the horrific repression of authoritarian and totalitarian states – but not to the crisis of national welfare, the stagnation of the middle classes and the endurance of global hierarchy’.

Fundamentally, we have to stop understanding liberalism as a series of separate boxes labeled “state” and “market”, and understand them, as every successful movement for political and social reform has, as mutually complementary and interchangeable. Without this underpinning, any attempt at just playing the game without rewriting its rulebook is destined for ingominous failure.