House of Eratosthenes

Discovering that things don’t mean what they plainly say is how liberals demonstrate they’re smart.

If you’re good at it, you can win debate tournaments in high school.

If you’re really good at it, you’ll get As in those college classes taught by cat ladies with PhDs.

If you’re really, really good at it, you can become one of those PhD-wielding cat ladies yourself.

If you’re really, really, really good at it, you can be President.

If you suck at it, but think you’re good at it, you’ve got a bright future in journalism.

It is a sub-genre of teevee “Drama”; in fact, it is drama. It is the basis of any good murder mystery. At first blush, it is emphatically and obviously true that this guy must be the killer — b-u-u-u-t, this obscure little piece of evidence came out, and now we see it’s that other guy we never would’ve suspected. Which makes the piece of evidence a MacGuffin of sorts, in the sense that it is a game-changer and it creates an implicit comment about the character of the person who finds it. As well as, the person who accepts it, and the many many people who reject it. It turns out to be true, and some people look like smarty pants and other people look like dumbasses.

Out here in real life, some people haven’t managed to extricate themselves from the drama to go about the business of living real life. They can’t grasp the notion that sometimes a cigar is a cigar and nothing more.

There are two things going on here, I think. Consider the case of a red-stater blue-collar guy who might be interviewed on Dirty Jobs. He’s not as likely to engage in this phony-snowglobe-reality as his counterpart taking a college class taught by a cat lady with a Ph.D.; he’s apt to recognize that a cigar is a cigar. Even though his income potential is probably far less, which will make the snowglobe-reality grad student guy feel very smart.

The dirt-clod-picking-guy from Dirty Jobs isn’t going to lunge for the pretend made-up MacGuffin until some evidence comes along that would compel him to do so; there are two reasons for this and they both have to do with this gratuitous drama offered by the MacGuffin. He can’t afford the drama — a lot of these jobs are genuinely dangerous. In his vocation, he needs to know that the snake really is too slow and stupid to bite him, or that the platform really is thick and strong enough to support him. The other reason has to do with need. He doesn’t need the drama. Crawling through a sewer pipe is an experience that packs plenty enough.

The grad student in the crazy-cat-lady class, on the other hand…

He’s still feeling really super-smart. His income potential is much higher than the dirt-clod picker guy’s, and as I said above that makes him feel smart. But that’s not enough. He has this psychological need for that game-changer MacGuffin nugget of evidence that turns everything around, that “pregnant chad” almost-undervote for Al Gore. Even after monologuing about that over and over again, though, he still isn’t going to feel complete, he’s going to have to join some protests to “spread awareness,” maybe log on to some conservative blogs and do some trolling. The hole is never filled in his life. We know this from watching those sad people who’ve been “hippies” for half a century non-stop.

Why is the hole never filled? Is it because they see the results and recognize that they leave something to be proven still? I know it can’t be that. They don’t think about the results. I say something like “So that’s why the healthcare.gov launch went the way it did,” and that’s a true paradigm shift for them; they weren’t thinking about it. So this seems to me to be a case of journey being more important than destination. They’re living out their lives this way, looking for their “Aha, but what about this” moment with every little subject that comes up.

But a majority of these situations don’t have one. Some ninety percent of them or so, I’d estimate, are like the original Bush v. Gore — looks the very first time the question comes up, that George W. Bush won Florida, and at the end of it it turns out that’s exactly what happened. This is something they simply can’t handle, and not just because Bill Clinton’s presidency was disgraced once & for all and a Republican ended up being President. They can’t handle it because when all’s said & done, the mini-drama is missing the drama, missing that 180-degree hairpin turn. They never could wrap their minds around it.

Things meaning what they plainly say, nothing more and nothing less? They can’t comprehend. It’s like explaining depth to a creature from a two-dimensional cartoon universe.

Thanks for the shout-out!
- Severian | 08/31/2014 @ 10:48
Have you read P.J. O’Rourke’s latest book, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again)?

It’s not actually all that great on its own — more autobiography than anything, with a lot of recycled material. But as a whole it’s perfect confirmation of something I’ve long suspected — liberals act that way because they’re bored.

As you say: No drama. They have no stable self concept. All they know is how to be against things. The college town where I live is a perfect example. You can get kids and professors to hit the streets for any vague, gassy cause you can think of — end poverty, stop rape culture, shave the whales — so long as it’s global, and as long as success is not an option. Since it’s impossible to know when all the whales have been shaved, they can pat themselves on the back for their superior moral virtue until the sun’s a cinder.

Meanwhile, all the food and clothing drives, the homeless shelter fundraisers, the adopt-a-pet programs, the soup kitchens… these are run by local churches.

Were they to actually go down to the shelter and try to fix, say, Crazy Leroy, they’d realize that it’s impossible. Crazy Leroy can’t be fixed, and at least 75% of that is because Crazy Leroy doesn’t want to be fixed. And that’s boring. There’s no drama to be wrung from a guy who won’t recite his damn lines. But Capitalism, now, and Conservatism, and The Rich…. they always stay on-script.
- Severian | 08/31/2014 @ 11:32
Since it’s impossible to know when all the whales have been shaved, they can pat themselves on the back for their superior moral virtue until the sun’s a cinder.

Meanwhile, all the food and clothing drives, the homeless shelter fundraisers, the adopt-a-pet programs, the soup kitchens… these are run by local churches.

Conceding the point that the libs really are trying to save the whales, which is charitable, and that there is the potential for some sort of actual effect vis a vis a whale somewhere that really was saved…which is even more charitable…there is still a huge difference between something like that, and the food/clothing drive run by the local church.

There is the injection of an absolute. The local church doesn’t even include in its mission statement any sort of quest to end poverty. Christ Himself said that simply isn’t going to happen, when Judas protested that the fine perfume could’ve been sold, and the proceeds used to feed the poor. But our friends the libs always seem to be all about ending something. End racism, end sexism, end all the “isms,” end illiteracy, end poverty, end disease, end inequality, et al.

That’s one of many reasons why I don’t see “end slavery” as a lefty cause. That was actually a measurable change of state to a defined object, which was the constitutional/legal framework of the nation. The lefty formula for helping people is to “end” something, and the lefty formula for ending something is to look for some example of it and play whack-a-mole. With a lot more emphasis placed on being seen swinging the mallet, than on actually connecting with the mole.
- mkfreeberg | 08/31/2014 @ 13:33
I couldn’t agree more. The activity doesn’t support a goal; the activity IS the goal.

This is my problem with things like the “ice bucket challenge.” If I really wanted to end ALS, well, I could tell when that is achieved — no more cases of ALS. If I wanted to further that goal, I could a) become a scientist and devote my life to anti-ALS research, or b) donate time and money to anti-ALS research.

B) is supposedly the point of the ice bucket challenge. But: You’re free to donate any amount of money, at any time. The foundation won’t send the check back if it doesn’t come doused in ice water, I assure you. And nobody ever posts videos of themselves mailing the fucking check. It’s all “lookit me!! I dumped ice on my head!!!!”

Narcissism. Straight, un-cut, 100% pure narcissism. When this fad passes, we will never hear another word about “the fight against ALS,” and we’ll never see a report about how much money was raised, much less a progress report on how it was spent. We’ll just find another fad, another “good cause” to film ourselves “supporting.” He who gets the most Facebook likes wins.

But, of course, I’m the bad guy for saying so, because don’t I care that they’re raising money? If the charity gets the money, why do I care how it happens? I’m just making excuses because I either don’t want to give myself hypothermia, and/or don’t want to part with my money, because conservatives are evil.
- Severian | 08/31/2014 @ 13:59
There’s one other thing going on, I think… the realization that all of their livelihoods and senses of worth – their whole reason for existing – comes from telling other people how it is. That’s the one thing the left-dominated fields have in common, every time: educators, media, entertainment. Their whole reason to be is telling us stuff.

What happens when we don’t actually need to be told something?

That’s a thought that will make the truest-blue of them sit up in the dead of night in a damp patch of terror-sweat. In a world where it’s not difficult to impart basic knowledge to children, or anyone with a cell phone and wifi can gather and report the facts of events, and the culture is confident and productive, then all the educational experts, first drafters of history, and cultural bellweathers would be instantly useless.

So – teaching is held out as a mystical calling, and the media twist themselves into ourobouros pretzels to give us “the story behind the story” and “what’s really going on”, and the entertainment industry makes a fetish of boundary-crossing.

CS Lewis observed that loves that attempt to set up in business for themselves quickly lose their character and become hatreds, destroying themselves and their devotees in the process. This is an analogous process. How much actual productive teaching gets done in modern schools, especially into high school and beyond? How much information does the media give without burying it under smothering blankets of spin and nuance? And how much do we actually enjoy half the movies and shows when they’re out to make us feel guilty about being human in general, and whatever target class in particular?

And to move out to the larger point, it’s pretty obvious that by dedicating themselves only to knowing things that nobody else does – the better to feel superior – that the Left isn’t actually dedicated to knowledge at all. They are trapped in a contradiction: they have to show off their secret learning to feel superior, which makes it no longer secret, which means that they have to get new secret knowledge, which means that sooner or later they’re going to be in the position where the culture at large is where they were thirty years ago, and they have to then come back out and say, “NO – you are all wrong, in fact, and THIS is the way it ought to be.” That’s why the Left of previous generations sound like Reaganites now. That’s why those who have never fallen for this sort of sophistry sound fresh and relevant to us even if they wrote 100 years ago.
- nightfly | 09/02/2014 @ 08:52
In academia they’ve even got a phrase for this: “the esotericism of knowledge.” Michel Foucault was one of the all-time charlatans, but he was dead on about that. The point of impenetrable jargon — at which MF himself was a past master — is to conceal one’s point, not reveal it.

Like Marxism and “climate change,” it’s a bait-and-switch, using the trappings of science to poach science’s reputation for truth. Consider medicalese. There are lots of ways to say “a Jones fracture of the left foot,” including even more elaborate medicalese: “a fracture of the diaphysis of the fifth metatarsal of the foot.” But those words actually mean something. A podiatrist really does need to know that the break is located at the diaphysis of the fifth metatarsal, whereas the rest of us can get by with “my foot hurts.”

Academia works the exact opposite way. You can make yourself sound very clever indeed if you talk about Kafka’s experimentalism being a “Jones fracture of the narrative,” with “traditionally structured metaphors” being the diaphyses which are “broken” by his non-linear contusions of comparison. (Any prospective Lit PhD candidates among the HoE readership, be sure to cite me in your dissertations if you steal that). It doesn’t increase our understanding of Kafka’s prose, even if we know what all those words mean, because it’s not designed to. You’re just supposed to go “whoa!” and cite it in your next article in those all-important peer-reviewed journals.

And you’re right about the last part, too — towards the end of his life (he died of AIDS in the mid-80s), Foucault was sounding increasingly Reaganesque, and there’s a hardcore Marxist philosopher named Slavoj Ziszek who, I’m told, is all about the ironic enjoyment of enjoying capitalist excesses like the movie Titanic unironically. Because, you know, he’s a deep thinker. And stuff.
- Severian | 09/02/2014 @ 09:47
Funny you hit on that example… I actually did break my fifth metatarsal last year, though it healed in eight weeks with no surgery and no complications. If only the Left’s breaks from reality were as simple to diagnose and remedy.
- nightfly | 09/02/2014 @ 13:55
I had a family member with a Jones fracture recently. I just thought it was a funny name, since so many medical conditions have obscure Latin tags. Turns out there is an obscure Latin tag — because of course there is — but this is one of a very few instances where the shorthand is actually comprehensible and more common (see also: “boxer’s break,” “Lisfranc fracture” (though only football players get that one)).

Jonah Goldberg has a lot to say about this, too, and it was one of my biggest frustrations in grad school. You could stop a seminar dead — and become someone’s enemy for life — simply by translating their highfalutin’ polysyllabic gibberish into English. “So you’re saying that everything is the fault of white males”…..

Good times.
- Severian | 09/02/2014 @ 15:07

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

This Is Good CXIIISunday, August 31st, 2014

This Is Good CXIII
Sunday, August 31st, 2014