Thoughts on Substack Notes a week or so in

Still too early, it seems to me, to draw conclusions about its long-term place in the social-media landscape

I know I invited you all to join me on Substack Notes the other day, and I hope you will still look into it.

But, like any social-media platform, or the Internet in general, or, really, all technology, it seems to be serving as a mirror for our species’ best and worst impulses.

I’ve come across some great writers with great Substacks in the past few days. I’m making my peace with the fact that I’ll never be able to keep up with every last post from every one of them.

But here’s a short list. I figure that if I’m going to mention it, I ought to let you in on what they are. You, after all, demonstrate a keen mind and a resolute resistance to tribal presumptions bay reading Precipice, and if I can steer you to some new sources of enrichment, it seems like a courtesy I ought to extend.

Herewith:

Anti-Mimetic. From its About page:

Hi, I’m Luke.

Anti-Mimetic is an exploration of our highly mimetic (imitative) culture and how to live well within it.

This newsletter started out as a supplement to my book Wanting, an introduction to the ideas of René Girard—namely, mimetic desire. It has evolved into a more general publication about what it means to be human in an increasingly chaotic and confusing world.

I’m a veteran entrepreneur who, after attending NYU Stern and making my way through Wall Street and the start-up world, felt that something was missing. I desired something that transcended the world of work (and life) as I knew it, but I was trapped playing the same games as everyone else.

I wanted to understand human desire—most of all my own—and how we may go about building companies and families and schools and lives that bring out the best in people, not the worst. I immersed myself in philosophy, theology, and classical literature for many years. This newsletter is about some of the things I’ve learned, and still learning.

Thank you for reading.
Luke

The Natural Theologian About page:

Welcome to my Substack! My name is Joel Carini, and I write about the renewal of a proper relationship between philosophy and theology. Within theology, I seek a proper formulation of the relation between grace and nature. Within philosophy, I seek a better Christian approach to philosophy, particularly one that is as helpful to non-Christians as Christians.

I’m taking Paul Kingsnorth’s self-introduction from his - I guess you’d call it his main - website, but it lets you know what the thematic bent of The Abbey of Misrule is:

I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I'm mad, or the world is. It could be both, I suppose. But I don’t believe in most of the stories my society tells me. I’m not even sure my society believes them anymore.

Here are some things I believe instead.

I believe that the global industrial economy – what William Cobbet called ‘the Thing’, but what we might equally simply call the human empire – is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself, razing and homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and increasingly using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial machine which may one day supplant us. This is known as ‘progress’. Its cultural arm, individualist liberalism, is meanwhile engaged in stripping all meaning, truth and traditional support structures from our lives, in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as ‘freedom’.

In opposition to this, I believe in a healthy suspicion of entrenched power, whether it is entrenched in leaders, states or corporations; decentralisation of economics, politics and culture; connection to land, nature and heritage; a deep attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty. A man can dream.

My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.

The About page of Stillness in the West:

We live in a time of radical change. Even by the standards of modernity—itself a time of extensive upheaval and overturning—we are quickly losing our grip on things. The postmodernism of our own day is the exponential intensification of this same process of cultural, communal, and personal dissolution. How are we to respond? It often seems far from simple and we are blocked at every turn. Human will-to-power has indeed created marvels, but also the catastrophe we fear is unfolding before us. We have come to the end of our tether. Something has to give.

There is an old way that we can make new again. The path of contemplation. I call it the Arsenios Option: Fleeing distraction, being silent in silence, and dwelling in stillness. A way of letting go of the failed categories of thought and action which have created the very mess we are in and have us running in circles. The path of contemplation has been tested for thousands of years, all over the planet and in many different traditions and contexts. It is our best, and maybe only alternative.

I am currently living as a semi-hermit at a remote Orthodox Benedictine Monastery in the Rocky Mountains. Joy and Beauty are still possible.

As you can see, the thrusts of these sites dovetail harmoniously with that of Precipice. They reinforce my inkling that, for all the twists and turns and folly and narrow escapes from self-destruction that characterize human history, our current juncture is fraught with a unique kind of peril. It was refreshing to see that others are thinking about this as well. I wasn’t just indulging a hankering for melodrama.

But, to get back to Notes proper, I was struck by this post this morning:

Is anyone else finding @Substack Notes as crushingly boring as I am, now that they have cordoned us writers off into our echo chambers? I hate to sound sour, but I went out of my way to recommend Notes to readers, and it’s kind of embarrassing.

Some of the responses were more hopeful than others. This one was interesting:

I personally think you're jumping the gun by accusing Notes of being responsible for you not being sufficiently entertained. It's a brand new platform. They've given us a bouncy castle to play in. It's our job to make it good. If you're going back to Twitter after a week after they defamed, censored, and throttled you, I think that says more about you than it does about Notes. I'm honestly reluctant to post this, because I'm a huge fan of your work, but good lord, how could anyone prefer Twitter?

Dismayingly, I’m also seeing a fair amount of the kinds of snarky exchanges that have drained nearly all the appeal of established platforms. I guess in atomized 2023 post-America, that’s going to come with the territory.

And there’s one lefty Substacker in particular whose posts show up more often in my feed at Notes than anyone else’s. How the algorithm concluded that I’d be keen on that mystifies me.

Something else that I suppose is inevitable is that dog-and-pony show types are showing up. Cutesy site names and tags, various gimmicks to impress the scroller with what a unique perspective the writer has on this universe.

In a way, seeing that stuff has strengthened my resolve. I will do my best to give Precipice readers and subscribers an authentic and humbly delivered assessment of where our culture is and what’s at stake for our souls. I’m not here to inflame you, confirm your tribal status or, God forbid, amuse or distract you.

Do I still hope you’ll use Notes as a way to correspond with me and others in the Precipice community? I think so. Then again, maybe Chat works better for filtering out the noise. We shall see. There is much shaking out still to occur before we can see what kind of long-term value Notes os going to have - or not have.

But, as you can see, it can expose one to some mature, sincerely arrive at grapplings with the present moment.

I’ll just do what I think serves the Precipice community best.

This is important work. I feel that in my bones. And I thank you for acknowledging, by reading the content here, that that is what I’m seeking to do.