Thursday roundup
Recent reading recommendations (how's that for some off-the-cuff alliteration?)
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I’m going to try something different today. Actually, it’s something I’ve been doing for years over at Late in the Day, the old-school blog I’ve had since 2012. I keep it around for writing that’s a little more topical and a little less essay-ish.
I’ve done the reading-roundup format over at LITD on an irregular basis. (As you Precipice readers know, I’m not the most regular Substacker on the block.) Here are the two most recent examples: a Sunday Roundup from August, and a Saturday Roundup from June.
Why am I trying the roundup format here? I’ve been considering it for a while. My sense is that Precipice readers would appreciate the best of the range of periodicals I check in with, thinky bunch that you are. Also, I feel another essay on the theme of feeling my way toward a unified field theory that ties together my positions on the spiritual, character-forming, cultural, political and economic levels of human life, but it’s still gestating. And it’s high time for a fresh Precipice post.
So herewith a list of reads that ought to keep you busy over the weekend.
Nicholas Eberstadt, writing at Foreign Affairs, says we ought to heed an alarming trend, toward a world of shrinking population:
Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people.
With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.
Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.
A lot of what I share in these Roundups is based largely on the great writing. I mean, I dig the content as well, but the major impact is the author’s writing chops. Case in point: Dudley Newright (obviously a nom de plume) at The Upheaval and his piece “Millenial Snot”. Here’s a taste:
Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.
Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:
"I mean, I'm sorry --"
"Let's be *very* clear here"
"So true 🙄"
"You're so right 🙄"
"This is an *extremely* bad look for you"
"Umm, frankly..."
These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.
"History PhD here, and uh, this thread is...a lot!"
You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat.” This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now.
I call it “Millennial Snot.”
He looks into its origins:
Liberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.
Pity the “front row kid,” the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school…
That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment.” This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs,” and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.
The liberal has developed an argot that combines everything he thinks is cool. And what is that, exactly?
Libs know they’re smarter than you but they’re often not as successful as they’d like to be. The resulting inferiority and superiority complexes send the liberal into convulsions of contempt toward healthy, well-adjusted, normal people, along with an attendant parasocial identification with figures they think of as downtrodden underdogs. Underdogs are cool.
And he looks into its coarsening effect:
What’s more, middle-aged academics and politicians did not used to be so sweary. People with advanced degrees did not say “what the actual fuck” and “fuck right off” and deem their lessers “fuckwits” and “fucktards” 20 years ago. But today they love to cuss, liberals. They especially enjoy doing the high-low thing where they pair a beefy vocab word like “unreconstructed,” with a snippy teengirl-ism like “creepy,” or a working-class swear like “dipshit” or “shitheel.” This is supposed to say, I’m smart, but I’m also cool.
Excessive use of “like,” uptalk, and vocal fry – these were once considered unprofessional ways of speaking. But in the early 2010s a handful feminist linguists with Tumblr accounts wrote opinion pieces arguing that the way teen girls talk is actually like, totally valid. “Like” isn’t just a crutch, a semantically empty filler word for someone who’s not in command of her ideas, it’s a “lexical hedge.” Talking like a teen girl or catty gay became a way for boring straight white people to reposition themselves as youthful rebels.
Per Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman at The Free Press, Shari Redstone is none too happy with what happened to Tony Dokoupil in the CBS News staff meeting:
On Monday, we reported that CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil was admonished by senior executives for failing to meet CBS “editorial standards” in an interview with best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message, which features a one-sided anti-Israel polemic. We also published a recording of part of that October 7 meeting, in which CBS’s bigwigs hung Dokoupil out to dry.
Our reporting was picked up everywhere—even The New York Times had to acknowledge the scoop—and two days later it’s still not clear what Dokoupil did wrong, other than ask tough but substantive questions.
In our world, we call that journalism.
But the fallout over the sin of Dokoupil’s questions continued on Tuesday morning during a meeting for the morning show staff.
Originally, CBS News had invited a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist, and trauma trainer” named Dr. Donald Grant to moderate a conversation on the issue in an all-staff meeting on Tuesday. That plan was scrapped after old social media posts from Dr. Grant surfaced—including one where he referred to South Carolina senator Tim Scott as “Uncle Tim” (a reference to “Uncle Tom”) and another of him describing a possible second Trump term as “MAGAcide” and the “death of a nation.” Seems like just the guy you should call when you want to smooth things over. (A source close to the drama told The Free Press that the network was “humiliated by his Instagram.”)
The meeting went ahead without Grant—staffers were not able to join from outside of CBS offices in order to prevent leaks. One source familiar with the proceedings suggested it was a “shit show,” with various employees “yelling.” Shawna Thomas, the show’s executive producer, was in tears. So was Dokoupil.
There was an open debate in the meeting about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” There are some people at CBS who think that “Israel’s existence as a state should be part of fair conversation,” said one CBS source. Can you imagine journalists having that conversation about any other country?
No wonder Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS’s parent company Paramount Global—at least until its merger with Skydance goes through some time next year—is not happy. A source close to Redstone told The Free Press that Redstone thought that “Tony gave a great interview and modeled what civil discourse should look like. And she disagreed with the action the company took. She’s working with the CEOs to address this issue.”
Meanwhile, Coates himself spoke about the controversy for the first time Tuesday. In a trailer for an appearance on Trevor Noah’s podcast, he accused Dokoupil of “commandeering” the interview. “I don’t think he did Nate and Gayle a service, and I’m really, really sorry for them,” said Coates, referring to Dokoupil’s co-hosts Gayle King and Nate Burleson.
But Coates also revealed a detail that caught our eye. As he was praising King as a “great journalist and a great interviewer,” he said that “Gayle came behind the stage before we went [on] and she had gone through the book, and I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I’m gonna ask you about this. I’m gonna ask you about that.’ ”
So let’s get this straight: One journalist is raked over the coals for asking tough questions, while another journalist—if Coates’s recollection is correct—previews her questions and faces no repercussions. (King did not respond to a request for comment.)
Which poses a few questions. Chief among them: Are there different rules for different journalists at CBS?
Great piece by Phil Christman at Hedgehog Review titled “Adventures Close to Home: What Has Travel Ever Done For Me?” Again, just plain great writing. A taste:
Similarly, the well-worn complaint that travel banalizes places—that, if too many people start to go somewhere, the place reconfigures itself in order to please the almighty tourist’s gaze—doesn’t take the absolute otherness of human beings seriously enough. For example, in “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace writes that tourism is good for the soul, not because it broadens tourists, but precisely because it constricts them, in a painful yet educational way:
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.1
“Better, realer, without you,” he writes. The first adjective may well apply, in a given case. (If it does, you just shouldn’t go.) The second is nonsense. Places and people can be made worse, can be farther from or closer to the best versions of themselves, but they cannot be made realer or less real. We could say, at most, that some of their realness is concealed, as realness notoriously tends to be. (Plato had a few things to say about that.)
If you, existentially loathsome reader, were to visit New York City, as I did a few years ago—my wife was going for work and there were friends there I wanted to see—and if you were to walk around Times Square, as I did, lugging a suitcase among all the other out-of-town suitcase luggers, staying in (gasp) a hotel, and visiting, like the cliché you are, the Museum of Modern Art (why on earth wouldn’t you, what with all the paintings?), you would still be real, and these things would still be happening to you. If folks assemble their faces into a certain blandly friendly shape to meet your gaze and earn your dollar—my feeling was that New Yorkers mostly don’t do this, except for a conspicuous few who do it with such gusto and artifice that it becomes its own fascinating phenomenon—surely you, an adult, are intelligent enough to notice that this is happening, to account for it in your observations, even to grow curious about it.
In fact, you can treat this performance as information in its own right. Before every place was spoiled, assuming that there was such a time, we could go observe what we took to be the unselfconscious manners and ancient customs of the people there. Today, we can observe self-conscious manners and generic customs—each with its own little flutters of imperfection and telling gaps in performance. And these, again, are information. You can learn as much about people from thinking about the way they act themselves out for you as you can from analyzing their less artful, less premeditated moments. So I agree with Wallace that there is no “unspoiledness” to experience, but the curious and attentive mind can do just fine with spoiledness. Wallace certainly did, in several of his classic essays.
Thank U
We love, as well, to mock the privileged Westerners who go somewhere far away and realize one or two momentous, banal things about themselves, especially if these same people then have the temerity to make art about their epiphanies. Consider, to name two much-discussed examples, Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, and Alanis Morrissette in “Thank U,” that song in which she thanks India. It happens that I, too, dislike that book, and that song. But to have an epiphany in Italy or India is no sillier than to have one in the woods or at work or on a walk around one’s neighborhood. Abroad, one is surrounded by billions of strangers who presumably have better things to do than serve as one’s backdrop, but that is also true at home, or even in the woods. (Look at all those trees! Do you, solipsistic walker, even know their species names?) Yet we dare to have interior lives anyway.
To fault an artist for noticing his own feelings and reactions is like faulting an athlete for paying so much attention to that silly ball when the weather is gorgeous and the field is green. It’s his job! Sometimes what an artist has to communicate is, precisely, “I had to go X number of miles, and surround myself with an infinity of diverting things and people, in order to think clearly about my own life,” which is, let’s be fair, funny, and in its own way a statement on human nature. I only ask that people do it well. Jessa Crispin writes, of Eat, Pray, Love and its imitators, that “the focus of attention is the self, and the beautiful locale becomes the backdrop of the real action, which is interior psychodrama.”2 Crispin’s analysis is acute, as usual—this is definitely true of these books—but you could also say this about The Ambassadors. What’s wrong with Eat, Pray, Love is finally only that it’s not as well written or funny as The Ambassadors.
Agnes Callard criticizes tourism as pointless “locomotion.” (She does so, tellingly, only after distinguishing tourism from several more benign forms of faraway-place-going.3)“The single most important fact about tourism is this: We already know what we will be like when we return,” she writes. This is a hell of an assumption. I don’t really know what I will be like next week, at least not in every important detail. To judge by her other writing, Callard is also, and not infrequently, a surprise to herself; her ability to describe these moments in fine, perhaps unintentionally comic detail provides her work with much of the insight and entertainment value it possesses.
In disconnecting us from the ongoing and sometimes nightmarish dailiness of our lives, travel allows us to “do nothing and be nobody.” For Callard, this makes it a preview of death, the nothingness that will put an end to our quotidian boredom forever. “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death,” she concludes. “For everyone else, there’s travel.” This is funny because, like many of Nietzsche’s witticisms, it is a melodramatic overstatement of something that is, perhaps, five percent true. When we disrupt our routines, we do not do nothing, or become no one; we do different things, we try on other selves. This is why we frequently come back from even rather silly jaunts, pace Callard, a bit different.
Elsewhere in her essay, Callard laments the pointlessness of her long walks through Paris:
I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk. In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time.4
Indeed, you do. Yet in the (surely fewer) great cities that I have lived and worked in, I spent whole days walking, especially early on, and do not regret that use of time. Surely walking does not require a defense? Coming soon, from Agnes Callard: “Against Drinking Water.”
Conor Fitzgerald looks at “What Covid Did to Men”:
A recent article in Vox (yeah, I know) highlighted the growing cultural power of what the author describes as the “anti-woke tech bro”, a mutation of the old style Libertarian and described as follows (emphasis of the final sentence is mine):
They regurgitate the gospel of tech overlords like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessenand the creators who interview them — Joe Rogan and his many imitators. They love tough-guy sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu but are worried about vaccines, seed oils, and the mainstreaming of trans rights. Their worldview is often a paradox, full of irony and sometimes hypocrisy…
Since the Obama administration, two things happened that changed the way these men (and they are overwhelmingly men) think, look, and behave online: the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic…
The article is wrong and silly in all the predictable ways but that last part is true and worth dwelling on. Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the unaccounted for psychic toll of Covid, and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s not always noted is the obvious conclusion that the former crisis fed the latter: that establishment reaction to Covid in the west alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of current sex-based political polarisation. The idea that the approaches adopted by all important bureaucracies and interpretative institutions during the plague years seemed based on a set of values foreign to many men, and accelerated male withdrawal from respectable cultural spaces and the creation of alternative ones explains an awful lot.
To begin it’s worth reminding ourselves how men and women felt about Covid and Covid restrictions.
Polling carried out by Gallup during 2020 highlighted that men were:
less concerned about catching covid;
less likely to wear a mask in general, as well as less likely to wear one in or outdoors;
less likely to follow social distancing guidelines, and more likely to never follow them.
The report noted that
… looking at the last two months of data, it is clear that differences between men and women are related to partisanship, but they also transcend it… there are still clear gender differences that go beyond party. Strong gender differences are observed among Republicans… such that men tend to be less concerned about and less likely to take measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission than women within their same party.
Aaron Renn reviews Democracy and Solidarity by James Davison Hunter:
Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and convictions recognize that the entire political ecosystem—not only its leadership and its governing institutions, but also its leading ideas and ideals—is failing.
With this quote, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter telegraphs his fundamentally gloomy view of the future of the American experiment - a pessimism broadly shared by many Americans of various political stripes.
His new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisisis an explanation of how we got here, and what it means for our current cultural and political conditions. It is a return to the focus of his early 90s work on cultural conflict in Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War.
This is an important book. It’s not a light read, but for those who aren’t afraid to take on a more intellectual work, I highly recommend it.
Like many such works, Hunter’s book tells the history of America seen through a particular lens. In this case, it’s what he calls the “hybrid Enlightenment,” or the shared cultural underpinnings that enabled social and political solidarity in the US.
The hybrid Enlightenment is a combination of multiple elements, principally the English and Scottish strands of the Enlightenment and a millenarian Christianity of both the austere Calvinistic variety and a sort of populist folk one.
This hybrid Enlightenment was flawed, with various incomplete or contradictory elements that needed to be “worked through” (his adaptation of a Freudian term), such as racial injustice. But this working through, along with the evolution of society, caused the hybrid Enlightenment to slowly dissolve over time to the point where it no long provides a basis for solidarity, of which he says:
Solidarity is not just about the will to come together to do the work of democratic politics. It is about the cultural preconditions and the normative sources that make that coming together possible in the first place…Solidarity in this more capacious sense defines a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place…The power of solidarity is found in the unspoken, often vague or fuzzy resonances of shared identity, shared affections, shared challenges, and a shared destiny.
After tracing his history, Hunter then provides a deeply depressing overview of our current cultural and political climate, one that raises fully legitimate questions about the future of American democracy due to the loss of the pre-conditions of solidarity. He writes:
The contention of this book is that we are at a moment when the answer to the fundamental question about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed—though not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us.
And later:
That does not mean that democracy in America is dead. It is not. But it is far from healthy, and prospects for its vitality are not at all bright. In all likelihood, it will endure in form, but its substance will continue to be hollowed out. In its wake, the legitimation crisis will continue to harden: confidence in the range of governing institutions will continue to weaken, cynicism toward the leadership class will deepen, and the alienation of ordinary citizens from their nation will worsen. What is there to impede or reverse this course?
Two things stood out to me while reading this book. The first is that he hits essentially every critical element of American history, including many that are frequently neglected. I made a list of items in my head to look for in the book, and by the end he’d hit all of them. This includes things ranging from early 20th century anarchist bombings to managerialism to McCarthyism as a type of ethnic self-assertion by the Ellis Island generation.
The second is the overall fairness of the book. Hunter works hard to be even handed to both liberals and conservatives. I’m sure both will have many issues with his takes. The right might say that he devotes way too much ink to race. The left might say that he legitimizes the illegitimate. But while no one will agree with everything, I thought on the whole he worked hard to be balanced. For example, he gives a lengthy writeup of the Claremont Institute. While my guess is that any Claremont people reading it would disagree with parts of what he said, they would recognize it as a basically fair writeup (in contrast to the typical hit job piece).
And finally, there’s my latest at The Freemen News-letter, “Who Really Inhabits This Narrow Sliver of Terrain?”
It’s lonely where we stand. Signals that we’re irrelevant come from all corners. We’ve coined terms for our place within the landscape. Jonah Goldberg calls us The Remnant, and has named his Dispatch podcast thusly. I’ve heard it referred to as the wilderness. My own articulation is the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. That suggests steep falloffs on either side.
So who is really standing on it, and not just some piece of semi-solid ground nearby that seems similar?
I see a lot of social media observations along the lines of how Republicans would be blowing the doors off the Harris-Walz ticket if they’d nominated DeSantis or Haley.
Okay.
Haley was a credible center-right governor, and, for my money, she was an excellent UN ambassador, consistently standing up for Israel and the overall alliance that the US leads.
But her pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago weeks after January 6, and now her expressed willingness to be of service to the Trump-Vance campaign, after having been called “birdbrain” during her own primary run, is a deal breaker. She contributes to a pattern initiated by Ted Cruz, who, in the spring of 2016, waxed indignant about the Very Stable Genius’s insult of his wife and slander of his father. Any politician willing to overlook such humiliation in the name of dragging the Republican brand over the finish line demonstrates judgment too faulty for Terrain voters.
DeSantis? I don’t begrudge his wading into the culture wars, but he did so in the most boneheaded way possible. His decision to address Moms for Liberty - a group whose initial motivation was laudable, but has rendered itself questionable, with sex tapes and assault allegations surrounding its leadership - at an event co-moderated by Kevin Roberts, head of the once-indispensable-but-now-disgraced Heritage Foundation is the most recent example. His campaigning for Kari Lake is an earlier example. And while Anthony Fauci has been proven to have gone overboard with a top-down approach to COVID, DeSantis saying he’d like to “grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac” further coarsened our national discourse.
This is not to dismiss his impressive resume: Juris Doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School, legal advisor to SEAL Team One, seat in the US House. He’s clearly a sharp guy.
And there’s even a place for combativeness. Buckley and even the affable Ronald Reagan could be scrappy. But therein lies an important point. Polemic combat, for a conservative, ought to suggest a hint of willingness to extend grace. Is not a society in which all are pleased to live in a Madisonian republic our aim? Stomping our opponents into the dust not only works counter to that, it’s not possible to do permanently.
As gets noted frequently here at The Freemen News-letter, and appropriately so, Principles First and The Bulwark don’t stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. That camp uses the inversion of the Flight 93 binary-choice argument Trumpists employed in 2016 and 2020 to impart a sense of urgency about the state of our country. We didn’t buy it from them, and we shouldn’t buy it from these entities, or even those such as Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, whose bona fides we know to be impeccable, but have reached a different conclusion about how to proceed.
The we-can-survive-four-years-of-bad-policy argument is specious. It’s sometimes augmented by the mention of a good chance that Republicans could take the Senate, thereby serving as a foil to progressive machinations.
But consider the indications we’ve already gotten as to Harris’s intention to do as much though the executive branch as possible - continuing a trend that has been accelerating through several presidencies - to complete the program of militant identity politics, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution.
So here we stand. Yes, it’s lonely.
I guess you can deduce that I still intend to stay home the first Tuesday in November.