Nihilism and Anxiety

On one side of the table on HBO's Real Time Friday night, Bill Maher was using the excuse of guest NYU "Moral psychologist" (there's a profession no one asked for) Jonathan Haidt's plugging of his new book The Coddling of the American Mind* (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), to get extremely worked up about coddled millenials as the main problem with the left.  On the other side of the table and opposite end of the political spectrum, short-termed Trump Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had moments before been calmly insisting that Trump's supporters see the exact same outrage in Trump's behavior and thought balloons as the left does and are excited by it.  Maher was so worked up about both Trump and the millenials that he didn't realize he was making Scaramucci's point for him. (Not an unusual position for Maher to be in lately.  But he still makes great television.)

Political correctness is an obvious concern of Maher who thumbed his nose at it with the name of his first show on network television 25 years ago, Politically Incorrect.  It's been a primary topic for him ever since.  Rarely does he admit that the right has elements just as PC as any on the left, although he did manage a petulant "I know they do" when another guest pointed it out to him.

For Maher and Haidt, the 'coddling' of the millenials is of grave concern to the health of the republic.  Crediting his co-author with the notion to study a sociological phenomenon and the literature search to back it up, Haidt painted an unflattering portrait of millenials as anxious, triggered, skill-less, underemployed, overmedicated, self-mutilating, undersexed snowflakes. Maher provided a steady supply of amens along with anecdotes and theories of his own as a counterpoint to the professor's learned voice of authority, revealing a bit too much of his own personal animus to the youngest adults and their parents in the process.  He's turning into a bit of an old man where the new generation is concerned.  You might say he's triggered by them.  <smiley face>  For Maher, there's a connection between Trigger warnings-- a major topic of interest in Haidt's book apparently-- and political correctness, a topic that Haidt has written about in the past.    Haidt gained renown originally with a book on the non-intersecting morals of liberals and of conservatives, making the case for them for those inclined to organize tribally that these are 2 different species of animal.  In my experience of Haidt over the years, I've found the topics that occupy his professional attention to be a bit perversely concerned with the pathology of young people's politics and social consciousness.  Those who wrote, studied and taught in colleges and universities were once accurately termed "educators" but education does not seem to be the apt description for Haidt's curious predilections of study.  "Public intellectual" is the term many of his class prefer for themselves and it's accurate in a "green paint" kind of way, but I prefer the term "data strategist."  What do they do with the data when it can't be twisted to their agendas?  (I have always had this notion I can't get out of my head that there exists a class of liberal who make good careers and build solid reputations-- usually in journalism and academia-- on besmirching the left as a way of proving their own cred if not outright pleasing their paymasters.)

As for Maher, who has shown himself to be a bit off the hinges when it comes to this topic in recent episodes, when he is not spiraling about Donald Trump (or pushing anti-Islamic fervor while plugging his ears about the context anti-Western violence is fomented in), he is fretting about how political correctness and trigger warnings are pushing people to the right.  His go-to place for examples of the problem all come from Twitter.  As a non-twitter or facebook user who is by osmosis no stranger to the trainwreck atmosphere on social media, take it from me.  It's not the left that's bugging you, dude.  It's Twitter.  The real world impact of Twitter controversies is a problem but you won't solve it by mistaking it for Excesses of the Left.   Where do you think the term "snowflake" snowballed, and by whom?

People forget: Political correctness has been with us a long time.  People were complaining about it when I was in school in the seventies.  It's an easy target!  Everybody hates it!  One person's morality is another person's political correctness.  The person who is triggered by social justice is just as fragile as the one who is triggered by cultural appropriation.  But People!  Bill!  Jonathan!  Very few people can't tolerate being triggered!  Most people-- even young people-- perhaps especially young people-- live for it!  It's ugly when people like Maher and others are disinvited from collegiate venues they'd been invited to on the basis that their speech is deemed odious by young loudmouths.  But how could it not be invigorating for the students who make it happen?  What's fragile about that?  In this polarized age, if you don't learn to develop tolerance to contrary ideas and be inoculated by them, you will be in pain for a very long time.  Most people will learn.  Barring speech I don't agree with is not how I would choose to confront it or what I would urge, but it's rarer than the deliberately incorrect would have you believe; it's a tactic evidenced on all ends of the spectrums of politics, class and age (and it's not new); and it is one way to deal to with it.  Sometimes it's called for. So why tar young people on the left with it?

Now that I've triggered myself, back to Scaramucci.  Before Jonathan Haidt was brought out to balance things, Bill Maher had been exciting himself on the topic of Donald Trump's prevarications and shit-stirring about the approaching Caravan of would-be refugees from the South.  As Maher turned red in his anger and became increasingly vigilant about letting anyone else, particularly Scaramucci speak, Scaramucci, the author of a new book called, Trump: The Blue Collar President, was as calmly attempting to make the point that at least one member of the audience got: Trump's base gets off on Bill Maher getting unhinged.  The crazier Trump gets, the more they like it because it's guaranteed to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the left.  In an odd way, Scaramucci seemed to be saying, Trump's base anticipates the reaction and thereby almost mirrors it.  On some level, these hapless rubes grok the essence of what is wrong with Trump's intellect as gleaned through his utterances, and yet, coming from feelings of deep resentment toward the sensibilities of the class who are reviled by the nature of Trump's worldview, they are damned if they won't share it.  The importance of this point can not be stressed enough: there is no fixing this way of thinking.  This is the mind virus of nihilism pure and simple.  I don't know if Trump is masterfully manipulating the unmoored impulses of his audiences for personal gain-- it may be his one talent if so-- or if he's just one of them, who merely happens to be the most powerful person in the world at the moment.  It hardly matters.  From Trump to Brexit to Orbán in Hungary to Duterte in the Philippines to Bolsonaro in Brazil, this is the age of the nihilists and if you're not one of them, this is not your age.

This is not my age.

~~~~~~~~~~
* For a review by someone who actually read the book, go here.

They're coming to get you, Barbara

I am not an authority on Zombies.  But I do know one when I see one.  By one means or another, they have risen from the deathbed or the grave. Several have been spotted in this area.  They include:

• Indifference to Poverty: This Zombie was never truly dead but had been on life support for a while and there was even a war on it once. Once out of fashion, it's back,  stalking the streets again.
• Vote Suppression by Race: As soon as the Supreme Court struck down constitutionality of the Voting Rights act on the basis that it had done its job, the predictable states began discriminately dropping voters from the rolls, requiring IDs for voting, and otherwise enacting laws designed to effectively keep millions of African American adults from voting.
• Saying "Passed Away" instead of "Died" - I thought that that most ostentatiously euphemistic of euphemisms ('Mustn't upset grandmama!') had itself been killed in the social enlightenment. When did people start being publicly fussy and squeamish about death again?
• Scarcity:  Except in far corners of the globe, scarcity used to be under the control of corporations who manipulated it for profits, which we were assured was good for everyone.  Now overuse, overdemand and stark conditions on the planet contribute to an increase in decrease that seems to be acting on its own.  Oil is dwindling. Whole species of edible fish are disappearing.  Cotton crops are failing year after year.  Do you know what used to be as plentiful as grains of sand on the seashore but no longer is?  Sand.
• Disease:  Back from the dead are polio, mumps, rubella, leprosy and bubonic plague.  Some were never really dead, but others were revived by vigilant, ideological resistance to prevention.
•  Fascism: The Greatest Generation defeated it in 1945, but it has returned from the dead.

What can be done?  No one knows.  Zombies are "in" and no one knows how to make them "out" again.

Sermon

William Rimmer

Toward the end of Sapiens, the phenomenal history of the species by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari the account turns to the question of immortality (my bold italics):

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms. Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Let's hope the "cause for optimism" that Harari refers to is all the researchers'.  It's certainly not mine.

I spent the first 8 years of my life subject to Sunday school teachings of the protestant variety of Christianity-- the latter 4 of them in a particularly joyless and blanched sect of it.  When I was 9 my inquisitive mother experienced a severe de-conversion, which necessarily meant that my Christian education ceased.  To that point I had been thoroughly indoctrinated (with a child's darkly outlined coloring-book-and-crayon doctrine), to the point that I was occasionally caught trying to preach the gospel to Jewish friends.  Though I was chastised for it by my mother, I had been taught to seriously fear for their life, not in this world but in the next.

For myself, I was already convinced that if my immortality was in the hands of an authority, even if that authority was the squeaky clean holy nerd Jesus Christ, I was doomed.  The effect this had on me in those formative years was a panic about eternity.  That's the beauty of the concept of Hell.  In my brand of Christianity it wasn't a question of whether you were going to get immortality but where you were going to have to spend it.  By the doctrines of the faith, if one person lived a life of strict virtue, and another a life of wickedness, but you knew only one would make it to heaven, you could not say which since it all came down to one final judgment-- a judgment which could be swayed by a single sin;  possibly merely the sin of doubt.  In my case that meant that no matter how I spent my life, I risked at least (but with my luck, probably better than) a 50% chance of hell.

In my circumstances, I needed all the help I could get, which to that point had taken the form of weekly cod-liver oil flavored doses of Jesus preached at us in a baby voice by a cold and distant, personality-deprived mother of one of my fellow sheep, before I rejoined my parents for an interminable hour of agony in the "sanctuary" on hard wooden pews, frequently reminded not to squirm, while the monotoned, crew-cutted "pastor" (wow do I hate that word!) droned at the adults, punctuated by inscrutably paced stretches when the congregation was instructed to stand, grab a hymnal, turn to a random page and soldier through an invariably long and boring song-- usually so long that the initial excitement of finally getting off the pew was soon replaced by a desire to lie down under it. How could this sort of torture not help my case?  And when I was 9, my mother took it away from me.

As the book title goes: First you cry.  I pleaded with my mother to not screw up the only shot I had of avoiding hell.  I don't think she had any idea how full of the fear of hell I'd been filled by my Christian education.  But in the end, her status as caretaker won out.  I came to realize that the only thing going for church was its never-assured part in the case for the immortality of my soul.  Literally everything else about it sucked.  Our lives outside of church had already become pretty non-Christian.  Once I worked through the shock that perhaps the dichotomy between eternity in horrific hell versus bland, fun-less immortality in heaven was a false one, the panic subsided and was replaced by an indifference to the question of what happened after one's life on this planet came to an end.

I think this experience of mine overcoming concern about immortality may somehow underlie my shrug at news of the promise of actual a-mortality in this life for some.  I realize it's not the same category of perpetual life as what Jesus promises for a different kind of price, but isn't the attraction of it (for those who are attracted by it) the same?  If those who seek immortality are not hooked on life, they are afraid of death-- neither of which is a particularly laudable motivation.  As Harari's book argues, it's only been within the past 200 years that it had even occured to anyone that it might actually be possible to prolong life indefinitely by medicine.  For some possessed of money, ambition and in my opinion a severe lack of, if not imagination itself, certainly depth of imagination, the scientific quest for perpetual life joins a long list of other pursuits that haven't aged as well with me as skepticism has: AI, the singularity, interplanetary colonization.  Bad sci-fi.

This week we learned from a UN report  -- the work of 91 climate scientists-- that the planet has about 12 years left in which to avoid reaching the point of no return on Global Warming, beyond which the effects of it will result in even more volatile weather patterns, drought, food shortages, rising waters, changing coastlines, accelerated destruction of habitat, extinction of species and spreading of global misery and poverty.  Should we fail, those who survive for however long survival remains possible will be in Hell.

The response to the news has been predictably underwhelming from the American power elite.  Predictably, the media have chosen to remain focused on the cash cow of the antics of Trump.  For its part the Trump administration has once again gone the "Ignorance-Is-Strength" route with Trump first not knowing what body the study came from before confidently shrugging it off with the assertion that he could come up with reports that reach the opposite conclusion. (No shit!  You wouldn't be you if you couldn't!)  We've been well-trained by propaganda and experience to expect challenges to the future of humanity to be met by infuriating indifference on the part of our leaders.  Trump as usual takes it to the extreme.

While I find myself naturally in the camp of those who bypassed the combative early stages of grief and went right to acceptance and mourning, I was made aware by internet wanderings this week of what I suspect is going to be an increasingly common response, especially in capitalist America: Bring it on!  There's a certain mindset that sees opportunity in every calamity.  If you believe in science and hope for progress, the news is a challenge to optimism, if not an outright excuse for dread of the chaos to come.  If you believe in yourself and the free market and are bolstered in your confidence by your stockpile of weaponry that ought to give you an edge in the tightening competition for survival and believe that your struggles in this life are merely a prelude to eternity in paradise anyway, why wouldn't you face the news with eagerness?  What chance do pragmatists have of persuading those of such a mindset (and arsenal) to set aside their selfish concerns and join in the struggle to save the planet and the future of the species.  Talk till you're blue in the face. Nothing wins an intellectual argument like extreme violence.

Which raises the question of what happens to the quest for immortality in light of impending shortages of resources and manpower and increasing unforeseeable chaos on Earth in the coming decades.  For all of their wealth, access and power, couldn't the billionaire geniuses obsessed with a-mortality and with the only sort of means at their disposal that could possibly bring it about* have seen this coming and done something to prevent it?  And then it occurs to me: but they already have!  Of course they saw this coming.  That's why they've put their wagers onto a laundry list of shallow sci-fi schemes: interplanetary travel to get the hell out of dodge before the shit hits the fan; immortality and perpetual youth to keep themselves alive for as long as it takes to get out into space and onto viable new worlds; and as a backup plan, AI to get their consciousness uploaded to the singularity before anything unfixable happens to their mortal coil.  We can forget their participation.  As far as they're concerned the rest of us can go to hell!

These are the people you want to spend eternity with?

~~~~~

* And let’s face it a-mortality may be the only way some of these sexually unappealing nerds can perpetuate their genes into the future indefinitely. Is a woman-less (and thus a necessarily rather than involuntarily celibate) future a motivation? 

Post mortem

For some reason, I don't blame Susan Sarandon for Brett Kavanaugh.  Humans love a scapegoat, but I think singling out the most visible Democratic Party apostate is a great way of making the wrong point.  I do think those of the far left who made a calculated decision in 2016 that a Trump win was well worth the risk in order to maintain the purity of their own political virtue (achieved by abstaining from voting for --or voting for a guaranteed losing alternative to-- the candidate who had, hands down, the only chance of defeating him*) protest a bit too much at the well of anger that has erupted against them from the pragmatic bloc who made up the majority of the popular vote in the last election.

The truth does hurt: In 2 years, Trump has gotten 2 picks for the Supreme Court (legal co-popes for very archaic reasons), and Brett Kavanaugh is the apotheosis of what the right has been seeking against the wishes of the majority of Americans for a very long time: a lock on the majority vote of judges on the court for decades to come.  They got this win because the system that elects justices underrepresents vast swaths of the population and overrepresents millions of deserted acres.  This is exactly what Hillary Clinton supporters were hoping to avoid.  The anger that is directed at the virtuous left is not because they made Hillary Clinton lose, dammit!  It's because they did nothing to keep Donald Trump from winning.  That is anger I can get behind.†   It's somewhat misplaced anger.  Trump had plenty of help without their indifference to the outcome.  But it's low hanging fruit, so I get the urge to take a swing at it.  It's an ugly pass that things have come to and people are entitled to their anger about how it came to be.

We shouldn't understate the poor quality of the alternative choice that Democrats offer to republicans.  We can't deny that Democrats are losing ground across the country because they seem to have lost their mojo at picking candidates who appeal to voters and at putting forth messages that set the electorate afire.  (They are also on the losing end of voter suppression, campaign financing, and aggressive gerrymandering by Republicans in battleground states-- practices that are very likely to continue to be contested or enshrined all the way to the Supreme Court-- Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court-- from time to time.)  But something does not jibe in the fact that although a majority of the country prefers socialist policies, the only viable alternative to the retrograde corporatocracy of the right aggressively pushes a centrist agenda that no one but a lobbyist could possibly want.

We also shouldn't overstate the impact of the court.  But Roe v Wade is most likely soon to be history.  If so, for the first time in nearly 50 years, availability of a medical choice will be limited in  States that turn back their laws in the not too distant future for those who need it who can't afford to travel to get the procedure in States that continue to make it available (not a hindrance to wealthy Republican's daughters of course).  And every state will then continue to have perpetual battles on their hands to keep the choice legal, as Republicans should not be expected to abandon a red meat issue merely because the decision will have been returned to the states.

This was not what the majority wanted.  This could have been avoided.

Term limits for Supreme Court Justices now.  Abandon the Electoral College now.  Redistribute the representation of voters in the Senate now.  (Or better yet, abolish it.)

The 38 million people of California got 2 votes in Saturday's floor vote for Kavanaugh.  The 38.8 million combined population of 22 rural states got 44 votes.  How is that democracy? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/11/if-youre-from-california-you-should-hate-the-senate/?utm_term=.9ae1415c5a50

*************'
*  How many of them made the same mistake Hillary Clinton appears to have made in believing she could not lose against the ridiculous, incompetent, vile, conniving jerk of reality TV?  Anyone who felt empowered to vote their conscience in 2016 only because the less evil outcome was assured was less a hero than the victim of a fatal miscalculation.

† If you see a lot of new anti-Hillary rhetoric out there on the web in response to discussions of who's to blame for Kavanaugh, remember 2 things: 1) it's never really gone away since November 2016; and b) its uptick now on the part of the virtuous left is a manifestation of hard-won cognitive dissonance.  The fact that Hillary Clinton is not virtuously radical is irrelevant to the fact that Donald Trump has no business picking Supreme Court justices and he's now picked two.