On Disillusionment As A Way of Life

Avi Woolf

3rd class Elder of Zion. Wilderness conservative/traditionalist. Buckley Club alum. Chief editor of @conpathways.

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10 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    Good, but sad, post.

    If we acknowledge that something is happening, then we have to make a decision. If we don’t acknowledge it, hey. We don’t have to do anything.

    You’re overstating things.
    Surely things aren’t that bad.
    The authorities are on top of this.
    Don’t be a conspiracy theorist.Report

  2. Yossi says:

    You make some powerful and true points. I’d love to hear more. Thank you for writing.Report

  3. Murali says:

    In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

    Here, I think, is the central conceit of humanities types*. And it involves a kind of elision over two very distinct claims. The first, we can attribute to Socrates (or maybe actually Plato) is that we can become better people by thinking more carefully about right and wrong. There is a sense in which this is true for some people. Some people are bad because they have bad beliefs about what morality requires. Other people are bad, not because they have false beliefs about what morality requires, but either because their wills are too weak, the temptations surrounding them are too strong, or because they don’t care. Reasoning better about morality is not going to make them better people.

    Even in the cases where it is true, it does not follow that culture is a humanising force. In fact, people like Socrates who endorse the first claim were suspicious of the culture of their day and its purveyors. Socrates famously found that the Homerian epics contained lots of immorality and would have banned it from the polity if he were philosopher-king.

    Humanities types who do claim culture is a humanising force instead tend to be the intellectual heirs of the counter-enlightenment. The problem here is that those guys were never really great on the whole reasoning business. Expecting them to make humanity better is like expecting a miracle. It’s like the underpants gnome theory of moral improvement. How is someone reading more literature supposed to make them a better person? Consuming more cultural products may make you more cultured, but there is little reason to think that this makes you a morally better person.

    I’m not saying culture is pointless, only that it does not exist to morally improve people.

    *And it is always or almost always humanities types who make such claims.Report

    • CJColucci in reply to Murali says:

      And why high culture? Get a few drinks into me, and I’ll expound at length on my theory that the most influential moralist of our times was Stan Lee and that the moral examples of Peter Parker and Clark Kent (I know, different comic universe, but still) are at least as important as those of any examples from more refined literature.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to CJColucci says:

        The problem with the moral universes of Clark Kent (and Peter Parker to a lesser degree) is that they seem overly simplistic. At least they seem overly simplistic to me. I know a guy whose whole life is comic books and he somehow made it his career as well. He also has quite left politics. He seems very fond of comic book quotes which amount to “there is a right and a wrong and it is easy to choose.”

        Except ethics and morality can be really hard and I feel like lots of people (of all political ideologies) would rather do anything than admit that ethics and morality can be very hard, very gray, and not always have satisfactory answers or conclusions. We should help people be okay with the gray muck of existence.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          On paper, ethics and morals can be very clear. The shades of grey are more because us humans are very good at rationalizing our way out of doing something that is difficult or uncomfortable, or doing something we really, really want to*.

          Don’t steal is easy. It’s a lot harder when you are hungry. But hey, we get that. But when you steal to feed a drug habit, or just because you want a new whiz-bang and your current cash-flow won’t let you buy it, or because you are simply a greedy SOB…

          So really, there isn’t actually a lot of grey in there for the old school morals. You know – kill, steal, lie, rape, etc.

          * Allowing elite (of whatever stripe) to slide on moral and ethical violations because reasons introduces all sorts of grey into our moral calculus that doesn’t really need to be there.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to CJColucci says:

        Comic books also gave us Green Lanternism.Report

  4. Rufus F. says:

    There was an older man involved in Scouting who I knew as a kid named Bobby Nuckels and he was a magician and ventriloquist and I thought he was the coolest person alive. And he took me under his wing and served as an older friend and a mentor at a time when my teachers and parents weren’t as thrilled with my weirdness and creative mind. He absolutely helped me get through the tougher adolescent years.

    It’s occurred to me, now that I’m older, that there’s something a little sad about the fact that, when I recall Bobby, who’s since passed on, that I always hasten to add that there was never anything untoward about it. He was an older friend and a role model and a good person. I guess I don’t have to explain all that to people who didn’t know him, but it’s kind of necessary too now. I can’t quite say why that makes me sad.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Rufus F. says:

      It’s a salient question. How can a man actively be a role model to children without having his motives questioned?

      Of course, it wouldn’t be such an issue if claims of abuse were treated fairly, rather than either buried, or put on blast while investigated.Report