A place between the poles
I’m a pig-headed bastard, slow to understand, slower to accept, and reluctant to admit error. What’s worse is that in today’s techno-milieu, reasoning together has been foreclosed by the development of virtual armed camps whose wins and losses are measured not by the integrity of an argument, but by hostile little zingers—transient online humiliations of our ‘enemies.’ Admitting error is a loss, a failure, a defeat!—an opportunity for your enemy of the day to do his or her little victory dance. So we have compounded our/my reluctance to listen to others and admit we might not have all the answers.
During the last two election follies, I was drawn into this world by the possibility that our high-finance political ecology could be disrupted by a social democratic surge (and we had to try). In that process, I waded into the technological swamp that is Youtube progressivism, where so-and-so “got cucked’ by so-and-so, or X “owned” Y, or this guy said something all-caps DISGUSTING. I get it, it’s clickbait titling, and we could pull some other threads on that . . . the attention economy, e.g., or ‘influencer’ culture (ick ick ick!). The thread I’m pulling now is internet tribalism, or virtual militarism, idk. The collapse of discourse and argument into warring camps.
The aforementioned social democratic surge was defeated, at great cost, and upon that defeat, the so-called left, in the absence of a shared practice, resumed its internecine bloodletting and is now sliding back into insular ideological enclaves where they can resume their self-imposed irrelevance. Maybe they can re-ignite the Tralin-Stotsky debates! Those were fun. Don’t even get me started on woketivist cancellations (yes, they are real, but their battleground is fucking Twitter—itself a rotting cesspool of short-lived zingers).
Today, as I write this, the Vaccination Wars have been put on a temporary hold as people begin to dig ideological trenches to fight over the meanings and possible outcomes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Never fear, after gas prices go back down, we’ll resume these endless skirmishes between fixed and incompatible premises. CRT anyone?
I myself was attacked for saying Agamben had something salient to say about the Vaccination Wars, because I wasn’t sufficiently authoritarian . . . attacked by a left-liberal virtual friend who suggested I was equivalent to a murderer. A piece I wrote that said humans are inescapably biological likewise got me cancelled by a few and compared to an abuser.
War gets attention, so expect the MSM to be stoking the fires, because they’ve lost most of their former audiences to people who are rightly sick of their bullshit after all these years. CNN practically drove the tanks into Iraq in 2003. And in the attention economy—see how I slipped that in there—conflict will yield a lot more clicks than boring mf’s who are patiently trying to reason their way through complex subjects . . . sometimes even with (shhh) people who don’t share their general intellectual orientation.
Maybe we’ll grow sick of it. I certainly have. I’m reminded of the Christmas Truce in World War I, where exhausted, traumatized troops from both sides crawled out of their trenches for Christmas and spent a little time together (sharing drinks, looking at each other’s family photos, and playing soccer), with the result that commanders had a difficult time forcing them resume the war.
In my own search for a Christmas Truce, I had to admit I was wrong about a lot of things, and in the process, I’ve discovered a few writers out there who have likewise abandoned the trenches. Some have been labeled as leftists, or conservatives, or anarchists, et al, and none of them really fit these categories as they exist in the popular, polarized imaginations. I’d like to share them with you now.