I haven’t had the time to write a full newsletter this week. The sun is shining in Yorkshire and I have things to do away from the screen. It might be this way a couple more times over the next month or so, but then things should settle back into the usual routine.
Here are a few things of interest to keep you going in the meantime.
The Arsenios Option
Jack Leahy suggested a response to modernity based around three steps – ‘Flee, be silent, and dwell in stillness’ - here.
…if done in the right spirit and with humility—as best as one is able—then there is a great opportunity waiting for us there. That is true no matter what the future holds, no matter how catastrophic. The reason to flee is not to escape from the world, but to move towards something far greater.
I responded here, worrying that there is a lot more fake asceticism out there than the real thing:
The ersatz ascetic tells you not to have the brownie because the ingredients aren’t local, aren’t vegan, and it doesn’t taste as good as the carob and courgette one that the whole food shop sells. Then, when you aren’t looking, they have one themselves as a special treat. The real ascetic knows the brownie is magnificent, yet doesn’t eat it.
Jack has responded to my response here. I highly recommend you read it:
When I lived in the people kennel I did the best I could. I did retreats after a fashion within my apartment. I turned off the internet. I fasted and prayed, usually over a long holiday weekend. I took long walks. I did what I could. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was what I was able to muster…
…If at the same time I am doing this I am otherwise living a life hardly different from the most enthusiastic consumer, then so what? Yes, I still order from Amazon. I still depend on the machine for everything. I am still sitting in a chair and now glued to the internet. Yet, in practicing hypocritical asceticism I am carving out a little zone of freedom within myself. Freedom from the blind dogs of craving that neurotically circle the people kennels we’ve been taught to see as normal. They may be statistically normal, but they aren’t natural. Far from it. The people kennels are killing us inside and out. We still have the ability to free ourselves. We still have the ability to see that we are far, far more than we have been sold, but first, we must accept much, much less.
I hope to continue the conversation soon.
Words of dismissal
One reason this newsletter has ‘fatalism’ in the title is that the word is often used a way that amuses me. It gives away the limits of what someone will allow themselves to think:
Alice: Renewable sources aren’t capable of supplying sufficient energy to replace fossil fuels on a global scale if current consumption patterns continue.
The Queen: That’s just fatalism!
The Queen isn’t addressing Alice’s point. She is using ‘fatalism’ as a magic word of dismissal to make difficult thoughts go away. If it’s ‘just fatalism’, then she doesn’t have to think about whether or not it is true. Nobody respectable is a fatalist.
Other magic words of dismissal are used in similar ways.
Anarchy: used to dismiss the idea that the state might not carry moral authority. Sometimes used to dismiss the idea that the state doesn’t carry overwhelming moral authority. Obviously, the word is never used these ways by anarchists.
Mysticism: used to dismiss any worry that there is more to the world than a chatty primate can understand.
Parochialism: used to dismiss any possibility that local interests might be more important than the interests of global networks.
What other words of dismissal are there?
Of the moment
The Mineral Conflict is Here by Brian Balkus: ‘As the world’s energy economies become more electrified and by extension more mineral intensive, minerals will become a major part of the U.S.-China contest for power’
Non-Egalitarianism by Michael Huemer: ‘Non-egalitarianism holds that equality is intrinsically neutral (neither good nor bad). We’re going to prove non-egalitarianism.’
A Portrait of Civil Servants by Robin Hanson: ‘I find little support for the idea that we can trust govt agencies more than private orgs due to their having or inspiring more trustworthy employees.’
Will we Escape our Age of Failure? by Martin Gurri: ‘…the limits of human knowledge press much tighter to the skin than presidents and prime ministers have been willing to admit’.
Echoing down the years
Sima Niu asked about Goodness.
The Master said, ‘The Good person is hesitant to speak’
‘“Hesitant to speak” – is that all there is to Goodness?’
‘When being Good is so difficult, how can one not be hesitant to speak about it?’
Kongzi (Confucius): Analects (Slingerland translation)
‘… the truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. She seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome. She is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. Errors, indeed, prevail by the assistance of foreign and borrowed succours. But if Truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be but the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her.’
John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration
Image: Rusty Bolts by arbyreed (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Words of dismissal are everywhere. Discussions are becoming harder as nearly every argument has a fitting word of dismissal. Some of my favourites are: fascism, communism, racism, mysogyny, islamophobia, homophobia, anti-vaxx, etc.
I was reading Gabriel Marcel and he was already (in 1950) noting how the word "democracy" had been debased and was being used to achieve its opposite. If I get the time today I will post the quote, if for no other reason than to emphasize how long this has been going on. Before Marcel, certainly.
Thank you, brother for this conversation.