Strap in or hop off - Rarely Certain is changing
Shit's about to get real, baby
So Rarely Certain passed its first birthday and I'm bored and often frustrated with it now.
Bored because the format is tired and formulaic. Here's what I think about a controversial thing and why it's not as clear cut as ideological proponents on either side say about the controversial thing. Or, hey look at these ideological double standards and how mind-warping it has to be if you adhere to framework x.
This kind of stuff was old long before I came to it. You can get very good versions elsewhere, if that's what you want, and I'll still be recommending good sources for it.
Frustrated because, along the way, I've also realised that Rarely Certain isn't really telling the story of the thing I call a practice of 'radical uncertainty'. This is because I've been slightly afraid to articulate it in a cultural environment which demands reason, proof and zero-sum appraisal of ideas as right or wrong.
Ideas, eh. Those things that invite the gravitational well-like force of making your mind up. I'll often have an idea and start writing about it, only to hear the monkey on my back coming up with arguments about why it isn't intellectually watertight. The monkey on my back being the religion of reason, which insists that nothing has intellectual value if it cannot be proven. Along with the rule in publishing that ideas have to be fully developed and tested before they're shared. So I haven't bothered, until now.
So out with that and in with some semi-developed intuitions. Such as...
Sneering is actually a fear response to being ungrounded.
We sneer at people who don't defer to their 'betters', not because they really are stupid but because if you're not connected to anything concrete in this world all you have are moral intuitions and attachments to ideas and those detractors not conforming makes them a threat to your reality. If your reality is soil (or anything you can touch outside your mental world) someone has to take your soil to pose a problem to you. If your reality is 'being someone with x, y & z values' someone only has to be driven instead by values a, b & c to be a threat. This thought arose during a two-hour evening sit in my meadow, about which there is much more to come.
The being nice industrial complex.
Cultural modernity, largely driven as it is by capitalism, seems to involve the replacement of real things with simulacra. We see this especially in relation to love and compassion. Wokeism, for example, is a simulacrum of caring while ensuring that a permalayer of the downtrodden is not just maintained but endlessly compacted to provide firm foundations onto which can be built personal reputations (the good white man), idle, self-stroking pastimes ('calling out', sharing political memes) and entire industries such as D&I, which achieve no consistently measurable results but support a lot of salaries and high status reputations amassing social capital.
Not just simulacra but simulated realities.
We tend to think that 'post-truth' refers to other people having beliefs that are not founded on evidence. But really we don't care for evidence ourselves. What we care about is that the other are having sway when we think that their inferiority should preclude them from influence. I came to this via realising how often leftish liberals use fake news stories to promote their ideological agendas. My favourite (among several) examples of this is the Jussie Smollett faked hate crime and the fact that many people of the leftish still refuse to accept that it didn't happen. The fact that social liberals in my real life orbit never know about these things used to frustrate me, so I would try to tell them about it. They weren't interested. I came to the conclusion that we construct our personal realities as much on excluding inconvenient truths as embracing the ideas and principles that suit us. Plus, updating your beliefs can be tiring and dispiriting because it requires actual thinking and accepting that the old you wasn't as cool as they thought they were at the time. So, chances are, the current you isn't either.
Bad idea laundering.
Passive, habitual, casual consumers of legacy and social media launder bad ideas into society. This is when we consistently and ambiently expose ourselves to a single perspective while not really being particularly thoughtful about it. This was me, until a couple of years ago (albeit in a really shouty way). We then casually reference hot button topics without knowing really why they have become hot button topics. An example is thinking that 'trans rights' is just about not being mean to trans people and damn well minding your own business about other people's choices, like a good western liberal. Or insisting that immigration is always a straight up good since we obviously need people to wipe old folks' bottoms because our own native population isn't having enough babies to balance out the retired cohort and it's obviously good economics, if only you could grasp that, you thick bigot. Also, did you know that fish & chips was imported and St George was Greek, you morons. Etc. Same goes for the 'we can't afford immigrants because we've got homegrown homeless people' brigade and their idiot notions that there is only so much stuff to go around, which means someone else getting stuff entails there being less stuff left for them.
Hangers on are the vector via which the activist class reach everyone else. They are idea launderers. They sanitise destructive ideologies by promoting the easy-to-grasp bits. This applies equally to all sides in the culture war. Which continues to fascinate me but which I hope to talk less about here.
Demons and monsters.
People talk about eradicating Hate. As if it's an entity you might fight against. Like demons or monsters of yore. It feels like a religious age in this respect. Twitter is a theatre of hate because it brings us into closer proximity with the 'repugnant other' than we might otherwise experience while enabling us to cluster together in comforting epistemic bubbles to celebrate how shit the other side is. See also 'Whiteness'. Or global cabals practising literal paedophile cannibalism.
I'm curious about the revival of the concept of the egregore. What might it mean to say that the egregore exists, separately from people and their minds? Do phenomena such as insanely bad ideas (eg having severe psychosis is really just part of being a special person rather than someone needing serious and robust intervention) qualify as something more than just a bad abstract argument and become an actual thing? Is it possible to talk about this as an emergent property of digitally connected humanity without falling into woo woo?
Given that the quasi-religious qualities of of supposedly secular belief systems of modernity are still not recognised even by their adherents, should we even worry too much about falling into woo woo?
Do we want to be more right or more happy?
Reason was assumed to function adequately as a replacement for meaning, but western culture then spawned Scientism and it became a sin not to accept The Science or the word of its priesthood (but only the approved members of it). Despite the Replication Crisis (which few people seem to know about - so see also here for another primer). As scepticism for institutions grows, the angry, sneering, frightened, educated, professional, controlling, managerial class turns out to be as authoritarian, feelings-led and hateful as the pitchfork mob. This seems fascinating to me, following a lifetime of blindly accepting Reason as a solid replacement for Meaning.
These are personally more interesting areas to explore now than preoccupations around who's right and who's wrong about things.
There's an epochal shift afoot and part of how it manifests seems to be in anger, fear, and grasping for certainty. Just as I find myself feeling less angry or fearful and more comfortable with uncertainty. So that's what Rarely Certain needs to be. A place for intuitions, ideas, noticings, questions, wonderings, scepticism, rule-breaking and curiosity.
It might not be for you, but as Antonio Gramsci said:
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters."
And who doesn't love monsters?
More to come...
Various interactions over the past year have revealed that Rarely Certain is often seen as being about being 'even-handed'. My bad. It's because I've never bothered to explain the notion of 'radical uncertainty'.
It isn't saying 'a bit of that is true and a bit of it isn't'. Such as 'I like these policies of the Green Party but not those policies'. That's just standard fare pick n mix. Radical uncertainty is being an observer rather than a participant. It's about noticing from somewhere outside the thing that you're observing.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, Grasshopper, is not what Rarely Certain is saying.
It's exploring what is going on at the emergent level. The things that are manifesting outside of the facts of the matter.
It's also about shrugging off the rules and embracing curiosity and wonder. Ultimately it's about being humble, human and happier. Also, bits of audio too. That's coming soon.
Got all that?
It might even be quite good.
When my dad was alive he would sometimes brandish a newspaper opinion column triumphantly because it reiterated his own view of something. Although he was evidently proud that an actual journalist thought the same thing that he did (except when the journalist was me), it was also experienced by him as validating his view. As if someone else he admired coming up with a similar thought lent his own thought more credibility.
I notice that I'm pretty much the same. A few months ago I wrote about how activism needs problems more than it wants solutions or there would be nothing to agitate for.
So here I am, just like my dad, brandishing something by a writer I admire who just published a whole piece making similar arguments. Activism as a vocation - why things keep getting worse - by Leighton Woodhouse.
The apple never falls far from the tree.