This week’s:
- Movie – Avatar
- Short Film – Stutterer
- Music – Nahre Sol plays Autumn Leaves in the style of 10 classical composers
- Tweet – New political compass
- Beautiful Thing – The Tashkent Metro
- Rational Thought – The Repugnant Conclusion as Nirvana
- Wrongthink – N.S. Lyons on how the New Right has become the new counterculture
- Hot Take – Zvi on climate activists
- Quick Links
Movie of the Week
Avatar – It is uncool to like Avatar. It’s story lacks a single beat of originality. Its politics are admirable, but ham-fisted. Its only innovation was in the scale of its spectacle, a value that has lost much of its shine in the age of the MCU. The only acceptable Take on the movie these days is smugly pointing out how little of an impression it ended up making in our collective cultural memory.
All of these things are true. And I could not care less. I love Avatar. With all my being, I truly love it. The implicit promise that every movie makes to its audience is to transport them to another world. After Avatar, all other movies get half credit at best. And not just because Avatar literally takes place on an alien planet. To watch Avatar is to spend three hours immersed in an experience of such triumphant beauty, scope, and richness that even nearly 15 years later no other film has managed to come within a league of matching it.
There is a reason why there were stories of people experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts after leaving their first viewings back in 2009. I experienced this melancholy myself on the way home from a showing of its re-release last week. Some may scoff at those who respond this way, seeing it as evidence of a spiritually desiccated audience with an unhealthy relationship to fantasy. I pity these people. Seeing Avatar again on the big screen filled me with awe till I felt I would burst. To be able to fully give myself over to this feeling and lose myself in the epic revelation of its world brings me inexpressible joy. I am so grateful to live in a world in which Avatar exists, even in moments when its brilliance makes reality seem dull. The sequel cannot come soon enough. 10/10
Trailer of the Week
Babylon – Every year has its obligatory Oscar-baiting film about LA, Hollywood, and the movie business. Recently we’ve been lucky with these, getting phenomenal Licorice Pizza, Mank, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Babylon seems to be this year’s entry, and if the trailer is indication, it doesn’t seem likely to break the streak.
Short Film of the Week
Stutterer – In honor of Matthew Needham’s emergence as the wonderfully sinister Larys Strong in this week’s House of the Dragon, I thought it appropriate to dig up the terrific short he featured in about a man with a severe stutter who is suddenly thrown into anxiety when the woman he has fostered an online romance with announces that she will come for a visit.
Music of the Week
Pianist and music YouTuber Nahre Sol plays Autumn Leaves in the style of 10 different classical composers. I’m a bit partial to the Mendelssohn version, I think, though I did also love the Glass.
Tweet of the Week
Beautiful Thing of the Week
Rational Thought of the Week
Applied Divinity Studies notes that the Repugnant Conclusion (the idea that the ultimate result of trying to maximize total happiness would be to create a world filled with an enormous number of people whose lives are just barely worth living) is actually a vision of Nirvana:
“There is nothing bad in each of these lives; but there is little happiness, and little else that is good. The people in Z never suffer; but all they have is muzak and potatoes.” – Derek Parfit [describing the repugnant conclusion]
The Repugnant Conclusion Isn’t – Applied Divinity Studies
…
Although it sounds mundane, I contend that this is nearly incomprehensible. Can you actually imagine what it would be like to never have anything bad happen to you? We don’t describe such a [life] as mediocre, we describe it as “charmed” or “overwhelmingly privileged”. These are lives with no pain, no loneliness or depression, no loss or fear, no anxiety, no aging, no disease, nor decay… It is thus less the world of peasants, and closer to that of subdued paradise. The closest analog we can imagine is perhaps a Buddhist sanctuary, each member so permanently, universally and profoundly enlightened that they no longer experience suffering of any kind.
Putting the broader question of population ethics aside, I think there’s an important difference between a world in which the total net happiness sums to just a fraction over 0, and a world where suffering = 0 and happiness equals a fraction over 0. Nevertheless, I think this is a very insightful reframing. But my main reaction to this piece is to lament how thin our vocabulary for these concepts is, and how narrow a perspective they take. I think that properly shifting this thought experiment away from its EA origins and into an Eastern lens would require a much more fundamental change in how we think about concepts like happiness and suffering. I’m not yet wise enough to attempt the task myself, but I have a feeling that if someone did, the problem would not be solved so much as it would simply cease to be a problem at all.
Wrongthink of the Week
N.S. Lyons observes that the New Right is becoming the center of a new counterculture, upending decades of precedent in which the Left was the natural home of cultural rebels. This shift is occurring as progressivism assumes its position as the new establishment, flipping the table and leaving Leftists as the ones who are now responsible for enforcing the kind of stifling orthodoxy that inevitably breeds discontent.
Reason 1 for why this happened: young people are miserable, making them question the value of the regime they live under, and leaving them susceptible to alternate ideologies.
Young people living under the permanent revolution of today’s cultural mainstream often tend to be miserable. Their disillusionment opens the door to subversive second thoughts on such verities as the bulldozing of sexual and gender norms, the replacement of romance by a Tinder hellscape, general atomized rootlessness, working life that resembles neo-feudal serfdom, and the enervating meaninglessness of consumerism and mass media. In this environment, the most countercultural act is to embrace traditional values and ways of life—like the vogue among some young people for the Latin Mass. We shouldn’t be too surprised if at least a subset of those youth seeking to rebel against the Man might, say, choose to tune in to Jordan Peterson, turn on to a latent thirst for objective truth and beauty, and drop out of the postmodern Left.
Reason 2 for why this happened: Leftism has become intellectually sterile.
much of American society’s genuine intellectual, artistic, and comedic energy—the kind of creative fire that draws bright young minds—has migrated to the Right. As the populist academic Michael Lind recently argued, “If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star,” since at this point “intellectual life on the American center-left is dead.” The spirit of adventure and debate that once drove the Left has, as he wrote, “been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned,” while the mainstream marketplace of ideas is now filled with “the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds.”
Reason 3 for why this happened: the New Right is filled with humor and intellectual dynamism, creating a natural attraction for smart young elites.
In contrast with this oppressive decadence of the mainstream Left, the dialectic of the countercultural Right crackles with irreverence and intellectual possibility. Across a growing ecosystem of YouTube videos, Twitter threads, Substack essays, online book clubs, and three-hour podcasts, exiles from the mainstream are looking to broaden their horizons, not only seeking alternative media but also excitedly discovering Christopher Lasch, debating John Locke, and discoursing on Livy. A hunger for forbidden knowledge and a yearning for genuine answers on political and cultural phenomena cloaked in official gaslighting has produced a legion of autodidacts, unrestrained by elite gatekeepers. And, finding themselves already outside the window of acceptability, and therefore no longer fettered by encrusted ideological orthodoxies or the need for self-censorship, many of these dissidents have no remaining reason to hesitate in pointing out when an establishment emperor has no clothes.
Lyons cautions against making too much of this trend, however. Merely grabbing back some proportion of cultural power will not, in itself, achieve the New Right’s political goals. No more than successfully electing representatives like Trump was enough to achieve the new right’s goals. For the New Right to actually re-direct the regime would require seizing power within the state, which is a question of personnel. The success or failure of the New Right will be determined by whether they are able to develop a counter-elite (Yarvin’s dark elves) that can gain and maintain institutional power.
The only practical way forward for the populist Right, then, is to develop a counter-elite—operating in parallel under a different political formula and leveraging a different cultural currency—from which new leadership could staff positions of institutional power. These new elites could eventually come from anywhere, and from any social or economic class. But conversion from within the existing managerial class—in other words, the cultivation of “class traitors”—would produce the quickest results. The development of a counterculture attractive among the young and educated, up-and-coming elite is the best possible means to accomplish this. It is, after all, the path by which the hippies of the 1960s eventually acquired power. This is the true potential value of a right-wing counterculture.
My take: I think an active equilibrium of the left and right cycling through the roles of Establishment and Rebellion is probably healthy for culture. It keeps either from being able to rest on their laurels. I often fret about the direction of our memeplex, but this piece has made me feel slightly more at ease in the way I often do after sitting for a while with the Tao Te Ching. There is a separate question of whether, regardless of the long-term suitability of this dynamic, the current moment of this cycle that we find ourselves in is the right one for the challenges we will be facing in the near future. On this, I will continue to fret.
Discourse Take of the Week
Zvi comments on the phenomenon of climate justice advocates opposing policies that would advance climate goals when those policies would involve working with fossil fuel providers rather than against them:
My current understanding of how groups like this work is that they think this way: What is important is the sacred value of Justice, which means the suffering of bad monkeys. The bad monkeys must be punished and the Sacrifices to the Gods must be made. No amount of good outcomes, no amount of making the world better and people’s lives better, including the very people you claim to be advocating for, can hold a candle to that. Climate here means ‘punish monkeys that are bad on climate.’ Also important to this model: Everyone is a bad monkey.
I’m even more cynical. I suspect that even the sacred value of Justice is a secondary concern to simple tribal psychology. The bad monkeys must be punished because they’re the outgroup. No further justification is really even necessary. The sacred value of Justice is just the ex-post rationalization of chimp politics.
Quick Links
1) I can’t wait to be a parent for many reasons, but one of them is the satisfaction I will gain from aggressively bucking this trend.
2) The Shirky Principle – “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky.
3) We’re getting better at building models of complex systems that change slowly, then very suddenly. This seems like a very important area for us to be making progress!
4) Visions of a circular economy (h/t The Prepared)
Industrial parks, particularly in Europe and Asia, are increasingly adopting circular economy approaches, enabling companies to make use of each others’ waste products, surplus energy, and other by-products through contract-based agreements… The Asnaes combined heat and power station, for example, provides inputs for multiple other businesses: its process steam is used by an oil refinery and two biotechnology companies, ash is used by construction and cement companies, gypsum from its sulfur scrubbers is made into plasterboard, its cooling water is used in aquaculture, and its lime is used as farming fertilizer. Over the past five years, the Symbiosis project has prevented the use of 4 million cubic meters of groundwater, cut CO2 emissions by over half a million tonnes, and recycled 62,000 tonnes of residual materials.
5) From a story about the former EV startup CEO Trevor Milton, who is currently on trial for fraud (h/t Matt Levine):
“In one tweet, Mr. Milton wrote that the Badger would have a drinking fountain using the water created by the truck’s hydrogen fuel cell. Days later, Mr. Milton typed “can you drink water from a fuel cell?” into an internet search, prosecutors alleged.”
Ruet Caelum 
One response to “Weekly Links 9/26/22”
[…] comparable scale to the greatest dramas. I already went some ways towards arguing this point when I proclaimed my love for Avatar, but I can do even better: look at the Iliad or the Song of Roland and tell me that action cannot […]
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