Davos is usually a place for polished platitudes, carefully manicured optimism, and the occasional nervous billionaire pretending to care deeply about the planet. Into this alpine shrine to seriousness strode Trump, carrying not policy, not vision, but vibes. Strong vibes. Tremendous vibes. Possibly the best vibes anyone has ever brought to Switzerland.
From the outset, the speech felt less like an address to global leaders and more like a rally held in an echo chamber. There were boasts untethered from facts, grievances aired as if the audience were a captive jury, and digressions that appeared to be chasing one another around the podium like startled chickens. […]
One could almost hear the collective internal monologue of the audience: Is this… the speech? Diplomats stared with the fixed smiles of people trapped in a lift with someone explaining crypto. CEOs blinked slowly, recalculating their life choices. Somewhere in the Alps, a cow likely stopped chewing.
And yet, the most remarkable thing about the address was Trump’s apparent certainty that it had gone well. In his mind, no doubt, it was flawless – historic, even. The laughter (if any) would be interpreted as admiration. The discomfort as awe. The silence as respect.
Davos will move on, as it always does. Panels will panel. Declarations will be declared. But Trump’s speech will linger as a reminder that failure, when paired with supreme self-confidence, does not always recognise itself as failure.
Which, in its own strange way, may have been the most honest part of the performance.
TDS
Frank Bruni (via Tipsy Teetotaler):
I’m feeling dark, so no playful notes today. Just this: I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.
There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton, when he commenced the refrain of his political life — “rigged,” “rigged,” “rigged” — before his Electoral College victory proved the opposite. He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.
“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.
With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.
“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”
How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.
playing within the pattern: the pithy threat and the sane orientation
When work is mere work, when it’s not naturally prayerful, not naturally communal, when your grandparents and children are not a part of it in some way, when it’s fragmented from your existence so that your co-workers are in a separate communal category from your family and friends, or when earning a paycheck dominates your waking hours and you are not free until five o’clock, this pattern, to me, has something dead in it. […]
In the traditional Ladakhi culture, writes Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book, Ancient Futures, work and festivity are united:
Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between work and play is not rigidly defined.
I have no problem idealizing a traditional culture. Of course individuals have surely been flawed wherever they’ve shown up. But industrial culture as a culture is so extremely de-graded, probably like civilizational cultures in general, that the search for any particular good takes us outside of it. We require inspiration and ideals to make our way out of industrial work, and the variety of traditional cultures can suggest patterns of daily life that match our own intuitions and deepest longings. […]
In seeking a different vessel for work, I suppose I always come back to subsistence work, though not in the meager sense of merely meeting one’s basic needs, which is actually the secondary definition of “subsistence.” The primary definition is “real being: existence,” which aligns with the meanings of the word’s various Latin roots: “actual existence, real being,” “substance, reality,” “stand still or firm.“ The word is related to the Greek “hypostasis, meaning “foundation, substance, real nature,”“that which settles at the bottom.”
Subsistence work, then, means existence work, or work that makes you a real being; foundational work, or work that makes you stand firm. And what work makes us into real beings? What work helps us stand firm? Certainly the answer is not work that turns time, labor, and nature into profit, that grinds all of Creation into raw economic material […]
In a culture that works like a machine, most of us cannot give our full attention to working like humans.
Degraded as it is, the culture has us.
But while subsistence work isn’t attainable for us, it’s the sane orientation for those trying to course-correct away from industrial work. There are never solutions to machine culture, only abandonment of its strange ideals and a walking toward reality.
Also, I will be getting myself one of these t-shirts:
Machine culture says this: No work, no play.
The pithy threat means that if you want leisure that is mere leisure, you earn it through work that is mere work.
When she was 10 my daughter gave me a t-shirt that she’d painted with fabric paint to say this: “All work, all play.” I don’t think she was attempting with this Christmas gift a grand statement about culture; she was simply saying something that sounded right to her ears. And she was sharing a gift.
He closes the essay with this: “In a culture that uncreates the human through work that is mere work, what else can you do but play within the pattern like this…? … In a culture where work generally desecrates human experience, to giggle while you kneel in the soil and harvest tomatoes is to undermine the machine. In a small way it is to recreate, to truly recreate.”
(See also this reflection from Jeremy Abel.)
contraband
CONTRABAND
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable-but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in—as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
denial ain’t just a river
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
Jef Sewell, on why Ernest Becker’s ideas are more relevant than ever:
I think that … human denial has never been greater. A pattern of denial of reality itself has just grown.
I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation — one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life — the re-presentation is simply what one might call the limit case of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.
Ernest Becket:
It’s the lie about the world that is killing the world. Everyone’s lie about how the world is that they are using as a defense against reality and the crazy games they play as they lie to defend themselves against the world.
(I’ll happily say again: if you haven’t seen the film All Illusions Must Be Broken, you should.
a river meanders through it
Life seems a funny thing when reading Winnie the Pooh makes you want to pick up James C. Scott’s latest…
Milne:
BY THE TIME it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
Scott:
Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they teem (usually) with life.… Each river, though subject to the same hydraulic laws, has its own unique personality and history. It makes abundant sense, then, to speak of the life history of a particular river, of its eco-biography. The biography of any river—the Orinoco, the Zambesi, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Danube, the Ayeyarwady—would be every bit as distinctive as the personal biographies of the various shamans, sages, fishers, philosophers, tyrants, rebels, and saints who lived along their banks.
[…]
The term meander comes to us from an actual river in west central Turkey, the Büyük Menderes, which follows a winding course over a flat plain before entering the Aegean. The Menderes appears in Homer’s Iliad. As a verb in English, the word has come to mean aimless wandering in walking, speaking, or writing. As a technical geological and hydrological term, however, it denotes a distinct nonrandom and rather systematic pattern of movement.
Wendell Berry in 1990:
It would be uncharitable and foolish of me to suggest that nothing good will ever be written on a computer. Some of my best friends have computers. I have only said that a computer cannot help you to write better, and I stand by that. But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of thebody from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.
But writing is of the body in yet another way. It is preeminently a walker’s art. It can be done on foot and at large. The beauty of its traditional equipment is simplicity. And cheapness. Going off to the woods, I take a pencil and some paper (any paper—a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of a feed sack), and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM. I am also free, for the time being at least, of everything that IBM is hooked to. My thoughts will not be coming to me from the power structure or the power grid, but from another direction and way entirely. My mind is free to go with my feet. I know that there are some people, perhaps many, to whom you cannot appeal on behalf of the body. To them, disembodiment is a goal, and they long for the realm of pure mind—or pure machine; the difference is negligible. Their departure from their bodies, obviously, is much to be desired, but the rest of us had better be warned: they are going to cause a lot of dangerous commotion on their way out.
Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography
The U.S. is not only “upside down” from the traditional forms of world map, but compressed into a narrow area near the top margin. The promotional text for this map urge the viewer to “See the World From Another Perspective.” […]
At an international conference in 2001, Hao presented a paper describing the projection eventually used to produce this world map, the “Generalized Equivalent-Difference Latitude Parallel Polyconic Projection.” […]
This map has been employed since 2004 by China’s Oceanic Administration and since 2006 as an official military map of the People’s Liberation Army, used in establishing and maintaining the nation’s strategic navigation system. This topographic version of the map was first released to the public in 2014.
religious emotion in the age of the machine
A sympathetic theme threaded throughout…
Romano Guardini:
Indeed man has always known anxiety, and even if science and technology succeed in giving him the appearance of security he will continue to know anxiety. But the causes and the nature of anxiety differ with differing times.… Modern anxiety … arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a “real” or a symbolic place in reality. In spite of his actual position on earth he is a being without security. The very needs of man’s senses are left unsatisfied, since he has ceased to experience a world which guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence.
____
Most intensely modern man sought for answers within his own soul. The loss of the old, accepted vision of the world denied to man his chance of coming to terms with himself, of answering the questions posed by existence. He was shaken, insecure, exposed to the mystery of limitless realities. As occurs during all crises the depths of human nature were excited. Anguish, violence, greed, rebellion against order—more compellingly than ever these primitive drives stirred the soul of man. Both word and deed had been stripped bare by the new vision of man, shaking his deepest-held convictions. Enigmatic powers awoke out of the religious spirit; the force of the numinous impinged itself directly upon the human spirit, either from within the spirit itself or from the world at large. Not only was the numinous beneficent now but also bewildering, even destructive in its impact. Every fundamental question shook man with a new intensity: salvation and damnation, man’s just relation to God, the true ordering for human life. As time passed the tensions within man’s soul between the will to truth and the drive toward error, between good and evil, increased and weighed down his spirit. As the age moved on even the probity of human existence itself struck against the oppressed soul of man.
____
Assuredly the world as a whole no longer encompasses and shelters man as once it did; it has become a far different thing. And it has gained thereby new significances for the religious life of man. […]
The modern era was fond of justifying technology and rested its defense upon the argument that technology promoted the well-being of man. In doing so it masked the destructive effects of a ruthless system. I do not believe that the age to come will rest with such an argument. The man engaged today in the labor of “technics” knows full well that technology moves forward in final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the race. He knows in the most radical sense of the term that power is its motive—a lordship of all; that man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature. His action bespeaks immense possibilities not only for “creation” but also for destruction, especially for the destruction of humanity itself. Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers grow day by day. Once the “autonomous” state has broken all bonds, it will be able to deliver the last coup de grâce to human nature itself. …
Within this area of choice an emotion partaking of the religious seems to penetrate again. This religious feeling has no link with the natural piety of Giordano Bruno or of Goethe; rather, it is bound up intrinsically with the dangers for himself and for his earth which man has found locked up with his technological power. The new religious emotion wells up from a sense of the profound loneliness which man knows in the midst of all that is now summed up by the term “the World”; man’s emotion grows out of the realization that he approaches his ultimate decision, that he must face it with responsibility, with resolution and with bravery.
____
If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding “Christian” culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: “it will, if possible, deceive even the elect” (Matthew xxiv, 24).
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? …
These eschatological conditions will show themselves, it seems to me, in the religious temper of the future. With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here … If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger.