Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world.
Unbelievable, but their vanity prevents the ruling class from seeing their own foolishness. Like Glenn Reynolds ( Yale Law, ‘85 ) says: Abolish the Ivy League.
I was never a huge fan of Bill Moyers, but it is a shame that the closest thing we have to a "public" intellectual these days is Dr. Jordan Peterson. He would have been nothing more than an academic of not for the hollowing out of intellectual culture due to the democratization of social media. Now we have to try harder to locate the meat when all we are being delivered is milk. This is the intellectual and moral challenge of our current cultural era.
After 11 years at Columbia I was pretty darn gloomy and cynical about higher education, but then recently a couple of months ago I went to Chicago for the Heterodox Academy conference and met a ton of very impressive academics. Not that higher education isn't in terrible shape, but it was a real shot in the arm to meet a whole crowd of the sort of academics that have become an endangered species. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/heterodox-and-loving-it
Fun reading. Progressives call themselves by that epithet to mask to themselves their own regressive natures and to camouflage the real intent: the destruction of those they deem inferior. They simply cannot let people live the way they want to. They must force upon them their soi-disant superiority.
Thanks for the insider insights! That kind of editing must happen all the time, regardless of political slant. But I’m with you, I think the public would be better served — and even more interested — to see/hear guests go off-script, even the batshit stuff. Joe Rogan seems to have done okay with that approach. We’re all so tired of a fake, Photoshopped reality, there’s a hunger for authenticity, warts and all.
On one hand the rise of podcasts and streaming series that need not fit into a rigid time slot has opened up all sorts of possibilities for less filtered content, and so much now feels so fake that there is a genuine hunger out there for something more authentic -- hence the rise of Substack. On the other hand, we live in such a mediated society that regardless of stated preference (few will say they want less nuance) most consumers expect telegenic, charismatic, demographically diverse talking heads to speak in snappy bite-sized talking points that affirm the viewer's gut, and what is presented as authenticity is often a carefully constructed performance. I'm not hugely optimistic that most residents of Plato's Cave really want to go outside. You might be interested in another piece concerning fakery and sloppiness in academia, and how most of the career incentives point in the wrong direction: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/how-broken-is-academia
Oh yah, this. The source of knowledge has shifted from the library stacks--and the streets--to Infotainment. Including Infotainment done for the self-flattering, self-licking ice cream cone of the Liberal Establishment.
The irony is that they think the solution to the problem of "information siloing" is to ban any construction materials that could serve to build a silo that might possibly benefit the Partisan Opposition.
The actual solution is applying the individually self-willed due diligence to zone one's own information silo out of existence, in order to leave the foundation of Reality in place. A crucial edge over anyone in a silo and getting fed stovepiped information. No matter which silo.
Tangentially: having read 4 of his 44 books (as of 2023), Canadian cultural geographer Vaclav Smil is the most reality-based writer I know of. He has little to say on "social questions.", Other than examining the requirements required to maintain the material conditions of modern civilization, that is. He's non-ideological (other than considering what hasn't worked for the ideologues.) He does not speak to the reader as parent to child. It's like he's an extraordinarily capable naval staff officer, and the reader is the captain on the bridge.
A conspiracist would say that Vaclav Smil is not well known because the Ivy League Left Liberal Conspiracy don't want anyone to read his books. It's my impression that Smil isn't well-known because the Ivy League Left Liberal Conspiracy is terrified at what they might learn. Smil will discomfit the knee-jerk partisan Right, too: he thinks that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. They don't want to read him, either.
(Credit where credit is due to Bill Gates, who cites Smil as important reading. But ironically, Gates' wealth privilege likely impedes an accurate assessment of just how important Smil is, as a voice in public policy. I'd rather pay attention to Smil himself.)
(Liberal Establishment: "why can't you read something niice, like Bill McKibben?
Establishment Right: "why can't you read Market Theology, like Steve Forbes?" With the necessary changes in place, the same crackpot optimism. Luxury beliefs, "Left" and "Right" versions.)
That's totally fair, I was speaking somewhat more figuratively about the larger landscape of NGO grants and clickbait we seem to be hurtling towards...
What’s your sense of Jordan Peterson? (Not as an interviewer, where he insists on speaking over or crashing the interviewee’s train of thought, but as a substantive public intellectual?)
I haven't read any of Peterson's books or seen more than a few brief clips, I'm more familiar with him as a persona than an intellectual per se. I've not seen anything that really spoke directly to me, but my general view is to let a thousand flowers bloom and it seems like a lot of young men in particular have been inspired by his work.
Beautiful lines here: "Moyers programming shaped my whole sense of humanistic possibility, of the crackling potential when nuanced thinkers can empathetically come together. Years of disillusioning experience have forced me to question if that too was largely a fantasy. Not quite, I don’t believe—not so long ago, the range of respectable discourse was broader, attention spans longer, and technology limited for seamless video editing. Before this age of personalized partisan silos, opposing advocates had to jostle for the same common ground."
For me it's not so much the passing of an era "credible authorities" as it is an awakening to the cultural Marxism that has existed and now reigns over the country in which i was born. Unfortunately, the GAE also helped spread that same illness militarily, politically and financially across the world.
The seeds of today's derangements have been around for a long, long time (someone like Jacques Barzun would have said for centuries) but the progressives of my parents' generation were still grounded in the organic communities they came from and tended to see the opposition as misguided or misinformed rather than EVIL. They were for equality and free speech and would have seen the notions of equity and 'stochastic terrorism' as utterly childish. Which isn't to say that the authorities in the corridors of power were necessarily credible per se, but to some extent they were less clownish and at very least were more constrained by a less polarized, more intellectually honest constituency. Sadly, between generational decline and social media, the madness has completely taken over.
'But I'm against Forever Wars!' I hastily spluttered, in type.
'No,' he patiently explained 'I meant you're a liberal mugged by reality!'
It was only when I reached my mid-forties, when I began to see the Left become increasingly authoritarian (and Manichean in their outlook), that I realised my primary political ethos had always been motivated by civic libertarianism.
Ha, I have a friend who refers to me as a "neo-neocon" and that's probably not unfair in terms of the original 1970s neocons who'd been "mugged by reality." But I still think of myself basically as a 1960s liberal, my parents were social workers and I've been driving around with "Another Side of Bob Dylan" playing in the car for the past week.
Same here. It's not long until mushroom season here in the UK. I'm quite lucky in my area, because there is a fair amount of fallow land (which makes magic mushrooms far more likely, apparently). We're also lucky in the fact that the main magic mushroom on the UK mainland is distinctive and only has one type of mildly poisonous mushroom for which it can be mistaken (it causes nausea and vomiting, but little else).
You're in for a treat! Barzun was a longtime historian at Columbia who consistently stood against the churn of fashionable nonsense. His book "From Dawn to Decadence" is one of the most gripping 900 page historical opuses around.
He was one of the last truly literate academics in university life. There are none any more that I know of in the United States, since Joseph Epstein has retired.
Unbelievable, but their vanity prevents the ruling class from seeing their own foolishness. Like Glenn Reynolds ( Yale Law, ‘85 ) says: Abolish the Ivy League.
I was never a huge fan of Bill Moyers, but it is a shame that the closest thing we have to a "public" intellectual these days is Dr. Jordan Peterson. He would have been nothing more than an academic of not for the hollowing out of intellectual culture due to the democratization of social media. Now we have to try harder to locate the meat when all we are being delivered is milk. This is the intellectual and moral challenge of our current cultural era.
After 11 years at Columbia I was pretty darn gloomy and cynical about higher education, but then recently a couple of months ago I went to Chicago for the Heterodox Academy conference and met a ton of very impressive academics. Not that higher education isn't in terrible shape, but it was a real shot in the arm to meet a whole crowd of the sort of academics that have become an endangered species. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/heterodox-and-loving-it
Fun reading. Progressives call themselves by that epithet to mask to themselves their own regressive natures and to camouflage the real intent: the destruction of those they deem inferior. They simply cannot let people live the way they want to. They must force upon them their soi-disant superiority.
Thanks for the insider insights! That kind of editing must happen all the time, regardless of political slant. But I’m with you, I think the public would be better served — and even more interested — to see/hear guests go off-script, even the batshit stuff. Joe Rogan seems to have done okay with that approach. We’re all so tired of a fake, Photoshopped reality, there’s a hunger for authenticity, warts and all.
On one hand the rise of podcasts and streaming series that need not fit into a rigid time slot has opened up all sorts of possibilities for less filtered content, and so much now feels so fake that there is a genuine hunger out there for something more authentic -- hence the rise of Substack. On the other hand, we live in such a mediated society that regardless of stated preference (few will say they want less nuance) most consumers expect telegenic, charismatic, demographically diverse talking heads to speak in snappy bite-sized talking points that affirm the viewer's gut, and what is presented as authenticity is often a carefully constructed performance. I'm not hugely optimistic that most residents of Plato's Cave really want to go outside. You might be interested in another piece concerning fakery and sloppiness in academia, and how most of the career incentives point in the wrong direction: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/how-broken-is-academia
Oh yah, this. The source of knowledge has shifted from the library stacks--and the streets--to Infotainment. Including Infotainment done for the self-flattering, self-licking ice cream cone of the Liberal Establishment.
The irony is that they think the solution to the problem of "information siloing" is to ban any construction materials that could serve to build a silo that might possibly benefit the Partisan Opposition.
The actual solution is applying the individually self-willed due diligence to zone one's own information silo out of existence, in order to leave the foundation of Reality in place. A crucial edge over anyone in a silo and getting fed stovepiped information. No matter which silo.
Tangentially: having read 4 of his 44 books (as of 2023), Canadian cultural geographer Vaclav Smil is the most reality-based writer I know of. He has little to say on "social questions.", Other than examining the requirements required to maintain the material conditions of modern civilization, that is. He's non-ideological (other than considering what hasn't worked for the ideologues.) He does not speak to the reader as parent to child. It's like he's an extraordinarily capable naval staff officer, and the reader is the captain on the bridge.
I just read this https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262551014/invention-and-innovation/ That's what's prompted this Hype Man persona. You just don't find books like this.
A conspiracist would say that Vaclav Smil is not well known because the Ivy League Left Liberal Conspiracy don't want anyone to read his books. It's my impression that Smil isn't well-known because the Ivy League Left Liberal Conspiracy is terrified at what they might learn. Smil will discomfit the knee-jerk partisan Right, too: he thinks that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. They don't want to read him, either.
(Credit where credit is due to Bill Gates, who cites Smil as important reading. But ironically, Gates' wealth privilege likely impedes an accurate assessment of just how important Smil is, as a voice in public policy. I'd rather pay attention to Smil himself.)
(Liberal Establishment: "why can't you read something niice, like Bill McKibben?
Establishment Right: "why can't you read Market Theology, like Steve Forbes?" With the necessary changes in place, the same crackpot optimism. Luxury beliefs, "Left" and "Right" versions.)
That's totally fair, I was speaking somewhat more figuratively about the larger landscape of NGO grants and clickbait we seem to be hurtling towards...
I don't disagree, it's more that the discontent has proved so resistant to channeling productively with people preferring their particular media!
What’s your sense of Jordan Peterson? (Not as an interviewer, where he insists on speaking over or crashing the interviewee’s train of thought, but as a substantive public intellectual?)
I haven't read any of Peterson's books or seen more than a few brief clips, I'm more familiar with him as a persona than an intellectual per se. I've not seen anything that really spoke directly to me, but my general view is to let a thousand flowers bloom and it seems like a lot of young men in particular have been inspired by his work.
Beautiful lines here: "Moyers programming shaped my whole sense of humanistic possibility, of the crackling potential when nuanced thinkers can empathetically come together. Years of disillusioning experience have forced me to question if that too was largely a fantasy. Not quite, I don’t believe—not so long ago, the range of respectable discourse was broader, attention spans longer, and technology limited for seamless video editing. Before this age of personalized partisan silos, opposing advocates had to jostle for the same common ground."
For me it's not so much the passing of an era "credible authorities" as it is an awakening to the cultural Marxism that has existed and now reigns over the country in which i was born. Unfortunately, the GAE also helped spread that same illness militarily, politically and financially across the world.
The seeds of today's derangements have been around for a long, long time (someone like Jacques Barzun would have said for centuries) but the progressives of my parents' generation were still grounded in the organic communities they came from and tended to see the opposition as misguided or misinformed rather than EVIL. They were for equality and free speech and would have seen the notions of equity and 'stochastic terrorism' as utterly childish. Which isn't to say that the authorities in the corridors of power were necessarily credible per se, but to some extent they were less clownish and at very least were more constrained by a less polarized, more intellectually honest constituency. Sadly, between generational decline and social media, the madness has completely taken over.
One of my readers accused me of being a neocon.
'But I'm against Forever Wars!' I hastily spluttered, in type.
'No,' he patiently explained 'I meant you're a liberal mugged by reality!'
It was only when I reached my mid-forties, when I began to see the Left become increasingly authoritarian (and Manichean in their outlook), that I realised my primary political ethos had always been motivated by civic libertarianism.
Ha, I have a friend who refers to me as a "neo-neocon" and that's probably not unfair in terms of the original 1970s neocons who'd been "mugged by reality." But I still think of myself basically as a 1960s liberal, my parents were social workers and I've been driving around with "Another Side of Bob Dylan" playing in the car for the past week.
Same here. It's not long until mushroom season here in the UK. I'm quite lucky in my area, because there is a fair amount of fallow land (which makes magic mushrooms far more likely, apparently). We're also lucky in the fact that the main magic mushroom on the UK mainland is distinctive and only has one type of mildly poisonous mushroom for which it can be mistaken (it causes nausea and vomiting, but little else).
Good luck, brave psychonaut!
Never heard of Barzun, but sounds like someone with whom i might agree. Thanks for the tip.
Good conversation. Thank you.
You're in for a treat! Barzun was a longtime historian at Columbia who consistently stood against the churn of fashionable nonsense. His book "From Dawn to Decadence" is one of the most gripping 900 page historical opuses around.
He was one of the last truly literate academics in university life. There are none any more that I know of in the United States, since Joseph Epstein has retired.
Yes. I just did a cursory search about him and saw about his book. That kind of thing is right up my alley.