The Week, Links

I shall be offline for the next few days — a break long overdue. But here is some of what I hope to mull over, with varying degrees of care or focus.

Discouragement over public discourse as represented in MSM contributes in no small way to my current malaise. And yes, yes. But — it seems to me if Jay Scott were still alive and opining, he’d be doing it at Substack or Medium, or some other place with a malleable firewall. Something integral has been lost in this transition, I think. A particular exercise and expression of liberalism is getting siloed at the worst possible moment. It does indeed feel like The Cherry Orchard.

Anyhoo, catch the good content while you can. 

• “[M]arket forces instaured principally by decisions made by Boomers decades ago, along with the desperation and naïveté of Millennials, are coming together to somehow make our culture’s productions far more radical and far more conventional at the same time.” Justin E.H. Smith unpacks The New Eliminationism: Notes on the Economics of Cancel Culture, here. Smith, rather generously, offers his newsletter for free, with option to pay.
• “Kołakowski is distinguishing between two ways of being in the world — two ways that we all engage in, though the proportionate influences of the two ‘cores’ will differ greatly from one person to the next. As a philosopher, he is aware of and determined to resist the common inclination to ‘include myth in the technological order,’ which is to say, the order of analytical reason. . . Something deep-seated is at work when student protesters’ interpretations of events, and their proffered remedies for historical or current injustice, are challenged and the students reply, ‘You are denying my very identity.’ This response makes sense only within the mythical core, not the technological core. One cannot analytically pick apart a complex, integrated mythical framework and say, ‘I choose this but not that’ without tearing holes in the web and leaving it dangling and useless. That is what instrumental reason always does to myth.” (Smith touches on this too, BTW) I shall be reading and pondering Jacobs and Kolakowski.

Back Sundayish, hopefully.