Virginia Woolf: Nietzsche on the fainting couch

Is there a more absurd progressive icon in the Age of Intersectionality?

The Unbearable Burden of Being a Special Snowflake

G. K. Chesterton:

Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere-- a very powerful description in a purely literary sense-- of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

In our age, Nietzsche is no longer the most prominent exemplar of the pretentious claims of fastidiousness. That honor has to belong to Virginia Woolf.

Nietzsche had to hide his weakness as he paraded his “disgust and disdain” for humanity; the Ubermensch can’t very well be a trembling, feverish invalid. Woolf, on the other hand, pulled off a feat of daring rhetorical jujutsu: She justified her Will to Power with her weakness and “oppression.”

As Theodore Dalrymple points out, the great theme of Woolf’s work can be summarized as “How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.”

Woolf’s solipsistic whining is absurd when examined in the hard light of reason. Yet it is irresistible academic catnip for Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Intellectual-Yet-Idiots.

Dalrymple:

Her historiography was very modern: she scoured the records to justify the backward projection of her current resentments. For her, there was no such thing as the human condition, with its inevitable discontent and limitations. She thought that all the things she desired were reconcilable, so that freedom and security, for example, or artistic effort and complete selflessness, might abide in perpetual harmony. As a female member of the British upper middle class and one of what she called “the daughters of educated men,” she felt both socially superior to the rest of the world and peculiarly, indeed uniquely, put upon. The very locution, “the daughters of educated men,” is an odd one, capturing her oscillation between grandiosity and self-pity: she meant by it that class of women who, by virtue of their gentle birth and hereditarily superior minds, could not be expected to perform physical labor of any kind, but who were prevented by the injustice of “the system” from participating fully in public and intellectual affairs.
…
For those who actually know anything about the hardships endured by the British working class, male and female, during the years of the Depression, statements that insinuate an equality, or even a superiority, of suffering on the part of the daughters of educated men are little short of nauseating: but they would clearly appeal to the pampered resentful, a class that was to grow exponentially in the postwar years of sustained prosperity.
…
Had Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mindshallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutalhad triumphed among the elites of the Western world.

I think Dalrymple cut to the heart of the matter here:

It comes as no surprise that a thinker (or perhaps I should say a feeler) such as Mrs. Woolf, with her emotional and intellectual dishonesty, should collapse all relevant moral distinctions, a technique vital to all schools of resentment. Time and again we find her misappropriating the connotation of one thing and attaching it to another, by insinuating a false analogy: that since both the British policeman and the Nazi stormtrooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find the truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to “maintain your rage.”

This explains Woolf’s “thinking” (and by “explain” I guess I mean “demolish and destroy”) while also helping us to see why she has become an icon to the “pampered resentful class”, the special snowflakes who make up the I-Y-Is. “Maintain the rage” becomes “righteous indignation” and that fire is vital to modern intellectuals:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseperable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

Related:

Variations of a theme

Steak, ketchup, and Trump Derangement Disorder

Who was John Galt?

Steak, ketchup, and Trump Derangement Disorder

Really insightful piece by Matthew Continetti:

Freedom Is Eating Steak Well Done With Ketchup
Over the last year however the press has fixated on the steak and its accompaniment, returned to them again and again, fetishized them, contorted them into a metaphor for the childishness and vulgarity and gaucheness that Trump's opponents so despise. "Putting ketchup on his $54 steak drives a wedge between Trump and his fans," reports Marketwatch.com, citing a silly PPP poll in order to expel Trump from the in-group. Does Trump put "Bernaise? Chimichurri? Peppercorn?" on his steak? Negative. "Instead, Trump went with ketchup, that most pedestrian of all condiments." Lock him up!

I am fascinated by the condescending use of "pedestrian," with its connotations of déclassement, to describe one of America's most popular condiments. What it suggests is that the fixation with Trump's manner of eating is in reality a fixation with the persistence of habits and attitudes and trends that the over-schooled and undereducated metropolitan producers of news and opinion do not like, deem retrograde, wish would recede into the past as humanity progresses toward its gender-neutral, multicultural, borderless, medium-rare steak au poivre future. "For real, Mr. President?" asks the Washington Post‘s food critic when confronted with Trump's menu choices.

The heart of the matter:

It is hard to read stories like these without coming to the conclusion that so much of our elite's abhorrence of Trump is a matter of aesthetics, of his not fitting in, of his stubborn devotion to practices and ideas deemed retrograde by opinion leaders but that still appeal to, oh, about half the country.

G. K. Chesterton:

The modern world will not distinguish between matters of opinion and matters of principle and it ends up treating them all as matters of taste.

GKC did not regard this as an advance for civilization. Instead he described “good taste” as “the last and vilest of human superstitions”

The history of the 20th century shows that it was a superstition that could be exploited for the worst ends. England and its Bloomsbury group should serve as a warning. Ostensibly concerned with Taste and Art and Higher Things, the reality was far different.

Stephen Koch:

Even by the ungentle standards of most literary cliques, Bloomsbury was exceptionally malicious within its own ranks, and with outsiders cruel to the point of systematic sadism. All the talk of 'friendship' concealed quite different interests,
…
First, last, and always, the real politics of Bloomsbury was a search for elite cultural power in England.

Lytton Strachey and his “friends” might mock the middle classes and their conventional heroes but their disdain was not disinterested:

Within Strachey's supercilious view of the British middle class was encoded an assumed right to rule that class

“Taste” for Bloomsbury, as Chesterton saw clearly, became an elastic standard which swallowed up all aspects of life .

Upper class sensibilities trumped left-wing solidarity with the laboring classes:

And my God how workmen smell. The Whole house stinks of them. How I hate the proletariat. (Vita Sackville-West)

To Virginia Woolf, there were things more important than feminist solidarity or professional accomplishment. Things like a good manicure:

Woolf withdrew from West’s very presence, preferring to dismiss Rebecca because she had dirty fingernails. Bloomsbury was Woolf’s safe haven, but Westcertainly just as enamored of creature comforts as Woolf wasjourneyed to the Balkans and beyond, to Lebanon and South Africa, in order to understand the nature of the modern world. She was not, in short, afraid of dirtying herself by reporting on great events and movements of the twentieth century.

The politics of taste, as practiced by Bloomsbury, was totalitarian in both scope and practice.

As Paul Johnson noted of Strachey:

From the Apostles he grasped the principles of group power: The ability not merely to exclude but to be seen to exclude. He perfected the art of inapproachability and rejection.

Virginia Woolf:

I have just had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.

Here we see the fatuous absurdity of the Bloomsbury worldview. They begin by cultivating Higher Feelings and Refined Tastes while seeking companions who share those tastes. They end up excluding the great poets and writers of their age because those people are not up to the high standards of Bloomsbury.

Koch:

Following Strachey's lead, the coterie remained far too preoccupied with questions of mere taste to touch real greatness  .

Except it doesn’t end there.

In the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the unmasked traitor Bill Haydon offers an explanation for going over to the Soviets:

It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. The West has become so very ugly.

Haydon is seemingly based on Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Spies. As Koch reminds us, Bloomsbury and the Cambridge Ring are not separate phenomena.:

The Cambridge spies were Bloomsbury's heirs by direct line of descent. The crucible for both was the 'Cambridge Conversation Club', the Apostles, a long-established campus secret society for aristocratic young intellectuals. Tennyson and Hallam had been members, Strachey and Leonard Woolf had taken over the Apostles for their own political purposes before the war, and a generation later Blunt and Burgess remade it for theirs.

One generation mocks the conventional heroes and holds their countrymen in contempt and views her allies with disdain. The next generation betrays their country in the service of a murderous tyrant.

Hugh Trevor-Roper:

I consider the whole Bloomsbury group—excepting only J. M. Keynes—to be the most overrated literary phenomenon of our times. Above all, Lytton Strachey: Strachey who has recently been accorded a two-volume biography, and whose only achievement was to trivialize history, to empty it of its real content and meaning, in order to raise a few complacent titters from the radical chic of his time.

Related:

Sometimes it seems that all worthwhile social commentary is really just elaborations on G. K. Chesterton

Variations on a theme

Half-blind experts and the straw men they create

Foreign Affairs features an article by professor Tom Nichols on the Perils of Democracy and the Ordeal of one of America’s most vulnerable classes:

How America Lost Faith in Expertise

It's not just that people don't know a lot about science or politics or geography. They don't, but that's an old problem. The bigger concern today is that Americans have reached a point where ignorance--at least regarding what is generally considered established knowledge in public policy--is seen as an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to demonstrate their independence from nefarious elites--and insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong.

The article will appeal to all those in the “credentialed not educated" classes who are still dealing with post-election trauma. Like a good friend after a break up, Nichols reassures the Acela riders “It’s not you, it’s the idiots who don’t recognize your value.”

I doubt that Nichols will win many converts. G. K. Chesterton was a formidable polemicist and debater because he tried to “never let a quarrel ruin a good argument.” On Twitter (@RadioFreeTom) Nichols is the anti-Chesterton. He never argues when he can dismiss and demean.

This passage is hilarious and damning:

Conspiracy theories are attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and little patience for boring, detailed explanations. They are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty of either an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity. And just as individuals facing grief and confusion look for meaning where none may exist, so, too, will entire societies gravitate toward outlandish theories when collectively subjected to a terrible national experience. Conspiracy theories and the awed reasoning behind them, as the Canadian writer Jonathan Kay has noted, become especially seductive "in any society that has suffered an epic, collectively felt trauma." This is why they spiked in popularity after World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Kennedy assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and other major disasters--and are growing now in response to destabilizing contemporary trends, such as the economic and social dislocations of globalization and persistent terrorism.

At their worst, conspiracy theories can produce a moral panic in which innocent people get hurt. But even when they seem trivial, their prevalence undermines the sort of reasoned interpersonal discourse on which liberal democracy depends. Why? Because by definition, conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable: experts who contradict them demonstrate that they, too, are part of the conspiracy.

As recently noted on this blog (“They trusted the experts”) the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s and 1990s were fueled by the insane conspiracy theories of experts: child psychologists, social workers, policeman, prosecutors.

Nichols teaches at the Naval War College. This piece notes that the experts of the 1990s got most of the big things wrong when it came to Future War:

Anticipating Contemporary War: How Well Did We Do?

This article by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is also well worth a read:

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities??but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Related:

Changing Minds

More on Changing Minds

UPDATE 3-20-2017:

Instapundit weighs in:

The suicide of expertise

It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.

And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.

This Thomas Sowell column from 2008 makes for interesting reading.

Intellectuals

Sometimes it seems that all worthwhile social commentary is really just elaborations on G. K. Chesterton

Kevin Williamson:

Why Corporate Leaders Became Progressive Activists

Some of them are rock-star entrepreneurs. But most of them are variations on the Organization Man, veterans of MBA programs, management consultancies, financial firms, and 10,000 corporate-strategy meetings. If you have not read it, spare a moment for William H. Whyte’s Cold War classic. In the 1950s, Whyte, a writer for Fortune, interviewed dozens of important CEOs and found that they mostly rejected the ethos of rugged individualism in favor of a more collectivist view of the world. The capitalists were not much interested in defending the culture of capitalism. What he found was that the psychological and operational mechanics of large corporations were much like those of other large organizations, including government agencies, and that American CEOs believed, as they had believed since at least the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 19th-century cult of “scientific management,” that expertise deployed through bureaucracy could impose rationality on such unruly social entities as free markets, culture, family, and sexuality. The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism, then and now.

From 2013:

The birth of the hive mind

Not all of Chesterton’s targets were socialists. If many socialists loved the vision of a society tightly organized like an anthill, many conservatives and businessmen shared the same vision. They were in thrall of factories full of unmammal-like men and women; worker bees with the emphasis on bee. No wonder Taylorism proved so seductive to the business and managerial class.
...
From Taylorism to Reengineering to ERP the private sector managerial class has fallen for one fad after another that promote command, control, uniformity, and the massacre of the drones.

Insect worship helps explain why hip Apple loves to build their expensive trinkets in the world’s largest Stalinist state.

Worth checking out

The latest from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Facts are True, the News is Fake

Worthwhile point that journalists and journalism professors should take to heart:

One way journalism will self destruct [from its divergence away from the public] is illustrated by the Gawker story. A voyeurism outfit realized that there are tort laws in the U.S. protecting private citizens. America has tort laws and a legal mechanism by which people harmed by corporations can be compensated for it –a mechanism that flourished thanks to Ralph Nader. It, along with the First Amendment, protect citizens by putting skin in the game of the corporations. So eventually Gawker which bullied its financially weaker victims (often twenty-one-year old in revenge porn scenes) got bullied by someone richer and went bankrupt.

What was quite revealing is that journalists sided with Gawker on grounds of “freedom of information”, the most misplaced exploitation of that concept, rather than with the public who sided, naturally, with the victim. Nobody is a saint, nobody wants his or her sexual scenes or private information to spread without some type of punishment; nobody likes the industrialization of voyeurism.

He also has some very on point things to say about the media's agency problems.

RTWT

Sauce/Goose/Gander

Journalists like to picture themselves as fearless speakers of truth to power. They love it when the powerful try (and fail) to silence a lowly reporter doing his job. From martyr to victor -- that’s how icons get made.

David Halberstam made his bones as a journalistic hero when JFK tried to get the New York Times to move him out of Vietnam. Nixon’s pressure on the Washington Post during Watergate adds a touch of Hitchcock to the early pages of All the President’s Men. Would the Pentagon Papers be as famous if the New York Times had not fought an injunction all the way to the Supreme Court?

Then there is that class of stories that do not fit the template.

In this talk from 1997, Hilton Kramer recalls the reaction to an article he wrote on Hollywood and the Blacklist. (Starts at the 40.00 min mark). Because he did not show the proper feality to the Great Historical Concensus, Sy Hersh went to his editor and demanded that he fire Kramer. Hersh believed the article did not show proper respect to the Martyrs of McCarthyism.

Kramer had committed the cardinal sin of noting that there really were communists in Hollywood and that Lillian Hellman was not always honest. To Hersh this was a firing offense. That Kramer was right was of little consequence.

In 1965 Tom Wolfe wrote a two part profile of the New Yorker and its editor William Shawn for Herald-Tribune’s New York magazine. It was brilliantvintage Wolfe. It mocked the New Yorker’s pretensions but Wolfe had also done his homework. He knew more about how the New Yorker and Shawn operated than any other outsider. The piece was New Journalism but it was, at its core, very good journalism.

The New Yorker was a powerful media outlet and Wolfe took readers inside its walls, explained how that distinctive style was created, dissected the editing process that ensured every piece had that unique New Yorker tone. He also, boldly, suggested that the overpowering editorial system of Mr. William Shawn had preserved that quintessential style at the cost of missing the best writing in post-war America.

Much of ‘literary’ New York reacted with horror and outrage. All sorts of the right people suggested that New York should never have run Wolfe’s story. Richard Rovere the scourge of Sen. Joe McCarthy thought Wolfe had crossed a line. It was one thing to mock Henry Luce (as the New Yorker had) or to traffic in rumors about Tailgunner Joe (as Rovere had with glee.) But the New Yorker and Mr. Willaim Shawn were supposed to be off-limits.

The highlight for Wolfe came when his editor received a phone call from Richard Goodwin, now best known as Mr. Doris Kearns Goodwin, but then a White House muckety muck for LBJ. Wolfe describes the call in Hooking Up:

“This is Richard Goodwin. I’m calling from the White House.

He preceded to tell Clay [Felker] what poisonous, gutterish, despicable stuff our New Yorker articles were. The bill of particulars was pretty famialar by now. The only thing that made Goodwin’s different was that he couldn’t let twenty-five words go by without interjecting “Here at the White House”. Golly, what were we to conclude? Johnson was already sending half a million American troops to Vietnam on the basis of a ten cent gunboat incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. What chance did we have? But by now Clay’s instincts and Jim Bellow’s were the same.

“Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Clay, “but if you’ll do me a favor and write down everything you’ve just said on White House stationary and send it to me, I promise you we’ll print it.”

We never heard another word from Richard Goodwin there at the White House.

Three months after William Safire began writing an op-ed column for the New York Times, a former Times reporter wrote ‘Punch’ Sulzberger and demanded that Safire be fired.

It is a very dishonest column and a shabby one. A few years ago when you had just taken over the paper you were handed a tough decision on the West Coast edition. You said“It’s a lousy paper. Close it.” So Punch, this time the play is to you. It’s a lousy column and it’s a dishonest one. So close it. Our you end up just as shabby as Safire.

The letter was written by David Halberstam. Safire deserves the last word:

The irony did not escape me. Halberstam had gained fame when an American President tried to get the New York Times to fire him for his out-of-step Vietnam dispatches, and here was that same reporter trying to get the Times’s publisher to ‘close up’ a point of view that, however shabby, was mine own.

When disruption requires a sugar daddy

From the always interesting Nicholas Carr:

The Uber advantage

We’re often told that companies like Uber and Amazon are masters of business innovation and industry disruption. But an argument could be made that what they’re really masters of is getting investors, whether in public or private markets, to cover massive losses over long periods of time. The generosity of the capital markets is what allows Uber and its ilk to subsidize purchases by customers, again on a massive scale and over many years. It’s worth asking whether these subsidies are the real engine behind much of the tech industry’s vaunted wave of disruption. After all, the small businesses being disrupted — local taxi companies and book shops, for instance — don’t have sugar daddies underwriting their existence. They actually have to make money, day after day, to pay their employees and their bankers. They have to charge real prices, not make-believe ones.

Some will argue that the capital markets are acting rationally, investing for future returns. But if those future returns are predicated on the killing off of competitors through years of investor-subsidized predatory pricing and other economically dubious behavior, how rational are the capital market’s actions, really? At some point, it starts to smell like a market failure rather than a market success.

This reminded me of something Peter Drucker said back when the first Dot-Com bubble was bursting:

Many of these internet startups were not startups of businesses at all. They were just stock exchange gambles. If there was a business plan, it was only to launch an IPO or be bought. Not to build a business.

Intellectuals and the seduction of power

Western intellectual enthusiasm for communism peaked not in the time of 'goulash communism' or 'socialism with a human face,' but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-1939 and 1944-1956. Writers and professors and teachers and trade unionists admired and loved Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women were most seduced by the man and his cult. Likewise the cult of Mao in the West

Tony Judt

New Republic, 2002

A lot of this happens when the Narrative demands it

As long as you look at the Emperor from the neck up, it's almost easy to forget he's as naked as a jaybird.

Mark Y. Herring

Still true a century later

I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.

G.K. Chesterton

They trusted the experts

Alan Jacobs looks at a new book on the Satanic ritual abuse scandals of the 1980s and early 1990s:

structures of presumption: case studies

As Jacobs notes:

We don’t hear many claims these days that day-care workers, or anyone else, are forcing children to participate in Satanic rituals. But reading Beck’s narrative, I couldn’t help reflecting on the ways in which certain structures of presumption that drove that “moral panic” thirty years ago are still in place and still having massive social effects just in somewhat different contexts.

He bravely points out that while the MSM doesn’t fall for Satanic ritual abuse claims anymore, there are parallels to current media obsessions:

The precise logic I have outlined above is at work today in two prominent venues, sexual assault cases on college campuses and the increasingly widespread diagnoses of gender dysphoria among young people. Just as child abuse is real and tragic and often in the past was diminished or ignored so too with sexual assault and profound gender dysphoria. But as Beck’s narrative shows, attempts to correct past neglect can go wildly, destructively awry; and the “structures of presumption” I have laid out above make it virtually impossible to have a reasonable discussion of how to assess claims that have immense consequences for human lives.

To that list I would add a third:the MSM-promoted hysteria which fueled Black Lives Matter and their agitprop narratives.

Three quick points:

1. The ritual abuse panic was just an extreme example of the Rosenhan problem in criminal investigations. When an investigator or prosecutor makes up their mind their theories are immune to falsification.

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan experiment

Rosenhan II

Rosenhan redux

Revisiting the Hanssen case

2.) The abuse panic and the related popularization of “recovered memories” exposed modern psychology as a pseudoscientific cesspit. Frederick Crews demolished its intellectual foundations in the NYRB. Those essays and the resulting correspondence make for exhilarating reading.

3. The panic did not express itself in unthinking, proto-Trumpian lynch mobs. Instead, the damage was done by “experts”: police investigators, journalists, social workers, lawyers, psychologists.

Forgotten witch hunts

Note that very few of these “experts” paid a professional or personal price for the lives they ruined. They had no skin in the game. This sort of makes one think that an awful lot of media-approved experts qualify for Intellectual-Yet-Idiot status.

The great minds at NPR

The hosts of public radio’s On the Media think of themselves as smart, honest and brave. In the Age of Trump they are eager to play generals in the crusader armies of woke journalists.*

Needless to say, self-awareness is not the strong suit of either host. Before Donald Trump was even elected, Bob Garfield was convinced that America in 2016 was just like Weimar in 1933. Brooke Gladstone has repeatedly embarrassed herself. There was her hopeless fangirling for Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert:

Max Peak MSM Blue Bubble

Then there was that time she managed to cram three lies into nineteen words while defending the Obama administration on the IRS scandal:

We still need better media critics

Despite my low expectations based on this track record, Gladstone still manages to surprise me.

In a recent podcast interview (here) she exhorted young journalists to remember that it was possible to do ‘great journalism’ even in difficult times. She offered several examples of what she considered ‘some of the best journalism that has ever been done in America’:

Ida Tarbell
Lincoln Steffens
The New Masses

To Gladstone, these are among the ‘greats of American journalism.’

Lincoln Steffens was such a great journalist that he returned from Lenin’s famine-stricken Soviet Union and famously announced: “I have seen the future and it works.” Steffens was such a hard-bitten truth-seeker that he spent the last years of his life under the control of Comintern operative Ella Winters (he even married her) and dutifully followed whatever line Stalin wanted to.

The New Masses was an organ of the Communist Party USA. Its founding editor was Mike Gold one of Stalin’s cultural commissars. Gold’s commitment to the Party shines through in this quote from 1922:

The Russian Bolsheviks will leave the world a better place than Jesus left it. They will leave it on the threshold of the final victorythe poor will have bread and peace and culture in another generation, not churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs, the legacy of Jesus.

Mike Gold a true believer and the magazine he helped found was devoted to the Party line laid down in Moscow. The New Masses did not do investigative journalism; it did agitprop. It worked tirelessly to cover-up, minimize and justify Stalin’s crimes.

And yet, Brook Gladstone sees this as a role model for young journalists.

Perhaps On The Media should change its name to Truth. It is altogether more fitting.

*As generals go, they are very much in the mold of the Western Front commanders circa 1916. It’s easy to urge journalists to race to the left when you have nice public radio sinicures subsidized by the tax payers.

Thoughts for today

Whittaker Chambers:

Substituting a good deal of intellectual inbreeding for organic contact with U. S. life, they developed a curious cultural provincialism. The Depression came to them as a refreshing change. Fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their fellow countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity. Fundamentally skeptical, maladjusted, defeatist, the intellectual felt themselves thoroughly at home in the chaos and misery of the '30s. Fundamentally benevolent and humane, they loved their fellow countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity. And they particularly enjoyed life when applause began to greet their berating of the robber barons, president makers, economic royalists, malefactors of great wealth.

"Revolt of the Intellectuals", January 1941

Tom Wolfe:

From the outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down on the rest of humanity. And it did not cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: 'Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

Hooking Up

Ross Douthat:

The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.

"The Return of the Paranoid Style," Atlantic, April 2008

Fred Siegel:

For the American critics of mass culture, it was the good times of the 1920s, not the depression of the 1930s, that proved terrifying. 'It wasn't the depression that got me,' explained literary critic Malcolm Cowley, 'it was the boom... the conventionality, articiality... the organized stupidity.' of America.

The Revolt against the Masses

Just a couple of dots for future reference

From Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev,

The practical tricks of the trade including how to throw off police surveillance by making convuluted journeys-- switching public transport between buses and taxis was a favoured method. When it came to passing documents to contacts, libraries and the dark interiors of cinemas were favoured.. According to Orlov, the OGPU in the 1920s and 1930s favored particularly the use of the surgeries of 'trusted dentists and physicians', which were the preferred sites for really important meetings.

Why ‘investigative journalism’ is problematic

Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction:

The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are, therefore, almost entirely dependent on self-interested 'sources' for versions of reality that they report. 

Indeed, given the voluntary nature of the relationship between a reporter and his source, a continued flow of information can only be assured if the journalist's stories promise to serve the interests of the witness. 

Despite the heroic public claims of the news media, daily journalism is largely concerned with finding and retaining profitable sources of pre-packaged stories. 

What is called 'investigative journalism is merely the development of sources within the counter-elite or other dissidents in the government, while 'stenographic reporting' refers to the development of sources among official spokesmen for the government. There is no difference in the basic method of reporting. 

By concealing the machinations and politics behind a leak, journalists suppress part of the truth surrounding a story. Thus, the means by which the medical records of Senator Thomas Eagleton were acquired and passed on to the Knight newspapers (which won the 1973 Pulitizer Prize for disclosing information contained in these records) seems no less important than the senator's medical history itself, especially since copies of the illegally obtained records were later found in the White House safe of John Ehrlichman. 

Max Holland, Leak

As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his review of The Secret Man, Watergate 'ranks as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own. Without a consensus about what that agenda was, there is a gaping hole in the center of the narrative. 

(On Bernstein source John Sears): Backgrounding Watergate stories was a perfect way to exact revenge against those who had twarted his aspirations, chiefly Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman. Their decline might even pave the way for him to return to a position of influence and power.

The primary documents also proved that several of Felt's statements to Woodward had been false and/or misleading. p183

(Quoting Joan Didion): “Every reporter, in the development of a story, depends on and coddles, or protects, his or her sources. Only when the protection of the source gets in the way of telling the story does the reporter face a professional, even a moral choice: he can blow the source... or he can roll over, [and] shape the story to continue serving the source.” 

A Felt-sourced story appeared first in the Post, immediately followed an even better account in Time, which had also been sourced by Felt. Ironically, the Post then ran another story citing the Time article as corroboration. 

Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber

The whole purpose of the ‘anonymous source has been precisely reversed. The reason there exists a First Amendment protection for journalists’ confidential sources has always been to permit citizens -- the weak, the vulnerable, the isolated-- to be heard publicly, without fear of retaliation by the strong-- by their employer, for example, or by the forces of government … Instead, almost every ‘anonymous source’ in the press, in recent years, has been an official of some kind, or a person in the course of a vendetta speaking from a position of power.

[Using anonymous sources] makes stories almost impossible to verify. It suppresses a major element of almost every investigative story: who wanted it known.

Edward Jay Epstein, The Annals of Unsolved Crime

A third possible conspiracy involved government officials clandestinely distributing protected data, including FBI 201 files, to select journalists in order to weaken, if not destroy, the Nixon Administration. That the release was “deliberately coordinated,” rather than a spontaneous act of whistle-blowing, is suggested by CIA memoranda, written by CIA officers Martin Lukoskie and Eric Eisenstadt (published as an appendix in Jim Hougan’s book Secret Agenda), one “for the record” and the other for the CIA’s deputy director of plans. The memos discuss how Lukoskie’s operation “has now established a ‘back door entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm, which is representing the Democratic Party in its suit for damages resulting from the Watergate incident,” and had also managed to feed stories to the Washington Post via Bob Woodward on the understanding that there be no attribution to the CIA operation.

Sir John Keegan, Intelligence in War

As defence correspondent, then defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, i decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having concluded, by that stage of my life, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists, and the historians who try to reconstruct the past out of their records are, for the most part, dealing in fantasy.

Jack Shafer:

Evidence of the reviewers' cluelessness comes when the panel assesses the CBS journalists for political bias and discovers none. I don't know that I've met more than four or five investigative journalists in my life who didn't wear their political biases on their flapping tongues. Almost to a one, they're suspicious (paranoid?) about corporate power, dubious about the intentions of governments, and convinced that at this very moment a secret meeting is being held somewhere in which a hateful conspiracy against the masses is being hatched. I won't provoke the investigative-journalist union by alleging that most of its members are Democrats or lefties, but aside from a few right-wing reporters sucking conservative teats inside the government, how many Republican investigative aces can you name?

Far from being a handicap, political bias appears to be a necessity for the investigative reporter.

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A hero passes

RIP Gen. Harold Moore

'We Were Soldiers' Vietnam veteran Hal Moore, 94, dies in Auburn

Related:

Ia Drang

Thought for the day

Computers hide mistakes in logic while sanctifying information with an aura of truth.

More here:

Computer Models

Thought for the Day

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley

Rudi Feistman is gone, but his type is still around and making trouble

From Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing:

Rudy Feistman was one of the young intellectuals, or rather eternal adolescents of the Party, who had never done any serious work in their lives, were incapable of standing on their own feet, and therefore regarded themselves as 'professional revolutionaries'. They had become so completely soaked in the atmosphere of the Party and in the dialectics of the smear, that they regarded slander as a natural and legitimate weapon.

Point to ponder

Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists, and the historians who try to reconstruct the past out of their records are, for the most part, dealing in fantasy

Malcolm Muggeridge

John Dean's tired act

Good read here:

Why The Press Needs To Stop Comparing Everything To Watergate
By now, John Dean’s pronouncements on the scandals du jour have become one of the most predictable tropes in political journalism.

While Dean did some laudable things to expose Watergate, we’re going on year 42 of his 15 minutes of fame. McKay Coppins is a talented and creditable reporter, and he’s hardly the first to shoot the breeze with Dean in search of a drive-by byline. By now, Dean’s pronouncements on the scandals du jour have become one of the most predictable tropes in political journalism.

More on Dean:

Watergate: The Dean Story and the Standard Account

Watergate and the True Believers

Watergate Curiosity Shop (II)

I whole-heartedly agree with this:

(God forbid we all acknowledge that the only truly, sincerely repentant Nixon aide was Chuck Colson, who spent the rest of his life ministering to prisoners after he became one.)

Related:

Facts are stubborn things

Watergate and history

Steelers and Patriots, amateurs and professionals

End of a season and maybe the end of an era as Ben Roethlisberger talks retirement.

Joe Starkey: Tomlin, Butler should be embarrassed after latest Brady beating

Last year, with an entire offseason to prepare, the Steelers were disorganized and literally did not cover the Patriots’ top weapon (Rob Gronkowski) on several plays. In this game, Brady sat back there like he always does against the Steelers and lit them up for a franchise postseason record 384 yards. He completed 32 of 42 passes for three touchdowns and no interceptions.

His numbers in Foxborough against the Steelers really do seem like fake news. In six games dating to 2002, Brady has completed 171 of 239 passes for 2,147 yards, 21 touchdowns and no interceptions.

Against Mike Tomlin teams, Brady now has 22 touchdowns and no interceptions.

I am defender of Tomlin, and Ben Roethlisberger is a Hall of Famer. But it’s hard to win when the other coach and other quarterback are so clearly superior.

Paul Zeise: Patriots outplayed and out-coached the Steelers yet again

The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.

If that is truly the definition, then my diagnosis for the Steelers today is that they are officially certifiably insane. …
The Patriots don’t beat the Steelers every time because they have better players or more talent; they beat the Steelers because they are much smarter, much more disciplined, tougher and far better coached.
…
“We do what we do” is silly it worked against the Dolphins and Chiefs because the Steelers are better than those teams, but against the Patriots, you better have more than just empty cliches and chest-pounding nonsense.

What if “empty clichés and chest-pounding nonsense” is the best this coach has to offer?

When Joe Green was asked what made Chuck Noll a great coach he responded that Noll “knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it.” Noll explained the “how to get it” to Rocky Blier once on the sidelines:

When you are out there on the field the thing that gets you through are the habits you create. It's what you do in practice that carries on to the field. All that rah-rah stuff doesn't win ball games.

As a coach Tomlin reminds me of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes. Instead of “???” as step 2 of his plan, he offers portentously delivered clichés about “next man up”, “rise to the occasion”, “unleashing Hell in December”, and “the standard is the standard”.

The special operations world has a saying that applies here:

Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they cannot get it wrong.

On Sunday there was no doubt who were the amateurs and who were the professionals in Foxborough. The gap between the two teams starts with coaching.

Big Ben’s Real Message

I think, particularly in his post-Kansas City criticism last week of the selfish Antonio Brown, and this week of the team’s lack of maturity and readiness for the game, that Roethlisberger was focusing his frustration on three people: Brown (to be sure), coach Mike Tomlin and offensive coordinator Todd Haley.

The dissing of Brown is easy. He’s too often this year been immature, and if Roethlisberger had to settle him down on the sidelines at Foxborowhich has been reportedit’s an Odell Beckham-like bout of baby behavior that simply has to stop. Brown’s too great a player to be sulking. He’s the major reason why the Steelers won the division in the first place, after his reach over the goal line resulted in the AFC North-winning touchdown on Christmas against Baltimore.

I got the sense, regarding the Roethlisberger/Tomlin situation, that the quarterback is frustrated that Brown is acting up over and over again, and the coach hasn’t stopped it. Good on Tomlin for forcefully going after Brown after the Facebook incident last week, but little things have flared up often this year. I cannot imagine Tom Brady issuing a read-between-the-lines call-out of an offensive teammate; he’d never question how Bill Belichick was handling a player. Maybe Roethlisberger isn’t. But two weeks in a row, when he questions things like players’ maturity and attentiveness, what really is he talking about? Players, yes. But alsoright or wrongthe control of them by the head coach.

Ben Roethlisberger critical of young receivers after AFC title loss

A drop by Cobi Hamilton in the end zone a few plays earlier on the same drive also was costly. Roethlisberger did not refer to Hamilton’s drop specifically, but he alluded to the young players not coming through in big moments throughout the game.

“I don’t know if that’s the one thing, but you have to score when they’re down there,” Roethlisberger said. “There were missed opportunities whether we didn’t execute well enough, whether plays weren’t made by me or other guys. At times it felt like maybe it was too big for some of the young guys.”

...

“It’s a little frustrating,” Roethlisberger said. “We talk about how sometimes it’s just one play here, one play there. Tonight we didn’t make those plays. Was [the moment] too big? I don’t know. We need to make every single play in a game like this, in a moment like this.

Another relevant lesson from the world of combat training: In critical moments, "you don't rise to the occasion; you default to your training."

And one from Chuck Noll: "You only feel pressure when you don't know what you're doing."

Watergate Curiosity Shop (II)

Politics was a Washington blood sport long before the Clintons moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. During Watergate even the ‘good guys’ played the game.

Len Garment relates a particularly nasty episode in his book Crazy Rhythm.

In late 1973 someone from the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office leaked a transcript of a White House tape to Sy Hersh of the New York Times. According to Hersh, Nixon had discussed an SEC investigation with John Dean. In the course of the conversation Nixon called two of the SEC investigators “Jew boys.”

That night a furious Nixon summoned Garment to the White House. He vehemently denied using the slur. He ordered Garment to listen to the tape and then demand a retraction from the Times.

The next day a dubious Garment listened to the tape. He was surprised to find that Nixon was right: the phrase “Jew boys” never occurred. The men from the SEC were described as “Jewish boys”but not by Nixon.

It was John Dean who said it.

Garment called Clifton Daniels, the Washington Bureau chief of the Times. He offered to let him hear the tape so that he could run a retraction. Daniels delayed and negotiated but never attempted to verify Garment’s claims. Nor did the Times ever correct their false story.

It is a small incident, not even a footnote in the conventional histories of Watergate. Yet it is telling.

Someone in the righteous band of Watergate prosecutors saw fit to doctor a transcript and leak it to Sy Hersh with the obvious intent to libel the president. Had one of Nixon’s men done something like this, it would have made it into the Articles of Impeachment. But because one of the ostensible ‘good guys’ pulled this dirty trick, the New York Times did not care.

BTW, I’m sure that the fact that Clifton Daniels was Harry Truman’s son-in-law had nothing to do with how Gray Lady handled this.

Related:

Watergate Curiosity Shop (I)

Journalists (especially editors) need to learn from Sir John Keegan

As defence correspondent, then defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, i decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having concluded, by that stage of my life, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case

Chesterton on bubbles and the red/blue divide

From Heretics:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell.
=======
Modern man "says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; he he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. he is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals-- of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.
=======
He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this....The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke.
===============
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherenct weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere-- a very powerful description in a purely literary sense-- of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

Nat Hentoff, RIP

A lefty, but an honest and independent lefty.

Wesley J. Smith:

We have lost a great writer, civil libertarian, free speech absolutist, jazz historian, and pro-life advocate....

Nat Hentoff was an indefatigable writer, a man whose deeply ingrained integrity compelled him to willingly lose good friends and professional opportunities if that is what it took to remain steadfast on behalf of causes he thought to be right.

This is from one of his columns about Terri Schiavo

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.

Seems appropriate to quote the late Henry Hyde here.

When the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God – and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world – and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him because he loved us,’ – and God will look at you and say not, ‘Did you succeed?’ but ‘Did you try?’

There can be no doubt that Nat Hentoff tried. At great cost to himself and with no profit to be had, he was an unstinting fighter for life and human dignity.

Merry Christmas

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2:8-14