IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

The Grating Roar: a review of How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, Philipp Felsch (Theodore Dalrymple, 8/02/24, The Lamp)

At the start of his essay on André Malraux, the great Belgian-Australian sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys tells a most amusing story. A stranger to a village attends Sunday Mass, the local priest being famous for his eloquence. After the service, all the congregation except the stranger have been moved to tears. Asked why he was not similarly moved, the stranger replies, “I am not of this parish.”

Leys said that he was not of Malraux’s parish either: he did not admire him. When it comes to Nietzsche, I am not of this parish.

I grant that Nietzsche was brilliantly clever and was possessed of certain important insights, psychological and sociological, sometimes expressed with wit and pithiness reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld. His main insight was that the loss of religious belief would entail philosophical, social, and psychological problems more severe than most people realized at the time, but as far as I am aware he provided no new philosophical arguments against the existence of God, nor was he the first person to question the metaphysics of morality in a world without transcendent meaning. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” was written when Nietzsche was a very young boy:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full . . .
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Of course, Nietzsche proposed a solution to this existential impasse, though again, he was far from the first to do so; but I do not think that he can be absolved entirely from the accusation that his solution, if taken to mean what it appears to mean, could serve as a pretext for the worst imaginable conduct. Between what he sometimes wrote and what Himmler said in his infamous speech about the S.S.’s glorious work of mass extermination there is, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a family resemblance (though of course Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for all that was done by his most brutish of admirers). His exegetes in turn accuse those who take him literally of being unsophisticated and incapable of understanding his depths; but this reminds me of attempts to turn the seventy-two virgins into seventy-two raisins.

LIBERALISM GOES FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH:

The U.S. is the King of Net Worth (Calafia Beach Pundit, 12/16/24)

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

REVIEW: of I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin (Reviewed by Karl Straub, December 18, 2024, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The big story throughout the book is that different elements of music are processed by different circuits in our brains, and the separate pieces of information are collated and then transferred to new circuits in order to process more complex aspects of the music. Details about pitch, duration, and loudness are stored early on, and the cooperating chain of brain departments eventually turns to complicated issues like the shape of a melody, the sonic character of instruments, and the emotional connections for the listener.

Few human activities compare to listening to music — although hikes in the wild and dancing are distant siblings — with its epic journey of interoffice memos linking both a network of small circuits and the often-isolated two hemispheres of the brain. It’s this sweeping process that leads to medicinal and therapeutic benefits; listening to music can open up alternate neural pathways to substitute for burned-out or dormant ones, and it can also rejuvenate paths exhausted by stress.

Among the book’s other fascinating takeaways: Playing music or singing decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, leaving us more relaxed. Children get attached to inanely catchy songs like “Baby Shark” because the repetition of musical information is building the brain pathways they’ll need to enjoy the greater benefits of music later on. Because adults already built their own pathways in childhood, these songs often drive them crazy. (Take heart, Mom and Dad: They really are good for the kids.)

For most music-therapy applications (stress/pain relief, mood alteration, and treating complex neurological dysfunction), the best results happen when the listener picks music they already love. (This means Zell Miller was onto something with his Charlie Daniels theory.) But it’s also true that increased understanding of how music works helps lead to improvements in brain health, even for non-virtuosos. In other words, musical comfort food and the musical equivalent of high fiber are both good for you.

ONE CUCKOO FLEW OVER:

Argentina Is Responding to Shock Therapy: He comes across like a madman, but Javier Milei is fast becoming the man of the moment. (Quico Toro, Dec 17, 2024, Persuasion)

Alongside a tax and cost-cutting spree, Javier Milei has gone on a kind of crusade against the thicket of regulatory nonsense that had colonized every bit of the Argentinian state. His economy minister launched a new mechanism to invite Argentinians to suggest useless rules to be done away with: in the first eight hours it was in operation, it received over 1,300 suggestions. The government deregulated everything from imports to labeling to apartment rentals. Its Deregulation Minister thundered at the mass of absurd regulations that meant importing, say, $30,000 dollars worth of toys required you to spend $10,000 on paperwork.

Argentinians may not have all turned into doctrinaire libertarians overnight, but they seem to have been catching on to the utility of the libertarian instinct. Faced with the mad mass of overbearing state interference in economic life, they seem to have accepted that you need a bit of a lunatic to cut through it: someone with the bombast and the pugnaciousness to fight the beast. In normal times, you’d surely prefer your president not to run around waving a chainsaw in the air like a madman, but Argentina left normal times so long ago the objection barely seems to even register.

Not, of course, that you can ever rest quite easy with a crazy person in charge of the government. Though he’s shown some signs of moderation in, for instance, restraining himself from calling Xi Jinping a murderous thug to his face, the way he used to, Javier Milei remains the edgelord he’s been all along: inveterately vituperative, revelling in insult, permanently itching for a fight. Treating bilateral relations with Spain the way a 14-year-old treats his first online fight, he called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez “the torture poor Spaniards have to put up with.” His frustration-control, never strong, remains as flimsy as ever. As long as he stays in power, Argentina will always be one tweet-thread away from the next crisis.

But for the moment, Milei has had more successes than failures. He’s stabilized the currency, ended the deficit, tamed inflation, and made more progress in terms of structural reform than would’ve seemed imaginable a year ago. He’s managed to get enough support from a congress he doesn’t control to pass some important reforms, though he’s had to push much of his agenda through executive action. He’s pushing for a major new nuclear power plant building program to prepare Argentina for the AI future. Milei is a man with big plans, and it’s no longer obvious they will fail.

HE HAD HER AT KILLING MUSLIMS:

Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad and me: Trump’s DNI pick and I, both in Damascus in the winter of 2017 to meet with the dictator of Syria, came away with very different takes (Michael Isikoff, December 17, 2024, Asia Times)

“Whether, if the FBI says something, it’s not some — something it’s not evidence for anyone, especially for us … It’s just propaganda. It’s just fake news.”

And with that, Assad gave me my lead. The dictator of Syria was using a phrase —“fake news” — that had been coined on the 2016 campaign trail by the now-US president. It was a new and lethal American export, a gift to authoritarians around the world looking for a way to dismiss and ridicule inconvenient truths.

And Assad, no doubt emboldened by the PR boost he had just gotten from his new friend, the congresswoman from Hawaii, was happy to join the chorus.

IT’S LONG COVID:

In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream (Tatum Hunter, 12/17/24, Washington Post)

[P]urported drone witnesses from Connecticut to Virginia — and as far west as Ohio — have taken to social media to share photos or videos of their sightings, which typically look like faraway orbs or blinking lights. Some have offered rank speculation: Did the government’s lax response to the drone reports indicate that authorities were somehow involved?

“This is the reason the government wants TikTok banned, so we can’t see what they’re doing,” said one TikTok comment with 20,000 likes on an unconfirmed news clip about dozens of drones emerging straight from the ocean.

Trump has fueled the frenzy, suggesting on Truth Social that the government is hiding information about the drones. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted Friday.

He repeated the claim during a Monday news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “The government knows what is happening,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment.”

DROOPALONG DEPUTIES:

Shootout in DOGE City: What can the new sheriffs in town actually do to cut government inefficiency? (Peter Van Buren, Dec 16, 2024, American Conservative)

One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending—things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt, also untouchable. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.

It’s busy work for the problem kids.

NOT QUITE TIME TO EAT FROM THE OTHER TREE:

Exploding the Big Bang: It was thought that science could tell us about the origins of the Universe. Today that great endeavour is in serious doubt (Daniel Linford, 12/09/24, Aeon)

The question of our Universe’s birth seems settled. And yet, despite how the Big Bang is portrayed in popular culture, many physicists and philosophers of physics have long doubted whether science can truly tell us that time began. In recent decades, powerful results developed by scientifically minded philosophers appear to show that science may never show us that time began. The beginning of time, once imagined as igniting in a sudden burst of fireworks, is no longer an indisputable scientific fact.

THE FISH DOES NOT KNOW IT’S WET:

Death at Yuletude: T.S. Eliot and “The Journey of the Magi” (Nayeli Riano, 12/14/24, Voegelin View)

Art, after all, is the way we cope with the world. It is not faith whole, even if art does, in the best times, impart the undeniable need for Christianity without proselytizing. Art can either hand us a little piece of light that lingers in our minds or hearts for some time, or it can be completely devoid of joy or hope, leaving us empty and seeking something more. But this is only the opinion of someone for whom excessively devotional pieces miss the necessary mark of suffering that makes for the best art, be it musical, visual, or literary. The great canon of Western literature is, for the most part, an ongoing conversation that is agnostic at best about hope or salvation despite it being rooted in Christianity; herein lies the paradox about Western civilization that, I believe, has rendered it the legacy that it is. What we inherit is the quality of conversation through art and philosophy that allows us to doubt and to interpret pain and suffering in ways that turn out to be, no matter how hard we try to shake it, hopeful, and beautiful—as though God’s grace is never really gone from our efforts to create meaning and to understand the world.

GETTING THE KITTENS TO CHASE THE LASER PEN:

Bringing Elon to a knife fight: Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform (Jennifer Pahlka, Dec 13, 2024, eating Policy)

I am guessing that those most worried that DOGE will succeed have never tried their hand at reforming government. It’s hard. But easier, you say, with no respect for the law, and the DOGE team will be unencumbered by such details. But that’s not true. The lawsuits will come. A lot of the government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they’ve basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?

Take the issue of respect for the law. Put aside the headline grabbing issues for a second and live in the mundane world of implementation in government. If you’ve spent the past ten years trying to make, say, better online services for veterans, or clearer ways to understand your Medicare benefits, or even better ways to support warfighters, you’ve sat in countless -– and I mean countless — meetings where you’ve been told that something you were trying to do was illegal. Was it? Now, instead of launching your new web form or doing the user research your team needed to do, you spend weeks researching why you are now branded as dangerously lawless, only to find that either a) it was absolutely not illegal but 25 years ago someone wrote a memo that has since been interpreted as advising against this thing, b) no one had heard of the thing you were trying to do (the cloud, user research, A/B testing) and didn’t understand what you were talking about so had simply asserted it was illegal out of fear, c) there was an actual provision in law somewhere that did seem to address this and interpreting it required understanding both the actual intent of the law and the operational mechanics of the thing you were trying to do, which actually matched up pretty well or d) (and this one is uncommon) that the basic, common sense thing you were trying to do was actually illegal, which was clearly the result of a misunderstanding by policymakers or the people who draft legislation and policy on their behalf, and if they understood how their words had been operationalized, they’d be horrified. It is absolutely possible to both respect the rule of law, considering the democratic process and the peaceful transfer of power sacred, and have developed an aversion to the fetishization of law that perverts its intent. The majority of public servants I know have well earned this right.

DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo and yes, the people in my community are watching. While our eyes are on potential abuses, they are also on the durability of the wall generally, and with deeply mixed emotions. It must be said: the wall is a problem. It is a problem for people who value the rule of law. It is a problem for people who care about an effective, responsive government.