In the Stacks, December 2024
Mysteries, abortions, ordinary men
NOTE: This post will not fit in your email! To see the full article, please click the title of this piece, and you can read it on a browser.
Hello, kittens! Welcome to my new monthly series In the Stacks. Because I consume a lethal quantity of Substacks every month, I’ve decided to start a monthly series featuring and celebrating the articles that made me think.
Every single one of these writers is good and worthy of your subscription. I try to provide a variety of small and large creators and a diversity of perspectives. If some of them make you mad or sharply differ from your perspective, that’s good. Please consider supporting them by liking, subscribing, and sharing their work.
Note that inclusion in this series does not imply agreement. I read widely across the ideological spectrum. If a piece shows up here, it is well written and made me think, but it might not reflect my worldview. If you want to know what I think, read my own writing or ask me directly.
First, here is a rundown of my articles from November. I’m biased, but I think you should read all of them:
Without further ado, here are the articles I read over the past month that I enjoyed most.
: The Deeper Mystery of Reality
Nietzsche’s and Molière’s point is to call out the absurdity of claiming to answer a question or clarify a mystery by using fancy language to essentially restate the question itself in the form of an assertion. Today, if you multiply that approach by something like infinity, you have the situation that exists in modern technological societies, where it is widely but implicitly assumed that, thanks to science, we all know exactly who and what we are, what the world is, how everything works, and how it all fits together, simply because of the multitude of scientific-sounding but ultimately vacuous and question-begging explanations that undergird our collective worldview.
: The Men Who Raped Gisèle Pelicot Were Not Ordinary.
Many people have commented on description of the rapists as ‘ordinary men’ that has frequently been made The rapists have been described thus because they had such normal jobs and roles in all parts of society - a butcher, a soldier, a nurse, a lorry driver - and are men one could expect to encounter routinely in one’s daily life and never know what they were capable of. We often like to think that we would know if we were in the company of a man who fantasised about and then participated in the rape of women - that some aura of evil would emanate from him. No, in this sense, they were, indeed, ordinary men and that is terrifying. Some pieces written about the case have used Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil” to describe how seemingly ordinary people participated in the Holocaust.
However, some feminists have used the phrase ‘ordinary men’ not to convey that seemingly ordinary people can be monsters, but to convey that it is ordinary - commonplace, standard, normal - for men to participate in serial rape. This is simply not true and it is not only deeply unjust to the vast majority of men (whom many feminists making this argument would tell me I should not be caring about in the current context or possibly any context) but also deeply counterproductive to the aim of addressing sexual violence against women.
Rachel Hewitt: Why Aren’t More Men Talking About This?
I have no advice about how to spot men who are living out these secret, destructive, women-hating lives. I wish I knew. But from talking and listening to other women, I’d simply say this: women, trust your instincts. If something feels off in a man’s behaviour, take it seriously. Men maintain their secret lives by gaslighting women who become suspicious, by denying that any suspicion-arousing behaviour occurred, and by turning the blame back on women, suggesting they’re paranoid, controlling, mad. Pélicot encouraged Gisèle’s heart-breaking belief that she was suffering from dementia. I’d advise women to be aware of this tactic. I’d also recommend wariness if a man is performing a public act of virtue, or playing up his ‘family man’ role. Don’t necessarily see this as an indication of virtue through-and-through: it might well be the opposite, an attempt to over-compensate for secret malevolence. And I’d also be extremely cautious about men who spend a lot of time online, and are secretive regarding passwords and access to his phone.
: Relational Itinerancy
This condition, these worries, constitute relational itinerancy. You see, I'm worried about these questions because no one values friendships here. I seem destined to wander through friendships, being with the same people for a few months or years at a time, but never reaching a point of stability. Not once have I ever heard of someone turning down a big job offer to stay in his current location for a friend. For a romantic partner, perhaps—but not a friend. I have no ability to hope that anyone will not dump me at the sight of the slightest economic upward movement. Do you have any idea how debilitating this is—to believe that no one will ever see you as more valuable than five thousand dollars a year? I'm worth less than a car.
Freddie DeBoer: All The Little Unborn Babies
Nature is the most ruthless abortionist; those who talk about a right to life must face up to that plain truth. Nature takes babies by the bushel, sending decent and vulnerable career women to the bathroom at work, bleeding, weeping and inconsolable, telling themselves they’ve got five minutes to get it together and head back to their desks so that no one knows. Once you understand that you live in a world where atoms make up cells that make up tissues that make up organs that make up embryos that end up as clots in the toilets of people who desperately, desperately want to have children, you can’t take the idea of a “right to life” seriously anymore. A right to life? Babies are born addicted to fentanyl, babies are born with cancer. What are you talking about, a right to life? Whose job is it to enforce this right, if not the very celestial being that invented Trisomy 13, placenta previa, and ectopic pregnancy? He made the woman that was raped and He made the rapist and He made the resulting pregnancy that, we’re told, must not be ended with the medical science He allowed into His universe because that’s not what He wants. Mysterious ways, indeed.
: Why I Left Catholicism
Let me comment on the vibes point. Catholicism is unbelievably awesome. Catholic aesthetics — its art, its music, its sculpture — are simply the bomb; Catholic spirituality is objectively superior to that of many spiritual traditions on offer, and protestants wish they could lay claim to Catholicism’s philosophical heritage. (I took Aquinas as my confirmation name, in honour of the galaxy-brained Angelic Doctor who could dictate multiple books at the same time without a single dose of Ritalin.)
Many leave Catholicism for exactly the reasons you’d expect — they don’t like Catholicism’s sexual prohibitions, pro-lifeness, or what have you, and are justifiably disturbed by clerical pederasty and the Church’s complicity in hiding it.
These weren’t the reason I left: at the time, I was happy to accept the Church’s sexual teachings — even if I couldn’t make sense of all of them1 — and I knew that Catholicism could be true even if there were paedophiles masquerading as Catholics.
: The Reckoning
Identity politics is over. No one wants it. Latinos and blacks don't even want it, as witnessed by the fact that they moved to Trump in record numbers. Trump got a majority of Latino men nationwide, and in some counties he got a majority of Latino men and women, even with all that he has said about immigrants from Latin America over the years—like that “they're poisoning the blood of our people,” which is straight out of Mein Kampf. A comedian called Puerto Rico “a pile of garbage” at a Trump rally, and the entire democratic machine, and all of liberal media, seized upon it, as though a nuclear bomb had just vaporized an American city, and no one cared.
Identity politics is dead, and we have to bury it.
: Is Buddhism Losing It’s Cool?
I first became interested in Buddhism in my late teens - the late 1970s. I started practicing Zen in 1991. Perhaps my experience was idiosyncratic, or my memory is distorted, but I recall lots of emphasis on stories that conveyed mental toughness. Years staring at walls, cutting off one’s arm to convince a teacher to teach, taunting a samurai who could behead you. When I was at Tofuku-ji, a Rinzai monastery in Kyoto, one of the monks complimented me, impressed that such an old man (I was 37) could do the hard practice they did. The monks were all in their early 20s. And, yes, it was very hard.
No wonder the cool thing today is Stoicism. While several prominent Stoics such as Ryan Holiday, Massimo Piglucci, and Donald Robertson made it clear that they thought one of the candidates was particularly lacking in virtue, post-election, I’ve not seen any signs of Stoic pity parties. They’re all, like, being stoic about it.
Suppose you’re some young guy looking for a spiritual practice. Which looks cooler?
: Question Marks of the Mysterians
By leaps, steps, and stumbles, science progresses. Its seemingly inexorable advance promotes a sense that everything can be known and will be known. Through observation and experiment, and lots of hard thinking, we will come to explain even the murkiest and most complicated of nature’s secrets: consciousness, dark matter, time, the origin and fate of the universe.
But what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as Mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry, the Mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many prominent thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the linguist Noam Chomsky to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The Mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that many of the mysteries of the cosmos will forever lie beyond our comprehension.
: The Republicans Are No Longer Conservative
Trump and Trumpism more broadly represent the death of modern conservatism.
Trump’s platform was not about preserving institutions, but shaking things up. He primarily appealed to those of the view that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and needs major institutional reform. Already in 2016, Trump was not a conservative—he was a populist, interested in tariffs and immigration restrictions, and most of all, disruption for its own sake. He came to power on the platform of “things suck, those running our institutions are corrupt morons, and we need someone with a huge brain to change things.”
Trump’s reaction to Chesterton’s fence would be to Tweet “Totally Failed and Corrupt fence put up by the Democrats must be Put Down. Make America Great Again.” Personality-wise, Trump is the opposite of a conservative; he’s impulsive, firing off radical plans for major reform just to bring about change. No conservative advocates eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs as a throwaway proposal.
: Have Man-Hating Feminists Gone Too Far?
The course actually dedicated the bulk of its criticism to “white feminism” in a class that was like 80% white girls and taught by a white woman. The fact that these white women can read deep and often harsh criticism of their social status without becoming reactionaries, while hordes of young men vote against their economic interests because a podcaster dug up some anti-male tweets or headlines from gossip magazines is unmanly and pathetic.
Yes, it was normal to see viral tweets shitting on men or attacking men on social media a few years ago. I figured deep in the core of feminism I would see this, but it turns out those tweets and “I hate all men” statements are just random young women and girls venting about their dating or interpersonal issues. It has no relation to feminist ideology, despite male content creators who make money telling young men that’s what feminists think about them.
That’s all for now. If, between now and the next installment of In The Stacks, you find an article you think I would enjoy, please send it my way! Maybe it will make the list.
Thank you very much for the round-up! I had read about half of those and enjoyed them, so I'm excited to see more in the same vein.
This is awesome, thanks!