Waking Up from an Illusion

I suppose I must have recently finished reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. It was Arnold who gave me the awareness of culture as against “machinery.” Culture was the pursuit of the Good, of “sweetness and light” in Arnold’s words. What he called “machinery” was simply a tool used towards that pursuit. 

I saw a Tucker Carlson segment in which he was bemoaning an increasingly transparent effort by the mass media to lodge insect-based diets in the minds of the public. I do not know how obvious this may or may not be to most people, but the first stage in any effort to affect public opinion towards any desired course of action is to present that plan as an object of thought. This recurring rash of articles and think pieces on the benefits of an insect diet was presumed to be part of a much longer campaign against the popular and widespread consumption of meat. 

“They want to make it so that you can’t eat what you want to eat. But that’s your right as an American, to eat a hamburger or whatever else you want, whenever you feel like it.” 

[This is not an exact quote, just the gist of what I took from the segment. It’s not worth it to me to try to find this clip and confirm the exact language used.]

Cards on the table: I like meat. I like chicken. I like steak. I even, on occasion, like a burger. 

However, I am also of the opinion (an opinion that has been significantly strengthened by my time abroad) that Americans are tremendously overweight and that MacDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, and all the rest are ersatz food — a crude delivery mechanism for empty calories meant to sustain a disposable workforce. As I understand it, this technique was first pioneered during wartime, when it was realized that calories of almost any quality might be used to fuel an army that would otherwise starve. 

Over and above these opinions, I believe that freedom must mean something more than “freedom to indulge my most crude and carnal appetites” or else it has little value. Liberty may mean freedom from unjust impositions from external forces, but it must also entail a degree of freedom from those internal forces which demean and degrade human existence. What was most offensive about Carlson’s objection was, I suppose, simply how low the motivations expressed by it were. If all that could be mustered against the imposition of the “bug-man” diet was the sweaty, pre-diabetic McDonald’s masses, then really — why not eat grasshoppers?

As someone who constantly castigates progressives for being congenitally incapable of recognizing the negative outcomes of their own policy decisions, it was hard to ignore that conservatives are prone to the same mistaken in the reverse direction: praising those forces which lead to the erosion of conservative values. Conservatives so often bemoan the bloating of the administrative state as anti-liberty if not outright anti-human, but how had I failed to realize previously that the “right” for me and for anyone else to eat as many hamburgers as my wallet could stand and my belly contain required an administrative managerial apparatus every bit as far reaching and degrading as anything a government might create. What difference should it make if this apparatus was directed by corporate managers rather than politicians or bureaucrats? 

I noticed a similar irony emanating from the hordes of progressives who bemoan our supposed impending annihilation via global warming. A recent conversation between my coworkers began with them discussing how dire our situation was (environmentally speaking), how we would surely be wiped from existence in the next ten to twenty years, and from there, seamlessly moved to discussing what brand of electric car they would like to buy. This is not even idiocy; it is simply make-believe. 

The fantasy of “Green Energy” is a convenient fake-out for bad-faith fake-activists. When Michael Moore (darling of the Left) took bite out of this myth by producing Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans, it was illuminating to see how quickly he was cut down by the people whom he had previously considered his own. Moore didn’t realize that he’d forced upon left-wingers a choice that they were loath to make, between their stated commitments and their actual commitments. He was the dummy who stands up in a room fool of liars and out sheer idiocy states the truth because he thinks that his company simply aren’t aware of it. 

Aside: Please do not write some inane comment telling me that Moore’s doc was “debunked.” It’s not that I don’t believe such a refutation is possible (obviously it is), it’s simply that I have no faith that you have would be able to correctly identify it. I barely trust you to identify which of your holes the shit comes out of. 

The conclusion to his doc was that green energy was not going to provide any kind of miracle cure. There was only one realistic solution to climate change: we would simply have to stop consuming as much. This is (whether they admit it or not) anathema to the Left. Any future which does not assure them greater comfort, greater pleasure, greater ease, greater self-indulgence will never be considered “progress,” because those are literally the foundations for how they define that word. 

Sad to say, the Right is not terribly different. 

History has provided us with examples of truly great hedonists and libertines: Casanova, Oscar Wilde, Louis XIV, Charlie Sheen. In the writings of the Marquis de Sade, the hedonic is heedlessly elevated till it approaches the demonic. But, as Kierkegaard notes in Fear and Trembling, the demonic approaches more closely to Grace and to the divine because it does have a heroic nature to it. The opposite of the divine is not the demonic; it is the profane, the banal. 

But there is exactly nothing heroic about wanting to fulfill one’s fast-food indulgences as one likes, to be as unkept and self-indulgent as one cares to be. In other words, there is nothing heroic in banality, by definition. 

But the other issue at hand was the ironic fact that Carlson was here endorsing the same consumer interests that in other areas, he would fight against. 

This must be understood: consumerism is by its nature anti-conservative — if “conservative” is to mean anything more than an occasional pumping of the breaks on left-wing radicalism. In the eternal drive to discover new areas of commodification, barriers such as morality and deep cultural bonds (the stuff conservatives claim they care about), must inevitably be eroded in the name of selling more and more to an increasingly unscrupulous public. As Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death, in the pursuit of “good television,” everything but the spectacle could be (and would be) jettisoned, including rational thought. Maybe this trend has reached its apogee in the absurdities of Tik Tok, but I suspect not. It seems that there are yet newer lows to be discovered. 

What this means is that, to the extent that conservatism is consumerist, it is not actually conservatism. It is a Trojan horse which sounds a weak complaint about whatever new idiocy the Left has concocted, while strengthening the very drives and cultural mores which have justified that latest idiocy as well as the idiocy that will soon follow after it. A true conservative cannot be anti-porn and pro-MacDonalds, anti-lust and pro-gluttony. Maybe conservatives need to spend some time asking themselves whether they are not simply one school of hedonism shouting at a rival school of hedonism. 

These are the questions that occupy my thinking a fair amount today. I know that I often affect a tone of absolute confidence in much of my writing, usually because most public opinion on controversial topics is so ludicrously, hilariously uninformed. But this time, I do actually see this as, possibly the start of a conversation, or at the minimum, a record of my developing thoughts on politics. It seems to me that we have labored for too long under two complimentary forms of false-consciousness (Left and Right) which have only masked developments more significant than either is prepared to admit. 

Please don’t mistake this for another instance of the annoying both-sides-ism which does so well on this platform. The “enlightened centrist” is (characteristically) the utilitarian hedonist par excellence. Their only guiding principle is (9 times out of 10) simply whatever works out best for their own self-satisfaction.

I am simply suggesting a reexamination of these categories, what they represent, and to what extent they may be altered in order to remain relevant to the political considerations of our times.