Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Unhappy, Mad, Soft Moderns

Much seems to be said about contemporary madness and the various disorders which seem to afflict people at unprecedented rates throughout society (which nonetheless semi-mysteriously don’t appear outside the US). There are many treatments, but for every new treatment, a new illness emerges, while former illnesses tend to be retired, only to become behaviors seen to signal holiness.

Homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals most famously all went from being seen as insane to being venerated as holy people over the course of a few decades. The ability of the progressive social structure to raise and lower different behavioral groups is just a sign of its social power.

So, while in the 1950s and earlier, loose men and women were seen as kin to serial killers, just a decade or two afterward, they became objects of mass veneration and adoration — in a way that lasts to this day. Much of this can be traced to Freud and his critique of Christian morality.

Psychiatrists in the middle of the 20th century used to call promiscuity among both men and women a clear sign of ‘psychopathy.’ Following the convulsions of the late 1960s and 70s, children subjected to sexual education tend to learn that promiscuity is healthy at any age, and that possessiveness, romantic ‘obsession,’ and ‘slut-shaming’ are the real sins.

Today, you’re more likely to see people terms like ‘sociopath’ — to describe their boss, their father, their mercurial girlfriend, or some other figure in their personal lives whom they dislike and wish to cast moral aspersions against. They’d appear to be ridiculous were they to cast those aspersions in religious terms. If they use medical language, they can smart themselves up, like a real doctor.

These crazes tended to be reinforced by the mass press, which took the words of doctors seriously, but more often blew them out of proportion to the actual problem.

We see this today as new disorders fall into and out of fashion. Mothers want to ensure that their boys have the most fashionable diagnoses. Men and women categorize one another in terms of psychiatric diagnoses to warn one another away from madwomen and madmen. Many are happy to define themselves by diagnosis, as you routinely see on personal blogs like on Tumblr. Others self-diagnose using Dr. Google, much to the consternation of the professionals who bill by the hour.

What Thomas Szasz uncovered was that mental illnesses are better understood as metaphors for moral illness than as conventional illnesses like cancer and appendicitis. As progressives change the moral structure of society, the quasi-scientific notions of what is healthy and what is ill must also change.

The real physiological, emotional maladies manifested by patients can often be traced to fundamental moral errors.While this may or may not result in lesions or neurological imbalances, it’s mistaken to trace these factors entirely to genetics or to some injury or another.

For many years now, the West has tended to train its people into moral error, and those moral errors often manifest themselves in disastrous physical and mental symptoms.

Obesity resulting from sloth and gluttony would be the most obvious and objective result of bad moral and medical teaching. People tend to want to blame technology for their sins or for sinful developments in history, but it’d be better to bring back a strong conception of virtue and vice.

It’s easy to blame the birth control pill for your own sexual incontinence, but much harder to confess your own willful sins. The fat man is more likely to blame Nabisco for making Oreo creme cookies so delicious rather than to look into his own gluttony, sloth, and intemperance. Or he will blame his ‘genes,’ even if his grandfather was skinny as a beanstalk.

Similarly, the gangbanger who is shot by police after he fails to properly rob a liquor store is a ‘victim of society,’ which is to say the result of impersonal forces, who is not seen as a morally responsible agent. Condemning such a man for being evil seems out-dated, non-scientific, and just plain cruel besides.

Since the currency of the language around virtue and vice has exited circulation, while the impulses remain. They try to find linguistic and medical substitutes to ascribe personal moral failings to impersonal forces and objects. “The devil made me do it” at least has some poetic elegance to it.

From Social Pathologist’s clinical experience seeing over 140,000 patients in Australia, and Theodore Dalyrymple’s similar experience with patients in the United Kingdom, bad moral teaching about gender and sexuality tends to result in mass unhappiness and worse. [ED: Social Pathologist informs us that it was 140,000 visits, and not 140,000 separate patients. My mistake.]

What must be taken as odd is that what’s considered healthy romantic behavior now would have been considered ‘psychopathic’ in 1950. The family structure of 1950, which was already relatively feminine-centered, tends to be termed as ‘abusive’ today, in the same sort of slippery ways in which ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘rape’ have been flippantly, repeatedly redefined.

There’s a certain method to this madness — it’s to grasp for demons to blame for sin. The demons may be real, but someone has to invite them in through the door for them to get any of their work done.

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Economist Deputy Editor Standage on Digital Media

I thought this interview with Nieman Labs was quite useful, although it’ll be irrelevant to most of you. This is mostly only going to be relevant to other bloggers and people who are heavy readers.

This is the key passage:

TOM STANDAGE: There are a number of big trends at the moment. The starting point is that we do see digital as an opportunity — because what we do, what our mission is, does not depend on the medium with which you deliver it. And I know everyone says that, but in our case it really is true, because what we actually sell is what I like to call the feeling of being informed when you get to the very end. So we sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. And we did that initially as a weekly print product. Then it turns out you can take that same content and deliver it through an app.

The “you’ve got to the end and now you’ve got permission to go do something else” is something you never get. You can never finish the Internet, you can never finish Twitter, and you can never really finish The New York Times, to be honest. So at its heart is that we have this very high density of information, and the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time — which is roughly how long people spend reading The Economist each week — then we’ll tell you what matters in the world and what’s going on. And if you only read one thing, we want to be the desert-islandmagazine. And our readers, that’s what they say.

So that’s the starting point. The word “print” and the word “digital” don’t appear in there. This is a model that works in print and you can apply it to digital. And it is working — this is a product that does just as well in a digital world.

What we did with Espresso was instead of doing that in a weekly cadence, we should be doing it in a daily cadence. So Espresso is again meant to be the daily desert-island briefing. And there are a lot of these news daily briefings around, but what we wanted to be was forward-looking — to give you the feeling of being ahead of the news, “this is what’s coming up today, and look out for this.”

Another aspect of it is — and I get all the morning briefings,Sentences, the FT one, and Quartz’s, and the rest of them — is that we don’t do links. The reason that we don’t do links, again, if you want to get links you can get them from other people. You can go on Twitter and get as many as you like. But the idea was everything that you need to know is distilled into this thing that you can get to the end of, and you can get to the end of it without worrying that you should’ve clicked on those links in case there was something interesting. So we’ve clicked on the links already and we’ve decided what’s interesting, and we’ve put it in Espresso.

That’s the same that we do in the weekly as well — we’re not big on linking out. And it’s not because we’re luddites, or not because we don’t want to send traffic to other people. It’s that we don’t want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here’s an Economist article on it — read it and that’s what you need to know. And it’s not covered in links that invite you to go elsewhere. We’ll link to background, and we’ll link to things like white papers or scientific papers and stuff like that. The idea of a 600-word science story that explains a paper is that you only need to read the 600-word science story — you don’t actually have to fight your way through the paper. There is a distillation going on there.

That’s a big thing that we’re focusing on. How else can we apply the same values — which is the distillation and the finishability, the trend-spotting and the advocacy — how else can we apply them to new areas? So we have various things that are on the boil. As has been reported, we’re looking at foreign-language editions. It’s not quite editions, because we’re taking a slightly different approach to it. We haven’t said exactly what we’re doing there, but that’s very much something that digital distribution allows us to do.

The key takeaway, at least for me, is that people whose time is valuable want their reading packet to have a solid ending. Part of what makes the web addictive and enervating is that it goes on infinitely. Including lots of links in an article (or many links at all) is cognitively tempting, and tends to encourage infinite curiosity which is rarely satiated.

As a side note, I grew up reading the Economist from maybe around age 12 to my early 20s. I stopped because they’re filthy rotten Commies who only give people the illusion of being well-informed. Nonetheless, they’re effective at what they set out to do, so the structure is worth imitating somewhat, whereas the venture funded media companies (funded by a monetary policy the editorial staff at the Economist were happy to cheer on) don’t care about profit and are as such not under much real economic pressure to produce business models that work.

So, the weakness of the Economist model is that people like me, who should have been lifelong subscribers, no longer trust the judgment of the editorial team, which has pretenses towards political neutrality and intellectual excellence, but fails to fulfill those promises regularly. It’s the magazine of the ‘Davos Consensus / Soviet-Harvard Delusion,’ which is useful if you have to operate in that environment, but useless or damaging otherwise.

The method I’ve seen succeed recently is to have some mix of quick-bloggy-type posts along with larger, more permanent articles in a separate section. But there is no one ‘right’ answer, and a lot of the reason that I write like this is because it helps me to record/form my thoughts, invite criticism, and see what resonates and doesn’t with people.

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Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”

Someone on Ask.fm suggested that I take the time to watch the famous documentary series by Kenneth Clark on the development and artistic history of Western Civilization. I’d previously only seen segments of it. I’m not finished yet, but am halfway through.

Most of it’s easy to find on Youtube via this playlist, but the first episode can be rough to find thanks to a DMCA takedown from our friends at the BBC.

Thankfully, there’s a version of it buried in the search results (due to a shoddy text description) which I’ve linked to below for your convenience:

This reminds me of the good bits of taking an art history course, along with the pleasure of traveling around Europe (which I haven’t been able to do for a long time now). For those of you unfamiliar with this, it’s a series of films from 1968 in which the presenter goes about discussing the development of European civilization after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The first episode in particular is worth watching for Clark’s articulated perspective (second-hand, I’m sure) that part of what makes civilization different is the motive force of feeling and belief in the essential goodness and excellence of that civilization. What also differentiates it from barbaric social forms is that the people actually believe in it enough to build rather permanent and beautiful structures. Barbarians roam, but civilized people settle. The artifacts that barbarians leave behind tend to be portable and durable — gem-encrusted talismans, jewelry, and statuettes. Civilized people leave behind fragile things, exquisite books, towering buildings, and heroic statuary.

Part of what makes modernity strange is that, although technology renders it super-capable in some ways, many of the things that we build lack permanence and beauty. The people are also enervated, with few honestly believing in the core spirit of that civilization. Sadness, depression, and madness emanate from a people sapped of meaning to their lives. When people can readily come to a satisfying answer about what their life is fundamentally for, they become far more animated, in a way that tends to leave indelible marks on history.

This series also leads inevitably to thoughts about the disposable nature of most contemporary artifacts and art. Our surroundings, buildings, and most of our possessions tend to lack both permanence and lasting purpose.

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