A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, it was a good time to revisit (or visit for the first time) John Stuart Mill’s great liberal treatise of 1859, On Liberty. In my essay, I situate Mill’s defense of free speech in his drive to synthesize English Utilitarianism’s dry but pragmatic calculus of “the greatest good for the greatest number” with German Romanticism’s headier insistence on the imagination’s world-making power. Mill wanted to arrive at a rich conception of humanity as “a progressive being,” creating and consummating ourselves through the historical process. Without this context, Mill’s liberalism is easy to caricature as feckless irresponsibility; with it, nothing less is at stake than the free unfolding of our variable human nature. I pause to offer a mitigation, not an outright defense, of Mill’s notorious colonial-era restriction of free speech to people who are not what he calls “barbarians,” and I dwell especially on his argument that true education demands that students learn to master and assimilate divergent viewpoints:
How is the infrastructure of free speech to be erected and sustained? Through a proper education, one in which students are allowed to hear a diversity of views from those who hold them. Citing precedents in intellectual history from the Platonic dialogues (in which philosophy is conducted as an argument between multiple personae) to the legal practice of Cicero (who learned the opposing counsel’s case better than his own) to the process of Catholic canonization (which invites the “devil’s advocate” to speak against the candidate for sainthood), Mill argues that students must be prepared to defend their own positions against counterarguments they themselves are able to reconstruct from the inside: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Otherwise, people will hold even their own opinions lazily, unfeelingly, and without really knowing why—a state of intellectual torpor that bodes ill for the polity.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I responded to the controversy on the left over the putative “fascism” of Robert Egger’s films with a general reflection on why “[a]nti-modern aesthetics is not mere ornament; it is a load-bearing pillar of modern culture” and how “[a]ll cinema is fascist, even liberal cinema; all literature is liberal, even fascist literature” (and don’t miss the quote from Terry Eagleton explaining why Marxists prefer fascist to liberal art, at least in the context of high modernism, and my negative assessment of The Witch and The Lighthouse, since I haven’t seen The Northman yet);
I contextualized my essay on Mill (as linked above) in the New York Times’s oversimplification of his philosophy in their Elon Musk hit piece, reminisced about my college reading of Mill (on a final exam I was asked to write a dialogue between Mill and Hitler), castigated him for his eugenics, and explored the implications of his fascinating aphorism, “It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either”;
I denounced the practice in academia of demanding and giving coerced, undignified, jargon-choked apologies for social-justice offenses real and imagined (the one in question—a journal rejecting an overstatedly negative book review—is mostly imagined); then I traced this practice to French Theory’s rendezvous with The Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1968 and quoted an autobiographical passage from one of my own professors about falling under and then emerging from the spell of Leninism;
I wondered why the anti-abortion position ended up on the political right and the abortion-rights position on the left, given that it would really make more sense the other way around;
and I commented briefly, speculatively, and cryptically on the frightening new video the U.S. Army’s psyop unit recently released to the public, with reference to one of my own most paranoid pieces of writing, an essay from that most fiery summer of 2020 on Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
Elsewhere online: I feel honor bound to recommend this introduction to “Miladys,” an NFT phenomenon obscurely connected to the new reactionary avant-garde I’ve been charting on blog and podcast. Someone named in the piece Tweeted that the article is “Pure Ass”—but this is just defensiveness: people don’t want their scene scoped, accurately or in-. It’s all a bit over my head, but I offer it to you anyway as a flashpoint in the strobing war of culture and infrastructure, on the off-chance that you may understand it better than I do:
Milady Maker’s connection to New York also lends credence to the idea that its origins are, if not entirely grounded in edgelord, shock-value politics, at least somewhat reactionary. A recent Vanity Fair article traced the shape of the city’s “new right,” a scene more indebted to Nick Land and the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin than to the MAGA crowd. For these people, Catholicism is cool, family values are in and accepting money from Peter Thiel is a kind of aspiration. Angelicism01 and Land’s collected works (“Fanged Noumena”) are urtext; Barrett Avner’s Contain project, Honor Levy’s Wet Brain podcast, and the array of Instagram meme accounts ending in “-cellectuals” are sites of interpretation.
The article notes the prominence of Radiohead’s “Idioteque” at one of the “Milady Raves.” An old song, a different epoch. I recall standing in line at midnight on a city street to purchase Kid A two months into my first year of college. This may seem naive, but back in 2000 we really did think Kid A sounded like it was from the future. And here we are in the future, listening to Kid A.
We’re not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
We’re not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
And right here on SubStack, I recommend Elijah del Medigo’s aphorisms, gathered under the heading “Notes Toward a Lower Literacy Rate,” at the Covidian Aesthetics project. There I find the profound sentence, which might be written at the entrance of the Grand Hotel Abyss,
Political legibility is not merely poor strategy, it is simply gauche: it is impolite to announce your desires to the world.
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