a slightly embarrassed announcement

Two weeks ago I entered mortal combat with Covid, and have emerged victorious but not unscathed. This bout featured an unexpected symptom: persistent vertigo, especially when looking at text. Not a great situation for someone in my line of work! (And with my personal preferences.)

But if I kept my computer screen at a certain distance and held my head still, I could without experiencing physical nausea read stuff on the internet. So for about a week what’s what I did, and the positive result, as I saw it, was that I was able to queue up several posts for my blog.

After about a week I started feeling better, and one evening I put on an Ella Fitzgerald record and sat down with my notebooks … and just started laughing. Laughing at how simply pleasureable pen and paper and music were. How much happier I was with the internet at a safe distance.

And the next day, when I looked over the posts I had queued up, I thought: these are unpleasant. These are the posts of … not an angry man so much as a petulant man. A man who had over the course of a week absorbed, as by osmosis, the Spirit of the Internet. And that is a foul, foul thing. Think of the polluted river in Spirited Away before Chihiro/Sen cleans him up.

I feel that in the last few days I’ve been purging myself. My head was full of this:

I had five posts queued up, and I’ve deleted all five of them. That means that in the coming week or two you’ll have fewer posts in your feed, but also that you’ll have less petulance in your feed. You’re better off, trust me on that.

And by the way, all this happened before the murder of Charlie Kirk. I only had a vague sense of who Charlie Kirk was, but suddenly my informational world was filled with people being maliciously idiotic online, while the legacy media were producing articles titled “Breaking News: People Being Maliciously Idiotic Online.” (See image above for what all that looked like.) At least that gave me the opportunity to purge my RSS feeds.

All this leads me to one more thought: often, when some current event crosses my horizon, I’ll start to write about it and then pause and ask myself whether I’ve written about that kind of thing before. I’ll do a little search, and usually I discover that I have indeed written about that kind of thing before. New events tend not to be anomalous; rather, they continue patterns of action and thought that are well established. Cultural change almost never happens suddenly. There’s a long, slow development or evolution along established lines. For instance, Yuval Levin’s book The Great Debate demonstrates quite conclusively that the pattern of contemporary political debates was established by the contest in the late 18th century between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. This is typical.

I hear many people saying that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “changes everything” for them, but they already said precisely that about the attempted assassination last year of Donald Trump. In fact neither event altered anyone, except to consolidate their myths. There is very rarely anything new under the sun, and the surest sign that all the existing norms and terms and disputes are firmly in place comes when people start shouting “This changes everything!”

When I look back through this blog I see certain themes, both analytical and prescriptive, articulated repeatedly. I have a fairly consistent explanatory framework to account for our culture’s primary traits, especially its pathologies; also for the conflicts that afflict the church. I have little new to add by way of explanation or prescription because my culture is locked into certain obsessively repeated patterns from which very few people learn anything. What I said five or ten years ago is equally applicable today (if it was ever applicable at all).

It’s especially important to remember that people love hating their enemies — they love that more than anything. So the worst thing you could do to them, as far as they’re concerned, is to diminish their hatreds. To those of us who don’t happen to share those hatreds, their behavior might look like wearying, pointless repetition. But from the inside, those hatreds are the primary instrument of myth confirmation. They give security, and people want security. I can’t blame them for that, but I sure wish they chose different means to that end. I have no influence in the matter, though.

In short: I’m wondering what the point of this blog is. Increasingly, I think of it as something complete. I don’t regret writing it, but it may have served its purpose, and I’m inclined to think that I should focus on my microblog as a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities, linking to posts from here when they seem to illuminate some new-but-not-really-new situation but writing new things here only rarely. And then almost always little essay-reviews on books and movies.

I need to mull all this over further — not that it matters much. My sense is that I’m one of those writers whose books make more of a difference than their online presence, though of course not much difference. So few people read anything I write — glamping videos on YouTube get eight million views while I’m a long way from a thousand true fans — that if I made decisions on the basis of influence I would just quit. But I’m trying be obedient to my calling. Hard to know what that means in this media environment, though.

Anyway, no matter how much or how little I write here, I’ll keep the blog up for public access.