Nihilism, sex and marriage

Read the following paragraph and you'd probably feel pretty confident making some assumptions about the author and the rest of the article it appears in. Those assumptions would probably be mostly wrong. But, play the game with me. Read it and imagine the person and the piece.

This isn’t to argue that pornography is harmless or even that it shouldn’t be censored: its pervasiveness clearly exacerbates the growing moral nihilism of our culture. But removing pornography won’t alter the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn depicts and legitimizes. The history of civilization would seem to show that there’s no hope of eradicating those qualities; they can only be contained—and checked—by strenuously enforced norms. And given our à la carte morality and our aversion to cultural authority—a societal direction made plain by porn’s very omnipresence—I wouldn’t put much faith in enforcement.

What attracted me to this quote on another site is that word "nihilism". You read this paragraph and you think, here is writer who is opposed to nihilism. She is actually a very unconvincing opponent of moral nihilism and is, I suspect, actually a moral nihilist despite herself. You might also think she doesn't like sex much but you'd be very wrong about that too. The things she doesn't much like are men's sexuality and marriage. Not just the institution mind; she doesn't like the kind of relationship that marriage institutionalizes.

First of all, however, I think she is very much right in two claims she makes that appear in that paragraph;

1. The problems of modern sexuality do not arise from pornography but from inescapable facts about sexuality. She clearly seems to believe that these are facts about male sexuality but her article reveals, again despite her claims, that this writer knows better than that and that female sexuality also plays a huge role.
2. I also agree with her that our culture's commitment to individual autonomy and aversion to authority make it impossible to deal with the issue through culturally enforced norms (assuming that would be a good idea, which I doubt).

Okay, you say but who is the author and what is the piece about?

Her name is Natasha Vargas-Cooper and the article is called Hard Core: The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women. Before you click on that, you will want to know that while the article is completely unpornographic, Vargas-Cooper is very direct and detailed in talking about what sort of subjects are increasingly portrayed in modern porn.

The piece has caused a lot of buzz on the Internet. Some people have attacked the piece for being yet another anti-porn crusade but it isn't that. As the headline says, she is more interested in what she believes modern porn is telling us about human sexuality. Others have zeroed in on something else: although the headline talks about revealing truths about men and women, Vargas-Cooper is actually much more concerned with men and the supposed pathologies of our sexuality.

There are some obvious and real problems with the article. For example: Millions of young women are fans of Taylor Swift but no reasonable person would allow that you can successfully generalize about all young women based on the personal style of Taylor Swift and the lyrics of her songs. And such generalizations would not be any more convincing if I told you about an encounter with one young woman who clearly modeled herself on Swift. Likewise it simply does not follow that because a lot of men use porn and some of that porn portrays something really ugly that every man's or even most men's sexuality fits into this model.

Another huge problem is that the numbers Vargas-Cooper cites are less than convincing:

The Internet has created a perfect market of buyers and sellers (with the sellers increasingly proffering their goods gratis) that provides what people—overwhelmingly males (who make up two-thirds of all porn viewers)—want to see or do.

If two thirds of porn viewers are men, then one third are women and one-third of porn users is an awful lot of women. And when you consider that people use porn as a masturbatory aid and that most men masturbate a lot more often than most women do, this statistic alone demolishes Vargas-Cooper's claim that today's porn tells us something unique to male sexuality. (Something that is also clear reading between the lines of her own piece.)

That said, I think Vargas-Cooper is on to something very important when she writes things like this:

The heated act of sex often expunges judgment, pushing the participants into territory they hadn’t previously contemplated. The speed at which one transgresses, the urge to reach oblivion, the glamour of violence, the arbitrary and shifting distinction between acts repulsive and attractive—all these aspects that existed only in sex are now re-created through Internet porn.

And this:

The manner in which one physically, and emotionally, contorts oneself for sex simply takes sex outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control.

Sex is like Huckleberry Finn, it defies sivilizing. It is one of those experiences where we are confronted by our raw animality. We surprise ourselves by responding positively to things we don't think we are going to or that we should like. Interestingly, however, Vargas-Cooper is honest enough to admit here what she is less comfortable acknowledging elsewhere: women are not immune to this reaction. And if that is true, we can't really say that it is all men pushing for this sort of experience that is to blame. And yet that is exactly what Vargas-Cooper wants us to conclude.

Let me give you a mundane, by today's standards, example of how women's sexual responses can surprise women themselves. A woman I have known since high school told me that when she was thirteen years old, one of her friends snuck a sex manual out of her mother's underwear drawer and a small group of girls her age read it aloud to one another. This was in the late 1970s. Anyway, they hit the section that discussed fellatio and all the girls had the same reaction: "Not in my mouth—never, ever ever, ever."

As my friend related it, all she had to do reduce one of those women to hysterical laughter five to ten years later was to remind them of that incident. As she put it, "Women's sense of what we will really want to do when we are really aroused is not very dependable". And we men get a lot of pleasure from pushing women a bit; we get a lot of pleasure from a woman surrendering herself to us by allowing herself to reach that point where that arbitrarily shift Vargas-Copper discusses above takes place. I suspect most men have had the experience where the harsh, ugly little word that a woman has said she hates suddenly becomes the harsh, ugly little word that puts her over the top.

Really good sex is always about surrender
One of the odd things about sex is that allowing the other person to please you is a form of surrender. And it is precisely because that pleasure involves a loss of control. Even to enjoy having your neck massaged requires you to put yourself, quite literally, in someone else's hands. In really good sex you reach a point where you are out of control and the other person is very much in control. And Vargas-Cooper correctly points out that this sex—sex where we surrender completely to another—is the very best sex there is. (She doesn't acknowledge, but we should, that this is a much more significant surrender for women than it is for men and that doing so will leave a woman more vulnerable than it does a man.)

If you don't feel comfortable about that surrender, you have three choices:

1. You can never lose control by either making sex about the other person's pleasure or simply abstaining.
2. You can lose control in circumstances where the other person is distanced; that is to say you can lose control in conditions where they are reduced to something like a masturbatory aid.
3. You can lose control only in the context of a loving, committed relationship wherein you have both pledged to fully give yourself to the other.

And it is here where Vargas-Cooper really gives herself away. Read the following and you'll notice that she is telling us an awful lot more about herself than she ought to be:

But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.” But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life.

Perhaps surprisingly, Vargas-Cooper's preferred choice from my list above is clearly option #2. Lots of women, but not all I am happy to be able to say authoritatively, want exactly what Vargas-Cooper wants. Relevant disclosure: been there, done that, was the man my ex claimed she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and consequently suffered through years of mundane sex and boring underwear while occasionally hearing about how other guys before me got to push her boundaries and that experience does have an impact on the way I see things. And I know I'm not alone here.

And you can see how that just might set up an ugly power struggle. If you cannot, you can read an account of just such an ugly power struggle in Vargas-Cooper's article.

But lots of other women will read what Vargas-Cooper wrote above and say, "Speak for yourself sister." As I say, she is revealing a lot more about herself here than she realizes.

Marriage?
But I would like to move onto the issue of marriage because Vargas-Cooper really reveals herself when she talks about marriage. In the quote above, she not only doesn't want to have her best sex in a committed relationship, she describes marriages as "domestic gulags". Later on, she will respond to another author by writing:

More important, the sort of sex that Dines envisions—where respect, love, and civic connections are merged into erotically rewarding experience—is utopian (and not perhaps all that enticing).

I don't, as I say, entirely disagree. The rewarding sexual experience doesn't come as a result of respect, love and civic connections.  Sex is and will always be something that defies control but is precisely that which makes the respect, love and civic connections so essential. The uncontrollable aspects become something you make a gift of to one and only one other person and you can do that because you trust them. You don't trust them because you know they will always be trustworthy; you do it because you love them and have decided to trust them. Marriage is a promise without a guarantee. But if you read the article, you will see that Vargas-Cooper provides lots of evidence of what happens when you take respect, love, and civic connections away and it isn't pretty.

Because she relentlessly slams the door on marriage every time it rears its head, Vargas-Cooper has to blame something else: male sexuality. But read her own words and there is an undeniable admission that female sexuality complements male sexuality. She is pushing to make sex meaningless and male dominated precisely because she won't allow the kind of relationship that is based on complete mutual giving. In other words, it is her own insistence on a lack of any moral sense to sexual relationships that gets her where she ends up. And that is a funny way to oppose nihilism.

More tomorrow.

Clea

Clea is a novel written by a guy who doesn't seem to believe in novels. It is sort of the opposite of books like Brideshead, A la recherche du temps perdu, and A Dance to the Music of Time. In those books, characters keep trying to live lives that have the unity and purpose of art and keep failing at this. In Clea, and the rest of the Alexandria Quartet, art keeps trying to represent life and it keeps failing.

I suppose this sort of stuff goes back to Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford: think of Conrad's Marlow telling the story of his visit to Africa but stopping again and again to say. "It's hopeless, hopeless".

Lawrence Durrell has used that trick in a way that's really quite audacious. He has a story told by a writer named Darley. You might say that Durrell created a character named Darley and then had Darley write the books for him. The audacious thing is that Darley, unlike Charles Marlow, is not a good story teller; he is a bad writer. He aspires to do fine writing and all four books are full of his efforts that don't really add up to much.

Here is an example. This is from Clea. Notice the clichés and awful metaphors here:

How could I help but think of the past towards which we were returning across the dense thickets of time, across the familiar pathways of the Greek sea? The night slid past me, an unrolling ribbon of darkness. The warm wind sea-wind brushed my cheek—soft as brush of a fox. Between sleep and waking I lay, feeling the tug of memory's heavy plumb-line: tug of the leaf-veined city which my memory people with masks, malign and beautiful at once.

Read it quickly—because you are gobbling up the book the way people gobble up the road when they are in a hurry to get somewhere and don't care to notice the country they are driving through—and it might not bother you. But does writing come any more hackneyed than "dense thickets of time", or winds that are "soft as the brush of a fox"? And ask yourself what an unrolling ribbon of darkness is supposed to convey? Or how does a plumb line tug at you? And what does telling us that Alexandria is leaf-veined help us to see? That it has streets that form a regular pattern maybe? Which would make it different from every other city in the known universe how exactly?

That's not unconsciously bad writing. Durrell has put a lot of effort into making Darley like this. And it's very modern. Compare it with the way Shakespeare has characters say stupid things in beautiful language that only Shakespeare could write. Bottom gets love all wrong when he wakes up from his dream but he gets it wrong in ways that are beautiful and profound. Darley just gets love wrong. He gets it wrong the way a fourth rate writer would if he tried to express something too big, too beautiful and too sacred. Pulling that off credibly is a lot harder than it seems.

That's also brave because, obviously, there is always the possibility that your readers won't get the joke and think that it's just bad writing plain and simple. Alternatively, and this is far more common in my experience, they might miss the thing entirely and think that the "fine writing" Durrell means to mock really is fine writing. That's what I did back in university and I knew a bunch of guys who took Durrell as their Hemingway and got wrapped up in silly romantic fantasies about Alexandria.

This ought to have been harder than it was because no one, not even silly romantic young men, could miss that Durrell was playing with us. But you also can't shake the feeling that he is playing with himself too. He keeps playing game after game after game. But it's never quite like peeling an onion in that you never get to the point where you have nothing.

To keep reading you have to believe that the truth is cleverly hidden around the edges like A Heart of Darkness or The Good Soldier. Or, as he keeps hinting, that Durrell is pointing at some sort of gnosticism where the possession of inside knowledge will give you power. In the first volume when Justine first meets Darley after a  lecture he has given on Cavafy, she says, "What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?" That seems like a powerful idea: that irony would free us from moral obligation.

Except that the irony in The Alexandria Quartet is anything but subtle. To recognize it is not to join some small and exclusive club of knowers.

By the time you get to Clea, you're thinking maybe this time he is going to let us get a glimpse of real love; maybe this time he is describing a woman who won't turn into so much vapour at the end. And he seems to do that at first. Except that he starts using the same events to describe his love and she starts to feel like the other women Darley has loved and the awful suspicion that Melissa, Justine and Clea are the same fantasy woman described in different ways starts to bother you.

The party at the end of the universe
Camus, in a metaphor I've borrowed before, compared nihilism to a dead-end alley. When you get to the dead end, you have three choices,

• you can beat your skull to a pulp against the brick wall at the end of the alley,
• you can just hang around and think of ways to amuse yourself, or
• you can do what Cardinal Newman advised and turn around and walk out.

We tend to admire people who take the first option.  Cool Hand Luke is a compelling character if seen from enough distance. Some people can even admire Sid Vicious, Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain. It can look like their horrible ends are the result not of irrational self-destructive behaviour but some special sort of integrity.

In real life, though, being a martyr for nihilism is a grim and depressing choice so we find ways to make the second choice look morally admirable. You sit in the audience and watch the nihilistic movie and then you go to a party where you and a bunch of your friends collectively pretend to be edgy and transgressive and a whole lot of other words that mean a little less every time you think about them. The nagging doubt that you are just being dilettantes is always there but you are still alive and you can even have quite a bit of fun.

The last choice seems underwhelming.

You may wonder why I invoke Cardinal Newman as it doesn't seem like we need to be told that you can turn around and walk out of a dead-end alley. That's because metaphors have limits. In real life, you never would have headed up the alley in the first place if you had really believed it was a dead end. You may have known in an abstract sense, or adults may have tried to tell you, that this alley went nowhere but you thought maybe it would be different for you.

And when you get to the end of the alleyway, you found that it was crowded with other people just like you and they were having a party and it was a good party at first. And there is no denial quite like collective denial.

You can't just turn around because you have paid a price to get all this way up the alley. You had to defy those adults who told you not to go as well as overcome your own sense of doubt. And then you had to earn your way into that party at the end. The cool kids at the nihilism bash don't let anyone in. You have to learn the talk and the ways to act and dress and, not incidentally, it always costs more money to be a nihilist than it might appear. You might think that you should be able to do anything you want but show up at the nihilist party wearing the wrong clothes and you'll soon know about it.To just dump all that investment on the ground and turn around is to abandon much of what your life has been about.

And so you convince yourself that you can't turn around because logic defies you. "Show me proof that walking out the alley will get me to the truth and then I'll go," you shout, forgetting that the brick wall going the other way definitely won't get you any truth. Although you might argue that oblivion is a kind of truth and try beating your head to a pulp against it.

Of course you are right, and this is comforting, that there is no proof that walking back out again will lead anywhere at all. The choice is not between dilettantish semi-nihilism and a life of meaning and truth. It's a choice between nihilism and a life where you have to keep up the hope and faith that there will be meaning and truth.

I think Durrell never got over that party at the end of nihilism alley. He had to leave at one point because he wasn't cool enough to be allowed to hang around too long. But he kept trying to find a way to recreate it. He recognized it was laughable to he dressed it up in irony in the perennial hope that "being stupid" isn't quite the same as being stupid.

But if Clea is supposed to be real love then how does he make her seem like something other than an arbitrary choice? You can go through life having one monogamous relationship after another wondering what is going to make you stop at this one. You'd like to think there was more to it than the feeling that your sexual capital is drying up and the choices are going to get progressively less appealing and then vanish so you better settle before it's too late.

On the other hand, you want the experience. It would be nice to say you lived in Alexandria just before the war. That you lived in this wonderful polyglot city full of romance and despair and with a history that includes Cavafy, Ptolemy, Anthony and Cleopatra and even the great Alexander himself. A city that now no longer exists and maybe it never existed but the sense of a dead end is what makes it attractive somehow. Who cares you think. Damn the expense, feed that cat another goldfish 'cause here we go.

True Grit

Update: I have seen and reviewed the new film here.

No I haven't seen it. I'm tempted which is saying something as the last new release I saw in a theatre was Pride and Prejudice. It was released in 2005!

What has me especially intrigued about it is a Frank Rich column from this weekend. Something about that column linked up with some other stuff I have been treading this week. That something is nihilism. It's nihilism week here at Studiously Uncool.

I don't read Frank Rich very often because he is not only very political but also has a take-no-prisoners style about politics. But the surprise success of the remake of True Grit has him in an introspective mood and that is interesting and revealing. Rich is a polarizing writer—you either love him or hate him—but his opinions remain important because he has a special genius for reflecting and directing the opinions of hip urban people. You may think you've never read Rich but you have because his arguments and opinions have a way of reappearing in hundreds of other columns in the week following their appearance in the New York Times. There are at least three columnists at Toronto's Globe and Mail, for example, who ought to be paying him royalties.

How Frank Rich is like my mother
 He has an approach to handling unsettling events—and this movie has clearly unsettled him—that is a lot like the way my mother counseled me to follow. When I was growing up, my mother taught me to treat every good event as unprecedented: 'This is a uniquely good thing to be appreciated and cherished'. And she taught me to look for precedents whenever anything bad came along: 'Because if it has happened before and we dealt with it this shows that it is nothing to be too worried about; we can remember how the evil was overcome'.

And True Grit represents evil for Rich. It is a reactionary movie:

Yet “True Grit” was warmly received, including by the Times critic, Vincent Canby, who put it in a year-end list of bests dominated by such antiestablishment fare as “The Wild Bunch,” “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy” (that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner) and the ultimate anti-Western, Andy Warhol’s sexually transgressive “Lonesome Cowboys.” Canby described “True Grit” as “a classic frontier fable that manages to be most entertaining even when it’s being most reactionary.” 

You'll note the contrast. We have this reactionary movie and we have a bunch of others that Rich believes more truly reflected where the country was in 1969.

Before moving on, I wonder just how true that claim about the mood of the country. Because if those movies really did signal where people were at morally and culturally speaking, we should expect them to have laid down deep cultural roots. I watched High Society last night so let's take it as a random comparison point: of all the movies and TV shows Amazon sells High Society ranks at #2920.

Midnight Cowboy rates at #8809. Easy Rider is #1963. The Wild Bunch is at #5552. Lonesome Cowboys, not surprisingly is bringing up the rear at #140,864.

The original True Grit meanwhile, no doubt helped by the remake, is in the top 100 and has been for 33 days now.

So right off the top, we can write off Rich's understanding of history as factually wrong. The cultural impact of the movies he thinks better represented the moral mood society was in back in 1969 does not seem to have lasted.

It's worth noting in passing that Midnight Cowboy has the distinction of being the only X-rated picture to ever win the Oscar for best picture. Now if an X-rated movie had won for the first time last year, it would be reasonable to wonder if this represented a new trend. But if 41 years later it has not happened again, I think it's fairly safe to say that the "trend" petered out.

(By the way, other movies and TV shows old enough to count as lasting influences in the top 100 are the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice at #47, the Star Wars Trilogy at #48, Beauty and the Beast at #56, Dances With Wolves at #68, Fantasia at #70, The Wizard of Oz at #75, The Sound of Music at #85, The Little Mermaid at #90 and Gone With the Wind at #100. All of which suggests that the "dark vision" and nihilism of Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch and Lonesome Cowboys failed to take root in American culture. The only thing all those old shows in the top 100 have in common is relentless optimism.)

And what is reactionary for Rich?
Frank Rich writes for people who largely agree with him already so he doesn't stop to think much about what counts as reactionary. He just writes as if it is obvious. Whenever anyone does that it is interesting to tease out what counts as significant in this regard for them.

Here is Rich's, I'd say bang-on accurate explanation of the success of the first True Grit:

Ultimately, law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage — which Rooster failed at — had to prevail if America was to grow up. The Matties had to outlive the Roosters. And so they did. For a weary mainstream 1969 audience, and not just a reactionary one, the restoration of order in “True Grit,” inevitably to be followed by Rooster’s ride off into the sunset, was a heartening two-hour escape from the near-civil-war raging beyond the theater’s walls.

And am I the only one to think it a little funny that Rich so casually takes it for granted that "law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage" are reactionary ideas?

Rich's great hope for the future
As I wrote at the top, the rule in these contrasts is that every good thing is new and unprecedented. So what is the new hope for Rich? Why it's The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin.

Now Rich doesn't think that The Social Network portrays anything good. In his estimation, what is good about this movie is its dark portrayal of the world as it is becoming.

Talk about Two Americas. Look at “The Social Network” again after seeing “True Grit,” and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley. While “Social Network” fictionalizes Mark Zuckerberg, it mines the truth of an era — from the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system to the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue at the top of that economic pyramid. 

The thing that The Social Network  as understood by Frank Rich and Midnight Cowboy have in common is a kind of nihilism. You can believe in justice and truth in Rich's world but it's not going to do you a fat lot of good. The only escape from such a nihilism is something like Nietzschean superman who would, by sheer force of will (and presumably political power) impose justice on the world. I find that a rather uncertain prospect, more likely to produce crimes against humanity than justice but no one has to agree with me.

I'm no nihilist but I understand how people get there. What's the answer to nihilism? Well, there are a few and I may hit on them later this week but I thought a line in the new True Grit that seems to have particularly rankled Frank Rich was pretty darn good:

More than the first “True Grit,” the new one emphasizes Mattie’s precocious, almost obsessive preoccupation with the law. She is forever citing law-book principles, invoking lawyers and affidavits, and threatening to go to court. “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another,” says Mattie. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.” 

Those are good words to live by if you ask me.

Now I need to find a woman who is beautiful and has a devastatingly sharp mind who might be interested in going out with me for a movie followed by port and discussion of said movie.

What's wrong with Woody Allen?

Note: I promised this yesterday and then must have clicked the wrong button as it has been sitting in my draft pile ever since.

 Below is what is, for me, the ultimate Woody Allen movie scene. It's from Manhattan and it's a conversation between Isaac (as played by Woody) and Yale (as played by Michael Murphy).

The set up is complex. Both men have been considerably less than honourable in their dealings with women. But the immediately relevant detail you need to know to understand this scene is that Isaac has been in a relationship with Yale's ex-mistress and he has just learned that she and Yale saw one another secretly and now she is going back to Yale. Isaac goes to see his friend full of moral certainty. He has been wronged and he means call his friend on it. You can see the sense of conviction on his face as he walks to meet Yale in the opening moments.

It doesn't quite work out as he imagined:





What goes wrong?

The key moment is when Isaac points at the skeleton of the early hominid. "One day we're going to be like him," he says. No one actually says "So what!" but that is only because no one has to.

Isaac trots out a whole lot of moral arguments but none of them lead anywhere. They can't because he and Yale live in a world where there is no difference between moral argument and moral manipulation. They both feel their moral decisions are purely private and the business of nobody else.

But, and this is the crucial thing, they have an active interest in trying to sway other people's moral decisions. At the very least they have an interest in trying to stop other people from hurting them. Beyond that they have an interest in convincing others to get along with them and  even to fall in love with them. They all use moral arguments relentlessly and with great virtuosity to achieve these ends.

But they accept no objective moral standards as applying to themselves. And thus the break down. All Isaac can do is try and shame Yale into surrendering. When he points at the skeleton it's because he hits the end of his ability to manipulate. He has nothing left.

When first I saw this movie we all thought Woody was making fun of Isaac and Yale. That he was saying, look at these empty people. As his subsequent life has demonstrated, it turns out that Woody really is Isaac. It's not a parody.

You can see that quite clearly in the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors mentioned in the comments Wednesday. Again, the lead character, Judah* Rosenthal as played by Martin Landau, is a virtuoso with moral arguments but, again, he can also talk himself into doing whatever he wants, up to and including having someone killed, because he accepts no objective standards as applying to himself. This time Judah talks himself not into an affair with a seventeen-year-old but into taking a hit out on a troublesome mistress.

He feels guilty for a while but ultimately he gets over it. And that is how it ends. See, Woody tells us, there really aren't any objective moral standards. Morality is whatever you can make work. Conscience is only the fear of getting caught. Once that fear is removed, there is nothing.

Nothing being the point. It's nihilism pure and simple.



* Woody's choice of the names Isaac and Judah can not be accidental here nor can it be an accident that Isaac's friend in Manhattan has the same name as an establishment university.

A scary word

Okay, let's all sit down because I am about to introduce an incendiary word into the conversation. A word that frightens children and evokes an image of moral monsters. But I don't want anyone to think of it that way. I want to convince you that the word actually means something common and familiar. It occurs in the following sentence and I think you'll spot it right away.

The kind of moral argument that Tyler Cowen is pushing is called nihilism.

Okay, I know what you are thinking but nihilism is a pretty common and familiar position these days. This song is nihilist and so is this one. Lennon's song in particular has become the inspiration for a charity; it's not Mein Kampf. You could even say nihilism is the opposite of that book which describes life as a struggle.

What makes john Lennon, Peggy Lee and Tyler Cowen nihilists? It's a negative quality. These songs argue—and they both make a powerful and influential moral argument—that certain kinds of beliefs undermine our ability to be happy. Nihilists do not refuse to believe in anything at all. They believe in trees, rocks and glasses of orange juice just like everyone else. But there are certain very big moral organizing principles that they want to encourage us to give up on. They think that we can find freedom and happiness by doing so. Tyler Cowen is a nihilist in that sense.

His real target in that lecture is not stories but certain big moral ideas. Over the next few posts I'll try to prove that to you.


PS: A pedantic philosopher point. If there is one thing people think they know about nihilism it is that Nietzsche was a nihilist. He was not! If we put Tyler Cowen in a time machine and took him back to meet Nietzsche, Nietzsche would hate Tyler Cowen with a passion that would not be pleasant to contemplate. The last thing in the world Nietzsche wanted was for people to accept their messes.