The Bluestocking, vol 209
Unearthly powders and goos
Happy Friday!
And hello from the charming city of Milan, where I have just discovered that the Italian for “cancel culture” is . . . “cancel culture.” (I assumed there would be a cool, sophisticated Italian phrase for it.)
Helen
Apocalypse Now (The Atlantic)
In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all. Its workers, indoctrinated at elite universities, use “wokeness” to buy off the left and to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool. “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.” The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”
The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference. . . . These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If I’d had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning.
David Brooks reports from the National Conservatism conference in Florida, the intellectual clearing-house for the new US right, as they ask “how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.”
It’s Not All In Your Head (First Things)
“We are living in an age of ambient unwellness. You need only look at how many products are out there promising to make you better. Nootropics to enhance your cognition, supplements for your bones and your skin and every one of your organs. Microdosing to enhance your creativity; therapy, of course, for your traumas. New and better sleep regimens. Unearthly powders and goos to replace all the actual food in your diet. Everything invites you to optimize yourself. The entire self, body and mind, isn’t just the thing you are: It’s a kind of machinery, something to be fine-tuned and set to work. The dream of a fully frictionless existence, a world of highly efficient cyborgs. Because if you’re not perfectly productive, if you let up for even a moment, you must be sick: The forces of decay will swallow you whole.
The chronically ill person is a negative pole, the hidden shadow of this cyborg utopia. While the rest of us are in our manias of productivity, millions of people are imprisoned in their homes, stranded with terrible pains that have no identifiable physical cause, or exhaustion that can’t be cured by rest, or a fog that blots out the mind. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are existential illnesses. The human body simply refuses to work: It announces itself in a way that can’t be ignored. Maybe it’s casting its own terrible veto on the sickness of the world.”
Another interesting piece on psychogenic illness—or as Kriss calls them, “existential illness.”
On which note, last week’s link prompted an interesting and cautionary comment from Ben under the original post (this is just an excerpt): “There is a long history of medicine writing off anything they can't explain as hysteria, especially in women - later repackaged as ‘conversion disorder’, ‘functional neurological disorders’ or ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. Given how often these diagnoses turn out to be wrong (the pre-Pylori view of stomach ulcers, the pre-MRI literature on the ‘multiple sclerosis personality’), and how ineffective treatments to correct ‘false illness beliefs’ are (see the recent NICE rowback on treatments for ME), one would think the profession wouldn’t still immediately leap to a psychological explanation if they can’t immediately explain something. Yet still they do.”
Ben is right—when researching functional disorders, I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t that long ago that Parkinson’s was regarded as a disorder with no organic cause. Then researchers found the link to dopamine in the brain.
At the same time, I wish that the stigma of psychological illness could be smashed, because I know there have been times when my stress and anxiety manifested as physical symptoms (perpetual tiredness, floaters in my eyes—or rather, noticing the floaters which are there all the time—panic attacks etc). I feel like our bodies have a way of saying “GET ME OUT OF THIS INTOLERABLE SITUATION”.
So it’s all about medical science finding the balance, and not treating patients as hysterics when there is a physical cause, but also not treating patients as hysterics when there isn’t.
Quick Links
“Most IP-juicing requires starting with well-known movies and working sideways or, increasingly, backwards.” Dorian Lynskey on the plague of backstory (Unherd).
What’s Milo Yiannopoulos up to these days? Oh right.
“In the long run, however, allying with the pluto-theocracy will be disastrous for women and girls.” Interesting reflection from the US on why feminists there shouldn’t work with the fundamentalist right, even when some of their goals align.
Giles Coren being serious, and thus bearable, for once—on his friend Alexander Mosley and why Oxford University was right to take money from the trust named after him (Times, paywall).
A couple of people asked me where to look for good coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, because it has been so polarised—he became a hero to some conservatives while some liberals saw him as a white supremacist. Neither of those is accurate. David French’s Atlantic piece is good, I think, and the Honestly podcast talks you through the evidence.
Scott Alexander analysed all the studies on ivermectin, the dewormer adopted by the US right as a Covid treatment, and discovered that the studies where it performed best… were conducted in places with endemic worm infections. So, uh, maybe it helped people fight Covid there because they weren’t also then fighting a worm infestation.
“Mr. Rosenberg was dispatched to buy passports on the black market, scout escape routes and find safe hiding places for refugees. When he worked with the team’s master document forger, he became convinced that he recognized him, and he was right: It was the same man who drew caricatures down by the harbor for 10 francs a pop.” A great obituary (New York Times).
I love watching this Japanese craftsman make clay teapots.
Ciao bella!