"Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. It is demonic, 'the complete anti-God state of mind'..."

"... as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity.' Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself.* The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the Apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.'... In Islamic mysticism... a smudged mirror is a metaphor for the human soul. It is only when the ego is annihilated, and the surface is polished clean, that the divine becomes visible.... In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a 'heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"

A small sample from "All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" (NYT gift link), by Catherine Shannon.

___________________

* Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"? Are we not talking about raising ourselves above God (as opposed to jubilating over how wonderful we are)? Think about it. We say "an exaltation of larks," not "an exultation of larks." 

"[O]blivion is restorative: we come apart in order to come back together. (Sleep is a case in point; without a nightly suspension of our rational faculties, we go nuts.)"

"Another is the notion that oblivion is integral to the possibility of personal evolution. 'The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,' Foucault writes. To do so, however, you must believe that the future can be different from the past—a belief that becomes harder to sustain when one is besieged by information, as the obsessive documentation of life makes it 'more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.' Oblivion, by setting aside a space for forgetting, offers a refuge from this 'excess of memory,' and thus a standpoint from which to imagine alternative futures. Oblivion is also essential for human dignity. Because we cannot be fully known, we cannot be fully instrumentalized. Immanuel Kant urged us to treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means.... [O]ur obscurities are precisely what endow us with a sense of value that exceeds our usefulness.... The modernist city promised anonymity, reinvention. The Internet is devoid of such pleasures. It is more like a village: a place where your identity is fixed...."

Writes Ben Tarnoff, in "What Is Privacy For? We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem" (The New Yorker).

The article is mostly about the book "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life," by Lowry Pressly (commission earned).

ADDED: Here, I made you an "Oblivion" playlist:

"Surprising words from the country that gave us Derrida and Foucault :)"

Tweets Jordan Peterson, looking at "'Out-of-control woke leftism and cancel culture' from the U.S is a threat to FRANCE because it 'attacks' the nation's heritage and identity, French politicians and intellectuals say" (Daily Mail). 

This is a good nudge to think deeply about how the "woke leftism and cancel culture" has used and distorted the grand French philosophers beyond recognition. The French don't recognize what we've done to the philosophy we appropriated. Our lefties are doing Frenchface... badly.

From the Daily Mail article:

The collection of intellectuals arguing that France is being contaminated by the leftism of America was buoyed on last year after French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to side with them. In a speech in October on the 'Fight against Separatism', Macron warned against leaving 'the intellectual debate to others' as he cautioned of the 'certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States'....

Entirely!  

This month also saw the publication of a book by social scientists Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel in which they claimed that race is a 'bulldozer' that destroys other subjects....  Historian Pierre-André Taguieff argued... that the 'American-style black question' was a 'totally artificial importation' to France. He said that it was all driven by 'hatred of the West, as a white civilization'.... 

James Lindsay — author of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody" — has a response at Peterson's tweet: "They have a complicated relationship with those thinkers, who were wrong, yes, but who were also bastardized by American Critical Theory frauds the French would certainly not respect in the least." 

A strange image, from Joe Biden: "We got to stop pouring flames on the fire."

Pouring flames? On fire?

The context is his remarks yesterday to the US Conference of Mayors (transcript):

This moment we’re facing now, isn’t a partisan moment. It’s an American moment.... It’s a chance for us to overcome anger and division that has hold [sic] us back of late for far too long. We can emerge from these crises.... If I’m elected, you will have direct access to the White House. I want to thank you all because we need you to build back better. You are the foundation stone, not a joke. You’re the ones leading away.... We got to stop the hate and the division now, we got to stop pouring flames on the fire, we got to start talking straight to the American people.... I’ve never been more optimistic... The blinders have been taken off the American people. They understand what’s going on now. They understand.... They want to get things done... and I want to make sure that your ideas are the ones that are funneled up. They don’t have to go through a state legislature, go through a governor. They can go straight to the federal government, straight to me....

Funneled up? I'm trying to picture that. Don't funnels work only downward, through gravity? Oh, I don't know!



That's a detail from the Hieronymus Bosch painting "Cutting the Stone," which appears at the Wikipedia article "Funnel." There, I learn something about the idea of a funnel working upward instead of downward:

The inverted funnel is a symbol of madness. It appears in many Medieval depictions of the mad; for example, in Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony and Lust....

And in "Cutting the Stone." Michel Foucault, "History of Madness," had something to say about that doctor in an inverted funnel hat: "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."

There's also inverted funnel hat worn by the Tin Woodman in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."  It's not mentioned in the text of the book. It comes from the imagination of the the first illustrator,  W. W. Denslow:

"What expectations of privacy do friends and partners have a right to when hanging out with someone whose job or hobby it is to share everything about their day-to-day?"

"Where do we draw the line between self-expression and unwarranted exposure? If their friends are sharing every single day of their lives, can they reasonably expect to be asked for consent every single day?"

Asks Hayley Phelan in "Will You Be My #Content?/For social media influencers and oversharers, life is full of material. But what if their friends don’t want to be the co-stars?" by (NYT).

The answer to "If their friends are sharing every single day of their lives, can they reasonably expect to be asked for consent every single day?" is: YES!

This is like the question whether marital rape is possible. There used to be a theory that you gave your consent once and for all or that your status as spouse equals consent.

Obviously, there are some differences. Rape is a crime and writing about people who don't want to be written about is not a crime and cannot be made into a crime. But we're talking about taking advantage of your intimate access to other people and the ethics of how you are treating them.

“These are the questions I grapple with on a daily basis,” said Caroline Calloway, 28, the Instagrammer whose viral shenanigans have garnered her 722,000 followers and plenty of headlines.

Garnered.

Yet this fall, when she began dating a model, she started to rethink her strategy. “I’ve learned firsthand how much it can complicate a relationship,” she said.... While she continued to share personal conversations and details of their sex life, she also went to great lengths to keep his identity hidden, disguising his face by placing a bright blue butterfly emoji over it in the posts....

We're not told whether he consented to any or all of that.

In “Discipline and Punish,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault theorized that the mere suggestion of surveillance is enough to alter our behavior, as we internalize expectations and monitor ourselves in an effort to conform to them. This was, to Foucault, ultimately more threatening to an individual’s personal freedom than actually being locked up behind bars....

"Local authorities in southern China are investigating a popular coconut milk brand for once again claiming the drink would enhance women’s breasts...."

Sixth Tone reports.

Coconut Palm...  has often attracted eyeballs and ire because of its sexist advertisements and provocative packaging claiming their coconut concoction makes women “curvier” and gives them “bigger breasts.”...

The drink’s latest advertisement has also angered its loyal consumers, with many calling it “obscene” and “tasteless.” The latest social media furor comes two years after Coconut Palm was attacked for a similar advertisement, which also claimed its product could enhance a woman’s cleavage and whiten her skin.

It makes some poetic sense — milk... coconuts....

It's basically the old doctrine of signatures, isn't it?

The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts. A theological justification, as stated by botanists such as William Coles, was that God would have wanted to show men what plants would be useful for.... Plants bearing parts that resembled human body-parts, animals, or other objects were thought to have useful relevance to those parts, animals or objects. ..

For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with images of the Deity: 'as above, so below,' a Hermetic principle expressed as the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

"Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them."

Here's the Chinese ad. I wish I could embed it, because it made me laugh, but it's in Chinese and I can't figure out how to get the code. Screen shot (I think this is a "tweet" by someone who disapproves):



And here's the great Harry Nilsson song, "Coconut" ("Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?")(According to the Genius lyrics annotation: "The etiology of the abdominal pain is unclear, but could be due to the lime and the coconut, both the cause and the cure of this odd episode.")

ADDED: Let's hear from Melania:

Who was America’s first stand-up comedian?

According to "Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians," by Justin Martin, it was Artemus Ward (1834-1867):

Ostensibly, he was delivering a lecture called The Babes in the Wood... [H]is act consisted of a man in a dark suit, who, in a tone of complete seriousness, speaks utter nonsense. At some level, it certainly reminded audiences of all the oratories and lectures and sermons they’d been forced to endure, delivered by assorted pompous moralists...

The impression that his performances were rambling and spontaneous was just that, an impression: he was in complete control... He would begin by struggling to describe the claustrophobic feeling of traveling inside a very small stagecoach. “Those of you who have been in the penitentiary . . . ,” he offered. But then his voice trailed off, and his eyes filled with panic. He realized his error. He’d just suggested that members of his audience had been to jail.

As Ward tried to extricate himself from this awkwardness, the audience could almost see the wheels turning in his mind. He spoke slowly, trying to buy himself time to recover: “and stayed there . . . any length . . . of time . . . ” Suddenly, his expression brightened. He added hopefully, “ . . . as visitors.” He stood up straight, pleased with himself. But then Ward’s trademark crestfallen look returned. He recognized his error. Even suggesting that members of his audience had merely visited the penitentiary didn’t do the trick. That only meant they had friends and loved ones in jail...

Ward’s show clocked in at exactly one hour. Just as it opened on a high note, it closed on one, too. As the hour mark drew nigh, Ward would reach into his pocket and retrieve his watch. He’d stare at it, an expression of alarm spreading across his face. He had been rambling rambling for many minutes, traveling countless conversational tangents, yet he’d failed to address the subject at hand, “The Babes in the Wood.” But what could he say now? What pithy comment about the topic could he offer that might tie things up? There simply wasn’t enough time left. After a few more stumbles and false starts, Ward would apologize, promising to give the subject a full airing during his next lecture. Then he’d bid a good night to his delighted audience. The next morning, the critics’ columns would be full of praise.

Here's the Wikipedia page for Artemus Ward (AKA Charles Farrar Browne ). Excerpt:

Browne was also known as a member of the New York Bohemian set which included leader Henry Clapp Jr., Walt Whitman, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Ward met Mark Twain when Ward performed in Virginia City, Nevada and the two became friends. In his correspondences with Twain, Browne called him "My Dearest Love." Legend has it that, following Ward's stage performance, he, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille were taking a drunken rooftop tour of Virginia City until a town constable threatened to blast all three of them with a shotgun loaded with rock salt.

Here are some Artemus Ward jokes. Example: "Did you ever have the measels, and if so, how many?"

ADDED: The author of the quoted book doesn't attempt to define "stand-up comedian." He only describes what Ward did and sums it up: "[I]t’s fair to describe Artemus Ward as America’s first stand-up comedian." In search of the history of the term and the practice, I found this in Wikipedia:

Stand-up comedy is a comic style in which a comedian performs in front of a live audience, usually speaking directly to them... [T]he comedian usually recites a grouping of humorous stories, jokes and one-liners...

It's so simple, it's hard not to think that it's something human beings have done going all the way back to when we first figured out how to talk.

The history section of the Wikipedia article is almost entirely about the last 200 or so years, but there is this one sentence:

Stand-up comedy has its origin in classic Parrhesia in 400 BC used for cynics and epicureans in order to tell the reality without censorship.

That has this footnote:

Foucault, Michel (Oct–Nov 1983), Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia (six lectures), The University of California at Berkeley.

I'll have to get to that later. There's just not enough time in this blog post.

Sentence of the day.

"It is a mildly disconcerting experience, seeing conscious evolutions and experiments in style; baroque, ornate, urgent, dyspeptic; the repetitions and modalities at various points and the stylized categorizations and oppositions – prudes and perverts, monsters and insanity, measures and tests, inquiries and examinations, bodies and boys, punishment, pleasure, asceticism, suicide; the going back over old themes in new ways; how the old becomes new but how the new can never entirely disown the old; the desire for both fidelity in the evocation of moods and worlds, but not necessarily strict historical accuracy, whatever that might in the end be taken to mean; and the desire to write all this up somehow as a history of the present."

From a TLS article with a nicely short title, "Foucault investigates."

Posner on plagiarism.

Posner's new book is about plagiarism:

Richard Posner, moreover, is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a law professor at the University of Chicago who turns out books and articles with annoying frequency and facility. Surely, under deadline pressure, he is tempted every now and then to resort to a little clipping and pasting, especially since he cuts members of his own profession a good deal of slack on the plagiarism issue. In the book he readily acknowledges that judges publish opinions all the time that are in fact written by their clerks, but he excuses the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is harmed.

Is ghostwriting plagiarism? The clerks are ghostwriters. It's true everyone knows about it, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.

Anyway, in "The Little Book of Plagiarism," Posner seems to give judges a pass. But then he's hard on the professors who are soft on plagiarism (by other professors). The reason: Politics! All those lefties in academia:

[T]he left, which dominates the professoriate these days, is soft on plagiarism because the left is uncomfortable with ideas of individual creativity and ownership. (Surprisingly, he fails to take a whack at French theorists like Barthes and Foucault, who argued that in the strictest sense there is no such thing as an “author,” because all writing is collaborative and produced by a kind of cultural collective.)

Academic lefties don't preen over their own creativity and fawn over the creativity of writers they admire? I haven't read the book -- it's not even out until the 16th -- but it seems to me that professors are soft on plagiarizing professors because they feel a natural sympathy toward one of their own.

"Bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy."

That's Sean Wilentz's description of "the new political history," quoted by Gordon S. Wood in his review of Wilentz's "The Rise of American Democracy," which dares to tell the story of dead white males.

[Wilentz] writes as a good liberal, but an old-fashioned New Deal one. Like Schlesinger in 1945, he wants in 2005 to speak to the liberalism of the modern Democratic Party. By suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party.

"The Manolo he does not wish to go all Foucault on you."

Or maybe he does! Manolo steps outside of his (shoe) box.

"Big Brother" appears in two headlines in today's NYT.

(No, it isn't my abiding purpose to dog the NYT. It's just the newspaper I get in newspaper form, which I like to see there, in its blue bag, every morning.)

One article, written by Emily Eakin is called "Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms." “Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City … influenced by the theories of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault” has written a book called "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched."

Reality shows glamorize surveillance, he writes, presenting it "as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world," "an entree into the world of wealth and celebrity" and even a moral good. … [T]he reality genre appears to fulfill the democratic promise of the emerging interactive economy, turning passive cultural consumers into active ones who can star on shows or vote on their outcomes. …

[But] reality television is essentially a scam: propaganda for a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control while in fact subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and manipulation.

Andrejevic finds his students unreceptive to his theories, theorizing that because they were:

Raised on Web logs, Google, cellphones and instant messaging, they "divulge much more information about themselves on a daily basis than previous generations," he said, and they don't associate the idea of surveillance with a totalitarian Big Brother.

Or maybe they are just tired of hearing about Foucault all the time.

At least in one respect, he added, reality television does conform to real life. "It portrays the reality of contrivance, the way consumers are manipulated," he said. "I look at it with the fascination of somebody watching a car wreck."

"Somebody" watching a car wreck. That’s somebody else presumably. Hey, isn't that a reality show?