Writes Maya Chung, in "Go Ahead, Put Down That Book" (The Atlantic)(free-access link).
That links to "When Is It Okay to Not Finish a Book?/How to decide to put down a book—without all the angst" (also in The Atlantic, with a free-access link).
Before dropping a book, you need to figure out what’s motivating you to stop reading it.
In this bleak new landscape, strivers haven’t disappeared—they have simply reoriented themselves around a new set of values that bolster their class position in less noticeable ways...The suggested term is the "aspirational class."
This new elite is typified by the brownstone-dweller traipsing through Whole Foods with a yoga mat peeping from the top of her NPR tote; the new Prospect Heights mother who stops in at the lactation consultant before her Y7 class; the tech startup employee with the neatly trimmed beard and Everlane button-down who announces on Facebook that he’s “bumping the new Kendrick.” They buy green cleaning products, ethically made clothes, and small-batch everything. They aspire, says [public policy scholar Elizabeth] Currid-Halkett, “to be their version of better humans in all aspects of their lives.”...
It encompasses both the well-off partner in the law firm and the liberal arts school graduate working as an unpaid publishing intern, so long as both know to consume the same organic farmers market berries, discuss the latest Rachel Maddow segment, and quote lines from the musical Hamilton....So... the people who 3 decades ago would have been crass strivers in danger of seeing how hateful and hollow they were are now softly mellowed and well-cushioned with self-love and only troubled by how horrible those other people are.
[M]embers of this elite often come to view their station in life as ethical and deserved, unaware of the ways in which their spending patterns exacerbate class stratification.... “Quite frankly,” writes [economist Tyler] Cowen, “those are parts of America where people feel very good about themselves.”...
[Hillary] Clinton’s was a campaign tailor-made for and by the aspirational class... But it was the Democrats’ pitiful rejoinder to Trump that could serve as a mantra for the complacent class: “America is already great.”
COWEN: We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.Here's the precise clip (from the middle of an hour-and-a-half conversation):
PAGLIA: Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That’s what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We’re all genderless mannequins. The movie The Time Machine is like one. We’re moving toward that, the Eloi. That’s how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They’re the Eloi. They’re completely bland. They have no ideas. They all get along very well with each other because they’re nothing. They’re eating their fruits which are given to them by the Morlocks, or the industrial class. That’s how I see the future — unfortunately. I began my career talking about androgyny and talking about the imaginative complexity of androgyny and how the artist and the shaman and the prophet have this androgynous component. But today’s androgyny, it’s just boring....
The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin....Kit Carson may have thought Paglia sounded like me, but Paglia proclaimed that she was like Des Esseintes. Reading the text, I wonder if Paglia really intended to seem to be finding nature dull and boring and best replaced by artifice and imagination. Paglia tends to recommend that brainy folk get out of their cloisters and into the real world, and I don't think she looks down her nose at "the vulgar realities of things."
Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.... One could revel... in long explorations while near one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, if need be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distant lands.....
The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself.
Artifice, besides, seemed to Des Esseintes the final distinctive mark of man's genius. Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of æsthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of the specialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners of the tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of all others. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas!
Morris considers a wide variety of cases, including the Roman Empire, the European state during its Renaissance rise and the contemporary United States. In each case there is good evidence that the desire to prepare for war spurred technological invention and also brought a higher degree of internal social order.That reminded me of the old Camille Paglia quote: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." Searching for it on line, I found it in a discussion — in the corner of Reddit called "MensRights" — of the statement "If women ran the world there would be no wars." But here's a better source for the Paglia quote, the 1990 review of "Sexual Personae," in the NYT, written by Terry Teachout:
... Ms. Paglia heats things up considerably by drawing a flashy assortment of extreme conclusions from her basic premises. Not only does she praise ''the spectacular glory of male civilization,'' she flatly rejects Rousseau's vision of ''benign Romantic nature'' and its offspring, ''the progressivist strain in nineteenth-century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth.'' Feminism, she claims, is ''heir to Rousseau'' in that it ''sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about woman is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. . . . If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.''Now that I've gotten this far afield, I feel I must note that Tyler Cowen had nothing to say about the rise of women in the modern West.
Reviewers from Paul Krugman to Tyler Cowen — who seldom agree on much — have panned the launch. If you need to be personally convinced, just check out this example. Yikes.I was going to post about that very example when I noticed it yesterday...
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