Thank you again to everyone who has subscribed to my Substack. This is a millionth (and final!) reminder to anyone who was planning to subscribe to Substack that my 2020 rates are the lowest allowable on the platform and will be adjusted upward in the new year.
For anybody who took the healthy approach of being offline for the last couple of weeks, you might like something within among all this content for I cranked out for the Substack. Here are five free blog posts (available whether your subscription is paid or unpaid):
I chose the topics, so of course, I enjoyed writing all of these. But I think the one on the Zhou was the most satisfying for me. Not a surprise that it was the IQ piece that seemed to speak to the most readers.
I pulled 6 favorite past podcasts from my archives too:
I’m working through a long list of favorite thinkers I already know and have enjoyed talking with in the past, and people who are on my radar to chase down for a first podcast, but if there’s anyone you think I’d be remiss not to try and connect with this year, please leave a comment.
def no dino
I had a great Christmas, not least because my youngest became completely obsessed with dinosaurs overnight (thanks, Schleich!). Not going to lie, I was always a little disappointed his older siblings had no love for dinosaurs (one of his siblings had such disdain for all things biology, that for probably a solid year, he would dismiss any quadruped sighting, whether cow, sheep, horse, etc. with an unimpressed “DIE-SAUR”).
But the tail is wagging the dog since Christmas and half of sibling chatter is now debates of omnivore v. carnivore v. herbivore and discussions of the Jurassic and things like what syllable of diplodocus is emphasized. The caliber of illustrated books for kids now, refinements on old hypotheses, and depth of detail known today are leaving me with a lot of updates to perform on my mid-80’s body of dinosaur knowledge. So what should I read? Who should I know? Anyone it would be a shame not to seek out for the podcast?
For all you current paid subscribers and those who grab a subscription today, I can unreservedly recommend my final 2020 podcast: a conversation with Armand Leroi. It drops today. We discussed both Mutants and The Lagoon. Each well worth a read if you missed them. Mutants is a quick read; The Lagoon is a bit encyclopedic (we discuss why it’s so long). Additionally, we revisited his op-ed on race from 2005, his argument in favor of ‘neo-eugenics‘, recent work on cultural evolution, and the impact of wokeness on the academy in Britain.
The Substack has been up for a week, and it’s been fun so far. Lots of people have ideas about what to do, and how to do, “paid newsletters.” I’ve gotten some feedback on Twitter and elsewhere. I may change it up, or not.
Tanner Greer has a post up on his weblog, Why I am Bearish on Substack. He makes some good points. But to be frank, his weblog and Kevin Drum are almost the only “bloggers” I read who aren’t on Substack. The old ecosystem is dead. But clearly, this can’t scale…I’m not going to pay $200 a month for Substacks (well, perhaps…).
Suggestions and comments are welcome. Right now it’s a mix of free and paid stuff, and that’s my current plan.
2020 has sunk the final nail in the coffin of the “End of History” myth. We are witnessing the worst global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu, and the West’s response has exposed deep structural weaknesses in our civilization. One symptom of this rot is the fact that the norms of free intellectual inquiry seem to have passed out of fashion. Optimistic Y2K liberalism in America has given way to Right and Left identitarianism. Today, intellectuals can tell you in all seriousness that who you are matters more than what you know or do.
Standing athwart history
In this, I am against the spirit of the age. Though I don’t expect to change the direction the world lurches, I myself cannot change. I am what I am. And for good and for ill, that has always been someone with an almost pathological need for truth and data, the rawer the better. I simply cannot recalculate the value of an idea according to the identity or eminence of its originator.
Ideas which are true, the goal toward which science fitfully stumbles, differ from the ephemeral things of our social existence. Sports and politics, ratios and retweets are the foam of the present. Money so arduously accumulated will be spent without a trace. Individual humans are born, flourish, grow old, and die. Permanence lies elsewhere. Truth binds us across the centuries and spans national borders.
Reality stands apart from our gloss on it. A stone-faced witness to our coming and our passing. To seek truth is to grasp at something eternal, something that will persist long after us. It is neither spent nor dissipated.
This anxious craving for truth, be it in the end ugly or divine, has propelled me for the two decades I’ve been writing on the internet. It motivated me as a voracious and meandering reader during my childhood. My catholic tastes in intellectual inquiry are both a matter of happenstance and disposition. In the 1980’s my immigrant parents adopted the norms of the place and time where they landed. It was still socially acceptable, if slightly odd, to leave an 8-year-old wandering the stacks of the public library for entire weekends. This is where I discovered the world on my own, guided by my own inclinations and caprice.
The dual blessings of a restless mind and an unsupervised childhood though can conspire to leave a man a bewildered stranger in this age. Suddenly ideas are disdained as disposable instruments in political games. For me, they can only ever be the goal of my journey.
Fools Rush In
In the early 2000’s, a lack of concern for shibboleths or taboos wasn’t particularly brave or rare. John Brockman published a book of essays in 2006 titled “What is your dangerous idea?” I suspect such a collection would be unthinkable today, its very premise triggering. Instead of a frisson, it would risk its contributors’ cancellation. If such a book appeared, it would be a sham, the essays timid and cautious out of concern for the contributors’ reputations. A social-media-driven world of ideas metes out strong tribal sanctions against wrongthink. It does not, as it turns out, always “get better.” The pre-social-media world was much more forgiving of deviationism. Information may want to be free, but the masses do not. They want confirmation of what they already know to be true. They want comfort. They want Voxplainers on how they are right.
Perhaps this is being too generous. The internet is a place where “everyone” watches livestreams of the likes of Khloe Khardasian. But who actually has time for the great thinkers of the past, say Xunzi or Schopenhauer? The information superhighway is choking with trash trucks. But if you look, gold glistens right there on the street as the hordes rush past, bound for their must-see outrage du jour.
