September 2008: David Foster Wallace commits suicide. Mere weeks later, Axl Rose reappears from relative obscurity with the long-awaited Chinese Democracy.
Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feelentitledto this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value” …the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus. [emphasis added]
Now, look. Like much that comes out of the Cato Institute, this twenty-two-year-old essay contains its fair share of gleeful left-baiting. But this is a salient point. Bloggers, journalists and authors declares the intellectual* the new aristocrat, with over-educated millennials able to work the way they want, in fascinating fields, achieve social status and wealth, and still have time left over for surfing. But is this borne out by the evidence, or is it - as I suspect - mostly clever kids’ wish-fulfilment?
The brilliant PhD candidate who struggles to get funding; the intelligent, thoughtful young journalist who chafes at the tabloid leanings of his paper; the idealistic young lawyer who rails against his profession’s less ethical habits, or its disinterest in work/life balance. All the stuff of alientated twentysomething cliche. Can’t all of this be summed up, quite neatly, in the realisation Nozick describes above?
*Also known by the handy new phrase “knowledge worker,” which is essentially an attempt to replace “intellectual” with something that doesn’t scare off employers.
Washington Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders has admitted that he was the one who stood up and yelled “tyrant!” at U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey during a speech in which Mukasey later fainted. At a black-tie dinner on Nov. 20, the AG defended the Bush administration’s war on terror. Sanders, who said he felt compelled to voice his disagreement with those policies, said he had already left the event before Mukasey’s collapse, and did not learn of it until the next day.
Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job. The fantasies of perfection of replaced by the fantasies of utter failure. So I finally get to work on it. Now it would have been simpler for me, and for the publisher, and for the author, if I had sat down and spent four or five hours on the manuscript right off the bat. If only I had been able to give myself permission to do an imperfect job right at the outset. Is there anyway we can bring that about?
You have to get in the habit of forcing yourself to analyze, at the time you accept a task, to consider the costs and befits of doing a less than perfect job. You need to ask the questions: how useful would a perfect job be here? How much more useful than a merely adequate job? Or even a half-assed job? And you need to ask the questions: what is the probability that I will really do anything like a remotely perfect job on this? And you need to ask: what difference will it make to me, whether I do or not?
There’s surely some truth in this. The slow descent from great intentions to panicked cobbling-together is a depressingly regular hallmark of my life. But I’m not constantly getting into trouble. Actually, the results are usually pretty good. So why not aim to do an adequate job, get it out of the way, and get out of there, right from the start?
Those frightening people who tend to have half a task done, halfway through the alloted time; who never seem to have that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they think about things they have to do; they’re not superhuman. They just understand that, for most things, good enough is just that - good enough. But millions of us - particularly, I’ll wager, over-educated knowledge-worker types - create a vision of genius that haunts us until we’re unable to actually get anything done.
"US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama points on his way to board his campaign plane in Columbia, Missouri, October 31, 2008"
Well, yes. He clearly is pointing. This superb photo series of Obama’s campaign is only slightly impaired by the ponderous captions.
The election being over is… odd. Of course, there’s a transition to over-analyse and the future Obama administration to wildly speculate about. But that sense of urgency - the sense that it really is my duty, as a concerned citizen of the world, to spend an hour or so each day catching up on the latest Sarah Palin scandal / Joe the Plumber appearance / McCain campaign infighting / outrageous slur against Obama - is gone.
There is an upside - more time for pointless web crazery such as, for example, finding my-name-as-a-face:
Disapointingly dull, you may agree. But I like that it appears to have a moustache.
In other Web News, Metro’s Tom Phillips has pointed out that the forgotten (or in my case, never-on-the-radar) indie lot Johnny Boy produced a 2004 hit (ahem) that, as well as being pleasantly jangly in a sort of Retro Bar way, presciently predicts the current ongoing Collapse Of Everything:
Just watched McCain conference speech again. It’s good, but the crowd aren’t listening to the best bits. The first time he tries to talk seriously about the economic crisis, he’s drowned out by chants of “USA! USA! USA!” But then he goes on to talk about cutting taxes, and the crowd goes insane. Which, quite possibly, sums up the whole reason the McCain campaign failed.
Andrew Sullivan has a plethora of reaction from across the ’sphere, with a conservative leaning. These two really sum it up:
The analytical quote:
1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.
2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.
Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.
I feel so much hope. I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.
I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.
What with all the fuss about the election for the office of what law blogs call POTUS, it’s easy to forget that today is also the day, not only of hundreds of US Senate and House of Representative races, but thousands more elections to state legislatures and of hundreds of elected judges, sheriffs and city commissioners across America. The world’s largest developed country really is an experiment in local democracy.
And, of course, there are hundreds of state and city referenda on particular issues. These vary from the vastly important to the - well, less so. This list of LA Times endorsements gives you the idea. You probably know about Proposition 8, the measure to amend California’s constitution to ban gay marriage (LA Times says: “No”). But what about Prop 5, introducing new drug rehabilitation agencies (LA Times: also “no”)? Or Prop 2, on the size of battery-hen cages (also, interestingly, “no”)?
The Guardian sums up some of the other, wackier, ballots out there. As well as waking up tomorrow in a world with a black US President-elect, we may be in a world where Colorado’s state constitution defines life as beginning at birth. I look forward to reading the coroner’s reports on the thousands of miscarriages that must take place in Colorado every year…
It’s worth recalling just how absurdly action-packed this two-year campaign has been. The First Lady Candidate vs the ambitious young black senator. The earliest-ever primaries. The shock in Iowa, Hillary’s tears. The Michigan-Florida farrago, which saw the term “Democratic Rules Committee” enter water-cooler vocabulary. John McCain’s campaign out of money, written off, and then reborn in New Hampshire. Guliani’s Florida gamble. Rev. Wright and “A More Perfect Union”. Bill Clinton’s “fairytale”. “Clean and articulate”. The pit bull, Katie Couric, Tina Fey and Joe the Plumber (say it ain’t so, Joe!). The dramatic Powell endorsement. Then - just as it all seems to be over - Obama’s grandmother dies the day before the election. You couldn’t make it up.
I’m 28, British, and have only been watching elections closely since the Bush era began. But surely this has been the most dramatic campaign since 1968. I wonder if anything - short of, God forbid, an inaugural assassination - can bring it to a suitably compelling climax.
You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, ‘this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic’…
The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it’ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers. [Read more →]
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