For decades my listening of choice has been primarily jazz. Ella. Coltrane. Miles. Parker. Turrentine. That sort of thing. I missed much of the popular music of the 90s and the 2000s, because I wasn’t listening to music on the radio. My understanding of classical music is, sadly, spotty also. I’m a product of my times.
When I spent the summer of 2019 driving around the western United States I decided to not bring a stack of music along and to instead listen to whatever was on the radio wherever I happened to be. Country, rock, R&B, talk, Christian programming, whatever I could tune in on AM or FM with the stock radio and a crappy antenna. It was edifying.
When I stopped, I found myself listening, more and more, to “classic” rock and gradually an appreciation for the musicianship of the artists grew. Musicians I’d dismissed as pop artists took on a depth I’d missed. People I’d listened to in my youth (The Stones, Yes, Bob Seger, Journey, Kansas, AC/DC, etc.) and then dismissed in favor of jazz seemed to take on a complexity and skill that I’d never understood. The complexity and depth was always there, of course. I’d just been too judgmental to notice.
Anyway, that is why, today, my radio is usually tuned to a classic rock station. Hold that thought. I’ll get back to it.
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Yesterday an intellectual giant passed away at the age of 78. Angelo Codevilla was a professor of international relations at Boston University and his writing often appeared in a wide variety of publications, ranging from The New York Times to Popular Science. He published a translation of Machiavelli's The Prince and his interests were wide-ranging, and though he is best known for his work in foreign relations, he was also an astute critic of cultural trends.
Perhaps the last thing of his that will ever see print is an essay, Resetting the Educational Reset, that will appear in a collection of essays, Against the Great Reset, which will be published at some future date. This, however, is the passage that jumped out at me:
“Some studies suggest that the complex of what each generation conveyed to the next made those generations more intellectually/morally potent than their predecessors though the early twentieth century, but that this process has reversed itself over about a half century and average IQ has dropped by some 14 points. The decline seems to have come at the top of our civilizational pyramid. Speculation about the causes is less relevant than noting the effects.
But the deepest philosophical causes are not in dispute. After Descartes’ Discourse on Method reduced reality into something wholly comprehensible by truncating it, the very peaks of Western philosophy reversed the relationship between reality and the observer. Kant and Hegel’s “idealism” is neither more nor less than the further affirmation that the mind, for its own sovereign convenience, can take possession of what it perceives. From these philosophical peaks, any number of streams of far less sophisticated thought have flowed that effectively and explicitly place the mind’s product under the sway of man’s will, and hence of man’s various interests.
The intellectual mechanism is straightforward: presume to abolish the objective status of what you see, and presume to retake possession of what you then suppose to be reality, based on what matters to you.”
I find this fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which that this is a phenomena I’ve noticed myself. A whole lot of people seem to be increasingly pissed off to discover reality does not bend to their will.
In the past I’ve written a little about how popular culture is downstream from philosophical movements and fads, and I think Codevilla put his finger on something important. For about a half century the trend in academia has been to “abolish the objective status of what you see, and presume to retake possession of what you then suppose to be reality, based on what matters to you.”
My objections to Black Lives Matter are rooted right there. In discussions on Facebook, I demonstrated, using statistics gathered by the FBI and by organizations that were started with the purpose of curbing police violence, that the police pose no greater threat to young black males than to anyone else, of any color. This didn’t matter. I won’t break it all down here, but the numbers prove beyond question that the police get it right about 99.97% of the time, which is an impressive record in any field. Didn’t matter. Beyond the fact that literally no one is suggesting that black lives Don’t matter, or matter less, for pointing out the irrefutable, mathematical evidence, many claimed I am a racist myself. Those making the claims, the supporters of BLM, are doing precisely what Codevilla describes: abolishing objective reality (the facts) and presuming to take possession of reality, based on what matters to them.
We see this everywhere, and it explains the gaping chasm between the left and the right. Islam is the “religion of peace”. A biological man declares himself a woman and competes in women’s sports. The only president since Gerald Ford to not start a war is a warmonger. Green energy, though completely unreliable, should be the majority of the energy produced. The USA was founded on and in support of racism and slavery.
When these things do not pan out (as fantasies often do not) the proponents do not become contemplative or wonder where they went wrong. The problem is obvious: reality is not behaving. Anyone who mocks is an unbeliever, a Philistine among the Chosen People in the Tribe of the Woke.
Am I mistaken? Possible, but I don’t think so.
*
So, driving along yesterday with the radio tuned to classic rock, Aerosmith came on, playing Dude Looks Like a Lady. I’d never listened to the lyrics, so I turned it up and paid attention.
“So never judge a book by its cover
Or who you gonna love by your lover
Love put me wise to her love in disguise
She had the body of a Venus
Lord, imagine my surprise
Dude looks like a lady
Dude looks like a lady
Dude looks like a lady
Dude looks like a lady”
Woah, I thought. That’s just not going fly. If the dude wants to be a lady, the doctrine goes, she’s a lady, not a dude at all. How dare Steve Tyler presume her gender because she’s packing a penis.
This brought to mind a hit from 1971 by the British group Ten Years After. I’d Love to Change the World. As a kid, I liked this song quite a lot, and DJs played the crap out of it.
“Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity?
Tax the rich, feed the poor
'Til there are no rich no more
I'd love to change the world
But I don't know what to do
So I'll leave it up to you”
You’ll never hear this song on the radio again, on any station.
In 1971, when I’d Love to Change the World was released, something between 4% and 10% of the population was gay and a much smaller number transgender. This was also true sixteen years later, in 1987 when Aerosmith released Dude Looks Like a Lady. It is still true today. All that has changed is the demand that we all ignore what we see and go along with the fantasy that reality is malleable. Today, we are all expected to believe that if someone really believes they are something other than what they are, reality will warp to accommodate their wishes. This is a very, very stupid idea, because it encourages individuals to believe that there is no reality. There is a huge difference between Do Not Judge and Have No Judgment. Reality is a real thing.
Here’s the problem coming up the road: If reality is expected to bend for one group, it must also be presumed that reality will bend for everyone else. If a man can decide he is actually a woman, he can also decide, ad hoc, that he is invisible, or a superhero, or an eel, or a zombie. If a group can decide, without any evidence whatsoever, that the nation is racist and black people are above the law, another group, any group, is free to define a problem that doesn’t exist, insist their delusion be respected, and behave accordingly. We can just toss the DSM out the window, because mental illness will no longer exist. We have a word for this: barbarism. The absence of culture and civilization. The center will not hold. Everyone can not decide what is real.
So there is a built in double standard. The guy who wants to be a woman is heroic, but the guy who identifies as, say, an amputee is mentally ill. The person who imagines a nation full of racist cops is speaking truth to power, but the person who thinks the entire concept of race is hooey is a racist. Someone who tries to burn a police station with the people inside of it is engaged in free speech, but the person who wanders the halls of the Capital without permission is an insurrectionist.
This won’t work. It is destined to collapse because things that can not go on forever, don’t. Somehow, we are, eventually, going to have to get on the same page. No one need be persecuted or stigmatized, but delusions will have to be relegated to the realm of the private. Policies made that are rooted in the flexibility of reality will always be inherently unfair. They always have been.
I have no idea how to fix this, but I stand with reality.
I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do.
So I’ll leave it up to you.
Peace.