Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwaanza/Solstice/Newtonmas/Season of Joyful Consumption! – Like Matt Welch, I’m off to the Continent for the Holidays. I’ll be in Berlin, visiting a good friend. I’m looking forward to Christmas in Vetschau, a little burg east of Berlin and New Year’s in Prague. It’ll be my first trip out of North America. And it’s about time!

I may post once or twice from Berlin in the next week or so. Otherwise The Fly Bottle will be a field of deafening silence.

Have a great time celebrating whatever you celebrate, and may you get more than you deserve!

Totalitarian Chic – At the Georgetown Urban Outfitters, for $45 you can get a replica Soviet soccer Jersey — CCCP boldly emblazoned across the breast. For only $45, you can purchase ideological transgression. For just $45, you can have your own faux-vintage wearable protest against hegemonic market culture. Show you’re too cool to care about forced starvation and other forms of mass murder! Nazi-wear is a skoche too Republican for the scenester in the know. But Urban Outfitter Soviet-wear… well that’s just proletarian, but, you know, with flair!

The irony just destroys me. The Guevara-gear too. The kids who buy this stuff in a spirit of dissent are oblivious to their role in punctuating the utter destruction of the collectivist order. Like severed heads impaled on posts, these kids are walking warnings for anyone who would dare challenge the market order:

Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.

Without genetic or cybernetic enhancements to the capacities of the human brain it may be impossible to fully comprehend just how dumb Ted Rall is.

Living Without Appeal – Re-reading my previous post, I was reminded of one of my favorite philsophical passages. It’s from The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, and it moves me every time I read it. It’s about living “without appeal.” Very roughly, Camus’ point, as I understand it, is that by remaining almost naively honest about what one truly knows and persistently denying the desire to use doubtful readymade schemes to make life seem meaningful, one might discover a more authentic kind of meaning. But that doesn’t do it justice. Go read it.

I’ve posted it on a new page, Afterthoughts, where I’ll be putting things like like this that supplement writings on the main page.

In Praise of Crises of Meaning– A common complaint from both left and right is that liberal commercial society creates a crisis of meaning for its denizens. Without the external imposition of expectations and responsibilites, our lives lack a structure within which meaning may emerge. This is supposed to be a problem in need of a solution.

Our free society, together with our thriving market culture, creates a surfeit of choice. Yet in the absence of a readymade vision of life’s meaning and duties, we cannot know what we need to choose, or make a resolute stand against the onslaught of marketing that pulls us in contrary directions. Worse, without a readymade vision of life’s meaning, a vision of life’s meaning becomes yet another consumer product. But we cannot know which vision to choose without some sort of vision already in place. We are left with a gnawing anxiety, unsure of who we are, alienated from our own culture even as we participate in it. What good are thirty four models of toasters, or one hundred twelve flavors of gum, when this sense of disconnection and aimlessness dogs you relentlessly? You might have the exact Sumatran blend you desire. But that won’t make you happy.

That’s the argument, isn’t it? Well, it’s not a bad one. The anxiety of freedom is real. However, like a tortured, heartbreaking decision between Giselle Bundchen and Laetetia Casta, there are worse problems to have. The beautiful possibilities go overlooked.

There’s no denying that it’s hard making something of your life. And there’s no denying that there is comfort, even meaning, in tradition and in assigned roles. But there is no universal formula for meaning. And readymade visions may leave you cold, or oppressed. Our freedom and wealth is beautiful and good. And, yes, the possibilities of freedom and wealth are daunting. But therein lies much of the beauty and goodness. We are now at a point in history when our wealth and freedom make it possible to treat life as art. We are at liberty to recombine the found elements of our culture and shape our days into something not only novel, but beautiful and true.

Now, no one is forced to be an artist with her life. There are templates. Join the Marines. Become a Moonie. Save the spotted titmouse. If you need a scripted life, then by all means have one. However, if you need a script to tell you how to choose a script, that’s your problem, not freedom’s.

We are not too free. For the first time in history we are almost free enough. Because this is new (in the big picture), we have yet to fully internalize the loveliness of a custom-made life, and to recognize periodic crises of meaning as its necessary concommitant. No one ever said great things are easy. It is a great virtue of our civilization that so many of us have these crises so often, because it means we are not entirely preoccupied by immediate needs — by herding the sheep, throwing more dung on the fire, burying the children.

Last night I paid thirty minutes’ wages to see one scary looking bearded dude do awesome and dumbfounding things with a bass, a synth, a vocorder and drum machine. Who fucking knew? And that’s the point: Who fucking knows? Like the freedom to explore the vast space of musical possibility, the freedom to explore the vast space of human possibility is awe inspiring, not only for the beauty of exploration for its own sake, but for the treasures exploration can uncover.

So, yes, I am unsure of who I am, or what to make of myself. My life has no fixed meaning. I feel alone and a little afraid. And I like it that way.

Goldberg has moved on to a topic proper to his intellect: Is respect for dogs a sign of cultural health? Wow.

Gillespie Gives Goldberg the Beatdown — Nick Gillespie’s crisp, smart rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg’s aimless ravings about the dangers of libertarianism demonstrates by contrast the morbid condition of conservative thought and the vitality and robustness of the libertarian program.

Perry de Havilland of the Libertarian Samizdata lets Goldberg have it, and sportingly links to The Fly Bottle. And Instapundit mentions us both!

The Libertarian Defense League v. George Will – George Will bizarrely characterizes libertarianism as “faux conservatism.” Have libertarians ever tried to pass off their ideology as conservative? Are gay marriage, legalized heroin, open markets for prostitution and so forth easily confused for conservatism? Someone please explain this to me.

In any case, the libertarian view is not “that freedom exists where government compulsion does not,” as Will puts it. If my next door neighbor puts a gun to my head, dresses me in a latex body suit, and chains me to the pool table in his rec room, my freedom no longer exists, and government compulsion didn’t have anything to do with it. The libertarian view is just that government compulsion is not morally special. If it’s wrong for my neighbor to force me to do things I wouldn’t volunteer to do, then it’s wrong for the government too, and for the same reasons. After all, the government is just a bunch of folks like me and my neighbor.

Will goes on to argue that libertarians make a fetish of freedom in a way that fails to face the reality of conflicting political values, such as freedom, equality and order. Well, these don’t seem to me to conflict. Freedom is about being unconstrained by others to do what you like as long as you don’t use violence to keep others from doing what they like. Order is just the efficient maintenance of the peace that freedom entails. And the only kind of equality that matters morally is equality of violent power over others. We should all be as equal as is possible in having no (or as little as is really necessary) violent power over others. If everyone is equal in violent power such that no one can coerce others, then there is order, and everyone is free. Ta da!

Of course, the trick is how you keep people from coercing others by allowing some people (police) to have special powers to use pre-emptive and retaliatory violence, but without allowing this power to be abused? And how do you defend your borders against agressors without a big expensive military? And how do you pay for it if no one is allowed to just take your money, whether you like it or not? Good questions, all of which have interesting anwers!

More Goldberg Bashing — Goldberg concludes his essay thus:

Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won’t believe in nothing, he’ll believe in anything. God isn’t necessarily the issue here. But the principle is the same. Humans, especially children, very much want to believe in things. If we don’t bother to teach — or impose — certain Western values on our own people, they will embrace values that are neither open nor tolerant. Belief in “something” just isn’t good enough.

First, Chesterton never pointed out any such thing, because pointing out a falsehood is like pointing out the winged horse crossing the street with the elf on its back. He asserted it, falsely. Indeed, it’s necessarily false, as it’s contradictory. A man who stops believing in God has, by that very action, demonstrated that he will not believe in anything.

The gist of Chesterton’s falsehood is deeply anti-rational. The claim is that baseless commitment to (i.e., faith in) the existence a supernatural entity is the only possible foundation for norms governing belief. But that’s bizarre. One needn’t have God’s assistance to arrive at the principle that you should only believe things you have evidence for (which principle is an excellent reason to stop believing in God.) With respect to value, the notion is that only God’s commands can ground our judgments about value. But of course this is false. There is something that it is like to be a human being, and there are real requirements for life and happiness imposed on us not by God or our own descisions or desires, but by our naturally evolved biological and psychological constitution. Pace Chesterton’s mystical skepticism, it is possible to discover what these requirements and values are using plain old human reason unaided by divine guidance.

We should certainly teach our children these values. But they aren’t really “Western” in any other sense than that Westerners first discovered some of them. In any case, I certainly don’t want people like Goldberg imposing them. Goldberg has just told us that he believes that you cannot discover these values by rational means, and the biggest problem in the world today is precisely that of people attempting to impose on others values that have been gained through leaps of unreason. The cultural source of the parental idiocy that allowed one stupid kid to join the Taliban simply has no significance compared to the danger posed by anti-rational religious commitment, which caused the death of thousands of Americans, and which Goldberg continues to recommend to us.