Frame Problems (09/21/21)
9/11, Critical Rationalism, and The Great Kayfabrication
Hello new subscribers!
I had a bit of a false start with this newsletter a few months ago and still don’t quite know what shape I’d like it it to take, but I’m going to start publishing it regularly and try to work things out on the fly. Please let me know if there’s anything you’d especially like to see in here! As it stands, today’s edition is a medley of what I’ve been reading and thinking about. But first…
What I’m Working On
I released part two of my How Politics Became Pro Wrestling series, entitled “The Great Kayfabrication.”
The response has been better than I could have hoped for, aided in no small part by Eric Weinstein generously making it his pinned tweet:
I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about what the research, writing, and editing process is for these videos. I’ll be sharing more details on this in future newsletters, and will likely make behind-the-scenes stuff available to patrons on my newly-launched Patreon.
But for now, I’d like to point to two creators whose work inspired the aesthetic of the video. The first is Coleman Lowndes, whose Darkroom series at Vox was the inspiration behind the look of the wrestling cold open. The second is Johnny Harris, whose COVID video for the New York Times was the inspiration for the timeline look — and whose tutorial taught me how to do it. Johnny and his wife Iz also gave me encouragement on their podcast when I wrote in to them a few years ago, so I owe them in more ways than one.
I am hard at work on part three, “Reality Shoots,” which will be about the succession of narrative-breaking events that have occurred over the last twenty years: 9/11, the Financial Crisis, the election of Donald Trump, and COVID-19.
I dare not say how long it will take me, because I am notoriously bad at predicting these things, but I’ll do my best to keep getting faster with each video. Even more than the other two, this one is a bit of a high-wire act, because it deals with contemporary politics at their most polarized. My overall aim with the series (and, I believe, Weinstein’s aim with his narrative) is to tell a story that addresses the concerns of both left and right without alienating either or making excuses for their crazier wings. That may well be impossible, but it’s worth a shot!
Totally apart from the video stuff, I’ve been continuing longstanding efforts to build a bridge between two of my favorite thinkers, David Deutsch and David Chapman. (At the moment, this is more of a crusade to convince the Deutschians that Chapman has important lessons to teach them, but I hold out hope for a reconciliation.)
I did a thread on this some months ago that recently got some traction again because of the success of Lulie Tannett’s recent threads on Deutsch’s philosophy.
After a somewhat rocky initial reception from Deutschian thought-leader Brett Hall, I think I’m starting to make some headway!
I appeared twice on Christofer Lövgren’s Do Explain podcast to try to hash some of this out, and by the end of the second appearance, I’d certainly persuaded him that there was something worth paying attention to.
Whether or not the philosophical minutiae interest you, both episodes are lively explorations of some of my favorite topics: mind, meaning, and meditation.
Here are parts 1 and 2 of my first appearance.
And here’s the second appearance, which is quite a bit more speculative and fun.
What I’m Thinking About
Like many others, I was given the chance last week to reflect on the events of September 11, 2001 and their impact on my life and thinking — all the more because 9/11 will likely kick off part three of the video series.
I was only nine years old on the day and didn’t lose anyone I knew, so the experience was more an inchoate sense of rupture in the world than any kind of articulated pain or insight. I was quite surprised when, at a memorial ceremony my school held a year later, I found myself inconsolably in tears.
I do remember being struck, to a degree that continues to resonate, by the sheer strangeness of the explanation that coalesced over the following days and weeks. The culprits, I learned, were motivated by a mix of religious and political grievances so alien to me as to scarcely be intelligible. If, over the subsequent years, I would develop an uncommon level of interest in questions of mind, meaning, and belief, it undoubtedly owes something to this early bafflement.
My confusion found articulation a few years later with the rise of the rise of the New Atheism and, especially, the publication of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. It is difficult to remember, given the movement’s descent into irrelevance and cringe, but the New Atheists really did have something important to say in an era when both global jihadism and Bush-style Christian fundamentalism were ascendant. Harris’s emphasis on the role of genuine religious conviction — rather than merely terrestrial grievances or social bonding — in jihadist terror still strikes me as a necessary corrective to the obfuscations of many liberals. (Consider Barack Obama’s claim that “…there’s no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that [ISIS or Al Qaeda] do.”)
Harris reiterated this view in a recent audio essay, titled “The Second Plane”:
So what changed with the second plane? Well, it proved the intentionality of the act, and the suicidality of it, and therefore it established its ideological origins. In fact, it established the truth of what was happening as fully as it would have if you could have heard the hijackers shrieking, “Allah hu akbar” from the cockpit of the plane…Very soon, I think within 24 hours, or 48 hours at most, the fact that we were dealing with Islamic extremists of some sort was established. And then the experience for me was something like a feeling of limitless clarity on a few points. [Among them, the connection between extremist Islam and Islam]…There are seemingly unlimited numbers of overeducated people who imagine nobody really believes in paradise, not really, and I’ve spent more than a decade arguing with these people.
I’m still convinced that this point is correct, as far as it goes. But I now believe that it elides some of the important distinctions that are necessary to understand both jihadist terrorism and the changing role of religion in the modern world.
Harris’s basic claim is that, while religious moderation is undoubtedly preferable to religious fundamentalism, the latter has a distinct memetic advantage, so long as scripture is held to be infallible. The fundamentalist interpretation of the text is more plausible, and in a certain sense more intellectually honest, than the moderate one. As such, the intellectually honest critique of religion must attack its fundaments, which is to say its scriptural truth claims about the world. To paraphrase Harris, “the fundamentalists have read the books, and they’re right about them.”
Implicit here is the idea that religions — and humans minds more generally — are best understood in terms of the propositional claims to which they assent; that is, what they believe to be true or false about the world. Indeed, this is how Harris connects his research on the neurological basis of belief with his critique of religion. But this understanding of religion, and of what it is to be a human being, is a flawed and distinctly modern one, not (as the fundamentalists themselves claim) a necessary and traditional one.
As David Chapman writes:
Fundamentalism describes itself as traditional and anti-modern. This is inaccurate… Systems of justifications are the defining feature of “modernity,” as I (and many historians) use the term.
The defining feature of actual tradition—“the choiceless mode”—is the absence of a system of justifications: chains of “therefore” and “because” that explain why you have to do what you have to do. In a traditional culture, you just do it, and there is no abstract “because.” How-things-are-done is immanent in concrete customs, not theorized in transcendent explanations.
Genuine traditions have no defense against modernity. Modernity asks “Why should anyone believe this? Why should anyone do that?” and tradition has no answer. (Beyond, perhaps, “we always have.”)…
Fundamentalisms try to defend traditions by building a system of justification that supplies the missing “becauses.” You can’t eat sushi because God hates shrimp. How do we know? Because it says so here in Leviticus 11:10-11.
Secular modernism tries to answer every “why” question with a chain of “becauses” that eventually ends in “rationality,” which magically reveals Ultimate Truth. Fundamentalist modernism tries to answer every “why” with a chain that eventually ends in “God said so right here in this magic book which contains the Ultimate Truth.”
To the secular rationalist, religion is best understood as a defective attempt at rationality. As Harris says in his interview with Eric Weinstein, he views religion as “failed science.” Religions are bad because they believe false things; or, more precisely, because they justify their beliefs incorrectly, using chains of reasoning that terminate with the authority of scripture rather than the tried and true methods of rational empiricism.
But as Chapman argues, our basic way of interacting with the world is better understood as meaning-making, rather than as belief-formation and plan-making to achieve goals. The modernist conceit that all meanings can be reduced to rational ones misunderstands human beings, and religion by extension.
(Harris himself has a more sophisticated epistemology, and rationalists of various stripes will find much to quibble with here, I’m sure! I recommend listening to the first of the podcasts above for more explanation on this front. Here, I’d like to make a different point.)
I’ll do my best to unpack this view further in future newsletters, but I bring it up here because of the light I think it sheds on the idea of “kayfabrication.”
In the last newsletter, I mentioned Peter Thiel’s essay, “The Straussian Moment,” a philosophical treatise about America in the post-9/11 world. In it, Thiel argues that the Enlightenment abandoned questions of what one might call existential meaning in order to escape the religious wars that had plagued Europe for centuries:
From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this ? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature.
Like Chapman, Thiel does not consider these questions to have been resolved by Enlightenment rationality. Rather, he views their abandonment as a “major strategic retreat”:
If the only way to stop people from killing one another about the right way to open an egg involved a world where nobody thought about it too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned because it is too perilous a question to debate.
The consequence of this abandonment, Thiel speculates, is a gradual turn toward interiority, entertainment, and fantasy in the modern world. Citing the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, he wonders whether this might also represent a turn away from politics, understood as the forum in which questions of fundamental value are disputed:
The world of "entertainment" represents the culmination of the shift away from politics. A representation of reality might appear to replace reality: instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be "intrigues of all sorts,' as in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death.
But this condition is not sustainable, and September 11th for Thiel represents a kind of vengeful return of these questions of existential meaning to the American political stage:
The progress of the Enlightenment has occurred at different rates in different parts of the world. And in that world outside the West, questions of religion and the purpose of humanity remained central; even in 2001 the greatest fear was not the fear of a painful death but the fear of what would happen to one in the life after that death…And so, a religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars.
The point here is not that we ought to understand ourselves to be engaged in any simplistic “clash of civilizations,” but rather that our own abandonment of questions of existential meaning left us vulnerable to to attackers whose motives we were not in a position to understand. Questions of existential meaning, and the violence they threaten to unleash, were obscured by our rational economic and political self-understanding.
And this is why 9/11 features in the third video of the kayfabe series. Kayfabrication, Weinstein argues, emerges out of the need to take something boring and dangerous and make it entertaining and safe for a mass audience. More broadly, it is about using fantasy to get meaning without violence. But this strategy is ultimately unsustainable: reality (or a competing fantasy world) has a way of breaking through, with violent consequences.
September 11th shatters the conceit that we can banish violence by retreat into fantasy. And the strange, degraded condition of modern politics — what Thiel describes as “super intense and super fake at the same time” — results in part from a failure to give existential meaning an adequate place in our self-understanding. As Thiel argues, “we’ve substituted the realities of politics for these increasingly fictionalized worlds, and I think that’s a very unhealthy thing.”
This is already too much for a newsletter, so I’m going to call it here. But I think the understanding of meaning that Chapman puts forward points the way out of some of these problems. It neither denies the centrality of existential meaning in our lives nor distorts it into political fantasy or anti-rational religiosity.
More to come! Please don’t hesitate to reply and let me know what you’d like to see more or less of in this newsletter.
Take care,
Jake
I remember how my brothers and their friends from our fundamentalist church were great fans of pro wrestling growing up. They talked about it as real. I tried to entertain the possibility seriously, and engage with it sincerely. But it seemed impossible. They insisted it was real. Insisted, over and over. It was important that you believed that they believed.
I looked around me at the congregation on Sunday morning, as my father preached from the pulpit. It was a church with "Fundamentalist" literally in the name. I could tell they weren't acting like they would act if they believed the things they were saying. But the thing is, my father could tell too. Tears would stream down his face as he begged them to have a revival of the spirit. There were tent revivals and altar calls which seemed impressive in the moment. These things were performed in front of each other. That was all that came of it.
Finally my father left the pastorate and took us to another fundamentalist church.
I went to Bible college, and it was the same. People around me were making words come out of their mouths, but they didn't act like they acted when they believed literally any other thing in their lives, such as the phrase "I'm hungry," in which case they changed their actions by seeking food. They were making those sounds for an unknown purpose, for a cryptic activity. Maybe some believed partially, some totally, and some not at all, but one could never quite tell who. What was ... important ... was ... that you _believed_ that they believed!
Very gradually, it started to dawn on me, that perhaps many people are doing something other than what I think they are doing when they state propositions. But I was incapable of articulating that at the time, even to myself. It remained inchoate for decades.
I need to read more