Are We All Blogged Out?
It’s been quite a topic on Twitter among our little loosely-defined community. A bunch of us seem to have gone blooey all at once, as if responding helplessly to some shift in the heavens, or in the collective unconscious. The cultural wavefront has moved on, but whither? Twitter feels transitional, somehow. But blogging just seems to have peaked and ebbed . . . to have reached a saturation point, or point of diminishing returns. Maybe after several years of emptying out our minds daily (like chamber pots?) a lot of us are running out of things to say, or feel in danger of repeating ourselves. Maybe, with the exception of those blogs that have broken through — become established institutions in their niches, sustained by massive rewards, expectations, and inertial momentum — a lot of us just couldn’t keep up the effort any longer. Myself, I felt right on the borderline between private and public: blogging was no longer something I was doing just for myself, and so there was guilt and sorrow involved in (mostly) quitting. But I plum ran out of gas. (A gasbag without gas?)
It’s interesting to ponder Ann Althouse’s role in all this. [UPDATE: Per Twitter, I do not mean to suggest that Ann is “blogged out”: “ravished away” is more like it.] As the sort of leader of this particular pack, did she issue the cue we’re all following, or was she just an early responder to something larger? I suspect the latter, even though it feels to a lot of us as if the sun has deserted its faithful planets and run off to join a twin star. Oh, she’s still blogging, but you get the sense that her heart, quite understandably, isn’t in it to nearly the same extent. And so it is for many of us in miniature: “real life,” and even “real writing,” calls.
Of course there’s an element of pure practicality, of energetic economy, to it all. Are you getting enough calories out to keep putting them in? I was amused to read, yesterday, “Is Blogging Keeping You Poor?
We drive ourselves to creative exhaustion by expecting ourselves to pump out a never-ending stream of remarkable content — a stream that, even in the best of cases, only pulls in a couple hundred bucks a month in advertising revenue. . . .
To say we are overworked and underpaid is an understatement. . . .
[C]reative energy is a finite resource. You can probably summon enough to write a few quality posts, but once you’ve done that, there’s no creative energy left for anything else. It doesn’t matter how hard you push yourself. When you’re out, you’re out.
This character goes on to say the solution is working less and “monetizing” more, but that’s not what most of us want. To be blunt, we — at least the “we” who write, have written, or aspire to write and be sustained by it — want to work just as hard, or joyously harder, and get paid for it. A friend of mine who did women’s-magazine writing and editing for years, and wrote three amazing, groundbreaking books — all of them probably just a little too subtle and unsettling to be smash hits — is now writing online in the same vein, and being expected by major commercial women’s websites to be grateful for the opportunity to provide content for free. “I used to get paid for this,” she said to me recently in a dazed and rueful “What happened??” tone. The Web is full of writers who never quite broke through “in real life” and have failed to break through here too, in the sense of making a living wage. Obviously, it’s our “fault” — we haven’t hit a major nerve, we haven’t built a “platform,” we have neither wakefully figured out how to exploit ourselves nor obliviously embodied the spirit of the age, which are the two roads to having a name that pulls its weight. We’re “minor” and we’re proud. And tired.
It’s sad, though. It’s the end of a mini-era that’s lasted five years or so. Where now? We have to follow where the piper leads. It’s interesting to me to watch what we’re talking about here when we’re talking at all. It’s mostly the economy, stupid, with a minor in my obsessive theme of science and religion. It’s interesting to become aware of the extent to which blogging has been a political medium. The death of blogging, at least in its familiar voice and form, is linked to a sense of the profound inadequacy of politics to address what ails us. But politics, it turns out, was easy to talk about. Whether you took one side or the other or spun your web between them, it provided a ready-made framework for and spur to words. And now? What do we take off from? What do we react to? We’re like baby spiders floating in space with our little bits of silk, having as yet found nothing to attach them to.
Le blog est mort, vive le blog?
Great Depression Lessons Learned?
Harvard economics professor Robert Barro answers some questions posed by The Browser about lessons to be learned from the Great Depression. Sample:
B: So your point is that even in the context of massive expenditures in a wartime situation, the multiplier effect of government spending on the economy is less than 1- i.e. it is not a multiplier at all. In other words, fiscal stimulus does not work. I read your WSJ editorial on this. Is that a good way for the layman to understand your arguments? Also on the “Voodoo Multipliers.”
~Randy
UPDATE: Thoughts and Prayers Have Force!
I admit I’ve been anxiously haunting Danny’s blog, holding my breath each time, rewarded tonight with the sight of his son’s eloquent, tiny hands. There will soon be a blog specially for Charlie, chronicling his journey through the NICU.
We’ll keep it coming!
Is Religion Necessary? [UPDATED!]
As previously quoted, Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to think so: [bold = emphasis added]
[B]eyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions —we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!
And so, in similar terms but more words, does Gagdad Bob:
So it seems that we must seek a proper balance between letter and spirit. Many people reject religion because of an early experience of too much letter, not enough spirit. But then they might get involved in some new age nonsense, which is all spirit and no letter. However, spirit itself, like any other energy, is neutral; if it isn’t guided by a nonlocal structure of unchanging truth, it can just as easily lead down as up. You can find yourself on a slippery slope that leads all the way down to a slippery dope such as Deepak Chopra, who embodies the paradox of pure “slime without substance.”
Put this way, organized religion itself is a “necessary evil,” as it were. While necessary, we must not confuse it with that to which it points, or else we are simply engaging in idolatry by another name.
* * *
[T]he other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who is a dyed-in-the-wool-over-his-own-eyes atheist — one of those people who is just completely tone deaf when it comes to religion. I mentioned how I had long since abandoned philosophy for theology, and he asked why — what do you get out of it?
Of course, I had no way to explain it in his earthly terms, i.e., to somehow fit it into his little world, which obviously excludes the realm of spirit. I mean, there is surely spirituality there, as there is in any normal person’s life, but he doesn’t see it as an autonomous realm, just a derivative one.
Oddly, this is obviously the real world in which humans live — it is the quintessentially human world — and yet, this type of person rejects the human world for a lower one, while still trying to maintain their humanness. I suppose this can work for a generation or two, but at some point, the thread that links us to our civilizational source will be snapped, and that will be the end. Then it will just be a matter of waiting for the Islamists to finish the job, as in Europe.
Anyway, this friend asked me what I “get out of theology,” and I tried to answer. I pointed out that, first of all, the whole thing is an ongoing surprise to me, and that it is not even as if I chose it; rather, it has chosen me. I said that it was like entering this huge, magnificent intellectual cathedral that was perfectly adapted to the human psyche. . . .
* * *
As you know, Mrs G has converted to Catholicism. Not only that, but quite a few of my readers have either returned to Christianity or undergone formal conversion, and for that I am humbled and eternally grateful. But what about you, Bob? What are you? And what are you waiting for?
I am not a Christian, in the commonly understood sense of the term. I have to acknowledge that up front. Now, some of you are no doubt thinking to yourself, “Ha ha. Yes you are. Stop kidding yourself. You just haven’t realized it yet.” I won’t argue with that, but please indulge me. The point I would like to make is that, while not Christian per se, I am surely on a Christian adventure. An extraordinarily deep one, I might add. It has been ongoing for the past, I don’t know, eight or nine years, and just keeps getting more compelling.
In a way, I feel like the earliest Christians, who, after all, were not “Christians.” Rather, they were simply people having a Christian experience that later came to be known as “Christianity.” In fact, I’m thinking of calling it that myself. But the point is, this is what makes these early writings all the more compelling. No one was telling them the “correct” way to think. They did not “believe” in religion, but were undergoing religion.
And yet, I hold back. Why?
* * *
[W]hat you are seeing is a purely spontaneous production chronicling the encounter between me and Christian truth, which I believe, in a certain way, gives it more weight than it might have if I were simply reciting dogma as an “insider.” While some of what I say might sound dogmatic or authoritarian, I must again emphasize that I am not in my right mind when I’m saying it. Rather, I not only try to write about what I know, but what I don’t know. That is, I try to “write beyond myself,” so to spook, so that I am as genuinely surprised as anyone else at what comes out. Boo!
It is very important to me that I reach people who aren’t religious, but still have an impulse to be — especially people with the “Jesus willies.” I think that I would be less convincing if I were simply coming from a Christian perspective. In other words, perhaps I can be analogous to the disinterested scientist who explains how global warming or reductionistic Darwinism are bogus. People get enough of the normal evangelizing, and, as often as not, it backfires. But when a disinterested person with no vested interest is doing the selling, it may be more effective.
What I hear both these provocative minds saying is that at least for now and the foreseeable future, we don’t have any adequate alternative to traditional religion to keep us on track, connected to our nonmaterial source of raison d’être and perspective and guidance. So even though we may have outgrown the cosmology, we still need the counsel and the consolation. Break the old vessels, spill the wine.
It’s a funny feeling, though. Whatever-it-is spoke to humanity in childlike terms humanity could understand. Now that science has shattered the medium, what happens to the message? And how do we accept that we’re growing up intellectually faster than we are emotionally?
UPDATE: We’re not the only ones talking about just this, just now. Stanley Fish writes in the NY Times (and gets 655, count ’em, high-level comments to date):
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”
Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions . . .
In a phrase I suspect is destined to be oft quoted, Eagleton says, “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”
Read the whole thing. This is shaping up to a verdict, or a consensus: we could shed religion now, but we’d better choose not to. It’s strange to make a conscious choice to believe the no longer believable (the Biblical cosmos is to the actual cosmos we are discovering as a small child’s drawing is to the Sistine ceiling); maybe related to what Jack Whelan of After the Future calls “second naiveté.”
We cannot live as the ancestors lived, but the rationalist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost. Our job now is to retrieve the lost gifts, and to adapt it to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to the premoderns. [ . . .]
We no longer can maintain a “first naivete”, which is the state of the believer before critical consciousness. We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a second naivete, which is the attitude toward the superrational that is childlike in its receptivity, but, because we must travel lightly, shrewd in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous.
(P.S. Agnosticism — admitting we don’t know shit — still seems more honest and more reverent to my temperament. But like Cal in the comments, I’m not sorry to be surrounded by people who aren’t like me. Being in the gaseous state myself, I’m glad some people are solid.)
Ambiance 