The more you quote from McLuhan the more I think he wasnt rejected in his time (not that Im saying he was; I have no idea how he was regarded, but if there was any rejection... ), but just that everyone around him had no idea or frame of reference to even understand what the hell he was saying. The stuff of his youve quoted is only now finding a social tech reality where it has direct application and context. To people back in his time is would have been complete gibberish.
I have to comment on that Alegria art style, because to me it is clearly derived from Leger.
It was through your article on Leger that I came to know of his art, and once I did I could see its influence literally everywhere in about 30s onward, especially his earlier (probably viewed as his peak phase) when he was doing his inanimate mechanical things like The Disc and The City.
Like, if you took that style of his from then and boiled it in a pot of water until it was limp and pliable youd get the Alegria art style. Kind of like Leger is uncooked brittle noodles and Alegria is a well cooked pasta dish.
He was definitely an enfant terrible of a public intellectual in the 1960s. Household name tier. But even though he pretty much invented media studies, he started falling out of favor with the academy in the 1970s because he was seen to be too much a provocateur, too oracular, even something of a bullshit artist. But if the literati and the academy were sliding away from his ideas in the 1980s, Silicon Valley was embracing them. In the last two or three weeks I've seen an article about McLuhan in Slate and heard a fifteen-minute NPR segment about retrieved orality, so maybe he'll become fashionable again—now that it's become pretty much impossible to deny he got more right than he got wrong.
Also—holy shit I never made the connection between Algeria/Corporate Memphis and Leger. I can see the points of contact in Leger's earlier work when I squint—but damn it, now I don't think I'll be able to look at his late-career "primitivist" stuff the same way ever again. (It wasn't my favorite, but still.)
I will be honest, and I must say sorry for lowering the intellectual bar on the comments, but I am just sad. All these socioeconomical mechanisms making me feel in a worldwide sublime hopeless scenario that is way beyond my grasp and control, yet having my personal failings pointed at as if they made my life unworthy of being lived. What brings me to read this after quitting my job and on 4 hours of sleep if I already know what to expect? Like a self fulfilling prophecy where the cellphone is making me sad because it says that the cellphone is making everyone sad. I can not put a cool facade of "yeah, I am conscious of all of this yet I will occasionally leave a comment to you about videogames that I think are worthwhile"; they are my main interest; I am sincerely sorry for being dishonest with myself, sorry for being a nihilist and sorry for not being a pretty sight over all; yes, it is an addiction in the sense that I don't want to live the rest of my life measuring how good I am living by how many years of nerd sobriety I have. I can't even think of pursuing creative endeavors anymore because what I want to create would only be liked by other people on the internet.
Yapping like this is not aligned with my interests as I feel I will be featured in a writeup like the subreddit for Monkey Island, emotionally gutted for all to see, but I can't put this anywhere else. Can't explain this to anybody in my family, as I can't articulate it and they like entertainment also. I can't talk about this with my peers, as they don't seem as miserable as me and I could just leave them an emotional wreck like myself. Can't put this on any other forum because that would be being part of the machine and also the internet is now mean. What would I say to a shrink? "Doctor, they are telling me to touch grass on the internet or else life on this Earth will cease to exist but not before being absolutely worthless to be lived". This is the lonelinest I have ever felt in my life.
Like, before the pandemic I tought being a geek wasn't that big of a deal and now I have a whole 6 part essay dissecting how I am an omen of the apocalypse even though I did what society told me all my life to do, I went to college and then I discover that I am alienated to my profession; but I bet kayaking hobbyists don't have to deal with this. (I need to clarify, it is not your fault that I feel how I feel, I got in contact with concerns like this somewhere else, never stopped using the internet but rediscovered one of your old rpg articles and serendipitously found that most of your writings were about these media concerns).
I have run out of steam, I forgot what was gonna be my final paragraph. I am not mad at you, but come on, Musk? That is a low blow, as if most Sillicon Valley bigwigs were gamers. Does it even matter who he is? He is just there because capital amasses more capital and he had a fat heritage.
Gonna read about Shuma-Gorath to regain some sense of normalcy. Never stop writing, but that dance floor better have live folk music.
I spent too long typing out replies, finding them inadequate, and deleting them. I'm just gonna go with whatever I come up with this time.
You don't have to apologize for lowering the intellectual bar of anyone's comments section. I'm lowering the intellectual bar of Substack, so what the hell.
You're not an omen of the apocalypse—no more than I am. I grew up with video games. I love video games—though I limit how much I play them nowadays. I love Magic: The Gathering—even though for the sake of my wallet & sanity I can never play it again. I grew up with the internet, and am some unevolved & unremarkable species of cOnTeNt CrEaToR, so I can't say that I've an entirely healthy relationship with the web or its social validation feedback loops. I'm a creature of addiction & compulsion.
I'm prone to depression (I don't want to go into detail, but yeah, it can be disruptive in a really bad kind of way), so I sometimes have a tendency towards black & white thinking and abyss-gazing. My spouse, my sister, basically every ex of mine, and a few critics who emailed me about my game writeups are/were convinced I'm some kind of autistic—so, sure, let's say that's a factor. But black & white and ungenerous thinking wasn't what you needed right now, and I'm sorry for that.
I was black & white and ungenerous with this piece because I've been feeling so disturbed by the Big Picture. And because I hate feeling fucked up & used by the things I love or once loved (but can't get away from). When I talk to a best friend of mine from my hometown who's been teaching middle school for almost 20 years I hate hearing him say that the evolved forms of the games & tech we grew up with & loved & bonded over have destroyed his students' minds, and that it's only getting worse. I hate that so many people I know are lonely and sad, and I hate that the people selling them their medicine have an interest in keeping them that way. I hate feeling like there's an epidemic of despair and I hate that I can't do anything about it.
Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to stay sane. It's not getting any easier, and I wish that weren't the case.
hot damn this sounds almost exactly like a reply I posted to an article here a short while back. I have a feeling that a lot of us around the same age are feeling the same things right now.
Very well written article, but your conclusion is extremely ungenerous. You start by talking about obfuscation caused by language, but I think you step into the classic linguistic trap of archeology : "the sacred". We know for a fact that, for example, ritualized Aztec combat did not make the sun come up or rain come down, so in that sense "bourgeois" art is no less sacred than primitive art forms. Heck, we can't even be certain that primitive peoples really did believe in their "sacred" practices. Perhaps it's all just one big social regulation mechanism, which as you point out, is no better than today.
Besides, what can survive analysis when brought to the level of the Cosmos and Capitalism? On that level, the Mona Lisa is just decomposing pigment made for a rich patron that's become a cash cow for a museum that caters to people who just want to put a check mark on their bucket list of "self-actualization".
What about that "dancing" of yours, eh? You wouldn't be moving your hips and legs around in a secular pastiche of dance's original sacred function? You wouldn't be dancing because CAPITALISM keeps you at your desk all day, huh? I bet you even go to commercial venues to dance and purchase various stimulants. That's practically being capitalism's lapdog! Gosh, I've even heard that some people put their dancing on social media to get attention! Can you believe it?
I'm not saying video games can't be soul-sucking time wasters. Heck, many of them are intentionally hooking their audience on their product and trying to sell as much as possible. And sure, everyone has to "touch grass" a lot more. Then again, I can't think of someone like Billy Basso sitting at his desk for seven years to make Animal Well as somehow Doing Capitalism's Bidding, not even in a vague loosey-goosey sense.
I am going to do the thing where I select parts of your reply and respond to them selectively. Forgive me if this comes across as a rebuttal; it's just that don't have a lot of time to punch out a reply and this way I can keep myself focused.
>>We know for a fact that, for example, ritualized Aztec combat did not make the sun come up or rain come down, so in that sense "bourgeois" art is no less sacred than primitive art forms. Heck, we can't even be certain that primitive peoples really did believe in their "sacred" practices.
I recently took a course in indigenous African religions because I had the opportunity, and because I wanted to better understand the pre-literate mindset and worldview. (Being the one white guy in a class full of hoteps was an education in itself.)
If what I learned about the premodern or traditional African worldview is at all representative of "primitive" outlooks in general, I can pretty confidently say that they *absolutely* believe in gods and spirits. For them, nothing happens without an intelligible will effectuating it. Piss off the ancestors, spirits, and/or divinities, bad things happen. Make the right sacrifices, observe propriety with regard to the unseen entities and to one's community, good things happen. Another way of putting it is that they are *very* superstitious—but that may be the cost of having a unified, closed-system ontology.
What we can say about their "magical" social regulatory mechanisms is that, in principal, they are locally and mutually applied. Ours confront us impersonally, originate from we know not where, and serve the interests of we know not whom (at least not personally). This is a bizarre state of affairs—leasing our eyes, ears, and nerves (as McLuhan says) to private firms. I don't think I can be blamed for having misgivings about it, even if I pretty much have to live with it.
>>Besides, what can survive analysis when brought to the level of the Cosmos and Capitalism? On that level, the Mona Lisa is just decomposing pigment made for a rich patron that's become a cash cow for a museum that caters to people who just want to put a check mark on their bucket list of "self-actualization".
You said it, not me.
The Mona Lisa's an unusual case, though—it's the Kim Kardashian of Western art. It's famous for being famous. The experience of viewing it (waiting in line as if for a roller coaster, being herded into a crowded room, glancing at it for a few moments before getting hurried forward) sounds like an exercise in tourist box-ticking if ever there was one. But if that box is important to somebody, I should hope they have the self-confidence to tell me to fuck off.
>>What about that "dancing" of yours, eh? You wouldn't be moving your hips and legs around in a secular pastiche of dance's original sacred function? You wouldn't be dancing because CAPITALISM keeps you at your desk all day, huh? I bet you even go to commercial venues to dance and purchase various stimulants. That's practically being capitalism's lapdog!
It's a "take what I can get" sort of thing. It puts me in my body and takes me out of my head. I like that it's a shared and even a little intimate experience with a revolving cast of characters where everyone is aware of and attuned to the people around them in an earnest but completely unserious situation. Music and dance predate civilization and will survive its next recession and/or collapse.
I try to talk about CaPiTaLiSm as a situation or an organizing principle, not as a boogeyman entity. Sometimes I don't do so good a job of it. I don't know what to tell you, though—if you're looking back on the general direction in which life in the United States has materially trended since the end of the New Deal era in the 1980s or the financial crisis of 2008 and thinking "yes, more FIRE economy, more technofeudalism, more enshittification please," then cool, I'm glad it's been working out for you.
>>I'm not saying video games can't be soul-sucking time wasters. Heck, many of them are intentionally hooking their audience on their product and trying to sell as much as possible.
I'll say that I love video games like I love cigarettes and leave it at that.
"For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which may not be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence. It is true; so fatal an event is very little to be dreaded. Nature is always too strong for principle. And though a Pyrrhonian may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point of action and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect, or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches. When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them." —David Hume
"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of scepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life."
In the margins of my copy I have "GET A JOB" penciled in. But I think we can file dancing under the "actions of common life" heading.
I feel compelled to point out to myself & sundry that Hume's Pyrrhonists aren't fixated on doomer social criticism but insoluble metaphysical quandaries—but, let's face it, they're about equally useless.
I know Hume was a skeptic of the inference where humans set up a story in-between cause and effect, himself. I can deal with the idea that sometimes the explanations we come up with are wrong. I respect that you know his work better than me. I get more joy reading about efficacy of vitamin K2 in reducing calcification of arteries than reading deeply of philosophy. More actionable.
Also, those quandaries are solvable as long as you can accept that, like, we need to eat and will think of ways to get food, and take shortcuts to spend less food. The thoughts we have are good and beautiful, even when they don't help get food, or do so only through Rube-Goldbergian devices of status and friendship.
As Terry Pratchet wrote: "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
> Has the internet made classic games like chess and Scrabble more fun or less fun?
More fun. Like, a *lot* more fun - none of my IRL friends want to play Scrabble with me because I consistently whoop their asses, and I lose every single chess game against them. The widespread adoption of Elo ratings is maybe the only good aspect of gamification.
(Forgive me this one nitpick on this excellent series lol.)
The more you quote from McLuhan the more I think he wasnt rejected in his time (not that Im saying he was; I have no idea how he was regarded, but if there was any rejection... ), but just that everyone around him had no idea or frame of reference to even understand what the hell he was saying. The stuff of his youve quoted is only now finding a social tech reality where it has direct application and context. To people back in his time is would have been complete gibberish.
I have to comment on that Alegria art style, because to me it is clearly derived from Leger.
It was through your article on Leger that I came to know of his art, and once I did I could see its influence literally everywhere in about 30s onward, especially his earlier (probably viewed as his peak phase) when he was doing his inanimate mechanical things like The Disc and The City.
Like, if you took that style of his from then and boiled it in a pot of water until it was limp and pliable youd get the Alegria art style. Kind of like Leger is uncooked brittle noodles and Alegria is a well cooked pasta dish.
He was definitely an enfant terrible of a public intellectual in the 1960s. Household name tier. But even though he pretty much invented media studies, he started falling out of favor with the academy in the 1970s because he was seen to be too much a provocateur, too oracular, even something of a bullshit artist. But if the literati and the academy were sliding away from his ideas in the 1980s, Silicon Valley was embracing them. In the last two or three weeks I've seen an article about McLuhan in Slate and heard a fifteen-minute NPR segment about retrieved orality, so maybe he'll become fashionable again—now that it's become pretty much impossible to deny he got more right than he got wrong.
Also—holy shit I never made the connection between Algeria/Corporate Memphis and Leger. I can see the points of contact in Leger's earlier work when I squint—but damn it, now I don't think I'll be able to look at his late-career "primitivist" stuff the same way ever again. (It wasn't my favorite, but still.)
Example 1: https://www.wikiart.org/en/fernand-leger/the-great-julie-1945
Example 2: https://www.wikiart.org/en/fernand-leger/acrobats-and-clowns-1950
I will be honest, and I must say sorry for lowering the intellectual bar on the comments, but I am just sad. All these socioeconomical mechanisms making me feel in a worldwide sublime hopeless scenario that is way beyond my grasp and control, yet having my personal failings pointed at as if they made my life unworthy of being lived. What brings me to read this after quitting my job and on 4 hours of sleep if I already know what to expect? Like a self fulfilling prophecy where the cellphone is making me sad because it says that the cellphone is making everyone sad. I can not put a cool facade of "yeah, I am conscious of all of this yet I will occasionally leave a comment to you about videogames that I think are worthwhile"; they are my main interest; I am sincerely sorry for being dishonest with myself, sorry for being a nihilist and sorry for not being a pretty sight over all; yes, it is an addiction in the sense that I don't want to live the rest of my life measuring how good I am living by how many years of nerd sobriety I have. I can't even think of pursuing creative endeavors anymore because what I want to create would only be liked by other people on the internet.
Yapping like this is not aligned with my interests as I feel I will be featured in a writeup like the subreddit for Monkey Island, emotionally gutted for all to see, but I can't put this anywhere else. Can't explain this to anybody in my family, as I can't articulate it and they like entertainment also. I can't talk about this with my peers, as they don't seem as miserable as me and I could just leave them an emotional wreck like myself. Can't put this on any other forum because that would be being part of the machine and also the internet is now mean. What would I say to a shrink? "Doctor, they are telling me to touch grass on the internet or else life on this Earth will cease to exist but not before being absolutely worthless to be lived". This is the lonelinest I have ever felt in my life.
Like, before the pandemic I tought being a geek wasn't that big of a deal and now I have a whole 6 part essay dissecting how I am an omen of the apocalypse even though I did what society told me all my life to do, I went to college and then I discover that I am alienated to my profession; but I bet kayaking hobbyists don't have to deal with this. (I need to clarify, it is not your fault that I feel how I feel, I got in contact with concerns like this somewhere else, never stopped using the internet but rediscovered one of your old rpg articles and serendipitously found that most of your writings were about these media concerns).
I have run out of steam, I forgot what was gonna be my final paragraph. I am not mad at you, but come on, Musk? That is a low blow, as if most Sillicon Valley bigwigs were gamers. Does it even matter who he is? He is just there because capital amasses more capital and he had a fat heritage.
Gonna read about Shuma-Gorath to regain some sense of normalcy. Never stop writing, but that dance floor better have live folk music.
I spent too long typing out replies, finding them inadequate, and deleting them. I'm just gonna go with whatever I come up with this time.
You don't have to apologize for lowering the intellectual bar of anyone's comments section. I'm lowering the intellectual bar of Substack, so what the hell.
You're not an omen of the apocalypse—no more than I am. I grew up with video games. I love video games—though I limit how much I play them nowadays. I love Magic: The Gathering—even though for the sake of my wallet & sanity I can never play it again. I grew up with the internet, and am some unevolved & unremarkable species of cOnTeNt CrEaToR, so I can't say that I've an entirely healthy relationship with the web or its social validation feedback loops. I'm a creature of addiction & compulsion.
I'm prone to depression (I don't want to go into detail, but yeah, it can be disruptive in a really bad kind of way), so I sometimes have a tendency towards black & white thinking and abyss-gazing. My spouse, my sister, basically every ex of mine, and a few critics who emailed me about my game writeups are/were convinced I'm some kind of autistic—so, sure, let's say that's a factor. But black & white and ungenerous thinking wasn't what you needed right now, and I'm sorry for that.
I was black & white and ungenerous with this piece because I've been feeling so disturbed by the Big Picture. And because I hate feeling fucked up & used by the things I love or once loved (but can't get away from). When I talk to a best friend of mine from my hometown who's been teaching middle school for almost 20 years I hate hearing him say that the evolved forms of the games & tech we grew up with & loved & bonded over have destroyed his students' minds, and that it's only getting worse. I hate that so many people I know are lonely and sad, and I hate that the people selling them their medicine have an interest in keeping them that way. I hate feeling like there's an epidemic of despair and I hate that I can't do anything about it.
Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to stay sane. It's not getting any easier, and I wish that weren't the case.
DM me if you'd like a postcard.
hot damn this sounds almost exactly like a reply I posted to an article here a short while back. I have a feeling that a lot of us around the same age are feeling the same things right now.
Very well written article, but your conclusion is extremely ungenerous. You start by talking about obfuscation caused by language, but I think you step into the classic linguistic trap of archeology : "the sacred". We know for a fact that, for example, ritualized Aztec combat did not make the sun come up or rain come down, so in that sense "bourgeois" art is no less sacred than primitive art forms. Heck, we can't even be certain that primitive peoples really did believe in their "sacred" practices. Perhaps it's all just one big social regulation mechanism, which as you point out, is no better than today.
Besides, what can survive analysis when brought to the level of the Cosmos and Capitalism? On that level, the Mona Lisa is just decomposing pigment made for a rich patron that's become a cash cow for a museum that caters to people who just want to put a check mark on their bucket list of "self-actualization".
What about that "dancing" of yours, eh? You wouldn't be moving your hips and legs around in a secular pastiche of dance's original sacred function? You wouldn't be dancing because CAPITALISM keeps you at your desk all day, huh? I bet you even go to commercial venues to dance and purchase various stimulants. That's practically being capitalism's lapdog! Gosh, I've even heard that some people put their dancing on social media to get attention! Can you believe it?
I'm not saying video games can't be soul-sucking time wasters. Heck, many of them are intentionally hooking their audience on their product and trying to sell as much as possible. And sure, everyone has to "touch grass" a lot more. Then again, I can't think of someone like Billy Basso sitting at his desk for seven years to make Animal Well as somehow Doing Capitalism's Bidding, not even in a vague loosey-goosey sense.
I am going to do the thing where I select parts of your reply and respond to them selectively. Forgive me if this comes across as a rebuttal; it's just that don't have a lot of time to punch out a reply and this way I can keep myself focused.
>>We know for a fact that, for example, ritualized Aztec combat did not make the sun come up or rain come down, so in that sense "bourgeois" art is no less sacred than primitive art forms. Heck, we can't even be certain that primitive peoples really did believe in their "sacred" practices.
I recently took a course in indigenous African religions because I had the opportunity, and because I wanted to better understand the pre-literate mindset and worldview. (Being the one white guy in a class full of hoteps was an education in itself.)
If what I learned about the premodern or traditional African worldview is at all representative of "primitive" outlooks in general, I can pretty confidently say that they *absolutely* believe in gods and spirits. For them, nothing happens without an intelligible will effectuating it. Piss off the ancestors, spirits, and/or divinities, bad things happen. Make the right sacrifices, observe propriety with regard to the unseen entities and to one's community, good things happen. Another way of putting it is that they are *very* superstitious—but that may be the cost of having a unified, closed-system ontology.
What we can say about their "magical" social regulatory mechanisms is that, in principal, they are locally and mutually applied. Ours confront us impersonally, originate from we know not where, and serve the interests of we know not whom (at least not personally). This is a bizarre state of affairs—leasing our eyes, ears, and nerves (as McLuhan says) to private firms. I don't think I can be blamed for having misgivings about it, even if I pretty much have to live with it.
>>Besides, what can survive analysis when brought to the level of the Cosmos and Capitalism? On that level, the Mona Lisa is just decomposing pigment made for a rich patron that's become a cash cow for a museum that caters to people who just want to put a check mark on their bucket list of "self-actualization".
You said it, not me.
The Mona Lisa's an unusual case, though—it's the Kim Kardashian of Western art. It's famous for being famous. The experience of viewing it (waiting in line as if for a roller coaster, being herded into a crowded room, glancing at it for a few moments before getting hurried forward) sounds like an exercise in tourist box-ticking if ever there was one. But if that box is important to somebody, I should hope they have the self-confidence to tell me to fuck off.
>>What about that "dancing" of yours, eh? You wouldn't be moving your hips and legs around in a secular pastiche of dance's original sacred function? You wouldn't be dancing because CAPITALISM keeps you at your desk all day, huh? I bet you even go to commercial venues to dance and purchase various stimulants. That's practically being capitalism's lapdog!
It's a "take what I can get" sort of thing. It puts me in my body and takes me out of my head. I like that it's a shared and even a little intimate experience with a revolving cast of characters where everyone is aware of and attuned to the people around them in an earnest but completely unserious situation. Music and dance predate civilization and will survive its next recession and/or collapse.
I try to talk about CaPiTaLiSm as a situation or an organizing principle, not as a boogeyman entity. Sometimes I don't do so good a job of it. I don't know what to tell you, though—if you're looking back on the general direction in which life in the United States has materially trended since the end of the New Deal era in the 1980s or the financial crisis of 2008 and thinking "yes, more FIRE economy, more technofeudalism, more enshittification please," then cool, I'm glad it's been working out for you.
>>I'm not saying video games can't be soul-sucking time wasters. Heck, many of them are intentionally hooking their audience on their product and trying to sell as much as possible.
I'll say that I love video games like I love cigarettes and leave it at that.
woah, you bring a bitter dose of self detached irony to your reply there. -_^
I feel like this subject you could go round and round in circles, until you hit the breaks.
"For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive scepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which may not be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence. It is true; so fatal an event is very little to be dreaded. Nature is always too strong for principle. And though a Pyrrhonian may throw himself or others into a momentary amazement and confusion by his profound reasonings; the first and most trivial event in life will put to flight all his doubts and scruples, and leave him the same, in every point of action and speculation, with the philosophers of every other sect, or with those who never concerned themselves in any philosophical researches. When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them." —David Hume
So Pyrrhonians also need to go dancing more. Got it. (Well math wherein probability can be other than 1 or 0 also helps.)
A few pages earlier:
"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of scepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life."
In the margins of my copy I have "GET A JOB" penciled in. But I think we can file dancing under the "actions of common life" heading.
I feel compelled to point out to myself & sundry that Hume's Pyrrhonists aren't fixated on doomer social criticism but insoluble metaphysical quandaries—but, let's face it, they're about equally useless.
I know Hume was a skeptic of the inference where humans set up a story in-between cause and effect, himself. I can deal with the idea that sometimes the explanations we come up with are wrong. I respect that you know his work better than me. I get more joy reading about efficacy of vitamin K2 in reducing calcification of arteries than reading deeply of philosophy. More actionable.
Also, those quandaries are solvable as long as you can accept that, like, we need to eat and will think of ways to get food, and take shortcuts to spend less food. The thoughts we have are good and beautiful, even when they don't help get food, or do so only through Rube-Goldbergian devices of status and friendship.
As Terry Pratchet wrote: "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
> Has the internet made classic games like chess and Scrabble more fun or less fun?
More fun. Like, a *lot* more fun - none of my IRL friends want to play Scrabble with me because I consistently whoop their asses, and I lose every single chess game against them. The widespread adoption of Elo ratings is maybe the only good aspect of gamification.
(Forgive me this one nitpick on this excellent series lol.)
Huh! Very good to know. I was definitely running on fumes & nodding a bit during that section.