Does Art Have Intrinsic Value?

The question is pertinent, more so at a time when “value” has become a casualty of wokeness. Does artistic value exist? Are some composers, painters and writers really that much better than others? Can we ascertain who is great and who is mediocre?

In an age of identity politics the last remaining standard for judging much of anything, certainly anything that does not have a basis in objective fact, seems to be racial or ethnic identity. A work is pronounced to be good because its creator belongs to this or that victim group. There are no standardized tests to evaluate art, so the art world, in a spasm of wokeness-- we can hope that it’s a death spasm-- has now decided that the greatest art was produced by those who belonged to this or that oppressed group.

At which point there is no such thing as intrinsic artistic value. Everything is relative. One remarks, with regret, that the lame reasoning behind this movement derives from practices like book burning. The Nazis-- that is, the real ones-- burned books, not on the basis of their intrinsic merit, but on the basis of their author’s ethnic identity. In effect, it resembles the current practice of having college admissions officers downgrade the test scores of Asian students, only because they are Asian. It’s the equity that counts, not the mental competence and aptitude shown objectively in standardized tests.

If our culture no longer recognizes objective test results, consider how skewed the process of evaluating art has become. This is moreover the case when we consider that one’s contemporaries, for example, are not always the best placed to judge the value of a work of art.

Tom Wolfe-- bless his soul-- once pointed out that at the turn of the twentieth century, the grandees of the Paris art world got together to predict which of their contemporaries would, a century later, be considered to have possessed true greatness. 

The winner of the poll: William Bouguereau.

Perhaps this merely demonstrates that it takes time to judge greatness in art. After all, it took quite some time for Shakespeare to become Shakespeare. On the other hand, much of what passes for great writing today is-- to anyone who knows how to read-- unadulterated crap. In fact, today’s writing, to take an obvious example, has become even crappier under the influence of wokeness.

Nowadays, pronominal usage has become, at the least, controversial, so writers are contorting and convoluting their prose in order to avoid offending some inchoate self-proclaimed victim group.

Take the example of Adam Gopnik, an excellent writer, to say the least. Thus, one was somewhat optimistic when one saw that Gopnik had chosen to address the question of whether we could determine artistic excellence objectively. One should have known that an article written for a magazine called Town and Country was not likely to be especially profound, but one likes to keep hope alive.

Before launching into Gopnik’s arguments, I offer up one of his sentences, as evidence that wokeness can even ruin a good writer’s prose. I would like to think that some idiot millennial editor had a hand in producing this sentence, but here it is, from the text of the article:

The man or woman of real taste is to us known not by the firmness of her insistences but by the subtlety of her affirmations. 

Incoherent grammar, someone should have noticed. After opening with the de rigueur usage of “man or woman” the sentence slides into using the generic she. One does not want to opine at too much length over the stupidity of it all, but simply to point out that this, according to the rules of English grammar, an error. If his editors did not know any better, Gopnik should have.

As for the thought, whether or not one insists firmly is more about rhetoric than judgment. Being subtle in one’s affirmations might be more persuasive, but it does not necessarily tell us whether the speaker is right or wrong.

And the other infelicity, the phrase-- “to us known”-- is poor sentence structure. It should be “known to us.” Yet, if you have the normal distaste for passive constructions, the sentence should have opened: We know (or recognize) the man or the woman… and so on.

When it comes to grammar, there are rules. They cannot be changed at whim in order to avoid offending someone. The rules of grammar and of English language usage evolved over centuries. They did not arrive where they arrived because of a vast right wing conspiracy, but because correct usage facilitates communication and thought. Obscure and ambiguous locutions tend to melt away because not enough people understand them.

In a world where people cannot even agree on pronominal usage, how can we decide on the intrinsic value of a work of art? Or better, we might ask the question of whether or not artistic value functions like the rules of grammar, and whether some people know them better than others. Do those who know more about art can have a better sense of artistic value? Does their experience allow them to know artistic value when they see it? Does the man who spent his life looking at painting have a better sense of artistic value than the man who is seeing a painting for the first time?

If we can, pace Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, know that a work is pornographic when we see it, why can we not say the same about a work of art?

Anyway, Gopnik, perhaps because he is writing in Town and Country, reduces it all to a question of taste. He opens his essay with the famous Latin expression: De gustibus non est disputandum. It means, there is no arguing with taste.

Since taste is highly individual, we can imagine that your taste in oysters might not correlate with mine or that your taste in decor is not the same as mine. This does not mean that there is no such thing as a bad oyster-- it will make you sick, regardless of your taste-- or that a hoarder’s hovel is not generally repugnant-- because the question is not taste in decor but offense to human sensibility.

Of course, if you take the contents of a hoarder’s hovel and dump them in a museum, you can confidently assume that some well-heeled individuals, filled full with their pretense to know something about art, will declare it to be a great leap forward in art history. Or some such.

One suspects that judging art is not a matter of taste. After all, great art cannot merely appeal to the taste of a single individual. Great art becomes great because it speaks to large groups of individuals over long periods of time. That is, it transcends time and place. It even transcends, dare we suggest, taste.

When it comes to artistic value, we all know, even if Gopnik fails to mention it, that there is such a thing as the art market. Need we say that any market can be corrupted. The art market in particular is subject to all manner of deception and corruption. It has always been easy enough for a dealer who possesses a slew of works by artist X to hire two auction bidders who will bid up the price of a work by artist X, thus jacking up the value of the dealer’s stash.

Of course, market pricing of art is not quite the same thing as market pricing of pork bellies or wheat. We do not, at least under normal circumstances, consume art the same way we consume bacon or Wheaties. We might say that we do, but, strictly speaking we do not.

Since art is bought and sold, and since it is not consumed, its value will probably be established over time by a series of market events. In this way the value of art is determined roughly as English grammar is set.

In the end we like to assume the best art will be recognized. But, there is no guarantee. The longer people look at a work, the more people who look at and experience a work, the more likely it will be that we will discover something like intrinsic value. Or should we say, people in the know, experts will have an inordinate influence on what we do or do not value.

Needless to say our woke intelligentsia is having none of this. They reject the market value of certain artistic works because they do not like the message and because they and their friends refuse to be judged against the standards established by, for example, Homer or Dickens. Those who reject the verdict of the art market, a free market-- though not quite as free as the market in language usage-- are forced to conjure vast transnational, transhistorical conspiracies. This makes them sound paranoid, but that is not our problem. Not believing in markets exacts a cost, in mental health terms.

Of course, giving credit to markets saves us from the tyranny of experts. But that does not mean that experts do not matter. We all love democracy-- at least we say so-- but the value of great art is not normally determined by the hoi polloi. 

Here Gopnik introduces an amusing sidelight. 

Gopnik loves Mozart. In that he is not alone. One day he discovered that one of the great musical geniuses of our time, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, was not quite as enamored of Wolfgang. I was not too surprised. Some people of my acquaintance believe that there is a jejune quality to Mozart, one that does not exist in the greatest composer ever, that would be the GOAT-- Johann Sebastian Bach.

Of course, Gould was an expert, an expert’s expert, if you will. And yet, Mozart’s work has certainly endured, for centuries now. It continues to fill concert halls and it sells CDs. As opposed to painting and sculpture, music provides a direct experience to far more people than does, for example, a fresco painted on the wall of an Italian church.

Music has a larger audience, but that might mean that it appeals to a lower common denominator. Great paintings and sculptures grace museums and perhaps grand homes. Beyond the aesthetic satisfaction of gazing at great art lies the simple fact that the world of fine art is inexorably elitist. 

Anyway, Gopnik did not mention Bach, so we are left with Mozart:

Given that we think that, or try to, I was all the more shocked to discover, during a recent late night grazing of YouTube, a video in which the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould goes after Mozart as a mediocrity. Mozart! Truly. There is Gould, in 1968, indisputably a great musician, the author of two of the best renditions of Bach ever recorded, lashing into Mozart and those of us who love him. He plays a heartbreaking passage from the C Minor Concerto and then rips it apart: “Listless scale runs,” “predictable chord changes.” He compares Mozart’s composition—really!—to “interoffice memos,” the email of that time. He concedes it no more credit than “a few wistful themes.”

 Gopnik then defends Wolfie by attacking Gould-- for lacking emotional maturity. A strange charge, one that could easily be turned against Gopnik, saying that he loves Mozart because he suffers from emotional immaturity. Then again, the ad hominem against Gould ignores his analysis of the music. So, Gopnik believes that emotion is more important than, say, structure. While we would admit that emotion has a say in our taste in art or music, the truth is, there must be more to art than its appeal to emotion.

What we would answer to Gould is not that Mozart is great, but that your critique, however intelligent, is limited in its horizon. It is apparent, listening to Gould, that he was indifferent to, even made uncomfortable by (in what we would now call a “spectrumy” way), the extraordinary emotional immediacy of Mozart’s music, its replication of a human being wandering in and out of melancholic and affirmative moods—by, in short, the implicit romanticism of the sound. Great melodic music, after all, is made from repetition as much as variation. Mozart makes music by rote and repetition? Well, Rococo art delights us in general not because of the profundity of its architecture but the shimmering variety of its surface.

Unfortunately, Gopnik has obscured the question of whether Mozart is great. Or else, is he as great as Bach? And yet, if there is such a thing as intrinsic artistic value, those are the questions we want to answer.

Your Right to Sex

Yet again, I report on a book that I have not read. This time the book is entitled, The Right to Sex. It was written by an Oxford professor named Amia Srinivasan. Rather than read the book-- life is too short-- I will be referring to a review by one Jennifer Wilson in The New Republic. 

Dare we say, the book is a feminist tract, which immediately alerts us to the fact that it will range between inept and inane. Yet another reason not to read it.

You see, not to put too fine a point on it, but feminism broke sex, and now it is trying to put it back together again. As Lewis Carroll once wrote, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men-- are not going to do the job. Surely, an ideologically addled Oxford feminist is not going to do it either.

Sex was not invented yesterday. Throughout human history people have committed sex. It is not a novelty and it has been subjected to much serious reflection. The difference between past treatises on sex and the feminist treatises is that the former contain some serious intelligence. The latter, not so much.

One might argue, with some cogency, that the current mania about constructing new rules of sexual behavior dates at least to Freud. You see, the good neurologist decided to bring sex out of the darkness into the light. He might not have been promoting the traffic in self-portraits of one’s genitalia, but his theorization, his call for more open and honest public discussion of matters sexual seems clearly to be the spark that lit the kindling and produced a forest fire.

One recalls, wistfully, that Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, had already plowed the field, on the basis of some personal experience, and had concluded that sex was better in the dark. By his theory, and by the terms of Christian theology, sex always contained a quantity of sin, and therefore, was best kept under wraps.

Of course, we are far too sophisticated to continue such practices. We do not like to associate sex with anything dark and mysterious. The result of our rage for self-exposure is quite simply, as Kate Julian correctly reported, that young people have less sex than they used to. We have, with our clever theorizing and pontificating, wrung the desire out of sex. We have rendered it completely mechanical and not very desirable.

One does not want to expatiate at much length about a book’s failings before having read it. This even applies to a book that one has not read. And yet, if the New Republic review is any indication, the Oxford author, surely a woman of supreme intelligence, never really considers issues like procreation and marriage or, dare we say, adultery and prostitution.

For millennia now societies have striven to regulate sex and its expression. The simple reason is that when it comes to certain sex acts, society has a direct interest. Given the need for people to sustain their communities by producing progeny, one specific sex act seems to have been elevated to a higher moral level. This elevation is certainly not an arbitrary imposition designed to produce guilt feelings in all of the onanists out there.

Other sex acts, whether condemned or glorified, are of less interest-- unless it threatens the survival of the community, at which time it becomes of interest to the community.

Of course, the conjugal bond has often been defined in terms of conjugal duty. One understands that feminists have been up in arms about conjugal duty, because it smacks of non-consent. So, we have, thankfully, abolished the notion of conjugal duty, unless it applies to the male of the couple who is obliged, nay, duty-bound, to provide a sexual service to his wife at a specific time of the month, regardless of his desire.

Now that we have overcome the notion of conjugal duty, we have replaced it, with the full consent of movement feminists, with the notion that a woman should express their thoroughly liberated sexuality by hooking up. Thus, no more conjugal duty, but women feel duty-bound to provide blow jobs to men they met a half-hour previously. We can console ourselves with the thought that fellatio is foolproof contraception. 

You’ve come a long way, baby!

So, sex and marriage, the connection seems never to cross the feminist mindset of our author. And, dare we say, the same applies to institutionalized instances of adultery, from courtesans to courtly love, from adulterous husbands to adulterous wives. These institutions arose because marriages have most often in the course of human history been arrangements, for the purpose of combining property, power, prestige or privilege. This being the case, society evolved institutions that would allow people to express their sexual urges outside of the conjugal bed.

The notion that marriage should involve love, and the free choice of the participants, is a recent human invention. It was probably a byproduct of the Protestant Reformation and was largely promoted by the group we now derisively call the Puritans.

And, of course, among the other institutions designed to help people to socialize their sexual urges was prostitution. Human societies have always had a free market in sex. In many cultures it is an open market, too.

When one considers the agonies of the people who are called incels, which means involuntarily celibate, generally meaning that they have been rejected by the liberated females who are mostly giving their own sex away for free, one cannot help but recommend that they should not feel quite so rejected when they can easily, given the internet, find a woman who will happily cure their celibacy, though for a price. As you know, some of them will even provide something called the girlfriend experience, which might not be quite as gratifying as having an actual girlfriend, and which may be more or less expensive in the long run.

Anyway, the human species has found numerous ways to socialize sexuality, that is, to provide sexual gratification to social beings. Not only that, it has found ways to multiply the species, for better or for worse. 

I mention these obvious facts because it seems that our good Oxford professor, being too brilliant for such mundanities, has ignored them, completely. Thus, she is not theorizing about human beings, about social beings, who have defined roles in society and who follow certain rules. She is theorizing about machines that are seeking sexual gratification. These machines, defined, not by their sociability, but by their desires, dispense with all traditional rules and roles. They seem unconcerned with the old notion that some manner of commitment should precede coital consummation. And they have overcome the idea that it is good to have sex with someone you know.

Obviously, the issue of consent, one that clearly preoccupies all feminist theorizing about these matters, would be considerably less fraught if people were having sex within defined relationships, toward a specific end, with someone to whom they had pledged their troth, as the old saying went. 

If you are engaging in sex with someone you barely know the chances for miscommunication multiply. If a woman feels obliged to demonstrate her membership in the feminist cult by having sex with someone she barely knows, the better to prove that she has liberated herself from convention and custom, then it seems clear, to everyone but those who are directly involved in this traffic, that she is being pimped out by the sisterhood. 

If such is her habit, and if she feel proud of her accomplishments--since when did it become a great achievement to find a man who is willing to allow a comely coed to offer him a blow job without his having to offer anything in return--she will, as Wilson points out, be living a feminist life.

Apparently, living a feminist life does not involve marriage or family. Liberation seems to involve shedding social roles and not playing by social rules. It is merely about desire. Then again, the more a woman lives a feminist life, the less likely it will be that she finds a husband or has a family. So, one sees that there is some method to the madness.

As I said, you’ve come a long way, baby.

Murder in America

A few facts, from the New York Times, comparing the murder rate in America over the years. Dare we call the 2020 spike an insurrection? 

Doing Business with the Gulf Arab States, or Not

Beyond the mindless ranting that infects most policy debates in this country, there are facts on the ground. Normally, you will only find them in the business press, as in this Financial Times article by Andrew England and Simeon Kerr. It appeared a couple of days ago in the paper. Since we cannot link to FT articles, I will offer some considerable excerpts.

The issue is the Middle East, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. These countries, long time and long standing American allies, have lately been developing extensive new commercial ties with China. In short, we are losing out in the Middle East, on a very basic level.

Consider the ways. The authors open thusly:

As the first senior United Arab Emirates official to visit the Biden administration touched down in Washington, the message the Gulf state sought to promote was “the strength and continuity” of the partnership between the two countries. Yet when Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE’s president, sat down with his American counterparts it was another of the Gulf state’s relationships that was the focus of much of the discussions: China.

China has become a major purchaser of crude oil. What with America’s shale gas and oil bonanza China is now the biggest market for Gulf energy. And, of course, the singular ineptitude of our withdrawal from Afghanistan has certainly been noticed in the region:

It is a balancing act that the UAE and other Gulf states have been grappling with since China began broadening its economic and political footprint across the Middle East two decades ago — Beijing is now the biggest buyer of crude oil from the Gulf region. The trend has coincided with the perception among Gulf rulers that the US is bent on disengaging from the region, a sentiment exacerbated by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Can the Gulf states still trust America? Can they trust an America led by fools like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:

“There’s a trust deficit with America which is growing by the day,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati professor of politics. “The trend is more of China, less of America on all fronts, not just economically but politically, militarily and strategically in the years to come. There’s nothing America can do about it.”

For decades, Gulf leaders viewed Washington as the guarantor of their security, while the US looked to them as reliable suppliers of global energy. But US oil imports from the region have declined markedly over the past 10 years as a result of the shale gas boom in North America. In contrast, demand for oil in Asia soared, and as the economic ties deepened, the China-Gulf relationship has flourished into one that today is about far more than just crude.

Naturally, everyone in the region is talking up the relationship with America, but still:

But as more assertive rulers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE — the Middle East’s two biggest economies and traditional US partners — look to diversify their relations and project their power, the more they look eastward.

China has high quality telecommunications equipment, and it is willing to sell it with no strings attached. We impose political conditions on sales:

Often it is a pragmatic choice, officials say, as China provides technology that is cheaper and more readily available than western options, with Huawei’s 5G technology a prime example. Beijing is also willing to sell equipment to Gulf states that Washington is not — and it comes without political conditions.

Apparently, the Gulf Arab states believe that Congressional limitations on technology transfers are harassment:

“More and more is going to be done with China for obvious reasons,” says Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst. “First of all the Chinese are willing to transfer technology and don’t have a Congress to harass you; secondly, China is our biggest market and, thirdly, China has influence with [Saudi Arabia’s rival] Iran. It’s virtually Iran’s only valuable ally, so exceedingly important to Saudi Arabia.”

When it comes to the 5G network in the new Saudi city of Noem, the winner was Huawei:

As an example of the blossoming relationship, he cites Riyadh’s decision to use Huawei 5G in Neom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s $500bn flagship development project to include a futuristic city, even though the “Americans were dead set against it”. The tech firm is already building its biggest overseas retail outlet in the kingdom as China cements its position as Saudi Arabia’s biggest trading partner. Over the past two decades, trade between the two has soared from less than $4bn in 2001 to $60bn in 2020, nearly half of which was Chinese imports.

“We don’t really pivot to China but we have to be onside with China,” a senior Saudi official says. “With 5G, it wasn’t a question of ‘we are taking theirs over yours’, it was ‘we are taking the best available’. You do the same and we will buy from you. But we have to protect our own interests, so develop your technologies or we will develop our own.”

Did you catch that-- the best available.

And then, when America refuses to sell defense technology to the Gulf states they go elsewhere. Would you do otherwise?

More recently it has been the US refusal to sell armed drones to Gulf states that has caused both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to procure the weapons from China instead. After Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed met President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017, a deal was reportedly agreed to establish a Chinese drone factory — the Gulf’s first — at the kingdom’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.

A similar set of circumstances had the Gulf states turn to China for personal protective gear against the coronavirus:

Three years later, as coronavirus hit the region, the UAE turned to China as it scoured the globe for the resources to tackle the disease. Group 42, a state-affiliated company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the federation’s national security adviser, quickly established ventures with Chinese firm BGI, to open a coronavirus laboratory in Abu Dhabi and conduct trials for a vaccine.

In contrast, when Khaldoon al-Mubarak, one of the most trusted lieutenants of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s de facto leader, contacted Honeywell to supply much-needed personal protective equipment, the conglomerate was unable to deliver because of a US ban on PPE exports. Honeywell ultimately sourced supplies from its subsidiary in China as Beijing allowed the equipment to be shipped to the UAE, before setting up a joint venture with Mubadala, a state investment fund, to manufacture it in the Gulf state.

And, of course, China is not clamoring about human rights. It is not trashing the Saudis over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In return,  the Gulf Arab states have had nothing to say about the way China is treating the Uighurs. And, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, leading his own reform and modernization drive, seems more intent on emulating the Chinese example, not the American example:

From a Gulf perspective, China offers something else that the US and other western powers cannot — an autocratic, state-led development model that resonates with the Gulf’s dynastical rulers.

“There’s a lot to learn from China and its ability to develop the way it has is predicated on the fact it’s not a democracy . . . it can make the decisions and it has to be state led,” says the Saudi official. “They are becoming light years ahead on a lot of things.

“We are also studying their industrial cities, not just big industry but downstream industries, technology, and looking at how they built them so successfully,” adds the official.

And the Chinese mind their own business:

The Gulf states and China also appreciate pledges not to meddle in internal affairs. When much of the western world was chastising Prince Mohammed in the months after the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, the crown prince was warmly welcomed in Beijing. And Prince Mohammed, whose father, King Salman, is custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, made no public comments about China’s mass internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority. Instead, he said Beijing had “the right to take anti-terrorism and de-extremisation measures for safeguarding national security”, according to a Chinese foreign ministry account of his meeting with Xi.

Compare the American with the Chinese way of doing business:

“They look at China and they see a rising power that creates a lot of opportunity and they don’t demand a whole lot, whereas western countries tend to tie in human rights issues, or political ideology,” Fulton says. “China’s got this very firm, non-interference principle hard baked into its foreign policy.”

He believes the US still has the ability to influence the direction of relations between China and the Gulf, but adds that “there’s no way they can stop it from happening”, adding: “I don’t think there’s any changing it, just look at markets, population projections: the global centre of gravity, economic gravity, is just constantly moving eastward.”

As for human rights concerns, the more we pressure the Gulf leaders about human rights, the more they buy from China.

Others take a blunter view — particularly if Washington seeks to pressure Gulf leaders, such as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, over human rights.

President Joe Biden entered the White House criticising Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s murder and promising to reassess relations with the kingdom, while freezing some arms sales.

“I think China is going to slip in and eat more of America’s lunch in Saudi Arabia because every hassle the Americans give the kingdom, it just encourages them,” Shihabi says.

‘There’s an effort to make them choose in a binary fashion and the Emiratis have been firm in saying “don’t make us choose”’

‘The Chinese are willing to transfer technology; China is our biggest market and [the country] has influence with Iran.

So, that’s the state of play. We are losing out in the Gulf, largely because of our own ineptitude. Then again, we have our ideals and we would rather be loyal to our ideals than to do business.

Eight Months to Fuck It Up

Matt Lewis is a conservative columnist at the Daily Beast. It is not, generally speaking, a conservative site.

Regardless, Lewis’s assessment of the Biden presidency is devastating.  His title sums it up: It Took Biden 48 Years to Be President and 8 Months To Fuck It Up.

Lewis opens thusly:

It’s starting to feel like the wheels are coming off for Joe Biden at the job he’s been dreaming of since he first arrived in the Senate in 1973.

Let’s start with his legislative agenda, where progressives’ most ambitious hopes rest on a $3.5 trillion social policy plan that Democrats intend to ram through via reconciliation, which means they can’t afford to lose a single vote in the Senate.

In a precarious ploy to appease the two wings of his party, Democrats pledged to pass this sweeping progressive wish list and a more modest bipartisan infrastructure bill currently scheduled for a September 27 vote in the House at the same time. But progressives say they won’t vote for the bipartisan bill unless the $3.5 trillion social spending package passes first, while West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin reportedly thinks the $3.5 trillion bill should wait until 2022 (and, according to Politico, Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema says she will not back it if the bipartisan bill is delayed or fails.)

As for the border crisis in Texas, the situation has gotten so bad that the media cannot ignore it. True, the mainstream media is trying to make it all about racism-- it’s all they know-- but the horror of it all reflects badly on Biden and on the fool he assigned to take charge of the situation. That fool would be Veep Kamala Harris:

In a scene so discomfiting the FAA had to shut down FOX’s ability to collect aerial drone footage of it, some 12,000 Haitian migrants are currently camped under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas. The U.S. is reportedly in the process of deporting and/or relocating them, but Biden’s rhetoric (and policies) were the magnet that drew them there.

Things are not much better on the covid front:

At least one of the migrants has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19, which brings us to the issue that has plagued Biden since the onset of the Delta variant: the fact that we still can’t declare “independence” from the virus. Unfortunately for Biden, the issue continues to cause political embarrassment. Last week, in what The New York Times described as “a blow to Biden,” a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel stymied Biden’s plans by voting against making COVID booster shots available to most vaccinated Americans over the age of 16.

And, of course, the Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster, from beginning to end:

While COVID’s resilience softened Biden’s approval numbers this summer, it was his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal that finally caused Biden’s ratings to crater. And instead of receding as a news story, the war ended up back on the front pages after a series of reports showed that a U.S. drone strike targeting ISIS-K fighters was in fact a “tragic mistake” that killed 10 innocent people, including an aid worker and seven children.

Two days after that deadly drone mistake, but well before the Pentagon acknowledged it, Biden declared, “We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.”

Oh, and somehow Biden has severely damaged relations with France.

If this is starting to sound like a comedy of errors, the extent of Biden’s summer slump can be summed up by the fact that France has recalled its ambassador to the U.S. That’s right, France. This is the first time since 1778 that our nation’s first ally has taken this step. And it’s all happening on Joe Biden’s watch.

What happened to the notion that the adults were back?

I’ve written again and again about how Trump’s childish approach to governing was problematic, but it turns out that dunking on him and signifying responsibility without actually achieving better results isn’t nearly enough.

Lewis reminds us that he was not a Trump fanboy, but he adds for all the ranting about Trump, the Democrats have managed to make Trump look better. 

Does the Body Really Keep the Score?

Dare I say, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of the best selling book on trauma medicine-- that would be Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score. 

The book feels like a bunch of recycled New Age nostrums and bromides, ranging from yoga exercises to psychedelic drugs. It’s thesis, that the body remembers traumas when the mind forgets them, is intriguing, but it also feels like recycled Freud. 

The good doctor, not a very impressive thinker, suggests that certain yogic exercises and massages can revive repressed memories, leading to-- it is not very clear what. We will grant, for the sake of argument, that exercises can bring back memories, but then, what about it?

In fairness, I have still not read the book and have no intention to do so. But I did find a largely sympathetic interview with Van der Kolk in the Guardian. Since it will not require too much time to assess the value of the book from the Guardian story I will make that my lodestone. At the risk of being churlish I would say that the picture of the doctor that accompanies the article does not inspire confidence. I will leave it at that.

Before offering something of a critique of his approach, I would make one point. The first involves resilience. As psychiatry has been researching of late, most people recover from trauma and abuse without undergoing any specialized treatment. The implication, not quite explicit, that people can only recover from trauma if they do some yoga, have a massage and take some psychedelic mushrooms seems superseded by the simple fact that the normal way of dealing with trauma seems largely to work.

As for New Age approach favored by Van der Kolk, yoga can certainly be beneficial, so can massage. And yet, the experience of reliving a trauma that had been stored in your musculature does not necessarily provide anything more than a cathartic experience. When it’s over you still have the problems you had before you underwent it. And you still need to learn how to function in daily life. Taking magic mushrooms tells you nothing about any of this.

Be careful before you start imagining that miracle cures can bring back traumas and make you whole again. 

According to the Guardian, the end result of the exercises is that you treat yourself with  more compassion. In truth, we did not need to go on any magical mystery tour to learn this. And we can question whether an obvious call to self-absorption is really what trauma victims need:

When Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached; you start treating yourself with more compassion.

Dr. Van der Kolk recognizes the reasons why people do not try to recall traumas, do not want to have traumas define them and try to forget trauma. If the mind wants to forget trauma, perhaps it has good reason to do so. Obviously, this does not make sense to someone who worships the goddess of truth, but still:

His thesis centres on trauma: the urgent work of the brain after a traumatic event is to suppress it, through forgetting or self-blame, to avoid being ostracised. But the body does not forget; physiological changes result, a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormones, an alteration in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant”, as he says in his book. The stress is stored in the muscles and does not dissipate. This has profound ramifications for talking therapies and their limits: the rational mind cannot do the repair work on its own, since that part of you is pretending it has already been repaired.

Why the stress? Perhaps it’s because the victim fears, as the doctor suggests, that other people find out about the trauma. In more succinct terms, there are two issues with trauma: what happened and who knows.

In short, if it is only you who know about your trauma-- though normally another person, your tormentor, also knows-- it is easier to deal with than if the world knows. We sympathize with the gymnasts who were sexually abused by one Dr. Larry Nasser, but aren’t they suffering mightily from the fact that everyone knows what happened to them, and that everyone who knows is looking at them in a certain, pitying way? Once the world knows you have been traumatized and once people look at you as a victim, the trauma will come to define you. And most people, especially victims of sexual abuse, do not want to be defined by their traumas.

Apparently, Dr. Van der Kolk thinks he is the only psychiatrist who knows how much sexual abuse and violence there is in the world. This means that he is completely full of himself. The psychiatric profession talks of nothing but abuse and harassment. We have had giant cultural movements where people have defiantly chosen to share the stories of their abuse with the public. To say that this is being hidden is a bit much. If anything, we are exposing too much and defining people by their traumas-- thus producing victimhood cults.

The Guardian continues:

“We define ‘trauma’ as an event outside the normal human veins of experience,” he says. “At least one-third of couples, globally, engage in physical violence. The number of kids who get abused and abandoned is just staggering. Domestic violence, staggering. Rapes, staggering. Psychiatry is completely out to lunch and just doesn’t see this.”

It adds:

There’s very good literature [on shellshock] from 1919 and 1920. But then there was pushback, people saying: ‘You’re just a bunch of cowards.’ The assault on people who had been traumatised has been relentless – to this day, almost. You’re not allowed to tell the truth about the horrible things that people do to each other.”

Where is he living? We talk about nothing but the horrible things that people do to each other. Unfortunately, the more we talk about it, the more it feels like a norm. And, the more we give people bad ideas about doing bad things to other people.

Dr. Van der Kolk believes that there is only one way to deal with trauma-- badly. Again, his simple minded thinking fails to see differences and nuances.  In truth, different people deal with trauma differently. Resilience studies show us that most people recover well on their own, without taking magic mushrooms.

The further he delved, the more important he realised the work was, in terms of the incidence and impact of trauma, on society and the self. “The reality, of course, is that being traumatised does make you a difficult person to get along with. Because you suddenly get angry, you suddenly shut down or you space out. But more difficult is to live that life: not being able to trust yourself. And there’s always this internal pressure to step up to the plate and keep functioning. So the next piece is a profound feeling of shame about yourself and your reactions.”

The good doctor reflects on one Isaac Newton, a man who suffered unconscionable abuse but who achieved greatness in science-- without receiving the right kinds of massages. 

It would be much too simple to say that PTSD quashes any potential for creativity or success. “It is striking how many times people carve out a piece of exceptional intelligence – exceptional creativity – that allows them to go on. Isaac Newton was one of the most abused, abandoned children ever … And then he invented mathematics.” The question, I suppose, is what else he might have invented, had his trauma been addressed. Van der Kolk is adamant; people shouldn’t be left as walking wounded. No one should have to keep hurling themselves at the same brick wall of therapy and antidepressants if they are not working.

This kind of reasoning signals fanaticism. Yes, Newton could always have done better. He could also have done worse. This form of logic is not science; it traffics in a fiction. It’s like saying that tens of millions of people died during the Chinese famine of five decades ago, but, without Mao’s Great Leap Forward, more people might have died. It’s flatulent reasoning, like saying that Newton might have invented relativity theory if he had been treated by the right psychiatrist. It’s fatuous cant.

The enticing part of the van der Kolk approach is that the victim need not do anything to overcome his trauma. The massages and the mushrooms will do it all. This provides you with no sense of what happened to you and it gives you no way to conduct your life more productively in the future. It makes you perfectly passive-- which is the way trauma victims feel.

His thinking on the body is so succinct and simple: if the body is storing trauma in its musculature, in its hormonal pathways, then it is the body that needs “experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage or collapse that result from trauma”, as he writes in his book.

As for the mambo jumbo and the psychobabble, he has plenty of it.

Separately, he mentions in passing that it is much easier to have compassion for your spouse if you have compassion for yourself. In Van der Kolk’s telling, the idea that self-love is a precondition for loving others – so popular in motivational statements on Instagram – has very credible and practical examples.

So, if you love yourself, if you have compassion for yourself, you will naturally love others. This is silly, worthy of an adolescent. It suggests that the book is popular because it is unrelentingly simple minded. 

He is obviously at war with psychiatry, but he is also a shameless self-promoter. To say that psychiatry has no sense of trauma, that the issue has been swept aside, is patent nonsense. To say that we should overcome social norms and overcome our denial of reality is psychobabble. For some, especially those of simple mind, it might be comforting. It has no real use beyond that.

In the end, psychiatry is simply society in a white coat, the medical end of the norm-enforcement and denial of reality that drives individuals to suppress their trauma in the first place.