Authenticity, faith and journalism
Hamburgers, doom metal and Hunter S. Thompson
I was sitting down with Dennis at this up-scale burger joint the other day, for one of our regular Friday meetings. A mix of research seminar, after-work and just catching up about the day-to-day in our lives. Freshness Burger. Genuine. “Heart-made”, the paint on the wall proclaimed.
It was the second burger place of that afternoon. Just before, I’d been on a special quest to retrieve some unique and limited Happy Meal toy for my girlfriend’s collector acquaintance back in Hong Kong, so I’d had to take a not unpleasant detour through the south of Seijo in the early spring heat. Apparently they sold out the next day. People bought four or five “happy sets” each and just threw away the food.
That area is on the south-west end of Setagaya, and stretches down towards the Tama river which is where Tokyo ends and Kawasaki begins. If you walk a little further down from the McDonald’s where I stood in line with a bunch of kids and their moms, out of breath, sweating and waiting for my toy, you can literally see how the affluent upper-middle class territory slowly begins to morph into that of increasingly heavy industry.
There’s an aspect to the aesthetics of the latter that I really like. It’s artificial, it’s inhuman, but at least it’s not fake. It’s not a representation of something else. It kind of reminds me of the derelict military installations scattered around my hometown, and there’s this unfalsified honesty of an overgrown tank trap, a rotting canvas ammo bag or the rusty fence around the gravel backlot of an industrial warehouse that soothingly pierces through the blaring migraine of the city’s pornographic commercial nightmare. The Sprawl, as Gibson called it.
So me and Dennis got to talking about the conditions for innovation and radical thought in the current, strange liminal state that society has found itself in for at least half a decade now. It’s like we’ve all been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but for some reason it never does. He asked me if I think there are now any major philosophers out there in the wings at the moment, working unseen, ready to emerge to disrupt the basic foundations of thought. Any Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Hegel poised to turn the world upside down? “Except for myself?” I humbly quipped.
No, I’m sure there are. But I’m less sure that they’ll have space to grow. Some will push through the asphalt like the weeds scattered about that decaying industrial infrastructure, but even if they’re not quickly cut down, it’s not like there’s a rich soil to set roots in. They’ll be dying on the vine, if that’s not me mixing metaphors. Perhaps I’m also damaged by all of the AI slop.
Universities in Europe as well as Asia are providing new guidelines for the use of AI tools among their student populations. They now almost unanimously allow it by default, that is, unless there’s a specific injunction against them for a given course or moment, they will be permitted. Can’t stand in the way of “progress”, now can we?
The kids are not gonna learn to fucking think anymore.
I mean, nobody believes you could attain mastery of something like boxing or classical piano while skipping the basics. There’s not gonna be a Sonny Liston who dialled in his homework using AI, skipping out on dodging a million punches in sparring sessions and street brawls.
And learning to think, to really think, is incomparably more difficult than building basic reflexes or imitating Chopin.
The best work of the greats in literature is written when they’re about half a century old. Novelists debut just shy of forty. And this is not random, it’s because it takes weeks and months and years of just learning the basic fundamentals of this mind-bogglingly complex skill of critical and creative thinking, and then of practicing them until they become second nature, of internalizing the footwork while facing all the demons and defeats and obstacles that prevent you from really grappling with the most profound and terrifying questions of life from every possible angle, and then finally figuring out how to translate the result into something the people of your day and age can actually understand make use of.
You don’t get there with a bag of cheap tricks while feeding your stupid, half-assed ideas into an LLM, “prompt-engineering” your way to posterity, avoiding all of the hard work and drudgery. There’s no way you’re getting even half way there without taking a lot of punches. Without learning to sit with pain and uncertainty at least long enough to know how to reliably slip the jab.
The decay will be faster than anyone imagines.
We’re now intentionally building a society of people radically unable to think for themselves. And we all know it hasn’t exactly looked promising for the last half-century or so.
At the burger joint, we moved on to talking about Castaneda and Hunter S. Thompson, looking for an angle on the potential of a radical counterculture emerging today. And there’s a paradoxical sense in which both of these avatars of the 60s movement, neither of which exactly a paragon of honesty, were still deeply and profoundly beholden to the truth. This is why they mattered, and why they resonated with people.
Because at the end of the day, the pull of their lies and exaggerations was based around certain core realities. It doesn’t matter if Thompson really popped all those quaaludes or got kicked the shit out of by the Hell’s Angels. The important thing is he realized that Las Vegas was the spiritual capital of the West and that Nixon was an avatar of something demonic.
And that he and many others like him managed to convey how there’s an authenticity in rebellion and self-reliance against which all of the alienation and carefully crafted unreality of the global spectacle doesn’t stand a chance.
Charging at windmills or not, there’s a sense in which the real always reclaims its lost territory in the end.
There’s a point at which the Hello Kitty-themed funeral of a cancer-stricken fifteen-year-old girl stops being hyperreal kitsch and actually comes full circle.
We spent the rest of the weekend at a little doom metal festival just by the sumo arena in Ryogoku. The genre is a kind of nostalgic masturbation over acts like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, so I was never really into it. During the last twenty years or so, however, it has apparently morphed into something of a hybrid with the stoner rock genre, and for some reason it especially attached to the latter’s attitude of absolutely not giving a fuck at all, sometimes affected and sometimes genuine. I immediately felt at home.
Real people. Trying to make sense of it all. Trying to exist in the midst of all the lies and the meaninglessness, to be genuinely present in spite being enveloped in this cosmic bad joke of alienation.
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
a long way from home”
The only lyrics I could make out during the entire day of garbled growls and heroic vocals, more truth right there than in all of contemporary academia, and as I was reflecting on this fact during the suprisingly wizard magic kitsch finale of the Chinese DEMON & ELEVEN CHILDREN, I’m suddenly interrupted by the unhinged screams of a lanky, probably Australian, gentleman somewhere to my right:
“ELVIS!”
What?
“ABERDEEN!”
What?
“ELVIS! BRING THE FUZZ!”
The guy’s either very drunk, or very tourettes (and possibly both), but I realize he’s actually right.
“ELVIS! THANK GOD FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON SNOW!”
I decide to join him in whatever he’s doing, also screaming about Elvis, fuzz, and cities of New South Wales, and when after a while he realizes he’s got company, he greets me with this wide, manic smile, and grabs my hair while exclaiming, really in the very friendliest sense, “YOU FUCKING CURLY MOTHERFUCKER”.
There’s something real here. Something coming full circle. A raw, primal incomprehensible that’s breaking free from all the plastic commodification.
The secret wizard magic of kitsch brought beyond its breaking-point.
On the following afternoon, I’m looking for a church that holds a late Sunday Mass. The few that have them are often irregular, so you have to go to a different part of the city every time. Hard to find a stable congregation, which isn’t ideal, but it works.
As I approach the little modernist chapel from the wrong side, I’m struck by this intense smell of lilac. I haven’t seen them in Japan before. Smells almost exactly like the bushes from my parent’s house some forty years ago, just subtly different. Early summer, short week of flowering. Home, in all of its familiar difference.
Inside, it’s a Novus Ordo low mass, with all of its vulgar excesses. Guitar, simple hymns of the kind that the TLM crowd despises. Some soft chatting in the pews. A birthday celebration with applause. I used to think I was better than them.
But I get it now. It’s not disrepectful. It’s just unpretentious and human. It’s just home.
And when the Body was consecrated and the mystery enveloped me, I knew, as always, that right here is the only Real thing in the universe.
You joke, Johan, but you're heads and shoulders above most other contemporary philosophers our age.
I've been in Manhattan the past few months, walking the streets and going to restaurants, attending concerts and whatnot, and I hear and overhear conversations and they sound to me like some form of AI or spoken texts messages at best. The speech patterns themselves are becoming robotic. As for the thought patterns of these up and coming generations, who have never known life without a screen in their hands, I'm left with wild guesses. Is this really the end of empirical and theoretical knowledge, along with any historical perspective, or is it already well on its way? I can't say that I really worry about it, but sometimes I do marvel at it, breathlessly.
You mention novelists and I have attended a few literary events. One I guess you could consider rather high brow, with some ivy leaguers, where one guy read a chapter from his recently self-published debut novel. And it was excellent. Really raw, honest writing. But then he gave the synopsis and mentioned something about vampires or zombies coming into it and it was so disappointing. Because this guy has the potential.
As for AI in the universities, I'll take a radical stance here, I don't think it really matters. For all the hype and prize of Diversity, superficial diversity of course: race, gender, sexuality; any actual diversity, of thought, opinion, perspective, intellectual influences, experiences, that are not filtered through "the proper channels", is nil. The universality is already damn near complete. AI can simply be the icing on the cake.
When I think of most of the writing today, whether it's novels or poetry or essays or philosophy, it reads as though it was written in between guidelines. And the writer's backgrounds are almost universally the same: upper-middle to upper class, university educated, similar life experiences. And it's obvious to show. No more Genet's writing from their prison cells. Or Henry Miller or Bukowski trudging along in the grueling work-a-day world, reading and honing their craft in their spare time.
I still have hope here though. Every so often I'll find a name and read their works and want to sing both from the rooftops.
We are again talking about the same thing (my last blog post) -- this inability to think. Certainly institutional learning is anti thought. Even most podcasts I know are reports or author interviews. Very little thinking goes on. Formats have been shaped (from mostly economic forces I think, though not entirely at all) to discourage thinking. Most people, even relatively smart ones, can barely recognise thinking. Everything is a collation of data -- of facts, or pseudo facts, and often this is called materialism. There is an enormous hostility to culture overall. Dennis' piece on castaneda was excellent and got me thinking on those books for the first time in a long while. They are not at all stupid. That's what is unnerving in a sense. Back in the 70s in So Cal the rumours about casteneda were endless. It did sort of inch toward something cultish. But they resonated for a reason. -- I do think there are young thinkers out there, maybe even a lot of them, but as you note, their potential to grow is limited. Same for artists. And this becomes a question i return to again and again, the audience, the culture, the context. Who goes to serious theatre or music or reads difficult material? Not a lot. There is no relationship anymore between society and its thinkers or artists. One is out on the fringe, in the cold, and alone.