Reconsidering issue importance: On climate, and intellectual life

 I'm going to step back this morning, and take a contrarian position against my own arguments.  Hey, look!  A navel!  If you gaze too long into the navel, the navel gazes back.  At that point, you become, "a professor."  Anyway, I have repeatedly taken the position that climate change is not only the most important issue, but so much more important than any other issue that any other issue is really of questionable importance at best, all things considered.  OK, yeah, COVID, but once we're through this pandemic, it's climate change, climate change, and climate change, with some side-helpings of water sanitation and malaria.  Translation:  stop bothering me with shit that doesn't matter.  The only shit that matters is that which kills because people don't have clean water.  Oh, did that joke bother you?  Yeah, well people seriously die from this, so fuck off.  Focus on what matters.

Consider, then, "cancel culture," the challenges it poses to free and open discourse, art and intellectual life.  I blather a lot about this.  By my own standard-- and I readily acknowledge this-- it is far less important than climate change.  So why do I ramble about it?  Two observations.  First, my choice of topics is not a statement of the relative importance of the topics I choose to address.  I write for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, so I write about what engages my interest.  I make no claim that this is the most important blog to read, nor that my comments are the most important comments to read.  I'd say they are the least, except that I am aware of just how bad much of the internet is.  Second, self-interest.  I dwell in the Ivory Tower.  Academia, more than any other social institution, has been taken over by the excesses of the new political correctness.  So, this affects me.  That doesn't mean it is important, in the grand scheme of things.  It just means it's on my mind.

Yet by my own standard, nothing associated with the culture war matters.  No position taken by either side on any associated issue is of any importance, compared to an issue like climate change.

And now, I turn to a defense of fighting the good fight against cancel culture, offered by John McWhorter.  Imagine French intellectuals derogating the importance of art and intellectual discourse, blithely brushing it aside in favor of the immediate and the practical.  One can hardly imagine such a thing coming from the French intellectual tradition, and I'm not going to do the thing where the chest-thumping American says, "if we hadn't saved their asses in WWII, they'd be speakin' German."  Doug Stanhope had the best response to such people.  Instead, I'm going to take the point seriously.  Call it the French defense.  Pawn to King-3, we go.

What matters?  What truly matters?

Some time back, I posed my own variation of the famous and very stupid "trolley problem" from the discipline of bullshit navel-gazing, I mean, philosophy.  No, scratch that.  I was right the first time.  Anyway, I posed my own variation of "the trolley problem" here.  The gist of it was this:  blow up the Louvre, or 10,000 people will die.  You pick.  Or maybe just let the artwork go boom, and you can save an old docent who works there.  What do you choose?  I had some fun with the question of what matters.  And what matters to you.  Would you let the Louvre go boom to save one docent?  Where's your line?

So I ask, what matters?  What endures?  What is the relationship?

John Coltrane matters.  I mentioned Octavia Butler in that post.  She matters.  I don't, obviously, but some great artists and great thinkers matter.  They produce work that endures.  If we are not doing that, then so fucking what?

Let's be honest here.  There are cultures with boring food.  We all know it.  I'm not picking on anybody specific here, and as an American, I can't really cast any stones given what most Americans eat, even if we have pockets of high cuisine scattered around in places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco (and New Orleans is its own thing), but we ain't Italy, or India, or a country with a real food culture.  Fine.  I'll pick on someone.  I detest Eastern European cuisine.  It sucks.  You know I'm right.  This isn't to diminish the importance of any music or literature that has come from Eastern Europe... but their food sucks.  I don't care if you like their beer, or whatever.  Their food... sucks.

What, you like pierogies, or something?  They're popular here.  I don't get it.  Whatever.  Think of the most boring food culture on the planet.  Put that together with equally unimaginative music, no literature worthwhile... no creativity of any kind.  Is there such a culture?  I don't think so.  People need artistic expression.  We're doing a thought experiment here.

In the case of pandemics, or other such threats, for what would they be fighting?  Mere survival.  Is that enough?  I'm not asking about the value to you of creature comforts.  I'm asking about the value of something more, assuming you place value on something other than mere creature comforts.  A good book.  Music, whatever art or intellectual endeavor you value.

There's a dust-up about the process of adapting Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem trilogy for a new tv series.  (Obviously, we don't have enough adaptations, and clearly, no exec could ever contemplate green-lighting an original fucking project.)  Anyway, my quick take here is that the first book is genius, the second book is well worth reading, and the third book is shit.  Also, grossly misogynistic.  Shit anyway, but compounded by gross misogyny.

Anyway, here's the deal.  Earth is getting invaded by aliens called, "Trisolarans."  The first book takes you through the process of figuring that out, so I just spoiled Book 1.  Sorrynotsorry.  You should read it anyway, because it's genius.  Moving on, though.  The aliens receive the moniker because they come from a system with... three stars.  Hence, "the three body problem."  It makes their star system unstable, which is why they are going to invade ours.  However, because they are subject to repeated cataclysms, they merely survive.  Their technological advancement, while impressive, is purely for survival purposes.  They have no art.  This becomes a plot point later on, but the concept of what is valued, and what endures... this is what I mean.  The Trisolarans merely survive.

Is that enough?  As a culture, they're pretty much shit.  A group of traitors to humanity decide to help the Trisolarans invade, based on the premise that humanity sucks, and while they have no information about the Trisolarans... well, they can't be worse than humanity, right?  Um... no.  They actually can be.  They are brutal and amoral on a scale that puts humanity's brutality and amorality to shame (or, I guess, pride?), in addition to-- or perhaps related to-- their lack of any interest in anything aside from survival.  But they survive, right?  So what do we lose when we give up open discourse?  An open artistic and intellectual world?

As a general rule, I take free speech to be a precondition to action on most anything of value, and justify defense thusly.  How full of shit am I?  Probably quite, but regardless, it is worth considering the French intellectual/McWhorter defense of fighting the good fight on open discourse.  Because fuck the Trisolarans.

P-K3.

(Not that I have anything against Sicilian!)

And of course, music.  Eric McFadden, "If All Is Lost," from Our Revels Now Are Ended.