An Almost Worthless Day

 The light company turned off the power around 10 am. That screwed up my day. I went to see The Boys in the Boat because there was nowhere else to spend hours that would also be warm, and because I did not want to watch Aquaman in 3-D. I liked the movie - Clooney is a good director, the story may be a typical sports movie, but it was good to watch a movie about people and not a mere spectacle.

Still no power at 1 pm, so I had lunch across the street. Cheers lacked a cook, so I had Mexican - huevos and chorizo. 

The word when I came back from the restaurant was another hour. I came back to the room, got under a blanket and dozed. The lights came on after 4.

I managed to get "The Rational Actor: A Case Study" submitted to Santa Clara Review.

I did not get my laundry done.

I did not get any work done on "Love Stinks".

I did get two articles read, both from The Los Angeles Review of Books, and which I think have overlapping concerns: the cohesion of society. 

From Arguing Alone: On Alexandra Hudson’s “The Soul of Civility” by Alex Bronzini-Vender there is first a description of what is civility:

Civility is not politeness, which, Hudson writes, often runs counter to civility because it serves to mask misanthropy on both the interpersonal and political level. Indeed, politeness derives, as Hudson notes, from the Latin polire: to polish, to make smooth. (In her earlier career on Capitol Hill, Hudson encountered no shortage of co-workers who smoothed over their Machiavellian ways with superficial politeness.) She mines sources ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Guy Debord, crafting a deeply informed definition of civility that avoids clichéd liberal pitfalls about the virtue of tolerating repellant beliefs.

Civility, of course, doesn’t emerge from nowhere. The Soul of Civility isn’t just about theorizing what civility is; it is also about the spaces that nurture it, an intervention in a dialogue that often frames the United States’ present incivility as an en masse moral failing rather than a symptom of deeply atomized times. The country’s slide into populist resentment politics hasn’t been the result of individual moral failings on a mass scale but the controlled demolition of the American public sphere. As Robert Putnam noted in his seminal study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Americans are far less likely than ever to spend time socializing as members of community organizations.

Stranger probalby is finding a connection with Houellebecq’s Holy Folly: On Michel Houellebecq’s “Quelques mois dans ma vie” by Cory Stockwell which presents this idea:

Houellebecq says as much about two-thirds of the way through the book:

Aside from sex, there are other pleasures in life, for example those related to gastronomy, to alcohol or to other drugs; if I wanted to compare their intensity to that offered by sexual pleasure, I’d have to divide by about fifty. Above all because they’re not shared, not to the same degree, and not with the same blinding sensation of union.

It is clear that his hyperbole here indicates not a quantitative but a qualitative difference, between experiencing something pleasant and being brought into a spiritual union—a communion—with another human being.

 Before turning to this idea, which is wholly new to me and which also seems rather obvious from where I have been:

It is at these moments—when Houellebecq discusses what he calls the “absolutely modern” nature of KIRAC’s evil—that his work joins up with the many writers and thinkers who have recently examined our turn toward asexuality, figures such as Matthew B. Crawford, whose work turns often to the question of what makes societies sexy (a sexiness, he says, that continues to dwindle “in our radically anti-sexy times”), and Geoff Shullenberger, who has gone so far as to refer to what is taking place in our era as an asexual revolution. Rather than merely joining these voices, however, Houellebecq adds something new, or at least fleshes out something that to this point has remained obscure: the idea that this asexual revolution is quite simply an attack on the bonds that have traditionally tied us together.

Arguing Alone: On Alexandra Hudson’s “The Soul of Civility”  also has a critique of solutions for restoring civility, but which I do not think may include the a solution to the above problem.

Though restoring civility to American society cannot be a technocratic project, community institutions, as scholar Tyler A. Harper points out, do not thrive without a government that funds and defends them. A low minimum wage might force people into working several jobs, time that would otherwise be spent among friends, teammates, and congregation members. A town without strong schools and libraries won’t have lifelong readers and therefore book clubs, and a state that permits union busting won’t have unions. Though any of us could individually start book clubs, or organize unions, or join churches, the premise that vast swaths of Americans can be convinced to do so overnight is plainly utopian.

If we are to challenge incivility, we must challenge the neoliberal paradigm that has pulverized American civil society. What will it take? Not useful advice alone—though it has its role—but also the mass political action that Hudson seems to disown. American civic life didn’t collapse spontaneously, and it won’t be rebuilt spontaneously.

 No snese trying to do more tonight. I will pick up Fuentes before bed.

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