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How is Nihilism relevant to the Modern world?
Bit of a big question there, and nihilism is a big concept—that often gets used quite loosely, to mean “relativistic” or “cynical”.
We are in a time in the West, of course, when a lot of longstanding moral absolutes have been increasingly questioned or scrutinised, and the outcome has been called nihilistic by both proponents and adversaries. (Adversaries more than proponents: the term is something of a cudgel.)
Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods: for example, Jean Baudrillardand others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch; and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.
So one primary point of relevance is that it is a shorthand for the modern-day questioning of absolute values, which is prevalent, and which you need to be aware of to work out how the modern West ticks. Or fails to tick.
The second primary point of relevance is not as time-bound. Nihilism, like solipsism, is a useful intellectual exercise. It is a useful phase to go through, if you like. The teen or undergrad who stumbles across solipsism in their intellectual development is something of a cliche: “Woah, man, like what if I told you everything was, like, an illusion!”
But it is useful because, when you come out the other end, you acknowledge better the contingency and fragility of your construction of the world: you know to be on the lookout for misconstrual and bias better.
Same with nihilism. It’s good to have values. It’s better if you’ve scrutinised those values, and worked out why they are a good thing, rather than to just passively accept what you have been handed down. And a phase of questioning everything, of early nihilism, is useful to help you build them back up again—and convince yourself that there are things really worth holding on to, after all.
Why are people in Australia racist?
I of course knew that as soon as I opened this question, I’d get several replies saying “no we’re not”.
White Anglo-Celtic Australians (and these days, White Non-Anglo-Celtic Australians) are not the people to ask this.
No, we don’t burn crosses in our yards. Yes, we did give Aboriginal Australians the vote, and we even gave them an apology for the Stolen Generations (although that had to wait for a change of government). No, you don’t see *lots* of brown people being beaten up. And yes, Australia has made an honest stab at embracing multiculturalism socially, and seems to have taken it to heart more seriously than many other places (although that again depends on how the culture wars are currently going).
But of course there’s racism in this country. It’s at its most virulent still with Aboriginal Australians, who have had a long history of paternalism, segregation, and othering. It’s at its most sensationalised with African Australians, who are the latest in the merry-go-round of underprivileged refugee children in street gangs. It’s at its most shameful with the out-of-sight out-of-mind warehousing and demonising of refugees, mainly from the Middle East.
It’s at its most understated, I guess, with Asians. The Yellow Peril phobia was killed off officially in the 70s, with the end of the White Australia Policy; it was alive in the 90s, when our local white nationalists warned against the influx of Asians; the same white nationalists are now warning against Muslims taking over the country. But it’s still there.
The South and East Asian Australians I stay in touch with from high school have spoken to me of the “bamboo ceiling”: you can only get to a certain point of social or professional advancement before you notice opportunities close down. They have remarked that the only time you’ll see an Asian face on TV is Masterchef: Reality TV in general is far more representative of the population than TV drama is.
That’s not explaining Why, of course, just noting that it’s there. Why?
As Peter Foran’s answer said, all countries have racist people. The more countries have ethnic (or racial) minorities, with a clear notion of one ethnicity being “normal” or “dominant”, the more expressions of racism you will find. African-Americans will recognise that the North was just as capable of racism as the South; the North just used to have fewer black people, so there was less opportunity for friction.
Now, of the racisms of Australia, Aboriginal Australians were dehumanised in colonial policy, and then segregated, and are now disproportionately underprivileged, and often ghettoised. Most (urban) white people never met any, and there were old prejudices that simply weren’t being redressed through exposure.
The other racisms are explained more straightforwardly as unfamiliarity and majority/minority relations. I don’t know that Australia was more prone to racism than any country with a significant influx of migration. But there are some different circumstances, which explain why Australia has done racism differently to the US:
- The US has always had Blacks as the bottom of the heap to look down on. Australian Aboriginals, like American Indians, had neither the numbers nor the extent of contact with whites to serve in that role; so it was whatever the newest minority coming in was. That went from the Irish (who really were the target of prejudice in Australia for an exceedingly long time), then the Chinese, then the Southern Europeans and Lebanese, then the Vietnamese, then in different ways the Indians and the East Africans.
- As noted elsewhere, Australians are blunt and proud of being blunt—they define themselves, after all, as the opposite of the English. (Which blinds them to how similar to the English they really are.) That means they rib you in ways that get misconstrued for racism; that also means that when they are being racist, they don’t particularly care to hide it.
- Australia really has had a massive influx of heterogeneous peoples for a very long time. The dominant Anglo culture has not felt threatened until relatively recently (and as in the US, it’s not all the dominant culture that feels threatened, just the culturally/economically aggrieved portion). But it has had to confront the challenge of different cultures coexisting for generations, and it has struggled with it, both before and after assimilation was the norm of the land. And I do agree with other posters that it has done a lot better than many—certainly better than what Europe is doing now.
Is gender dysphoria a recent phenomenon?
I should be careful about opining here, but this is a discussion that, as it happens, I’ve had recently with a couple of trans women.
Gender dysphoria–or at the very least, awareness of gender/sex mismatch—seems to be very old, given the number of attestations of gender-diverse instances in human societies, and of androgynous cultural artefacts.
What is new is the way that society—and individuals within that society—deal with gender dysphoria. That’s not just about veneration vs punishment from the social norm. That’s also about how individuals express a gender identity under dysphoria; what options their culture afforded them.
Some cultures had well accepted “third” genders. Some cultures had well established, even if not accepted, performative roles. In the West, even when gender reassignment became an option, being a street queen or transvestite were the default options in the 60s; the same people now would be be trans. Sylvia Rivera called herself gay till she died in 2002, and at the peak of her activism called herself transvestite. The disjunction of cross-dressing and trans identity is pretty solid now, but it was nebulous a couple of generations ago. The construals and options of gender, as social phenomena, have changed, even if the psychological and biological drivers behind dysphoria are the same.
I made the argument above to my friend Janna, that the dysphoria is old, but the social construals are new. And she made a very insightful point: the social construals have to be new. Because society is dynamic, in a way that biology is not.
What’s the most unforgettable food that you have eaten in a foreign country?
I’ve had the opportunity to travel a bit in my time; and because Australians are food snobs, I’ve used the opportunity to sample what the locals eat.
I’ll put down two memorable meals.
The first was in Amsterdam. On my last day there, I opened up my Lonely Planet guide book, flicked past the hoity-toity restaurant recommendations and Argentinian steakhouses and the Indonesian Fusion, went down to the Hotel Amsterdam De Roode Leeuw, and ordered myself some Stamppot.
Shh.
Listen.
Listen closely.
Do you hear a faint popping sound?
That’s the sound of a whole bunch of Dutch minds being blown.
The meal was memorable, because my Dutch waiter at the Red Lion Hotel had the selfsame reaction. He just could not even about the fact that an obvious tourist was chowing down with some Dutch comfort food. The kind of Dutch comfort food, he told me, you go skating across frozen lakes with.
Oh, what did it taste like? Stodgy. Filling. Reassuring. The kind of Dutch comfort food you go skating across frozen lakes with.
(This was my account at the time: Fine Dining In Amsterdam)
The second memorable meal was in Kadıköy, a hip suburb of Istanbul, where my wife’s cousin lives. We tried to pay her a visit one evening while we were in Istanbul for our honeymoon.
Getting the brand new Marmaray metro under the Bosphorus, from Sultanahmet to Üsküdar, was a seven-minute breeze, even if the subway was congested. The next three hours, not so much: waiting half an hour to get a cab, discovering that no cab drivers in Turkey speak English, being stuck in traffic for an hour, being dumped at the start of Kadıköy ’cause “just walk down a bit, you can’t miss it”, missing it, finding that none of the hip young things lounging around Kadıköy cafés speak English either, realising we had the wrong number for Tamar’s cousin, finding an Internet café so we could Facebook a red alert to Telma, having a generous lounger walk us for another half hour in the dark to the address (without any English)…
Oh, distance of Üsküdar to Kadıköy? 11 km.
It was way past 9 by the time we got to Telma’s. Telma, her husband, her newborn, all had grand plans on entertaining us, and sadly, we’d plain gotten there too late. They had to settle for the local kebab joint: KASSAB.
I asseverate to you, by all that is pure and righteous on this good Earth.
That was the best meat I have had the privilege of eating in all my days in this Vale of Tears.
(The Wagyu steak I had on the weekend comes close, but the Wagyu steak just had divine texture, like an oyster that kept on looping. This meat had spice and punch and character.)
Kaleidoscope yet good honest flavours—familiar from Greece, but with a bunch of twists I hadn’t expected; knock-out firewater; newly met family; casual friendly owners; neighbourly chow-down. It doesn’t get better. It truly doesn’t.
What are two truths and a lie about you?
Hokay. Let’s dance.
- Yes, my first name really is the same as my surname. Just like my three firstborn cousins.
- I did not speak to my parents until I was 2. While I was being wheeled in by the nurse to see the doctor about it, I was reading out the room numbers to her.
- I learned English from Sesame Street. Which has left me with a lifelong aspiration to to be Oscar the Grouch.
EDIT: The non-truth is #1; congratulations to Dorian Shkëmbi, Abigail (Abbey) Beach, and most especially Delaney Natale, who has clearly been paying attention:
I’m guessing 1, because I think I read somewhere that your first name is “Nick” and not “Nicholas”, which would technically make them different.
Yes, it’s a technicality. Sorry not sorry. But the birth certificate does say “Nick Nicholas” and not “Nicholas Nicholas” (thank the Gods), and I’m going with that.
#2 and #3 are related, and both are true. My parents were giving me mixed linguistic input, English and Greek—which is not a problem with language acquisition as such, it just means that kids take a few months longer as they disentangle the input. Because of it, I had acquired English just fine, but I wasn’t speaking to my parents who were giving me the confusing input.
I was however fluent in American, from Sesame Street (which child-minded me while my parents worked in the fish & chip shop downstairs); and when I’d worked out the nurses were not giving confusing linguistic input, I felt free to make like Count von Count, and count the room numbers. When my parents came in, I said mama, and that was the first word they heard from me.
Oh, btw:
In the early 1970s, following a counting session, the Count would laugh maniacally, “AH AH AH AH AH!”, accompanied by thunder and lightning flashes. He wouldn’t let anything interrupt his counting, and used hypnotic powers to temporarily stun people with a wave of his hands. This practice, however, was discontinued in the mid-1970s because of concern that young viewers would become frightened. In the mid-1970s, the Count became friendlier, did not have hypnotic powers, and interacted more with the characters (both live actors and Muppets). His laugh also changed from maniacal laughter to a more triumphant, stereotypical Dracula-style laugh.
He’ll always be maniacal laughter and thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me, as far as I’m concerned.
And yet, I put down the Grouch as my role model. I know. It was a close run!
I couldn’t find the Oscar the Grouch and Yitzhak Perlman duet, so I’ll have to settle for this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e8xlA33q9EI
What texts and experiences shaped the development of your political views? What were the seminal factors in the growth of your civic sensibilities? What books most influenced you? What events?
I am somewhat surprised to have been A2A’d this by four people. That my politics should be of interest at all, though I haven’t expressed my politics here coherently, is likely more a token of their esteem than my interest.
I am somewhat mortified to have been A2A’d this by four people. Unlike the other answers here, I have not distilled my politics in the crucible of texts and reflection; I’ve inherited tribal politics, identified axioms, and drifted accordingly.
I am somewhat grateful to have been A2A’d this by four people. The Decalogue of Nick was stalled at #8, my politics. So I get to write that here.
I come from a long line of Greek peasants, on both sides. The Left in the Grecosphere did not make social progressiveness its main rallying point (though that is there); the Right in the Grecosphere had no equivalent of the American Dream, to seduce the entrepreneurial poor. There are regions in the Grecosphere that are die-hard right-wing anyway; and they are not where my parents are from.
My father tried to be a union organiser as a nurse, before he was intimidated out of it by management. He kept a belief in social justice, but also a reticence which his boisterous brothers-in-law could not understand. The household was broadly socialist in Greece, though with a touch of cynicism that I was too young to identify.
1981 was a heady time to be a kid in Crete. Our apartment was across the road from the Socialist Party headquarters, blaring out Theodorakis and Loizos anthems: “This soil is theirs and ours”, “We’ll get the sun drunk”, “We took our lives the wrong way, and we changed our lives”.
There was hope, there was ferment, there was anticipation. “The People in Power!” “For the First Time, The Left [in government]!” And when the Socialists were voted in, honest to God, random people were lighting each others’ candles in the streets. Just like Easter. The People had been reborn.
And then there was clientelism and corruption and disillusionment, but I was not around for that. I came back eight years later, shocked to see Andreas a laughing stock, and much of the country bought up by a con-man.
A chubby blunt-spoken first time MP was around for it though, and was surprised when he discovered that his voters expected the same favours and preferential treatment as did the supporters of the party they’d just ousted. Greeks have never forgiven that MP, for proclaiming his conclusion three decades later, “We embezzled that money together”—that the People were complicit in corruption. (So much more blunt in Greek, μαζί τα φάγαμε.) The People are not guileless, and The People are not always right. That’s always a useful corrective to realise.
I’m grateful I wasn’t around for the election of Syriza, “For the First Time, The True Left!” I’m grateful that my formative political experiences were not the sullen betrayal and dysfunction that Dimitris Almyrantis witnessed, a generation later. I’m grateful I got to taste some of the romance that comes before the Fall.
In Australia, first generation Greek migrants were just as tribal about being Labor. The conservative parties were aggressively Anglo; Greeks in the Liberal party are a second and third generation thing. Those first generation Greek migrants were after all, for the most part, labourers. Menzies founded the Liberal party to appeal to the “forgotten” middle class of shopkeepers, but he never tried to grab the vote of the working man. (That was much later, under Howard.) So there was no question of the household aligning with Labor, and yelling “You ape” whenever Howard was on the TV. I don’t think they quite realised that the Labor vision was being traduced from under them until it was too late.
In Australia, Labor had the largesse and vision of Whitlam, who my parents venerated. An appalling manager of his caucus and of finances, I’ve learned latterly; but this was back when people expected politicians to do more than manage finances. It had Hawke, who charmed the people into reform, and it had Keating, the last left visionary the country has seen—though he was the pioneer of fiscal managerialism, he still dared to have big ideas, backed with an acid tongue.
And since then, we’ve had a queue of puny shopkeepers, reactionaries and reactive centrists, poll-spooked functionaries. And myself voting Australian Democrats while they still existed as a third party, then Australian Greens until the Greens were big enough for people to start talking about “tripartisan” consensus, and then the Australian Sex Party for the lulz. (Well, for the left-wing libertarianism. And the lulz.)
So I was formed with a tribal allegiance to the Left, and with a vague notion of ferment and the People.
I’ve realised, gradually and annoyedly, that I’m not Left in the way I’d assumed I am. To the extent any of this crystallised, it was in my 30s and 40s rather than my 20s.
The axioms I’ve come to arrive at are:
- Society must afford opportunity and equity to all. The State and redistribution of wealth are an appropriate mechanism of achieving this; and the individual owes a duty to the State, inasmuch as the State is going about this task.
- Social cohesion and continuity matter, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity.
- Individual freedom matters, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity. (And often not at the expense of social cohesion and continuity, but I concede that as more of a judgement call.)
Of these, (1) is Big Government left; it’s the overt continuation of where I started from, though much more socially aware than its tribal origin. (2) is a social conservatism I’m somewhat surprised by, but it’s there, bolstered by my thinking on nationalism and on my upbringing. It’s the covert continuation of where I started from, which I had not acknowledged because it did not fit the tribal narrative.
(3) is a libertarianism I’m also somewhat surprised by. A Libertarianism by Australian standards, at least, and a reaction to the curtailment of personal liberties that has emerged as a national consensus in Australia in the last couple of decades. (The stuff libertarians decry as the Nanny State.) I don’t think that reaction in me was led by reading so much; but it certainly has been informed by awareness of the American libertarian streak in political thinking (and not just its big-L Libertarian manifestation of wishing to drown the government in a bathtub).
Economically, I have come to appreciate that The Market can be a force for good, so long as it is appropriately shackled and regulated. I don’t look forward to the People’s appropriation of the Means of Production, because The People are not guileless; I don’t rule out a future where technocommunism makes sense (though I think climate catastrophe likelier), but in our current fallen circumstances, a regulated market seems to me the best compromise.
- Comrade Victoria Weaver, my teacher of technocommunism along with Star Trek, has said similar things to that in her less careful moments.
- My main intellectual exposure to theories of The Market has been, oddly enough, a historical linguistics textbook: On Language Change, which drew parallels between Smith’s “invisible hand” and the forces driving language change—individual selfish choices converging into a stable equilibrium.
- As for the shackling, I don’t know where I read it, but I was heartened to find Smith hated monopolies, as disrupting the equilibrium of the market. Preventing monopolies is where the State comes in. The State also comes in with infrastructure, and I’ve retained my faith in the State as the guarantor of collective welfare.
What are some stereotypes about linguists and linguistics majors?
In my experience in Australia, we slotted readily into the stereotype of Arts students in general. (Well, I didn’t: I was a refugee from Engineering.) Leftie do-gooders, dressed down, partial to cheap wine, mostly laid back.
Have Australian politics stabilized or will we see more prime ministers with shortened terms?
- Polling for the major parties even and low at 37%.
- Parties eroded both from their radical flanks (Labor by Greens, Liberals by host of right wing parties), and from centrist populists (Nick Xenophon).
- Liberal Party split between moderates and conservatives, with conservatives openly sniping at Turnbull or breaking away, and several conservative pretenders waiting in the wings.
- Only the embarrassment of having more leadership spills than Labor is holding the Lib conservatives back.
- Rudd’s last hurrah as second-time PM was to change the rules for how the leader of the Labor party is voted in, to give the membership a vote, and prevent repetitions of rapid coups.
- No obvious challengers within the Labor party to Shorten right now; Albanese and Plibersek to his left are being loyal.
- Labor, after a lot of bloodletting, is currently stable, and have put structures in place to keep them stable; but that may well change again if they’re in government. The Libs are not looking like a happy family in government, and they’ve never had the discipline around factions that Labor did.
- The fundamentals that toppled all those PMs in a row are still there: neck-to-neck polling, panicky parliamentarians, populace disengaged with the major parties, lack of ideological cohesion or direction in the major parties, personality-driven rather than caucus-driven politics.
Who is the most feminine woman you know?
A2A by Emlyn Shen.
Now, I am cis. Emlyn is trans.
Inspired by this tweet,
— jordan (@redazarath) May 2, 2017
—I asked a trans friend of mine. I would have asked Emlyn herself, but she A2A’d me, so that hardly seems fair.
Nick:
You’ve reflected on femininity; you’d have a much better informed answer than me. Who do you think the most feminine woman out there is?
Janna:
well in all honesty I don’t think there’s an answer. femininty not being simple, I guess there are many different ways to possess it
so I could name some feminine ppl, but ~most feminine for me doesnt have a meaning
Now, you see the pic of Aristotle on the left? I’m that guy when it comes to music; which is why “What’s your favourite piece of music” is a question I find meaningless.
See that pic of the ginger two–year-old on the right? I’m that guy when it comes to gender. Which is why I asked Janna “Who do you think the most feminine woman out there is?”
Janna, OTOH, is that Aristotle guy when it comes to gender. (Only she’s a chick.) Which is why she handled the question the way I’d handle a similar question about music.
So, as a ginger two–year-old when it comes to gender, I could pick, oh, I dunno, some archetype like Marilyn Monroe or Ophelia or Jessica Rabbit. But given what femininity is actually about—a performed identity, an identity learned and that can be reflected on, I’m picking Janna.
After all, how many cis women do you know that wear stockings?
What were the biggest highlights of Australia’s cultural history?
Ooh. That’s a tough one, and I’m going to want backup on this.
- The nationalist writers of the 1890s: Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Culturally defining figures.
- At the same time, the Heidelberg School of painters (back when Heidelberg was on the outskirts of Melbourne, instead of suburbia); just as strongly defining of Australia’s self-perception, and the mythologising of the bush.
- I’m not a visual arts guy, but Sidney Nolan in the 1940s was another mythic figure.
- The Whitlam prime ministership. Seismic shift in Australian self-perception, and seismic shift in funding of the arts.
- Australian film in the 1970s and 1980s, from Picnic in Hanging Rock through to Mad Max.