February 6, 2011
Notice to Serve
If there’s one thing more boring than blogging, it’s blogging about blogging. Nonetheless, I will try and say something interesting.
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My self-imposed blogging sabbatical is not entirely due to a lack of time. I’ve been busy in the past, and that has never stopped me before. There are two, more fundamental reasons I’ve opted to cut back – or perhaps, two facets of one more fundamental problem.
Firstly, blogging about politics – for that is what this website has been dedicated to for over two years – increasingly bores me. At one level, this is because daily politics – and the bulk of blogging reaction to it – is boring.
Each day and week brings a superficially fresh piece of outrage perpetrated by the Conservative Party/the DailyMail/some idiot celebrity/the Government/some idiot rightwing blogger or commentator/the police/whatever [substitute leftwing alternatives to suit preference]. On the surface at least, the issue prompting comment is usually in some way different to whatever happened the week before (“selling off the woodlands”/ “destroying the NHS”/ “being a horrible bigot” / “lying and abusing positions of power”). But the game of political blogging is tiresomely repetitive.
The predictable daily reaction is to get into an outraged indignant lather of denunciation. Or to sarcastically mock with varying degrees of cynicism. Or to dissect at tedious length in predictable detail why The Enemy is wrong (and usually evil). All these reactions share a common feature: total practical impotence and wider irrelevance. No doubt, for a couple of years this has sustained me, and I’ve found it interesting to watch others do the same. Increasingly I feel I’m living in electronic groundhog day.
What I’m really complaining about is quite simply most political bloggers’ hobby. People go on and on, expressing the same outrage and indignation at the Daily Mail/Tory Party/Richard Liddle-Phillips [substitute left-wing alternatives to suite preference] day-in-day out, because they enjoy it. Rather like many people enjoy campaigning for a political party, or going to big political conferences. It’s about tribalism, and the fun of political group-think and purported engagement. But it bores me more and more with each passing day.
Quite self-consciously, this blog has attempted to do something a bit different for at least the past 18 months. Namely, to analyse political events through the filter of an academic training I’m lucky enough to still be receiving. For a while this has served at least two purposes. One, it helped me get clearer on my own ideas by applying them. Two, I liked to think of it as public-service pedagogy; the dissemination of interesting ideas for those who might be interested in them but who lack my privileged background.
But I only have so much in my repertoire, and the last few months have seen me falling into the trap of repetition. This bores me, to the point whereby it outweighs the appeal of offering any free pedagogical service. Not least because I have to question the extent to which this is really about sharing interesting ideas. Or about wanting people to think I’m clever, whilst advancing my career in various ways.
Which brings me to the second set of general considerations.
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I’ve also decided to cut back blogging because it has begun to feel like a duty, an obligation. Rather than writing just for pleasure, or to share ideas, or seek critical reaction, I increasingly write to secure my “status”, as an ever-more-popular blogger [see the sidebar]. That, and because I’ve been trying to build this blog as a personal tool of complementary professional development for so long that to abandon it feels like a major wasted investment.
And I really don’t like this situation. I am extremely adverse to the role of duty and obligation in most human life, in what philosophers narrowly define as “moral theory” and beyond. For most of the good outcomes secured by imposing duties on people can be achieved by alternative means: for example, by encouraging dispositions in people such that they want to do some action from their own volition, rather than feeling they must do so because they are beholden to some external power, sanction, condemnation or failure.
Duty is an unhealthy concept to be beholden to, a sort of moral pathology. Things should be done because they are in themselves good things to do, not because they are your “duty”. The concept and experience of duty creates and fosters a psyche of meekness, dependency, constraint and subjection to overbearing command. It also opens the door for the extraction of fulfilment. This can be done by others: those who perceive your failure of “duty” and coercively extract compliance, or inflict “justified” punishment. Or it can be done by your own self: the mechanisms of repression, guilt and self-loathing so easily generated in complex human animals. Nietzsche saw something very profound when he noted that Kant’s categorical imperative “stinks of cruelty”.
Morality and life is, of course, about other people. But morality and life is also about yourself. The criterion of how to live might be primarily ordered around the question “what is good for others?” – but the question “what is healthy for me?” should never leave the picture. And if we can secure the first by healthier means with regard to the second, then that ought to be done. It may be a fact about us that we cannot do without duty entirely. But that is no reason not to do without duty as much as possible.
To retreat from philosophy and come back to the manner at hand; for this blog – which started as a source of pleasure and enjoyment – to transmutate into a source of duty and obligation is something I’ve decided not to continue tolerating. Perhaps this will mean I’ve wasted two years of investment. But as they say to smokers, it’s never too late to quit.
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Not, actually, that I’m going to stop blogging. For despite the above, regular writing has a particularly important function in my life: it is a form of exercise.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and live off of my brain. And being ambitious, I’ve decided I’m going to go as far as that can possibly take me. So my brain needs exercise. You wouldn’t try and become a top athlete without regular training; the same goes for anyone serious about thinking.
Of course, most serious thinkers simply keep their written thoughts to themselves. And there’s much to be said for that – not least the face it saves. But I enjoy and benefit from (some of) the critical engagement frequent public writing receives. I also think there’s something interesting in the possibility of a fairly open and visible process of intellectual development, insofar as not many people have tried (or for contingent historical reasons, been able to try) this. And anyway, my amour propre outweighs my sense of shame; so why not see what happens?
What I need is a change of direction. If blogging about politics – or at least, blogging about politics in the way I and many others have been doing for the past couple of years – bores me, then I should blog about something else, or in a different way. Obviously, I won’t stop writing about politics tout court. But it’s time to see what else I can do.
The new status badges added to the side of this website indicate a statement of intent. I’ll mostly be trying to read things in those three domains, and to write accordingly. Of course, I wasn’t lying when I said I was busy. And I’m still on sabbatical for the foreseeable future. But let’s just see what happens, even if that turns out to be a healthy nothing.
John Boettcher said,
February 7, 2011 at 6:06 am
I shall miss your frequent discursive, analytical approach to subjects but your statement:
“Morality and life is, of course, about other people. But morality and life is also about yourself. The criterion of how to live might be primarily ordered around the question “what is good for others?” – but the question “what is healthy for me?” should never leave the picture. And if we can secure the first by healthier means with regard to the second, then that ought to be done. It may be a fact about us that we cannot do without duty entirely. But that is no reason not to do without duty as much as possible.”
-is, I recognise, a truism psychologically as well as philosophically.
I’ll still look forward to an article appearing within my RSS reader now and then.
I have enjoyed your writing immensely and shared many of your articles with friends.
Perhaps I’ll be reading your work via the “dead tree press” sometime in the future? :-)
Regards,
John
Mercer Finn said,
February 7, 2011 at 9:12 am
A notice of support: I haven’t been reading yr blog for very long, so I’ll perhaps feel the loss more than most if it goes silent. Am excited abt the new statement of intent, and hope it won’t be too long before yr rss starts ringing again.
Franlydie said,
February 7, 2011 at 9:17 am
You are making increasing use of French. :-)
Phil said,
February 7, 2011 at 9:18 am
When I was a teenage anarchist, I remember formulating a theory of morality that consisted of the words “do what you *want* to” – where “want” means “want for myself, in a way that will make me happier, and in a way that I’m happy to tell other people about, looking them in the eye and smiling”. Very much getting at the sickly undertone of duty, and the sense that a society built by people not really pleasing themselves probably isn’t going to please anyone else. But my libertopia would have been horribly vulnerable to psychopaths, and for that matter to anyone less scrupulous and anxiously reflective than me (“you see, I *want* your LPs, I really do…”)
But the main thing I wanted to say was that I know exactly what you mean wrt political blogging – I hit the Self-Righteous Wall myself just over five years ago. See here and here.
(I seem to remember your comments box eats proper links. If so, see here
http://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2006/01/23/by-secondhand-daylight/
and here
http://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2006/01/24/flowers-and-their-hair/
Chris Brooke said,
February 7, 2011 at 11:34 am
Are those badges really saying that this is the top literature blog (in the UK? in the world?), the third best culture blog, and only 53rd for politics? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Paul Sagar said,
February 7, 2011 at 11:51 am
Chris,
In the UK.
It’s a reflection of 1. the paucity of literature and culture blogs in the UK, 2. the ridiculous nature of the Wikio ranking system; it works by registering track-back from listed blogs – so for example I’m currently ranked above Crooked Timber, despite the fact that Crooked Timber has a readership several dozen times the size of mine.
It’s all very silly. But then, whoever said stepping stones should possess intrinsic value? Because whoever they were, they were probably wrong.
Paul Cotterill said,
February 7, 2011 at 2:47 pm
I was going to write a post about you some time, but you’ve done it for me over last few posts.
Oh well.
Left Outside said,
February 7, 2011 at 2:49 pm
tl;dr.
Left Outside said,
February 7, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Hahahaha. Anyway…more seriously.
I like to think I’m very familiar with your blog and blogging, having blogged for nearly two years and read yours for longer.
I understand how you feel, blogging can become something which you feel you “should” do, not for yourself, but for others. I’m not sure this is necessarily as pernicious as you make out. Perhaps its my own odd philosphy, but the only thing which survives you is other people, even your written words are only preserved as interpreted by other people.
Feeling bored of politics is also something I’m familiar with, try studying economic history and you soon realise that “selling off the forests” is about as important in the grand scheme of things of whether I shit before I shave or vice versa. The agency of those individuals in politics is also exagerated in the heated vitriol of blogging about politics. For example, I HATE James Slack, any google search will reveal why, but I’ve become bored of hating him, there are others who would do what he does and I’ve made my position clear.
I think blogging as a form of political (and economic and philosophic) writing is very important, and I think you will look back as an aged Don on how lucky you were to get involved so early. The engagement and public discourse now available is mind blowing (interfluidity.com is written by a Grad Student somewhere in North America and writes things regularly more interesting than anything I’m set on my course). So I beseech you to keep blogging.
Plus, I mean if you don’t keep blogging how will you be invited to join Crooked Timber one day?
Stuart White said,
February 7, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for this, Paul. I’ve cut down on blogging a lot too of late, in part because of time pressures, but I suspect I’m also motivated in part by the two things you identify: boredom and fear of repetition and the way it becomes a self-imposed ‘duty’. In my case, there’s only so many times one can point out just how awful Nick Clegg’s intepretation of liberalism is before it starts to feel like banging one’s head against a wall…
But your blog is very far from a predictable lefty blog, and always very interesting, so I hope you’ll keep it up at a pace you feel comfortable with.
grrl said,
February 7, 2011 at 4:51 pm
It seems that, in your academic ascension you have reached that altitude from which you can enjoy a more and more comprehensive (because ‘panoramic’) view, where – like looking down from Mont Blanc – you see the world made up of little land patches partitioned by small rivers flowing in little valleys between small hills, patches inhabited by little groups of people that practice group-think, preferably a (more or less) different think from the other little groups that they call ‘Enemy’, and their church choir (or a political Party, doesn’t matter so much who) sings on Sundays(more intense on Sundays before Elections) “The Enemy is wrong, and evil”–song. As long as there is enough cheese for everyone, that group-think-in-little-valleysis the preferable state of affairs. The best profession in such an environment is to live off your brain, that is, theorizing about the state of affairs (as seen from your panoramic point of view), or theorize about culture, or history of thought, or whatever brings you an (academic)teaching chair in future. Because, I thing you have the stuff to educate others (that is: offering pedagogical service, but for considerable fees). And you are right, Nietzsche was an interesting chap, but then… you’d better preach Kant, because, without duty and obligation, no one down there in the little valleys will want to make cheese any longer, and then… without cheese… you know…
I’ll miss your free pedagogical service! :-) But I will enjoy whatever you’ll write – with, or without pedagogic intentions – because you write well.
CharlieMcMenamin said,
February 8, 2011 at 8:35 pm
‘Politics makes us human’ is, I’m sure, a thought one can track down and allocate intellectual forefathers too going way back. I only mention it because I’m reading the new Hobsbawm, and he makes clear that his admiration of Gramsci rests on a view that he discerns in the Italian to much this effect, re-worked into a specifically socialist context.
But politics alonemakes us inhuman. So you’re doing the right thing. its time to consdier how best to do the modern day equivalent of allowing yourself to ,”.. hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner….”
Mark said,
February 10, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Probably for the best.
Your political stuff really isn’t up to much.
MJW said,
February 23, 2011 at 4:07 pm
I enjoy reading this blog, so is a shame to hear it will not be updated as frequetly. I think what makes it stand out beyond the typical political blog is the attempt to look at contrasting/contesting views with a critical eye (no doubt because of the academic background). It’s obviously not going to fit with those looking for one dimensional, unbalanced, punch and judy style of political slanging match, where the actual understanding of opposing political, economic and philosophical concepts simply become defined by a ragbag of selective anecdotes and poorly structured rants which are put forward to prove how bad those concepts are, and how evil the opposition is for having them.