Deprave‘s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
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To alter Andrew Marvell.
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“Deprave” is such a fine word, intimating dark and private vileness — vileness twisted and extended beyond the capacity of most of us to comprehend it. A survey of its use turns up, again and again, two characters in particular — Josef Mengele, and Kim Jong Un. Which is to say, we tend to reserve the word not only for the perverted evil people among us, but for high-level, solo practitioners: Mengele, Kim, and our obviously more constrained but nonetheless, as in Liz Cheney’s remark yesterday, depraved Donald Trump.
None, I think, do them embrace; all are radical isolationists, slashing depravedly about all by themselves; and indeed, as in the now-notorious Jan 6 moment, telling all the decent frightened normal people around them who beg them not to be depraved to fuck off. “Depraved” carries a sense of morally lost, far outside the recognizable human ambit. Lone wolves.
Depraved indifference. There is a head-scratching oddness and excess about depravity, as in What’s the percentage in it? Why? Questions that only the non-depraved would ever ask; but the answer must involve some deep, positively mystical, gratification, a well of delight into which one dips again and again with each unimaginable (for us. for us unimaginable) cruelty. Part of the sensation is one’s cosmic singular power – you alone have the freedom to torture children, entomb a country, end democratic life. You come to recognize yourself as a charismatic godlet, a Caligula for our times. You feel this, excitingly, in your blood: The willingness of the world to let you enact and then exceed one viciousness after another; the voyeuristic thrill you inspire in millions who lack the depravity to do the things you do, but who would dearly love to do them. I am, Trump declares, your retribution.
Is there ever any content to depravity? Can it have a purpose beyond lurid sexual or power gratification?
The worst form of depraved behavior presents itself as purposive: Mengele’s experiments; Pol Pot’s revolutionary communism. To the extent that any intellectual/ideological something adheres to the worst of which humans are capable, we are merely that much more shaken, hollowed out, terrified, by its emergence. Only when we understand the facade that “ideas” offer pure sadism are we able to put monsters like Mengele and Pol Pot in their proper place.
More common is the simple vacuity of what Cheney isolates in Trump — most depraved people don’t bother trying to sketch even the primitive outlines of a meaningful world view, much less a politics. The enormously attractive – charismatic – role they play for us is draughtsmen of mental darkness, drawers-up and drawers-out of private primal places within us of sadistic rage, obscene curiosity, physical aggression, and bloody nihilism.
October 6th, 2024 at 10:42AM
“Only when we understand the facade that ‘ideas’ offer pure sadism are we able to put monsters like Mengele and Pol Pot in their proper place.”
C.S. Lewis understood that. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
G. K. Chesterton understood that. “The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
Trump got into politics after the coastal cosmopolitans made fun of “Teatards.” What will come after Trump will be even more primitive and ragey.
And tormenting the Normies without for their ceiling fans on one hand or their memes about cats on social media on the other is not going to make them more docile.
Reap what you sow.
October 6th, 2024 at 10:55AM
I love both of those quotations, Stephen, especially the CS Lewis. I immediately thought of this gem from Adrian Vermeule, a tyrant Harvard continues to house.
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=65072
October 7th, 2024 at 9:56PM
Yes, UD, that’s a good observation from Nathaniel Zelinsky, although his closing argument is incomplete.
The rationalization for the strictures of the Cathophate or whatever the senator call for sound a lot like Herbert Croly, or, for that matter, the latest call for more control on information. There’s a heck of a lot of illiberal chic in the air these days, and a lot of potential tyranny to push back against. Moreso that you or I have different lists of which to push back against first.
For example: I’m in no mood to thank the rulers of pro football for replay review, nor do I have a quarrel with motorcyclists who have no use for helmet laws, “better habits” notwithstanding. But then I have this stubborn idea that individuals have better ideas about what their individual goods are than Adrian Vermeule or Herbert Croly or Pol Pot, and I’ve always considered the notion of a common good to be ill-structured.
October 8th, 2024 at 8:25AM
Agree again. “Adrian Vermeule knows what moral codes a strong ruler should impose.” Yup. How did a guy smart enough to etc etc become a fanatic?
October 8th, 2024 at 10:20AM
Smart guys becoming fanatics? Sounds like a High Modern Authoritarian notion. Any thoughts from Mr UD?
October 8th, 2024 at 11:01AM
Mr UD is the sort of mild-mannered Catholic who finds nuts like Vermeule appalling.
October 9th, 2024 at 1:55PM
Sorry, I could have posed the question better. I’m looking for a more general principle, what is it that gets smart people fancying themselves to be Men of System who can order people about like pieces on a chess-board, to borrow from Adam Smith. It’s not so much whether Vermeule is too full of himself, or Joe Stiglitz for that matter, as it is to the tendency of people who think themselves smart to reduce individual choice for others Because It’s For Their Own Good.
There might be a hint of an answer to your “why is half the country voting” question in there as well.
October 12th, 2024 at 12:34AM
Stephen: The best I’ve ever been able to do goes like this: People like Vermeule are like the crazed Howard Beale in Network. The world disgusts them more and more and more, to the point where they’re “not going to take this anymore.”
They’re going to become vindictive radicals, seeking ways to force gross stinky ugly disgusting sinners to conform to the radicals’ higher less stinky morality. I actually think that in many cases it’s this visceral, this corporeal. Think of Trump and his germ phobia, which has predictably morphed into fascist language about ridding the country’s gene pool/blood of filthy disgusting alien populations. I don’t even think that, as you write, it’s about thinking you’re so smart. It’s about knowing that human beings are absolutely disgusting, and that without their being literally whipped into shape, their disgustingness will always make the Vermeules of the world intolerably itchy/scratchy.