Category Archives: Nihilism

As 24 million acres of Australia burned in record bushfires between September and January, Australian teens turned to TikTok. Chlo Hayden, a 22-year-old motivational speaker and YouTuber based in Victoria, had barely used the video-sharing app, but her peers were flooding it with their frustration with Prime Minister Scott Morrisons mishandling of the crisis and footage of the dense smoke as a way of raising awareness among a largely ignorant public.

Chlos video was a perfect encapsulation of the TikTok sensibility: She used a popular meme format to show the hypocrisy of the lack of media attention by comparing it to the immediate outpouring of financial support after the Notre Dame fire. It was equal parts funny and incisive, and ended up being viewed nearly 300,000 times.

I love that through the use of short comedy sketches, teens are getting a bigger point across than most lengthy, informative articles posted by some old bloke who we cant relate to in the slightest, she explains. Its both parts a coping mechanism and an incredible way to speak our minds where were all equal, and I genuinely dont think theres any other platform that you can do that in a similar way.

TikTok has, in its barely year and a half of existing, become the most effective way for a random person to spread a message to the widest possible audience in the shortest amount of time. It takes the best of Twitter (brevity, as videos can be a maximum of 60 seconds but most are much shorter) and YouTube (the ability to see someones face as theyre speaking to you) and adds the ability to go viral with virtually zero followers.

That the app is populated largely by teens also means that so much of what happens on it participates in a brand of ironic internet comedy that complicates the idea of serious news-sharing. TikTok videos on geopolitical events, from the Australian fires to the vague threat of World War III, can be viewed variously as awareness-spreading of underreported stories, coping mechanisms, exercises in nihilism, or goofy videos that no one should spend too much time analyzing.

Though its always tried to position itself as a joyful space for creating and viewing silly and inspiring content, TikTok has unintentionally become one of the best means of disseminating ideas on the internet. Its a power thats being used for better or for worse, and largely by minors.

TikTok was never supposed to be political. The app was expressly designed to discourage news-sharing its home feed is non-chronological, and there are no visible timestamps for when a video is posted, making it nearly impossible to understand what happened when. Political advertisements are not allowed, and until recently, TikTok had vague content guidelines that reportedly encouraged moderators to censor content sensitive to local governments. Its slogan is Make your day, presumably by distracting you from *gestures widely at everything*.

TikTok was never supposed to be political, but of course it was always going to be. During 2019s widespread climate strikes, TikTokers used jokes about e-girls to spread awareness about e-missions. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was revealed to have worn brownface, TikTok had fun brutally roasting him. In November, a New Jersey teen posted a viral TikTok discussing the Chinese mass internment of Muslims (and was subsequently locked out of her account). Another teen used the app to organize a strike in solidarity with her school districts teachers. When adults on TikTok mocked teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, there was a flood of comments with just one phrase, sparking one of the years biggest memes: ok boomer. US Democratic presidential candidates are on TikTok. Police officers, soldiers, and the Israel Defense Forces are on TikTok. Nazis and terrorists are, too.

Most importantly, millions of regular people are on TikTok, all of whom have at least some awareness of what happens in the world and who probably have opinions about it. In the first week of 2020, just a few days after memes about new year new me and leaving negativity in 2019 proliferated on the internet, the world seemed to explode: President Trump ordered the assassination of Quassem Soleimani, pushing the US and Iran to the brink of war. Puerto Rico was hit by a series of massive earthquakes, cutting off power for nearly a million people and access to clean water for hundreds of thousands. Bushfires, worsened by climate change, continued to rage across Australia, killing at least 28 people and an estimated 1 billion animals and destroying 2,000 homes. The most powerful man in the world faced an impeachment trial.

World War III seemed imminent, but on TikTok it was already raging. Me in the trenches doing my 10-step Korean skincare routine, read the caption on one video by 19-year-old Australian student Isaac Tuazon. Gays when we get drafted into WW3, read another in a video of TikToker Sir Carter voguing with Nerf guns. Me after getting my first kill in WW3, wrote one TikToker while doing a Fortnite dance.

I just thought the idea of bringing my entire skin care routine with me to the battlefield would be a little extra and would earn a few laughs, Tuazon tells me about his K-beauty WW3 TikTok. He likes the app because it gives him a chance to see average kids, no matter their country of origin, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, having fun and laughing together.

Its the same for Juana Isabelle Sarenas, an 18-year-old student in Hong Kong who recently posted a video about Cabin 6, the theoretical cabin where all the cool TikTok kids will end up when Trump is impeached and President Mike Pence sends queer teens to conversion-therapy summer camp.

The LGBT community there is huge, Sarenas says of TikTok. The jokes dont erase the tragic events if anything, they use the memes to bring light to them in a humorous way. I learned more about concentration camps and other horrifying current events from TikTok than I had any other platform.

Cabin 6 memes, in general, are a pretty joyous way to react to the reality that the US vice president once advocated for allocating federal dollars to conversion therapy groups instead of HIV/AIDS patients. As many of the memes reference, conservative boomers sending a bunch of queer kids to a summer camp together seems like a great way to encourage the very sexuality those people find so repugnant. We all know that if [Pence] tried to force people to go to camps, it would never be passed as a law, one 16-year-old told Mel Magazine. I just find it funny to joke about that like summer camp with the fellow gays.

Like the rest of the internet, as much as TikTok is a place for blas nihilism kids self-deprecating about how ugly they are, or begging for Harry Styles to run them over its also proved to be a great way of getting other people to listen. On TikTok, users dont have to follow anyone to see videos the app thinks they might like. As on Reddit, information can come from anywhere, as long as enough people favorite it. Thats how Gem Nwanne, a 24-year-old grad student, data analyst, and activist in New York, went viral after posting a video about the citys crackdown on subway fare evasion using the same meme format as Chlos.

Nwanne was used to the kind of discourse that takes place in activist and academic circles on Twitter and Instagram, with long threads and jargon-y paragraphs. Its a little difficult to engage on Twitter because if you ask the wrong question to the wrong person ... there will be a pile-on. Youll get kicked the shit kicked out of you, Nwanne says with a laugh. But with a platform like TikTok, its way more accessible. Im dancing. Its a joke. Its a lot easier to teach or to spread an idea when people are laughing.

The subway fare video helped Nwanne gain 10,000 followers in a month on TikTok, where they continue to post videos about race, queer identity, capitalism, and leftist politics. I think TikTok as a tool for education can be so revolutionary, and I would really love to see more people on my side of the political spectrum using it, moving away from these academic Twitter threads. Lets meet the people where they are.

Its much easier to see the humanity of someone whose ideas youre hearing when you can actually see them. The dominant TikTok aesthetic is a person in their own home, alone, speaking to the camera without knowing who will end up seeing their face on their screen. Its like YouTube one of the most effective platforms for sharing ideas, for better or for worse but TikToks take even less effort to produce.

Conversations are difficult to have on Twitter or Instagram because of how reactive everybody is on those apps, Nwanne says. Comments on a video about the Australian fires were like, folks asking questions and people answering them. On Twitter or Instagram theyd be like, How dare you ask the question? The communitys a lot chiller, and I do think its because theyre younger, and so they dont know to be pretentious douchebags yet.

I always compare TikTok to all of the rhymes and hand games that we played in middle school, says Sophie Dickinson, an associate editor at Know Your Meme who covers TikTok. The bushfires, other things that are happening now, its all the same jokes over and over and over again. It has to do with whatever the popular opinion is. It could be dangerous, but its also nice for kids to be coming together over something that might be very difficult and challenging to wrap their heads around.

It would be easy to make TikTok out to be a utopian Gen Z playground, where authenticity sells and love wins and the rest is mostly just dancing, but thats not the whole story. Nwanne, for instance, doesnt read their comments because they say the platform is often quite conservative like Facebook-lite. The #impeachment hashtag on TikTok seems to have nearly as many earnest Trump supporters as it does people poking fun at the president using a popular Camila Cabello song.

TikTok has some of the same political pitfalls as YouTube ironic memes and jokes can seduce people into believing harmful ideologies and its mysterious algorithm makes it such that the TikTok I see, the one with hilarious and well-meaning teens goofing off in their bedrooms, is not the same one that someone else sees. That certain songs and sounds, dances, and memes go hugely viral, and fast, also ends up with many people using those memes to spread false or extremist information. Nurse Holly, a nurse on TikTok with nearly 2 million followers, recently received major backlash when she used a popular song and video format to post a video that said the best way to prevent STDs was by waiting for sex until marriage. Even mostly harmless jokes about getting drafted for WW3 led at least some college kids to briefly panic over the idea of being forced to join the Army, even though the US hasnt had a draft since 1973.

Bad stuff has been happening in the world forever, and the internet has always been full of very funny and very sad people to make jokes out of it. TikTok is now a crucial part of that machine, one that can set the discourse in practically zero time. Whatever comes of it, Nwanne knows one thing is certain: Were gonna set some shit on fire on TikTok.

Sign up for The Goods newsletter. Twice a week, well send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

Read the original here:

TikTok memes like WW3, impeachment, and Australian fires prove the platform is political - Vox.com

If ever there were a recipe for the kind of audacity needed to bring some of H.P. Lovecrafts more challenging stories to life on film, it would include a director like Richard Stanley, an actor like Nicolas Cage, and the studio that brought us Mandy last year.Twenty-three years removed from his last directorial outing, which famously ended after just three days, Stanley makes a triumphant return behind the camera with Color Out of Space. Lovecraft fans can rest assured that this is one of the best direct adaptations of the weird fiction writers seminal works since Re-Animator.

COLOR OUT OF SPACE (3/5 stars)Directed by:Richard StanleyWritten by: Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, and story by H.P. LovecraftStarring: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Elliot KnightRunning time: 111 min

The film makes a few major changes to the short story, namely bringing it into the present day and telling the story from the perspective of the family rather than as a second-hand account of events. These changes succeed in making the story more immediate and dont sacrifice any of the spirit of the source material.

Thie story marinates in the cosmic nihilism one would expect from Lovecraft. The Gardner family, headed by the super dorky Nathan Gardner (Cage), has an idyllic life together, until one day a meteorite strikes their farmland and begins poisoning everything. Animals, insects, plant life it all starts giving off an eerie pink glow. Its like cosmic bowling!

Luck has it that a very intelligent hydrologist happens to be surveying the Gardners land around this time because of a city-proposed new reservoir, and he discovers that the water contains contaminants. Theres just poison all over this damn place now, and for some reason this family ignores the red flags long enough to descend into the kind of madness normally reserved for mountains.

Madness and Nic Cage go together, so theres no shortage of instant classic outbursts from him , but the rest of the cast perceivably attempts to match that energy. While they dont quite ever get there, and who could blame them, they make a commendable effort. They do just enough to sell the family drama and add some absurd levity so that we can enjoy what we really came here to see. The realized vision of an unimaginable terror awaits.

The central horror comes from the source of the spreading mutagen poison, which is an indescribable, incomprehensible hue that doesnt register on the known color spectrum. How the hell do you film that? Stanleys answer is mostly to use magenta and morphing neon, which are en vogue right now with many cinematographers, but it works.

While some of the CGI Special effects leave a little to be desired in spots, they build to an ethereal atmospheric effect not unlike what we saw in Annihilation. The practical effects pick up the slack on grotesquerie and give the film the kind of verve thats lacking in a lot of modern horror films. As a result, a pack of four alpacas and an unspeakable familial monstrosity are the real stars of this movie.

Lovecrafts fingerprints are all over horror classics that were not direct adaptations of his work, like Alien and The Thing, which is why its so exciting when we get a film like Color Out Of Space that comes from a place of deep reverence and understands what the audience wants from cosmic horror.

At a Q&A for an LA premiere of the film, Stanley clarified that Color Out of Space is the intended beginning of a Lovecraft film adaptation trilogy, with the next script hes working on drawing from The Dunwich Horror. One can hope he gets to follow through on that vision.

Here is the original post:

Color Out Of Space Movie Review - Book and Film Globe

Joe Pera Talks With You is unlike anything else on Adult Swim. Cartoon Network's nighttime programming block is known for the maximalist absurdity of Tim & Eric; The Eric Andre Show and its demented, ranch-obsessed host ; Rick & Morty's animated nihilism; and the bizarre and surprisingly violent short Too Many Cooks. But it's now also home to a show where comedian Joe Pera plays a fictionalized version of himself, a "soft-handed choir teacher" who lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and, though in his thirties, boasts the unhurried mannerisms of a senior citizen. As it approaches the end of its masterful 14-episode second season, the show has become an essential salve against cynicism: It's relaxing and gentle TV that revels more in its meditative beauty than its eccentric comedy.

While the shock-value fanfare typical of Adult Swim has its own inherent comedic value, there's a warmth radiating throughout Joe Pera Talks With You that feels equally, if not more, needed in 2020. This is doubly true given Pera's sincere commitment to his character. (The fictional) Pera's disarmingly earnest in everything he does, from his teaching jobwhere he rewards students with green applesto his trip to the Friday fish fry with his Nana. Each 12-minute episode of the series finds Pera musing on one of the smaller things in life, like taking a hike, going to the grocery store, or waiting for someone at the beauty salon. With its ethereal soundtrack; Pera's calming, grandfatherly voice; and its surprisingly gorgeous cinematography, the show feels like a distant and often funny cousin to Bob Rossor a millennial version of Mr. Rogers.

Where many comedies lean on vulgarity and edginess, Pera finds his beat in everyday gratitude and basking in the mundane, to surprisingly amusing effect. In this season's first episode, Pera decides to create a bean arch in his garden so that when the vines are fully grown, they meet at the crown of the structure. As he explains to the audience the many pros of raising your own beans, he looks up at the arch and says, Imagine that not having to bend over to pick a bean, a simple observation so off-the-cuff and innocent that it's shockingly funny. It's unlikely that most of the show's target audiencetwenty- and thirtysomethingshave spent much time thinking about the best way to pick a bean with such sincerity, yet here they are, taking a moment to consider it. With too much of modern day-to-day life spent being chronically online, overstimulated, and filled with anxiety, the good-natured humor in Joe Pera Talks With You provides a brief but deserved respite. Hey, why aren't we growing bean arches?

On a lesser show, Pera's character would be treated like a punchline: an oafish, painfully Midwestern rube whose wholesomeness is sneered at. Instead, Joe Pera Talks With You and its world actively root for him. One stellar episode from 2018's first season, "Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements," deals in the joy of discovering a song for the first timein this case, it's "Baba O'Riley" by The Who, a track so ubiquitous his ignorance of it is both hilarious and beguiling. In a sleepless daze from spending the previous night calling into every local radio station to play the song (he doesn't think to Google it himself), Pera asks the congregation if they've heard of The Who. It's not just played for laughs; in fact, at the end of the episode the churchgoers join Pera on a sing-a-along of the iconic classic track and it's surprisingly moving.

Though he's awkward and doesn't quite fit in during most social interactions, it's clear the other characters genuinely like being around Pera. There's a small-town joy in seeing him interact with his community even though it's rarely seamlessan episode where the straightlaced Pera is a last-minute invite to a boozy bachelor party is a particularly funny example. But his relationships with his neighbors the Melskis, his elderly best friend Gene, and his coworkers are especially affecting, especially when he navigates his newfound romance with his girlfriend Sarah (Jo Firestone). Just as Pera's clear passion for each episode's topic of the week is infectious, his enthusiasm for life's ostensibly ordinary things rubs off on those closest to him. It's this refreshing kindness that makes Pera so easy to cheer on. The genuine, honest, and full-hearted life his character lives in rural Michigan isn't treated with scorn; instead, it's aspirational.

It's easy to get caught up and overwhelmed by the fast-paced and demanding nature of just being alive in 2020. But even when things get hard, Joe Pera Talks With You is there to remind us to take a step back and appreciate the smaller things that make up our days. Pera's thoughtfulness is the series' emotional centerpiece, and when true obstacles are thrown his way as the second season progresses, it's heartrending, even devastating. But no matter what, he endures, leans on those closest to him, and remembers to take stock on the simple things that bring him joyto Pera, it truly is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Go here to see the original:

Joe Pera Talks With You Is the Best Thing Adult Swim Has Ever Done - VICE

Having opened late last year with Dave Malloy's gorgeous but esoteric supernatural song cycle Ghost Quartet, Soho's tiny theatrical jewel box, the Boulevard, continues its' policy of defiantly left-field programming with this UK premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy's challenging talk-piece.

There are shades of Beckett and Mamet in the male-focussed nihilism and austerity of this bleak script, apparently set in a rundown New York tenement apartment immediately after a black ex-convict has stopped a white college professor from leaping to his death in front of a subway train. I say "apparently" because, as the play progresses, it starts to possibly look as though the suicide did in fact go to plan and we are eavesdropping on a conversation in some sort of purgatorial anteroom. McCarthy's opaque text first seen in Chicago in 2006 and subsequently turned into a film with Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones remains tantalisingly ambiguous on this and several other points.

The characters are named simply 'Black' and 'White' which proves less of a racial statement and more of an indication of their opposing standpoints on the "Big Stuff" such as human suffering, whether suicide is a valid response to life's difficulties, and the relevance and existence of God. Much of it is very interesting and one is left in little doubt as to where the author's allegiances lie (and it's not with Gary Beadle's devout, watchfully chirpy Black).

"The one thing I won't give up is giving up" says the sardonic White (Jasper Britton, painfully convincing) in one of a few comic moments, however bitter, that leaven the existential gloom. The lengthy anecdotes and monologues as each character propounds his viewpoint are beautifully written, but collectively have a slightly deadening effect, as though one should be reading them rather than listening to them in a theatre, despite the technical brilliance of these fine actors. The lack of true drama makes the play feel rather longer than its 95 minutes.

Terry Johnson's production - from Tim Shortall's atmospherically grimy set to the accomplished lighting and sound designs by Ben Ormerod and John Leonard respectively is pretty much flawless however. Plus it is hard to imagine another pair of actors inhabiting Black and White with as much skill and commitment as Beadle and Britton. They precisely capture the rhythms of McCarthy's spiky prose and the middle ground it occupies between naturalism and poetically heightened.

Thought-provoking and technically impressive, but frustratingly elliptical as a piece of drama, this feels like an evening that is more to admire than truly engage with. "I yearn for the darkness" says White at one point...by the end of The Sunset Limited, I was starting to feel the same way. See it for the acting.

Loading...

Loading...

Read this article:

Review: The Sunset Limited (Boulevard Theatre) - WhatsOnStage.com

CultureTVThere's also Star Trek: Picard, Bring Back the Bush on Channel 4 and a documentary following Nigel Farage's Brexit campaign

Friday, 24th January 2020, 7:00 am

Star Trek: Picard

From Friday 24 January, Amazon Prime

i's TV newsletter: what you should watch next

The Goop Lab

From Friday 24 January, Netflix

Providing yet more evidence that actress-turned-lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow is in on the Goop joke, this six-part documentary about the wellness brands research group is a rare insight into the controversial company. Taking on everything from contacting the dead to recalibrating their biological age, Paltrows troupe of guinea pigs are up for anything, making for a bizarre, fascinating show.

Keeler, Profumo, Ward and Me

Sunday 26 January, 10pm, BBC Two

As The Trial of Christine Keeler comes to an end, ex-journalist Tom Mangold who reported first-hand on the Profumo affair in 1963 presents this documentary on the scandal. Featuring previously unheard interview recordings with Keeler, the film provides evidence that she was pressured into giving evidence against Dr Stephen Ward, who introduced the young girl to thepolitician.

Bring Back The Bush: Where Did Our Pubic Hair Go?

Monday 27 January, 10pm, Channel 4

Chidera Eggerue, aka Twitters @theslumflower, presents this investigation into Britains lack of pubic hair. Eggerue herself takes on the shame often associated with having hair down there by growing out her own pubes and presenting them as part of a public exhibition all in the name of self-love, of course.

The Windermere Children

Monday 27 January, 9pm, BBC Two

A one-off drama about the group of children who arrived at Windermeres Calgarth Estate in the Lake District after surviving the Holocaust. Based on first-person testimonies from Jewish people who made a new life in the UK after the Second World War, it is a heart-breaking but ultimately hopeful watch as the children rebuild a family together.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Tuesday 28 January 9pm, Sky Comedy

The Sky channel launching on Monday brings Larry Davids miserable alter ego to the UK only a couple of weeks after it premiered in America. In the first episode, Larry begins 2020 by creating a new rival for himself Mocha Joe, who owns a coffee shop where the coffee is too cold and the scones are too soft. Nihilism at its most entertaining.

Young, Sikh and Proud

Tuesday 28 January, 10.35pm, BBC One

Jagraj Singh is often credited as the most popular Sikh leader in modern Britain, attracting young people to return to their faith before he died in 2017. This documentary follows his brother, the journalist Sunny Hundal, in his attempt to understand the allure of Singhs Sikhism and examine why the pair fell out over their different interpretations of the same religion.

Next In Fashion

From Wednesday 29 January, Netflix

Queer Eyes Tan France and model Alexa Chung present Netflixs first fashion competition. Competing for the chance to have their designs sold on luxury site Net-a-Porter and a cash prize of $250,000 (190,000), 10 designers from around the world take on various sartorial challenges. Guest judges include the designers Tommy Hilfiger and Christopher Kane, and the model Adriana Lima.

Farage: The Man Who Made Brexit

Wednesday 29 January, 9pm, Channel 4

Christian Trumble, the director who brought us Carry on Brussels, goes behind the scenes of Nigel Farages 2019 European election triumph, in which his Brexit Party won more votes than the Conservatives and Labour combined. In the months following, the controversial politician attempts to get soon-to-be PM Boris Johnson on side a dream that ends with tales of bullying, threats and phone calls from Donald Trump.

Auschwitz Untold: In Colour

Wednesday 29 January, 10.30pm, More 4

Almost 75 years to the day since the liberation of Auschwitz, 16 Holocaust survivors tell their stories alongside newly restored and colourised archive footage of the genocide. Among the contributors are a Roma resistance fighter and a Jewish artist, who tell their stories of survival with admirable bravery.

Read this article:

The 10 best TV shows to watch this week, from The Goop Lab to Curb Your Enthusiasm season 10 - inews

Why does every waiter act like they needs to explain how menus work now? Theyre menus. Appetizers up top, desserts at the bottom. We get it. That topic and more are covered in our interview with Avenue 5's Zach Woods and Rebecca Front, above. On Armando Iannuccis new farce, premiering this weekend on HBO, the pair play against each other as a nihilist customer service representative and a busybody passenger, both of whom are now stuck on what amounts to a damaged cruise ship languishing in space. Its a great premise for the two to play with, especially since theyre both veterans of the Iannucci-verse. In the clip above, the pair talk about their relationship with Arm, as Woods calls him, and well as who theyd ultimately find themselves becoming if they were trapped with strangers for the foreseeable future.

Read the original:

Avenue 5's Zach Woods and Rebecca Front on nihilism and pet peeves - The A.V. Club

Fifty years after Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature, newly opened archives reveal the serious doubts the Nobel committee had about giving the award to an author they felt held a bottomless contempt for the human condition.

Announcing that the Irishman had won the laureateship in 1969, the Swedish Academy praised his writing, which in new forms for the novel and drama in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.

But with Nobel archives being made public only after five decades, documents have now revealed there were major disagreements within the Swedish Academy over the choice of the Waiting for Godot author. According to Svenska Dagbladet, the split was between Beckett and French writer Andr Malraux, with other nominations including Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Graham Greene.

Four members of the committee supported Beckett and two backed Malraux, with the primary objections to Beckett coming from the Nobel committees chairman, Anders sterling, who had campaigned against the playwright for years. sterling questioned whether writing of a demonstratively negative or nihilistic nature like Becketts corresponded to the intention laid out in Alfred Nobels will, to reward the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.

While sterling acknowledged the possibility that behind Becketts depressing motives might lie a secret defence of humanity, but in the eyes of most readers, he said, it remains an artistically staged ghost poetry, characterised by a bottomless contempt for the human condition.

But Becketts main supporter on the committee, Karl Ragnar Gierow, felt that Becketts black vision was not the expression of animosity and nihilism. Beckett, he argued, portrays humanity as we have all seen it, at the moment of its most severe violation, and searches for the depths of degradation because, even there, there is the possibility of rehabilitation.

Beckett was rejected for the prize a year earlier, in 1968, but a year later his champions won out. sterling did not give the speech presenting him with the award. That was done by Gierow, who expanded on the arguments he made to the committee, saying that Becketts work goes to the depths because it is only there that pessimistic thought and poetry can work their miracles. What does one get when a negative is printed? A positive, a clarification, with black proving to be the light of day, the parts in deepest shade those which reflect the light source.

Beckett himself accepted the prize, but he did not come to Stockholm to receive it, or give the traditional winners lecture. And the division among the jury remained secret for half a century unlike today, when the split over the decision to award the 2019 prize to the Austrian writer Peter Handke prompted the boycott of the ceremony by Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and further resignations. Guardian

See the rest here:

Revealed: The fight to stop Samuel Beckett winning the Nobel prize - The Irish Times

Broadway seems to get a new jukebox musical every few months: There are ersatz Chers and Tina Turners and Carole Kings and Jersey Boys all over Times Square. Still, there was something a little shocking about the very idea of Jagged Little Pill, the new jukebox musical based on Alanis Morissettes seminal 1994 album that premiered on Broadway in December. Jukebox musicals, surely, were for nostalgic baby boomers with tourist money to burn. They can be well executed, but traditionally they are painfully sincere hagiographies that wedge their songs into their subjects lives with much, too much, literalism. So what was Alanis, the poster girl for Gen Xs ironic nihilism, doing on Broadway?

Then Jagged Little Pill opened in Boston in 2018, and the rumors began: As jukebox musicals go, the early buzz whispered, Jagged Little Pill was actually not that bad. It had some astonishing performances. It had fixed the jukebox musical.

Part of what made Jagged Little Pill so exciting, according to those early out-of-town reviews, was that it eschewed the traditional biographical jukebox musical plot (And then they said I shouldnt be myself, but I was! And then I won a thousand Grammys! is usually how you can summarize a typical plot.)

Instead, first-time playwright Diablo Codys book tells the story of a suburban family caught in contemporary malaise. Perfect mother Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley) is drowning under the weight of keeping up appearances, and shes become dependent on opioids. Shes also struggling to connect to her daughter Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), a committed activist who sings to Mary Jane that shes frustrated by your apathy. But both Mary Jane and Frankie have to reconsider their understanding of each other after Frankies classmate Bella (Kathryn Gallagher) is raped at a party.

Its still rare and unusual for a jukebox musical to have an original plot not focused on the artist themselves, so for many critics, Codys involvement was already an enormous step forward for the genre. But after the show moved to New York and was met with initial raves, a counternarrative began. For some critics, Codys book was the shows weak link that let down Morissettes music, a shaky and contrived mess of confusion and occasional silliness.

One month after the shows Broadway debut, the conversation about whether Jagged Little Pill is worth swallowing has calmed down a little. So Vox culture writers Constance Grady and Aja Romano decided to take this time to talk through Jagged Little Pill and the problems of the jukebox musical. What makes them work, what makes them not and is this particular musical any good or not?

Constance: In the month and change that Jagged Little Pill has been out, weve had time for a rough consensus on the show to develop among critics, and it goes a little something like this: The performances are brilliant, but the book is overstuffed at best and a shapeless mess at worst. Where you fall on the musical overall seems to depend upon which aspect of the show youre willing to give the most weight to.

Ill put my cards on the table. I think Jagged Little Pill is a mess, and I love it with my whole heart. I had a blast at this show. I laughed, I cried, I cheered. I have only a glancing acquaintance with Alaniss original album (I was slightly too young and way too uncool to listen to Jagged Little Pill very much in the 90s), but the music is so undeniable, and the young cast so strong, that it was easy for me to let myself get swept away by everything that was happening onstage.

Like, try to sit there while Lauren Pattens heartbroken Jo absolutely shreds You Oughta Know and not start screaming with catharsis. You cant! Its physically impossible! Thats why the show has to stop dead for a standing ovation every night as soon as shes finished.

On the other hand, I have to acknowledge that this show suffers from the standard jukebox musical problem of forcing its characters into position to sing a particular song. And because this particular example is trying to do so much at once, giving every single character a disconnected subplot of their own, it doesnt quite have time to pay off the tensions its songs set up.

You Oughta Know is a bit of a case study in this problem. An Alanis musical absolutely has to have someone sing You Oughta Know, because its one of her best and biggest hits. To set up the song, the show puts together a love triangle, so we see Frankie become torn between her girlfriend Jo and new kid Phoenix. But at the same time, the main concerns of Jagged Little Pill as a play are Mary Janes opioid addiction and the ripple effects from Bellas rape, and it really doesnt have time to make the love triangle feel like anything more than an afterthought.

The aims of this show as a jukebox musical and the aims of this show as an original musical are at odds, and as a result, its center of gravity is warped. This giant showstopper of a number is embedded in the slightest and weakest arc of the show. And the only conclusion Jo gets after the heartbreak and rage of You Oughta Know is half a verse in the finale, which is a pretty weak conclusion.

Having said all that, I actually think that as far as this genre goes, Diablo Codys much-maligned book is pretty solid. If nothing else, Cody managed to people the cast with characters who all have different personalities, but who all believably feel like they are the kind of person who would break into an Alanis Morissette song if given the chance. Thats such a monumental achievement for a jukebox musical that I have to give her props for it.

Aja, where do you fall on Jagged Little Pill? Does the critical consensus feel correct to you? And do you love it in spite of the structure or hate it because of it?

Aja: Ill be very upfront and say that I grew up with an unshakeable, nay, zealous, faith in the thoroughly integrated book musical, whose songs evolve organically from the book and the characters. So the last two decades of musical theater have been pretty fraught for me, because I deeply resent the rise of the jukebox musical. Its a regression in form! Its everything Broadway aspired for decades to evolve beyond, now wrapped in a fancy marketing package as a cheap trick to get people into theaters! Its cheating, Constance!

So, with all that said, I really do appreciate the spirit of Jagged Little Pill. Its aims are pure, its ambitions are to become a real musical, and Im mostly in its corner. The creative team understands that you just shouldnt treat Morissettes music like that in any other pop biopic. Most jukebox musical scores are light even if the subjects are serious, but Alaniss music is raw emotion. Its the classic Gen X mix of depression and angst, infused with societal malaise and a touch of addiction.

Even its upbeat moments veer into neurotic, manic, difficult. JLP really couldnt ever be a jukebox musical in that sense, because whos actually gonna play Alanis on a jukebox? You play Alanis while screaming into your pillow at 3 am over a dirty breakup. You play Alanis while eye-rolling at each other about how ironically self-aware youre being about playing Alanis a move the musical itself parodies, in a scene meant purely to lampoon the cultural reaction to Ironic.

But the fact that Im talking about how a musical is breaking the fourth wall to answer the longstanding cultural perceptions about one of its songs is part of the inherent problems you run into with musicals like this one. You have to work much harder to create characters the audience cares about as much as the songs themselves, and especially to get those characters to fit the situations prescribed by those songs.

You Oughta Know is one of the most glaring examples of this, because this song is meant to be the shows climactic showstopper, but it just doesnt fit. You Oughta Know is full of the kind of deep bitterness that results from a relationship thats lasted years, not the uncertain, relatively new relationship its assigned to onstage.

Lauren Patten acts the hell out of Jo who I read as emphatically nonbinary, FWIW and she also gets one of the shows other big numbers, One Hand In My Pocket. But her role is frustrating, because even though shes one of the most compelling actors onstage, shes working hard to fill a very thinly written part. Remember, Jo is the strongest leg in that ultimately weak love triangle Constance mentioned, and the character seems to have been created just to deliver strong (low-key queer) anthems, not to do much of anything else.

We barely get glimpses of her life outside their relationship with Frankie, and we really dont even understand that relationship before it starts falling apart. Ultimately, the contrast between these giant, overly emotive songs and such an underwritten part just highlights just how lacking so much of the book is. (Next time, just make the whole musical about the misfit genderqueer kid! Done!)

Diablo Codys book is overstuffed with too many social issues and too many characters, and its really obvious that much of this bloat is about finding ways to shoehorn in all the Alanis songs you know, whether or not they make sense and fit the plot or its characters.

Head Over Feet bizarrely gets split between two couples at once, as an attempt to give our main character, Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley), some backstory with her husband. Only this random nostalgia break abruptly happens in the middle of a bitter couples therapy session, where its placement makes no sense. Similarly, turning Ironic into a purely throwaway meta-number seems like a wasted opportunity, but thats what happens when youre trying to match characters to songs instead of letting songs grow out of character.

Additionally, Tom Kitt of the Pulitzer-winning Next to Normal did the orchestrations and arrangements for JLP, and I felt like Next to Normal heavily influenced this show in spirit without influencing its approach to characterization and story structure so I felt the ghostly imprint of a much better show about family dysfunction bleeding through at every turn.

Even so, theres a lot to like about JLP. The staging and choreography, together with the additional music by Glen Ballard (Morissettes co-writer and Jagged Little Pills original album producer) and Kitt are all fantastic and full of pulsing energy and heart. Even though the characters are all little more than ciphers, Mary Jane in particular is the classic unlikeable Diablo Cody protagonist. Shes really hard to take until she becomes almost heartbreakingly vulnerable, and Elizabeth Stanley really nails that performance.

I wasnt as moved as other audience members were by the scene where Uninvited invites us into the darkness in her head, but boy did I appreciate it as a way of drawing out that songs complex, layered meanings, and as a way of elevating the jukebox musical itself. If we have to have jukebox musicals, and it seems we must, Id rather have a dozen Jagged Little Pills that dont quite work than a dozen blander, frothier musicals that do.

Constance: I absolutely agree on Jagged Little Pills massive ambitions, and I think youre correct, Aja, that they are both its saving grace and one of its biggest problems. We can see this basic paradox not only formally but also thematically, because whoa, boy, does this musical have ambitions of handling a lot of different social and political themes. And it honestly only really has space for maaaaaaaaybe one and a half of them.

Most obviously, this is a musical about the opioid addiction crisis. Frankies mom Mary Jane is addicted to pills, and over the course of the show, we delve into Mary Janes addiction, its roots, and all the ways its begun to warp her ostensibly perfect suburban mom life. That plotline works nicely, I think: Smiling in particular, in which we see a disoriented and alienated Mary Jane going backwards through her days routine, really succeeds at making Alaniss music feel fresh and new and character-based, is staged in an inventive and effective way, and is also genuinely moving.

Weve also got the date rape plotline, which I would say is handled in a way that feels basically fine. Sure, some of the protest scenes are a little cringe-inducingly earnest, and yes, songs like Predator and No get extremely literal interpretations (Predator can more or less survive it; No cant). Still, Codys book gets nicely nuanced in the way she talks through the concerns here, especially when it comes to who believes whom and why. The plotline plays into Mary Janes addiction story in a thoughtful way. And Kathryn Gallagher gives a really grounded, smart performance as Bella throughout this subplot.

And then, sort of stuffed into the corners of the play, weve got Frankies political activism, and that just does not work at all. This plotline seems to want to cover basically all the progressive causes du jour, including climate change and, in a very bizarrely weighted moment, school gun violence.

Theres also the barely-sketched-in subplot of Frankies angst as a black girl adopted by a very white family, plus the sexual politics of her queer love triangle between Jo and Phoenix. Those issues are just kind of there. They take up space, they inspire some extremely energetic rage-dancing but theres no room for the show to explore them as fully as they deserve. It begins to feel as though its just going through a checklist of issues for the wokeness street cred, rather than caring about those issues for their own sake.

Aja: And that is, wait for it, the ultimate irony of Jagged Little Pill: The show doesnt care enough about any of the issues its cycling through to make them meaningful when the whole point of the Jagged Little Pill album is the terror of caring too much.

Alaniss album was an instant legend in part because it captured the zeitgeist of a generation that had turned toward ironic detachment to cope with the lack of control they felt over the world and their own lives. Alaniss songs explicitly voiced the terror and anxiety of letting yourself care for anything at the end of a century in a culture increasingly veering towards nihilism. Her lyrics embraced her own neuroses and the power of her own bitterness in ways that also enhanced and amplified her hesitant, constantly-deflected shows of genuine affection and positive emotion. They made us feel how hard it is to love and care for anything.

And look, everyone knows that a suburban nuclear family is always a deceptively idyllic allegory for larger societal disquiet, right? Thats the trope. But when we look at the vast pantheon of stories that use this trope, too often suburban malaise itself is treated as the problem and not a symptom of something larger.

I think thats the basic mistake Cody makes here: She treats most of her characters like theyve been inducted by default into the national suburban burnout epidemic, and thats the reason theyre all in individually self-absorbed hazes that keep them from connecting to each other or even listening to each other half the time. (On that front, I also think her storyline is strangely non-critical of the male members of our family, who both are actively dismissive of the pain of the women in their lives until they magically arent anymore, in ways that arent really fully examined or dealt with.)

These characters are performing their default identities, both individual and collective, and hitting their trope marks so they can get into position to sing their big Alanis number: the angry adopted child rebelling through feminism; the overworked absent dad who resents his depressed wife for not making him feel loved; the all-American jock who implodes under the pressure of getting into a top school by going to a dangerous high school party. It all feels perfunctory. But a cast full of characters truly inspired by Alanis Morissette would be fighting with themselves every step of the way about where they wanted to go, and why, and why theyre even this invested when its clear nothing matters at all.

Jagged Little Pill, the album, isnt about characters performing simulacrums of humanity while being stuck in a bucolic modern hell: Its about characters loudly and angrily trying to fight through that malaise to something better and more authentic. But here the characters struggles collectively feel far more performative than sincere. In a musical full of fight songs, theres very little fight at all.

See the original post:

How Broadways Jagged Little Pill tries to reinvent the jukebox musical - Vox.com

The 2020s have arrived. Science and technology are poised to revolutionize health care, spawning moral questions we cant yet imagine. Such questions will tempt governments to mandate or prohibit new technologies. Unintended consequences will follow.

2020 marks a good time for medical professionals, ethicists and policymakers to examine events that transpired in the previous 20s the 1920s a similar period of foment. In 1920, nobody quite knew the nature of the coming medical revolution. Before the decade was out, hope turned to hubris, and public policy veered in abominable directions.

In the 1920s, scientific and political consensus led to appalling abuses of human rights, including the forcible sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans.

In teaching medical professionals, Ive always devoted a week or two to the 1920s, never telling the students exactly why we were covering this period or exactly what they were supposed to learn from it. They were left to draw their own lessons on what that period means for our own time. Ill do the same here.

First, a bit of context. From around the 1830s on, Western medicine sank into therapeutic nihilism the idea that then-existing medical interventions did more harm than good, so doctors should limit their activities to observing and comforting patients not trying to heal them. In the late 1800s, the field of statistics emerged, and researchers zealously applied new mathematical tools to the study of physical and mental illness. Knowledge grew rapidly, but confidence in that knowledge grew even faster. Therapeutic medicine was back. The 1920s produced insulin and penicillin, but it also generated an awful consensus around eugenics the highly politicized junk-science predecessor to genetics.

Eugenics was purportedly the science of good breeding. Armed with statistical tools and modern medical techniques, eugenicists believed they could and should breed a superior race of humans by encouraging fit people to mate and discouraging unfit people from procreating. In 1927, the Supreme Court signed onto this agenda.

In Buck v. Bell, the Commonwealth of Virginia argued that a young woman, Carrie Buck, her mother, and Carries infant daughter exemplified hereditary feeblemindedness. The case was built on sham science and sleazy legal shenanigans, but the Supreme Court bought the states arguments. Virginia and other states were now free to forcibly sterilize people like Buck to prevent the birth of future generations of unfit people.

Bucks mother was a suspected prostitute. Buck was judged immoral for giving birth out of wedlock (after being raped). A local nurse testified that Bucks infant daughter was somewhat peculiar somehow. These paltry facts were taken as scientific proof of genetic illness and doomed Bucks life. In the decision, Oliver Wendell Holmes penned some of the most appalling words that ever emerged from the Supreme Court:

It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Buck v. Bell led to the forcible sterilization of more than 70,000 Americans 8,300 in my own state of Virginia. The story of Buck v. Bell and eugenics is told painfully and movingly in an eerie 49-minute 1993 documentary called The Lynchburg Story and in Edwin Blacks book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race. I consider them must-watch and must-read for this topic.

People in the 1920s were thrilled by the power that statistical, pharmacological, diagnostical, and surgical innovations brought to medicine. But popular enthusiasm for these techniques led to a grotesque overestimation of the wisdom of experts and the desirability of state micromanagement of human beings.

Today, were equally thrilled by the prospects of genomic medicine, CRISPR, Big Data, and sharing intimate data through wearable devices and genetic testing companies. I myself am enthusiastic about these innovations. But the history of eugenics tempers my enthusiasm, making me wary of efforts to manipulate individual lives, based on this explosion of information. Theres reason to fear both the mandates and the prohibitions that governments will summon forth. Tread lightly.

Robert Graboyes is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he focuses on technological innovation in health care. He is the author of Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care and has taught health economics at five universities. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

See original here:

GUEST VIEW: How the 1920s can inform the 2020s in health care - Odessa American

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

By: Nolen Gertz

Nihilism, not unlike time (according to Augustine) or porn (according to the U.S. Supreme Court), is one of those concepts that we are all pretty sure we know the meaning of unless someone asks us to define it. Nihil means nothing. -ism means ideology. Yet when we try to combine these terms, the combination seems to immediately refute itself, as the idea that nihilism is the ideology of nothing appears to be nonsensical. To say that this means that someone believes in nothing is not really much more helpful, as believing in something suggests there is something to be believed in, but if that something is nothing, then there is not something to be believed in, in which case believing in nothing is again a self-refuting idea.

It is easy therefore to fall into the trap of thinking Everything is nihilism! which of course leads to thinking Nothing is nihilism! Thus in order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it is necessary to distinguish it from concepts that are often associated with it but are nevertheless different, concepts such as pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

If optimism is hopefulness, then pessimism is hopelessness. To be a pessimist is to say, Whats the point? Pessimism is often likened to a Glass is half empty way of seeing the world, but since its only half empty this scenario might still be too hopeful for a pessimist. A better scenario might be that, if a pessimist fell in a well, and someone offered to rescue him, hed likely respond, Why bother? In the well, out of the well, were all going to die anyway. In other words, pessimism is dark and depressing. But it is not nihilism.

If a pessimist fell in a well, and someone offered to rescue him, hed likely respond, Why bother? In the well, out of the well, were all going to die anyway.

In fact, we might even go so far as to say that pessimism is the opposite of nihilism. Like nihilism, pessimism could be seen as arising from despair. The fact of our death, the frustration of our desires, the unintended consequences of our actions, the tweets of our political leaders, any or all of these could lead us to either nihilism or pessimism. However, where these two roads diverge is over the question of whether we dwell on our despair or hide from it.

To be with a pessimist is to know that you are with a pessimist. But you can be with a nihilist and have no idea. Indeed you could yourself be a nihilist and have no idea. Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding from despair rather than dwelling on it. This difference was illustrated by Woody Allen in his movie Annie Hall (1977) when his alter ego Alvy Singer has the following exchange with a couple he stops on the street for advice:

ALVY (He moves up the sidewalk to a young trendy-looking couple, arms wrapped around each other): You-you look like a really happy couple. Uh, uh are you?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah.

ALVY: Yeah! So h-h-how do you account for it?

YOUNG WOMAN: Uh, Im very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

YOUNG MAN: And Im exactly the same way.

ALVY: I see. Well, thats very interesting. So youve managed to work out something, huh?

YOUNG MAN: Right.

Alvy Singer is a pessimist. The man and woman are nihilists.

What is most illuminating about this scene is that it shows how a pessimist can reveal the identity of a nihilist, just as it might be argued that the pessimism of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer helped reveal to Nietzsche his own nihilism. Before they are confronted by Alvy, they are just a happily shallow and happily empty couple. However, when he asks them to explain their happiness, they are no longer shallow and empty; they are instead forced to awaken from their reverie and to become self-aware. It is not that they are happy that reveals their nihilism; rather it is their attempt to explain to a pessimist why they are happy that reveals their nihilism. On the surface, they are soul mates who have found each other. But surface is all that they are. The attempt to go any deeper reveals that there is nothing deeper. And it is precisely a pessimist who, when confronted with such a happy couple, would ask the Why? that reveals their nothingness.

If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism. To see the glass as half full is to think that we should be happy with what we have rather than focusing on what is missing. But being happy with what we have can also be a way of remaining complacent, of ignoring what is missing so as to avoid having to seek change. Similarly, to believe that everything will work out in the end, that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, is to believe that life is teleological, that there is some goal or purpose whether God or Justice operating invisibly behind what we experience.

It is by believing in the existence of superhuman goals and superhuman purposes that we lose sight of human goals and human purposes. Likewise, when we elevate someone like Martin Luther King Jr. to the status of a saint or a prophet, we see him as more than a mere mortal, thus freeing ourselves from the responsibility of trying to emulate him since we simply have to be hopeful that someone like him will come again. If optimism leads us to be complacent, leads us to wait for something good to happen, or for someone else to make something good happen, then optimism leads us to do nothing. In other words, it is not pessimism but optimism that is similar to nihilism.

In Ancient Greece, a Cynic was someone who lived like a dog (the Greek kynikos means doglike), or, to be more precise, was someone who lived by the Cynic philosophy of staying true to nature rather than conforming to what that person saw as social artifice. Today, a cynic is similarly someone who looks down on society and sees it as fake, though not because the cynic sees society as unnatural, but because the cynic sees the people who make up society as fake. To be cynical is to assume the worst of people, to think that morality is mere pretense, and to suppose that even when people seem to be helping others they are really only trying to help themselves. Believing in only self-interest, the cynic appears to others to believe in nothing. Consequently, cynicism can appear to be nihilism. But it is not nihilism.

A cynic can even enjoy life. In particular, a cynic can take pleasure in mocking those who claim that altruism exists, or that politicians are self-sacrificing public servants, and especially finds laughable the idea that we should try to see the good in people.

Cynicism, like pessimism, is about negativity. However, whereas pessimism is about despair, about the feeling that life is pointless in the face of death, cynicism is instead much more about disdain than despair. A cynic wouldnt say that life is pointless but would just say that what people claim about life is pointless. A cynic can even enjoy life. In particular, a cynic can take pleasure in mocking those who claim that altruism exists, or that politicians are self-sacrificing public servants, and especially finds laughable the idea that we should try to see the good in people.

Pessimists are not nihilists because pessimists embrace rather than evade despair. Cynics are not nihilists because cynics embrace rather than evade mendacity. A key part of evading despair is the willingness to believe, to believe that people can be good, that goodness is rewarded, and that such rewards can exist even if we do not experience them. But to a cynic such a willingness to believe is a willingness to be naive, to be gullible, and to be manipulated. The cynic mocks such beliefs not because the cynic claims to know that such beliefs are necessarily false, but because the cynic is aware of the danger represented by people who claim to know that such beliefs are necessarily true.

A skeptic waits for evidence before passing judgment. A cynic, however, does not trust evidence because the cynic does not trust that anyone is capable of providing evidence objectively.

A skeptic waits for evidence before passing judgment. A cynic, however, does not trust evidence because the cynic does not trust that anyone is capable of providing evidence objectively. The cynic would prefer to remain dubious than risk being duped, and thus the cynic sees those who do take such risks as dupes. For this reason the cynic is able to reveal the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of cynicism, much like how the pessimist reveals the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of pessimism.

Perhaps the best example of the revelatory abilities of a cynic is the argument between Thrasymachus and Socrates in the opening book of Platos Republic. Thrasymachus is first introduced as mocking Socrates for questioning others about the definition of justice and then demands that he be paid in order to tell them what justice truly is. Once appeased, Thrasymachus defines justice as a trick invented by the strong in order to take advantage of the weak, as a way for the strong to seize power by manipulating society into believing that obedience is justice. Thrasymachus further argues that whenever possible people do what is unjust, except when they are too afraid of being caught and punished, and thus Thrasymachus concludes that injustice is better than justice.

When Socrates attempts to refute this definition by likening political leaders to doctors, to those who have power but use it to help others rather than to help themselves, Thrasymachus does not accept the refutation like the others do, but instead refutes Socratess refutation. Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of being naive and argues that Socrates is like a sheep who thinks the shepherd who protects and feeds the sheep does so because the shepherd is good rather than realizing that the shepherd is fattening them for the slaughter. Socrates is never able to truly convince Thrasymachus that his definition of justice is wrong, and indeed Thrasymachuss cynicism is so compelling that Socrates spends the rest of the Republic trying to prove that justice is better than injustice by trying to refute the apparent success of unjust people by making metaphysical claims about the effects of injustice on the soul. Socrates is thus only able to counter cynicism in the visible world through faith in the existence of an invisible world, an invisible world that he argues is more real than the visible world. In other words, it is Thrasymachuss cynicism that forces Socrates to reveal his nihilism.

Here we can see that nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than to cynicism. The cynic presents himself or herself as a realist, as someone who cares about actions, not intentions, who focuses on what people do rather than on what people hope to achieve, who remembers the failed promises of the past in order to avoid being swept up in the not-yet-failed promises about the future. The idealist, however, rejects cynicism as hopelessly negative. By focusing on intentions, on hopes, and on the future, the idealist is able to provide a positive vision to oppose the negativity of the cynic. But in rejecting cynicism, does the idealist also reject reality?

Nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than to cynicism.

The idealist, as we saw with Socrates, is not able to challenge the cynics view of reality and instead is forced to construct an alternate reality, a reality of ideas. These ideas may form a coherent logical story about reality, but that in no way guarantees that the ideas are anything more than just a story. As the idealist focuses more and more on how reality ought to be, the idealist becomes less and less concerned with how reality is. The utopian views of the idealist may be more compelling than the dystopian views of the cynic, but dystopian views are at least focused on this world, whereas utopian views are, by definition, focused on a world that does not exist. It is for this reason that to use other-worldly idealism to refute this-worldly cynicism is to engage in nihilism.

Along with pessimism and cynicism, nihilism is also frequently associated with apathy. To be apathetic is to be without pathos, to be without feeling, to be without desire. While we are all occasionally given choices that do not particularly sway us one way or another (Do you want to eat Italian or Chinese?), such disinterestedness is what someone who is apathetic feels all the time. To be apathetic is thus to be seen as not caring about anything. The pessimist feels despair, the cynic feels disdain, but the apathetic individual feels nothing. In other words, apathy is seen as nihilism. But apathy is not nihilism.

The pessimist feels despair, the cynic feels disdain, but the apathetic individual feels nothing.

Apathy can be an attitude (I dont care about that) or a character trait (I dont care about anything). However, in either case the apathetic individual is expressing a personal feeling (or, to be more precise, feelinglessness) and is not making a claim about how everyone should feel (or, again, not feel). The apathetic individual understands perfectly well that other people feel differently insofar as they feel anything at all. And because the apathetic individual feels nothing, the apathetic individual does not feel any desire to convince others that they should similarly feel nothing. Others may care, but the apathetic individual does not, and because they do not care, the apathetic individual does not care that others care.

Yet apathy is still often seen as an affront, as an insult, as a rebuke by those who do care. For example, in MTVs Daria (19972002) a show about a highly apathetic high schooler Daria Morgendorffer and her friend Jane Lane have the following conversation:

DARIA: Tragedy hits the school and everyone thinks of me. A popular guy died, and now Im popular because Im the misery chick. But Im not miserable. Im just not like them.

JANE: It really makes you think.

DARIA: Funny. Thanks a lot.

JANE: No! Thats why they want to talk to you. When they say, Youre always unhappy, Daria, what they mean is, You think, Daria. I can tell because you dont smile. Now this guy died and it makes me think and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling. So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetable state.

DARIA: Okay. So why have you been avoiding me?

JANE: Because Ive been trying not to think.

The apathetic individual can thus, like the pessimist and the cynic, reveal the nihilism of others, though, unlike the pessimist and the cynic, the apathetic individual does this without actually trying to. Whereas the pessimist and the cynic challenge others to explain their lack of either pessimism or cynicism, the apathetic individual is instead the one who is challenged, challenged by others to explain his or her lack of pathos. In trying to get the apathetic individual to care, the person who does care is forced to explain why he or she cares, an explanation which can reveal just how meaningful (or meaningless) is the reason the person has for caring.

The apathetic individual doesnt care. However, not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But the nihilist has feelings. Its just that what the nihilist has feelings for is itself nothing. And indeed it is because the nihilist is able to have such strong feelings, strong feelings for something that is nothing, that the nihilist is not and cannot be apathetic. Nihilists can have sympathy, empathy, and antipathy, but they cannot have apathy.

Not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But the nihilist has feelings.

Nietzsche tried to demonstrate the feelings at work in nihilism in his argument against what he called the morality of pity. The morality of pity holds that it is good to feel pity for those who are in need, and it is especially good to be moved by such pity to help those who are in need. But, according to Nietzsche, what is often motivating the desire to help is how we are able to see ourselves thanks to how we see others in need, in particular how we see ourselves as capable of helping, as powerful enough to help.

The morality of pity is for Nietzsche not about helping others, but about elevating oneself by reducing others, by reducing others to their neediness, to a neediness that we do not have and that reveals how much we do have by contrast. Pity is nihilistic insofar as it allows us to evade reality, such as by allowing us to feel that we are better than we are, and that we are better than those in need. Consequently, we are able to avoid recognizing that we have perhaps only had better luck or have been more privileged.

The morality of pity drives us to feel pity and to feel good for feeling pity. Having such feelings is worse than feeling nothing, for if we feel good when we feel pity, then we are motivated only to help the individuals we feel pity for rather than to help end the systemic injustices that create such pitiful situations in the first place. Whereas apathy may help us to avoid being blinded by our emotions and to see situations of injustice more clearly, pity is instead more likely to motivate us to perpetuate injustice by perpetuating the conditions that allow us to help the needy, that allow us to see ourselves as good for helping those we see only as needy.

This is not to suggest, however, that we should try to achieve apathy, that we should try to will ourselves to feel nothing. Popular versions of Stoicism and of Buddhism advocate for calmness, for detachment, for trying to not feel what we feel. To force oneself to become apathetic is nihilistic, as to do so is to evade our feelings rather than to confront them. There is thus an important difference between being apathetic and becoming apathetic, between being indifferent because that is how one responds to the world and becoming indifferent because we want to be liberated from our feelings and attachments. Similarly, to become detached, not because of Stoicism or Buddhism, but because of hipsterism, is still to try to detach oneself from oneself, from life, from reality. So pursuing irony can be just as nihilistic as pursuing apatheia or nirvana.

Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and author of Nihilism, from which this article is excerpted.

Link:

What Nihilism Is Not - The MIT Press Reader