Archedelia

In his 1943 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper offered one of the early articulations of “the open society” as an ideal. It is an ideal that gathers up some of the West’s dearest principles: universalism, toleration, cosmopolitanism, individualism. As against the chauvinism that is native to political life, the ideal of the open society announces a higher allegiance — to all mankind.

There is a cloud of lousiness that hangs over many products and services these days, as though the people responsible for making it, or doing it, weren’t too concerned about the result. Sometimes this can shade over from insouciance to real perversity. As my friend Matt Feeney put it to me about a year ago, “Capitalism seems to have moved into an actively misanthropic stage. Corporations don’t just hate their workers.

A lot of young men seem to be stuck on their couches in a stupor of screens, unable to launch a life. One could point to any number of contributing factors, material and psychological. Surely one of them is that the basic engine of male aspiration – competition -- has fallen under suspicion in our egalitarian moral landscape. What your better self might be capable of is something you have to discover. The ascent is set in motion by watching other people and feeling the sting of rank.

The most shining moment of my education as a physics major at U.C. Santa Barbara came in the final lecture of an upper-division course on electricity and magnetism. We had learned the facts early in the semester, and could do the problem sets. Then the instructor, Nobel laureate Bob Schrieffer, seemed to take us backwards.

I previously posted this as a Note, but I suspect most people don’t read Notes. The other day I took my project car out for a test run and got about two blocks before it died. As it sputtered to a stop, there was a group of maybe 8 high school boys standing nearby. They were looking at me and seemed on the verge of cracking up with laughter. I yelled over to them and asked them to come give me a push. They jumped right to it.

In the phone conversation I had this morning while trying to schedule an x-ray, I feel like the new reality stood fully naked before me. With each of the several bureaucracies involved, there was a comprehensive breakdown of that most rudimentary human activity: exchanging information. To begin with, most immediately, there was an auditory problem.

Years ago, I had a friend named Manuel Lopez. One day we were emailing about the uniquely smarmy forms of coercion-not-coercion that operate in the contemporary workplace. (Think Office Space.)  He likened eruptions of obligatory office fun to “a high school pep rally, without the more natural enthusiasms generated by cheerleaders.

Archedelia is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. My dear Archedeliacs, I have generally refrained from wading into retail politics, and regret permitting myself to get baited into responding to an obnoxious political ad in my last post. I expect that after this Tuesday, regardless of who wins, we will all be going batshit crazy for months.

Marilyn and I were in Budapest for a few days last weekend, the start of a belated honeymoon. We went to the thermal baths, visited the magnificent Matthias Church where monarchs were coronated, and attended a Serbian Orthodox service with the American writer Rod Dreher. He has a new book coming out soon, a weird and wonderful reflection on the experience of wonder. Now we are in Hvar, an island on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. It is just as lovely as you may have heard.

“A lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.” -- Martin Luther This is a joint posting of Matthew Crawford (Archedelia) and Marilyn Simon (Submission). On June 8 of this year, we married at St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, a city on the prairies of Canada. It was truly a joyful day. The wedding was officiated by David Widdicombe. The homily he delivered was something magnificent.