Saturday Commentary and Review #96
The Failure of the Experts, "Americanization" of Children as a Net Negative, Infantilization of Young Adults, Is Giorga Meloni a Fake? The Banality of Elite Hollywood Sex Club Ownership
“Familiarity breeds contempt”.
Nowhere has this proverb been proven more accurate than on social media these past 15 years or so, thanks to the presence of historians, scientists, journalists, and others who in the past were able to generate a respect for their professions thanks to the personal distance they had from the public. This long-held respect has tanked like so many crypto-currencies recently, due to the persistent habit many of them have in embarrassing themselves online rather frequently, and often hilariously. We’re not supposed to see what is happening behind the curtain, I guess.
Suffice it to say that not all experts are like this, but narcissism dictates that many will be, and they unfortunately taint the overall image of their disciplines and/or professions. Whether it be for reasons of self-preservation or ego, some of them simply cannot stop making a fool out of themselves publicly. The net result of this continuing comedy is the drop in trust towards expertise. Every single one of you reading this has experienced this recently, whether it be disgust with medical professionals putting politics over public health during COVID-19, or a historian projecting current trendy mores onto the past where they clearly do not belong.
David Polansky is one of these experts (and to his detriment is a fan of The Grateful Dead), and he tells us that we are right to be skeptical of experts who pontificate at length on subjects, especially outside of their core area of focus.
Expertise Criminal #1 Paul Krugman:
This has given rise to what I have come to think of as the “Krugman phenomenon”. Paul Krugman, you may recall, is a trained economist who has used his sinecure at the opinion page of the New York Times to discourse on geopolitics, democratic theory, race relations, constitutional law, congressional races, et very much cetera.
Of course, Krugman has no greater standing to declaim on these topics than most other people. Yet this is the process by which nominal expertise in one area is laundered into political authority. It’s a neat trick and a sneaky form of rhetorical arbitrage, and he is hardly alone. What gives living malaprop factory Thomas Friedman the authority to speak on international affairs? Or David Brooks on virtue ethics?
None of us will ever forget how many obliterated their credibility by way of urging people to demonstrate with #BLM during lockdown:
Keen observers of official COVID-messaging couldn’t fail to note how many of the same public health experts reliably tacked with the political winds: from informing us that worry over COVID-19 was just barely-disguised anti-Chinese bigotry, to insisting that we cut off all human contact indefinitely, to explaining that the cause of anti-racism in fact justified taking to the streets en masse during the pandemic, and so on and so forth. Expertise in this case increasingly came down not to a proven track record of accurate predictions or wise proposals, but to the unchanging status wielded by the members of a technocratic class itself.
The following is key:
The same goes for our contemporary experts on geopolitics. It is this model that has given us Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Parag Khanna and Ian Bremmer, among others: self-styled public intellectuals with flashy resumes who provide the appearance of knowledge about the most consequential global developments for an audience that knows enough to be interested in such things but not enough to separate the ephemeral from the enduring.
Public faces+titles+snappy presentation lends an air of credibility to those who might not necessarily deserve it. Yet it takes a lot of work to see if there is any merit in what these types have to say for the simple fact that we are so bombarded with news that we simply do not have the time to sort through all of it. At some point we are forced to rely on others, hence the ‘experts’ who perform this task for us.
Shameless punching bag Bruno Maçães:
The latest scion in this not-terribly-august lineage appears to be one Bruno Maçães. Interestingly, he possesses some practical experience as a former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs. In his role of roving geopolitical public intellectual, he rarely draws on such quotidian matters, however, tending instead toward grandiose and unfalsifiable claims about the future of world politics. For some years now, he has published a book approximately every year, each with portentous titles like “Dawn of Eurasia” and “History Has Begun”.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has vastly increased his social media presence as well, padding his literary output with instantly-refutable tweets, such as claiming that Russia has never been part of Europe or that Germany’s decision to rely on Russian natural gas is the greatest foreign policy blunder in a century. The point of this commentary is neither to demonstrate facility with the history of world politics nor to educate readers, but to maintain the writer’s place in “the conversation”.
Polansky on the irony of an expert calling caution on other experts:
Does this mean then that I am no better than those whom I criticise? My claim is at least to some expertise in the matter of knowing those who claim it for themselves. When confronted with their resume-polishing and credential-mongering, I can only think of the exchange from The Princess Bride in which Inigo Montoya seeks to gain the trust of the Man in Black:
“Would it help if I gave you my word as a Spaniard?”
“No good — I’ve known too many Spaniards!”
So, too, with me and the great menagerie of geopolitical experts.
I’m sure my readership can flood the comments section with examples of other experts who have made fools of themselves these past few years.
“If you don’t like it, leave.”
“Okay.”
“No…..wait….not like that!”
Before I returned to Europe permanently, I noticed a trend in schooling in Ontario where immigrant Muslim families were sending their children to Catholic schools instead of public ones. Despite Ontario being an anomaly where Catholic schools are publicly funded, they tend to lag behind public schooling when it comes to social experimentation (although the gap on that is closing as well, parents are telling me). Many Muslim families preferred Liberal Light over Liberal Max (this is a dumb branding joke, forgive me).
A decline or collapse in trust in institutions can be somewhat offset when choices are available to people seeking to mitigate that which they interpret as harmful to them, inflicted upon them by those very same institutions. You might not be able to sidestep Corporate HR training sessions, and all the rules of personal interactions that are attached to it, but you can spare your child the vagaries of increasingly radical social education by putting them in different schools that do not operate in the same manner.
Abigail Schrier has noticed a similar trend in the USA, one that bodes ill for the future of the country as a whole:
As kids headed back to school this week, I noticed a peculiar trend: friends and acquaintances have started sending their kids to Japanese, French, and Spanish immersion schools—parents, that is, who do not speak those languages. I know a lovely family of American-born parents who is sending its children to mainland China to be educated, and another who selected a school offering a “Classical education,” where, in the mom’s words, “the kids are learning Latin and Greek by third grade.” (Mom never studied either language.)
Over the last two decades, matriculation at dual-language curricula in both public and private schools has skyrocketed. In 2000, there were roughly 260 dual-language programs in the U.S. By 2011, Harvard Graduate School of education estimated the number at 2,000.
The American Councils Research Center estimates that in 2010, there were about 1,000 dual-language programs in public-schools in the U.S. A decade later, there were more than three times that many. American parents are signing up their kids for instruction in languages they can’t speak and immersion in cultures to which they have no native connection.
Why is this happening?
So what’s with all the sudden interest in making American kids bilingual? It’s better for their brains, parents tell me. We live in an increasingly international world, they say. Or maybe it just seems a way for educated parents to signal higher status. The American-born parents who are educating their kids in China are hoping—wait for it—the children might actually learn something; their elementary school kids just didn’t seem to be reaching their potential here in America.
And here is the peculiar part: it isn’t exactly love for, or attachment to, a specific foreign culture that often seems to motivate parents’ desire to seal their kids inside it for 8 hours a day. They may send their kids to a full-day of Japanese, but the parents I’ve talked to aren’t learning Japanese themselves. They’ve never been to Japan. They aren’t serving Tonkatsu at home.
They don’t actually seem to want to raise Japanese kids. They may claim deep admiration for “Japanese aesthetics” or “Chinese discipline.” But most of the parents I’ve met could no more raise a culturally Japanese child than they could order conger eel stew off a menu in Kyoto. What they actually seem to be hoping for is to raise kids who are—dare I say—less American?
Dr. Leonard Sax seems to agree:
Dr. Sax lectures internationally about raising kids, which he frankly thinks America, as a society, is doing poorly. American parents are not authorities in their own households and they don’t enforce even basic behavioral standards with their children, he says. “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys. And that there are many American men who want nothing more than to sit with their twelve-year-old son and play Call of Duty and games like that—they have no clue of the role of the father. They just want to give their kids a good time.”
Sure, American parents are lax. So what? It’s far deeper than a little lassitude, he explained. The culture we’re surrounding our children in—by so many metrics (mental health, physical fitness, drive)—it’s making them worse. “We now have very good research comparing American kids who speak English at home to immigrant kids who don't speak English at home,” he said. “American kids who speak English at home are much more likely to be anxious, depressed, disengaged, and experienced non-suicidal self-injury compared to kids who don't speak English at home, using speaking English at home as a proxy for engagement with American culture.” When he advises immigrant families in the United States, he tells them not to speak English at home.
Here’s the punch to the gut:
For decades, kids of American-born parents generally outperformed those of recent immigrants in school and had lower crime and better mental health related outcomes. But in recent decades, evidence began to emerge that length of time spent in the United States was associated with declining outcomes. This is the “immigrant paradox,” so named because it shocked the researchers at the time: the more time immigrants spent in this country, the worse their kids fared by all sorts of metrics.
“Being American-born and raised to American parents is now a major risk factor for bad outcomes,” Dr. Sax said. “Being American-born and raised to American parents is a major risk factor for anxiety, depression, disengagement from school non-suicidal self-injury and many other bad outcomes, being children of immigrants and not speaking English at home now predicts good outcomes.”
This boils down to “Americanizing your children will make them worse off”.
The Doctor’s verdict:
America has become a “culture of disrespect” and English, a primary vector. Every cultural medium—your kid’s favorite webisodes on YouTube or Disney Plus—promotes to children the notion that parents are foolish and inept and that it’s admirable, cool, or smart for kids to dismiss, deride or countermand them.
This, he believes, lies at the heart of the mental health crisis among the rising generation. Parents can’t guide you or make you feel safe if you doubt their authority. Yes, there are any number of things that may threaten an adolescent’s wellbeing, and this is true in every culture; the difference is, an American kid in a culture that disparages parental authority, doubts her parents can do anything to stop or contain the harm. (And if her parents can’t, how can she?)
This speaks to the continuing erosion of parental authority that we are witness to and whose arguments we are inundated with daily. The transgender phenomenon, in which children are coached to not tell their parents that they “want to transition”, is the best case in point.
Abigail agrees:
From my years of research into the stunning spike in transgender identification among teen girls, this may be the most important take-away: social media, schools, doctors, therapists, even teachers now actively work to undermine parents’ authority and pry kids away from the values and protection of their families.
The history of Europe was for hundreds of years the war between church and state. The state won that war. Since that victory, it has turned to the only remaining competing centre of power: the family. Destroying parental authority destroys the family, leaving the individual at the mercy of the Total State.
In the previous piece we see Dr. Sax criticizing American fathers for being less fatherly and more ‘buddy-buddy’ with their children, favouring a ‘good time’ over vital discipline. This raises the chicken and egg question as to what came first: the erosion of parental authority or parenthood?
Many North American women will (rightly) lament that significant numbers of men these days seem to be trapped in a state of permanent adolescence. Criticism can cut both ways, but the infantilization of young adults is rather obvious to anyone with two working eyes. Matt Alt takes a very deep and thorough look at this trend, one that he has identified as having its roots in post-boom Japan of the 1990s, and ties it to the notion that young adults do not see a future for themselves, and instead have chosen to regress into childhood.
The Great Regression:
Critics claim that ‘Britain Is A Nation Of Kidults’ (Female First website, 2012), and that the United States is experiencing a ‘Peter Pandemic’ (The Baltimore Sun, 2004), even going so far as to lament ‘The Death Of Adulthood In American Culture’ (The New York Times, 2014). And they’re right. Grownups around the globe really do seem to be eschewing the trappings of adulthood in favour of constructing second childhoods for themselves. But where the critics are wrong is in their assumptions that the Great Regression is a crisis – or worse.
It’s easy to assume the worst of the Great Regression, for Western societies have long treated the idea of infantilisation with unalloyed contempt. By traditional standards, the rise of childish sensibilities represents dysfunction and danger, a rejection of autonomy, a mental illness or even a society-wide sickness. A true man, as the Bible admonishes, is expected to ‘put away childish things’. In the agrarian and industrial eras, when self-sufficiency and production were the orders of the day, who was less competent and less productive than a helplessly dependent infant? In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America (1835-40), described how despotism strives to keep subjects in ‘perpetual childhood’. At the turn of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud re-framed regression in psychological terms, defining it is as self-sabotage resulting from unresolved trauma. Even in decidedly more youth-friendly modern times, acting younger than one’s age is treated as shameful. It’s why rebukes such as ‘Grow up!’ and ‘Don’t be a baby!’ retain their sting.
Why did it begin in Japan? First came economic success:
Shattered by the Second World War, Japan re-engineered itself during the 1960s into an economic tiger. By the 1970s, it had become the planet’s second-largest economy, thanks in large part to a series of cheap and increasingly well-made Japanese products that swept the globe: first, transistor radios; then televisions, home appliances and cars. Japan’s surprise success inspired derision at first, denigrated as the product of ‘a nation of workaholics living in rabbit hutches’, as a European Economic Community report condescendingly put it in the late 1970s. But as the designs of Sony, Honda, Toshiba and other manufacturers disrupted local industries, ‘Made in Japan’ morphed from joke into threat, becoming an open challenge to the unquestioned assumption of European and US hegemony. It was delivered by a workforce of ‘salarymen’, the Japanese term for a white-collar office worker. Their work was portrayed less as an occupation than an aspirational calling, one positively radiating adult responsibility, competence and machismo. In the 1960s and ’70s, when Japanese schoolboys were surveyed about what they wanted to be when they grew up, ‘salaryman’ inevitably topped the lists.
…followed by a burst bubble and all the social ills that came with it:
But that same year, the nation’s economic ‘bubble’ burst. The ballooning stock market sputtered, then crashed, dragging down the real-estate market with it. Stagflation set in, choking Japan’s once-enviable growth to a trickle. Many citizens found their investments totally underwater. A series of ineffectual prime ministers shuffled through the halls of its parliament, unable to effect any meaningful change. US politicians stopped dropping by on their tours of Asia. ‘Japan, Inc’ was out of business. As the nation surrendered treasured manufacturing industries to eager rivals in China, Korea and Southeast Asia, dreams of global and even regional dominance evaporated. Japanese economists now refer to the entirety of the 1990s and 2000s as their nation’s ‘lost decades’.
But the depression wasn’t merely financial; it was emotional, too. Shattered dreams led to some of the highest suicide rates in the industrial world. Companies scaled back their ambitions, and graduates who had entered university expecting lifetime employment now faced what locals ruefully nicknamed ‘the hiring ice-age’. A lexicon of new terms erupted to describe previously unknown social ills. ‘Parasite singles’ continued living with their parents well into adulthood, dumping their pay checks into fashion gear and clubbing rather than planning for the future. ‘Hikikomori’ dropped out of society altogether, refusing work or education and rarely leaving their homes. ‘Freeters’ were those forced to flit among part-time jobs for the entirety of their careers – a precursor of the gig economy. And then there’s ‘karoshi’, a chilling word for being literally worked to death by one’s employer.
Alt sees the upsides in this collapse as it produced a new culture that was very consumerist, and highly infantile:
This was more than niche subculture. Throughout much of the 1990s, Japan’s most popular comic magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, sold 6 million copies a week. In 1995, a quarter-million attendees thronged the biggest fan convention, Comic Market, making it the largest fan gathering of any kind in the world. But at the time, mainstream Japan disparaged these hyper-consumers of pop culture as ‘otaku’, meaning someone who focuses on their hobbies to the detriment of everything else in their lives. The irony was that, amid a desperate push to promote consumer spending in the 1990s, the otaku were among the last ones still seriously consuming. Nevertheless, social critics excoriated them for buying the ‘wrong’ things, which is to say things not befitting adults: games, cartoons, comic books.
Salarymen may have built Japan, Inc but, when it crumbled, young people picked up the pieces. The real trendsetters were young women, ranging from schoolgirls to ‘office ladies’, the female counterparts of the salarymen. They began unabashedly incorporating symbols of feminine childhood into their adult identities, upending entire industries through the power of ‘kawaii’, a Japanese word that overlaps with ‘cuteness’ but which is also a state of mind that refers to being adorable, playful, just begging for cuddles, like a kitten – or a baby. By 1992, one women’s magazine anointed kawaii ‘the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese’.
Over the course of the decade, a new crop of hypercute pop idols eschewed sex appeal for childishly high-pitched voices and juvenile fashions. Young women embraced Hello Kitty, that icon of childhood innocence, as an ironic symbol of togetherness and girl power. They co-opted pocket pagers, designed for businessmen, into makeshift mobile texting devices to stay in touch with girlfriends using elaborate numerical codes. They repurposed photobooths, intended for printing thumbnail portrait stickers for business cards, into selfie machines, compiling literal face-books of their friends. And when the first popular mobile internet service debuted in Japan in 1999, years before it would take off abroad, they pioneered the basis for a whole new online argot: emoji.
The infantilization of America:
Really, though, I was just ahead of the curve. In 2020, a Pew study revealed that more than half of 18- to 29-year-old Americans were living with their parents. Saddled with student debt, stagnant wages and out-of-control housing prices, many Millennials have returned to the nest – less for comfort than for survival. And now they, like the Japanese youth of the lost decades, bear the brunt of criticism for the ‘kiddification’ of modern adult sensibilities.
Examples of this kiddification can be found everywhere once you start looking. Grownups pepper their online conversations with emoji and kidspeak, like ‘adulting’ and ‘besties’, sounding suspiciously like those pioneering Japanese schoolgirls of decades past. More adults read young-adult novels than the tweens and teens for whom they were ostensibly written. In Hollywood, sex scenes are out; heroes based on cartoon characters and toys dominate the box office. Hyperfans known as ‘stans’, whose lives revolve around their favourite celebrities, have roiled social media, the music industry and even US politics. The investment world has been hijacked by NFT cartoons of apes, while Christie’s auctions NFTs of kawaii characters called ‘fRiENDSiES’. At the literal end of the spectrum is ‘kidcore’, a retro aesthetic inspired by children’s clothing that is making inroads on fashion runways. And the single most searched term on PornHub in 2021? ‘Hentai’: a word for erotic cartoons, tellingly borrowed from Japan.
In the 2010s, pundits in English-language media devised or repurposed many neologisms to describe those grownups who were indulging in this un-adult behaviour, including ‘rejuveniles’ (as Christopher Noxon put it in 2006), ‘adultescents’, and ‘kidults’. The psychologist Jean Twenge, in her book iGen (2017), described those born after 1995 as ‘less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy – and completely unprepared for adulthood’.
Alt argues that:
One is that there is a nourishing form of regression that harnesses the playfulness, creativity and diversity of childhood……
and ties it to:
In one of the biggest twists of all, the very same comics, cartoons and video games that Japanese authority figures railed against in the 20th century emerged as some of Japan’s most popular exports in the 21st. A breathless 2006 NBC report framed Japanese grownups who watched anime as ‘obsessed’ and ‘bizarre’. Today, the majority of Netflix’s 220 million subscribers stream anime, and The Hollywood Reporter has declared anime the ‘world’s most bankable genre’. With adults all over the planet eagerly consuming Japan’s toys, comics, cartoons and video games, one might even make the argument that we’re all ‘otaku’ now.
Alt points to creativity and market forces as proving that not all regression into childhood is wrong. The question we are then left with is: what social good is provided by this creativity and these disposable consumer goods?
We’re a bit short of European content this weekend because the continent takes the entire month off for vacation. With that in mind, I’ll share the very necessary Thomas Fazi’s take on Giorgia Meloni, the woman poised to become Italy’s next (and first female) Prime Minister.
Fazi is rather suspicious of her radical bonafides, suggesting that she will not rock the EU boat whatsoever.
Italy’s first-ever summer election does not take place for another month, but the outcome already appears certain: the country’s centre-Right coalition — comprising Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia — is leading the polls by a wide margin. Victory seems guaranteed.
Brothers of Italy, in particular, continues its surge ahead of all the other parties, establishing Meloni as the de facto leader of the centre-Right coalition and as a likely candidate to become the first female prime minister in Italian history. Her party is now polling at around 25%, with Salvini’s Lega at 15% and Forza Italia at 7% — close to potentially giving the coalition more than 60% of the seats due to the current electoral system.
Suspicions:
And no one is more aware of it than Giorgia Meloni. She knows very well that Italy is not a sovereign nation, and that winning an election is only part of the effort. Having the support of the European (and American) establishment is just as important, if she wants to remain in power.
This is why she has gone to great lengths in recent months to dispel concerns about the party’s neo-fascist roots, and to express her wholehearted support for the European Union, the Euro-Atlantic partnership and Nato, including voting for sending weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the first two points of the centre-right coalition’s agenda are the “full adherence to the European integration process” and “respect for Italy’s international alliances”.
By the same token, for all her talk of “being on the side of workers”, Meloni has made sure to steer clear of any socio-economic proposals that might come up against the EU’s economic governance, knowing full well that it would result in swift and merciless retaliation by the European authorities. Indeed, her economic agenda is a classic neoliberal-conservative agenda programme — based on lower taxes (but fiscal rectitude), workfare schemes (making income support conditional on accepting whatever job recipients are offered), and greater labour flexibility. The only proposal that defies the economic orthodoxy is the call for slightly higher pensions.
Overall, Meloni prefers to talk of cultural-identitarian issues rather than economic ones. Hence her agenda’s focus on defending and promoting “Europe’s classical and Judeo-Christian historical and cultural roots and identity”, tighter immigration rules and greater crime-prevention measures. This is partly a result of Meloni’s background, of course. But it’s just as much a consequence of the way in which the EU’s economic pensée unique, by ruling out all alternatives to managing society and the economy, inevitably ends up pushing political challenges to the status quo, and to the EU itself, on to a strictly cultural and identitarian terrain.
Fazi is a leftist and would prefer an Italian leader to focus on the economic issues (instead of the ones listed above) while trying to disentangle the country from the clutches of Brussels. Is Meloni simply saying all of those things to temper foreign critics, so as secure a victory? Or does she really mean it?
We end this weekend’s Substack with a long piece from November 2016 about the founder of an elite Hollywood sex club and how it failed to fulfill him, leaving him heartbroken over what he had abandoned in order to pursue this dream.
In a leafy enclave near Beverly Hills, behind an aging Tudor mansion, Snctm is hosting a pool party. The sun is radiant overhead, the sky is cloudless and blue; the therapeutic aroma from the eucalyptus trees mixes in the air with the scents of expensive perfume and hydroponic weed. Couples lie here and there on chaise longues or large blankets on the grass. A trio of topless young women, members of Snctm's erotic-theater troupe, known as Devotees, float languorously on giant blow-up swans, sipping drinks through bent straws. Two more Devotees bounce on a trampoline. In a little while, the brunette will be tied up, the blond will employ a suede flogger and other toys, dispensing pain and pleasure. A waitress circulates, delivering food prepared by the French chef—a choice today of sirloin sliders or fish tacos, with a side of crisp steak fries.
Sitting poolside in a wicker chair, presiding over all, is Damon Lawner. A handsome man of forty-five with a lean and chiseled physique, he wears gauzy, low-slung pants and a necklace of fragrant mala beads he picked up during a sojourn in Bali. With his longish tousled hair and high cheekbones, his inner glow and sober mien, he looks like a hunky Hollywood guru. But the truth is Lawner never set out to save any souls besides his own. Four years ago, he was a cash-strapped real estate agent with a beautiful wife and two young daughters, struggling with monogamy, facing with dread the prospects of his fifth decade. As many men do when they reach his age, he began to ask himself, "Is this all there is?"
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This week's review makes Larry Kramer look like an optimist