Conversation

Replying to
I suspect once you anchor on a historical era as a standard, it acts to slowly freeze all other attitudes in complementary, consistent ways. Like a dust particle in subzero water seeding the freezing/crystallization process.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @RealREverton
I used to think trad was 1950s aesthetics and belief in traditional gender roles/family structure, but now it seems to have an expanding set of implications for political allegiances, local community involvement, attitudes towards anything foreign/culturally distant.
1
15
It’s not necessarily a pathway to either straightforward reactionary positions, or full-blown purist retreat a la Amish, though those become highly likely. It’s more like a sort of unconscious pre-filtering of all novelty by aesthetic fit. A self-conscious mind-closing.
2
10
What I notice about people who go trad is a genuinely deadened responsiveness to anything that doesn’t meet filter criteria. At some level it becomes invisible. It’s not “acting dead” in Bruce Sterling sense though, since they seem to come really alive within their sandbox.
4
8
I suppose that’s why I have a qualified sympathy for people who go trad. It’s overall a life-positive turn, even if it seems to me like cutting off a leg to stay alive. Possibly from their point of view the leg is gangrenous or something. Would fit the disgust reaction angle.
4
12
But it’s hard to stay interested even if I am interested in the particular historical era they anchor on. I’m not interested in history in the same way as trads seem to be. Like being interested in how an obsolete old engine worked rather than the colors/styles of old cars.
2
7
There’s I think 3 ways of being interested in history: 1. Unironic Trad: how things were, what it was like to be there 2. Ironic trad: how things worked and why that was good/best 3. Philistinism: how things *could* work, given the existence proof of how things *did* work
3
14
For the longest time I’ve had a visual image of “history” that sees the past as a single trajectory, the future as a garden of forking paths, and the present as a sort of 💥 explosion-break-point computation for which the past is an input but not a constraint.
1
10
Every moment having revolutionary potential in a politically neutral sense, as in utterly unconstrained by the past that we imagine having a historicist shaping force on the future that necessarily must act, but... really doesn’t. And then breaks surprise us.
3
5
Replying to
You should! In some respects he was a precursor to the kind of writing and thinking we take for granted online today - provisional and easily distracted but always interesting