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  • Why are regressive expressions of masculinity now so popular?
    In a justly famous 1910 essay titled “The Moral Equivalent of War”, the American philosopher William James rejected the “fatalistic view” that war is an inevitability between nations, and expressed his hope of “a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples”.For all this, however, James confessed that he did not believe “peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states … preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline”. He feared that, in the absence of the cultivation of certain martial virtues — “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command” — a “peace-economy” would ultimately devolve into a “simple pleasure-economy”. Hence his appeal to discover what he would call a “moral equivalent of war”:“If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.”What William James is calling for, of course, is a form of national service — a mass mobilisation of young men (and it is, unquestionably, men that James has in view), not in order to engage in warfighting, but for the sake of nation-building. The cultivation of manliness and military discipline that would result, James hoped, would then form a kind of “cement” upon which peaceful societies could be built.It is a compelling vision, and resonates with calls in many quarters for the establishment of forms of compulsory national service and the restoration of rites of passage for young men — collective experiences meant to initiate them into adulthood, and prepare them for the responsibilities that come along with it. These calls are also arising at a time when the very concept of masculinity itself is shrugging off a degree of the shame or opprobrium it has accumulated (most often in the form of the adjective “toxic”), particularly under the aegis of the #MeToo movement.Indeed, one of the more conspicuous dynamics at work during the 2024 US presidential campaign was the relentless association of “liberals” or “Democrats” with weakness, enfeeblement, effeminacy, hysterical emotionality … whereas Donald Trump and his ilk were powerful, rebellious, virile, stoic — in a word, masculine. It was hardly coincidental that Trump made so many appearances at UFC events and on macho podcasts. In its own way, the 2024 US presidential election was restaging the ancient contrast between Sparta and Athens, between Rome and Greece.“Extreme fitness” content online, the almost religious significance of gyms and the iconography of the “swoll” male body does seem to point to a kind of rejection of the liberal “pleasure economy” in favour of the military virtues of “hardihood”, discipline, preparedness to struggle, “contempt of softness”.And yet this performative masculinity ultimately lives and thrives online — and as such, is not only narcissistic but eschews the “surrender of private interest” and “obedience to command” that William James believed needed to be cultivated in order to ward off self-directed egotism.If we accept that young men may be craving the restoration of a sense of honour, of pride even, to the concept of masculinity, can this be done without the performative egotism, without the contempt for “softness”, without the will to dominate, that seems so much part of online culture?You can read Samuel Cornell’s article “Welcome to the age of fitness content — where men train for battle without ever experiencing war” on ABC Religion & Ethics.
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  • “There’s a horse loose in a hospital”: What John Mulaney gets right about (non-)political comedy
    Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of “art” — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? A sketch certainly can. Just think of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” from 1944, or the trial of Ravelli in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup from 1933, or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s “One Leg Too Few” from 1964. With each new viewing, the comedic timing, the precision and cleverness of the puns, the exaggerated physicality, the sheer virtuosity of the writing cannot help but surprise and delight all over again.But with most stand-up, the humour arises from a certain immediacy: the interaction between the material and the peculiarity of the times in which it is delivered, and between the comedian and the physical audience. The frisson that arises from that interaction, the shock or surprise the comedian is able to elicit, is hard to re-experience to the same degree.It stands to reason, then, that if a stand-up act was to endure as a piece of comedic art, it would most likely be performed by a comedian who cut his teeth while working as a sketch writer for a show like Saturday Night Live.Enter John Mulaney. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even, about his Netflix special “Kid Gorgeous at Radio City”. It was recorded in 2017 — in the aftermath of Trump’s first election to the US presidency, when public bewilderment was still offset somewhat by the belief it wouldn’t last long — and won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 2018.Mulaney’s act exhibits a strange sort of genius, though. It is obviously a piece of writing. Indeed, he explicitly references the act of comedic writing throughout the routine.Mulaney is also assiduously non-political — right up until the moment that he isn’t. It begins with a nostalgic nod: “I just like old-fashioned things. I was in Connecticut recently, doing white people stuff …” He makes reference to the oddity of coming across a gazebo that was “built by the town in 1863”: “Building a gazebo during the Civil War, that’d be like doing stand-up comedy now.”And then he embarks on a metaphor for the Trump presidency that has been hailed by many as genius: “Here’s how I try to look at it, and this is just me, this guy being the president, it’s like there’s a horse loose in a hospital …”The aesthetic connection between Donald Trump’s golden coiff and a horse’s mane is, of course, immediately pleasing. As is the invocation of something heedless thundering through a finely tuned environment. There’s the added benefit that Trump’s name is not mentioned once, and yet the entire simile works. The question is … why?
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  • What is “content” doing to our sense of value?
    In a digital age, it’s all about “content”. The post or tweet or reel or video or pod is nothing without something in it that permits it to be shared, to circulate, to attract attention, to promote engagement. What matters is the fact of circulation, not the usefulness or accuracy or beauty of what is circulating.In other words, “content” is generated not to last, but merely to attract attention for the time-being; it is designed to be transitory without regard for either epistemic or aesthetic value; it merely fills the void left by the creation of digital platforms; it exists primarily to circulate, which is to say, to go viral; it reduces everything to “fodder”, regardless of the human dimensions or tragedy or seriousness or spuriousness of the story. The perfect encapsulation of “content” is the meme.The ethical and aesthetic problems this presents are not exactly new, but the scale and speed of the “content industry” — especially in a time of generative AI – invests them with a degree of urgency.
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  • Can the cinematic genius of “Jaws” overcome its problematic legacy?
    As soon as it was published in February 1974, Peter Benchley’s novel “Jaws” was a sensation and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over ten months. It continued to loom large in the public consciousness when, just 16 months after its publication, a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg adapted it for the big screen.While “Jaws” was the third such best-selling novel to be made into a popular film by the mid-1970s (following Mario Puzzo’s “The Godfather” from 1969, and William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” from 1971), nothing to date rivalled its commercial success and cultural influence. This had something to do with Universal Pictures’ television advertising campaign, as well as the decision to opt for nation-wide release rather than the staggered rollout which had been the norm. But there was something about the source material on which the film drew — designed as it was to both appeal to and induce a certain terror about swimming in the ocean, about venturing into an alien habitat where humans don’t belong — and the scheduled release date at the start of the summer holidays, that achieved a rare alchemy; a perfect recipe for mass appeal. And so the “summer blockbuster” was born.The genius of Carl Gottlieb’s script and Spielberg’s directorial vision was to pare back the sprawl of Benchley’s novel — its preoccupations with class tensions, political corruption, marital breakdown, economic decline, urban crime and pollution — and reduce the story to two central planks: a monster terrorising a small sea-side town, and three men united in the effort to kill it. The movie is divided almost exactly into these halves (unlike Benchley’s novel, in which the hunt for the shark is limited to last quarter of the book).For all this, however, it is not finally the monster that holds our attention throughout the film — the shark, after all, barely appears, and is most often suggested, by music, by the exposed dorsal fin, by the yellow barrels — but two profoundly human affects:the vulnerability of the town itself, represented powerfully by Amity’s precarious economy and the bodies of the shark’s preferred prey — young women and children;the humanity and unlikely comradery of the three men aboard the far-too-small boat (as Roger Ebert wrote in his 1975 review, the movie works “because it’s populated with characters that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about”).Without question, the cultural terror over the shark, which had been reduced to a “rogue” killer, a mindless “eating machine”, is one of the legacies of the film, and the impetus behind a range of disastrous anti-shark public policies. But “Jaws” also manages to hold out other lessons — about the danger of putting other priorities over public safety, about the nature of “moral panic”, and about the humanity that is required to ensure genuine threats don’t bring out the worst in us.
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  • Israel/Iran: What are the ethical and legal limits of self-defence?
    On 12 June, Israel initiated a devastating series of strikes on Iran — the goal of which was evidently to diminish the nation’s increasingly problematic nuclear program and to “decapitate” the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists. There is no doubt these attacks were meticulously planned and represent the culmination of a long-term strategy: to neutralise the threat posed by Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza.The timing and urgency of the strikes, however, have puzzled many. After all, they came little more than a week prior to the scheduled latest round of talks between the United States and Iran on the future of the latter’s nuclear program. The precipitating event seems to have been the release of a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which found that “Iran can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233 kg of WGU in three weeks … enough for 9 nuclear weapons”, and that “Iran is undertaking the near-final step of breaking out, now converting its 20 percent stock of enriched uranium into 60 percent enriched uranium at a greatly expanded rate”.Such findings would certainly have been central to US-Iran talks. But they were taken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as posing a clear and imminent threat to the State of Israel, and therefore as justifying a preventive attack.Iran then unleashed a series of missile strikes of its own, citing justification on the grounds of “self-defence”. We have, in other words, two nations claiming to be acting in self-defence. But this isn’t peculiar to this specific conflict between historically hostile nations. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States asserted a right to “pre-emptive self-defence”. Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as an act of “self-defence” against a future attack.“Self-defence” thus seems to have become a legally and politically promiscuous term, and can thus be used to justify actions in which no imminent threat is present and for which alternatives are available. What, then, are the legal and philosophical limits to claims that one is acting in “self-defence”, particularly when that entails pre-emptive violence?
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In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.
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