Who here has read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces?
It was one of my favorite books in the 1990s and I'm sure I'll love it
just as much when I re-read it (eventually) because I regarded it as a
moral warning, a milepost of sorts: Don't Be Like Ignatius V. Reilly. C.
S. Lewis talked about his moments of Joy or sehnsucht in
Surprised by Joy and I agree with him fully; such moments are
important—and Jack Lewis should have asked himself why he
stopped having them, even though he wasn't anywhere near Heaven
yet. But I've come to realize that there's a logical converse to such
moments: the times when you realize you've strayed too close to the Pit
and maybe you should back away. A Confederacy of Dunces was like
that. Reilly was too familiar for comfort. He was stagnant, soured,
morally and intellectually rotting in place, and as it turns out he also
predicted the future. The Internet is overflowing with Ignatius Reillys
and most of them call themselves "dark intellectuals" or something
similar. At some point in their pasts, as with Reilly, they decided
never to grow up: they chose some moment of dark epiphany to fixate
upon, some moment when they realized they were the only sane person in
an insane world, and they haven't budged a millimeter from that spot
ever since. I remember reading A Confederacy of Dunces in the
mid-1990s and thinking, oh gawd, let us make more use of college
education than THAT.
The "dark intellectual" people and the antisocial techbros who eat up
their stuff love to talk about their "redpill" moments, when they
supposedly realized that feminists had ruined the world or whatnot. Bret
Weinstein, who's peddled TERF diatribe and Sinophobic "theories" about
COVID-19 and is now claiming to be Saving the RepublicTM on a
speaking tour with a bunch of other propagandists, has a particularly
hilarious such moment: when he was fired from a teaching job at
Evergreen State College here in Washington State for being too bigoted,
he declared this was evidence that Evergreen was the secret headquarters
of a vast leftist conspiracy to corrupt all education or something like
that. (He's blithered about this at length and you can learn all about
it on YouTube if you like.) As it happened, Ignatius V. Reilly had a
similar moment: he bused to Baton Rouge to apply for a teaching job at
Louisiana State University, flubbed the interview, and then decided that
this experience was a trip into the Heart of Darkness of modernity.
Reilly would tell this story of dark awakening to all and sundry, and
write extensively about it into foolscap tablets in his bedroom at his
mom's house. Now, though, you can put that stuff on the Internet, and
get paid for putting it there.
If there's any ONE event that gets the "dark Enlightenment" people
worked up, though, it's the endless September, the day when the
Internet was finally too public and commercial a thing to remain the
exclusive domain of universities and .mil accounts and that sort of
thing. There was a long enough interval when the nascent Internet was
the exclusive playground of college students and military contractors
for a pecking order to develop between wise professional greybeards and
clueless college freshmen joining the party late (like I did) and thus
contributing to a September rush of "dumb" and "moronic" newbies on
mailing lists and Usenet. But then when there were enough people getting
Internet accounts through corporate outfits like AOL, round the clock
instead of clustered round the school schedule, that meant an "endless
September" of newbies at all times of year. It's quite clear that
there's a lot of rancid resentful nerds who still think of this as the
End of the World, more or less, the day that the barbarians arrived at
the gates. After all, nobody represents civilization better than a
racist computer nerd still waging Mac v. PC wars.
I'd love to kill this bit of toxic nostalgia stone dead, if I could.
I've experienced a bizarre reversed version of it: I came to hate
computer nerd culture so much that I aggressively took the part of the
unsophisticated user, partly because one of my best friends IRL is a
very old-fashioned gardener born in 1951 who NEVER got used to this
stuff even a bit and still prefers to talk on the telephone. I've helped
him out with computer stuff and shared his anger: why is this stuff so
confoundedly hostile and overcomplicated? It's not fair to make someone
like my friend deal with a labyrinth of bad choices like the modern-day
website or recent Windows versions, much less the fucking smart phone.
(He refuses to get one. Can you blame him?) "Endless September" now
seems merely like the reification of the casual bigotry of toxic
computer geeks, the ease with which they divide everyone up into the
[slurs] vs the high-IQ, more "evolved" human beings, hoi polloi
vs. hoi aristoi.
It's not like they even respect that era of computing anyway, not
really. Oh they still spout out sentimental glurge about it but in
reality they're happy to have left it behind. It's safely in the past
for them, like Napoleon or Julius Caesar, and therefore safe to
mythologize.
~Chara of Pnictogen
