"The Decline" (1999) by NOFX

"I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."
- HD Thoreau

"The great thing about bein' a human:
The ability to reason;
But reasoning don't work when no-one cares:
Two parts apathy, one part despair."
- NOFX

Going on and on about Decline is a pastime of conservatives. But then 'The Decline' - a lurid eighteen minute portrait of Imperial America by punk's once-reigning left-statists - is remarkably similar to the Tory-prog dystopias of, say, Rush; they share gross length, scifi gloom, and self-aggrandising individuality.

Context: NOFX are a tolerant bunch. Consider 'Happy Guy' (a song about leaving Christians alone), 'Vanilla Sex' and 'Cool and Unusual Punishment' (about consenting adults), 'Clams Have Feelings Too' (the argument from marginal cases), 'The Brews' (subverting Jewish stereotypes), 'Lori Meyers' (a stab at the sex-work question), or 'She's Nubs' (which has a go at affirming disabled people's sexuality...). Despite the comedy schtick, the band do act out a kind of Enlightenment egalitarianism. What unites the political stuff with the fart jokes is that each involves the embrace of losers; failure as lifestyle. (That might strike you as a bad way of describing societal oppression, but it captures the experience.)

Where 'The Decline' is a cartoon version of Chomskyan politics, Rush were cartoons of the novels of Ayn Rand (herself a cartoon Nietzsche). Rush are (or were) the pop embodiment of giving in to romantic individualism. Now, we know this as the basis of right-wing life - but even the most Left leftist has to have some: at minimum, glorying in their ability to see through the neoliberal individualist script. Since NOFX care about society, oppression, and all that, this gets us a contradiction - one which is also the principal contradiction in punk: how can the desire for social justice coexist with the love of doin' what the fuck you want? Do you want Chomsky or do you want Kant? (Decline is notable for other reasons - it is long-punk and it is concept-punk and is still, somehow, good - but as usual I fixate on the ideological.)

Anyway, what exactly is declining? America? Democracy? Morals? The economy? Punk? The song is vague. It has drunk of the diluted Frankfurt School, in particular their insistence on capitalism's irresistible mind control powers. ("Hegemony".)

• Reading #1: "Civil society has declined. Capitalism infected everyone with malign individualism, and now we are numb, solipsistic and stupid. It's over; we lost." An adolescent political economy, sure - but that's all you need to get started. Through this clumsy song, I learned the phrase "laissez faire" (LAY-ZY FAIR) aged 13 and correctly associated it with vast institutionalised suffering. That's not nothing.

So: demand both radical freedom and social justice. Thing is, social justice generally requires sacrifice on someone's part (even if that sacrifice is only undoing an existing inequity: taxation, or minding your tongue), i.e. you can't have it alongside complete negative liberty. There can't really be any such thing as Left-libertarianism. This isn't a particular failing of punk; the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the tension between your public and private virtues the most intractable question in all ethics and politics.

Is there really a contradiction? In some cases you can get both - e.g. encouraging women to opt out of traditional submissive social crap invariably boosts both individual women and their society - or as regards decriminalising drugs - which is pretty much warranted by the awful consequences of prohibition alone (cf. creation of an under-underclass out of the reach of public services; toxic adulteration; vast police expansion; the destructive prison cycle). But not always, or often.

More generally, we just want individualism which doesn't drag down the collective. This is not as easy as you might think. Maybe you can salvage freedom-talk by saying "we want freedom for everyone, not just rich white men - which is what 'freedom' has tended to mean in practice". But that requires heavy intervention, and some people understandably insist on seeing (government) intervention as the opposite of freedom. (I don't see how this can stand up to basic knowledge of what societies do to certain unlucky groups.) The contradiction is real - and philosophy's perennial failure to cope with it means we have to navigate between its horns by ear. This actually works ok, provided you are at least minimally compassionate, and don't mind losing purity.

A bypass: in the political climate of much of the world, to argue for this kind of justice - via positive discrimination, progressive taxation, strong welfare, active diversity education - is already to be a bit nonconformist - to begin to be individual. But even though I recognise the large-scale suffering, and agree with the project goals, I'm not militarising for change. This is because I think they (the New Left) are wrong about the decline of civil society, compassion, and free thought. Also because we're too clumsy en masse for revolution to have much hope of serving up anything but cool speeches, disappointment, and blood. I'm with Rorty, bizarre wet pragmatist though he is. The core claim of Chomskyans is that "the United States [et al] are run by a corrupt elite which aims at enriching itself by immiserating the Third World." The sometime global bully, sometime quasi-fascist. For some reason, this clear-sighted attention to the crimes of empire is usually tied to rejection of the Enlightenment (impartiality, individualism, technology, all that good stuff). Suspicion is always warranted, things have been bad indeed; but they would have been worse without Enlightenment ideas. We are "willing to grant that [the West] could slide into fascism at any time, but proud of its past and guardedly hopeful about its future."

Shall we get on to the actual song?

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NAVIGATING

"If you’re not a conspiracy theorist some of the time, you’re a sucker."

- John Emerson

"Fellow members, Club 'We've Got Ours'
I'd like to introduce you to our host;
He's got his, I've got mine: meet the decline."
- NOFX

First off: The Decline is really an EP of many 30 second songs stitched together. Its narrative is choppy: "BOO! Issues! Greed's bad, nationalism's bad, guns are bad, stupidity is bad, cultural hegemony is bad, drug laws are bad, powerful Christian right are bad, egoism's bad, apathy's bad. facelessly unfair economics, governmental murder." Broad sections:

1. Boo! Guns, irrationality, religion! (0:00 to 3:46)
2. Boo! war on drugs! prison! (3:46 to 6:15)
3. Boo! (Musical exposition) (6:15 to 7:17)
4. Boo sadness! (Call it anomie to be charitable) (7:17 to 9:42)
5. Boo! (Recap) (9:42 to 11:03)
6. Boo sadness! (11:03 to 13:57)
7. Boo everything! (The end of the world sounds like epic quietLOUD skate punk) (13:57 to end).

I find it helpful to write out the themes. The main epic one at 6:15, 10:34, call it "[The Decline]":

This ^ is Chomsky as trombone. The end of the radical world.

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A second reading of The Decline's decline involves wheeling in another bulky philosophical engine:

NOFX, super-rich band of Chomskyans, extremely permissive boys of the rationalist strain in punk are also, obviously, a dumbass band. Immature trolls full of puns, scat and innuendo. Even so, their Decline is about rejecting immaturity, in the special moral sense that Kant used the word. (This immaturity is just refusing to think for yourself, whether out of fear or learned incapacity.) The song's first disdain is reserved for asking "Where are all the stupid people from?" (Nationalism is supposedly to blame. Also commerce: "The man who used to speak performs a cute routine.")

This is what's thought to justify strong individualism: maybe it's only by standing alone you can attain certain heights - of originality, impartiality, hardness, spirituality. Problem for Left "libertarians" like NOFX: there's absolutely nothing to say that thinking for yourself will lead to rejecting capitalism. Plenty speaks against it, in fact. So:

• Reading #2: "Kantian maturity has declined fatally, in America, in the C20th." In the absence of NOFX giving extended historical arguments about the relative consciousness of Americans: meh. It was always low, and there are more tools to increase it now than ever before. (NOFX are immature in the common sense, but at least a little mature in this elevated sense.)

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Appendix 1. Paradoxes in the received idea of punk

• Punk tried to have both romantic individualism and social activism at the same time. (Good for it!)

• Punk despised the hippies while adopting lots of their practices - e.g. hedonism, bohemianism, basement gigs, aesthetic experiment (in certain prescribed dimensions) - as well as their social role as the West's young internal Other.


• Punk did everything it could to be provocative - mostly in order to mock the resulting outrage. This universal irreverence conflicted with its po-faced element. The Punk held nothing sacred but punk (and sometimes Marx).

• Punk tried to politicise nihilism!

• Punk painted itself as utterly revolutionary, anti-tradition, with 1975 being its Year Zero - but it actually sprang directly, without variation, from 60s US garage rock and 'trash culture'. (And that music was a conservative masculinist reaction to the hippies.)


• Punk was anti-art in a very theatrical way. (In New York, it was all anti-art art-school kids.)


• Punk, generally associated with anti-racist right-ons, was an almost wholly unfunky 4/4 music played almost wholly by whites - and this aesthetic segregation was representative of social segregation. (In the form of the overwhelmingly white 'Alternative' music, it perhaps still does represent that.) I concede that Bad Brains are canonised in Punk, and that Ska and Dub's crossover into punk was both rapid and lasting.

I wrote about punk as a political ideology; that piece can explain why there are so many of these: only some of these elements are of the essence of Punk, with the rest resulting from the customising incoherent whims of various individual punks.

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2. CONTEMPORARY CONCEPT PUNK*

Punk concept albums are rare, probably owing to their general suspicion of ambition. There's Zen Arcade, of course; The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks; maybe Group Sex. And it surprises no-one if Mike Watt is subversive: his Contemplating the Engine Room is expansive proletarian psychedelic punk. I also recently came across the lurid and authentically paranoid Only Lovers Left Alive, a biazrre, catchy affirmation of every anticommunist conspiracy theory going. There's been a few released recently, some actually worth your time. Metafiction is in:

• Fucked Up's David Comes To Life (2011)

Remarkable stuff. Love story for anarchists gets blown apart halfway through by open discussion of literary theory, socialisation, and the very idea of the grand narrative. Four narrators, not many more chords, lots of fodder without tasting of Pink Floyd.

• Titus Andronicus' The Monitor (2010)

This seems to be about the American Civil War... and also the life of Billy Bragg. No, really.

• Cursive's The Ugly Organ (2003)

Tuneful straight metafiction. "INTROSPECTING SO HARD IT HURTS. Don't mock me. I AM SAD ABOUT BEING SAD." Takes ordinary emo navel-gazing and, I dunno, looks at videos of it.

• Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine (2006)

Brief (36mins) and dirty. Seems to be The Handmaid's Tale retold for teenage skaters. It's the now-standard antitheist cartoon: all Christians are of the conservative right, all Gods are the Old Testament bastard, everything fun is getting banned. Still.

(I omit the two most famous examples - American Idiot and The Black Parade - because they both appeared just as mainstream punk, in the form of emo, finally sank into the undifferentiated gumbo called "alternative" "rock" music. Also because they're deeply uninteresting.)


* When I say 'punk' I mean "that derivative post-post-punk or pop-hardcore which favours simple scuzzy guitars and unpleasant lyrics". There. Drop the pitchforks please.

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3. THE LONG PUNK GOODBYE

Long punk songs are interesting because they break with punk's original protestantism: Bündigkeit uber alles, against the interminable Indulgences of prog. Unfortunately this is often the only interesting thing about them, since they're jam sessions by people who espouse amateurism. The clearest precursors to The Decline are the boring 'From the Cradle to the Grave' by Subhumans and Crass' furious elaborate analysis of the entire Cold War world, 'Yes Sir I Will'. Here is a playlist of others, listen here if you have nothing better to do tonight:

1. "Another World" by Richard Hell & the Voidoids (8:12)
2. "Shut Down" by The Germs (9:41)
3. "...And Now Back To Our Programming" by Aus Rotten (15:52)
4. "(I Saw You) Shine" (8:32) by Flipper. ("Sex Bomb" is shorter but actually good.)
5. "Kids of the Black Hole" by the Adolescents (5:28).
6. "Glazed" by Rocket from the Crypt (8:20).
7. "Pay the Man" by The Offspring (10:22). Surprising! low on lyrics though.
8. "No Big Surprise" by Nomeansno (11:07).
9. "The Bristol Road Leads To Dachau" by The Prefects (10:09)
10. "Clear Your Head" - Pennywise (15:42)
11. "Believe In Yourself" - Stalag 13 (15:33)
12. "Die Letzte Sau (Live)" - WIZO (14:02)
13. Lots of late Black Flag, e.g. "Nothing Left Inside", "Scream" and "Three Nights".

("Heaven Sent" by Half Japanese is apparently 60mins, but isn't online, thankfully.)

midsummer miscellany

(c) Jenny Morgan, 'Midsummer Hare'

It may be that curiosity comes at the expense of commonality.

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We need a term for high-IQ people who are, nonetheless, idiots. 'Arch-idiot', perhaps. Usage: "Almost the entire field of financial economics was composed of archidiots." Taleb uses nerd as a technical term for this; Marx, ein Fachidiot. We might also say book-smart, but that introduces too much anti-intellectual air for my liking.

Archstupidity (adj.): The presence of strong abstract reasoning in the absence of emotional intelligence, scrupulous empirical feedback, or actual rationality. Leads to the ubiquitous, dangerous assumption that since one understands one complex thing (C++, economics, cell biology, Heidegger), one understands all complex things (love, economies, cancer, Being).

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"So in closing, fuck you pandas. If you’re too stupid to get on all that hot panda ass, well then you deserve to die."

- an angry man, speaking for you

Pandas have problems; but people too have a serious panda problem. Panda-talk is one of the remaining places it's acceptable to openly despise the weak: a cranny for social Darwinism to breed in. Mate James tried to rationalise this - saying that it's not pandas' weakness or deviance from the Darwinian script that we despise, but their conservatism, their listlessness, their inability to change. I think you know fine well what it means.

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Today we'll prove that a straight line is sometimes a circle. (This is a mad but elementary result in Euclidean geometry.) We can understand this informally with the diagram above: as circles increase in diameter, the curvature of a given arc AB decreases, with the logical endpoint being curvature zero: a straight tangent. So a circle of infinite radius is an unimaginable circ/line chimera. The proper argument can be put lots of ways; here is a simple one:

1. From three points we can always construct their one associated circle. (Since the perpendicular bisectors of their two line segments must pass through the centre, and the radius is then trivial to find).
2. If these 3 points are on a line, though, their perp. bisectors are parallel.
3. If we then grant a line-at-infinity, the intersection of these bisectors - the centre they seek - exists, but infinitely far away;
4. So their circle's radius is infinite.
5. So the circle of three points on a line is a line. (Properly, a 'Euclidean horocycle', or 'collinear circumcircle').

Contentions abound: "Why doesn't this argument instead conclude that (1) only holds assuming the three points are not on a line? (Why isn't the circ/line a "degenerating case"?)  Obtaining curvature zero requires a division by infinity (Curv = 1/R, R=∞), and infinity isn't a number! And, don't parallel lines never meet? What on earth lets you get away with this line-at-infinity crap?" Good questions!

• Why isn't this "collinear circumcircle" just dismissed as degenerative? Why add in this line-at-infinity? How can parallel lines meet?

It all began because geometers didn't like caveats. (If parallel lines never meet, then the plane they extend over is infinite and incomplete.) They also had a good reason to piss about with infinity: the real plane has problems of incidence, and one new plane ("the projective plane") can be used to solve these generally and easily. Recipe for projective geometry: take the real plane, add in one strange "point at infinity": the point that both positive and negative line directions meet at when extended to a figurative horizon. On this plane, lines are actually cyclical, and, as we'll see, circles are actually, sort of, linear. This circularity includes the line-at-infinity (the dotted line here):

If our parallel bisectors intersect at this bizarre line, then we know the centre lies on the line-at-infinity (given this again, and given that we've built this whole bloody system to ensure that incidence is universal, and that all this holds up beyond the Limit). Specifically, our infinite chimera is perpendicular to the line of the original three points: the red line (by projective logic, the centre is both of the red dots there). So, the circline's not an exception to (1), because our circline is not a limiting case: it exists, in more than one well-motivated system. (Note, if it makes you feel any better, that two infinite circles can be thought of as parallel circlines.)

• Infinity isn't a number! How can you use it as a denominator? Why should we expect classical definitions of geometric objects to stand up to infinitudes?

There's a proof of the curvature-method that uses limits instead here. With regards to breaking Euclid: it's the same as with anything: we see what happens to the system at extremes and then talk to each other about what it means.

• Boo! I don't like limits! I define a tangent as that which only ever has one point of contact; so it's constant through increasing radius; so, you lose.

Feel free to move the goalposts. Make yourself at home. (There is a conflict of definitions going on. But since a circle is not, formally, "a very round thing", but "that plane figure that is the locus of all points equidistant from one fixed point C", I think our one wins out.)

Given all the above, we drop our intuition that "lines are never circles". Infinity is liable to do that to intuitions. So? What's the significance? Probably nothing, as usual - but it's cool to note that the medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa used the above argument as a Platonic gadget for seeing the outline of things we cannot really see (like, he thought, God). The infinite in the finite, and other old chestnuts.

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I wrote a thing about identity and my failing engagement to the immortal mind-queen Maths.


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Found myself in a roomful of pre-drinking clubbers talking about how much they drank last night, and were going to tonight, and how the people not currently in the room were skanks. In silent mental self-defence, I elaborated on one woman's thesis, that "Booze is awesome":

Assuredly is. Why? Because it legitimises bad behaviour. Because it levels conversation, precluding nuance. Because it exaggerates emotions. Because it alone allows you to  express said emotional state to others without enormous sanitising. Because it makes life less unentertaining (because it contrives situations for ridicule, and mutual ridicule). Because drunk people aren't alone (because booze uncovers the falsity of the Cartesian, centralised self)! Because it dulls the pain of being - a pain you never examine, for fear of what it might mean for your chances of ordinariness and cinematic happiness.

Did write this while drunk, so, y'know.

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"'He affects a large tolerance of the world - he keeps out of it. [But] I think no one can really be like that - either you're dismayed and baffled, or you reduce everything to aesthetics or politics or sex sociology or whatever.'"

- Paula Fox's Otto

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I wonder how often Yoko Ono listens to the Beatles.

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A mate recently rocked my comfortable, sneering position on postmodernism. I had made the tired point that in fact the realisms and metaphysics-of-presence that the New New Left revile have often been the oppressed's last refuge in the face of totalitarians distorting history and the present. Allowing this, he gave the following analogy, which is, I think, a third-order argument. (First-order: "is there a world?" Second-order: "are there possible worlds?" Third-order: "why do people argue that there are (or are not) possible worlds?"):

"There is a classroom. A fierce teacher stands at the head; the class work busily under his eye. What if all of Theory was just getting the teacher to leave the room? Some people predict social chaos and unchecked evil when you remove the old, objective structural rods. But maybe the class would just keep working - and that'd be the ultimate proof of the teacher's authority - the self-regulating, self-controlling class. Proof by exhaustion."

Only problem with this amazing analogy - and you can imagine the best jesters of French theory getting the joke - is that it understates the vitriol aimed at the Teacher among today's queer/eco/race Foucauldians. It's not that we are taking the teacher out for a tea break; no, we strip him naked, paint him orange and dismember him in front of his class. That's the real corollary of the academic sneer that is the mirror of mine.

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Really really good line in the otherwise stupid show Supernatural:

"Hunk #1: We make our own future.

Hunk #2: Yeah; got no choice."

(Compatibilism)

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Early class analysis missed a lot of things. A minor one: the world maintains a truly gross inequality in the distribution of posterity. (Who pays the piper is worth a thousand words.) Good reputations are a scarce and cartelised commodity, one the extremely rich pay vast amounts to secure, these days. With the internet, this could potentially be democratised - but not I think, until celebrity culture dies.

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I used to say things like "The truth cannot be sexist." This sounds good, but isn't really true: there are many false beliefs that have made themselves contingently true by exploiting human plasticity. Consider: "Women are worse at leadership"; "There were few great female artists, up to the C20th."

There are many countercases to these, from every slice of history. But these kinds of beliefs were beaten into generations of people, and no-one had time to challenge all of them. (This is how I rationalise Hume and Kant being bastard racists, for instance.)