The Right Side of History

Or why I'm posting through the Gramsci Gap

Yesterday, my postdoctoral advisor from 20 years ago (we exchange notes every few years) pinged me with a link to an Atlantic article mentioning a 2020 post of mine. It felt a bit surreal, a recently closed chapter of my life colliding with a much older closed chapter. A certain clarity of purpose attended both those chapters of my life (2004-06 postdoccing and 2007-2020 old-school blogging). I kinda knew what I was doing, and enjoyed a certain confidence that I was doing the right thing. That whole headspace feels surreal now, like those chapters happened to somebody else. My shorthand for this feeling is the phrase being on the right side of history. It’s a feeling I’ve lost in recent years, along with most of you. That doesn’t mean I feel I’m on the wrong side. It means I can’t see meaningful sides at all. History, as it winds its way through the Gramsci Gap, is non-orientable, so to speak.

I take the phrase to mean right in both senses of the word. There is a logic to history which creates certain inexorable tendencies in courses of events that are useless to resist. At best you can make your peace with those tendencies. That’s the epistemic sense of rightness; being on the side of history that turns out to be true in some sense, in the sense of being increasingly validated by later events. There is also a moral arc to history that may or may not bend towards anything you care about, but it is important, in a certain selfish sanity-preserving sense, to stand with the things you care about regardless of what the arc is doing. That’s the moral sense of rightness that has us whiplashing between thinking the world is heading towards its doom or that it is evolving towards higher, better things.

Some humans find themselves tempted to collapse both senses of rightness into one, which is the hallmark of political extremism. We might define extremism as the belief that the truths of the universe must necessarily and fully validate the particular moral positions you choose to adopt. That if you just discover a complete-enough version of the truth, guided by your moral compass, you eventually won’t need to adopt moral stances at all. That those who adopt other stances will simply be shown to have been mistaken about facts.

This attitude is actually characteristic of the feeling that one is on the right side of history. Extremism lies in clinging to that feeling even when the two senses of rightness begin to diverge in difficult-to-reconcile ways. In choosing to take on increasing risk of being wrong rather than allowing yourself to feel wrong.

My own suspicion is that the choices humans make are always going to be underdetermined by any present sense of the truth. While some advances in knowledge may render some moral questions moot, there is a residual core space of choices where the discoverable laws of reality will not usefully guide our actions. A space where our choices may be subverted by laws of reality discovered later. And progress usually expands that space too, by introducing new choices you never had to make before.

In other words, you can be wrong about the right side of history. That’s what makes history interesting. If there was always a demonstrably right side, we’d all get on that side and push in the same direction.

***

A good example of this phenomenology is evolution. Political ideologues seem to desperately want to believe in versions of evolutionary theory that fully determine morality. They want biological evolution to be morally meaningful. Either might is right, and you have no choice but to dominate and rule those weaker than you (and be ruled in turn by those stronger than you) or evolution is some sort of beautiful symphony of cooperation and empathy, building up inexorably towards a pain-free, cruelty-free Gaian condition.

In either case, there are no moral choices to be made. To be on the right side of the history of evolution, you just act in accordance with an understanding of natural (and moral) law that you believe to completely determine what happens; what must happen. The dumber versions of this sort of theorizing inspire efforts to immanetize the evolutionary eschaton; to skip to the end by optimizing and accelerating pathways towards “final” outcomes where evolution is “complete.” The smarter versions adopt an infinite-game view of evolution, but still seem to believe that the pathways can at least be smoothed out by abandoning “futile” acts of resistance, and surrendering more completely to the “true” nature of evolution.

Not surprisingly, I have a mediocritist view of evolution — the nature and meaning of biological life is underdetermined by evolutionary forces, leaving it full of pockets of randomly configured potentialities that create not just room for choice, but imperatives to choose. Choices that require open-ended computation processes fed by transient data that cannot be turned into compiled genetic code. Choices that cannot simply be used up “optimizing” or “accelerating” evolution itself towards illusory end states of moral arrival, or even to “smooth out” an infinite evolutionary trajectory.

Evolution is necessarily messy, noisy, and irreducibly inefficient, despite our valiant attempts to retcon some notion of optimality or “fitness” onto it, and imbue it with a “natural” meaning. Any effort to use apparent slack in the process to improve it will necessarily backfire. You cannot hurry evolution along or rush it, because it is discovering the pre-conceptual contours of truth — and therefore the boundaries of morality — through more fundamental processes than can be grasped, anticipated, or accelerated by our cognitive processes. Our language (which increasingly appears to be nearly co-extensive with our intelligence) is by definition and evolutionary construction insufficiently expressive to compete with evolution. So you must use the slack to do other things that may or may not shape evolution at all. There is only one way to find out whether anything you do corresponds to evolutionary truth in the sense of being adaptive, and that is to live forever and watch how things turn out, which we do not yet know how to do.

Something like this is true of the more superficial streams of history too, including the cultural and technological evolution streams unfolding in the nooks and crannies of unused biological evolutionary potential.

***

To be on the right side of history then, is to continuously update your sense of the boundaries of available moral choice space, while trying to get things epistemically and morally right within those boundaries. And accepting that you won’t always get it right, even if it mostly feels like you are getting it right.

To the extent things I was paying attention to during earlier chapters of my life are still relevant, I’d say on balance history has mostly “proved me right.” Take my postdoctoral work for instance, which was all about the future of warfare, full of drones and robots. I got many things wrong, but got the big things right (see this note for my assessment). Both factually, and by the ideas I try to stand for consistently, morally.

Or take my blogging 2007-20, when I was a trafficker of memes and instigator of viralities. I’d say I was mostly on the right side of history then as well, both factually and morally.

Now, you might not agree with the moral choices in either of my chapters of course. Both chapters featured my classic Be Slightly Evil™ morality, which I’ve characterized at various times as either Thermodynamic Theology (the 2nd law rules everything around us) and mediocre Darwinism (as in this essay). But as far as I’m concerned, I made no big choices I feel I have to apologize for. Perhaps that assessment comes across as smarmy self-righteousness, but I can live with that.

It is important to note though, that consistent values don’t imply consistent beliefs, alliances, or political positions. For example, until 2021 or so, I was largely aligned with the politics and beliefs of mainstream Silicon Valley, even though I was diverging in the sense of simply being interested in different things. But since 2021 or so, I haven’t been aligned with Silicon Valley. Mostly because Silicon Valley executed a sharp ideological pivot rightwards. My own updates were minor — I remain roughly as liberal-tarian as Silicon Valley used to be, circa 2013. Similarly, I was largely aligned with the progressive left until 2020 or so, but haven’t been since, thanks to their sharp ideological pivot towards authoritarianism.

Now you could argue that everyone thinks that they’ve stayed the same, while everyone else has become more “extremist” so let me offer a rubric to judge such matters. There is a simple test of who has shifted positions and who has stayed still — if you still have a clear sense of the “right side of history” you’ve moved and turned extremist. You’ve let your attachment to the sort of certainty that was possible in 2013 lead you astray, towards one sort of extremism or another. You want to know, and be on, the right side of history too badly.

The reason I believe that I’ve stayed put while others have moved is that I no longer have a clear sense of the “right side of history” while everyone I’ve diverged from seems to have, if anything, a stronger sense of what the “right side” is.

Think about what is meant by the phrase. To believe in a “right side of history” is to believe that history has at most a handful of legible and mappable “sides” (usually only two) and that all your positions across hundreds of individual little issues cohere into a totalizing position that is clearly on one “side.”

What makes Twitter and Bluesky/Mastodon equally surreal and hard to hang out in for me is not that there is a high level of toxicity and anger (I have pretty high tolerance for environmental bile), but the high level of totalizing certainty. People who seem able to hold a broadly predictable and clear set of positions on everything from the situations in Gaza and Ukraine to Trumpism, climate, and AI simply confuse me. They seem to be conjuring their certainties out of thin air, out of sheer force of will, rather than from any superior understanding of circumstances. I don’t find them useful to be around. I learn very little from them, and at too great a cost. They act more certain than I can feel, and I don’t feel dumb enough to trust their judgment over my own.

***

As for me, for the moment, I have abandoned all attempts to be on the “right side” of history, or to even map out sides. All my positions don’t seem to add up to a “side” I can characterize in any totalizing way with simple labels, and I’m content to let them constitute nothing more coherent than a bag of atomized beliefs and doubts.

Many people feel this way of course, but most of these people still seem to want to manufacture a weak “side” to be on. Two popular choices are “centrism” which attempts to craft a totalizing ideological certainty out of a bunch of low-confidence expedient compromises, and “third way” exercises in artisanal political constructionism.

I believe such efforts are both doomed and futile. I see no value in labeling myself either a centrist or a believer in any sort of “third way.” Merely avoiding the totalizing certainties of extremism is hard enough, and good enough for now.

The problem is that reality itself is fundamentally ambiguous today. There are no extant or constructible “sides” that you can be on that guarantee the levels of epistemic and moral rightness you grew accustomed to in the pre-Great Weirding years. And if you came of age after 2015 or so, you’ve never experienced the sense of history having clear sides you can confidently choose among.

If you try to be on the right side of history in 2025, you’re going to be wrong a lot more than you’ll find comfortable. I prefer to simply suspend the urge for the moment.

Now, this is an explicit and conscious recognition of my own condition for me, but I strongly suspect it is at least an implicit and unconscious recognition for a lot of people. Perhaps even the majority. The true extremists are rare. Most people who present as sincerely operating by totalizing certainties (ie ignoring those who are merely doing it as a political grift) are merely trying to meme themselves into a state of comforting and motivating righteousness; a condition where they don’t feel either helpless or confused, or burdened by an array of fundamentally difficult and confusingly correlated decisions.

Most people are not trying to do this. Instead of presenting with totalizing certainty, they are not “presenting” at all. They are retreating from public view into cozy, private enclaves where being on the right side of history is a simpler, socially localized problem.

Or to put it bluntly, it is easier to be on the right side of history, epistemically and morally, in a private chat of ~3-300 people than it is to be on the right side of history at Twitter scale. I can’t be certain if my beliefs about (say) Gaza are correct, or whether my doubts are justified, but it is certainly less stressful to hold both my beliefs and doubts in a small private chat than in public.

There is perhaps a certain admirable epistemic humility in our collective retreat to the cozyweb, even if there is also a certain not-so-admirable lack of moral courage. But there is no doubt about one thing — there is a collective cost.

The collective cost is in the form of the loss of a clear public sense of history with a set of sides to choose from. This condition is not an environmental given, but an emergent outcome of a great many people declaring choices in public, and those choices adding up in legible ways. The lines aren’t drawn. They emerge from publicly made choices, and then shape those choices, in a chicken-and-egg way.

Which means the fewer people do their choosing in public, the muddier the choices get, and the more confused the processes of history get. Which means more people retreat, accelerating the process. History failing to have clear right/wrong sides is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is easy to miss this, because emergent choices can seem very decisive, and it can be tempting to believe that the silent majority is injecting some sort of deep and mysterious wisdom of the crowds into the historical process. Elections can yield clear outcomes, even as the ranks of public intellectuals offering clear decision rubrics shrink, the noise of the confused rabble grows, and the cozyweb fills up with the doubtful and traumatized withdrawing their attention allocations from public view. The silent majority — which I define as social dark matter which organizes in pre-internet sub-cozyweb ways around friends-and-family epistemic/moral patterns — stews, simmers, and cooks. It may periodically express decisive preferences that shock the chattering classes from cozy chats to public squares, but that doesn’t mean it knows much better than more modern streams of civic life. Just because you speak up rarely doesn’t mean you’re more often right.

Some take these self-evident limits to democratic wisdom as a reason to reject democracy itself, but this is of course dumb. Just because the democratic process can express obviously wrong decisiveness and indecision rooted in confusion and ambiguity doesn’t mean cutting that process out can improve things. To treat the democratic process as either reliably wise or unwise is to make a category error. Like any process of discovery and decision-making, it is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and can act with more or less decisiveness, with actions only weakly correlated with any sort of rightness. Trust in democracy based on an uncritical belief in its rightness (epistemic or moral) is exactly as dumb as uncritical belief in the rightness of monarchs. A better basis for the trust is the idea that it is better to include even a noisy and unreliable reality signal than to exclude it. The reason to reject monarchism is not that emperors are sometimes bad, but that good or bad, it is better to constrain would-be emperors with more rather than fewer reality signals than they would prefer, turning them into elected figures.

As H. L. Mencken noted, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. Another Mencken quote explains why this is the case: For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. And sometimes we are attached enough to clarity and simplicity that we knowingly ignore wrongness in making our choices. And give it to ourselves good and hard.

***

What can we take away from this understanding of the processes of history?

I think the inescapable conclusion is that sometimes, fundamentally, there is no clear right side to history in the large, and those who insist on choosing anyway can become part of the problem.

Sometimes, history encounters stormy weather. Confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk pervade the societal condition. And no configuration of governance forces, mechanisms, and ideologies can make up for what is ultimately a deficit in our understanding of reality itself.

This should not be surprising. After all, there is no law of nature that says that reality must reveal itself to us at a rate that we can comfortably and collectively comprehend and keep up with it, via processes that look like repeatedly and trivially picking the “right side” through superior wisdom, and enjoying watching ourselves prevail over the less wise with our prescience. Anymore than there is a law of nature that says the weather must always be pleasant.

So yes, sometimes societies will seek out the right side of history too strongly, and get it wrong, while navigating fundamentally stormy historical weather. But this is unavoidable, because unlike regular storms, you can’t actually shelter from the storms of history.

So the central question remains — not what to choose or do, but how publicly? More precisely, should we publicly perform certainties we don’t feel, or retreat to process uncertainties? Or should we perhaps perform our uncertainties in public?

It is worth thinking more about what exactly we do when we retreat from public discourse spaces into our comforting cozyweb warrens. I think two things happen.

First, as we’ve discussed at length, the problem of choosing the “right side of history” becomes significantly simpler and more localized. In your filter bubble, well-shielded from context collapses and narrative violations, it is simply easier to talk without stress, make choices with sufficient confidence to act, and basically get on with life despite the “blooming, buzzing confusion” in the mind of the baby¹ world being messily born in the public Gramsci Gap.

Second, our sense of what is important to organize our lives around starts to drift and diverge, unmoored from any sense of societal consensus on the question. So long as you’re immersed in even a noisy public space, it is easy to have a sense of the top few important things everybody should perhaps be devoting some attention to. If it is not too stressful, you can contribute some portion of your attention and cognitive capacity to the global graph mind, and whether you get things beautifully right or wildly wrong, it does at least help create a consensus around what’s worth getting right or wrong.

This second consequence of the retreat to the cozyweb is generally under-appreciated. When people who used to contribute to the broader public consciousness begin to retreat from it, they begin to allocate proportionately more attention to a greater variety of things. For instance, to the extent I’ve retreated, I devote more attention to various nerdy interests ranging from legos and robots to cooking and candy-making.

More subtly, a lot of things that I used to publicly concern myself with in the past (2007-2020) seem now to be irrelevant to the processes of history. At the time of writing, most things I wrote in public felt like choices I was sharing about the right or wrong side of history. And perhaps they were, at that time. But just because something mattered on a historical scale in 2012 doesn’t mean it still matters on the same scale in 2025. If I were to classify my older writings as being right, wrong, or simply well past their peak relevance in 2025, I’d say 90% would fall in the last category.

This is a kind of cache invalidation or expiry in living historical memory. I think I was right about (for example) the dynamics of sociopathy and the nature of culture wars, and it still matters that I was right. Those questions are still salient and contribute to being on the right or wrong side of history in 2025. But on other questions, such as say the future of work, I feel like while I’ve been proved mostly right, it no longer matters whether my views on the question are right or wrong. They’ve gone from being historically consequential concerns to merely personally consequential choices. The latest chapter of the future of work question is better framed as the question of the future of AI, which has a very different shape to it, even if the impact on work is what interests or concerns you.

Equally, concerns I thought were random personal interests now strike me as things perhaps worth talking about publicly. My interest in contraptioney machines and mechanisms for instance, has graduated from a personal interest to a set of questions I think are of historic consequentiality now. It is kinda important in 2025 to have cogent and defensible views on what you think the societal machine should look like, since the one we have is being dismantled with extreme prejudice, with alien organizing principles waiting in the wings, in the form of weird new computing technologies.

Putting the two consequences together, and deploying the Timothy Leary term popularized by Robert Anton Wilson, when we retreat to the cozyweb, our individual reality tunnels begin to diverge.

To some extent, this is an adaptive historical response to reality outrunning societal cognitive capacities and knowledge. One potentially useful response to confusion is to expand the scope of inquiries, in the hope that random things you discover down bunnytrails of personal interest might suddenly prove extremely salient to more important things. But to pretend that the retreat to the cozyweb is necessarily good simply because it’s what we happen to be doing, and find to be the most comforting response, is clearly a cope.

To accept our current cozyweb phase as an inevitability of the historical process that we must just resign ourselves to getting through is a kind of social Darwinist fatalism, similar to the more biological variety I flagged earlier. Unfortunately for our sanity, we have more real choices to make than we might want to, and probably ought to be making more of them, more publicly, than we feel inclined to. Not out of any sense of civic responsibility or altruism, but simply because a life absorbed in too-solipsistic reality tunnels, constructed out of irrelevancies and passing fancies that nobody else cares about, eventually starts to feel empty even to the most dilettantish mind. To feel alive, you must plug into the liveness of the world, which means concerning yourself with things other people concern themselves with; ex officio serious things.

***

The idea that living a full life requires you to concern yourself with serious things is both widely recognized, and equally widely misunderstood.

Most commonly, the misunderstanding takes the form of what I call the transferred seriousness imperative: The belief that to engage with a serious thing at all, one must necessarily engage with it in a serious way.

Climate change for example, is a serious thing. It is important to get your views on it right, in both epistemically and morally. But only a tiny fraction of us have the aptitude or opportunity to (for instance) work on climate models, renewable energy technologies, and so on. In fact trying to be serious about climate change when you lack any ability to contribute usefully probably does more harm than good. But you can concern yourself with it, even if you don’t do so consequentially or seriously. You can make jokes about virtue signaling and plastic straws. You can read op-eds about nuclear energy. You can be casually curious about new renewable energy technologies. You can be interested. The mere fact of allocating a certain amount of your attention to a topic helps it emerge as one of the important ones. It’s a bit like voting. If a question matters at all, all attention to it is good attention. Serious and unserious, expert and amateur. And public attention to it helps make it matter.

I think this is one of the things cultural conservatives get most deeply wrong. They are suspicious of unseriousness in all its manifestations, especially idle curiosity. They are offended by serious things being engaged with unseriously, through jokes and shallow, dilettantish understandings. They view all unseriously deployed attention as detracting from the duty to deploy attentions seriously where you do have the ability to be serious. They believe all serious things should be left to those who take them seriously.

Cultural conservatives take seriousness too seriously. Mostly because they want to be taken seriously. Not because they have any ability to deploy serious attention usefully.

When cultural conservatives (many of whom are deeply liberal or progressive in other ways) retreat to solipsistic concerns in their personal reality tunnels, they try to do “deep work” seriously, in the hopes that it will come to matter publicly (and get visibly upset when it doesn’t). When they speak in public, they mostly allocate attention only to matters already deemed serious with visible conscientiousness, and strive to only say weighty and serious things about them. They resist the lure of the funny and the absurd. They avoid curiosity on the margins of the Important and Serious.™ They avoid fooling around and being embarrassingly wrong, even when there is a societal upside to it. They seem deeply afraid that a serious thing treated with unseriousness might itself become unserious.

Philosophers popular with cultural conservatives, (loosely corresponding in the West to the the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Byung-Chul-Han tradition), above all, want history to unfold under the wise stewardship of serious people taking serious matters seriously, and themselves seriously for doing so. In their world view, idleness, curiosity, a sense of the absurd, are all cardinal sins. Sins of levity that doom humanity to bleak ends. There are similar traditions elsewhere in the world.

I only recently recognized this throughline in cultural conservative modes of thought. They take seriousness too seriously, and unseriousness not seriously enough.

To me, it has always been obvious that the unserious side of life — play, absurdity, humor, idleness, curiosity — are not just serious and important, they are load-bearing. To not take unseriousness seriously is to make very poor use of the agency left to us by the constraints and inevitabilities of reality itself. As far as I’m concerned, even if the world spirals to its doom in an orgy of zombie-apocalyptic violence amid climate collapse and a global hot culture war between the wokies and redpills, fought with nukes, it will be important to find room for unseriousness down to the last day.

This does not mean that people like me, who center and prioritize unseriousness, even at the most serious of times, and around the most serious of matters, cannot or should not be serious too.

This is after all, a generally serious post, and I’ve been known to take both serious and unserious things seriously. One example is the book club we’re doing this year as part of this newsletter. Diving into a dozen difficult books on the history of early modernity is an attempt to take serious things seriously, and perhaps improving our ability to be on the right side of history in 2025 by studying the history of 1200-1600 more carefully.

But there are plenty of people doing that sort of thing. The general deficit today is in unseriousness. We’re not taking serious things unseriously enough, and this is a serious matter, because unseriousness is a key ingredient of imagination and creativity.

This can be hard to see, since the public sphere is dominated by the spectacle of people like Donald Trump apparently taking serious things unseriously. I made this mistake early on, in regarding him as an unserious person taking serious things unseriously. He takes everything seriously because he takes himself implacably seriously. He takes everything seriously in light of how he takes himself seriously, rather than in light of what, if anything, is actually serious about them. And his whole tragic arc began with being unable to handle Obama’s jokes at his expense, because he takes himself so seriously.

We’re on the historical path we’re on for many reasons, but at least one of them is that a somewhat absurd old man couldn’t take jokes at his own expense at a literal comedy event. I’ve been roasted. It’s uncomfortable, but not that hard to take.

What does it mean to take unseriousness seriously?

It means, for instance, devoting “too many” hours of your life consuming humor, especially voluminous humor with ambitious scope, such as the works of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. A society such as ours, which does not produce such works in sufficient quantity, or sufficiently elevate them in collectively assessed importance, is a society that does not take unseriousness seriously enough. When unseriousness is forced to confine itself to the trivialities of personal lives (a characteristic of much of the cringe comedy popular today) and does not engage with “serious” matters, you have a society that is blind in certain ways.

It’s not exactly a paradox, but to take a serious thing seriously necessarily means injecting some unseriousness into how you take it. To effectively grapple with the heavy stuff, you have to lighten up a little.

This throughline in cultural conservative modes of thought only recently became apparent to me, thanks to its unmistakeable recent ascendance. Some strands of it are very obvious due to their notable joylessness, such as the trad turn among the statue-headery, growing identification with archetypes of stoically unsmiling seriousness such as the Yes Chad, and the increasingly joyless strains of increasingly absurd leftist activism. There has been a corresponding rise in a tendency to view any unseriousness as a mark of weakness or cowardice.

Other strands are less obvious, because they do partake of the unserious side of life. They just don’t so seriously. Unseriousness to the median cultural conservative is a luxury to be indulged in rare moments of abundance and surplus in an existence generally marked by an oppressive sense of privation and threat, and usually associated with transient winning moods following temporary successes. It belongs with ice-cream rather than philosophy in their worldview.

***

The point of that digression into the metaphysics of seriousness and unseriousness was to add one final element to what I suppose is my prescription for myself. The world has retreated too far, and in too self-serious and fearful a manner, into the cozyweb, leaving the public sphere to the most humorlessly self-righteous extremists who are certain they’re on the right side of history, and are acting in ways that don’t take unseriousness seriously enough. People who can only laugh, if at all, at the pain they can inflict on others in their winning moments, and at themselves not at all.

The public sphere has turned into a lemon market, and its inability to laugh at itself, along with its growing taste for laughing at the pain of the powerless, is the clearest sign of its profound bankruptcy.

The result is our present condition — caught up in a joyless historical grand narrative that juxtaposes chaotic new realities none of us has any sort of handle on, with the flimsy totalizing certainties being peddled by unholy alliances of joyless extremists and gormless grifters all taking themselves far too seriously.

And we’ve lost the ability to even maintain a collective public sense of absurdity about it all.

Contemplating this condition, I think I get why, this year, even though I feel like my writing is not really up to the task of keeping up with reality and providing any sort of useful or even entertaining signal to you, the reader, it feels important to continue writing. Even at the risk of only adding only confusion, wrongness, and failed attempts at humor to an already confused, wrong, and largely unfunny condition.

This is why, though I’ve usually taken a couple of longish breaks from writing every year, I haven’t yet done so this year. Some part of me fears that if I stop writing now, I might not ever get back into it. That I might end up retreating entirely for good.

I might take a break later in the year, but right now, I’ve decided the thing to do is to simply post my way through it all, looking for that elusive vein of absurdity and unseriousness in our current condition that might point the way out of the current grand funk the End of History seems mired in.

1. The phrase is due to William James, and a popular description of the state of the infant mind. It isn’t quite right in the light of modern understandings of neonatal neural developmental processes, but it is right enough for our discussion here. Babies being born, whether they are new humans or new worlds, are necessarily cauldrons of confusion about what exactly is going on. Babies of any sort are not on the right or wrong side of history. They’re merely trying to establish very basic boundaries while wondering, with varying levels of anxiety, what the heck is going on.