(Nur) die Gedanken sind frei

Star Trek for Adults

William TimbermanLeave a comment

This week I’ve begun re-reading Iain M. Banks’s Culture series of science fiction novels, and am even more impressed by the subversive humor in them than I was the first time around. Purely as science fiction they’re genuinely entertaining, although what passes for science in them is science only if you can actually bring yourself to believe that the pursuit of it will someday free us from the barbarisms of need that always seem to short-circuit our progress as sentient beings.

Banks’s plotting is intricate and satisfying enough, the dilemmas faced by his characters and their responses to them plausible enough, but what I treasure most about his storytelling is the sheer maturity of the civilization he imagines. Intentionally or not, the chronicles of his future galaxy hold up a devastatingly unflattering mirror to the ruling class dumbshows of our present century. Comparing Banks’s protagonists to the morally and intellectually truncated inhabitant of today’s White House, and the belligerent idiocy of his MAGA legions, I somehow find it as easy to laugh as to cry, a state of ambiguous bliss that’s not on offer in many other places, real or virtual, in these new dark ages of ours.

Now and again the economist Brad DeLong calls us as we are these days East African Plains Apes, and has referred in interviews to the millennial imaginings of post New Deal liberalism as Star Trek Socialism. I suppose both are true enough, but I think I’d be tempted to shave my head and take up a begging bowl if what’s implied by these witticisms were all we had to look forward to as a species. Ape that I am, Star Trek Socialism and its implacable pieties in particular would bore me to death, leave me grimacing and staring at my shoes, praying for the bullshit please, please to be over in time for a drink before dinner. Running a bar in some back alley tucked away in an insignificant corner of a General Systems Vehicle (GSV), on the other hand, would be a delight, especially if the shipmind would pipe a little Mozart in as I was busy squeezing limes for the evening’s margaritas.

Signs of the Apocalypse

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Oligarchs, edgelords, influencers. The manosphere. Algorithms, blockchains, chatbot haruspications. Data centers, concentration camps, genocide. Stephen Miller in sunglasses and a shiny suit. The crooked cross at the base of Pam Bondi’s throat. The gig economy, the attention economy, the awake all night calliope of dread.

Does the Pope approve of Samuel Alito? Has Harvard made its deal with our new devils yet? Will someone please show me the way to the next whisky bar?

But never mind. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deus vult.

If Not Now, When?

William TimbermanLeave a comment

“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”

About Religion

William Timberman

I was asked a few years ago how an atheist like me could square his atheism with his fondness for snippets of church Latin. It does seem an odd affectation—I wasn’t raised Catholic, and a couple of years of Latin classes in a public high school in Oklahoma back in the Jurassic hardly qualifies as any Latin at all for those who truly know it. Amo, amas, amat, Gallia in tres partes divisa est, and the ablative absolute are just the beginning of a long quest, and I was forced off the trail early.

My response to being caught in this seeming contradiction—that I was an atheist “d’expression chrétienne”—was admittedly flippant, but it was also accurate. My atheism was assembled in the back rooms of the western culture I grew up in. The only tools I could find there, at least early on, were those left behind by the Catholic Church in its long retreat, the only materials its doctrinal remnants worked over in the centuries since with more or less success by the secular carpenters who preceded me. Small wonder, then, that Deo gratias, or sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, still seem appropriate to express the awe I feel for that branch of the human experiment I’m descended from, even though I’m as aware as Nietzsche ever was that God is dead. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….

Unbidden Bits—October 11, 2025

William Timberman

Life among our insistent MAGA fascists is made almost palatable by the caprices of human immanence. Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Doctorow—their antennae have long been busy registering what’s coming, even if ours have not, at least not yet. Here’s a revelation from Sterling’s Holy Fire that has lately added to the strain on my already overworked engines of impermeability:

Maya blinked. “Men and women just think differently, that’s all.” “Oh, that’s so stupid! ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ That’s all gone now, you understand? Anatomy is industry now!”

Okay, Zuckermuskians, top that if you can. We see you. Do you see us?

How Not To Be the New York Times

William Timberman

From Federico Thoman in the America-Cina Newsletter from today’s Corriere della Sera:

Ma anche dagli Stati Uniti abbiamo parecchi spunti: un’analisi su come Trump ha cambiato la retorica di un presidente americano e di come l’amministrazione abbia imposto una «censura» a termini come «cambiamento climatico» ed «emissioni» al dipartimento dell’Energia. Se, come diceva il filosofo tedesco Heidegger, «il linguaggio è la casa dell’essere», non siamo messi benissimo.

But we also have plenty of insights from the United States: an analysis of how Trump has changed the rhetoric of an American president and how the administration has imposed a “censorship” on terms like “climate change” and “emissions” at the Department of Energy. If, as the German philosopher Heidegger said, “language is the home of being,” we’re not in a good place.

There are some fine things still to read in the world, especially if you’re lucky enough not to be trapped in the prison currently being fashioned by MAGA zealots out of American English.

Gertrude!

William Timberman

Gertrude Stein was a steward of the English language as well as its first modern sorcerer. To this day, fifty years after I first read her Lectures in America, I’m still amazed by how skillfully she managed to dissolve the accepted frameworks of literacy without simultaneously depriving literacy itself of either its traditional subtlety or its depth. In the twenty-first century, as we’re beginning to believe that the written word lacks the ease of use that terminal stage capitalism and its media torrents demand, we look to computers to do the work of creating, disseminating, sorting and interpreting the flood of content for us. That’s a mistake, possibly a catastrophic one. If you want to know why, read Gertrude Stein, the only effective antidote I know of to the Newspeak now being forced on us by the shiny barbarisms of our new century.