There has to be a shot of horror in there, but I’m not going to lock onto it in time. (Next Yule, it’s a firm date.) “Santa Claus, Claws of Satan. Saint Nick, Old Nick. Coincidence? I don’t think so.” — yes, but that’s far too familiar to work, without a twist.

The hook, beside the obvious reversals (a sack full of children, the lashed-elf sweat shop bunker deep in the polar ice) is the peculiarity of the Santa Claus myth — which is designed to be disbelieved, as a kind of modern rite-of-passage. There’s a side to this worthy of affirmation. Discarding attractive wish-fulfillment myths is a cultural achievement whose massive generalization is long overdue. ‘Santa Claus’ as the idiot god of beneficent unreality is the proto-deity of every lunacy advanced modernity has been subjected to. There’s also another side …

“Santa won’t save us.” If that was something people really grew out of before voting age, there wouldn’t be a left-of-center political party remaining anywhere in the world. This suggests something very different is going on. A ritualized social training in disbelief seems ominously unprecedented, so one naturally wonders about the religious formation that commands this recently innovated power. If there is a disbelief that would set us free, the modern ceremony of Yule — celebrating the occult death of Santa at the Golgotha of secularism — doesn’t seem to be it. On the contrary, it represents a populist version of the Jacobin-Enlightenment Cult of Reason, symbolically purging infantile superstition to be reborn into an approved state of adult consciousness. The Death of Santa is mystery initiation into the New Church. Santa died to redeem humanity from the sins of attachment to Medieval unreason, and every year this sacrifice is ritualistically re-enacted to recall the new covenant. (Go on, tell me this isn’t the narrative.)

Someone ought to write a story about it …

This is what my third half has been doing recently:

Robin Hanson on the Great Filter for TED. It’s too well done to hold back until next Friday. “Something out there is killing everything, and you’re next. … You should be worried.” (He has the nightmare smile down to a T.)

The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight in accordance of a more general conservation law that its full current relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far more penetrating application.

‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive concreteness:

The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so, this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have since learnt is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.

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Nicola Masciandaro discusses the method of ‘hyper-literal anagogy’ in the introduction to his exquisite book Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem (p.3-4, also here):

It thus naturally tends to seize semantically on the substantiality of the negative and on what might have been said otherwise but was not — a not that is felt to contain the secret of everything. For example, Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus entirely ignores the ordinary, regular sense of “and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing” (Acts 9:8) [apertisque oculis nihil videbat] in favor of a mystically literal plenitude of possibilities: “I think this text has a fourfold sense. One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing.”[2] Similarly, Augustine’s well-known statement as to the unknowable knowability of time — “What therefore is time? If no one [nemo] asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone questioning me, I do not know”[3] — may be (im)properly read as saying that time is known in the positively negative presence of a nemo, a not-man (ne+homo) who asks about time, a pure question posed by nobody. The presence of this no-one who is still there, a senseless letter-spirit and sudden negative indication upon which superlative understanding depends, provides a fitting structural figure for this method and an image of its divinatory, daimonic form, its sortilegic reading of received signs.

[2] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), Sermon 19, p. 142.
[3] “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (Augustine, Confessions, 11.14).

Between The Nothing and Abstract Horror there is no difference. Some related hints (and others). Eventually we reach the Vast Abrupt.

As the Occident subsides into an ocean of shadow, the FBI is noticing:

“We’re seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence resides on a phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the password,” FBI Director Jim Comey said during a speech in Washington. “If this becomes the norm … justice may be denied.” […] Specifically, Comey said he is “deeply concerned” about what’s known as “going dark” — operating systems being developed by companies such as Apple and Google that automatically encrypt information on their devices. And that means even the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops and other devices so law enforcement can access emails, photos or other evidence that could be crucial to a case …

Comey, however, didn’t place full blame with companies like Apple and Google for creating devices with such encryption. They were “responding to what they perceive is a market demand” from the general public, which has grown “mistrustful of government” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures of secret government surveillance. […] Encryption “is a marketing pitch,” Comey said. “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?”

A process of Exit-in-place is underway, automatically, and it’s not easy to imagine how it could be stopped. With message management disintegrating on one side, and the public sphere eroding into dark nets on the other, it must seem to the State in the age of Internet runaway that the walls are closing in.

On the persistence of Lovecraft’s influence:

Lovecraft, who died five months before his 47th birthday, also “shrewdly created an American pantheon of horror,” [Leslie S.] Klinger said of the hardcore New Englander. “He was the first writer of supernatural literature to understand the psychological consequences of the generations of Puritanism and the warping of the human psyche that resulted.”

Lovecraft’s influence on [Alan] Moore lay in how the author was able to link the cosmic to the familiar. “Lovecraft’s most enduring influence on my own work is the way in which, consciously or otherwise, he managed to imbue the familiar New England landscape that was so dear and immediate to him with a sense of the universe’s dispiriting vastness and the blind, random nature of the forces governing it, a perspective drawn from his keen interest in contemporary science and astronomy,” Moore wrote to Speakeasy. “As the familiar worlds around us are increasingly invaded by alien ideas, today’s writers could do worse than look to the strategies of antiquarian-modernist H.P. Lovecraft.”

(If Neoreaction was still looking for a name, ‘antiquarian-modernism’ would be a definite candidate.)

Blame Bloom for luring me into this blasted landscape. (I agree with JAB that there’s something important going on here.)

A Doom Paul video selection (1, 2, 3).

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John Michael Greer muses on the topic of Ebola (in a typically luxuriant post, ultimately heading somewhere else):

According to the World Health Organization, the number of cases of Ebola in the current epidemic is doubling every twenty days, and could reach 1.4 million by the beginning of 2015. Let’s round down, and say that there are one million cases on January 1, 2015. Let’s also assume for the sake of the experiment that the doubling time stays the same. Assuming that nothing interrupts the continued spread of the virus, and cases continue to double every twenty days, in what month of what year will the total number of cases equal the human population of this planet? […] … the steps that could keep Ebola from spreading to the rest of the Third World are not being taken. Unless massive resources are committed to that task soon — as in before the end of this year — the possibility exists that when the pandemic finally winds down a few years from now, two to three billion people could be dead. We need to consider the possibility that the peak of global population is no longer an abstraction set comfortably off somewhere in the future. It may be knocking at the future’s door right now, shaking with fever and dripping blood from its gums.

The eventual scale of the Ebola outbreak is a known unknown. A number of people between a few thousand and several billion will die, and an uncertain probability distribution could be attached to these figures — we know, at least approximately, where the question marks are. Before the present outbreak began, in December 2013 (in Guinea), Ebola was of course known to exist, but at that stage the occurrence of an outbreak — and not merely its course — was an unknown. Before the Ebola virus was scientifically identified (in 1976), the specific pathogen was an unknown member of a known class. With each step backwards, we advance in abstraction, towards the acknowledgement of threats of a ‘black swan‘ type. Great Filter X-risk is a prominent model of such abstract threat.

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Some Horror Night samples from the Old Master:

The first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole subject, Man’s disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was placed: Then touches the prime cause of his Fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent; who, revolting from God, and drawing to his side many legions of Angels, was, by the command of God, driven out of Heaven, with all his crew, into the great deep. Which action passed over, the Poem hastens into the midst of things, presenting Satan with his Angels now falling into Hell described here, not in the center (for Heaven and Earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet accursed,) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos …
— PL I The Argument

… who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his airy flight,
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt …
— PL II 404-9

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
— PL IV 75-8

And on Milton’s blindness, a key unlocking the gates to abysmal depths of visionary accomplishment:

… Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
— PL III 40-55