Daniel LaPointe

The other day, I went through and reread every single one of my submissions to this blog. In so doing, I was on the lookout for the post that left me with the best feeling. That is, I wanted to locate the post that had the best “vibe” to it. Somewhat to my surprise, this ended up being “Notes from the Fourth Floor of the American Museum of Natural History” – a post that has received little reference in other posts and that thematically sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with the rest of my submissions.

More so than any other submission, “Notes from the Fourth Floor of the American Museum of Natural History” manages to break free from the fixation on the self. It also manages to reflect an embodied experience. Put another way, it is not the sort of thing that could have been written anywhere in the country on the basis of information obtained solely from the internet. On a very fundamental level, the piece functions on my having plopped myself into an unfamiliar environment.

One nice thing about having a functioning notion of space is that it takes a boatload of pressure off your shoulders. If I’m trying to come up with an interesting bit of philosophy, for example, I’m in competition with the entire planet as more or less anyone (in theory) is capable of thinking about such problems. But interpreting dinosaur bones? You either have access to them or you don’t. Hopping on the train and booking a two-star hotel for a few nights was the bulk of the effort I had to exert. Once in the museum, I just reported what I saw.

Put it this way – you don’t have to be a genius to be an observer. And that is a very comforting thing.

Of note is that AI lacks this capacity for embodied knowledge. Indeed, the big thing that seems to prevent it from attaining true consciousness is its inability to interact with the world in real time. See “A Conversation with ChatGPT” for the sorts of games it can play with consciousness despite still not making it all the way there.

As a general matter, my submissions have often danced around the concept of place. See the following.

  • “Random Walks” discusses an interest in the immediate urban environment rather than the intellectual topics at stake in Harvard course loads.

  • The opening clause of “Ode to a Sheltered Zoomer” bemoans the fact that social media has “compactified” the world and induced a trend of rampant comparison that makes everything feel smaller than it really is.

  • “This Was Not Written by AI,” other handwritten posts, and the skeuomorphic redacted journal entries call attention to formatting, not just the form-independent message of a piece. Note that “Random Walks” also gets at this sort of thing with the line “the key is to stop viewing objects as referents to non-sensory thoughts.”

  • “Meetup with an Old Friend” gets at the polar opposite of this. Instead of the “visual appeal” of the text of The Brothers Karamazov distracting me from reading the book (as it had in “Random Walks”), I put the book down early, having (in my mind) confidently located the “lumpy, Platonic mass” Dostoyevsky was pointing to.

  • “How Does One Sort a Box of Old Photos?” synthesizes these two urges with the concept of yin and yang. That is, the embracing of place and the urge to drown oneself in detail is associated with femininity and increased activation of the hippocampus. The embracing of universality and the urge to collapse away detail via the process of generalization is associated with masculinity and reduced activation of the hippocampus.

  • “Pharmapolitics and the Vitamin D Hypothesis,” while not directly related to the present topic, brings up Vitamin D and testosterone and posits a connection between these chemicals and politics. “Journal Session with Low Vitamin D” later links low Vitamin D with a yin-like, spatially aware interpretation of a picture of a mountain range (rather than a yang-like, information-collapsing interpretation as a mere pointer to a concept).

  • “When Gen Z finally set its coveted gaze tapirward…” also brings up Vitamin D and testosterone. In some sense, this piece is a fictional variant of the dialogue from “Learning, Populism, and Reddit.” That is, in both pieces, the stuck-in-his-head chronic Reddit user is encouraged to take a leap of faith and just stake an arbitrary claim for once. Do note, however, that here it is masculinity that has been associated with an embracing of one’s place.

  • “After Eating Some Christmas Chocolate” mainly deals with other topics, though the invocation of the Grothendieck/Erdos divide in math is an interesting one, especially given the invocation of category theory in “How Does One Sort a Box of Old Photos?” So here, Grothendieck takes up the yang side and Erdos takes up the yin side of the divide.

I should also note that Moby Dick comes up from time to time. It gets shoutouts in “Random Walks,” “Meetup with an Old Friend,” and “Presidents Godfather Tier List.” Moreover, “When Gen Z finally set its coveted gaze tapirward…” is rather Moby Dick-ish, with its playful language and its usage of an animal as a springboard for a philosophical discussion. Now, as Moby Dick puts a large emphasis on masculinity, whiteness, and universality, I would say it embodies the yang side of the divide I’ve been putting forward.1

I have also discussed The Brothers Karamazov in my posts (significantly more than Moby Dick, which gets only passing references). While roping an entire novel like that into a dichotomy with Moby Dick is a bit of a stretch given the large variety of characters, I am reminded of the prosecutor Kirillovitch’s description of Alyosha:

“He seems to me to have betrayed unconsciously that timid despair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences and mistakenly attribute all trouble to European enlightenment, to return to their ‘native soil,’ to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth. Like frightened children, they yearn to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother; to sleep there forever in order to escape the horrors that terrify them.”2

For those familiar with Moby Dick’s Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” Alyosha is characterized by Kirillovitch as a sort of anti-Bulkington.3 That is, he gets the yin side of the divide.

Now, whether there’s actually anything of merit going on here or whether I’m just forcing very, very different dichotomies to assimilate into two very, very broad camps remains to be seen. It would require someone else to say, “yeah, I think you might actually have a point.”4

But I do find this connection of “place” with the Left to be an interesting one. The whole point of identity politics, one might argue, is to preserve a notion of place and difference by splitting the population up into various boxes. People are expected to accept whatever box(es) circumstance has placed them into (always with an unconditional self-acceptance, i.e., a high self-esteem) and to try not to be anything other than “themselves.” That is to say, they are not to feel any pressure to conform to a universally desirable mode of behavior. After all, such a thing would undermine diversity, which is taken to be an a priori good.

The entire project of modern academia, meanwhile (something the Left is far more trusting of at this point), is to rise to the challenge of understanding the world via a divide-and-conquer strategy in which everyone is given a place. Variations in raw academic ability (i.e., “genius”) between those in the upper echelons are taken to be so minor the only real thing preventing someone from understanding all of human knowledge is time – “I trust you and you trust me; I’ll carve out this corner and you’ll carve out yours, and we’ll come back to one another with sufficiently lossless compressions of what we’ve found.” Gone are the days where a high-IQ chap can effectively comprehend everything in a single bound – though right-wing conspiracy theorists still like to give this a try.

Also, those living in the urban environments (who are far more likely to be liberal) might have a stronger notion of place because all the “hype” in the society is right there in the immediate physical environment. Conservatives from the “flyover states,” meanwhile, may be more inclined to dismiss the relevance of place as they themselves reside in regions the broader culture has deemed lesser or boring. This tendency may be especially pronounced in the modern world, where the ascendant internet simultaneously yields constant reminders of the cultural dominance of cities and provides a means of dissociating from the immediate environment.

So, food for thought.




Influences Disclaimer5: This piece was finalized under the influence of a fair degree of milk chocolate (the entire bar, bringing me up to more than 100% DV of saturated fat…), but no other source of caffeine. Sleep was roughly nine hours in a pitch-black room made that way by some damn-good new blackout curtains. I took a Vitamin D supplement with my first meal (lunch…) and went for a three-mile walk in overcast weather starting at around 4:00 PM. There was no intense exercise today. If I had to guess, I would say my testosterone was on the lower side. I haven’t seriously worked my muscles in over a week.

Last night and this morning, I read a decent chunk of the most recent edition of The Atlantic, picked up in physical form at the bookstore. Throughout this reading, I fancied myself one of the “coastal elites” the magazine is aimed at. Also, while driving around this past week, the CD playing in my car (it’s an old vehicle…) has been the Beatles album Revolver. Reading The Atlantic and listening to this album are highly unconventional for me. In fact, I kinda get the feeling I’ve been cosplaying as a stereotypical New England liberal the past few days. Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue coat, blue everything - and a sudden, strange desire to drive to Vermont.




Notes:

  1. Though I didn’t notice this until well after writing “Ode to a Sheltered Zoomer,” the gist of that piece’s opening clause bears a striking resemblance to a passage from Moby Dick. Like the narrator of “Ode to a Sheltered Zoomer,” Ishmael bemoans the smallness of the world, literally complaining that it is a compact manifold rather than an infinite plane. See the following passage from Chapter 52, “The Albatross”:

    “Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

    “Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

    ↩

  2. This is from the Constance Garnett translation. ↩

  3. For Bulkington, the land is dangerous in that it provides enticing comforts that undermine the stoicism required to endure the whaling ship. For Alyosha, the land is everything. He kisses it after his dream, and a stone comes to symbolize his deep bond with Ilusha’s classmates. ↩

  4. In my more manic and speculative moments, I try to bring the concept of adeles from math into the political divide. Here, the liberals get the standard Archimedean metric (with their concept of continuity and piecemeal progress) and the MAGAs get the p-adics (with their ability to consistently beat the odds and land on strategically correct answers [i.e., perpetuate their own power] in a manner that is incomprehensible to folks operating under the normal way of doing things). But even I will admit this is getting a little schizophrenic. ↩

  5. The day referenced here is Saturday, May 24, 2025. ↩