Prefatory Remarks in Advance of Site Re-Launch

Year Zero in transition

Some have noticed that I have taken an unplanned hiatus from posting here. There have been murmurs of dissension, and in some cases the voices have risen in volume above a murmur. All those concerns are of course well-merited and I understand that a few -- perhaps more than a few  -- will end their monthly  subscriptions as a result or decline to renew annual subscriptions. There is even a chance that this post will serve as a reminder, or, indeed, an alert, to some who had forgotten that they had subscribed in the first place. 

What I will say to those moved to take that step is that I am grateful that they subscribed in the first place and regret disappointing them -- but that I nonetheless hope that they will remain as free subscribers so as to receive the exciting new content I have in the works for a relaunch of the site slated for March 21.  I will be expanding the scope of my own personal vertically integrated messaging apparatus. In the fullness of time, I hope that some will consider re-subscribing once they have both been served enough of the unique content obtainable nowhere else that they sought by subscribing here to feel confident that they will continue to be adequately served going forward. And to those who have continued to subscribe despite the interruption in service -- proving myself worthy of that continued faith is my life's solemn duty. 

By way of partial explanation for the unplanned hiatus, I ran into some serious headwinds in December having to do with my family life, some of which I may be writing about in the memoiristic aspect of the site that I announced and never got around to fulfilling, in no small part because I didn't want to make the meta-drama of completing the work a part of the subject matter of the site itself. No excuses: others have written through events far more turbulent than the ones I am passing through today. And yet the story itself is one worth recording on its own terms and will, for those concerned to know, provide some retrospective illumination. Year Zero primarily concerns itself with a single topic -- the emergence and unfolding of the astro-turfed pseudo-morality as it becomes the established civil religion of the Anglosphere -- but it is also an all-purpose vehicle through which its proprietor can write on any subject, in any genre. The absolute freedom entailed by this fact has been a source of both wonder, for it is every writer's dream, and a source of anxiety leading to paralysis. It is time to overcome paralysis by living out the dream.

My time of turmoil happened to coincide with a sudden bout of good fortune. A friend has emerged who will be supplying me with the resources needed to make this site work with the machine-like efficiency it has lacked. Candidly, I have never quite been someone born to blog: I have never been a spontaneously well-ordered graphomaniac content to work in a solitary vacuum. But with his help, I have been able to populate this vacuum a support structure that can help me do my work at a new level of consistency and rigor. I have a list of a dozen stories sketched out in outline and will proceed to mow through them in the weeks to come. 

I will also be adding more outside contributors, each carefully vetted to be an exemplary instance of the thing that subscribers have sought out in my writing. Though a certain baseline skepticism is justified, the proof will be in the posting. With respect to my own life, salvation remains where it has always rested for every writer, in the act of writing itself. 

The story of the ongoing bourgeois moral revolution that has transformed the terms of reference through which power arrays itself in virtue, immunizes itself from critique, and increases its power and penchant to punish and anathematize whoever resists it will remain one of the defining narratives of our time. In the years to come, this moral revolution will find itself before the courts and on the ballot, where it will be to some greater or lesser degree constrained by countervailing powers. But it has already been institutionally entrenched, and it has already reshaped the language of moral justification and the rituals of conformity in politics, education, culture, and business in ways that will be permanent. The tone and tenor of American public and private life will not be free of the influence of these shifts in our lifetime. 

Reaction is of course sure to come, and is coming. Part of the role of this site is to mediate as well as chronicle that reaction, for the force of that reaction will have great destructive power as well. But we should not allow our fear of that reaction to prevent us from saying what is true about it -- that it endangers integrity in truth-seeking and expression that strikes at the core of every value that the scientist and the artist relies on, and will exert a deranging influence on every aspect of collective life that it touches. An elite drunk on its own fantasies of virtue while in possession of every lever of power is a great danger to others and also to itself.   

Virtually every subject is worth revisiting through the lens of what we now know about where the turn in American progressivism beginning around 2013 or so has taken us, for these events invite us to revisit earlier theories and practices of social change in light of what has since transpired. Having laid out the rudiments of a theoretical account, Year Zero will now move on to a thicker, more historically informed account of how we left the world of the Before Times behind. Much gratitude to all those continuing to participate in this endeavor.