The Weekly Wit: The Drugs Don't Work...

On drugs and art; a victory for cosmic irony, and aghast times at Twitter High.

Reclining Nude by Amedeo Modigliani (1919)

Welcome to the first edition of The Weekly Wit, a satirical review of news and culture.

The Drugs Don’t Work

I pity the poor famished souls who’ve never sipped absinthe in a disreputable bar, nor glimpsed the divine by listening to Beethoven’s ninth whilst submerged in MDMA. I digress.

This week, scientists in The Guardian (Of course it was The Guardian) breathlessly claimed that drugs and alcohol have no effect on creativity.

Researchers insisted altering one’s chemical landscape with alcohol, amphetamines, or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) does not inspire creativity among artists or mere mortals.

Dr Paul Hanel, from the University of Essex’s psychology department, said: “It doesn’t do anything for creativity. People don’t benefit from it—it just has no effect at all.”

Researchers also scotched the vogue for psilocybin—an article of faith amongst Silicon Valley tech bros, and amongst my more alternative friends—declaring those on magic mushrooms reported ‘feeling more creative’ whilst actually underperforming their sober state.

The drug and booze-soaked creative genius is all a myth, they said. Travel, exposure to culture, meditation, and training are far more effective than dipping one’s brain in LSD.

There are a few things wrong with this little study. Firstly, nobody claims the source of great art is drugs and alcohol itself.

Secondly, if travel and culture and meditation were prescriptions for creative life, we’d be riding the rip curl of a Generation Z-Millennial artistic tidal wave. You may have noticed our current time is not exactly brimming with literature, art, or music.

But the cliché of the troubled artist is not the myth many would like us to believe.

In his work, Solitude, Anthony Storr studied a worship of writers:

“Of fifteen writers, nine had seen a psychiatrist, eight had been treated with drugs or with psychotherapy, and four had been admitted to hospital. Two had suffered from both mania and depression, whilst eight had suffered from recurrent depression only. Six had symptoms of alcoholism. One committed suicide two years after the study was completed.”

In summary, writers were five times more likely than the general population to display such troubling features.

But the study in The Guardian misses the point. Drugs and alcohol don’t create good and great art, but unorthodox, independently-minded artists do. Drugs and alcohol, and the tendency to indulge them, are mere symbols of an independent nature. The sensual pursuits, then, are a symptom not a cause of the creative pursuits.

Perhaps this explains the cultural dearth amongst those under 45. We are some of the most conformist, most anxious, most depressed, most censorious, most sober, and most artless of generations. Conformity and creation go together like oil and water.

We drown at birth our novels and dramas and films and symphonies in a noisome sea of Twitter, doom-scrolling, and silliness. And we do this without a drink resting in the other hand!

Such is the fate of a culture hostile to the outsider and to the eccentric, those authors of almost everything truly progressive.

Reader, at this rate Generation X will be the first generation ever to complain the youth of today aren’t decadent, rebellious, or plain crazy enough.

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Talk isn’t Cheap

In other news, a Russian pro-war blogger by the name of Vladlen Tartarsky received an explosive reward on Sunday for his services to inhumanity and barbarism.

At a St. Petersburg café, Tartarsky, real name Maxim Fomin, had met fans of his lurid cheerleading for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the murder of thousands of Ukrainians.

An ‘admirer’ approached the stage, and handed Tartarsky an award—a golden bust of himself. Two minutes later, the pro-war blogger felt what thousands of Ukrainians have felt: that of his flesh decamping from his skeleton.

A vicarious connoisseur of grotesque primal urges, the neolithic Tartarsky spent much of his time calling for Russian soldiers to ‘kill as many Ukrainians as possible.’ Why? Perhaps he was picked last for the school football team and struggled to win the affection of raffish women. That’s usually the case.

After Russians last year annexed four regions of Ukraine, Tartarsky cut a jingoistic jib: “We’ll defeat everyone, we’ll kill everyone, we’ll loot and rob whoever we need to, and everything will be just as we like it.” 

(Reader, notice that surreptitious ‘we’—the scarlet letter of the eternally frustrated.)

Unlike the departed, I refuse to luxuriate in the death of others. But we can, at the very least, appreciate such cosmic irony.

Tartarsky inserted himself into horror, encouraged horror, and bloodying his soul but not his hands, revelled in horror. The irony: Tartarsky played the role of a tough guy. Like an actor, he received an award for playing a role. Ultimately, that award—a golden bust of himself—rewarded Tartarsky with the same end as those whom he wished a violent death.

An eye for an eye will indeed make the whole world blind. This is not a victory for humanity. But it is a victory for irony.

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Checkmate…

The reason I avoid Twitter is for the same reason I don’t withdraw my savings and wax the lot on crystal meth: I just don’t have the time.

Anyway, Elon Musk is struggling to convince the New York Times to fork out $1,000 a month for their coveted ‘verified’ check. For the disinterested, Twitter is like Lord of the Flies mixed with Mean Girls. The checks, which come in gold or blue, are status symbols for people who peaked in high school.

Basically, Twitter High is literally falling apart.

Good. The lead-crime hypothesis suggests that children exposed to high levels of lead in the 1970s later sparked a violent crime wave.

Researchers claim exposure to the high levels of lead then found in paint, gasoline etcetera decreased IQ, increased learning and behavioural difficulties, decreased impulse control, and increased violent crime.

Reader, I’m willing to bet that thirty years from now, experts will conjure the ‘Social Media Madness Hypothesis.’ Social media and poor mental health are indelibly linked. Sociologists will marvel at how the loudest and most extreme voices defined this most tribal, troubled and tumultuous of times.

Twitter is to our culture what lead paint is to our brains.

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Witticism of the Week

“You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.”

— Norman Mailer

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What I’m Reading

• The Free Press: The von Trapps of Harlem by Suzy Weiss

• New York Times: Not Your Daddy’s Freud by Joseph Bernstein

• New Criterion: Darkness Visible: Auden Collected by William Logan

• Spectator World: The Indictment that Broke the Country by Ben Domenech

• Book: Beyond The Wall: East Germany, 1949 - 1990 by Katja Hoyer

  • Podcast: Club Random with Bill Maher: Russell Brand

In case you missed it…

Therapy Speak

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A personal note…

Thank you for reading Oxford Sour. Feel free to send this column on to like-minds. And of course, please subscribe.

Bon weekend!
Christopher

Oxford Sour

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