Adulthood (5)

When we think of adulthood, what do we think of? A respectable career, home ownership, spare towels in the linen closet, etc. There are of course other, more internal qualities that we associate with adulthood, but those are harder to perceive and to define; it is by the external markers of job, house, etc. that we most readily identify the adult and, by their absence, the one who has failed to achieve adulthood.

Let me then make the obvious observation: these are not in fact the markings of maturity but of membership in a particular class. But, because the class in question is the one that (nearly) everyone aspires to, these markers have taken on a magnified significance: they are not merely the markers of adulthood for the bourgeoisie; they are the markers of the adulthood that everyone is striving for. From the American dream and the fetish of “upward mobility” comes a confusion of concepts: success, maturity, class membership—which is which? There is a suggestion, almost, that the only true adult is the bourgeois adult.

Adulthood, then, takes on an aspirational quality: it is not something that everyone achieves by dint of surviving so many years on earth, nor even by dint of learning something from those years. It is something that one amasses. It comes from particular choices, choices that depend not upon moral strength or courage but on material prudence and conformity. This reorientation runs in strange parallel to the reorientation of class itself, from a fixed category that one is born into, to a kind of ladder that one must climb and climb— or fall!

And yet, at the same time, we seem to find something repugnant about the bourgeoisie, and what we find repugnant is almost precisely their (as we depict it) uptight, stodgy, comfortable, self-satisfied grown-up-ness. Perhaps no boogeyman looms as large as this one in our popular culture. All of rock and roll, all of punk rock rages against it. It is the target of all of mainstream Hollywood’s figurative rebellions: the young Victorian heiress bridling under her family’s uptight manners, the 1980s high-schooler turning the tables on repressive teachers, the suburban dad rediscovering pot and rock & roll—are all figures in revolt against adulthood-as-bourgeois-culture. It is impossible to know where one ends and the other begins.

Thus, at the same time that so many of us doggedly pursue bourgeois adulthood (or wonder what is wrong with ourselves that we fail to pursue it), we also imbibe a steady diet of fictional narrative glorifying the rejection of that form of adulthood and all the aspirations that come with it. As with so many contradictions that exist comfortably side-by-side within our cultural mythology, these fictional narratives do nothing to reduce the force of the command to grow up and become bourgeois. In fact, for me at least, they make that command much more powerful, because they seem to turn my resistance to it into something ridiculous, a playing-out of puerile Hollywood fantasies.

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Adulthood (4)

Midway through the “Twixters” article, we find this paragraph:

Twixters expect a lot more from a job than a paycheck. Maybe it's a reaction to the greed-is-good 1980s or to the whatever-is-whatever apathy of the early 1990s. More likely, it's the way they were raised, by parents who came of age in the 1960s as the first generation determined to follow its bliss, who want their children to change the world the way they did. Maybe it has to do with advances in medicine. Twixters can reasonably expect to live into their 80s and beyond, so their working lives will be extended accordingly and when they choose a career, they know they'll be there for a while. But whatever the cause, twixters are looking for a sense of purpose and importance in their work, something that will add meaning to their lives, and many don't want to rest until they find it. "They're not just looking for a job," Arnett [a developmental psychologist] says. "They want something that's more like a calling, that's going to be an expression of their identity." Hedonistic nomads, the twixters may seem, but there's a serious core of idealism in them.

In 2005, this set my teeth on edge. The discovery that my own dreams and ambitions were merely the predictable loop-the-loops of a member of a cohort of naive (and, note, self-aggrandizing) idealists was of course humiliating, but Grossman’s babying efforts to pat us on the back gave it all a more vicious bite. (His tone here reminds me of people who say things like, “Kids these days are geniuses! My three-year-old niece already knows her way around an I-pad better than I do.” I don’t believe these people are as naive as they pretend to be. On some level, they must realize these children are warped and addicted, but this awareness runs up against an incontrovertible command to tell kids they’re wonderful and brilliant, and the result is a sort of curdled positivity. Grossman’s self-deception is subtler, but it’s of the same general type.)

In the years since, I’ve heard Grossman’s assessment repeated in various forms, usually (thank heavens) without the babying cheeriness. “Millennials expect too much from a job,” baby-boomers tell me. It is clearer than ever by now that I am one of the millennials they’re talking about, yet I no longer feel embarrassed or condemned. I have grown more bold in my failure. Once it ashamed me, but now I stand behind it with gloomy pride.

Here is what I have to say to these baby-boomers. When you entered the labor market, whatever job you took, you had at least this shred of dignity and purpose: that you were “a productive member of society.” It had not yet become clear that more productivity was just what society did not need. You did not seem to be a superfluous being whose “contribution” could only every be a contribution to a vast, intractable problem. You did not look out on the world and seem to hear a voice, muffled but urgent, whispering:

There are already too many lawyers, we do not need more of them. There are too many books, please don't write any more of them. Too many articles fighting for attention. Too many non-profits fighting for funding. Too many people, please don't deliver any more of them. Too many lives, please stop saving them. Too many buildings, please stop building them. Too many objects, please stop manufacturing them.

I’m well aware how self-justifying this all sounds. I don’t deny the charge. Naturally I want to justify myself, just as much as any investment banker or insurance salesman. I’m no better or worse than they—my shortcomings are just of a different type.

And, I won't deny, I long to go back: I long to believe again in the goals that once seemed clearly laid out for me. More than that, I long to achieve those goals. I wish success and prestige would suddenly fall upon me. I wonder, if they did, if I would forget all these galloping thoughts, these insatiable crumbs, and live comfortably and without criticism. Maybe I would. But they don’t fall upon me, and so I must keep nervously crumbling this loaf of thought and sprinkling it on the internet.

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Adulthood (3)

In 2005, the year I graduated college, Time Magazine published an article by Lev Grossman about people my age and a few years older. The headline and subhead ran:

Grow Up? Not So Fast
Meet the Twixters. They're not kids anymore, but they're not adults either. Why a new breed of young people won't — or can't — settle down

This was the first of a wave of such articles discussing the strange Peter-Panish quality of my generation. (Do not ask me for other examples, I don’t remember any. Maybe I imagined them, maybe there were dozens.)

These articles irritated and unsettled me, but this was clearly not because the question they were asking was a bad one. There was something weird going on with my generation. We all knew it. We wandered the streets of large coastal cities like hungry wraiths looking for something solid to cling to. We wallowed in nostalgia for the pop-culture of our childhoods, which was of course a proxy for something else—a sense of security, maybe, but not material security—that we remembered having in our childhoods. Clearly, a good deal of what these articles were saying about us was, in some straightforward sense, accurate. This was why they were unsettling. But why then were they so irritating?

The clearest answer I can give to this question, and it is not a very clear one, is that these articles were like think-pieces written by a murderer, asking what is wrong with her hand that it keeps picking up blunt objects and banging them against round, hard things until those things crack open and their wet insides spill out. They are like think-pieces written by a drunk asking what is the matter with his belly that it keeps being full of alcohol. My point is not that the solution is obvious: an alcoholic may well ask himself why he keeps drinking, and the answer may be deep and complex; same with the murderer. My point is that (a) the problem is not isolated to the place where it is immediately manifest; and (b) it is perfectly clear why the writer is so intent on misunderstanding the situation. It is, after all, much more appealing to prod a sickly organ than to explore the dire state of the whole organism.

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Adulthood (2)

I grew up in a comfortable home. I went to private school, I did well in many subjects, I was considered promising. I went to a prestigious college, took time off, returned to school, dabbled in a wide array of disciplines, took more time off, returned a second time. I graduated, I took a full-time job, I worked for two years, I gave notice. I went abroad for a year, returned, took a new full-time job, worked a year, switched to a part-time position, began private tutoring. Another year passed, I left the part-time position, I started a blog, produced a play in my living-room, survived on freelance tutoring. I began working on a protest movement, abandoned my blog, stopped taking tutoring clients, gave away money, departed the protest movement disillusioned.

At this point, it occurred to me (not for the first time, but more forcefully than ever before) that I was too old to consider these my youthful wanderings. Looking over my life, I saw that the trajectory was not towards a settled career but away from it. This was, of course, very scary. I decided to buckle down, to make myself settle on something. I couldn't do it. I applied to jobs, to graduate school, but my applications were all delayed by indecision, begun too late, finished last minute. I received only rejections. I had gotten off of the train and could not find my way back on. At my parents’ synagogue on high-holidays, I would see kids I’d grown up with, now transformed into lawyers, doctors, professors.

I had the intellectual capacity to do a variety of things, but I lacked some temperamental ingredient. I’m not lazy: give me any job, and I work hard at it. I’m not apathetic or dull. On the contrary, I’m passionate and curious and enjoy solving problems. I have no difficulty getting along with other people. No, it’s something else. What is it?

Then a strange thing happened: I accepted my mysterious inability—not as something good or pleasant but as something I could not run from. Maybe it was a curse, but it was not a moral failing. It was not merely the accidental result of a series of careless decisions or listless dissipation. It was something essential either to my nature or to my relationship to the world.

In the meantime, I had begun to notice that a lot of the people I was close to showed similar symptoms. And by all reports, statistically speaking, my friends and I were no anomaly.

In fact, I had been long aware of these statistical trends amongst young people, but previously I had seen my participation in them only as a source of further humiliation. Now it seemed to hint at something more generally frightening but less personally demeaning. Maybe failure was in fact a reasonable response to the world. It was not the only reasonable response, perhaps, but it was no less reasonable, and, I began to think, in its peculiar way, no less honorable, than the alternatives.

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Adulthood (1)

“I have four clean towels in the closet at all times: I’m a grown-up,” said the girl at the next table. “I’ve got a hair-dryer too, and an iron and an ironing board."

“I can’t believe it!” said her friend.

“It’ll happen to you one day too,” said the first girl. “I didn’t see it coming. The other day, I looked around, and there it all ways, the towels, the iron, and I thought, my god, it’s happened, I’ve grown up.”

I could put up with no more of this. I turned around in my chair. “Listen,” I said, “what you’re talking about—that’s not being grown up, that’s being bourgeois. If you want to be bourgeois, that’s fine, that’s great, but don’t confuse it with adulthood.”

They looked at me, offended, naturally. “Some people never grow up,” murmured the second girl.

“You’re right!” I said. “In fact, hardly anyone does, no matter how many accouterments they manage to stock their closets with.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said the one with the four towels. “No one was talking to you.”

“Oh, I suppose it was a private chat? At high volume, on a self-congratulatory topic, in a crowded café garden? I suppose you had no intention that the world should hear of your graduation into adulthood, you mealy-mouthed little bragger!” I cried striking the table, and overturning my coffee mug, which poured its contents neatly into my lap, as though there were some natural waterway leading in that direction.

I leaped up as the two girls retreated, pale but giggling, into the shadowy interior of the café.

*   *   *

The preceding is of course highly fictionalized. I did in fact overhear a conversation more or less like the one described between two girls in a café a couple years ago, but I had the— was it good sense? cowardice? apathy?— not to intervene. I present this work of partial fiction here by way of introducing a theme I would like to devote some time to.

More on adulthood>>

Thoughts

A thought is like a drug trip. In the midst of it, everything seems so meaningful and interrelated. Later, one awakes with a headache and remembers, with a confused sense of nostalgia and disillusionment, the excitement of the thought, the impression it gave of largeness, of drawing together many different themes. The worst thing to do at a moment like this is to cling to the thought’s past glory and clarity, to take, as it were, the hair of the dog. In this way, one can soon become thoroughly addicted. Some thoughts are so delightful that people can’t get enough. Soon an epidemic gets underway, everyone I meet is high as a kite on some thought, knowing smiles frosted on their lips.

That’s why I call these things crumbs: so I don’t forget how far they all are from being a loaf.

Still, there’s no good reason throw away a thought in disgust the moment one recovers from it. One only does this out of embarrassment, so as not to be reminded what a little, incomplete thing one was enthralled by. Much better to keep old thoughts around as reminders. And because, after all, it is a little flake of the truth.

A Pragmatic Approach

What will you do, and how will you live, when you know that there is nothing after or beyond this life? Will you live life more fully, more wholeheartedly because your eyes are not fixed on the pie in the sky? Or rather: will you dread that incomprehensible void of non-existence more than any hell that religious imagery could conjure? Will you live more carefully, guard your life more jealously, because death to you is not a passage but an end so complete that you dare not look upon it, lest it take hold of your mind, and all possibility of significance vanish before the yawning vastness of its irrevocable negation? Will you become obsessed with safety, pile precaution upon precaution, try to leave no chink where the cold wind of void may enter— but all in vain, of course. Will you live then in a world of dross, a world where nothing is valued so high as the extension, however incremental, of this life? Will you devote yourself to the material, to diet and nutrition, to fitness and health, to sterilization of surfaces and utensils, to food storage regulations? Will you live in terror of hazardous chemicals, of hidden poisons and sudden accidents? Will you discover then that every moment is precious, not in that it is full of secret ecstatic meaning, but in that you dread to lose it more than you dread any humiliation or decrepitude and will pay whatever price for a few more of the same?

And if, on the other hand, you believe that the soul survives the boundaries of this life, that it sheds the body like a snake its skin, and slithers on to unknown realms, will you give up all joy and lust for life in patient waiting for future rewards? Will your vision be dim to earthly beauty, earthly pain, earthly joy, because your mind is fixed on that other world? Or rather: will you live here more fully for living here more lightly? In caring less for flesh and more for spirit, will you perhaps live more truly in the world, and find yourself closer to its real ecstasies and tragedies? If you do not think that the closing curtain of death renders everything flat and equal, voids all pain and joy, settles all accounts to zero—will these pains and joys not then seem far more significant? And if you happen to believe that pain here in this world corresponds to joy in that other and joy here to pain there, will this reversal of meanings laid atop the immediate visceral meanings not rather enrich than impoverish them?

For this world is already half spirit.

I make no metaphysical claims. By spirit I mean only those substances that are perceived by the heart and the intellect: we are sensible to them, we encounter them, feel them, cannot avoid them. To say that those substances are not “real” in the way that other substances are real is to draw an artificial distinction. What do we mean by "real" if not that which we cannot avoid?

The Arts

All ideology provokes opposition; powerful then is the ideology that contains the figure of its own opposition comfortably within itself.

Thus to the rigor of science is opposed the freedom of art; to the vapidity of consumerist culture, the edgy brilliance of art; to the conformity of the corporate office, the revolutionary exuberance of art; to the prudent uptightness of the nerd, the sexy recklessness of the artist. It does not matter whether corporate offices are in fact conformist or instead partake of artistic exuberance, or both; it does not matter whether the nerd is a lab technician or a banker or an insurance salesman; it does not matter whether it appears to be scientism or economics or mean kids at school or parents that oppress us. There is a wellspring of dissatisfaction, an abiding sense of being trapped in something; art stands as the figure of opposition to this feeling. In the myriad versions of the myth (in books, movies, etc.), the repressive force is dressed up in every possible disguise, but it draws its psychic power, its seeming reality from this wellspring, this sense of being trapped. The source of this feeling is certainly not science. It is not even reductive materialism, though that is surely a part of it. It is something larger than all these. My purpose here is not to name it. Perhaps it is unnameable. I am speaking only of the role played by art; these digressions are only to ensure that I do not seem to be simplifying and confusing things any more than I actually am.

Art is the spiritual outlet for the prisoner of rationalist ideology, the oxygen mask that drops down from the ceiling to alleviate the sense of gradual suffocation that might otherwise drive him to desperate action. This explains why it is precisely in the liberal, educated urban centers and amongst the most educated and rational classes that art is most devoutly fetishized.

At the same time, or rather at other moments, as it were under different lighting, science takes on precisely the virtues of art: thus the scientist as free thinker, as rebel against conservative belief systems, as champion of individualism, trusting in the evidence of his senses rather than the ossified wisdom of the past. I raise this point here only in order that the reader should not become confused by the double-image. Both depictions exist simultaneously and without real conflict. We see one, the lighting shifts and we see the other; the mythology is not at all destabilized.

Two important points must be made about this art which stands for all that we long for.

(1) Prior to about three hundred years ago, art had a very different role. There were, on the one hand, elaborate religious and mythological systems that sacrilized and structured the world and imbued it with meaning; on the other, there was painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc. that spoke and signified within the systems of meaning that religion and mythology generated, that drew its imagery and allusions and often its passion from them, that was frequently devotional and in many cases actually created for ritual purposes. Now, the religious-mythological structures have been wiped away, and art is left to carry the entire burden: to not only depict sacred events but to be itself the sacred event; not only to express the meaning that is understood to lie in the world but to be the very source and form of that meaning. This is a burden it cannot bear.

It is entirely consistent with its role as the new source of the sacred that art has played such a central role in disassembling—or rather, flouting, tearing down, making a mockery of—older forms and objects of sacredness and devotion. The new king must, first of all, get rid of the old one.

But it is perhaps in its capacity as engine of desacrilization that we see most clearly art’s allegiance with reductive materialism. Science itself, real science, can do very little to dissolve systems of meaning, morality, sacrality, etc.. (Claims to the contrary are made with stunning confidence by people like Adam Gopnik, but it seems to me these claims are all nonsense—a discussion for another time.) The dissolution of these systems requires something that can act on the cultural level, that will not only soberly suggest that a literal reading of their cosmological foundations is untenable, but will actually flout their mores, make a laughing-stock of their sacred objects, undermine them at what we might call the ground-level of their psychological power.

I am not necessarily advocating a return to any particular religion or in fact to religion in general. I am only describing the way in which art and radical materialism work together.

(2) Over the past hundred years, and especially over the past fifty, all that which goes by the name art has undergone a division. At one time, this division was described as being between “pop” (or “low”) and “high” art. By now the division is further advanced, and the two resulting strands appear with a new bleaker clarity. On one side is the work of a highly consolidated media industry; what distinguishes this work, first and foremost, is not its popularity nor its low-brow-ness nor any other internal quality, but rather the economics of its production. It is mass-produced for a mass audience, carefully tailored to market segments, and disseminated through highly efficient distribution systems. On the other side stand the Real Artists— simultaneously heroic pioneers of the new and heroic bastions of High Culture— maintained by a rickety system of patronage from grant-making organizations, wealthy parents, and Kickstarter. The most important point about this latter group is that their work is viewed by an increasingly tiny segment of the population, and this segment consists largely of the artists themselves and their close friends.

The preceding paragraph sounds curmudgeonly and obnoxious, I know. But is there any other way to view the situation? Please write in! Tell me!

Self-Flagellation (2)

A commenter suggests “another reason why [scientism]’s so appealing: elitism”:

I don't see it so much as self-flagellation… as the opportunity to push oneself out of the class of "menial service and stunted opportunity”, which is to be accomplished by pushing others into it.  It's the old "I'm smarter than you because I can detect the world is awful" rag…

All self-flagellation is at least in part about purification. And all purification is at least in part about elitism.

But as with so many things, it’s hard to know which is the cause and which the effect: do we sneer at the superstitious in bitter envy, because secretly we long to believe in the sorts of things they believe? Or do we suffer the misery of a crushing world-view simply so that we may sneer at others?

What I want to suggest is that the latter description (at least taken on its own) is in some sense grounded in the same bleak world-view that we're critiquing here. It understands human beings in essentially predatory, competitive terms. It finds our deepest motives in some reductive-Darwinist compulsion to climb to the top. True, I am tortured by envy and competitive greed. But this is not all I am, nor will I believe that it’s what I am at heart. I envy not because I am built to envy but because I am discontent in myself, because of some sadness, some fear.

Let us not doubt that economic motivations, class warfare, insensate gobbling greed are at work in all of us, in all of our mistakes. But let us continue to insist that there are other motives at work as well, motives that are irreducibly personal and human. Let us view ourselves and our adversaries as characters in a novel, not as subjects in a statistical study. The more we do this, the more we will in fact experience our lives more like a novel and less like a statistical study.

Self-Flagellation (1)

But we are not satisfied with this mortal kind of knowing. We want to know as God knows: definitely, perfectly. Which is why we keep raising up these systems of knowledge…

So I wrote yesterday, but today I’m not so sure. True, there is a longing for superhuman certainty; and the progressivist pleasure in overcoming the past, in marching forward into the future, what Milan Kundera called the Kitsch of the Great March; and beneath all this an innate human greed, a wyrmish longing to sit on a hoard treasure.

But, on the other hand, there is something viscerally unpleasant in the feeling that we have the world all figured out. It is a crushing thought, and not from any elevated intellectual standpoint but from a very simple human one. It drains the very color out of life. So the question is not answered and must be asked more plainly: why do we put up with these systems of knowledge with their pretenses of absoluteness—and not only put up with them but swallow them greedily down and beg for more? When the decree comes down from on high that there’s no such thing as God or magic, that art and emotion are only chemical processes, that nothing matters, we do not merely groan and sadly accept our doom. No, we gleefully repeat it to everyone we meet. We heroically devote ourselves to it, we laugh at anyone dreamy-eyed enough to doubt it and revile their ignorance and delusion. Yes, we lash ourselves and one another for all the world like people who like to be whipped.

Until an honest observer must begin to doubt that there ever really was a decree from on high. Until an honest observer begins to think that the decrees are really generated down here below, and the monolith up on the hill (the cathedral, the university) is only a sort of show-tyrant, a figure onto which we project our collective compulsion to tyrannize and flagellate ourselves.

Progressivism (3)

If you want to pile something up, it has to be the sort of thing that stays put. But what sort of thing stays put? I’ll tell you what sort of thing: a thing that’s not alive.

Living things— living virtues, living understandings— wriggle away, shed their skin, become unrecognizable. The understanding that I have called wisdom is living understanding. It lives in the mind. To make it stay put, you have to kill it, stuff it, taxidermy it. It looks the same at first, but it takes only a moment to see that something essential has been removed. It’s not an animal anymore. It’s a wall-hanging.

Moderate Skepticism

There is nothing so dangerous as a moderate skepticism. A radical skepticism is at least logical: nothing is known, nothing is knowable, the chain of logic has no starting point. Such an idea has reached its terminal form. It has discovered the one thing that is definitely true— that nothing is definitely true— and is ready to reveal itself for what it really is: not an insight into the uncertainty of knowledge but a simple mis-understanding of what it is to know. It is then only one easy final step to abandon the fantasy of absolute knowledge and plunge back, open-eyed and unburdened, into the world.

What is dangerous is a partial skepticism, a skepticism that says: all those other ways of knowing are uncertain, but here is the One Way that is certain, here is the path to positive absolute knowledge.

At different times, in different places, different paths are given this idolatrous privilege. In some circles, it is a certain book; in others, a set of research methodologies. It is not that the bible is not full of wisdom. It is not that statistical studies will not generate knowledge. But this wisdom and this knowledge are subject to the same fundamental uncertainty that characterizes all human knowing. To know still means what it has always meant: that we have hold of a thought that has so far proved useful. And what we find, when we consider our experience in the world (like good empiricists), is that many of the thoughts that prove most useful are of the most indefinite sort: hazy, contingent, un-anointed by any magical source of transcendent truth.

But we are not satisfied with this mortal kind of knowing. We want to know as God knows: definitely, perfectly. Which is why we keep raising up these systems of knowledge, which are precisely Towers of Babel: projects of lifting ourselves up as high as God, to see as far as God. We do this even when we no longer believe in God— and why not? If there’s not already someone up there, that just leaves more room for us!

Progressivism (2)

Clearly certain kinds of questions are best answered by the accumulative type of knowledge: how to build a house, how much weight a bridge can hold, how to treat a Streptococcus infection, etc.. These are important questions to which we all sometimes need answers, but they are not the kinds of questions that most of us spend most of our time worrying about. Rather we spend our time worrying about how to navigate relationships—with other people, with the various parts of ourselves, and with various Other Things that may or may not be part of ourselves. This is not irrational or neurotic of us: it is in these relationships that we in fact find nearly all of the satisfaction and joy and misery and terror that are our lot in life.

Over the past 150 years and especially in the past 50, a lot of effort has gone into producing scientific answers to questions about these types of relationships. Approaches have varied. At one time surveying “test-groups” and “control-groups” was in vogue. Now I hear neural imaging’s all the rage. And there’s a lot of popular reporting, in magazines and on websites, on the supposed insights provided by these methods. However, no one I know has actually found any of it useful in answering questions like, “Should I marry the person I’m dating?” or “Why does my job seem so meaningless?” or even “How do I talk to my roommate about the dishes issue?” and “Should I go home for Thanksgiving?”

Will accumulative knowledge someday be found that bears on these sorts of questions? You may choose to keep an open mind and say that it might, but, if you are not entirely fanatical, you will have to admit that it also might not. That is, the questions to which we are most eager to find answers may be matters not of knowledge, but of wisdom. If they are, this is no threat to science, so long as science is content to speak only on those subjects about which it can speak. So long as it is content to be only one little system, not the whole System of Everything.

* * *

In the same way, we should contemplate the limits of progressivism. No doubt certain types of societal virtues are of the sort that we can pile it up like scientific knowledge, but others may prove slippery, and the slippery ones may turn out to be the most important. Maybe, even as we are working to make everything more just and more kind and more fair, these slippery virtues are slipping away. Maybe every incision we make in the fabric of culture to insert something good is a hole through which something else that we do not even have a name for is draining away.

What would these slippery virtues be? They would be things that are easy to sense but difficult to define. If we could define them, we could hang onto them. Whatever can be definitely described can be definitely remembered and definitely preserved. But, again, some things leach out of the very words of which they seem to be made.

The progressive believes that changes made for the good of society will in fact increase the good of society; therefore, the progressive seems to be in favor of change and in favor of justice. The opposing position is not (a) a desire for things to stay the same or (b) a preference for injustice. The opposing position is a kind of caution with regard to change, a sense that there is something delicate and precious mixed in with all the ugliness of the world, and that these delicate precious things are the easiest to lose sight of and thus the easiest to lose altogether.

A person who holds this opposing position is interested in conserving something, and so we might call her a conservative, but she need not hold any of the particular positions that are today associated with that term. Likewise, the particular political positions that we associate with the term "progressive" are only a small subset of the issues to which a progressive outlook can be and frequently is applied.

Progressivism (1)

What is progressivism? According to Wikipedia: "the support for or advocacy of the improvement of society by reform." This may be true, but the emphasis is oddly placed. Who's not for improving society? If reform will get the job done, who wouldn't support it?

Here's a definition I find more revealing: Progressivism is the belief that, by dint of constant effort, injustices can gradually be eliminated, the world made progressively better. The key word, of course, is "progressively." Very few people would deny that great effort can occasionally make the world better. The controversial and therefore defining element of the progressive position is the belief that this improvement can be sustained over time, that the improvements can be made to accumulate.

For the progressive, then, having a society is like doing science. Or perhaps I should say: a scientist is a type of progressive. In a science, knowledge piles up. Error is gradually removed. Science progresses.

But there is another kind of insight—let's call it “wisdom”—that does not work like this. Wisdom does not accumulate. It resides in ancient texts as surely as it lies in modern ones, perhaps more surely. Because, in order for something to accumulate, it must stay put. Wisdom will not stay put. It slips away, sneaks off just at the moment one thought one possessed it, leaches out of the very words that it seemed to be composed of and leaves them dry and empty, goes into hiding, reappears somewhere when one was not looking for it, is glimpsed from a new angle and mistaken for something new and strange, then revealed in a flash of understanding to be something old and strangely familiar.

In order for something to accumulate, it also must be transferable. Science is a cumulative project because the moment I discover something, I can tell you about it, and then you have it; you don’t need to go out and discover it again for yourself. You can replicate my experiment, but to replicate is not to discover: it is only to confirm, and thus to reaffirm the communality of scientific knowledge. This is why science is powerful. But this is also why it is anti-human: the individual journey no longer matters. The individual is displaced from the center of thought to its periphery. The project of learning, of discovering, of knowing, becomes one in the service of which individuals may act, but whose result, whose purpose, whose subject lies beyond any individual.

But wisdom does not work this way. Wisdom cannot be transferred. It is perfectly possible for you to tell me, in the plainest words you know, what you have discovered in the way of wisdom and for those words to mean nothing to me, or—worse still—to mean something entirely different to me than they mean to you.

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I Stand up for Murk (2)

Let us defend confusion and unclarity because they are right, but also because they are all but defenseless. Imagine, for example, that I believe I understand something but to you it is murky. Are you so bold as to claim that my understanding is wrong when you do not have a clear understanding of your own to oppose to it? And, even should you have the boldness to believe that I am wrong, are you not almost certain to say that what is wrong is the conclusion I have drawn, not the fact that I believe my conclusion is clear? For what person in a state of not-understanding is so bold as to say to one who seems to understand, “You may very well be right in your knowledge, but you are wrong because you know it and are not confused by it, whereas I am right because I am in a state of confusion”? Not one in a million! Therefore, we must stand up for unclarity, because unclarity will not stand up for itself. We must stand for shadows, because shadows flee from light— white, electric, searing light— but a body may yet stand in the way of the light and stubbornly cast a shadow.

I must clarify what I mean by unclarity. I do not mean obscurity and opacity in speech and writing nor vagueness and haziness of thought: not the unclarity of jargon and obscurantism, not the confusion of a lazy mind. What I wish to champion is the honest confusion of one who strives to understand but has not yet, or who did once but that understanding has dissolved, or who now understands but remembers the state of confusion that came before understanding, holds to it so tightly that the past confusion is inextricable from the present understanding.

In fact, it is those who believe in clarity and certainty who so frequently speak and write in a manner that is impossible to understand. And this is no accident: impenetrable language is a very good method of hiding chinks. And there will always be chinks, for clarity and certainty can only only occur when something has been glossed over— some gap, some uncertainty, some moment of unprovable interpretation hidden away, buried under jargon, or, better still, inside of jargon. The purpose of jargon is to refer quickly to something that supposedly is already understood— but is never really understood. And so it is not in fact referred to but rather leapt over.

The person who takes the position of uncertainty and unclarity, on the other hand, is able to speak and write very plainly, though his plain speech and writing may sometimes indeed be incomprehensible, as is the case, for example, in the writing of Kierkegaard. However, this desperate, wild incomprehensibility is unmistakably distinct from the cool, breezy incomprehensibility of jargon and technical exactitude that one finds, say, in a textbook on finance. One is a baring of the soul, speaking from the depths of its passionate confusion; the language is open and plain, but the content is bizarre; the reader can follow it at each step, but it is like following the footsteps of a blind person lost in a wilderness. The other is a smooth impenetrable carapace that repels inquiry. No honest reader could confuse the two.

But are we then to mistrust all conclusions? Must we suspend all judgment? And will it not then be impossible to act? Is everything arbitrary? No, no, no, no, no, no. Were there nothing right and wrong, nothing to understand, then there would be no need for confusion. One could persist in a state of happy certainty. Universal relativism is as clear and certain, as whole and complete and totalizing, a philosophy as there is. It is because we must decide and must act that we must plunge into confusion. And yet it is very often the case that my confusion proves crippling.

I Stand up for Murk (1)

If two people are in disagreement in that one (person A) believes that the meaning or outcome of a particular thing is clear whereas the other (person B) thinks that the meaning or outcome is unclear, murky, ambiguous, then it is nearly always best to side with person B, for she is closer to the truth. This is so even when the meaning which person A believes is so clear is in fact, in some demonstrable way, the correct meaning. For the dispute is not over what the meaning is but over whether it is clear. And until one has seen how the meaning of a thing is confusing and uncertain, one has no right to declare that one understands the thing. One who has not passed through the swamp cannot be said to have reached the castle. If they are found in the castle, it is only by chance and by ignorance. They should be sent back out of it.

Is it not the great mistake of our age that we believe that things can be made perfectly clear and wish to make them perfectly clear: either that we can know precisely the nature of the divine (fundamentalist religion) or that we can know precisely the nature of the world (fundamentalist “Sciencism” and radical materialism)? Is it not in the name of clarity, of removing all that refuses to submit to the clarifying gaze of some vast monolith, that nearly everything is to be destroyed: the heathen and the infidel, along with every untamed spark of the soul, the very existence of the soul, the reality of sensation and of thought? Even the possibility of meaning itself must fall before the insistence that all meanings be made clear. There are many here among us who are prepared to reduce the world to absolutely nothing, so long as that nothing will finally be clear and definitely known. But even then the unclarity persists, and they are forced to obliterate nothing as well.

When, in my introductory physics lecture, I explain Galileo’s principle, that all motion is relative, that nothing can be said to be moving or stationary on its own but only in relation to other objects; or when I write on the blackboard Newton’s Third Law of Motion, that if I exert a force on you, you must exert an equal and opposite force on me; or, to take a simpler example, when I tell my students that it is possible for an object to accelerate at a constant rate, that is to be forever changing (its velocity) but changing in a way that remains forever the same; or when I reveal many other things like these— my students always nod and agree that this makes sense, and I know that none of them has understood a thing. Weeks later, the clever ones will grow confused; they will squint and furrow their brows and say that they cannot understand; the most honest of them will doubt me outright, will think perhaps I am wrong about these laws of motion. A few then will come to understand, but to understand in such a way that they can readily find their way back into the position of doubting and not understanding. Over time, it is very possible that they will forget the position of doubting and remember only the fact that was finally stated. In this case, they will have lost understanding and retained only an empty statement. I know that this can happen, because it happens to me. Every semester, going through the same material, I at first can only state the laws; but by dint of effort, I can bring myself back to not understanding them, to finding them baffling.

I tell my students that they must go by way of confusion. This means nothing to them at first, for in many cases they hardly know what it is to be confused in the sense that I mean. They know, of course, what it is to fail an exam, to get an answer wrong, to be “lost”— by which they mean a sort of blankness in the face of something. But to be confused, to discover confusion, one must have thrown oneself at an idea with a kind of blind faith that there is something there in the darkness beyond their understanding to grasp. Knowledge may be got simply, by reading or listening; but understanding can result only from a leap of faith. This is what I am trying to teach my students. Some of them gain an inkling of it, a few even slightly more than an inkling. I am saved, professionally speaking, by the fact that I am only expected to teach them "physics"— by which is not meant the true science of physics but only a set of formulae and diagram-drawing techniques.

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An Unremarkable Beginning

I find I am a regular factory of thoughts too unfinished to be essays. When I try to build them up into something substantial, they turn back on themselves, devour themselves, become absurd, embarrassing, or else crumble to dust. At the same time, all these thoughts run together, appear to be part of a single vast web of thought, which I can never articulate because I do not know where to begin, but which obsesses me, which I can never stop thinking.

I have tried for some time to deal with these thoughts by venting them on my friends and family in the form of "emails" and "conversations." But, though my friends are strangely indulgent of this habit and have not fled my company as one might expect, I find the approach has other downsides, downsides I shall not name. I have determined therefore to share these thoughts in a more public forum. Perhaps this will solve nothing, only time will tell. I wish to begin with an especially unremarkable thought, a thought sure not to go too far.

The world of the past was not simpler than the world of today. Quite the reverse: it was far busier— richer, denser, more elaborate. The literature had more words, the painting more marks, the architecture more decorations. Each house, each window, each cornice, each cup, each plate, each suit, each dress was unique. And the further back you go, the more this was true: after all, what could be aesthetically busier than a wild wood or an uncultivated field? It is the modern world that is simple, clean, regular: each thing like the others of its kind, each building, each block, each street, each city.

But the old world was dark and quiet, and the people were not so numerous. The modern one is loud and bright and packed with shoppers. Maybe minimalism is a response to overstimulation.

How I long for that old, dark, intricate world, which I may or may not be imagining.