Imperfect World (2 of 3?)

(Continuing off the end of the previous crumb.)

Are we then left with only two options: a wicked society or no society at all?

This impossible choice presents itself only because we insist on thinking in absolute terms. We want an arrangement that will guarantee us justice evermore—as if it were our responsibility to set a course for the rest of history. The Kantian fantasy has infected our thinking: we want all our political decisions to be worthy of becoming universal laws. But this is all contrary to the nature of the world, which is irremediably particular, in which all supposed universals are overthrown. Heraclitus is the medicine for the madness of Kant.

In our everyday actions, we show that we implicitly understand all this, for again and again we act inconsistently, according to innumerable considerations, in contradiction to our supposed principles. We call this is irrational; perhaps it is, in a narrow sense, but it is supremely reasonable.

It is in this spirit of sussing out each action according to its particular circumstances that we must approach the problem of community norms and the informal manner in which they are policed. At times the mob is right and at times it is wrong. A community that relies on formal apparatuses to regulate its relations, in which people call the cops or complain to management if they don't like their neighbors' behavior and have no other recourse but dirty looks when these formal apparatuses are out of reach—such a community is going to the dogs. But a community that resorts to lynching when it believes that someone has violated its strictest codes is also going to the dogs.

That sounds obvious-- and yet we do not seem to understand it, for we are, as a society, progressively dismantling all informal systems on the suspicion that they are prejudiced, tyrannical, unregulated and un-regulatable. This suspicion has achieved the status of a paranoia and is part of a collection of neuroses that forms a central feature of our culture.

These neuroses include our attitudes towards germs and hygiene and towards accidents, injuries, and disease, as well as towards regulation of conduct. Their ramifications include everything from our litigation system, to the insurance costs that hobble our healthcare system, to disposable coffee stirrers and plastic packaging. We might call them “the fear of contamination” or “the fear of the uncontrolled,” but I find it more revealing to think of them instead in negative terms, as an absence or a loss. Their common source is a loss of faith in the world, in its continuity, its solidity, its validity. We do not want the world with its vicissitudes, its sufferings, its calamities, its cruelties; we want the purified world of our imaginings. We want the millennium now, we want to build it ourselves.

Or rather we want it to have already arrived. We seem to believe that it ought to be here now. Hence the outrage with which people are wont to meet any imperfection however minute-- an ill-chosen phrase, an object that could under certain rare circumstances cause injury, an eating utensil not perfectly sterilized and bearing some faint mark of previous usage-- as if they did not know that the world has always been dirty and dangerous and unfair.

This faith that we lack is not necessarily a religious or a theistic one, but it is a part of what was once covered by religious faith. The prayer goes “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done”: it asks for paradise, it accepts the world. Maybe we can restore ourselves to a state of sanity with a faith in the world that makes no mention of God or Creator, but this cannot be merely a faith in the material world, inasmuch as material means measurable, verifiable. It must be a faith in qualities of the world that do not fall within our systems of knowledge. It must be truly a faith, a trust. And it must include and contain and surpass death: it must retain its meaning, its trust, even in the face of death. Otherwise, it collapses, offers us no solace, no solidity. So it may be possible to avoid the theistic element, but it will not be possible to wholly eliminate the mystical element.

With such a faith, we can be at peace and live and act within that imperfection and finitude of the world rather than formulate hopeless schemes to eliminate imperfection and to avoid finitude; we can abandon the dream of absolute judgment and settle for the partial, contingent judgment that is available to us; we can engage with realities instead of abstractions. Without such a faith, we cannot. So only by finding an apparently “mystical” faith in things as they are can we escape the blatantly fantastical dream of perfection. Again, rationalism is not reasonable.

Outsiders (1 of 3?)

My apartment in Brooklyn looks out on a side-street that ends, mid-block, at a footbridge. Two apartment buildings open onto this street, and my own opens onto the avenue around the corner. These buildings are all large and rent-stabilized and have gentrified very slowly, while the surrounding neighborhood has been uprooted, its inhabitants scattered eastward and southward as if by some strange wind that carries people instead of leaves and paper.

With no through-traffic, our side-street forms a natural gathering place. In the summer, kids sometimes play football in the middle of street. The older men play dominos at a folding table on the sidewalk. There is a van that parks in front of one of the buildings certain evenings and plays a mix of soul and dancehall at high volume until past midnight. Occasionally there are barbecues. At other times, there are screaming matches. Once or twice I’ve heard shots fired.

A couple days ago there was a block party. Late in the day, I came outside and stood talking with one of my neighbors near the end of the block, where a line of police tape had been stretched to stop cars turning off the avenue and disrupting the party. A white man in his late thirties or early forties was standing nearby spray-painting some piece of paneling from a motorcycle. He held the object up near chest level, spray-painting back and forth continuously, and in the windy air the fumes wafted over to where my neighbor and I were talking, smelling strongly and stinging her eyes. I asked her if she’d like me to go say something. She said, yes please do.

I walked over to the man and politely asked him if he could move over to the side, near the wall of the building, where the fumes would be less likely to waft towards us. I don’t remember his exact answer; it was something to the effect of: “You’re outside, deal with it.” It was delivered aggressively. I said that I’d been polite to him and there was no reason to be rude to me. He doubled down. Eventually I walked away—I was close to losing my temper.

As more people walked by and commented on the situation, it became clear that this man had been spray-painting here for some time and had been rude to others before me. I was told that this man was also in the habit of calling the cops on people on the block. At one point, several passers-by were all chiding him at once, though none very aggressively. A couple people called him a gentrifier, I said he was rude and disrespectful, I don’t think anyone so much as cussed.

It felt good to have the crowd on my side, and it was especially easy to feel righteous in this case, because I really had been polite and he really had been rude; because all the other people yelling at him were black, and most of them had lived in these buildings for many years; because this man seemed to stand against neighborhood, against community, against everything I find worth preserving in New York.

But it did not entirely escape me that I was a member of a crowd busy ostracizing someone for flouting its mores. Leaving out the racial dynamics, if this were a movie, I'd be one of the villains.

In a novel or a movie or a TV show, we know immediately that we are to side with the outsider, that he is righteous and the crowd that is railing against him is wicked. I remember first noticing this a couple years ago while reading Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” how the very fact of outsiderness in fiction automatically signals goodness. Even then it made me suspicious. Because there is a strange feeling of righteousness that we, as readers or watchers, feel in siding with the outsider against the crowd, as if we ourselves were courageously standing against a crowd; whereas in fact we are behaving in an entirely prescribed and automatic manner; we are acting with the crowd— the crowd, that is, of readers and watchers, all of whom know that the outsider is the good-guy. We are adhering to a mainstream value system.

But only if we are the audience to a work of fiction. Place us in an actual crowd whose mores are being flouted by a real individual, and most of us will, without a second thought, side with the crowd (and here too we will feel righteous). We are not always wrong to do this. When we talk of in-groups and outsiders we tend to imagine scenes of a gay teenager being picked on by homophobe classmates, but this is a carefully constructed fantasy. In most cases, the outsider is not expressing anything that we would recognize as an identity; he is merely breaking norms of civility: using a cell phone in a movie theater, taking up too many seats in a subway car, being rude, irresponsible, unneighborly. etc..

When we talk about homophobia, racism, etc., we are focusing on bad norms, and through this focus on bad norms, the very concepts of norms, of normal, of social pressure, have come under suspicion, so that by now many people see these concepts as something out of a dark past of prejudice and brutality. And it is from this vision that we come to the liberal ideal of the individual as a free actor, unconstrained by conformist social forces, peer-pressure, fear of his neighbors; the individual who is constrained only by the law, which acts to uphold the rights of man.

But the law is never enough. We need mores, we need the soft pressure of social relations to enforce all those small niceties of behavior that make it possible to live side-by-side in anything but a state of simmering mutual hatred. We need this even more in the city, where we are packed together, than in the small town.

And yet there is no way to ensure that these social forces will always behave justly. Indeed they are more or less guaranteed to turn tyrannical.

(This discussion is continued in the next crumb.)

Adult Purchase

It's as if the world read my crumb and wanted to bring it to life:

These are your options, oh children of this present age: you can embrace the bourgeois dreams that have long waited for you, smiling quietly as you abused them, knowing in the end you would come round; or you can rebel. And what is rebellion? Booze and sneakers! Could any satirist have put it so precisely and succinctly? Nor should we be surprised if, after gobbling up the great majority of creative minds of a generation, it is the advertising industry that, in its strange way, shows us ourselves most vividly.