What would people do for work? (22)

Two problems strike me right away:

1.     It wouldn’t work on a practical level. What would people do for work? How would they afford to buy goods from outside (like computers or olive oil or mechanical pencils)? Who would do all that farming? Etc.

2.     It would be claustrophobic, it would feel like a cult.

 

I present these not as objections to be resolved but as issues that are fundamental to the desire I have (that I think many of us have) to live differently—and to the more ambitious, more fantastical desire for a better world.

 

What do people do for work? At one level the answer is obvious: Some are teachers, some doctors, some farmers. We need plumbers and electricians, butchers, bakers, carpenters, tailors—maybe, if we take the local production thing far enough, blacksmiths, cobblers, joiners, and so on. But all of these jobs are internal to our town: they are hired by and paid by citizens of our town—which means they don’t bring in money from outside.

 

So presumably there are things like graphic designers and software engineers too, who work remotely or open offices in our town. (This already opens up potential contradictions with ideas we may have about the ethical validity of the larger economy, but let’s accept such compromises, for the time being at least.) But clearly, more labor has to go into food-production than in most places. And more labor has to go into everything else that we want to do on a smaller scale or with less automation: raking leaves, cleaning streets, transporting goods, making tools and fences and so on.

 

This presumably means we’d have to make do with less—less excess, less luxury, fewer amenities—and that makes sense, because less waste should mean less to waste. There is no principle so good, so effective, so honest as necessity. It is admirable not to waste because one is conscientious, but it is much better not to waste because one has nothing to waste, because one needs everything one has. To quote something I quoted long ago in these crumbs: “superfluous goods make life superfluous.”

 

But how much less is too much less? Because, for one thing, I think we are not prepared to do without everything—to never have olive oil again; to make our own fabric, our own paper, our own pens and pencils; to do entirely without microchips. And what if we want to travel outside our town, visit the city, buy a book published elsewhere? Complete isolation is no good. We would like to be a city on a hill perhaps, but not a city in a bubble.

 

Part of the point of thinking of a town is that it forces these questions to arise. If we take this town not necessarily exactly as I’ve described it but as an instantiation of any particular set of ideas about how a city ought to be run, food produced, buildings built, etc., then the questions raised here (how much would we have to do without—and are we prepared to do without that much, in the interests of sustainability, community, non-alienation?) is quite simply the question of whether that set of ideas is viable.

A town (21)

Say there were a town without cars. People walk or ride bicycles. Produce and milk (grown largely on nearby farms) are brought in on ox-drawn carts. The street lamps are few and not too bright, stores turn out their lights at night, and although the town is busy and lively, it is possible on a clear night to see many stars. When it snows, classes are canceled, and young people go out in teams to shovel the streets. There is a general view, promoted by the local schools but shared by most parents, that young people should not carry phones nor spend a lot of time looking at screens; of course, each family interprets this view in their own way. There is a train station nearby, and citizens of the town sometimes travel to a nearby modern metropolis—because they have business there, or just for a day trip. (If you don’t like some of these details, feel free to alter them to your liking. I’m only sketching.)

 

Would you want to go live in this town and raise your children there?

 

I think many of us would say, well, yes.

 

Of course, this town does not exist, and somehow it seems impossible. But why? What exactly is impossible about it?

 

(I am bracketing for the moment the question of how this town came into being. I want to explore how, having been established, it works, or if it works at all, and what its workings tell us about how we want to live.)

A society (20)

Alienation, ugliness, cheapness, materialism, subservience to our own technology, distraction, excessive haste, inattention, hideous cruelties carried out in secret while a finicky daintiness and moral rectitude governs in public, an accumulation of “knowledge” beneath which we can hardly breathe or see—none of these is new.

 

Except for the outdated technological references, Thoreau could almost be writing today when he says, “The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim… It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour… We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” (Walden).

 

Gandhi, sixty years later: “Only evil can travel by railways, because only evil wants to travel fast” (Hind Swaraj).

 

Something is wrong with modernity. It has been wrong all along, but it’s reached a new pitch. No prophet is needed now to warn us: we all feel the disaster upon us.

 

You can’t return to the past. But if forwards is terrible and backwards impossible, then where do we go?

 

*

 

Every project to turn back or remake modernity has devolved into nightmare; every project to respond gently to it with something other than its own logic has sputtered out and vanished. Its logic emerges supreme, unstoppable. I would like to call this the logic of capital, but that’s too easy. It is the logic of prosperity, of more for less—more goods, more entertainment, more information for less labor, less effort, less trouble.

 

The problem is not to defeat this logic, for it is already defeating itself: its promise is ease, comfort, certainty, happiness, whereas we are nervous, angry, confused and filled with despair. Even its basic premises are coming apart: the goods are cheap and ugly and break quickly; the food is unhealthy, the entertainment trashy, the work week keeps getting longer.

 

The problem is, what other principle is there?

 

What can organize human behavior on so large a scale, so powerfully, organically, and simply as the market? Nothing. Nothing. Let us think not of replacing it but of introducing other principles that adhere to different logics, principles strong enough to oppose it, to control it, to keep it from ruining itself. This was, by some accounts, to be the role of the state; the state fails to play this role not, as some believe, because it was hijacked by special interests, but because it never was a force opposed to modernity but a force of modernity. It is governed by the same logic: the logic of improvement, of efficiency, of growth, of material-political-economic power. The modern state, the modern system of private land ownership, the corporation, the principle of oversight and control from the center— all these emerge together, not incidentally but necessarily, outgrowths of the same vision.

 

What follows a fundamentally different logic must be of a fundamentally different kind: not economic, not legalistic, not contractual. It will not come from the state nor from any economic model or business initiative. It will not "succeed" in those terms. It will come, if it comes at all, from individual human beings entering into association with one another, based on agreements that are not enforced by law, but which are nonetheless felt as binding and are enforced by social pressure and by personal honor. So this new association will have exactly the same form (but not the same content) as those old, stiffling, prejudiced codes that we were so eager to shuffle off. It will not free us but constrain us. It will limit our actions, bind us to conduct that will not always be in our material “interests” or in line with our immediate desires. We will enter into these agreements, if we enter into them, because we understand that the constraints are necessary for the kinds of lives we want to live, for the kind of world (however small) that we want to live in.

 

Such an association could reasonably be called a society. (Whereas an arrangement in which people's obligations towards one another are wholly defined by contract and required by law perhaps should not be called that.)

Addendum to genuine encounters (19.5)

It is not only by categorizing someone’s views as irredeemably evil that one can avoid engaging with them. It is equally possible to do so by treating their perspective as transcendentally right. That is, it is possible to stultify a conversation, to nullify the possibility of encounter, not only by insisting that we have nothing to learn from someone but by insisting that they have nothing to learn from us. The first tactic is obvious, the second subtler, but its mechanism is not so mysterious: if a person has nothing to learn from us, then we have no reason to tell them what we think or how we feel, what we have experienced, where our views diverge. We cannot (are spared from having to) defend any position or action.

Maybe we have other even subtler tactics. Maybe all our political awareness has a second hidden function as a kind of innoculation against meeting one another—just as all knowledge of the world can be a barrier to seeing it. So that it is not only encounters across political divisions that we are lacking (and secretly longing for), but also across lines of race, ethnicity, class—indeed across almost any possible divergence of deep experience.

Genuine encounters (19)

Trapped in these two modes of engagement—the smooth politeness of the in-group, in which a set of moral/political judgments are assumed and perpetually reaffirmed (though sometimes half-feigned), and the belligerent moral/political outrage that is perfectly calibrated never to change anyone’s mind, never to risk a meaningful encounter between opposing points of view—our public discourse has become stultifying. If, in our private lives we are not always quite so trapped; if, at times we can float ideas we are unsure of or disagree productively with others, it is nearly always because we are in a group of people whose experiences, whose background, whose world-view are already close to our own.

 

Under these circumstances, a genuine encounter between people who are not alike, in which real differences of opinion and outlook can be explored, generates a lot of energy. This is not only the energy of stimulation and interest; it is also the energy of glimmering hope and relief at the lifting, however slight, of despair, because for a moment the political-cultural stalemates don’t seem quite so stale, the other not quite so other. Such encounters are not impossible to have, but they do require a lot of faith, good will, and readiness to try to understand one another, to search for common ground. Not everyone has these things to spare. Many are too frightened, too desperate, too angry-- but they are so by circumstance, not by nature. For not only do all our news outlets work perpetually to stir up exactly these emotions in their viewers, but the stupid wicked voice that chants out of the computer screen tells us that these are righteous emotions, that anger and outrage are the appropriate response. As if these were not already the warp and woof of our public discourse, like standing in a room full of people trying to shout over each other and telling your friends: we must shout louder, louder!

 

But some do have faith and good will to spare, some are or could be ready to try to understand the people they disagree with. These people must find each other and begin to talk. This is an idea someone suggested to me many years ago, as I was leaving Occupy; I think it’s as right and as good an idea now as it was then. Among its several merits is the fact that it’s perfectly plausible: it really could be made to happen. This is in part a result of another of its merits: if it began to happen, it would be a pleasure to those involved. They would want to keep doing it.

Interactions with others (18)

Why is it so difficult to write stories in our world? I’ve answered this question three different ways, and here is a fourth: maybe there is something predictable and un-dramatic about our interactions with others. Not always, not completely, but enough to make our lives dull reading. There are some obvious reasons that might be true.

 

We hear a great deal about diversity and inclusion, but our social circles have never been so carefully curated, so uniform in terms of age, upbringing, education, political beliefs. We live in little cultural cubbies, where everyone has the same way of talking, the same baseline assumptions, and disagreements are confined to subtleties—though many are ready to fly into a rage over even these. The more people live in these cubbies, the more intolerant they are of disagreement, and thus the more loath to leave their cubbies. Only on the internet do they encounter the “other,” and here they excoriate him with rhetoric as ineffectual as it is supercharged. (In fact, the apparent agreement within group is becoming increasingly superficial: many people have more heterodox opinions than they would admit to in public, but they reveal these only when they are confident of a sympathetic ear.)

 

We interact less and less with strangers (because in public spaces, we only look at our phones and avoid stranger’s eyes), or when we do, these interactions are rigidly circumscribed. In ancient times, it was a mark of moral corruption if you did not invite the unknown traveler into your home, feed him, give him a bed, learn his life story, and send him away with gifts. Now, if we must speak to him at all, we keep it brief and stick to our prescribed roles: cashier, server, customer, panhandler. Within these roles there is sometimes room for a friendly exchange, conducted in an easy tone, almost as if these were only two human beings meeting in the agora—but these are rarer and rarer, and they are always carefully delimited. A more frequent deviation from script is when the smooth conduct of business hits a snag, and someone loses their temper; but in this case there is usually only one real person involved, for the other is only the representative of a company or bureau or other equally inhuman entity, and has as it were removed their soul from the encounter and stowed it away somewhere, who knows where.

 

We have only two modes: a smooth politesse that avoids saying anything personal unless it is a cloying affirmation; and a seething rage that must be childish because it cannot be effectual: either because the other person has become, through processes that perhaps they themselves do not understand, the faceless avatar of an institution; or because, in a very similar manner, we have made them into the representative of a cultural group that we despise. In any case, hardly any real human encounters are possible.

 

As usual, in following the impulse of my thoughts, I have ended up grossly exaggerating the situation; but the picture I’ve painted is one that anyone who wants to can easily recognize.

 

So if we wish to imagine a better condition, it must be one in which our interactions are less predetermined, more full of risk and the possibility of narrative. This means that free and non-delimited encounters must take place among strangers and between people with significantly different world-views and experiences. On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, this requires that there be some binding mores that all parties respect.

 

Communes, at least of the kind we usually imagine, will not answer to this need; they seem in fact more likely to exacerbate the problem than to correct it.

Visions, more precisely (17)

I wrote that a vision “is a way of formulating desires and questions, of putting our longings in clearer and more concrete terms.” It strikes me that I can be more precise:

 

A vision is a way of interrogating our longings, of seeing whether we understand what we are longing for, whether what we are having is really a desire for something in particular and not, perhaps, a sort of itch or a mental tic or a nameless unhappiness that has not found its proper expression—of seeing, in fact, whether we really do desire it and are not deceiving ourselves and longing for something we do not want.

 

This is a real concern when we're talking about community, because of course there are things about traditional communities that I think we want to leave behind (their narrow-mindedness, their enforced conformity), and it's an open question whether any sort of close, stable community is possible without these things. Or rather, it's not clear what relationship there is between the longing for community and the longing for conformity. Isn’t this longing that I have felt all my adult life in fact (in part at least) a longing to live around people whose beliefs I agree with and whose conduct I affirm? And don’t I long for that because I am surrounded, or imagine I’m surrounded, by people whose beliefs and behaviors I deeply disagree with? And isn’t that cosmopolitanism? Or multiculturalism? Or is it? This moral outrage at and paranoid mistrust of our fellow citizens? And yet I’m well aware that certain projects to turn back from modernity have opted instead for an enforced conformity of nightmare proportions.

 

So what are we to do with differences of opinion, belief, conduct? Why have they devolved into acrimony, and how ought we to navigate them, and how far should they go? Aren’t there in fact some basic agreements that would be necessary to live better together—and can these agreements, in the face of all that has gone wrong, really be confined to conduct alone? And, if there are in fact necessary agreements, then how would those agreements come about and how would they continue, or if they stopped what would that mean, what would we do? And in what setting, on what scale, could any of this begin to make sense?

 

I am talking about visions in order to force us to ask these kinds of questions, even to insist that we try to answer them. 

 

But my point is not to "turn from problems to solutions” but to suggest a different way of formulating and organizing problems. When we say that something is “wrong” with the world, this seems to mean that we have in mind some other conditions under which this thing would be “right.” But often we don’t, and in that case I think it must not really be clear what exactly is wrong, what we even mean by "wrong." To think about, even just to dream about, solutions is not to turn away from problems but finally to take them seriously.

The question of scale (16)

I want to suggest that the reason we are unable to begin to formulate a vision lies in the simple problem that we don’t know what scale to imagine on. The nation, the province, the metropolis are all too big. My repeated insistence that we focus on the immediate conditions of everyday life is meant to free us from the need to think so big. But, on the other hand, the individual is too small.

 

If a new form of life is to come into being in the world, it must begin at the individual level. We are all drowning in bad habits and bad philosophy. We must begin to free ourselves from them, and this is long and difficult work—for they press themselves on us ever more forcefully and more deviously. But when we say that we want to live differently, we mean of course that we want changes in our surroundings, not just in our inner lives and habits.

 

The scale that most people I know look to—long for, dream of, at times even scheme on—is that of the community. But this is still too small—too small and too uniform.

The impotence of criticism (15)

This inability to envision comes with a great capacity for critical analysis. There is no shortage of articles and books describing one or another way in which our civilization has gone astray, and these are often astute and well researched, sometimes even eye-opening. But there is always a chapter right near the end of such books where the writer tries to say something about how whatever evil processes have been the subject of the book can be resisted and how certain groups of people are already resisting them. And I’m always struck by how, at this juncture, the clear-eyed authority with which the criticism was carried out suddenly gives way to a dopey and unconvincing hopefulness. When these books are more than a few years old, one can often confirm already that whatever hopes the writer pointed to have dwindled or died in the interim, while the evil processes have only accelerated.

 

I am always left the with the terrible feeling that the book didn’t accomplish anything. There must be thousands at least who read it, and probably the majority of them took its warnings seriously—but there was nothing really for them to do. They went on with their lives and the world continued on its trajectory. Most people didn’t read it. Some read other books on other topics, many read no books at all. The thousands or tens of thousands who read the book in question were scattered across a nation of 350 million, or even further abroad.

 

On every issue we see this same situation: those who are aware of it are scattered through a much larger population of those who are not; the ones who are so concerned that they are willing to alter their lifestyle to do something about it are even rarer. And even if a particular issue rises to the surface of the public discourse and gains mass attention, the left-right divide ensures that it can become a concern to at most around half the voting public, and these of course have no way to express their concern but to vote for whichever candidate wins their party’s ticket. Whereas the logic of markets, consumption, and advertising affect nearly everyone, coordinate the actions of billions.

 

So criticism becomes irrelevant. A moral or ethical consciousness can never have an affect. And this is the direct result of the scale of our society and of its administrative districts. They are all too big.

Visions (14)

Two weeks ago, near the start of this  trail of crumbs, I wrote that we have no vision for the future and cannot even imagine someone having a convincing vision. This may not be the cause of our feeling of powerlessness but it is at least an essential component of that feeling. I say this not because I think visions ought to guide action in any direct way, but for the simple reason that one who cannot envision a future obviously is without hope.

 

A vision is not a plan, and it need not even be the basis for a plan. It is a way of formulating desires and questions, of putting our longings in clearer and more concrete terms.

 

If a vision is to be worth anything it must be convincing: though it is a fantasy, and perhaps very far from becoming a reality, it must be a plausible fantasy; it must have verisimilitude. This is a tall order.