Beginning again (11)

I began this trail of crumbs without giving any sign of where I was headed, and this has no doubt led to some confusion about what the exactly stakes were on each claim I made and why each crumb was placed where it was. This is a characteristic weakness of mine, in teaching as in writing: I always want to sneak up on my real point, as if arriving there by accident through an innocent and spontaneous process of inquiry; or as if the whole thing were some sort of story whose ending I don’t want to give away in advance.

 

So I want to “begin again,” in such a way as to bring out the overall gist of my thought and my purposes in these crumbs, and also to give everything a new “turn.”

 

*

 

Ten years ago, when I said that something was terribly wrong with our civilization, that “everything” had in some sense gone awry, people (even the very parents whose upbringing had helped produce this outlook) usually thought I was being hysterical or at least hyperbolic and one-sided. That is no longer the case. When I say such things now, almost everyone agrees with me.

 

When they agree, they are thinking mainly of certain large-scale political, ecological, and economic problems. These are the problems that, at a conscious level, are responsible for the rapid spread of generalized gloominess about the state of the world; but, real and serious as they may be, they are only half the picture. There has been a gradual hollowing out of our day-to-day and moment-to-moment existence—a degradation, material and spiritual, of our immediate surroundings. And this has worked on us, now consciously, now subconsciously, adding many additional dimensions and tones to our state of anxiety and despair.

 

(Neither of these processes—increasing anxiety about larger events and what I am calling the “hollowing out” of the everyday—are new. Both have been at work for a long time. But they have grown more intense and more complete in the past decade or two, and the factors that formerly compensated, or seemed to compensate, us—material security, social freedoms—have come to seem less and less convincing as compensation.)

 

Along with this sudden consciousness that something is wrong has come a feeling of powerlessness to do anything about the problems we see around us. In some people (usually those in the political center), this sense of powerlessness expresses itself in an insistent affirmation that the processes that are dissolving culture and reducing everything to commerce are “necessary” and therefore in some strange sense “good”—even as they lament in much more vivid terms everything that is being lost. In others (usually those on the political edges), it expresses itself in a vague hope (mixed, of course, with fear) for some immense upcoming crisis (an insurrection, a breakdown of civil society, a race war) which will “change everything”—even as they acknowledge, in soberer tones, that, should such a crisis come, things will probably change for the worse.

 

I take this feeling of powerlessness itself as a central problem. I realize that there are good reasons for it, but I do not accept it as inescapable. Because, whereas it is obvious why we feel it in regards to global ecological and political crises (the scale is simply too big), regarding our day-to-day lives it is much less obvious. The reasons are worth interrogating.

 

But if this was my point, then why did I spend much of the last ten crumbs talking about stories? Undoubtedly stories are my way into this subject because I often try to write them, and they will not seem as relevant to people who don’t. But I think they provide a useful lens for three reasons: (1) Because stories are how we make meaning out of our world, and one very useful way to describe what is happening to our world is that the meaning is draining out of it; or we are finding it harder and harder to know how to make meaning out of it. (2) Because stories present our world to us, they draw our attention to it, they make us see it in a way that is often clearer, more condensed, than our ordinary way of seeing. (3) Because a story depends on a character acting within the world, so that the problem of action and the problem of story are bound up in each other; I almost want to say, we can no longer tell stories about our world because we no longer are able to take meaningful action in it; or even, we cannot figure out how to take meaningful action because we have forgotten how to tell stories. That may be going a bit too far, or much too far, but it is usefully suggestive.