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.