Wiser, if not more sagacious (26)

I posted all that on Friday, and I do not at all retract it, but on Saturday I read something in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance that seemed to have been placed there for me, to remind me of the other way of thinking. Blithedale is a novel inspired by Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist utopian commune that he helped found in 1841 and which lasted all of six years. I’m reading it for the reason I read most things: because Tanya said I should. She picked it out—she even ordered me a copy—because she’s been reading these crumbs.

The novel opens with the narrator leaving Boston for Blithedale, the fictive stand-in for Brook Farm, “in quest of a better life.”

 

A better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so, now; it is enough if it looked so, then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic, is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt—and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

   Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one’s day dream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that! Its airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme. They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies, that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city-clocks, through a drifting snow-storm.

 

This is all true. I do not for a moment regret the four months I spent working on Occupy Wall Street, though I consider that a failed project. Yes, it had its political impact, but it failed on its own terms, failed in terms of the dreams and visions that drove the people who worked on it—failed absurdly, enormously, embarrassingly. When I bring up Occupy nowadays, if people have anything to say about it at all, it’s usually that we did it all wrong, that we should have had a vision, a strategy, a clear set of demands—but they don’t know what they’re talking about. It was much worse than they think—and much better too: much more wild a dream, much worse a reality. And I say that, of course, with a kind of pride.

 

It would be Hawthorne who reminded me of this, that great defender of failures, outcasts, sinners, lost causes. For a long time now, I have felt myself aligned with failure. I mistrust success—maybe it was admirable in the past, but nowadays it always comes with an ugly habit of self-promotion, an unwarranted self-confidence, an excited attachment to the latest trends. I mistrust the hip, the cool, the trendy. I love those who don’t know what to do with themselves in this world, who have brains and talent but can’t seem to put them to use, who would rather lose with their intellect and moral sense intact than win on the world’s terms.

 

But there is no contradiction between this and what I wrote on Friday. They are two sides of the same coin. To think practically about one’s dreams is exactly to risk failure. What remains perfect and abstract can never fail. It is only in the real attempt, in the encounter with reality, that we can meet with failure. When we fail, we know we’ve tried something.

 

To the questions in my last crumb (How can we be both radical and pragmatic? How can we radically reject and at the same time meticulously salvage?) the only possible answer begins with actually trying to make something.

The radical and the pragmatic (25)

But doesn’t the preceding thought lead straight to centrism? Isn’t the center the realm of pragmatic compromise, of detailed understanding of the actual workings of government and economy, of dealing with the world as it is? And isn’t this whole trail of crumbs precisely radical, theoretical, idealistic?

I would like to get out of this easily, by saying that the center is controlled by special interests and bad philosophy, a degraded and reductive materialism, that it does not serve anyone’s interests except for those of the economic ruling class. All this is true, but it does not quite resolve the contradiction, because, for one thing, actual practical governance always does involve power, moral compromise, interested parties. It is, by definition, not ideal—and this is precisely its virtue.

 

In fact I think I am face-to-face here with a very deep problem. The situation we are actually in is bad. Incremental change is no change at all. Things keep getting worse, and all the best efforts of activists and nonprofits hardly slow it down, much less turn it back—half the time they seem to be contributing to the problem. Everyone knows it’s getting worse, left and right, liberal and conservative, but their stories about how and why grow ever more one-sided, divisive, hysterical, hateful. Meanwhile, those who present themselves as, and in some sense are, dealers in practical realities, in the compromises and needs of the real everyday world, are the ones who are leading us (confidently, proudly) further and further, faster and faster, into disaster. So we want to live differently, yes really differently—but this must mean to imagine a new mode of life, to reject reality in favor of theory, fantasy, abstraction. And we know how dangerous and flimsy that is.

 

So how can we marry these insights? How can we radically reject a great mess of corrupted, confused ideas, destructive habits, etc. and at the same time meticulously salvage and conserve so much that is necessary and valuable, that has the solidity, detail, and texture that can come only from long usage over generations? To ask the question in a different way: how are we to make sense of our horror of our past and our love for it? 

(I have a friend who believes that nostalgia is a disease of our generation, a neurosis instilled in us by our culture. But I think nostalgia is our way of registering everything that has been and is being lost. That loss is so great we can’t really face it and take it only in little diluted doses, as a particular nostalgia for this or that time. Once, driving back from a wedding in Vermont, we passed a highway with a sign for Boston, and I suddenly thought how it might have been two hundred years ago, passing an unmarked highway winding off through woods and fields, not knowing for certain where it led, and having days to travel to reach Boston, and I thought how big and unknown the world was then, even the little corner of it in which one lived, and how good it would have been to live in a world that big, how humbling, how invigorating, and deep down how comforting. What is misleading in our nostalgia is only the narrowness of its scope.)

Doing versus imagining (24)

You can’t answer these questions (the one about economics and production or the one about culture and conformity) in advance. You’d have to work them out on the ground, in an actual town, or in a group of people that is in the process of forming a town. What does it mean to be “in the process of forming a town”? What does that look like? That also is something that needs to get worked out.

That we cannot answer these questions in advance is not a problem but a virtue. This working things out as we go is just the sort of work we need to be doing.

 

A few years ago, a friend of mine made an interesting observation about the current political situation. He had been reading about the French Revolution and in particular about The Terror. For those who don’t remember high-school history class (I didn't before this conversation), The Terror was a period in which the newly formed Republican government carried out thousands of executions and massacres of prisoners. The targets of these executions were not only nobility and royalty but former members of the Republican government itself who were found to be not radical enough, not revolutionary enough. The question as to why this happened, what factors produced such a bloody process of ideological purification, was one of the major historical preoccupations of the 19^th century. In his book on the revolution, de Tocqueville sets out to answer this question. His answer goes like this:

 

Under feudalism, governing power had been widely distributed across a large class of local lords and their ministers. But as France moved towards an absolute monarchy, power became more and more centralized, until, under Louis XIV, the state was run almost entirely by a small cadre of loyal bureaucrats of common birth who could be easily replaced if they didn’t do what the king wanted. The result was that the educated classes were no longer involved in governing. Cut off from the messy, pragmatic details of actual governance, with all their compromises and negotiations, their thinking became increasingly theoretical, idealistic, and extreme—or so de Tocqueville argues. So when the revolution came, they were all already, on an intellectual level, fanatics.

 

My friend’s point was, this is exactly what’s happening in America (and maybe all over the world) today. With almost no political agency, a strong sense that something’s wrong but no access to the real levers of power, insulated from opposing views, our political ideas are becoming increasingly ideologically pure and intolerant of disagreement. We view opposing positions are analyzed as fundamentally corrupt or diseased—the result of racism, greed, hysteria, cowardice, sexual repression, cruelty. I’m thinking not just of left vs. right (terms whose meaning is quickly breaking down anyhow) but of almost every one of the various camps that have emerged in the space where the old left and right once existed: the “identitarian” left, the “Bernie bros,” the old-style liberals, the neo-cons, the alt-right, etc. 

 

When, on rare occasions, I peek with squinted eyes inside a newspaper, or against my better judgment read an op-ed someone has sent me, and even more when I scroll down to the comments section, what I find are people shouting from one position or another, and their tone (sometimes shrill, sometimes sneering, sometimes “let’s cut all the BS”) is always the tone of people who can do nothing but shout (or at least speak), who make no compromises because there is nothing to compromise on, because they are not at work on something concrete, because their “participation” in governance consists only in expressing opinions. And this is not their fault.