Having argued at some length against a short list of succinct aims, I now present instead a long list of values. The idea is that these values, taken together, sketch the outlines of what I have called a worldview. The only way to test this idea is to for you to read and respond to them. But I would ask that you read the list not for its parts but for its whole. When, as I’m sure will happen, one or another item jangles, just go on to the next. See whether, all together, they form a picture that compels or repels you, that leaves you warm or cold. When you are done with that exercise, then please, by all means, tell me which individual items don’t sit right.
Things I value:
- People who listen well, who are slow to judgment, who are more curious than righteous, more kind to the person they’re face-to-face with than loyal to any ideals.
- Trust in one’s own experience and thought: the habit of reasoning from what one has seen and felt; of trusting this over what one has only read and heard about.
- Mistrust of absolute doctrines, whether moral or scientific (including this one!); a sense that meaning and purpose must be worked out by each person for themselves.
- And yet, belief in a real truth that lies forever beyond our grasp; rejection of a knee-jerk relativism that renders everything equal and dissolves all value; a conviction that some things really are much better than others.
- Works of art, especially those that have survived a long time and not become irrelevant, which show us both the strangeness of the past and also let us see, in altogether unfamiliar forms of life, elements that we recognize as our own.
- The analogue over the digital, the manual over the automatic, the natural over the artificial, the tarnished over the polished, the poetic over the literal, the particular over the general.
- A syncretic religiosity that makes it possible to relate to sacred texts and religious ideas, take them seriously, read them with fresh eyes, make them new and alive, free them from flattened, dogmatic interpretations, but without any anxious need to constantly disavow the supernatural, to sanitize and rationalize them; a capacity to encounter the weirdness and mystery of these texts without trying to control them.
- Mistrust of jargon, of any words that are used too often without explanation or elaboration, and which therefore imply too much more than they clearly state.
- A sense of the importance of other lifeforms and of nature as a whole, a sense that we are bound up with the natural world.
- A refusal to see anything, but especially ourselves, in purely scientific terms; a sense that there is more to the world, and more to being human, than we can ever know or understand.
- A longing for community in which the boundaries of individual possession will be softened; a recognition that all ownership is artificial and most of it unearned.
- And yet, a recognition that you can’t just clear away all conventions; that social and political forms are not easy to replace and cannot be made anew from scratch; that it is easier to see what’s wrong with a way of organizing life than what’s right about; that reality is always much more complicated than our idea of it.
- Strict economy: having fewer things, but better-made and more beautiful; mending, repairing, conserving, repurposing; avoiding waste.
- Rejection of the phobia of dirt and contamination, acceptance of mishap and risk: reusing containers, sharing utensils, talking to strangers, inviting them into your home, shaking homeless people’s hands when you give them money, eating food sold in open air markets by unregulated vendors.
- A desire to raise children in a manner that neither fetishes and coddles them, nor holds them under constant surveillance in the name of safety, nor subjects them to endless empty intellectual labor, against their inclination and their spirit.
3 comments:
Max, I just finished read the past several crumbs, starting with "Play with Life," up until this one. There's so much wisdom here. The list you present in this crumb is moving and very much resonates for me (with the possible small exception of eating food sold in open air markets, having gotten really sick at least twice after doing this).
Responding to the broader collection of crumbs, I agree with you that a parent group is a great place to start this experiment. It's the right scope, and for many parents (myself included), there is a genuine need for more support and like-minded community at this phase of life. One obstacle I see (and I would be curious to hear your thoughts, perhaps in a future crumb) is that having a "career," and especially career ambition, presents a real threat to the goal of self-determination and to participation in the kind of counter-cultural experimentation you propose. In careers pursued by many of those in upper economic strata (journalism, science, tech, medicine, law, politics, even working in non-profits and arts organizations), advancement requires an almost obsessive level of engagement. In order to be successful, people feel they must answer emails promptly, read all the latest articles by/about peers, engage on twitter, and maintain a steady stream of productive output. It's not just a feeling - these are the measured and unmeasured metrics of success, whether or not one chooses to subscribe to them. I am a "conscientious objector" to twitter and all social media, and several of my research colleagues have told me that they see this a sign of disengagement/disinterest. (Their assessment is correct.)
Participation in careers is one of the deepest mechanisms by which we become entrenched in a bad system and further entrench the system itself. Engaging with this system is a requirement of my own career: I spend all day on email; practice medicine within a broken medical system that frustrates patients; spend a lot of time producing niche research of limited long-term value; and write grants convincing funders to pay me for this research. Even as I resist the values of this bad system, by doing my job, I am implicitly shoring up this system and reinforcing its bad values. I found it much easier to critique society when I was younger and a student. Now I am the thing that I was critiquing.
This is all to say that it's much harder to attempt self-determination when it conflicts with one's profession. It's even harder if you accumulate wealth as a result (harder than a camel passing through the eye of the needle, as in Matthew 19:24). This might be something to consider when you are deciding which parents to recruit for the parent group experiment. And for younger people reading this blog, I would encourage them to consider career choices carefully for these reasons. There are jobs that do not entail nearly the same degree of spiritual corruption. But either way, I would warn against ambition. You can't rise within and be admired by a system whose values you reject.
Dot,
Thank you for this long & thoughtful response. I completely agree with your overall point here: that there is a basic conflict between career and self-determination. Career is, as you say, one of the (two) most important ways we participate in the social-economic-cultural system in which we live; so it is fundamentally opposed to a project of altering, turning away, trying to free ourselves from that system.
Yes, those with less ambition and less appetite for wealth are less tied to the values and the forms of this society. But clearly the situation is complicated: no job is wholly free from the systems around us; it is impossible to live in the modern world without being implicated in its evils; and poverty leads to moral compromise in its own ways, not only because of hunger and cold but more importantly because of indignity, disrespect, and the feeling of impotence. These are big and important questions: how much we must be willing to give up to escape the trap we’re in, how problems of wealth and poverty and social class will play out and must be encountered in any other scheme to reform or remake society. I don’t want to gloss over any of that, but I want first to reiterate what I feel has become my guiding principle: we want to change the world and ourselves, deeply, but not all at once, and not in order to make it and us perfect, only better.
If your job involves responding to dozens of emails a day, if it requires using social media, if it implicates you in systems you hate, if you are not sure it does any good—then you are better off than many people, whose work certainly does evil and who are so implicated in bad systems that they have ceased to hate them. You are in just the right position, in fact, to enter into projects like the ones I have been describing, for you know you need them.
A career or a job is only deadly if we succumb to its values: if, unable to accept that there is something bad or worthless in what we are devoting our energy to, we become blind to its contradictions, believe its falsehoods, defend its hypocrisies. But this danger is not really so peculiar to our age. Anyone who, at any time, in any society, insists on believing that his actions are all good and his role in the world leaves him unsullied; who cannot tolerate that inconsistency between what we would like to be and what we are (which is to say, cannot accept the human condition)—that person is in a dire moral state. That person is ready to commit atrocities.
My advice to young people reading these crumbs (if there were any!) would be: yes, try look for a job that seems less evil than others—but then remain open to the thought not only that what you’re doing is compromised and imperfect, but that it’s all wrong. For example, if you’re a physics teacher, feel sometimes not only that the particular curriculum you teach is bad, or that giving grades is bad, or that the way our school system goes about teaching physics is wrong—but that schooling itself is wrong, that keeping kids in classrooms is wrong, that physics should not be taught, that physics itself is an elaborate deception.
And knowing this, long to do better, try to do better. Discover immediately that all you can make are tiny changes, that your power to act is infinitesimal compared to the scale of the problem. And don’t then despair, but keep trying, keep longing. Do not ask whether you will ever succeed. Do not pin your hopes on that. That is the wrong way to think about action. We think that way because we want to control reality. We want to be like God, or how we imagine God—and this is what leads to despair. Act as well as you can, knowing that it won’t be good enough. As the Bhagavad Gita says,
“Your authority is
in action alone,
and never
in its fruits;
motive should never be
in the fruits of action,
nor should you
cling to inaction.
…
[E]ngage in actions!
Let go of clinging,*
and let fulfillment
and frustration
be the same.”
- Discourse 2, verses 47-48, Trans. Laurie L. Patton
[* i.e. clinging to the fruits, the outcomes, of your action]
You’re right, Lars: this is very much a list of negative values, a list of values in opposition. I will try to address why that is in a separate crumb. For now I want to say only that it seems I have been most misunderstood, or most exposed myself to misreading, just when I have stated things in positive terms—when I have not been explicit enough about what I am against. The list is meant as a corrective to excesses. What I am opposing is never a kind of person (those who judge quickly) nor a kind of artwork (new ones) but always a tendency within the culture.
I’m a great believer in what we sometimes call instantaneous judgments—but by “judgment” here I think we mean something like “reading” or “discernment” or “insight,” not condemnation. I try always to listen to these little messages, which seem to come directly from the realm of perception, bypassing that of rational thought. But I hope it is clear from the context that this is not at all the sort of judgment I’m opposing when I say I value “people who listen well, who are slow to judgment, who are more curious than righteous, more kind to the person they’re face-to-face with than loyal to any ideals.” Reading faces, responding to fleeting perceptions is in fact part of listening well. What I am against, what I wish to stop and escape from, is this habit people have developed of searching perpetually for the signs by which to identify their Sworn Enemies, the holders of Evil and Stupid Ideas. So many political conversations seem to consist almost entirely of people assuring each other that they’re all on the same team or else trying to stamp the most damning label on their enemies. It’s ridiculous, disgusting, stultifying, horrid.
As for the arts, it’s true that I think most of them are in a crisis (linked to the crisis of the society), and not much contemporary production really excites me, but of course it is important to keep paying attention to what the culture is producing. My fifth list item is not in opposition to contemporary art, literature. TV, etc.; it is in opposition to the very widespread contemporary disinterest in the works of the past. The majority of people who still read books only read recent ones, and the same is true of movies. The rejection of the cannon has become a rejection of the past in general, a rejection of the very notion of great art or of great works of art, even of the notion that a work of art contains anything in itself, has anything to say. It is this that I was opposing.
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