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Except for the outdated technological references, Thoreau could almost be writing today when he says, “The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the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.

Excursus on Occupy Wall Street (13)

What follows is background-- a piece of how I came to think what I think.

 

*

 

When, about ten years ago, I “quit” Occupy Wall Street, it was with the conviction not only that Occupy had failed, but that any large-scale, publicly visible movement in opposition to the power structures was bound to fail. But to make this at all clear, I must explain what it is I thought Occupy had failed at.

 

It is an oft-repeated complaint about Occupy Wall Street (or it was back when anybody bothered to talk about OWS) that it never made any demands. This complaint is based on a misunderstanding. You make demands if your aims are specific. If you want to stop the construction of a gas pipeline, get better labor protections for farm workers, change the rent laws, etc.—then demands make sense: if you make enough of a stink, then those in power may eventually decide to meet your demands to get rid of the stink. But if your aim is to do away with the whole economic and political system by which those in power hold power, then demands are meaningless. You are engaged in a revolution, not a protest movement.

 

The peculiar thing about Occupy was that while, on the outside, it acted just like a protest movement—it was driven by a particular set of grievances, it held marches, it acquired political allies—on the inside, it was something very different. The core of the movement—the people who lived in the park and those who regularly attended working-group meetings—had much more radical ideas. To them, the occupation was not so much a protest as an experiment, an attempt to build a completely different kind of society in the midst, in the very financial heart, of the surrounding post-industrial, late-capitalist, etc.

 

This project ended because Bloomberg, along with mayors of other major cities (following orders, rumor has it, from the Department of Homeland Security) forcibly cleared the park (and all the “defenses” that the activists had planned were of course completely meaningless in the face of an NYPD that had decided to put its foot down). But the project was failing long before it ended, and one of the major reasons it failed is that the people who were forming this “new” society came from the old one and, it turned out, could not help but reproduce it.

 

The occupation of Zuccotti Park began on September 17^th, 2011, with wild Marxist-anarchist ideals; but by mid-October it had already became a bizarre little microcosm of all the problems of the surrounding city. People fought over real-estate within the park (who got to put their tent where). The park itself quickly divided along class lines, with the college educated and professional activist types mostly sleeping at one end and poorer, more burnt-out hippie and crusty-punk types at the other. No one planned this, it just happened. Because the official decision-making apparati were completely transparent but also became completely dysfunctional once donations began to pour in, real decisions about resources were often made through more informal or opaque processes—because in fact they had to be made in this way if they were going to be made at all, if budget was going to get allocated for food, shelter, and so on. Thus, a small number of people came to effectively control the resources and distribute them to others, in the form of blankets and food, on what began to look more and more like a (disorganized) welfare-state model. Those who did not control the resources formed elaborate conspiracy theories about those who did: how they were hording them, embezzling them, getting drunk on GA dollars, even, one wild-eyed young man informed me, carrying out secret masonic/satanic rituals.

 

By February of 2012, when I told everyone who I worked with that I was “stepping back” and would no longer be facilitating meetings, organizing events, liaising with clergymen, cleaning church sanctuaries—I was convinced of various things:

1. That any project to remake our whole way of living must not oppose or threaten those in power; it must begin quietly, proceed gently and accommodatingly; and, in our wildest dreams, we should imagine not that we will someday overcome the powerful but that we will finally seduce even them.
2. That, if you “tear down everything” and “start from scratch,” you inevitably just create a shoddy, disorganized version of what you just tore down.
3. That it is easier to see what does not work about the world than what does; so, however radical one’s critique, any project to remake the world should make as much use as possible of the structures that already exist.

(I want to mention that any “understandings” that I came to in reaction to Occupy, I came to in conversation with others, and especially in conversation with one particular other, without whom I could not have seen things nearly as clearly. He knows who he is, as do most people reading this.)

 

At that time, in February of 2012, I was filled with a vague excitement and believed that from these ideas a new project, very different from Occupy but fully consuming, would soon emerge. But after a year of listlessness, intermittent depression, and religious reading, I came to a different conclusion: political progress was impossible; the times were evil; the only wise course was to withdraw and to focus on developing my own system of values and understanding.

When we want to live differently, what do we imagine? (12)

When we want to live differently, what do we imagine?

 

We could go live on a hippie commune or a squat house, start a farm, join a cult—but we're afraid that these are all naïve, escapist, silly, maybe even dysfunctional.

 

Surely our imaginations are not so easily exhausted! Surely, we can think beyond these worn out clichés.

 

The bad ideas of the past (not only the silly ones, but the nightmares too: Nazism was a nostalgic reaction against modernity; so was the Khmer Rouge; Stalin and Mao rose to power on utopian dreams) have left us paralyzed, unable to consider any substantive turn away from industrialism and the particular system of capital and power that it seems bound up with.

 

When we try to think about these things, we get lost in generalities or in enormities or in clichés. We need to begin somewhere specific and concrete, and, while keeping in mind all the ways that past efforts have gone awry, not for that reason assume that future efforts are doomed.

 

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.

The problem that fascinates me (10)

This feeling of paralysis is what I want to know better. Where does it come from, and is it true—are we really unable to do anything?

 

The further away we look—towards global ecological and political crises, away from everyday life—the more reasonable it seems. At those scales, the desires and actions of individual citizens seem meaningless. And a peculiar feature of the modern world is how much of our time and energy we do spend thinking about events and conditions that are far away an enormous, which we cannot directly see or touch, and over which we have no control. The news is largely responsible for this, and this is why I do not read the news.

 

But what is strange is that, when we turn our attention to the immediate conditions of our lives, we still feel trapped and unable to act.

 

We want to live differently—we want community, relations with our neighbors that are social not legalistic, objects that are well made by people we know, not shoddily in mysterious factories thousands of miles away; we want to use technology not be used by it, to do jobs that seem worthwhile, within institutions that do not seem utterly misguided and broken, in the service of neighborhoods that are not segregated, divided, alienated.

 

For a long time many people have felt this, and more and more are coming to feel it with each passing year. Yet, no one knows where to begin.

 

This is the problem that fascinates me, in some sense the problem at the heart of the loaf I’m crumbling.

Agency and lack of agency (9)

Yet a third way to explain the difficulty we have telling stories has to do with agency.

 

On the one hand, regarding our private lives, we have a degree of freedom that existed perhaps nowhere in the world before the last hundred years: we are free to marry or sleep with whoever will have us, to live wherever we like, to take whatever job, to pursue any career. There are financial constraints, but almost nothing is left of the social barriers, familial obligations, codes of honor, religious commitments that once created the structure within which drama occurred.

 

On the other hand, this arena of market-like freedom is hemmed in on all sides—by an ever more powerful system of government and corporate surveillance; by ever more minute legal regulations on how we rear and educate children, grow and prepare food, care for others, document our transactions; by a political and cultural deadlock that seems ever more entrenched and impossible to resolve; by the machinations of an ever more powerful global ruling class; by our own attachment to our material comforts; by impending ecological doom. And about these matters, we seem to have no agency whatsoever.

 

Something is terribly wrong and we feel unable to do anything about it. At most we can heroically devote our lives to a hopeless fight against an insurmountable evil (not a very appealing prospect). Or we can wait, in fear and vague dim hope, for something to happen.

 

We are not protagonists, we are not even actors—we are essentially audience, but an audience that can never escape, an audience doomed to watch until they die. Somewhere in the world are people who appear to be actors, but they all seem to be terribly corrupt, and what’s more we’re not so sure that even they have agency; they look more like the avatars of vast cultural and historical forces.

 

There have always been problems (8)

Of course, the idea that we’re in a crisis is nothing new.

 

Specifically the notion of a crisis of self-consciousness or artificiality in the arts dates to at least the end of the 18th century. And it was clearly already then a response to the upheaval of modernism. So in some sense the whole history of the 19th century novel is "troubled" from the start. And of course the world has always been full of problems. The problems of the present are related to, grow out of, have similarities with the problems of the past, and we can learn a lot from studying carefully what has come before. But that's not my purpose in this "trail of crumbs."

 

Whatever happened in past eras, good and bad, happy and miserable, I think it's clear that there's a crisis now that is substantially different from anything previous. My purpose is to understand this crisis and to find how to respond to it. Because the world is made of stories and stories are made of the world, I am thinking about one to help me think about the other— and vice versa.

 

So far I've focused on two separate (but obviously related) issues:

(1)  the lack of a sense of an eternal ordinary world out of which a story arises and into which it resolves; and

(2)  an atmosphere (i.e. a texture—material, social, spiritual) in everyday life that feels dull, flimsy, empty, flat and that one therefore struggles to know how to depict or whether to depict or what to do with it.

 

I turned to the second issue, because the first gave itself too easily to a discourse that focuses on big political-historical-environmental events that are far from our everyday lives and actions, and I believe that this placement of the locus of the problems very far from us is false, a kind of projection, and also paralyzing.

Excursus on atmosphere (7)

One natural response to this problem is to try, through writing, to see our world with fresh eyes, to instill some beauty, some vividness into it—or to try to wring those things from it.

 

I don’t read much contemporary fiction, but every once in a while a book falls open in front of me and I have no choice but to read a few pages. This happened to me a few days ago with a novel from 2014. In an opening scene, the narrator (who, one suspects, closely resembles the writer) is sitting on a plane. Interactions with a man seated next to her are interspersed with descriptions of generic airplane goings-on. In the passage below, I have excerpted the former and kept only the latter:

On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality and doom. […]

            […] Outside, the turgid summer afternoon lay stalled on the runway; little airport vehicles raced unconstrained across the flat distances, skating and turning circles like toys, and further away still was the silver thread of the morotrway that ran and glinted like a brook bounded by the monotonous fields. The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then faster, until there was the feeling of effortful, half-resistant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.

            […] In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man’s voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed.

One sees right away that this is a skillful writer. She is good with words and syntax. But she is squeezing these images too hard. The metaphor of the priest and the congregation is clearly overblown, but so is the simile of the glinting brook. Even the rasping of the nylon stockings seems gratuitous. Yes, the atmosphere of an airplane springs to mind—but why is it so gussied up? 

My point is not to throw shade on a book I haven’t actually read and which more than one person has recommended to me, but to try to bring out what I find tragic in this. The writer is doing what she must do: she is looking for poetry in her world. Only it isn’t there. What I mean is not that planes and airports are so ugly (even if they are) but that the writer is clearly desperate to make of them something beautiful, something that will hold her attention and ours, will make us feel that these passing moments have some meaning, that we are not falling through a void. If I have been able to guess what is happening in the writer’s soul, it is only because the same thing has happened many times in mine.

Atmosphere (6)

If, as I said earlier, we have lost our sense of a solid and, if not stable, at least eternal, ongoing human world within which our stories are lodged, out of which their conflicts arise, into which they resolve—then this loss is not just because we have been told that our way of life will likely become impossible sometime in the next 50 years, due to processes that we cannot directly perceive, which no one fully understands and most people don’t understand at all. It is also (I think primarily) because of perfectly tangible factors in our everyday existence.

 

The very partial list of problems in the last crumb is meant to give a sense of the sort of factors I mean, of their scope and pervasiveness.

 

Global climate change, real as it may be, has such a hold on our imaginations in part because we are already, right now, surrounded by physical things and social conditions that make us feel that the world is flimsy, ugly, and bad. It is this immediate experience, more than any environmental or political conditions, that makes it so hard to tell stories about our current world. Because one of the first things stories do, maybe their most fundamental pleasure, is to absorb us into an atmosphere, a texture, a mood, to conjure from scenery, gestures, objects, faces, a world we want to inhabit. But who wants to be absorbed into this atmosphere? What we long for is to get out of it.

A few of the problems (5)

What do I mean by “the full array” of problems? I do think we eventually need a complete list, or as complete a one as we can make, but that's a big undertaking and I don’t mean to begin it now. But I want to list a few. There are some that tend to jump to mind (depending on your political alignment): an array of ecological crises (of which climate change is only one), spiraling economic inequality, an ever-increasing accumulation of power in the hands of a tiny portion of the global population. There are others that I think get less play time in most people’s nightmares but which I think about a lot:

• Material ugliness: the things we make—buildings, furniture, everyday objects—keep getting uglier, flimsier, cheaper. Look at this image of a French school-room in the 1880s and compare it to this classroom in a recently-constructed school (where I happen to teach). Imagine spending your days in the old one. Imagine spending them in the new one. What would that do to you?
  
  
• Transience: everything is disposable, everything is knocked down, thrown away, demolished, and new, even more disposable things are put in their place. Nothing has any history. And people are the same way. They move and move until they have no roots anywhere.
  
  
• Segregation: while some kinds of segregation (e.g. by race, sexuality, religion) have lessened over the past century, segregation by age, political alignment, and socioeconomic class have gotten more and more extreme. Each is driven by different forces and with different results, but all three are bad. I’ll talk about age, because I think it’s the least obvious: as traditional communities break down, young people socialize less as families and more and more exclusively through school. The resulting age-segregated friend groups and habit of socializing only within age group persist into adulthood and create a sense of discontinuity between generations and a feeling of an eternal present that is forever severed from the past.
  
  
• Technology addiction: most of my students (high-schoolers) have no limits whatsoever placed on their screen time. During vacation, they tell me, they sometimes play videogames for twelve or fourteen hours straight. On school nights, they stay up watching movies and Netflix and YouTube. They complain about stress and workload. Many of them sleep only four or five hours a night. What they don’t realize is that their “leisure activities” do them no good, leave them as bleary-eyed and drained as doing homework.
  
  
• Over-scheduling, over-monitoring: kids (at least most of them) should not be in class eight hours a day. They should be out working in the fields or building things or repairing them, walking in the woods, taking care of animals, cleaning, cooking, reading—then maybe have classes for a few hours in the evenings. But not only do we keep them in class all day, we fill the remaining time with tutoring, piano lessons, summer programs—anything to give them "a leg up." And when they're not busy with those things, we keep them under careful watch, lest anything should happen to them. No wonder they’re bored and distracted. No wonder they need drugs to stay focused and happy. No wonder, by age 22, they’re so obnoxious. Their whole youth has been wasted.
  
  

This is hardly meant to be an exhaustive list. I present it only to give a sense of the kind of thing I mean.

Lest at this point the mouse begin to feel that these are bitter crumbs, I want to say that it is only the outer crust. The center of the loaf, I hope, is sweet.

What story is that, and how do you tell it? (4)

Isn’t there then a new kind of story to write: the story of this crisis?

But what story is that, and how do you tell it?

You could tell a story that depicts the crassness and ugliness of our world—plenty of people are telling stories like that. But what is such a story doing? What is it saying? Maybe it is saying: Ugly, ugly, ugly! But that’s just mimicry. It tells us what we all already know. It rubs our noses in it. Maybe it is saying: Things are bad but happiness is still possible, on an individual level—with more wisdom, with less self-deception. This is a nice idea (I mean that; I’m not being sarcastic), but in the background, don’t we always seem to hear the machinery grinding forward, beauty disappearing, madness spreading? The hope is at best short-term.

Or you could tell a story of radical destruction—the end of the world, a handful of survivors. Plenty of people are doing that too. Again, I want to know what such a story is doing, what it is saying. Let’s first note the obvious: this story is an allegory. The meteorite, the zombie virus, the irradiating sun beams—are metaphors for our own gradual but seemingly unstoppable dissolution. What is this metaphor saying? Clearly, it is saying: This is not something we are doing but something that is being done to us, and we have no power to stop it. And I want to ask: Is that true? Is that a useful story to keep telling ourselves?

Or we could tell the opposite kind of story: about humanity literally addressing its large-scale problems. But I don’t see anyone telling that story. For such a story to be compelling, the writer would first have to take cognizance of the full array of problems (because, as daunting as each one might be on its own, it is the whole configuration together that haunts us), and I don’t see anyone doing that either.

And one feels that, if someone did write that story, it would be unconvincing. Which is to say, we not only have no vision for the future, we feel that it is impossible to come up with one.

No need to choose (3)

(Everyone has their own idea of how the world is going bad: environmental disaster, economic inequality, technology, political fragmentation. There is no need to choose among these and many subtler problems. We’re like the blind men describing the elephant.) 

The Reason (2)

The reason we can no longer tell stories can be put simply.

 

The end of a story, whether happy or tragic, must be the resolution of the conflict. The murderer is caught, the couple united, the tragic hero dead—and the world returns to normal.

 

This “normal” is indispensable. It is not a drab uniformity but a great solid continuity. It is the whole ongoing world, which contains these struggles, joys, disasters and survives them and continues on, with its ordinary doings, its births and deaths, its endless cycles. Every emperor goes to his grave, every empire falls, every sharp edge is worn smooth with time.

 

But now we feel that the world itself is bad, its future bleak, its cycles broken. So when the story ends, there is nothing to return to. The lovers are united, the falsely accused proven innocent—but what lies ahead for them? Life in a botched civilization.

 

*

 

Things are not so bad as we sometimes imagine them. The world is still the world. Armageddon is not here, however much we dream of it. But things have gone very wrong, and we have lost our faith—in ourselves and our way of life. And, without that faith, the basic structure of a story is lost. We don’t know what to hope for.

   

Satisfying Stories (1)

This is the first in a long trail of crumbs. I will post one per day until I run out of bread. Hopefully some mice will come along and eat them.

 

*

 

It is very hard to tell a satisfying story in the contemporary world. Maybe it is impossible.

 

This is why television is the medium of our time: because its basic form is continuity not conclusion. A satisfying ending is not what it promises—or at any rate, not what it is obliged to deliver. Its tantalizing ellipses lead us ever onward. It does not tell stories so much as paint a world.

 

This is also why so many stories have specialized settings—the past, ghettoized communities, fantasy worlds—settings where, the audience imagines, stories are still possible.

Begging and Stealing

Calcutta is a charming city. I am told it is languishing, it is clinging to its past. I wish more cities would cling to their past; I wish more cities would languish. I shall be accused in the usual way: “it is easy to romanticize economic decay when you have all you need.” But are we not bored of this response by now? For how long will all judgment be held hostage to this mindless moralism. In fact, it is the wealthy who thrive in cities that “embrace the new.” The poor get more material comfort but less power and therefore less dignity than ever.

What the powerful do not wish to share is power; they are not jealous of their food, their shelter, their clothing; these they are happy to share. Neoliberals love to talk about the rising tide of wealth: to the moral dilemma of poverty they offer a solution that entails no threat to the distribution of power. All their hard-nosed materialism, their moral “realism” is really aimed at this: to deny that power, that dignity, that inequality matter (for these are, after all, in some sense spiritual matters) in the face of sheer material need. The neoliberals would like to tell me that the global poor don't care about my woo-woo spiritual concerns, that what they want is a meal, a house, a shirt; I maintain that the global poor in fact have spiritual concerns, just like me.

* * *

In Varanasi, the beggars are always trying to get the better of me. Some only want to beg, but most want something more. “No rupees—milk,” says the rail-thin young woman with the baby on her shoulder, and she leads me to a store where “milk” costs more than dinner at a tourist restaurant. Clearly, there’s some scheme afoot—the woman’s getting a kickback, probably, the store takes a cut. I feel resentful, indignant.

It is not that the sum of money demanded is difficult to part with—it amounts to five dollars. It is that I have been tricked, used. It is, I seem to feel, my money, and I have a right to do with it as I see fit. But do I? What I have, generally speaking, is the power to do with it as I see fit; what is being challenged here is that power. It does not seem a stretch to suppose that this is part of the appeal of such schemes. Presumably they are also lucrative, but equally importantly, the one who runs a scheme wrests a certain dignity from me; she challenges the asymmetry of our power relations. She refuses me the role of kind stranger, giving my money to someone in need; instead she assigns me the role of dupe. No wonder I find it so troubling.

In fact, this quality—this subtle upturning of power relations—seems to be at work all through my interactions with beggars in India. Every skinny dusty child has something up her sleeve. Even when there is no specific scheme afoot, there is an impish quality in her tone and gestures, a quality, it seems to me, of gleeful, or at least cheeky, mischief, no matter how much suffering, dirt, hunger it is mixed with. And the more I think about this, the more fitting it seems. I ought to be pleased, not resentful. Self respect persists, in the face of whatever circumstances.

For I have a legal right to my money, but I do not have a moral right to it. I got it by luck; I keep it by a system of laws that I had no part in making. It is a power I have; if someone can get it from me by whatever means, then they are only exercising another form of power. If they cause me no harm besides the loss of my money, is their method inherently less ethical than my own?

But why then is it a sin to steal? Because to do so is to undermine the stability of society? Because society depends on property? I would like to put it this way: property is not a fixed concept; it evolves with the economic conditions of a society. Not only the way that property is distributed but the very rights that the notion of property invokes—when and how and in what ways one is expected or required to give others access to one’s property (gleaning a field, hunting in a wood, borrowing a pot or an egg or a measure of flour)—changes from age to age. So the notion of theft also changes. Perhaps it is no longer a sin to steal. Perhaps the category of crime has done away with the category of sin. Of course, one may still wish to avoid being stolen from, and I am not trying to cure anyone of this wish; I too wish not to be stolen from. But this desire, and the means by which I try to pursue it, are matters of power, not justice.