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.

It would feel like a cult (23)

It would be claustrophobic. It would feel like a cult.

 

This is also a fundamental concern, and it was to ward off this feeling that I included the train station and the trips to the metropolis, that I insisted the town not be insular and cut off from the world around it. We’re on the electrical grid. We have a movie theater. We buy books from Penguin-Random House. And we’re subject to the law of whatever land we’re in.

 

But we are, after all, an intentional community with an unusual way of life. And this introduces problems of two kinds.

 

First there are the classic problems of small-town life: one does not have the (for some, at least) soothing anonymity of the city. One cannot go out on the street without meeting people one knows. One cannot keep one’s doings entirely to oneself. And there are social pressures and conformities that come with this.

 

Of course there are social pressures and conformities in urban life too, driven by advertising, mass media, mass culture. But these operate differently. We are, or seem to be, free to choose or reject them. (Indeed, subcultures of people who rail against and flout these conformities are an essential part of modern urban life—and maybe this is a clue: either to how to make conformity tolerable or else to the falseness of these resistances, I’m not sure which.)

 

The second problem is that of artificiality. A group of any kind—a religion, a town—that grows up “naturally,” “organically” has, in its social relations, its rituals and institutions, a certain solidity and genuineness that it gets from time, habit, tradition. One may find it oppressive, but it does not appear false or ridiculous. But a group that is created intentionally, according to a plan and with specific aims and values in mind, is always at risk of feeling artificial, forced, affected, uncanny, corny, embarrassing, absurd. Those outside it laugh or cringe; those inside, struggling unconsciously to overcome the feeling of falseness, compensate with an overblown and even more embarrassing sincerity.

 

But this conformity and this “newness” and intentionality are not side-effects of having a town—they are direct consequences of the whole project, maybe even the intended effect: we want to live differently, and we want to do so as a group. I don’t know what that could mean except that we want certain norms of conduct that are agreed upon initially but also upheld, which is to say enforced, socially; and that we want them to be not traditional but newly defined.

 

I point this out not in order to suggest that there is not really a problem with claustrophobia, conformity, artificiality, intentionality—but to say that these problems are essential. They are built in, not to the specific idea of a town, but to the basic problem (the degradation, material and spiritual, of our immediate surroundings) and the basic longing (to live differently) with which I began. They are fundamental to the modern world. Their appearance does not indicate that our project is misguided; indeed, it indicates that it is exactly the right kind of project, the kind that will bring us face to face with the right kind of problems.

Facing these problem must mean, in part, deciding just how much freedom we're willing to give up. But it also has to mean figuring out what it is that makes certain social contexts feel so artificial. I want to say, there is something missing from these contexts—maybe a sense of the difficulty and complexity of human life.

What would people do for work? (22)

Two problems strike me right away:

1.     It wouldn’t work on a practical level. What would people do for work? How would they afford to buy goods from outside (like computers or olive oil or mechanical pencils)? Who would do all that farming? Etc.

2.     It would be claustrophobic, it would feel like a cult.

 

I present these not as objections to be resolved but as issues that are fundamental to the desire I have (that I think many of us have) to live differently—and to the more ambitious, more fantastical desire for a better world.

 

What do people do for work? At one level the answer is obvious: Some are teachers, some doctors, some farmers. We need plumbers and electricians, butchers, bakers, carpenters, tailors—maybe, if we take the local production thing far enough, blacksmiths, cobblers, joiners, and so on. But all of these jobs are internal to our town: they are hired by and paid by citizens of our town—which means they don’t bring in money from outside.

 

So presumably there are things like graphic designers and software engineers too, who work remotely or open offices in our town. (This already opens up potential contradictions with ideas we may have about the ethical validity of the larger economy, but let’s accept such compromises, for the time being at least.) But clearly, more labor has to go into food-production than in most places. And more labor has to go into everything else that we want to do on a smaller scale or with less automation: raking leaves, cleaning streets, transporting goods, making tools and fences and so on.

 

This presumably means we’d have to make do with less—less excess, less luxury, fewer amenities—and that makes sense, because less waste should mean less to waste. There is no principle so good, so effective, so honest as necessity. It is admirable not to waste because one is conscientious, but it is much better not to waste because one has nothing to waste, because one needs everything one has. To quote something I quoted long ago in these crumbs: “superfluous goods make life superfluous.”

 

But how much less is too much less? Because, for one thing, I think we are not prepared to do without everything—to never have olive oil again; to make our own fabric, our own paper, our own pens and pencils; to do entirely without microchips. And what if we want to travel outside our town, visit the city, buy a book published elsewhere? Complete isolation is no good. We would like to be a city on a hill perhaps, but not a city in a bubble.

 

Part of the point of thinking of a town is that it forces these questions to arise. If we take this town not necessarily exactly as I’ve described it but as an instantiation of any particular set of ideas about how a city ought to be run, food produced, buildings built, etc., then the questions raised here (how much would we have to do without—and are we prepared to do without that much, in the interests of sustainability, community, non-alienation?) is quite simply the question of whether that set of ideas is viable.

A town (21)

Say there were a town without cars. People walk or ride bicycles. Produce and milk (grown largely on nearby farms) are brought in on ox-drawn carts. The street lamps are few and not too bright, stores turn out their lights at night, and although the town is busy and lively, it is possible on a clear night to see many stars. When it snows, classes are canceled, and young people go out in teams to shovel the streets. There is a general view, promoted by the local schools but shared by most parents, that young people should not carry phones nor spend a lot of time looking at screens; of course, each family interprets this view in their own way. There is a train station nearby, and citizens of the town sometimes travel to a nearby modern metropolis—because they have business there, or just for a day trip. (If you don’t like some of these details, feel free to alter them to your liking. I’m only sketching.)

 

Would you want to go live in this town and raise your children there?

 

I think many of us would say, well, yes.

 

Of course, this town does not exist, and somehow it seems impossible. But why? What exactly is impossible about it?

 

(I am bracketing for the moment the question of how this town came into being. I want to explore how, having been established, it works, or if it works at all, and what its workings tell us about how we want to live.)

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.