Ruminations
↓ 2024-08-29, 四.
I found myself on a college campus last night, sitting on a bench overlooking a small stream and a footbridge crossing over to the dorms. It was an evening in late summer, still humid and balmy, the skies dark, the scenery illuminated by the light from the buildings on the other side—the first week of classes, before students settle into coursework and routines. Around me was a palpable atmosphere of anticipation and eagerness for the semester ahead. Gazing at the comings and goings of the students, I was sitting and reflecting on the passing of time, on the growing distance between me and the next generation, how I am having less and less in common with these new faces who are just starting their lives. A group of friends walked by, and a young lass asked if I was okay. Of course I was, I responded, springing up with a glowing smile. After they passed, I mused: why the question? Did I look morose, just entertaining my thoughts as is my custom? But at least she didn’t call me a darling, as I have been in the past by folks who must have mistaken my starry-eyed, demure, and slightly off-kilter demeanor for a tame youth’s innocence.
In this hush profound,
Into the very rocks it seeps:
The cicada sound.
—Matsuo Bashō, THE NARROW ROAD TO THE FAR NORTH, tr. Dorothy Britton
Last year, someone shared with me an episode from the Poem-a-Day podcast. In it, Tiana Clark reads her poem, AFTER THE READING, which is about the moments after a poetry reading when a part of the audience comes up to converse with the poet. I didn’t make much of the poem at the time, as it wasn’t the kind of poetry I tend to enjoy, but after the passing of some recent events, today I listened again, and how differently the poem hits. I recall something a writer—maybe Zadie Smith?—said in an interview to the effect of: “When I was young I was a know-it-all. Now that I’m older, I think I know very little.”
↑ ↓ 2024-08-07, 三. On the Political Divide, Meritocracy, Liberal Hypocrisy, Inequality, Immigration and the Migrant Crisis, Social Capitalism, Man’s Inner World, and Wandering.
I was recently accused of being too serious, and today I aspire to introduce a dampening direction to my writing. I invite the reader to witness my attempt at levity.
Contents
Peace: Currid-Halkett
Trouble: Turchin
Merit
Meritocracy
Liberal Hypocrisy
Inequality: Rousseau
Immigration
Race and Gender as Secondary to Class, and the Material View
First Field
Confinement: Kant, and Desire: Schopenhauer
Import of Work
Second Field
Towards Social Capitalism
Gender Studies
Perceptions from Media, and Art: Serious vs Popular
Urban-Rural Divide
Finis
I wish to ground this political discussion with a tempered start, as topics of this nature tend to raise tensions that easily get carried away. Cornel West and Robert George, ideologically and racially separate but still having maintained a friendship over many years, had a discussion last year at Southern Methodist University, speaking about the importance of listening, openness, coming together in spite of differences, humility, remaining self-critical, and speaking honesty to both others’ and especially one’s own community. They’re both Christian, which I am not, and George mentions multiple times man being the dust of the earth, which I agree with, and the two of them repeatedly stress the fallibility of human nature and the need to continually regenerate a sense of propriety and humility, which I am also in agreement with. It’s comforting to watch and regain perspective in the midst of the current climate of polarization, to see that it’s possible to have civil dialogue and grow from it despite deep disagreement in views. George says:
It's tribalism that makes me think that if I'm a conservative, I must believe X. That's not how it should work. You should believe what you believe because you think the reasons for believing it are best, and then you'll see what that makes you in the parlance of the day. Notice how different that is from first choosing your box and then choosing your beliefs depending on what's in the box.
Elsewhere, West says, “I’m a blues man. There’s no optimism in the blues.” Elaborating further, West says:
Well, I come from a people who've been terrorized, traumatized, and stigmatized for four hundred years so we've had to come to terms with catastrophe on a variety of different levels, psychic, social—when you hear John Coltrane's LOVE SUPREME, when you hear Nina Simone, when you hear Luther King Jr., what do you see? In the face of catastrophe, compassion, courage, vision—not hatred, not revenge—compassion, courage.
And he then talks about B.B. King “playing with Lucille [his guitar]”—”B.B., how you do it? where you get that smile, where you get that style, B.B., don’t you realize you in the face of catastrophe, we know you come outta gut-bucket Jim Crow Mississippi but you still got that hope in you but you don’t talk about the hope, you enact the hope and it’s in your music, that is the blues.”
The blues captures the sentiment of this piece. The writer realized at some point while writing it that some of parts of his composition may read as accusatory, whose comments seem acerbic. The writer has no intention to slander or defame, but if any of the implied foibles of others hold true, the writer too is not free of blame. The writer’s intention is to portray his views on these issues as he understands, within the limits of his powers, with a generous latitude for honesty, faithful to fact and reason, with the aim of depicting some semblance of truth. Where the reader feels the writing is lofty, that may indeed be an accurate interpretation, but where the reader comes across a pointed remark, then that may also be an apt rendition of the current affairs, and something of a reminder of honesty may be of use, and when it comes to matters of seeking clarity and truth, the writer feels more obliged to pulling up the curtain concealing deceit than let the audience rest in comfort watching a misguiding puppet show. The writer makes no claim to possess knowledge of the whole truth but hopes this piece points in its direction and suggests its general contour, even if vaguely. If the writer were to condense this piece into one statement, it is this: we know quite a bit less than our pride has convinced us. Rather than unrealistic idealism, let us work with the reality we have before our eyes while also keeping our wits about us.
Peace: Currid-Halkett
As I mentioned, let’s start slow, before the discussion gets heated and my comments take a criticizing turn, which springs from my view that we should aim towards truth and away from self-conceit. This first section commences from the spirit of unity, of reminding us that the country, across divides, remain considerably similar and have much in common. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett published a book last year, THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS, about her research on rural America, and the Americans her title refers to are the prosperous ones living there who have been neglected in the dominant liberal narrative of a decaying, languishing, and emptying countryside. Through a combination of interviews and data analysis, Currid-Halkett’s findings show that, in spite of the perception of a wide gap, rural and urban Americans are remarkably similar on many measures, from political opinions, attitudes towards equality, stance on democracy, household income, employment rates, homeownership rates, life satisfaction, and religiosity. In Currid-Halkett’s view, what is driving the perceived divide is mainstream media, motivated by clicks, heightened stimuli, alarming headlines, in effect amplifying a sense of political divide.
Currid-Halkett writes that although the common perception is that educated citizens value diversity, tolerance, and openness more than those less educated, it is in fact the least educated groups (those who have not finished high school) that have the most support for racial diversity, according to data from the General Social Survey in 2018. Specifically, when asked the question, “Should government aid Blacks?”, among those with less than a high school education, 26.6% of urban respondents agreed, as did 23.1% of rural respondents (note the similarity of these two numbers)—as opposed to those with at least a college degree, of whom 19.8% of urban respondents and 21.4% of rural respondents agreed (again, note the similarity. The data sets Currid-Halkett reference in the book consistently display these urban-rural matches when responses have been grouped by other variables like general attitudes, race, or education, which helps her conclude that there isn’t an actual divide in the country between geographic red and blue, which is commonly portrayed in the predominant narrative as a major reason for the current state of political polarization). Currid-Halkett remarks that it is certainly true that educated folks support racial integration policies, but the support is only in the abstract, quickly faltering when it comes to applied policies. She cites a 1978 paper by sociologist Mary Jackman, from which I obtain a summarizing quote:
Increasing years of education lead to a greater familiarity with the appropriate democratic position on racial integration but not to a stronger commitment to racial integration . . . I am not arguing that the well educated lie to the interviewer in order to present themselves in the best light whenever they can readily recognize that a democratic principle constitutes the substance of a question. The process is probably more subtle. The well educated are more likely to have genuinely "learned" abstract democratic principles, but that learning is relatively superficial. When democratic principles are contemplated in isolation from other factors, the well educated are more likely to recognize those principles, to know the "right" answers, and to believe sincerely in those answers . . . As a result, they are more likely to support democratic principles in the abstract, but they are no more likely to call on those principles in an applied situation than is anyone else.
Currid-Halkett, finding corroborating studies in more recent years, cites this 2003 Pew survey and this 2020 Gallup article on the disparity in support between abstract principles and concrete policy. Currid-Halkett’s point is that obstructions to racial progress exist, but they exist in both rural and urban America at similar rates when it comes to actual corrective measures and government action.
Although Republicans and Democrats may have more in common than popular conception permits and certainly more than the polarized perception propagated by media outlets, the people drawn to each party, because of this decision, have their differences—what are they? Here I take issue with Currid-Halkett’s inclination to seek connection, pushing out space for differences. Currid-Halkett at the outset explicitly states that her intention is to find similarities and shared humanity across the red-blue geographic divide. A more appropriate approach is to make no assumption and investigate from there, open to however the results turn out, and if intractable differences are found, then the differences are simply the fact of the matter, not to be glossed over by countervailing liberal sympathies, wishful thinking, and unrealistic ideals for everything under the sky. I find it slightly irritating that she seems naively impressed by simple realities, overstating cliche truisms, making it sound like discovering a sense of common humanity among rural American is a holy grail that has never before occurred to anyone, so taken aback from realizing that other people are, in fact, people that she neglects to point out that had she studied common folks in any country, she’d likely reach similar mind-blowing revelations. I don’t think she’s unintelligent so much as she succumbs to the charming but flimsy vogue of “sympathy and kindness solve all the world’s problems.” But this particular qualm of mine is not important, as it is but an exhale from one innocent reader who simply wishes to disburden himself of all the disbelief and frustration he has accumulated over the course of the book’s earth-shattering sentiments over what are, plainly, common sense. I understand her attempt to lift the veil of the liberal urbanite’s condemning image of rural America, but when she keeps repeating that she wants to uncover the deep story, of which she continually emphasizes the “deep”, to reach out to a shared comaraderie, to stumble upon the “profound commonalities of the human condition”, to discover in connecting genuinely with her interviewees that she ends up liking them: look how human they are in spite of their conservative views! They are human too! My response: “Oh my, you don’t say.”
I find Currid-Halkett’s results on income parity between cities and the countryside surprising. In particular, she concludes from her data analysis:
Median income levels in rural America are almost the same as urban America. And despite urban Americans becoming more educated from 1990 to 2019, the gap between urban and rural median income has been closing over the same period. In 2019, the difference in median income levels beteen urban and rural populations was just $10,642 per year (this figure is in 2020 dollars) . . . Controlling for cost of living, that $10,642 advantage dwindles down to nothing.
Yet, how has such an important equivalence been unknown to most people to now suddenly be discovered by Currid-Halkett? Have the data all along been covering up this hidden reality? Her analysis uses median household income but according to the book END TIMES by Peter Turchin, which I discuss in the next section, suggests that this metric can be misleading, describing the scenario of a hypothetical family:
[A]lthough the combined income of Steve and his mom in 2016 was greater than what his dad earned back in 1976, this was due to both members of the household working. Steve's mom works at Walmart not because she enjoys the experience but simply because they wouldn't be able to pay the bills without her earnings. The increase in their household income was not accompanied by an increase in her quality of life. It merely enabled them not to fall behind.
This scenario opens up a broader array of reasons behind the rise in median household income: continuing to work after the retirement years against one’s original plans, working more jobs than usual, more members in the household working who ordinarily wouldn’t be. I am not saying Currid-Halkett’s results are impossible; I am merely exercising a healthy dose of skepticism and am holding off belief until further research and thirty-party confirmation. Considering Currid-Halkett’s preconceived mission to find the common humanity among rural Americans in her interviews, I wonder if she brought the same corrective halo into her demographic analysis. How is it that economists, who work more often with income data, have not come across this surprising income parity, and that it is Currid-Halkett, descending with an angelic calling, to stumble on a finding that runs contrary to the conventional understanding that urban jobs tend to have higher salaries? Perhaps all of us are due for a reminder that facts, clarity, and truth are independent of our sentiments, and reality is apathetic to our feelings. Truth ought to be confronted as it is, and our responses to it should ensue, not preordain. I’m aware that the quest towards truth can often be long and controversial, and multiple versions can coexist depending on perspective, and that every person is not immune from subjective prejudice, cognitive convenience, and experiential lapses brought to the table to then get mixed with the individual’s skewed lenses peering at reality. Each person’s truth is perhaps an inextricable blend of actual fact with the person’s values, ideals, projections, and prior experience. Frances Wickes writes in her 1938 book, THE INNER WORLD OF MAN:
Our concepts of life are combinations of objective reality and subjective attitude. In this way our world becomes peopled not by human beings as they really are, but by images of our own conceiving. Two daughters may describe a mother in such varying terms that you feel they must be talking of two different individuals. They have described not the parent but a parental image. Two people (a golfing friend and an employee) describe a man to us, and their descriptions bear little resemblance to each other. We meet him and the image we form of him differs from either of the others. Which is the image of reality? Where does the truth lie? We realize that in each case the person is telling the truth as he sees it, he is describing an image that to him expresses the reality of this person. Our personal experiences and our temperamental prejudices are continually at work forming images, not only of people but of ideals and concepts, by which we judge, evaluate and determine much of our conscious life. Nor is the image a mere psychic reproduction of an objective reality. Into its formation enter the emotions, the personal reactions, and the imaginative concepts about the object. All these elements combine to form an image which is a blending of the objective and the subjective. How much this image conforms to outer reality depends upon the psychic background of the individual . . . An increased understanding of these images moving in the unconscious gives one a chance to reckon with them with greater clarity and have more understanding of our real motives and desires. It would be convenient if the images marched along in the order given, but unfortunately they do nothing of the sort.
At least when it comes to data and numbers, which admittedly can certainly be molded and cut preferentially or incorrectly, subjective leanings can be chipped away in the search for truth. With such an income analysis as Currid-Halkett’s, we ought to make the attempt.
As a further note of my critique, my comments here perhaps verging on pedantry, Currid-Halkett inaccurately writes, “Rousseau argued that the root of inequality was not ‘natural inequality’ (for example, physical strength) but rather ‘moral inequality’ as a result of human decisions made in a civil society.” This statement of hers doesn’t seem to be the correct interpretation. Rousseau in DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MANKIND, his Second Discourse, claims it was with the invention of private property that marked the dawn of social inequality:
The first man, who after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders . . . would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter: you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
In the text itself, Rousseau writes that it is both natural and moral inequality, not just the moral inequality that Currid-Halkett ascribes to his claim, that contribute to social inequality among men, his argument set upon a hypothetical origin of civilization:
In proportion as ideas and feelings succeed each other, and the head and the heart become active, men continue to shake off their original wildness, and their connections become more intimate and extensive. They now began to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the genuine offspring of love and leisure . . . Everyone began to notice the rest, and wished to be noticed himself; and public esteem acquired a value. He who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be the most respected: this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions there arose on one side vanity and contempt, on the other envy and shame; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens at length produced combinations fatal to happiness and innocence . . . Things thus circumstanced might have remained equal, if men's talents had been equal, and if, for instance, the use of iron and the consumption of commodities had always held an exact proportion to each other; but as nothing preserved this balance, it was soon broken. The man that had the most strength performed the most labor; the most dextrous turned his labor to best account; the most ingenious found out methods of lessening his labor; the husbandman required more iron, or the smith more grain, and while both worked equally, one earned a great deal by his labor, while the other could scarcely live by his. Thus natural inequality insensibly unfolds itself with that arising from men's combining, and the differences among men, developed by the differences of their circumstances, become more noticeable, more permanent in their effects, and begin to influence in the same proportion the condition of individuals.
Prudently, Rousseau goes on to lament the regrettable outcome of inequality:
From the vast inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the great variety of passions and of talents, of useless arts, of pernicious arts, of frivolous sciences, would issue clouds of prejudices equally contrary to reason, to happiness, to virtue. We should see the chiefs foment everything that tends to weaken men united in societies by dividing them; everything that, while it gives society an air of apparent harmony, sows in it the seeds of real dissension; everything that can inspire the different classes with mutual distrust and hatred by an opposition of their rights and interests, and so strengthen that power which controls them all.
I will return later to this work from Rousseau when I discuss inequality in greater detail.
A thought: humans are vain and self-interested, preferring to consume media which flatter their self-image. They are drawn to simplified explanations and conform to the views of their peers. They prefer news that idolize their side and diminish the other. Media, in turn, drawn to clicks and profit, give viewers what they want, in effect amplifying political issues and cover sensational issues more extensively than their prevalence in reality, exaggerating the sense of divide, creating a reductive image of the other side as a stereotypical caricature, an easy recipient of blame, that though each side is in the same country, they have little personal contact with the other, digesting only their affiliation’s media and cementing into their perceived reality the uncomplimentary views of the other. How to incentivize truth-seeking? How to steer people away from self-flattery?
Most folks may simply not value politics all that much, and issues of race, gender, religion, abortion, though highly publicized in media, which may benefit from emphasizing such tribalism to attract viewership, are not significant components in daily life for most people, liberal or conservative, all of whom may just prefer to go about their business and mind their private matters. If asked, and if they’ll answer honestly, people will reveal their views, but for the most part the questions themselves are not more important than asking whether someone prefers creamy or crunchy peanut butter. Most folks may simply be apathetic to issues related to identity politics. Those issues may just not matter all that much, and the perception that they do may stem from media’s obsession over them and politicians riding the heated wave in their campaigns. These claims of mine, of course, come with the caveat that they pertain to daily matters and casual interactions, not the more consequential interfaces when it comes to changes in the public school curriculum, college admissions, job promotions, entrenched segregation in housing, and all other sorts of enduring divides where such issues very much remain relevant, and in sustained relations where certain demographic associations play a part, albeit subtly, but such factors exist in red country just as much as in urban liberal bastions, which offer a more modern and tolerant facade but underneath may not be all that different. I’ll return to this last point later; as I said, I’ll start slow and ground the discussion on a tempered foundation. For the predominant news providers to sustain these issues as a matter of national discourse and continually remind the public of divisive issues does the country a major disservice. Liberal media buoys liberal insularity, and conservative media exaggerates national threats and chaos, and when a conservative encounters a known liberal, the conservative brings grudges from the outset, but for that matter so will the liberal, and what results is an interaction of stereotypes received from media rather than of reality. I suspect many folks don’t enjoy thinking about politics which is not a priority in their lives so long as political troubles don’t impinge on them, yet when politics come up in conversation, the heated tension from accumulated exposure to divisive news on each side elicits a reactionary anger to what may otherwise not matter all that much. I make this next statement with the usual disclaimer that no generalization applies to everyone, and individual differences may vary greatly within any category: let me suggest to liberals that the label “Republican” of many such folks may not mean what liberals think it means, that the distance may not be that large, that people are people like all others who have their differences. And on that note, again to liberals, the terms “Democrat”, “progressive”, and even “liberal” may not mean the allyship such labels bring to mind, that they may be only surface identifiers that grant favor to those who, through education, have learned to play officialdom’s game and who benefit from the prevailing social climate, who may even have convinced themselves of the ideals but who then gracefully forget to extend those ideals into policy and action, that when they discover the personal cost and difficulty of following through with their words, it is with a curious, if predictably consistent, case of sudden cold feet that they recuse themselves, inexplicably awe-struck by the terms of reality that their hitherto righteous energy and loud protests collapse into a muted sound one might mistake for silence were it not for the crickets. But I have digressed; let me return to the grounded state! You tell me this not humorous, that I am failing my mission! Please do forgive moi! Allow me try once more!
I don’t mean to unduly criticize Currid-Halkett, from whose book I’ve learned a few things. Yet Currid-Halkett, well-educated, mature, only seven or eight decades younger than me, is a mother of three, so I can fairly assume she is strong enough to take honest feedback and maybe a joke here and especially later on, that she can dare to laugh at herself and her fellow liberals. As Lucian Freud observed of Sigmund Freud:
He always seemed to be in a good mood. He had what many really intelligent people have, which is not being serious or solemn. They know what they are talking about so they have no need to be earnest about it.
We must humor ourselves with a historic name whose life and fortune ran afoul in incredible jest! Currid-Halkett writes, “In the Enlightenment, Voltaire and Rousseau had equal footing.” But this is the sort of false perception caused by a retrospective rose-tinted lenses along the lines of: “Rousseau’s ideas have proved influential; therefore he must have been popular and well-received in his time.” This was not true. Voltaire, an aristocrat, was hostile and antagonistic to Rousseau and his upstart ideas. Rousseau, though well-known then and now, was for the most part infamous during his lifetime. It was with the French Revolution, nearly a decade after Roussea’s death, a radical political and social upheaval priding itself on Rousseau’s ideals of equality, that Rousseau’s name was accepted into the establishment. If Rousseau has come to be held in high regard, this reputation stems largely only after his death, even if the intermission was fairly short. While Rousseau was alive, his books were banned; he was a fugitive for much of his life; America’s founding fathers did not mention his influence. As Leo Damrosch writes in a 2012 article in the Humanities magazine:
It is always said that the American Founders were chiefly influenced by Locke and Montesquieu, and so they were. But some were influenced by Rousseau as well, though his radical reputation made it unwise to say so openly. Jefferson's immortal line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," comes directly out of The Social Contract, published two hundred and fifty years ago this year.
His contemporary peers derided his work and ideas, and Rousseau wrote considerably to defend himself, largely to no avail. He struggled financially and especially towards the end of his life. In a 2002 collection of Rousseau’s political writings, collated and edited by Susan Dunn, we find a timeline in which Rousseau’s later years read like a piece of comedy: 1762-1770: “Rousseau travels from place to place, hoping to find asylum, still preoccupied with grievances against his friends. The city of Geneva refuses him asylum because of his political and religious ideas.”—1765: “Voltaire calls for Rousseau’s death. Rousseau’s house in Môltiers is stoned, and he flees.”— 1767-1769: “Rousseau returns to France; he wanders clandestinely from place to place.”—1770-1771: “After eight years of wandering, Rousseau moves to Paris, where he lives in poverty.”—1772: “Dissatisfied with his Confessions and preoccupied with justifying and explaining himself, he begins writing Dialogues: Rousseau[,] Judge of Jean-Jacques.”—1776-1778: “He works on his Reveries of the Solitary Walker . . ., a poignant, introspective work . . . He makes a public plea for financial help.” And: “He dies on 2 July 1778, five days after his sixty-sixth birthday.” As a matter of fact, DIALOGUES: ROUSSEAU, JUDGE OF JEAN-JACQUES is a most curious piece of work, in which Rousseau is a character speaking to an unnamed Frenchman, and the subject of their conversation is a mysterious and obscure writer, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau, a rather verbose fella who never fails to deliver long, long paragraphs in a highly imbalanced conversation, tells the terse, inquisitive, and eerily persistent Frenchman seemingly immune to boredom about the pride Jean-Jacques has with his independence:
True passions, which are rarer than one might think among men, become even more so day by day. Interest erodes them, diminishes them, swallows them all up, and vanity, which is only a folly of amour-propre [vain self-love], helps to stifle them more. The motto of Baron de Feneste can be read in big letters in all the actions of the men of today: It is for appearances . . . The man who is not dominated by amour-propre and who does not go seeking his happiness far from himself is the only one who knows heedlessness and sweet leisure, and J.J. is that man as far as I can determine . . . It is through laziness, through nonchalance, through aversion for dependency and penury that J.J. copies music. He does his work when and as it suits him. He is not accountable to anyone for his day, his time, his work, his leisure. He doesn't need to arrange anything, forsee anything, worry about anything; he has nothing to expend his mind on; he is himself and on his own all day every day.
Is this the Rousseau of whom Currid-Halkett speaks? Is she referring to the popularly revered Rousseau, or is she nodding towards the defiant champion of himself, the Jean-Jacques, the great J.J. who insists that “he is himself and on his own all day every day”? For clarity, Rousseau writes in his last work, REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER, unfinished at the time of his death:
These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say I am what nature meant me to be . . . The conclusion I can draw from all these reflections is that I have never been truly fit for social life, where there is nothing but irksome duty and obligation, and that my independent character has always made it impossible for me to submit to the constraints which must be accepted by anyone who wishes to live among men.
What a character, this Rousseau! Nevertheless, as staunchly independent as he was, Rousseau is important, and as I said I will return to him later. For now, I shall conclude this foray into Rousseau with the words of a neutral commentator, Gita May, who makes the observation in her essay, ROUSSEAU, CULTURAL CRITIC:
Rousseau boldly challenged the commonly held and cherished notion that great scientific and artistic accomplishments necessarily contribute to the betterment of the human condition. This meant that he would have the stand alone against the philosophes [Enlightenment philosophers], and especially against his friend Diderot [editor of the ENCYCLOPÉDIE, the centerpiece of the Enlightenment] . . . In a society with a devalued morality every individual becomes an actor—that is, one well-versed in the art of wearing a mask and in the ruses of deception . . . Rousseau deliberately set out to contrast the simple, frugal ways of Sparta with the high culture of Athens as a strong warning that as a nation grows rich and powerful and as its prosperity increases, it may come to give in to a fatal craving for luxury, urbanity, refined manners and pleasures. This narcissistic preoccupation with pleasure, politeness, elegance, and good taste will be fatally inimical to morality and to the survival of such basic, simple, and essential virtues as truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty, courage, humanity, and love of duty and of freedom.
This incredibly pertinent foray into Rousseau notwithstanding and my critique of Currid-Halkett aside, let me repeat the core message of Currid-Halkett’s work, which I stand in agreement with: most of the country’s Republicans and Democrats, despite their apparent division and public discontent, actually have much in common. It is true that extremists on both sides exist, but the media echoes their voices, setting up one side against the other as though they are mortal enemies, and the effect on the public is a constant perception of irremediable fissure. Dissenting views between Republicans and Democrats also exist, but their opinions are often sensible in their circumstances, knowledge base, sources of trust and authority, and community, and the disagreement is not to the extent that they cannot exchange thoughts. Neither party is a solid monolith, and discord and difference also occur within.
Trouble: Turchin
Even though I agree with Currid-Halkett that the popular image of the red-blue polarization is misleading, there remains a very real problem of inequality that sits behind the current turmoil. We now turn to Peter Turchin and his view on the increasingly unstable state of affairs. Let me make the reminder that the intention of this post is to adhere to the truth, even to dire depths, and I forewarn the reader that from here onwards, this post offers little in the way of flattery and easy gains, and much of it ventures into the unpleasant, but it is only by wading through the gloom that the essential issues can be confronted in order to reach the genuine light at the end.
Turchin’s research has focused on what has caused historical societies to collapse, and his book published last year, END TIMES, describes the confluence of the same factors that lead to societal decline. For an overview, Turchin gave a talk on the book’s ideas. To get to the point: Turchin sees the circumstances today as a “revolutionary situation,” and the two main culprits, with self-explanatory names, are: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. Turchin bases his conception of popular immiseration on the growing inequality shown in economic data:
The US Census Bureau helpfully provides data on the median income. Between 1976 and 2016, it grew from $52,621 (in 2020 dollars) to $63,683, a change of 21 percent . . . When we look at wages, the supposed improvement in economic conditions is diluted . . . The median real wage between 1976 and 2016 increased from $17.11 to $18.90 per hour—that is, by 10 percent . . . The average real wage of workers with bachelor's degrees increased from $27.83 to $34.27 per hour. (As before, I am comparing 1976 to 2016 using inflation-adjusted dollars.) Americans with advanced degrees did even better, going from $33.18 to $43.92. But workers with just high school degrees saw their wages decrease from $19.25 to $18.57. For workers who did not complete high school, wages shrank from $15.50 to $13.66 . . . The startling conclusion from these data is that Americans without a four-year college degree—64 percent of the total population—have been losing ground in absolute terms; their real wages shrank over the forty years before 2016.
Then in a calculation disregarding inflation which provides a starker image:
In 1976, the average cost of studying at a public university was $617 per year. That sounds almost unreal. A worker earning the median wage in 1976 needed to work 150 hours to earn one year of college. In 2016, the average annual cost of public university tuition and fees was $8,804. A median-wage worker needed to work 500 hours to pay for it—that's more than three times longer. The challenge of affording a median house tells a similar story: a median worker must work 40 percent longer to earn it in 2016 compared to 1976. That 10 percent increase in real median wage starts to look even punier than before . . . In 2016, "working class" (less educated) [those who only completed high school] parents had to work four times as long to pay for college for their children compared to 1976. This means that the ability to move from the less educated to the more educated class has dramatically eroded in just a few decades.
Regina Deil-Amen points out in a 2012 paper, that community college students have, based on data from the 2008-2009 academic year, grown to be as numerous as four-year college students, even though they are not represented in the image of the typical college student, calling them the “marginalized majority”:
Our conceptions of the typical idealized college student are based on traditional notions and an imagined norm of someone who begins college immediately after high school, enrolls full-time, lives on campus, and is ready to begin college-level classes . . . [F]ocusing attention on the traditional four-year sector as the norm is quite dismissive of a clear majority of our nation's students and the institutions that serve them. They are the relatively neglected other half of U.S. higher education . . . For too long, it has been assumed that what works for the dominant and more elite groups can work in underresourced contexts with differing challenges. This is simply a hypothesis that thus far has not been born out in reality. Resource rich school with great pools of upper middle class parental capital and assistance function very well for those students. The same structure has not been shown to function very well in the absence of such parental support. In fact, I would argue that our public schools are structured to succeed dependent upon parental resources. It makes little sense to expect the same school structures to operate effectively for families in low SES circumstances and their children.
But what about those who haven’t gone to college? Oliver Anthony’s song, RICH MEN NORTH OF RICHMOND struck a particular chord with great portions of the country last summer, and based on the song’s popularity, it would be neglectful not to take popular immiseration seriously. Encapsulating these dire economic inequalities with a dismal prospect, Turchin warns:
[T]he declining well-being of the working class is a bad thing—because it fundamentally undermines the stability of our society. Most obviously, when large swaths of the population experience falling living standards, this undermines the legitimacy of our institutions and thus weakens the state. Popular immiseration increases mass mobilization potential. In the past, peasants revolted when their misery could not be borne anymore.
In conjunction with popular immiseration is an even more potent factor: elite overproduction, as Turchin discusses:
History (and CrisisDB [Turchin's historical database]) tells us that the credentialed precariat (or, in the jargon of cliodynamics, the frustrated elite aspirant class) is the most dangerous class for societal stability. Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the most significant factor in driving societal upheavals, from the Revolutions of 1848 to the Arab Spring of 2011 . . . The most dangerous occupation, however, appears to be the legal profession . . . Let's take a closer look at what's happened to law school graduates in the last few decades. For many years, the National Association for Law Placement, NALP, has been collecting data on starting salaries obtained by law school graduates. In 1991, this distribution was not particularly remarkable . . . For the class of 2020, the left bulge flattened a bit, with most reported salaries between $45K and $75K, accounting for 50 percent of reported salaries. But the right-hand peak was now $190K, with just over 20 percent of the distribution. There were very few salaries between the two peaks . . . The 20 percent . . . are well on their way to joining the established elites. Those who are in the lump on the left . . . are in trouble . . . [M]ost of them will be crushed by the debt and its relentlessly accumulating interest. It's strange to think of most law school graduates as members of the precariat, but that's what they are.
According to Turchin, when popular immiseration and elite overproduction combine, what results is rising societal instability and political fracture:
As of 2022, we are clearly in transition from the precrisis phase, when the state is still struggling to maintain control of the ideological landscape in the face of a multitude of counter-elite challengers, to the next phase, when numerous contenders struggle among themselves for primacy. Politicians who still cling to old-regime values, which emphasize moderation and intraelite cooperation, have been retiring, or losing elections to challengers with more extreme views . . . Many observers were taken aback by the intensity of the 'cancel culture' that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. But such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution. Jacque Mallet du Pan . . . formulated this observation as a dictum: 'Like Saturn, the [French] Revolution devours its children. This is a necessary corollary, essentially a mathematical certainty, following from elite overproduction as the most important driver of rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars. In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of—historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility. In America today, the losers are treated in milder ways, at least for now . . . Immiserated proletarians are not the ones who run successful revolutions. The truly dangerous revolutionaries are frustrated elite aspirants, who have the privileges, training, and connections to enable them to wield influence at scale. Even the minority of the newly credentialed youth who get into elite positions right away, like the 20 percent of law school graduates with $190K salaries, are not happy campers, because they feel the general insecurity. The growing proportion of credentialed youth who are doomed to become the educated precariat are the ones who have nothing to lose but their precarity.
Turchin likens the potency of popular immiseration as a forest and elite overproduction to a fire: how long has a drought been and how dense and overgrown are the trees? The surplus of elites is perhaps a constant, and at times it grows, and when only a small group of trees are in misery, only a negligible fire, easily put out, ensues. But when massive sections of the forest have been immiserated, easily swayed and influenced by anti-establishment alternatives of hope, the spark of a single fire expands outward as naturally as the wind blows: populism heralded by a potent counter-elite.
My fellow Americans of this yet-again great country, we must sit ourselves down like schoolchildren and take a page from some mighty fine folks aspiring to represent you and me in our country’s highest office and witness civility at its finest hour! Last year at the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, on the topic of Trump, Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis couldn’t wait to express their eagerness on the matter and elevated themselves to simultaneous talking! The patient audience can certainly follow along with what they are saying! This exchange surely resembles the workings of a functioning party! But to be sure, the trumpy man who won the primary did not even need to show up at any of the party’s debates to trump his trumpets! And to add salt to the wound, debased conduct is by no means limited to the presidential candidates! CNN shared a video of a recent verbal conflict during a hearing in a House of Representatives committee, with personal insults now thrown in—some real professional conduct that one would not find more proper in a middle-school playground. How comic! One may even start to wonder whether one should laugh and enjoy some comedy at the frustrated political divide, if only these aren’t elected representatives in the government who should be doing their jobs and fixing the country’s problems. More sensibly, the second half of the video is of David Frum and other commentators analyzing the incident and how this is behavior becoming more common in an increasingly dysfunctional political climate. Turchin writes:
Popular discontent coupled with a large pool of elite aspirants makes for a very combustible combination, as we have experienced in America since 2016.
Stepping back, Turchin reflects on the current political landscape:
The Democratic Party . . . is now the party of the 10 percent and of the 1 percent. But the 1 percent is losing its traditional political vehicle, the Republican Party, which is being taken over by its populist wing . . . Earlier I argued that a revolution cannot succeed without large-scale organization. The right-wing populists intend to use the GOP as an already existing organization to grasp power. An added advantage is that control of one of the main parties offers them a nonviolent, legal route to power.
Putting our predicament in perspective, Turchin writes:
The American Republic has gone through two revolutionary situations . . . The first one, which developed during the 1850s, was resolved by a social revolution, the American Civil War, which replaced the antebellum ruling elites with the new corporate ruling class. The second one, which peaked during the 1920s, was resolved by the adoption of the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal periods. Today, we are in a third revolutionary situation. How will it be resolved—by a civil war, by reforms, or by some combination of the two?
Merit
In this section and the next, we draw the distinction between merit and meritocracy. Anthony Quinton defended merit-based inequality in a 1976 article entitled ELITISM: A BRITISH VIEW:
I am an elitist to the extent that I believe excellence should be recognized, fostered, and rewarded . . . It is one thing to eliminate the inequalities that are, because excessive or unjustified, either unproductive or counterprodutive. It is another to eliminate the inequalities on which vitality and progress depend.
Quinton, in advocating for inequality of this justified, merit-based kind, mentions a caveat, which that he is opposed to a closed caste of meritocrats, and, in his understanding, the class of elites are decidedly not closed but is open to those with ability, ambition, and energy. I will return to this point later, as I disagree with his claim that the marketplace provides equal opportunity and that entry into the elites is open to all with ability, but the point stands: merit, greater ability, and industry should be encouraged and rewarded properly.
We start by evaluating the opposing circumstance, which diminishes merit and dilutes individual performance and accountability. Bibb Latané, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins reported in a 1979 paper that in group tasks in which individual efforts are unidentifiable, individual performance decreases in a group, as a result of social loafing. The more people in the group, the lower the individual contribution: “[S]ocial impact theory suggests that the amount of effort expended on group tasks should decrease as an inverse power function of the number of people in the group.”
Before continuing further on the issue of loafing, it is worth briefly delineating some cultural factors. P. Christopher Earley has observed that cultural perspective affects the impact of social loafing: individualist cultures are more susceptible to social loafing than collectivist cultures. Earley writes:
[A]n individualist's performance in a group setting was less than that of an individualist working alone. Further, this social loafing effect decreased with enhanced accountability for performance. Collectivists, however, did not demonstrate any social loafing effect and, in fact, appeared to perform better in a group than working alone.
Earley, in a later paper, finds further support that individualists work better on their own as opposed to in a group, while collectivists, on the other hand, work better as part of a group, specifically in an ingroup (which Earley defined as “an aggregate of people sharing similar trait and background characteristics”) as opposed to an outgroup or alone. Earley attributes the effects of these advantaged performance settings for individualists and collectivists to an enhanced perceived self-efficacy in their preferred setting. To be specific: America, for all its diverse groups, has a predominantly individualist culture, and it is in this context that I predicate my views.
Social loafing: more recently, Jennifer Mueller in a 2012 found that two previously known factors of an individual’s productivity loss when working in a team—coordination loss and motivation loss—are not sufficient to account for all the losses incurred when working with others—as if it is not enough that teamwork is beginning to sound like a train of loss, a colossal loss, a land of loss, a continual loss, what else could be missing but another loss in the already lossy team-scape?—Mueller further appends such an element as relational loss, as an individual perceives lower available support as teams grow larger. Mueller announces the new loss:
Based on current theory and research, one might infer that in larger teams the best individual performers should simply minimize the amount of time spent coordinating and increase time spent working on individual tasks to avoid coordination and motivation losses . . . However, the current paper will suggest that even if a person were to follow these recommendations he still might perform worse in large group contexts. This can be attributed to individuals in larger teams also experiencing relational loss which has important consequences for individual performance.
It goes without saying that multiple people working together can accomplish tasks at a scale, complexity, and availability that no individual, no matter how diligent and talented, is capable of attaining. But how should teams and companies reconcile superior individual performance with languish-prone group work? A 1993 paper from James Shepperd, collating research on productivity loss in social scenarios, suggests several solutions to motivate performance; aside from one which involves internal incentive when members identify with the group and take pride in being part of a cohesive collective, all the proposed solutions essentially reduce group work into the individual’s, recreating the individual context within the group environment: to reward individual work, to partition the group task, to hold individuals accountable, to privatize the social aspect into single portions, or to punish loafing. We can consider a real-world scenario in the case of the hedge fund, Bridgewater, thanks to the founder’s openness with sharing his approach. Ray Dalio describes his company’s principles of idea meritocracy and radical transparency in a TED talk in which he emphasizes that individuals’ performances are rated and exposed to everyone else, granting a view into both the rater and the ratee, as each can be compared to others’, and individuals are rewarded for higher credibility: “This process allows us to make decisions not based on democracy, not based on autocracy, but based on algorithms that take people’s believability into consideration.” In more detail, Ray Dalio writes in his 2017 book, PRINCIPLES:
At Bridgewater, new employees are often taken aback by how frank and direct such conversations can be, but it's not personal or hierarchical—no one is exempt from this kind of criticism. While this process is generally difficult for both managers and their subordinates, in the long run it has made people happier and Bridgewater more successful. Remember that most people are happiest when they are improving and doing the things that suit them naturally and help them advance . . . Typically it takes from six to twelve months to get to know a new employee in a by-and-large sort of way, and about eighteen months for them to internalize and adapt to the culture . . . Sometimes you need to stand by and let someone make a mistake (provided it's not too serious) so that they can learn . . . The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger. Compliments are easy to give but don't help people stretch. Pointing out someone's mistakes and weaknesses (so they learn what they need to deal with) is harder and less appreciated, but much more valuable in the long run . . . Keeping people in jobs they are not suited for is terrible for them because it allows them to live in a false reality while holding back their personal evolution, and it is terrible for the community because it compromises the meritocracy and everyone pays the price . . . It is very difficult to fire people you care about. Cutting someone that you have a meaningful relationship with but who isn't an A player in their job is difficult because ending good relationships is hard, but it is necessary for the long-term excellence of the company . . . [W]e know that we cannot compromise on the fundamentals of our culture, so if a person cannot operate within our requirements of excellence through radical truth and transparency in an acceptable time frame, he or she must leave.
Despite the array of possible losses in communal work, there is no doubt that working in teams is effective, and that collaborative work has grown to eclipse solo endeavors. Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin Jones, and Brian Uzzi in 2007 observed that knowledge creation in nearly every field has increasingly been done by teams as opposed to solo authors. Yet team size matters: how large a team is seems to determine the type of work the team undertakes, according to a 2019 paper from Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, who find that larger teams tend to develop established ideas, while small teams (three or fewer members) produce more disruptive, innovative work. The authors acknowledge that both team types are crucial to research progress, but team size correlates with the types of problems that the team pursues:
[S]olo authors are just as likely to produce high-impact papers (in the top 5% of citations) as teams with five members, but solo-authored papers are 72% more likely to be highly disruptive (in the top 5% of disruptive papers). By contrast, ten-person teams are 50% more likely to score a high-impact paper, yet these contributions are much more likely to develop existing ideas already prominent in the system, which is reflected in the very low likelihood they are among the most disruptive . . . We find that solo authors and small teams much more often build on older, less popular ideas . . . Larger teams more often target recent, high-impact work as their primary source of inspiration, and this tendency increases monotonically with team size. It follows that large teams receive more of their citations rapidly, as their work is immediately relevant to more contemporaries whose ideas they develop and audiences primed to appreciate them. Conversely, smaller teams experience a much longer citation delay . . . [E]ven though small teams receive less recognition overall owing to the rapid decay of collective attention . . ., their successful research produces a ripple effect, which becomes an influential source of later large-team success.
Two of the paper’s authors emphasize the role of team size in the Harvard Business Review:
Our results appeared remarkably robust against many tests and alternate explanations. For example, one could argue that certain types of people are more likely to work for smaller or larger teams, thus changing the outcomes associated with each. But when we compared the work of the same individual on a small team versus a large team, we found systematic differences in line with our results. We also found that team differences are not due to the different types of topics that large and small teams tend to study. This suggests it's about team size rather than the efficient sorting of people and problems.
The authors write that large teams are risk-averse and prefer to work on more conservative problems, while smaller teams favor untested and novel ideas with both greater potential success and failure. But here I stress that it is with the possibility of greater reward that incentivizes taking on more risk; if such reward structures were not in place, the norm will be the relative lack of innovation.
Without incentives for growth and rewards, why should an entrepreneur risk taking out a loan to brave a business venture if she or they receive the same returns as the next person who has taken no extra effort, undergone no further training, jeopardized no stakes greater than remaining in the security of regular employment? Why would a venture capitalist bet on a fledgling startup rather than an established, stable company if not for the promise of greater returns? Why would someone labor through long nights and thankless endeavors to manifest an invention if not to obtain benefits from the invention which are not freely given to those who made no contribution? If not for the benefits, why would anyone aspire to invent, to excel, to succeed, to do better? If everyone, regardless of performance, receives the same salary, why would an employee risk speaking out, ideate above and beyond, work overtime, remain in the office to work on an exciting concept long after the rest of the office has emptied out? I am not speaking about the casual courtesies among acquaintances or the convivial exchanges between friends—these are the pleasantries of life, and people can indulge in them as much as they desire, but these relations constitute only one aspect of the condition and necessity of human life—they incur no cost and evoke no pain, both of which the demands of work and labor often entail. For all the dialogue floated in public about equality, little recognition is given to the fruits of work as the bedrock of society’s operations, and a reminder is in order: without adequate production, there won’t be enough material sustenance to go around; without innovators and entrepreneurs, few novelties will be conceived, much less made accessible to the public through the market. Elon Musk, who emphasizes hard work and long hours, described his perspective on building a new company even in spite of massive risk:
Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear. So, starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%, and I just accepted that actually, probably I would just lose everything, but that maybe would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward, even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton and keep it moving forward, so that would still do some good. Same with Tesla, I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low.
Take another example in the case of the Polish film director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, even more fatalist but nevertheless still undeterred, who said:
I haven't got a great talent for films. Orson Welles, for example, managed to achieve this at the age of twenty-four or twenty-six when he made CITIZEN KANE, and, with his first film, climbed to the top, to the highest possible peak in cinema . . . But I'll need to take all my life to get there and I never will. I know that perfectly well. I just keep on going. And if somebody doesn't want to or can't understand that this is a lasting process then obviously he or she will keep saying that everything I do is different, better or worse, from what I've done before. But for me it isn't better or worse. It's all the same only a step further, and, according to my own private scale of values, these are small steps which are taking me nearer to a goal which I'll never reach anyway. I haven't got enough talent.
Differential performance, as a result of innovation or more industrious work, is essential to growth, to business, to research, to productivity. True equality is impossible; while equal pay for equal work is feasible and we may aspire towards equal opportunity for all, it is delusional to expect that everyone’s performance be equal; it is absurd and destructive to mandate equal outcomes to maintain nominal equality. Alex Inkeles writes in a 1950 paper that despite the Soviet Union’s attempt at equality:
It would appear that the Communist regime has not been highly successful in preventing the stratification of society into social-class groups, and is certainly a long way from having eliminated them . . . Soviet experience indicates that the very fact of modern large-scale production—involving extreme division of labor, precise differentiation of function, emphasis on technical competence, and elaborate hierarchies of authority and responsiblity—provides a natural basis for the development of distinct social groups. Such differences in the relations of individuals to the productive process tend to yield inequalities in economic reward because of the differential position of certain persons in the labor market.
I was still rather young in 1971 when Irving Kristol published in The Atlantic an article commenting on state welfare, his view summarized in the title, WELFARE: THE BEST OF INTENTIONS, THE WORST OF RESULTS. Kristol describes how welfare benefits compete with the market’s wages for labor, and when the benefits rise, more and more people will favor welfare over productive work, citing Tocqueville’s view on pauperism. Tocqueville himself writes against welfare in MEMOIR ON PAUPERISM:
Man, like all socially organised beings, has a natural passion for idleness. There are, however, two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve the conditions of life. Experience has proven that the majority of men can be sufficiently motivated to work only by the first of these incentives. The second is only effective with a small minority. Well, a charitable institution indiscriminately open to all those in need, or a law which gives all the poor a right to public aid, whatever the origin of their poverty, weakens or destroys the first stimulant and leaves only the second intact . . . [T]he peasant . . ., I maintain, has no interest in working, or, if he works, has no interest in saving. He therefore remains idle or thoughtlessly squanders the fruits of his labours . . . [T]he most generous, the most active, the most industrious part of the nation, which devotes its resources to furnishing the means of existence for those who do nothing or who make bad use of their labour . . . What is to prevent society from inquiring into the causes of the need before giving assistance? Why could work not be imposed as a condition on the able-bodied indigent who asks for public pity? . . . Any measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.
In spite of this aversion to state charity, I am not completely against welfare or some form of government influence on the market, for the reasons we shall see in the next section, and while Tocqueville writes harshly of what he calls “legal charity”, there is some truth to his claim that a system which provides free sustenance will demotivate those dependent on it from remediating their own situations. However, in the general case, it should be that merit should be prioritized.
Meritocracy
It is hard to fault merit, to deny that those who work harder, longer, are more responsible for their actions, take initiative and risk, push for innovation, that those with greater ability and willingness to apply themselves should receive correspondingly more substantial rewards for their greater effort and productivity. I agree with this point. Ben Carson recently spoke on Fox News about the importance of merit and equality of opportunity, which I find sensible and proper. He additionally said “this equity stuff is garbage, quite frankly.” If what he meant by equity is equality of outcome, then I also stand in agreement. However, if by equity he is referring to policies or slight preferences given to disadvantaged groups so that they may attain some semblance of equality of opportunity, I disagree. The issue is whether equality of opportunity currently exists. But this raises a question: if merit and differential outcomes and rewards are desired, are these forces not sufficient and satisfactory? What are the limits of merit? It turns out that, in order to understand the complete picture, it is not enough to reason on the simple basis of (1) opportunity is equally available to everyone, and (2) in a system that rewards merit, those with greater ability and commitment earn their deserved positions of success. Our discussion so far has considered only the virtues of merit, of the second point, but not the first, which is not true because of generational consequences, of how privilege, benefits, and advantages are passed on from meritorious parents to their children who are groomed into replicating their parents’ positions, creating asymmetric access to opportunity. I have up to this point resisted using the term meritocracy to describe my support of merit, for while merit itself is commendable, a system based on merit also encompasses the human tendencies and generational ramifications of meritocrats bequeathing privilege to their offspring.
There is no difficulty in conceiving of the trappings of meritocracy. In the article mentioned earlier advocating merit, Quinton himself considers them:
Sterner egalitarians argue that once you allow a minority, whether excellent or not, to acquire power and status, its members will inevitably use their position to secure an economic advantage for themselves. And once that happens, you have the makings of a closed caste . . . What is more important in the long run is that the members of an elite that is notably better off than the mass of the population will try to confer on their children the advantages they themselves have enjoyed.
Quinton offsets this potential by reasoning that when the children of the elites, inheriting wealth and privilege, lack the ability of their parents, they will fall from their elite status; the inherited elite will decay and lose their position to the ambitious and able from the more moderate classes:
Now, if wealth is inherited by those who have neither inherited the ability of those who acquired it nor, for some reason or other, derived any advantage from the circumstances of their upbringing, elite positions will be secured by those who do not have the qualities, whatever they may be, by which those positions were obtained in the first place. The elite, in other words, will decay.
This reasoning is sensible but this does not seem to be what happens; elite parents use every means to pass on their privileges, the elites strive to hold on to their status, even to competitive extremes of unenjoyable meritocratic labor that consume much of their lives, throughout their school years and continuing into their professional careers.
Class differences begin early. Annette Lareau studied first-graders and their parents in a 1987 paper in which she describes differences, between one working-class and one upper-middle-class school, in parental involvement in their children’s schooling. Middle-class parents had higher expectations, were more proactive with the school, and provided further educational opportunities outside of school. Lareau attributes these differences to differential parental resources, financial, cultural, educational. The study focused on white communities, but presumably the observations apply elsewhere, to both predominantly non-white and racially mixed student bodies. Lareau proceeds in 2002 to describe the middle-class childrearing approach as concerted cultivation, in which parents play a significant role in their children’s upbringing, scheduling activities, fostering language use, and training the children to reason, grooming their opinions and sense of self. Working-class and poor parents used, in Lareau’s terminology, the strategy of natural growth, in which children are given more freedom in their leisure time but whose views and opinions were not prompted when interacting with parents. Lareau further writes, in 2015, on how middle-class, as opposed to poor and working-class, parents use their cultural knowledge to help their children prepare for and navigate institutions and schools, leveraging their familiarity to obtain help and advantage, and this knowledge is passed on to their children.
On the upper middle class: Richard Reeves, writes in his 2017 book, DREAM HOARDERS:
Upper middle-class children have a very different upbringing than ordinary kids. In particular, they develop the skills, attributes, and credentials valued in the labor market. By the time Americans are old enough to drink, their place in the class system is clear. Upper middle-class parents obviously have more money to spend on their children and many ways to spend it. But this is also a social fracture. A class is not only defined in dollars, but by education, attitude, and zip code; not only by its economic standard of living, but by its way of life . . . The typical child born and raised in the American upper middle class is raised in a stable home by well-educated, married parents, lives in a great neighborhood, and attends the area's best schools. They develop a wide range of skills and gain and impressive array of credentials. Upper middle-class children lucked out right from the start.
Reeves remarks how class advantage shores up privilege through, among other things, exclusionary zoning, preferential treatment in college admissions, and unpaid internships:
[T]he main reason the children of the upper middle class end up as winners, especially in the labor market, is by being strong competitors . . . But we cannot ignore another contributor to class persistence: opportunity hoarding. This occurs when the upper middle class does not win by being better but by rigging the competition in our favor.
And specifically the wealthiest: last year, Raj Chetty released a working paper on how the top 1% receives admissions advantages to Ivy-Plus colleges through legacy preferences, non-academic factors like extracurricular activities and personality traits, and athletic recruitment. And earlier, in 2017, Chetty published a paper on how the children who grow up to be inventors are more likely to come from high-income households, even among children who had similar test scores, a barometer for equal ability. Chetty’s study further reveals that environmental effects play an important role in children’s eventual likelihood to innovate, which is enhanced by early exposure to innovative environments through their parents or neighborhoods. Chetty elaborates:
[T]he data point to mechanisms such as transmission of specific human capital, access to networks that help children pursue a certain subfield, acquisition of information about certain careers, or role model effects.
This meritocratic concentration of privilege emerged in the Soviet Union as well, and was even sustained by the state, as Victor Zaslavsky wrote in 1980:
That the class of specialists (intelligentsia) attempt to perpetuate itself is a well-known truism from the middle 1960s, and one could even find in the Soviet press the observation that "for the most part, the stratum of the intelligentsia reproduces itself." In recent years these testimonies are even more frequent because "the principal context of most serious Soviet discussions of social inequality has been the problem of access to higher education." . . . [T]he system of selection [into higher education] based on competitive entrance examinations has become an instrument for the transmission of specialist positions from one generation to the next . . . In contrast to all other classes, the majority of specialists have the right to reside in closed cities [the major urban areas of the Soviet Union where residence requires special permission by birth, inheritance, or official authorization, enforced with the internal passport system] where, coincidentally, all major universities are located as well. The specialists are geographically, professionally, and structurally connected with the system of higher education. This factor underlies, and to a significant extent determines, the operation of related factors such as access to better schooling, housing, and especially to personal ties and contacts with relevant networks.
Meritocracy encourages entrenched privilege over generations; those who become professors tend to be the children of professors who from early on have been exposed to the resources and the orientation towards academics, who have been groomed to value education, having learned how to seek the right opportunities, the preparatory credentials, the onset of institutionalized merit, largely unknown to those without such exposure. This inherited privilege is particularly pernicious to the reputation of the upper middle class because, unlike very exclusive factions in the top 0.5%, the upper middle class has the image of open access to those who work sufficiently hard. This is true for those who work hard in the proper direction early enough, but there appears to be an element of pseudo-aristocracy encroaching onto the merit ladder in the form of foot stools and climbing lessons for certain children whose parents who both know and can afford these stools and lessons. This image of the upper middle class as having doors to merit, as predicated on equal opportunity, is false, misleading, and damaging to everyone: those locked out and those within who, within their privileged quarters, must endeavor and compete among themselves. Daniel Markovits explains in THE MERITOCRACY TRAP how inequality grows as elite meritocrats invest in their children, sending them to exclusive schools early on, and when the children earn their privileged positions, they repeat the process with their own children, leading to accumulating inequality. He writes:
Meritocratic inequality grows—and meritocracy builds and then reinforces its trap—through a series of feedback loops. The most important connects meritocratic inequality's two basic building blocks: the exceptional training that rich children receive in school and the extravagant incomes that elite skills sustain at work.
For a brief overview, Markovits describes the issues with meritocracy at the Oxford Union. As Markovits notes, it is ferocious competition to function within the lifestyle of meritocrats, through all the stages from childhood to adulthood. Let us connect the image of this highly competitive endeavor which Markovits calls “extreme meritocratic competition” with Turchin’s perspective on elite overproduction and excess degrees: we see the cascade from college onwards, either from graduate school to tenured professorship or from law school to corporate legal careers, in which elite aspirants in the form of degree holders compete for finite slots, generating surplus elites who, excluded from the elite occupations they were trained to acquire, are positioned to assume populist leadership roles at the helm of immiserated masses.
They [urban meritocrats] are extremely stressed out about their kids' academic fortunes starting in ninth grade, or even earlier. They expect their students to end up at a top university. Educational consultants are hired for thousands of dollars, prep for standardized tests starts in tenth grade, and all the while activities—lacrosse, volunteering, chess club, debate team—are scrupulously chosen . . . Are they too obsessed? Perhaps. But what they really are is conscious of how difficult it is to get into a top university and the steps that are necessary to make it happen.
—Currid-Halkett, THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS
The vocal liberal crusade for justice, it seems, consists in part of privileged folks who, aware that their privilege is precarious, wish to secure more privilege, and they operate under the guise of identifying with those who are genuinely struggling. As Markovits observes of potential solutions to the harms of meritocracy:
Progressives cannot answer because they remain under meritocracy's thumb. They are captives who embrace their captor, through a sort of ideological Stockholm syndrome. As a result, progressives exacerbate problems that they do not even see.
Consumed by their passion and their flame, their lofty professors and their texts, holding up their beacon of equality and correctness, they march and protest, their radical energy unable to detect the faults of their version of truth. Quaquaqua blind, insatiable will. Mary Harrington, in a panel discussing Turchin’s book, describes “the children of the current [financial top] 10%” with a sobering comment:
Every time I come across them, [they] appear to be radical at a level which is genuinely shocking to people of my age. Whether they're approaching it from the left or from the right, they're willing to contemplate political possibilities which would be simply unthinkable for a late Gen-Xer such as I am. I think we're in, as Peter says, for some pretty rough times, and I think the contours of those rough times may be considerably broader and more chaotic than perhaps any of us would like.
If these radical youths are converging on political ends which are unthinkable to a Gen-Xer, imagine how much more unthinkable they are to someone even older like the writer! But the penchant for privileged liberals to engage in self-flagellation in the form of books, talks, and on college campuses is in itself harmless and admirable, but unless some remedial courses of action are adopted, ideals remain caged in words, hopes, longings, and, in pretty conference rooms, staring blankly. The action, it needs to be emphasized, must be of the right sort, not merely to instigate unrest or to further heighten domestic tensions. I describe my views on this matter later in this post, but at a glance, I concur with the liberal stance that the trouble stems from the economic inequality caused by the money at the very top, and I believe the problem does not stem from the friction between liberals and populist conservatives, which is only the surface discontent. In mentioning the prospect of heightening tensions in the near future, I don’t wish to sound alarming, and there exists some tempering perspectives such as Currid-Halkett’s, but we should keep in mind the very real possibility of even greater unrest in the coming years, as Turchin suggests. There’s a dictator on both sides of the pond, and both rely heavily on surveillance and mass censorship. I don’t think that’s a desirable outcome for anyone. In his book, Turchin mentions geopolitical tension as one factor for state dissolution, but another is implosion, when domestic tensions themselves result in state collapse.
What, shall this lust of gain
Not even the landmarks keep
Which that is thine contain?
This avarice o'er-leap
Thy client's scant domain?
—Horace, VANITY OF RICHES, ODES
I wish to end this section on a tame note with an example of young elites who identify with the common folk. Less unnerving, more civil, but nevertheless not lacking in leftist politics is a fairly new literary magazine, The Drift, founded in 2020, by Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka, two women who, according to Harvard Magazine, went to private schools in Manhattan before attending college at Harvard. The magazine is in its early stages and remains a small operation; I don’t wish to malign the magazine or the people behind it, but if they stand firmly by their claim that they don’t take themselves too seriously, I hope they don’t mind some humor:
Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year. That most of them do, today, that they are written and published as if they were magazines, to fade as rapidly, is one of the sorriest aspects of today's literature, and one of the clearest indictments of its dominant esthetic philosophy: concrete-bound, journalistic Naturalism which has now reached its dead end in the inarticulate sounds of panic.
—Ayn Rand, Introduction to the 1968 edition of THE FOUNTAINHEAD
The Epicureans have been purposely misrepresented as sensualists and "high livers" by their rivals and detractors . . . Actually the strict Epicurean sectarian was rather ascetic and even puritanical, both in teaching and in practice . . . Epicurus regarded "pleasure" as the logical opposite of "pain"; in other words, for him pleasure meant nonpain, or the relative absence of pain in mind and body . . . The good life, then, . . . is emphatically not a life of sensual enjoyments, excitement, competition, social prestige, and monetary success—all of which we in this country tend to believe constitute the good life, or what we call the "American way of life." . . . The good life for the Epicureans involves disciplining of the appetites, curtailment of desires and needs to the absolute minimum necessary for healthy living, . . ., and withdrawal from active participation in the life of the community, in the company of a few select friends—in a word, plain living and high thinking . . . The ideal, then, in its strict interpretation is practically Oriental—the achieving of a Buddha-like tranquility—with the difference, of course, that the Epicurean asserted the full reality of the physical world and did not seek to be absorbed into a mystical nirvana . . . The negative attitude toward pleasure and the minimizing of all the worldling's chief values are perfectly illustrated by the life of Epicurus himself . . . First, he withdrew from active participation in the social and political life of Athens and secluded himself with friends, both men and women, in a walled Garden. He followed his own precept—lathe biosas ("Live the obscure life"). Second, he lived a simple life, especially as regards diet . . . Third, he spent his time in unworldly pursuits—study, writing, teaching, conversation, contemplation.
—George Strodach, THE PHILOSOPHY OF EPICURUS
Avoid the display of virtue and cleverness
That the people may return to simplicity.
[. . .]
Thus let us cherish purity,
practice simplicity,
check selfishness and
simplify our desires.
—#19, TAO TE CHING, tr. Sum Nung Au-Young
I was walking in the woods a year or two ago with someone who was telling me that a massive underground mycelium network connected all the trees around us, saying that mycelia are sentient and can live for thousands of years. He told me that in the grand scheme of things, we humans aren’t the top dog in the world but rather play just a small part. I didn’t make much of the trite comment at the moment, though later the thought occurred to me: every deer, bear, wolf, worm, squirrel, beaver, and human too who hasn’t been locked up in a ceremonial box, gets decomposed in the earth and eventually become part of a mycelium. These colossal networks underneath—how many creatures and memories, how many generations, how many lives, have been absorbed by their roots like rain drops into the soil? I suppose it knows many things, and maybe it’s proper for organisms to return to something. Maybe that’s what judges us in the end, not a mighty man in the sky or the silence of an apathetic universe but just a really big and really old fungus.
Those who are more inclined to pursue fame hereafter fail to reckon that the next generation will have people just like those they dislike now: and they too will die. What, anyway, is it to you if this is the echo in future voices and this is the judgment they make of you?
—Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS
Things that happen in the narrative of our life
are what we think important. In Uruguay,
they think this too as they did in Sumer once.
There is an only life it happens to.
—William Bronk, THE ONLY LIFE, METAPHOR OF TREES AND LAST POEMS
All my life I have heard rain,
and I am an old man;
but now for the first time I understand
the sound of spring rain
on the river at night.
—Yang Wanli, NIGHT RAIN AT KUANG-K’OU, tr. Jonathan Chaves
Liberal Hypocrisy
The preference that our individual ends up conveying to others is what I will call his public preference. It is distinct from his private preference, which is what he would express in the absence of social pressures. By definition, preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one's private preference . . . The distribution of public preferences across individuals makes up public opinion, and that of private preferences forms private opinion. The latter distribution is hidden, so insofar as people's preferences determine which political programs get implemented, it is the former distribution that pressure groups have the most immediate stake in controlling. Likewise, it is public opinion, and not private opinion, that determines the rewards and punishments individuals receive for their public preferences.
—Timur Kuran, PRIVATE TRUTHS, PUBLIC LIES
My fellow liberals, my fellow intellectual, cultured, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, well-traveled, well-read, well-credentialed dignitaries, all of us immersed in a splendid diversity of cultures and cuisines, my fellow recycling fanatics, vegans, organic-chomping frequenters of farmers’ markets, my fellow consumers of single-origin-beans blended into a fine cup of cortado, our muscles impressively toned from all that vinyasa and meditating too long in the lotus position, my comrades of state-subsidized, media-endorsed, popularly accepted hegemonic officialdom, let us not thrust aside for even a moment our moral superiority and classist appetites, because we, in spite of this section’s title, are certainly not hypocrites! Does criticism cut deeper and make a more lasting impact if it comes from another liberal?
For this must be an uncommon situation: it doesn’t trouble anyone that too often those on this side proffer loud words but take no action. Were we tempted to advocate the truth, the high and unshaking truth itself pledges to reveal that liberals turn out to be innocent on all accounts! What, then, could be wrong with liberals refusing to instate their own agendas? What a measly inconvenience it is that Johnny Harris at The New York Times contrasted the Democrats’ proclaimed support for higher taxes on the wealthy and more affordable housing with their actual legislation once they acquire state power: their adamance on equitable rights quietly slip away into sudden absence when they get the chance for some follow through! This is clearly only a minor nuisance, nothing disconcerting! Even though liberals rally behind equity and justice and inclusiveness yet enact none of these when they have power, they are surely not hypocrites! All is well, and nothing could be better!
[T]he virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them . . . Since, then, the present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use), we must examine the nature of actions, namely how we ought to do them; for these determine also the nature of the states of character that are produced . . . But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think that they are being philosophers and will become good this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.
—Aristotle, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
If thou would'st beard Niag'ra in his pride,
Or stem the billows of Propontic tide;
Scale all alone some dizzy Alpine haut,
And shriek, "Excelsior!" among the snow;
Would'st tempt all death, all dangers that may be—
Perils by land and perils by sea;
This vast round world—I say, if thou would'st view it—
Then, why the dickens don't you go do it?
—Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell, OUR TRAVELLER, PUCK ON PEGASUS
But halt! It is a strange phenomenon for some to behold that outside of politics, the liberal persona has attained the complete reversal of outspoken progressivism. Too proud to be caught in the public square, we liberals deeply crave subtlety, especially when it comes to distinction, class trappings, material comfort, and their signaling. In a 2010 paper entitled Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption, Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward describe inconspicuous consumption in purchases and their value in signaling group identity:
[W]hile the moneyed elite go after items the lower classes could never purchase (e.g., yachts and caviar), educated elites often select the same items that the working class buys but in rarefied form (e.g., free range chicken legs or heirloom potatoes from France). In doing so, the educated elite not only distinguish themselves from the moneyed elite but do so in ways that the moneyed elite are unlikely to copy. Given that the moneyed elite want to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, they are unlikely to do something similar, so behaving like the lower classes in certain respects is a good way for the educated elite to discourage the moneyed elite from poaching their signals . . . This pattern is similar to what we observed in the cross-category analyses of handbags and sunglasses. While low-end items tend not to display brand names or logos, middle-tier options often do, which distinguishes them from cheaper alternatives. High-end options, however, distinguish themselves from the middle tier by the absence of logos, which also makes them resemble low-end options. People in the know, however, are able to use subtle signals to distinguish such products. Similar behavior can also be seen more generally in situations where high-status individuals behave similarly to low-status individuals on certain dimensions to avoid looking like middle-status individuals who themselves want to avoid looking low status.
What great fun! The monumental scale of our capitalist endeavors, even among liberals who champion anti-capitalism, amounts to no more than a collective game of tag! But we learn there’s a cost! The researchers continue:
While economists often suggest that widely recognizable markers will be preferred . . . we demonstrate that by selecting subtle signals, certain consumers will forgo widespread identification to facilitate interaction with others in the know. By choosing items that are more likely to be unrecognized or misidentified as cheaper alternatives by the general population, insiders incur an interaction cost. But in doing so, they also select a more reliable signal of their desired characteristics. Because most consumers want to be correctly identified by most observers, they will be unwilling to select subtle signals that decrease recognition.
And with a subtlety whose delicacy exceeds even their material nuance, liberals have never been caught signaling their righteousness, their correct moral opinions never having been thrust into the open for all to see!
A man of highest virtue
Will not display it as his own;
His virtue then is real.
Low virtue makes one miss no chance
To show his virtue off;
His virtue then is nought.
High virtue is at rest;
It knows no need to act.
Low virtue is a busyness
Pretending to accomplishment.
—#38, TAO TE CHING, tr. R.B. Blakney
Equipped with such charming virtues, by no means a beguiling facade, how can educated liberals not adore each other and coalesce into an elegant new class? David Brooks writes in his 2000 book, BOBOS IN PARADISE:
In this era ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money . . . So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians [Bobos] . . . The sociologists they read in college taught that consumerism is a disease, and yet now they find themselves shopping for $3,000 refrigerators . . . This is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are affluent yet oppposed to materialism . . . [T]o be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you. You always want to dress one notch lower than those around you . . . or somehow perform some other socially approved act of antistatus deviance . . . It's kind of pretentious to build yourself a big estate with magnificently manicured grounds. But nobody can accuse you of getting too big for your britches if you devote fanatical attention to small household items, like selecting exactly the right pasta strainer . . . The idea behind all this effort is to show that you have so much brainpower to spare, you can even be thoughtful about your water flow . . . It is not sufficient to buy stuff that is old. It is necessary in addition to go down the social scale and purchase objects that once belonged to persons much poorer than yourself . . . The old elite may have copied the styles of the European aristocrats or the colonial masters, but the Bobos prefer the colonial victims . . . The companies that appeal to educated consumers not only are informing us about things but are providing a philosophical context for our product.
Much philosophy, indeed! It follows directly that their customers are all profound philosophers! How much more enlightened and proper are our purchases when we adorn such important transactions with brand histories and their founders’ stories, how we stand in unison with disenfranchised locals and communities when we see their traditions dressed up in campaigns that certainly are not marketing maneuvers! In this continual conflict between public ideals and private greed that demands even to consume someone’s origin story, an inner hunger that wishes to trace every part of a purchase to its source, do liberals ever tire?
Thou onely vaunteſt [vauntest. "ſ" = "s"] of thy gentry, truely thou waſt made a gentleman before thou kneweſt what honeſty meant, and no more haſt thou to boaſt of thy ſtocke then he who being left rich by his father, dyeth a begger by his folly . . . But alas, why deſireſt thou to haue [have. "u" = "v"] the reuenewes of thy parent, and nothing regardeſt to haue his vertues? ſeekeſt thou by ſucceſſion to enioy [enjoy. "i" = "j"] thy patrimony, and by vice to obſcure his pietie? wilt thou haue the title of his honour, and no touch of his honeſtie?
—John Lyly, EUPHUES: THE ANATOMY OF WIT
The heroine of our earlier investigations, Currid-Halkett, describes her conception of an even newer class of elites that de-emphasizes materialism in her 2017 book, THE SUM OF SMALL THINGS:
This new, dominant cultural elite can be called, quite simply, the aspirational class. While their symbolic position sometimes manifests itself through material goods, mostly they reveal their class position through cultural signifiers that convey their acquisition of knowledge and value system—dinner party conversation around opinion pieces, bumper stickers that express political views and support for Greenpeace, and showing up at farmer's markets. These behaviors and signifiers imply aspirational class values . . . Today's aspirational class prizes ideas, cultural and social awareness, and the acquisition of knowledge in forming ideas and making choices ranging from their careers to the type of sliced bread they purchase at the grocery store. In each of these decisions, big and small, they strive to feel informed and legitimate in their belief that they have made the right and reasonable decision based on facts . . . He carries a canvas tote that displays a political or literary statement as another signal of his cultural knowledge and engagement with the intellectual current of the moment . . . Today's cultural hegemony is dominated by the aspirational class who are not idly sitting around but productively acquiring physical and metaphysical benefits for themselves and their offspring. As such, their consumer behavior has shifted from material displays of status to more implicit and tacitly coded means of showing social and economic position and reproducing their position of wealth for future generations . . . Rather than buying silver spoons and going on long holidays, their investments in education, health, retirement, and parenting ensure the reproduction of status (and often wealth too) for their offspring in a way that no material good can . . . What is most concerning about today's elites is that behaviors that appear to be moral or value-laden choices are deeply embedded in socioeconomic position and many of these decisions are quotidian, not grand material signifiers.
Could it be that all this liberal gesturing amounts only to class association and class signaling? But I hear my liberal compatriots: how could their genuine heartfelt sympathies be reduced to the hideous class distinctions their very platform abhors? Let no one equate liberal virtue signaling to that disgusting class posturing which pollutes the air full of gloating college students!
Those who inflate themselves are cursed
When pricked by a small pin to burst.
—Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE
Rob Henderson, who grew up in foster care but who in adulthood has joined the upper middle class, opines on what seems to be an almost unnoticed discrepancy between liberals’ views and the reality of those in actual disadvantage, calling the ideas behind the vocal liberal protests “luxury beliefs”, among them their aversion to drug restriction and the police. But how can we doubt the voices of the oppressed for whom college students have inserted themselves to represent? Even the venerable Currid-Halkett, with her later book on rural America, with the kindness of her all-encompassing inclusiveness advocating for equality, sympathizing as ever with her interviewees, for some reason doesn’t leave shop from her comfortable coastal Los Angeles home and career to stake up her claim among the fine folks in the countryside she wishes her fellow liberals to regard on equal terms. Sympathy surely goes very far! As a matter of fact, she makes her position on meritocracy clear in how she rears her three children, writing in THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS:
My children are young, but if I am fortunate enough to be able to support them fully as they approach the college application process, I certainly will. Why wouldn't I do as much as I possibly can to help my children reach their potential, to get into the college of their dreams? But I am aware of how this process is alien to most American families. So much so that Richard Reeves calls the meritocratic elite "dream hoarders." Reeves argues [in his book DREAM HOARDERS] that the entire system is set up such that social mobility remains among a rarified echelon of American society (his cutoff is the top 20 percent, although the band could be even narrower).
She sure will! And like every liberal professor, lawyer, doctor, investor, consultant, manager, and executive who publicly espouses equality with grandiose words a great many in the highest pitch, she and her family are exceptions to their own principles. What about those left out of the meritocracy? Ah, well, that’s a problem for other people and their kids. Ellen Brantlinger et al. observe in their 1996 paper:
Although in some ways the mothers in this study expressed the caring, socially inclusive perspective associated with women . . ., it appears that their role as status maintainers for the family—in this case, pushing their children and pushing for their children in school—put them in a contradictory and dissonant position. Most were attracted to socially inclusive, integrated ideals of education, but were intent on having advantaged circumstances for their own children . . . [E]ducated, middle-class mothers, perceived by others as well as themselves as liberals who believe in integrated and inclusive education, often support segregated and stratified school structures that mainly benefit students of the middle class . . . The study reveals that ideology operates to create social class distinctive positions and identifications and allows privileged educational and societal status to be justified.
My esteemed reader, blessed be your optimism! La Rochefoucauld describes kindness:
The good faith that appears in most men [or women, for we are inclusive!] is merely an invention of self-love aimed at winning trust; it is a means of elevating ourselves and to make ourselves trustees for things that are more important.
In token liberal pride, Currid-Halkett helps herself and her children onto the bandwagon riding towards greener pastures while she preaches back to the onlooking crowd that she sympathizes with them and, seriously enough, rebukes the other passengers for contributing to inequality. My problem with Currid-Halkett is not that she pursues self-interest, for everyone does, and she is no different, but that she, though well-meaning in researching rural America, tells herself and her fellow urban liberals to feel differently towards the heartland while she at the same time takes no further action than words, empathy, and good feelings, and in doing so benefiting from her position in the posh liberal hegemony as she leaves the problem just as plump and intact as before.
[T]he man [or woman] who gives himself [or herself] airs in trying to curb another as though he himself were some pure and passionless being, unless he be well on in years or possessed of an acknowledged position in virtue and repute, only appears annoying and tedious, and profits nothing.
—Plutarch, HOW TO TELL A FLATTERER FROM A FRIEND, MORALIA, tr. W. C. Helmbold
I speak of the importance of action. I wish to briefly contrast Currid-Halkett with Amy Coney Barrett. Action: Barrett adopted two children from Haiti; raising kids takes time, energy, money, and commitment that entail more than words, condolences, and sympathy. Currid-Halkett, of course, availed herself to what she thought was progress: calling for urban meritocrats to shift their views on meritocracy and rural Americans: nice, fine words. I don’t mean to diminish Currid-Halkett’s efforts and ideals, but I actually find Barrett’s approach more humble, graceful, proper: rather than relying solely on research, talking, and publicity, Barrett and her husband took it upon themselves to bring two kids into their family and raise them.
An instance of the liberal preoccupation with good feelings can be found in this year’s May issue of The Brooklyn Rail, in which Phong Bui summarizes his interpretation of the art at the 60th Venice Biennale:
Taken as a whole, this large panoply of works reminds us once again that having a free mind means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comforts, and spoon-fed ideologies or social engineering; that we must find ways to stay true to the issues of our vulnerability, our sense of mystery, and the perplexities of reality, for they are our best chances of remaining fully human.
Are we to understand that if we bare our hearts, weep out all our tears, hug everyone we see, commune with the mysteries of the universe, remain in tune with people’s feelings, that we can solve our present political dilemmas, that by extending our precious human sympathies, we can fix the very real disparities in material wealth? Or are these just words intended to solicit some back-patting from a community rather obsessed with feeling better about itself? Can we conjure a genie and make three wishes? To be clear, I’m sure Bui has the best of intentions, but words reek of duplicity and run the risk of hypocrisy; actions have the convenient benefit that more accurately reveal people as they are, but action, truth, and real progress, unfortunately, quite often don’t coddle anyone’s feelings.
I could point you out plenty of men of first-rate ability, sensible enough in all other respects, who have somehow picked up this vice of romancing. It makes me quite angry: what satisfaction can there be to men of their good qualities in deceiving themselves and their neighbors?
—Lucian, THE LIAR, tr. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler
When wisdom and intelligence are born,
The great pretense begins.
—#18, TAO TE CHING, tr. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
—GENESIS 3:3-4
Consider the tide of artifice in the wake of liberal sympathies. After the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions last year, Tyler Austin Harper published an opinion piece in The New York Times, writing that even in the prior few years when he was still a graduate student on a summer job:
Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a [college admissions] tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school.
Specifically, Harper writes:
The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
Harper elaborates on his views:
Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action. I don't think I would have gotten into Haverford College as an undergraduate if it had not been for affirmative action, and the same is probably true of my Ph.D. program at New York University and the professorship I now hold at Bates College. I believe that affirmative action works, that it is necessary to redress the historical evils of chattel slavery and its myriad afterlives and, above all, that it is a crucial counterbalance against the prevailing system of de facto white affirmative action that rewards many academically mediocre (and wealthier) students for having legacy parents or for being good at rowing a boat. Yet I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture. Before students ever set foot on a rolling green, they are encouraged to see racial identity as the most salient aspect of their personhood, inextricable from their value and merit.
I must say that I am on the same boat as Harper when advises, “Doing nothing is better than doing something if the something in question is P.R. skulduggery” in the form of “more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain” and “the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit.” Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor who comes from a disadvantaged background, echoed this message in a 2019 article in The New York Times Magazine:
Colleges have made racial and class diversity into virtues with which they welcome students during orientation and entice alumni to make donations. But students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds often bear the brunt of the tension that exists between proclamation and practice of this social experiment. Schools cannot simply showcase smiling black and brown faces in their glossy brochures and students wearing shirts blaring "First Gen and Proud" in curated videos and then abdicate responsibility for the problems from home that a more diverse class may bring with them to campus.
It is true that everyone wishes to impose their views and morals on others. Mike Hixenbaugh recently wrote an article in The Atlantic about the current conservative push for public schools to censor many political issues, among them race and gender. Hixenbaugh observes how this censorship is similar to the Reagan-era’s religion-derived censorship and backlash against a rising secular humanism.
Our civilization cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness that he threatens—and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive activity, its vital growth. To arrest or circumscribe the vital consciousness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would do it.
—D.H. Lawrence, LETTER TO MORRIS ERNST
This censorship is perhaps more egregious on the left, as liberals do not just pander to political correctness; they deceive by virtue signaling. Moving forward, are social norms to remain bound by false modesty and restraint, and is society to prescribe costumes for everyone in this public theatre? I ask: why is everyone so afraid of the truth?
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop [in a communist country] places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean? . . . Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth. The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself.
—Václav Havel, THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS, tr. Paul Wilson
These are formidable consequences, yet truth and an individual’s integrity long for open air. Are we convinced of the principles we have, or are they merely performative? Can we defend our convictions from multiple vantages, against repeated, sustained assault from some malicious nemesis, and can these convictions stand the test of time, or are they only skin-deep, aligning with virtue insofar as they procur benefit from the prevailing attitudes of the times?
I wish to emphasize that actions leading to effective social change may not evoke good feelings. Whether it is affirmative action or another social policy that disrupts the established elites who themselves pushed for the change, when the desired progress cements into reality, even the former liberal elites may feel uncertain about their ideals. Eve Fairbanks writes in an Atlantic article of the ambivalence of white Afrikaners after the end of apartheid in South Africa, when the Black majority came to govern itself:
In South Africa I often felt I was looking at America in a funhouse mirror, with certain emerging features magnified so I could see them more clearly. I saw how progressives could feel grief about being canceled, sneered at, or sidelined—just as their society comes to look more like what they had argued for. I also saw historically dominant people—especially those who criticized their own authority—become fully aware of their dominance only as it started to ebb.
Inequality: Rousseau
Inequality is currently a mounting issue in the country. It should come as no surprise that it has also been a recurring element in past societies. Rousseau informs this discussion on inequality, as he described society in its thrall, explained its causes and consequences, and suggested a solution. Let us start with his first major work, where he established his fundamental principle upon which his subsequent writings would further develop—Rousseau contended that man in nature is good but has been corrupted by society. In DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND ARTS, his First Discourse, he made the daring inversion that, contrary to Enlightenment values, in stark opposition to the common assumption that innovation drives mankind forward, it is civilized man who is degraded and unscrupulous, and that it is primitive man who is noble and principled. Rousseau argued that intellectual progress, cultural sophistication, the advancement of knowledge, the accumulation of luxuries, mark a step towards decline, duplicity, conformity, and obligatory surface charm over actual virtue:
While government and law provide for the security and well-being of people in their collective life, the sciences, letters, and arts—less despotic though perhaps more powerful—wrap garlands of flowers around the chains that weight people down. They stifle the sense of freedom that people once had and for which they sensed that they were born, making them love their own servitude, and turning them into what is called a civilized people. Need erected thrones; the sciences and arts consolidated them. Let the Powers that rule the earth cherish all talents and protect those who practice them! Civilized peoples, cultivate your talents! Happy slaves, you are indebted to them for the delicate, exquisite tastes you are so proud of, that sweetness of disposition and urbanity of manners that make social relations so easy and pleasant—in short, the appearance of virtues without the possession of a single one . . . Certain excesses will be condemned, certain vices abhorred, but others will be honored in the name of virtue, and people will be obliged either to have them or to pretend to have them.
We now return to a text we previously mentioned, Rousseau’s Second Discourse, in which he traces, through his hypothetical historical development of civilization, the dawn of inequality. Men, originating as solitary individuals in nature, came together first as families, then social groups, then societies. I quoted earlier how Rousseau attributed to natural inequalities their consequences on performance, using the examples of the “man that had most strength performed most labor; the most dexterous turned his labor to best account; the most ingenious found out methods of lessening his labor”. Rousseau observes the ensuing state of affairs and denounces the many insidious problems with inequality, writing pointedly against desire, comparison, deception, and appearances:
Behold all our natural qualities put in motion; the rank and lot of every man established, not only as to the amount of property and power of serving or hurting others, but likewise as to genius, beauty, strength, or skill, merits or talents; and as these were the only qualities which could command respect, it was found necessary to have or at least to affect them. It became to the interest of men to appear what they were really not. To be and to seem became two very different things, and from this distinction sprang haughty pomp and deceitful knavery, and all the vices which form their train. On the other hand, man, heretofore free and independent, was now, in consequence of a multitude of new needs, brought into subjection, as it were, to all nature, and especially to his fellows, whose slave in some sense he became . . . He must therefore have been continually at work to interest them in his happiness . . .: this rendered him sly and artful in his dealings with some, imperious and cruel in his dealings with others . . . In fine, an insatiable ambition, the rage of raising their relative fortunes, not so much through real necessity as to overtop others, inspires all men with a wicked inclination to injure each other . . . to carry its point with the greater security it often puts on the mask of benevolence . . . [C]itizens only allow themselves to be oppressed in proportion as hurried on by a blind ambition, they come to love authority more than independence. When they submit to fetters, it is only to be the better able to fetter others in their turn. It is no easy matter to reduce to obedience a man who does not wish to command; and the most astute politician would find it impossible to subdue those men who only desire to be independent . . . [I]f we behold a handful of rich and powerful men seated on the pinnacle of fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in darkness and misery, it is merely because the former value what they enjoy only because others are deprived of it; and that, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the minute the people ceased to be miserable . . . [Civilized] disposition engenders so much indifference toward good and evil, notwithstanding such fine discourses on morality; how everything, being reduced to appearances, becomes mere art and mummery; honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at last learn the secret of boasting; how, in short, ever asking others what we are, and never daring to ask ourselves, in the midst of so much philosophy, humanity and politeness, and such sublime moral codes, we have nothing but a deceitful and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
A counterpoint: this notion of appearances as separate from true intentions, which Rousseau interpreted as caustic and pernicious, was understood by David Hume to be required as a component of good-breeding in a civil society. Hume, in A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, his systematic analysis of the title’s subject matter, writes:
Thus self-satisfaction and vanity may not be allowed, but requisite in character. 'Tis, however, certain, that good-breeding and decency require that we shou'd avoid all signs and expressions, which tend directly to show that passion. We have, all of us, a wonderful partiality for ourselves, and were we always to give vent to our sentiments in this particular, we shou'd mutually cause the greatest indignation in each other . . . Nothing is more disagreeable than a man's over-weaning conceit of himself: Every one almost has a strong propensity to this vice: No one can well distinguish in himself betwixt the vice and virtue, or be certain, that his esteem of his own merit is well-founded: For these reasons, all direct expressions of this passion are condemn'd; nor do we make any exception to this rule in favour of men of sense and merit . . . At least, it must be own'd, that some disguise in this particular is absolutely requisite; and that if we harbour pride in our breasts, we must carry a fair outside, and have the appearance of modesty and mutual deference in all our conduct and behavior. We must, on every occasion, be ready to prefer others to ourselves.
The idea of an appearance separate from the self, a surface designed, meticulously deliberated, practiced, idealized, perfected, yet to be impressed upon others with ease, nonchalance, thoughtless grace, predates even Rousseau and Hume: it was Baldassare Castiglione’s THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER that spread the image of the gentlemanly air, effortless in his every action so as to never deign his feet contact with the foul earth but to float always imperceptibly above the ground, so holy his saintly being that he may even hardly have the need to breathe the impure air:
I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid and above all others, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible . . .; to practice in all things sprezzatura [non-chalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it . . . Thus, this excellence . . . brings with it another adornment which, when it accompanies any human action however small, not only reveals at once how much the person knows who does it, but often causes it to be judged much greater than it actually is . . . [T]ake a man who is handling weapons and is about to throw a dart or is holding a sword or other weapon in his hand: if he immediately takes a position of readiness, with ease, and without thinking, with such facility that his body and all his members fall into that posture naturally and without any effort, then, even if he does nothing more, he shows himself to be perfectly accomplished in that exercise.
Quite the honorable knight we have here, thoughtlessly posing with his sword in front of the mirror! Surely he lacks every bit of affectation! Thorstein Veblen would surely agree, having seriously examined the very important issue in THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS:
In persons of delicate sensibility, who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form, preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with their own hands . . . The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is, no doubt, to be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them . . . The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain desired mechanical results; he must, above all, know how to effect these results in due form. Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical function . . . The possessions and maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher wealth and position. Under this principle, there arises a class of servants, the more numerous the better, whose sole office is fatuously to wait upon the person of their owner.
Woe be me that in mine old age I have yet to employ in my service nor myself been employed in the service towards the great task of performing leisure, that my understanding of leisure has crudely and conspicuously been a mediocre, unperformed leisure! Doth it bestow upon oneself’s personage a higher state of consciousness when leisure becometh eine performanceth?
In all the professions, each affects an air and an exterior that will make him seem like what he wants people to think he is. And so we can say that the world is composed only of airs.
—La Rochefoucauld, MAXIMS
More recently, Derek Thompson in The Atlantic criticized the growth of bureaucratic administrators at universities. Though Thompson acknowledges that some of the new administrative jobs have genuine functions, he writes:
But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. "I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?," [Benjamin] Ginsberg told me last week. "I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice." In an email to me, [Gary] Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building. Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them. Before long, a human pyramid of bureaucrats has formed to take on jobs of dubious utility.
Well then, will a little fame distract you? Look at the speed of universal oblivion, the gulf of immeasurable time both before and after, the vacuity of applause, the indiscriminate fickleness of your apparent supporters, the tiny room in which all this is confined. The whole earth is a mere point in space: what a minute cranny within this is your own habitation, and how many and what sort will sing your praises here!
—Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS
Whether one thinks positively or negatively of civilized man’s separation of appearances from actual, this separation is undeniable and resolute. Yet for all the polite smoke and mirrors concealing civilized man’s real motivations, Rousseau admits that it is not feasible to return to the state of nature; he writes: “As for men like me, whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer subsist on plants or acorns . . . all these [people] will endeavour” to remain obedient citizens, although in a final utterance of spite, Rousseau concludes his discourse with a defiant attitude: “[T]hey will not therefore have less contempt for a constitution that cannot support itself”. Is this silent revolt the best response that good, decent folks can have in modern society plagued by inequality? What if instead we seek to relieve these problems? Given the broad scope of lesions in community, the tensions between a nation’s unequal people, the full range of horrors that morph virtuous, natural humans into covetous fiends, how should we address the trouble of inequality? How to resolve these fundamental differences in personal abilities and yet maintain a decent collective of people possessing unequal talents, opportunities, capacities for industry, who are interested in advancing themselves and wish to be rewarded proportionately to their output? Rousseau resolved this problem in a later work by proposing that, in essence, each member of society subsumes their individuality for the benefit of the greater whole, that the individual is subordinated to the collective, for the individual becomes indistinguishable from the general, and this is a sense of individual freedom because individual rights are inseparable from collective rights. It is no exaggeration that in Rousseau’s view, the individual would voluntarily enter into this social state. Rousseau writes in THE SOCIAL CONTRACT:
"To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain free as before." Such is the fundamental problem of which the social contract provides the solution . . . These clauses, rightly understood, can be reduced to a single one, namely, the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights; for, in the first place, since each gives himself up entirely, the situation is equal for all; and, the conditions being equal for all, no one has any interest in making them more burdensome than others . . . In short, each giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom we do no acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have. If, then, we set aside whatever does not belong to the essence of the social contract, we shall find that we can reduce it to the following terms: "Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole."
In a later section, I incorporate a sense of this general will and its social aspect into a view of sensible capitalism.
What lofty ideals! Yet how did Rousseau, for all his posthumous influence, live out the rest of his days? Only two years before his untimely demise in 1778 (why not 1812? Why not 1923, the year of mine birth?), Rousseau begineth writeth his last worketh, REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER, which doth openeth:
So I am alone on this earth . . . The most sociable and loving of human beings has been cast out by unanimous agreement. In the subtle intricacy of their hatred they sought out the torment that would be most cruel to my sensitive soul, violently severing all the ties binding me to them. I would have loved mankind despite its ways; it is only by ceasing to be humane that men have alienated my affection.
Oh, poorst thou! Where hath thy love for mankind, thy belief that man in nature is good but corrupteth by society ledst thou? Doth anyone remember thou wert a radical, banished and left to travel from place to place, only to perish in the countryside? Thou repeatedly signest thy works with “Citizen of Geneva”, which wert a Geneva only in thy memories, for thy own city didst non-welcometh thee and thy dangeroust idéaux. First casteth out by Paris, then thy Geneva, thou wert “guided by this conviction that it is Geneva that has abandoned Rousseau, not Rousseau who has abandoned Geneva”, writeth Benjamin Barber. How great thine imagination of Geneva wert even two centuries later scholars would marvel with irony that thou wert Swiss? Barber remarketh:
Rousseau is Swiss, then, because his life reflects an unseen Switzerland: not his dream of empty places, not the perfect republic—neither Clarens nor Geneva—but an all-too-human Switzerland that, like Rousseau, is more aptly honored for what it would be than for what it is.
What wert Rousseau’s imagined land of Switzerland? Barber continueth:
His was the Switzerland of Rousseau the exile, Rousseau the walker, Rousseau the recluse, Rousseau the botanist, Rousseau the refugee, Rousseau the dreamer. It was Switzerland rustic, Switzerland isolated, Switzerland natural, Switzerland alpine, Switzerland tranquil, Switzerland land of liberty not because of its sublime constitutions but because of its sublime geography, not because of its urban egalitarianism, which was mostly myth, but because of its pastoral independence and isolation, which were undeniably real. Alone in Switzerland, Rousseau might hope to make good on his motto—vitam impendere vero [to devote one's life to truth]-and live truth. Alone in Switzerland, he might live his reveries and uncover a natural world as charming as the one that, he had persuaded himself, was otherwise to be found only in the recesses of his imagination.
Where art thou now, Rue-so? Art thou still wandering, exiled, a fugitive, penniless, longing, and restless? Hast thou joinest Jung in the desert? To sucheth lukewarmeth resignationeth, Camus positeth positivity through-eth revolteth in THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS:
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy . . . One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness . . . Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable . . . In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing . . . The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux [happy].
Rousseau, showeth thy faceth! Wert man good, the universe surely wert good unto him! Art thou now lost in Octavio Paz’s LABYRINTH? Where art thou, Rousseau? Stones, vaults, and darkness? “C’est de l’autre côté de la vie”, Céline parle et ne ment jamais, “It’s on the other side of life.”
The writer was reading in a quaint coffee shop located some distance away from the bustle of society when he noticed the markedly slower pace of life and the appreciation of the little things, not in the decadent bourgeois sense of escaping a hectic work life to some remote and tranquil getaway with breathtaking and landscaped scenery reeking of exclusivity—this particular coffee shop was ordinary, with humble, middle-aged, working folks coming in briefly for a bagel or a black coffee before heading back out. These were locals of the community, going about their day, making the best of what they can. One grey-haired man came in and struck up a conversation with the shop owner, saying that back in the day the Dunkin Donuts over in the next town would be open late into the night, and people would go in at 1am when it would still be packed. The owner in turn shared that her mother used to enjoy shopping at a store not far away. These were people connected to the neighborhood, rooted in local history, with their stories and adventures and memories from youth, having seen how the area has changed, the passing of the seasons, the leaves blossoming and withering, its joys and sorrows, the people who remain and those no longer present, aware that nothing is permanent or perfect but one makes do with what one can and carries on. How still and peaceful this space was, in contrast with the city or even the nearby town which has turned into a weekend attraction for city tourists—these visitors breeze through like the wind; they come, loud and obnoxious, flashy and shallow, gloating and expectant. They bombard the space with photos, attention mostly on themselves, spreading consumerist greed, envy, dismay, disturbing the peace with boast and frenzy. They come, go into a few shops, have a meal here or there, go on a hike, and they feel they’ve completed something, as though they have seen in this brief excursion all there is in town, and off they go the next weekend to some other destination, to do the same routine in a different location. And these city folks fly to London and Rome and Bali and Tokyo, spending more of their hard-earned money from employment in globalized industries in the metropolises of other countries than in the small towns of their own. This contrast between the settled folks in the neighborhood and the unmoored visitors constantly in motion must’ve been what Roger Scruton meant when he said:
They [locals going fox-hunting] have been absolutely rooted in this little piece of land all their lives and have always related to the local economy and also to the wildlife . . . These are people whose noses have just been, as it were, pulled out of the ground with the imprint of the earth still on them . . . They're here every time. They come to talk to each other and to renew their social attachments and also attachment to the place. The problem with the modern world, in my view, is that people no longer dwell on the earth. They move nomadically around it in search of something they know not what, never finding it, moving from person to person, place to place . . . [On the contrary,] [t]hese [local] people still dwell, as Heidegger would say, wohnen in the land. I'm not a big fan of Heidegger, but it's one of the few things that he said which is absolutely true, that only if we learn how to dwell can we build, and only if we build can we actually live with each other.
Coincidentally, the book the writer brought to the coffee shop was Currid-Halkett’s THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS.
I received this message from a friend: "Please come back soon. Things are very dreary here without you." I wrote my reply on a lotus petal:
Though you bid me come,
How can I leave these dew-wet lotus leaves
And return to a world so full of grief?
—Sei Shōnagon, THE PILLOW BOOK, tr. Ivan Morris
Let’s play a game! We are tasked with administering an itinerary for a certain l’aventurier. Now, l’aventurier has a voracious appetite for travel and seeks to do nothing else. But l’aventurier is only mortal, and like any mortal is confined spatially and temporally; as a matter of consequence, our poor l’aventurier cannot be in two places at the same time and cannot return to the past. Perhaps more practically, l’aventurier’s funds are not infinite and cannot sustain the blow of too many a mischief. But supposing that this nuisance of practicality were no matter, and l’aventurier could travel as far and wide as l’aventurier wished, l’aventurier does just that till one day l’aventurier pauses and waxes contemplative and pondereth what doth it meane to travele and see? At a coffee shop, l’aventurier may not have noticed that the one-time patrons are like dandelion seeds spreading all over by the blow of a wind, never rooting deep into the earth with the grass and bushes, never allowing itself to learn about them and being learned in turn. In any given locale, what does l’aventurier see? People and things! In spite of this, it may evade l’aventurier’s sensibilities that even one space may change, that it varies over the seasons, by the time of day, by the happenstance encounter, and that over time, the shops, the streets, the buildings, the people, the faces, and seemingly everything changes, even, most treacherously, the traveler himself and, through his changes, his very awareness and judgments.
I was here once before, fifteen years ago.
I recognize half the monks—the temple is the same.
In those days the willows were just starting to grow.
Now they rise beautifully above the high eaves.
—Yang Wanli, TAI-TU TEMPLE, tr. Jonathan Chaves
But it may not be the illusion of understanding that crosses l’aventurier’s mighty mind, but a very real, very solid check marking off something else on an unending list: done and seen: next! So the game continues.
I had often thought the mind was, quite literally, a devil's advocate, an agent of diabolical sophistry that could argue any point and its opposite with equal conviction; an imp that delighted in self-contradiction and yet, though full of sound and fury, ultimately signified nothing . . . The Japanese were famous, I knew, for their delight in lacrimae rerum [tears of things] and for finding beauty mostly in sadness; indeed, it was often noted that their word for "love" and their word for "grief" are homonyms—and almost synonyms too—in a culture that seems to love grief, of the wistful kind . . . [W]hen I read in Dōgen, "Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own house and go aimlessly off to the dusty reaches of other lands?" I could almost hear his neighbor in New England declaring, "It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." And when I read Kamo no Chōmei's "Account of My Hut," singing the praises of a simple life of solitude, I found Thoreau again in the recluse's famous claim that none can know the pleasures of loneliness who has not tasted them himself.
—Pico Iyer, THE LADY AND THE MONK: FOUR SEASONS IN KYOTO
Another question: if instead of this perpetual traveling and endless series of excursions that knows no rest, our l’aventurier yearns for the calm, tranquil country life but at the same time also the city’s glitter and dazzling energy, what shall l’aventurier do?
Immigration
Every generation writes its own history, for the reason that it sees the past in the foreshortened perspective of its own experience. This has certainly been true of the writing of American history. The practical aim of our historiography is to offer us a more certain sense of where we are going by helping us understand the road we took in getting where we are. If the substance and nature of our historical writing is changing, it is precisely because our own generation is redefining its direction, much as the generations that preceded us redefined theirs.
—John Hope Franklin and Abraham Eisenstadt, Editor’s Foreword to THE AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
In the current political climate, immigration is a fraught issue. This section is long, and it clarifies the facts relating to immigration on the southern border: the quantities, criminality, economic impact, and how the current immigration surge compares to the country’s immigration history. This section removes the fog of mystery and dread that circulate in Republican circles from exaggerated claims of disorder and violence.
I will start by saying that I support legal, not illegal, immigration. As it happens, Biden recently passed legislation that limits the entry of illegal immigrants. I explain the reasons behind this legislation in greater detail later in this section, but this is the right decision when considering resource constraints, the high volumes of migrants, and outdated laws that prevent them from obtaining work authorizations—not because of the Republican narrative of criminals freely entering the country, a claim which relies more on an uninformed paranoia than evidence, bearing close resemblance to a loud exclamation: Look! Green aliens from the sky are landing in the neighbor’s backyard! Or: Behold, the Loch Ness monster! And with it comes a whole backstory and details we did not surely invent ourselves!
Let us first turn our attention to the most pressing part of the issue: the popular image of illegal hordes threatening to topple the country. Bret Weinstein recently spoke on the Joe Rogan podcast about what the migrants he saw on his trip to Panama. He talks about a sudden new wave of immigrants: the Chinese immigrants, who Weinstein describes as being “composed of mostly young, military-aged men”, who Weinstein further found to be “broadcasting hostility”. Weinstein paints a picture of mystery and secret scheming, questioning what could be the reasons behind this new migration, even saying that it “could well be an invasion.”
But if we look elsewhere we find, contrary to Weinstein’s fear-ridden portrayal, that 60 MINUTES covered these new migrants when they are just coming into the country and examined the gap in the wall where they come through. We must be clear: before the legislation halting the inflow of migrants, this was a problem. But the situation was not part of some cultish agenda. The issue may have seemed like a hidden scheme to someone like Weinstein who positions himself as a purveyor of rare and valuable knowledge unavailable to plain sight, who for some reason hasn’t consulted a search engine, but to the public, it’s actually not a secret. An article in the Associated Press covered the issue. The Washington Office on Latin America published a weekly update that provides facts and specific numbers on the migration. The New York Times has shared multiple articles, here, here, and here. But more specific to Weinstein and, I should add, in a manner more befitting his approach—on the admittedly left-leaning talk show, THE MAJORITY REPORT, Sam Seder and colleagues comment on Weinstein’s characterizations in a manner that is decidedly not sarcastic or satirical, not at all reproachful of some faulty and malicious judgment. Seder’s discerning sense of sight, his clarity of mind, combined with an absolutely precise detection of the ulterior motives of mankind, help us understand what the 60 MINUTES video is showing us. Seder remarks on a particularly enlightening moment in the video, with his natural X-ray vision, that someone who deceptively “appears to be an old lady” may actually be “exactly the disguise you would use if you were a military-aged man.” Evidently, we have now entered the realm of rigorous science, informed by someone’s highly trained observational prowess with decades of experience in such obscure matters. If the viewer were so keen to watch more of Seder, he goes on to make more incredibly illuminating revelations that match Weinstein’s wide-eyed paranoia that some might mistake for unhinged fright.
Let us return to facts and contextualize these oversimplifying images of immigrants and the alarming narrative of military-aged men currently entering the country. Alan Kraut writes in his 1982 book, THE HUDDLED MASSES: THE IMMIGRANT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY 1880-1921,
Who actually emigrated to America in the years between 1880 and 1921? Until the turn of the century, most were young males in their teens or early adulthood, who had left their parents or young wives and children behind as they pursued opportunity abroad. Immigration officials estimated that 78 percent of the Italian and 95 percent of the Greek immigrants were men. Asian emigrants in the period also tended to be young males. However, after 1900, the character of migration changed among some groups. By 1920, 48 percent of southern Italian arrivals were female. Among Poles the proportion of men to women was almost evenly divided. And among Slovaks, female immigrants outnumbered males 65 percent to 35 percent. In other groups, however, the newcomers continued to be mostly male. Almost 80 percent of the Greek arrivals were men and boys in 1920.
If Weinstein accuses the current migrants as consisting of mostly military-aged males, why does he limit himself to these modern migrants and not go back further into the country’s history to also indict the many prior ones? One may even ask, when have migrants not often consisted mostly of military-aged men? Kraut writes further:
The majority of immigrants were either Catholic or Jewish, especially frightening to a predominantly Protestant America . . . The physical appearance of the newcomers, over which they had little control, was perhaps most frightening to the native-born . . . Just as the ragged Irish of an earlier era had made proper Bostonians cringe, so the new immigrants of every hue and body type met anxious glances as they tramped down gangplanks into a New World long dominated by Anglo-Saxons. With each successive boatload, Americans worried about the influence of foreign blood on the vitality of the American population . . . Immigrants were denounced in articles and books most newcomers could not yet read and derided in sermons from church pulputs and university lecterns most never heard . . . The immigrants, then, were under attack for reasons that can be isolated for analytical purposes, though many Americans had multiple reasons for despising the newcomers. John Higham, in his now classic study of nativism, Strangers in the Land (1955), identified three strains of anti-immigrant venom: racial nativism, anti-Catholicism, and antiradical nativism. However, anti-Semitism, its origins buried deep in the culture of Western civilization, might well be treated as a fourth strain. Then, too, immigrants encountered the hatred of those who blamed the newcomers for unemployment, low wages, or urban problems such as violent crime and vice.
With Weinstein, we see an example of a blend of fact and fiction, and perhaps this is the accurate picture of any masked knight, that his statements are neither completely true nor completely false, but that deceivers couch their lies within the adjacency of verifiable facts. Daniel Markovits, collating research in deception studies, suggests in a paper the metaphor of a faucet as a mix of deception and truth, a blend of hot and cold water. It may be that someone is quite fond of faucets.
A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great. That's a shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot . . . Those who mask and make up women do less harm, for it is a matter of small loss not to see them in their natural state; whereas the other men make a profession of deceiving not our eyes but our judgment, and of adulterating and corrupting the essence of things.
—Montaigne, OF THE VANITY OF WORDS, ESSAYS
Likewise, Ben Carson recently made made similar claims at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying: “An estimated ten million illegal aliens have invaded our country since Biden took over”, consisting of “mostly military-aged males.” I can agree with Carson when he mentions the widespread condemnation and censorship of conservatives, but he, like Weinstein, spreads false claims about doom and terror, promoting blind fear, xenophobia, and paranoia. Among his claims, Carson describes the January 6 rioters as “peaceful pro-life protestors and patriotic grandmothers”. NBC has provided raw footage of the scene that day. And what do we find there? Without a doubt, we see lots of peace! And we surely see plenty of “patriotic grandmothers”!
We now step back from hysteria and consult immigration history. Francesco Cordasco presented the scale of immigration in his 1976 book, IMMIGRANT CHILDREN IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS:
Since the keeping of records which were begun in 1819, it has been estimated that some 43 million humans made their way into the United States of America, truly one of the greatest peaceful human migrations in the whole history of mankind. Of these, at least 40 million were of European origin and the remainder of widely scattered origins. The bulk of the migration in the period before 1819 (i.e., 1607-1819) came from Northern and Western Europe, and of this a preponderance came from the British Isles; the remainder was from other parts of Europe, and also included an estimated 300 thousand blacks, mostly brought in as slaves. The period between 1819-1882 is often referred to as the era of the "old migration" in which some 10 million immigrants arrived, with the majority again originating in Northern and Western Europe. Between 1882-1921 ("the new migration"), the period of the greatest sustained migration, the migrants were largely of southern and eastern European origin (some 20 million) out of an estimated 23.5 million.
In a similar accounting, Humbert Nelli describes the scope of immigration in an essay entitled, EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND URBAN AMERICA (from the 1973 essay collection, THE URBAN EXPERIENCE, edited by Raymond Mohl and James Richardson):
During the century that followed the Napoleonic wars and ended with World War I, approximately 35 million European immigrants entered the United States. Some left their homeland because of religious persecution, some to evade military service or prison sentences, and others to escape the death penalty. For most newcomers, however, economic factors ranked first in importance . . . Whatever their origin, newcomers tended to settle in American cities, where they formed a highly visible segment of the population . . . Newcomers from northern and western Europe—the so-called old immigrants—arrived in the decades between 1815 and the 1880s. Their pattern of settlement was followed later by "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who arrived during the thirty-five years prior to World War I. On the eve of the Civil War, foreign-born residents formed approximately half (and in some cases more) of the populations of Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnat, and New York City. For example, along with its other nationalities, New York City was more than one-fourth Irish and one-eighth German. In 1910, when the federal census showed that fewer than half the country's native Americans lived in cities, 68.3 percent of the "old" and 78.3 percent of the "new" immigration resided in urban areas.
Such high rates of immigrants! And their kids! How our public school surely knew how to cater to their needs! Cordasco writes:
By 1911, 57.5 percent of the children in the public schools of 37 of the largest American cities were of foreign-born parentage; in the parochial schools of 24 of these 37 cities, the children of foreign-born parents constituted 63.5 percent of the total registration . . . And by 1911 almost 50 percent of the students in secondary schools were of foreign-born parentage. The situation in New York City was not atypical. Serious deficiencies existed in the adequacy of available school facilities. In 1890, it was estimated that in New York City some 10,000 children, who were within the legal ages for school attendance, were without actual school accommodations, and this figure was undoubtedly conservative. The passage of the Compulsory Education Act in 1895, stipulating that all children attend school between the ages of eight and sixteen years . . . exacerbated the situation in New York City, and because of the lack of accommodations, the Compulsory Education Act was to all intents inoperative . . . That the public schools in New York City were unable, or unwilling to meet the challenge of immigrant children is readily apparent in the paucity of the concepts and programs which were fashioned . . . If New York City was typical, the urban schools provided no system-wide policy which dealt with the educational needs to immigrant children; and where programs were fashioned to meet these needs, there was no attempt made to differentiate between immigrant groups (e.g. the experience of Italians and Jewish children in New York City strongly documents this failure); instead children were lumped under the rubrics "native-born" or "foreign-born." If one discounts the multiplicity of disfunctional [sic] programs, rampant discrimination, authoritarian prejudice, it is still difficult to attribute the general patterns of failure to immigrant children or to their parents. The blame for the failure lies almost wholly within the school and the dominant society which shaped its programs and articulated its cultural ideals.
Cordasco, himself an Italian American born to immigrant parents, quotes from THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE ITALO-AMERICAN CHILD by Leonardo Covello, also an Italian American:
Of no little importance was the fact that the Americanization programs were directed only toward people of foreign stock, without giving any consideration to the necessity of involving all Americans, regardless of the time of their arrival in the United States. But, above all, the early Americanization policies, by and large, denied or neglected the strength of, and the values in, the foreign culture of immigrant groups. The concept of Americanization was based upon the assumption that foreigners and foreign ideas and ways were a threat to American political, economic, social stability and security. The infiltration of foreign culture, it was feared, would eventually bring about a deterioration of the American "way of life." Programs were designed, therefore, to suppress or eliminate all that was conceived of as "foreign" and to impose upon the immigrant a cultural uniformity with an American pattern.
What a great struggle for these Italian American children to find some decent education, these fine folks who in a different century would have been known as the Romans, whose ancient heritage seems to have appeal only when it is far and long gone! And in another century, the originators of the Renaissance!
In this rapid swelling of immigrants in the cities, how can it be that anyone could harbor decidedly negative views towards them? It is not nativism and resistance that amounts to the country’s default position on immigrants! It is not that we must hold a magnifying glass against a the needle in the haystack to convince ourselves of any welcoming illusion! In fact, the needle has surfaced before us: we find one sympathetic view in 1913, when Philander Claxton, then the Commissioner of Education, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Interior:
To the people of no other country is the problem of the education of immigrants of so much importance as to the people of the United States. No other country has so many men, women, and children coming to its shores every year from all parts of the world . . . It is reported that the immigrants stopping in New York City last year were from 98 different countries and provinces and spoke 66 different languages . . . Most of the immigrants in recent years have little kinship with the older stocks of our population, either in blood, language, methods of thought, traditions, manners, or customs; they know little of our political and civic life and are unused to our social ideals; their environment here is wholly different from that to which they have been accustomed. Strangers to each other, frequently from countries hostile to each other by tradition, of different speech and creeds, they are thrown together, strangers among strangers, in a strange country, and are thought of by us only as a conglomerate mass of foreigners. With little attention to their specific needs, they are crowded into factories, mines, and dirty tenement quarters, too often the prey of the exploiter in business and the demagogue in politics . . . But it is not alone the question of the school education of children. The millions of adult men and women, and of children older than the upper limit of the compulsory school-attendance age, must be looked after; they must be prepared for American citizenship and for participation in our democratic industrial, social, and religious life . . . For the enrichment of our national life as well as for the happiness and welfare of individuals we must respect their ideals and preserve and strengthen all of the best of their Old World life they bring with them. We must not attempt to destroy and remake—we can only transform.
Can we discover more shiny needles in the annals of American immigration history? Well, let us consult the facts. With the cities teeming with immigrants, Nelli writes:
In 1819, a report of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York complained that immigrants arriving in the United States were poverty-stricken, ignorant, incapable of self-support, and criminally inclined, placing an intolerable burden on the community and forcing better elements to despair of coping successfully with the whole immigrant problem . . . A report prepared in 1857 commented on tenement areas conditions of New York City: "These immigrants . . . are destitute, sick, ignorant, abject . . . They swarm in filthy localities, engendering disease, and enduring every species of suffering . . . They are often habitual sots, diseased and reckless, living precariously, considering themselves outcasts, and careless of any change in their condition." This report referred to "old" immigrants, principally Irish and German; later reports used similar (sometimes identical) wording to describe conditions among "new" immigrant groups before World War I. In 1922, John Palmer Gavit . . . described the repeating pattern: "Each phase of immigration has been 'the new immigration' at its time; each has been viewed with alarm; each has been described as certain to deteriorate the physical quality of our people and destroy the standards of living and of citizenship."
Whenever I wish to relive some dear old memories of mine, I visit the images that the New York Public Library has graciously provided the public of the city’s olden days. How charming were the tenement years! How I absolutely adore them! Oh, I miss them with a great nagging nostalgia! As I recall them now, a block of anger surges to my heart! How the government has changed all that was good about the city! The History Collection has provided photos for all to see how spectacular the good old days were! These are some of the highest quality images I’ve seen. Oh, how gorgeous! But the haughty city mayor and regulators thought they were doing the public a service when they wanted to pass some laws! Surely, the landlords had their tenants’ best interests in mind! How can anyone blame them for not installing windows or toilets in the apartments! How tenderly I remember those days when we knew not the word “toilet” but “chamber pot” and “outhouse”! How times have changed, oh, believe me! Believe me too when I say I did my best to resist any change! I myself was in front of the picket line, holding out the biggest sign of the bunch, protesting against the city’s proposed regulations. What an outrage that the city’s council thought it knew the tenants’ desires and comforts better than the landlords out to make a buck! Just imagine how many young immigrant lads and gals, rushing out in the evening to answer nature’s call, met while on the long line to use the one and only outhouse supplied for the overcrowded tenements! Under the full moon, surrounded by tense neighbors, in front of the distinct smell of rotting orchids, is the prime cinematic image of a meet-cute! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? What a hit it’ll surely be! Call it: Romance of the Fragrant Outhouse! And the sequel: Dream of the Spent Chamber Pot!
It wouldn’t be until the 1970s (photos from Rare Historical Photos) and 1980s (photos from Blind Magazine) that my doleful, forsaken spirits were revived when the sights and sounds and people reminded me of the golden days! How I held my breath until then! How I savored every moment surrounded by the graffiti in the subway! How I long for those days still! What great joy I had back then! As a matter of fact, if you look carefully, you might find me in one of the snapshots enjoying myself! To this day, I still have one of those glamorous photos framed in my bedroom, for nostalgia’s sake! Woody Allen portrayed a corrupt, degraded New York in his 1979 movie, MANHATTAN, but his abomination does little to deter me from my memories of the city’s former glory, its littered and poorly lit streets full of shade, sketch, and graphite on the walls! I am still holding my breath!
But we are speaking of immigration! Was it a problem? Considering the massive influx of immigrations, how could the federal government not invoke a whole commission to research the matter and decide on a course of action? Katherine Benton-Cohen writes in her 2018 book, INVENTING THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM: THE DILLINGHAM COMMISSION AND ITS LEGACY:
Along with seven other men, [Henry Cabot] Lodge and [William P.] Dillingham would oversee the largest study of immigrants ever conducted in the United States—the so-called Dillingham Commission. The Dillingham Commission's work has shaped immigration policy ever since. It produced forty-one volumes of reports, summarized in a brief but potent set of recommendations that was far more restrictive than its own evidence supported. Within a decade, almost all of these policy initiatives were implemented into law. They included a literacy test, a quota system that varied by nationality, the continued exclusion of Asians, and a panoply of new immigration rules. The commission's reforms effectively ended mass immigration from 1924 until the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.
Benton-Cohen draws a contrast between the factual results in the reports and the commission’s conclusive recommendation to limit immigration:
[E]ven the commission's assertions of objectivity produced inconsistent interpretations and contradictory data. The men and women of the Dillingham Commission were not of one voice. But its final recommendations were so brief, decisive, and restrictive—and so quickly successful—that the behind-the-scenes debates about the nature and impact of immigration . . . were swiftly obscured . . . The Dillingham Commission's paradigm of "old immigrants" versus "new immigrants" has shaped the study of immigration ever since. Both categories referred to Europeans: "old immigrants" had come mostly from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia in the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, the commission assumed the mostly Jewish, Italian and Slavic "new immigrants" to be less assimilable and more "alien." . . . For decades, this so-called hoary distinction between old and new was axiomatic in histories of immigration. But the dichotomous model implicitly defined Asian and Mexican immigrants as "other" in ways that have continued to structure immigration policy and to produce a racial subtext about "illegal aliens" to the present day . . . It was not inevitable that the commissioners would recommend these restrictions. The evidence presented in their own volumes did not support the weight of their conclusions. There were places in the text where they admitted as much. But the pressure to recommend decisive action was strong. A mandate by Congress to solve the "immigration problem" necessitated a clear response . . . Many of the Dillingham Commission's volumes were like other government reports, easily ignored or forgotten. Even the commisioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration, Charles Nagel, read only the abstracts, not the reports. "As to the forty volumes," he told Simon Wolf, "I feel constrained to consider my limited time and my obligations to my family." Indeed, the commission's brief list of recommendations in the first volume had remarkable influence.
But Mr. Nagel, the volumes number only to forty-one! This limited time of which you speak—is not time itself unlimited? And however we spend our time, is the end not all the same? Wouldn’t you agree? Oh my, I am taken aback—what loud protests I hear! On this note, it is with immense pleasure that I am afforded an opportunity to mention one of my great joys in life because, as it happens, Benton-Cohen appeared on my favorite television channel, C-SPAN. I must tell you I am an avid follower of this astonishing news outlet. I have a daily regimen: every night, after returning from church service, I consult the Bible, because church is not enough, and then with great excitement I catch up on some C-SPAN. Nonetheless, all joys come to an end, and I willfully put my elation aside for now, because the Smithsonian Magazine published a 2018 article that, concurring with Benton-Cohen, notes similar discrepancies in the Dillingham Reports, which for sure were best-selling and widely read:
Throughout its inquiry, the commission's investigators sought to maintain objectivity; to collect the facts, let them speak for themselves, and make recommendations absent of bias. Throughout the Reports, the commission described immigrants positively, including the vilified "new" arrivals. Even the verbiage immediately preceding the recommendation of the literacy test spoke of them positively. Yet, a social climate of fear and bigotry hijacked the investigation, and the commissioners themselves, ignoring facts in their own reports, endorsed restriction, largely to exclude the most recent types of immigrants. Critics, to no avail, would argue that socioeconomic conditions did not warrant more extensive exclusion, based on the commission's own standards for such action. But the commission's identification of the literacy test as the most "feasible method" trumped any such assertions.
One may wonder whether history tends to repeat itself! Could it be that back then, as now, nativist resistance against immigration stemmed from the notion that the newcomers take jobs from natives? Nelli responds to our inquiry:
Popular opinion held that newcomers, both "old" and "new," displaced native American workingmen and depreciated wage rates. This argument appeared as early as the 1850s against new arrivals from Ireland, England, and Germany. Its foremost proponent, Francis A. Walker, superintendent of the census in 1870 and later president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, maintained that immigration held down the native-born population because immigrants accepted lower wages and worse living conditions than did Americans . . . Dillingham researchers "showed" that new groups were in the process of forcing out older elements from industrial jobs, especially in the eastern portions of the nation. The commission concluded that such displacement adversely affected both workers and the country. However, this conclusion had only a tenuous connection with the commission's evidence. Facts collected by researchers indicated that immigrants neither underbid nor competed with their predecessors; furthermore, the increased economic activity permitted by a larger labor force enabled earlier groups to improve their economic levels. Displacement indeed occurred, but the movement was generally upward or outward, as earlier groups and native Americans became foremen, executives, partners, owners, and the like or moved to higher-paying jobs in other states. Examining the coal industry, the commission found that the native-born and "old" immigrant workers moved to the Midwest or Southwest and brought about a tremendous expansion in mining operations.
Elaborating on this question, Aviva Chomsky explains in her 2007 book, “THEY TAKE OUR JOBS!” AND 20 OTHER MYTHS ABOUT IMMIGRATION:
[T]he relationship between population size and the number of jobs available is not quite as simple as it might seem. In the fact, the number of jobs is not finite, it is elastic, and affected by many factors. Population growth creates jobs at the same time that it provides more people to fill jobs, and population decline decreases the number of jobs at the same time as it provides fewer people to work at them. Population growth creates jobs because people consume as well as produce: they buy things, they go to movies, they send their children to school, they build houses, they fill their cars with gasoline, they go to the dentist, they buy food at stores and restaurants. When the population declines, stores, schools, and hospitals close, and jobs are lost.
No doubt this Chomsky is getting at something! But fear we must! Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia writes in her 2012 book, FRONTIERS OF FEAR:
[I]t is worth noting that the U.S. and European public always overestimate the size of the foreign-born population. Two-thirds of Americans give inaccurate responses to questions about the proportion of the population of foreign born, and about how racial and ethnic groups are distributed in the national population. When asked in 2006 what proportion of the U.S. population was born outside the United States, most people tended to choose a figure much higher than the Census Bureau figure of 12 percent. Only 34 percent selected the correct answer ("closer to 10 percent"); 25 percent said the number was "closer to 25 percent"; and 28 percent believed it exceeded 25 percent of the total population.
These numbers don’t include the undocumented migrants though! Aren’t those the dangerous types? The ones we see as treacherous illegals whom we do not permit any other image than as dubious and immoral, and therefore, within the category we place them, must be so? Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib published a 2017 paper on the relation between sanctuary cities and crime, writing that:
The idea that sanctuary policies drive up crime rates is premised to a large extent on the notion that undocumented immigrants tend to offend at higher rates, something that has been disproven time and again. In fact, many studies find an inverse relationship between immigration, undocumented or otherwise, and crime rates . . . Despite these findings . . . criminalization has been the default response of the federal government to the "problem" of undocumented immigration . . . Indeed, if anything, undocumented immigrants may be more likely to be victims of crime, rather than perpetrators of crime . . . Our findings suggest that sanctuary policies themselves do not affect crime rates, which contradicts the primary narrative for their repeal . . . Sanctuary cities were initially designed to provide aid to and then incorporate people into American life from war-torn Central American countries. The policies have a strong basis in empathy, often with the backing of churches and local aid organizations. Thus, the policies are designed to assist people in extremely vulnerable positions in the United States in navigating their way to a life that is as safe and healthy as possible. However, in recent years, a few high-profile incidents where undocumented immigrants have committed horrific crimes have led some political candidates—generally on the right—and other actors to make sweeping negative claims about the deleterious effects of sanctuary cities . . . We found these claims highly dubious on their face given evidence beginning in the 1930s and continuing until today that immigrant populations tend to produce less crime because these populations are more concerned with deportation and running afoul of the law relative to the native-born population.
In this context, the researchers conducted their own analysis to evaluate these claims, finding that:
[T]he difference between our sanctuary cities and nonsanctuary cities on the matching variables reduced to essentially zero. The result indicates that there is no discernible difference on each type of crime we measured between sanctuary and nonsanctuary cities. Thus, when it comes to crime, we conclude that sanctuary cities have essentially no impact one way or the other.
More concretely, Aaron Chalfin points out the example of one city in Texas right along the Mexico border:
More than 80% of El Paso's residents are Hispanic and the vast majority of these individuals are of Mexican origin. A large population of El Paso's Hispanic population are immigrants. In fact, El Paso has one of the highest proportions of immigrants among U.S. cities. Many of these migrants are undocumented. If those who fear Mexican immigration are right, then El Paso should be a hotbed of violence. As it turns out, El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States with a homicide rate of 2.4 per 100,000 residents.
How can this be, we ask? We serious folks certainly do not receive the news from Michael Light et al. lightly when they turned the joke around and claimed in 2020:
Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years . . . Our findings are also consistent with research on the selective nature of migration, which suggests that immigrants tend to fare better on multiple social indicators than would be expected by their level of socioeconomic disadvantages . . . In addition, many undocumented immigrants are driven by economic and educational opportunities for themselves and their families, and the decision to migrate necessarily requires a considerable amount of motivation and planning. As such, undocumented immigrants may be selected on qualities such as motivation to work and ambition to achieve, attributes that are unlikely to predispose them toward criminality.
Light et al. used data between 2012 and 2018, but Ran Abramitzky et al. were surely not serious when they expanded the time range, studying incarceration data between 1850 and 2020! They don’t distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants in their study, but they write:
[W]e document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history . . . Today, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than all US-born men, and 30% less likely to be incarcerated relative to white US-born men.
To the great feminists who feel neglected, the authors dutifully kept inclusivity in mind! They focused on men “because men constitute the vast majority of the incarcerated population both today and in the past”, observing that, “Our takeaways are unchanged if we include women”. Over such a long time period: is this joke in fact true? Even the conservative Cato joins the merriment! Much to our chagrin, it was only earlier this year that Alex Nowrasteh admitted as much, specifically on homicide conviction rates. After jumping through a few hoops in data inconsistencies, lack of transparency, and confusion, he arrived at the same conclusion that the joke is on us! Yet, the researchers of the sanctuary city paper published a follow-up 2019 book, SANCTUARY CITIES, which expanded on the original paper with more research supporting the conclusions, in response to a misuse of the paper:
Unbeknownst to them [the authors], conservative media outlets like Fox and others were using their research to justify banning sanctuary cities based on a misinterpretation of a figure they had included in the paper.
As a matter of fact, criminal activity in general, not only from illegal immigrants, has been benting towards a certain direction for a number of years. Crime data from the FBI (because if the FBI doesn’t come to you, you go to the FBI!) with incident rates back until 1985 shows a distinctly downward trend on all crimes nationally since 1992 that some with keen eyes may characterize as a consistent decline. Confirming the wisdom of these perceptive onlookers, a Pew study combined the crime data from the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics, each with a different data collection method, going so far to even describe the type of decline: “[D]ata show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s”. And yet the Pew study points out that most Americans, 77% in 2023, up from 47% in 2000, believe that crime has risen nationally. Why this large discrepancy? Could it be that a particular party is spreading lies about the country’s imminent ruin and disaster from caravans of dangerous, nameless, faceless criminals entering the country? The authors of SANCTUARY CITIES, after reviewing the media’s portrayal of sanctuary cities, write in the book:
This [crime] narrative is fed by a highly negative and stereotypical portrayal of immigrants by the media . . . [T]he media persistently frame immigrants as undocumented, imply criminality by drawing attention primarily to imigrant arrests and detention, and focus on the border . . . Given the scholarship reviewed . . . there is little doubt that this framing drives many Americans to conflate immigration with crime, and to think of the issue in highly episodic ways.
The authors continue:
The potential benefits of sanctuary policies in the city from increasing cooperation between immigrant communities and police has been more and more drowned out, particularly in broadcast media and television news, by politicians like Donald Trump who seek to use the issue for electoral advantage and to tap into the nativism and racism that still make fear-mongering so effective in the United States.
Wherefore this fear-mongering if not horror and panic, terror and fright, nerves shaking in the night?
Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littré says so, and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It's on the other side of life.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
It is most relevant here! to mention that Carl Jung writes in his large and unwieldy RED BOOK:
At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me. The vision of the flood seized me and I felt the spirit of the depths, but I did not understand him. Yet he drove me on with unbearable inner longing and I said: "My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you. I am with you. After long years of wandering, I have come to you again." . . . Life does not come from events, but from us. Everything that happens outside has already been.
Therefore whoever considers the event from outside always sees only that it already was, and that it is always the same. But whoever looks from inside, knows that everything is new. The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths of man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.
In the latter half of this quote, Jung touches on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, having explicitly mentioned in a lecture at ETH Zurich in 1935 a turning point at a certain life phase as a parallel:
A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it.
Yes! Having encountered that point many, many decades ago, I can personally attest to such a phenomenon. Specifically in THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, this may be what Jung was referring to, as this was exactly what announced for me (too!) the shadow side of life:
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,—and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:
Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!
Mein Zarathustra, for whom but thee doth I shine, and doth nicht exist mein happiness wert nicht for thee! Speak, mein Zarathustra! Teach mich der Über! Let no unscrupulous atheist tell his good fellow Christians that God did not rest on the seventh day, as the big book proclaims! But what did He do the day before? He doth maketh the beautiful animals! He doth granteth his own image in you! And me! He doth maketh among them Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and those pagans too, so that they may quibble away! What an important task! While they bickered away, there roameth in the background the many dinosaurs that were created on the same day! But what did Jung do on the sixth? We learn from within the covers of the red tome:
Sixth night. My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink. The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for? How eerie is this wasteland. It seems to me that the way leads so far away from mankind. I take my way step by step, and do not know how long my journey will last.
Doth Jung’s journey not sound like a great time? Some mighty fun? I say it is certainly so! But caught in Jung’s desert, I spot in the yonder, through some rippling hot air, some shining blue puddles! Here, my dear reader, I find myself finally on familiar, recognizable grounds! It was in 1948 that the sociologist Oliver Cox published his book, CASTE, CLASS, RACE, just one year after my birth! If the appearance of the digits in that year strikes some readers with the unmoored, unrelatable distance of a past too long ago, those very digits evoke in me the immense fondness of attachment and nostalgia, like discovering an oasis after weeks of fruitless trekking in the desert. Aye! How the soul longs for the comforting airs of yesteryear! Although more popular back in my day, Cox’s work and reputation have waned in the intervening years, compelling one to think it is high time someone resurrects if not the man himself then surely his words! Just as we do with ours, Cox called his era the “modern times” as he observes the flexible nature of prejudice:
Probably one of the most persistent social illusions of modern times is that we have race prejudice against other people because they are physically different—that race prejudice is instinctive. From the point of view of Anglo-Saxon, gentile, well-to-do people, we may hate peoples of other nationalities, hate Jews, hate all colored peoples, and hate union workers. Yet we can safely say that these are not all an identical social attitude. Our feeling against, say, the Italians may vanish if they become our allies in war; feeling against the Jews may subside as we begin to discount the importance of religion in determining social phenomena; if Negroes do our work contentedly and help to break strikes for us, we may defend and even treat them amicably; we may see considerable virtue in union workers if they insist that the company union has more merit than the outside organization. Human beings have the capacity for "social hatred" or antagonism; yet in any given social situation of inter-group antagonism, we do not seek an explanation by referring to this capacity. The social antagonism is as stable and as different as the inciting cause—the interest—behind the antagonism. Human nature itself is probably the most plastic and malleable of all animal nature.
Resulting from this malleability, Cox’s central idea is that race prejudice is not separate from class exploitation but are outgrowths of capitalist interests:
[The] reaction of labor, however, is not peculiarly a racial phenomenon; the conflict is essentially between employer and worker. Indeed, workers will react to inanimate objects, to machinery, in a characteristic way if that latter is introduced suddenly as a significant substitute for labor. Workers have been known to riot and attack machines in a way not unlike their attacks upon other workers who, because of lower standards, are favored by employers . . . It should be noted that this [racial] attitude is not an exploitative attitude; it is a conflict between two exploited groups generated by the desire of one group of workers to keep the value of its labor power by maintaining its scarcity. In Trinidad, British West Indies, Negro workers, in almost identical terms, fought against the continued introduction of indentured East Indian laborers; and between 1930 and 1932 Negroes on the South Side of Chicago demonstrated against the employment of white "foreigners" by certain public utilities . . . We may cite, of course, many illustrations of this attitude among whites in the United States—beginning, perhaps, with the early anti-Irish attitude in the East. Every conflict between strikers and "scabs" produces similar attitudes among the strikers . . . This apparent racial conflict, then, is in fact an extension of the modern political-class conflict. The employer needs labor, cheap labor; he finds this in Asiatic workers and displaces white, more expensive labor with them. White workers then react violently against the Asiatics, indeed, not unlike the way in which early handicraft workers reacted against the machine. On this point Eliot Grinnell Mears observes [in the book RESIDENT ORIENTALS ON THE AMERICAN PACIFIC COAST]: "The organized-labor attitude . . . while strenuously opposed in its public utterances to Oriental immigration, is actually interested in racial questions in so far [sic] as they affect competitive conditions in industry. . . . The issue is capital and labor, not race and labor."
We now turn to the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Legal immigrants are not the focus of this piece, and I shall mention them only by reference to the Migration Policy Institute, with groups sorted alphabetically by origin: Asia, Central America, Europe, Mexico, Middle Eastern and North African, South America, and Sub-saharan African. As for illegal immigrants, Customs and Border Protection shares data and visualizations on the number of known migrant entries. CBP seems to favor not discovering, finding, or locating, but encountering, giving their statistics the daring name of Nationwide Encounters, evoking the mystery and thrall of a movie name like Alien Encounter: First Contact. Although these are by no means first contacts, encountering for sure remains preferable to any from among confronting, engaging, tracking, and capturing. The visualization offers a convenient citizenship filter for those who wish to delineate migrants by origin, including of course South American countries but also the places one suspects are a wee bit further away, behind a pond or some mountains like China, Russia, India, Romania, Burma, Turkey, and the Philippines. Pew provided a few visualizations on the growing numbers of migrants on the southern border, the greater portion traveling in families, and the origin countries with the most migrants.
Who are these migrants from the south? The approach to use is not to begin with outlook anticipating crime, drugs, immorality, and violence, and then to see whether what we encounter confirms or denies our criminal expectations, but to have an open eye towards what are people like any other, and it may be that crime plays only a small part of the whole story. Migrants come from various locations, but one difficult stretch for South Americans traveling north is the crossing into Central America, the Darién Gap. Last year, CNN covered the story of this part of the migrant trail in five parts, providing first-hand footage of the people and journey. I think these are ordinary people making the perilous trek for better opportunity, quite separate from the disturbing narrative among conservatives of criminal hordes slipping into the homeland under the cover of night. In spite of this, I am against illegal immigration out of practical concern.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph provides informative information in a Migration Policy Institute report on migrants, the asylum situation, the government’s response, and the generally insufficient resources in funding and personnel to handle the rapid rise in migrant arrivals in the past few years. She writes:
To improve border management, the United States needs a functioning asylum system so that people eligible for protection can receive it, and those who are ineligible can be quickly removed after fair review of their claim . . . Presently, the arrival of record numbers of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, the outdated legal framework for adjudicating their claims, and resource allocations that do not prioritize adjudications mean that the asylum system faces unprecedented strain. Since border officials are unable to quickly remove most border arrivals, nearly 2.5 million were released into the country to await immigration court proceedings between January 2021 and March 2023 and had no confirmed departure . . . The immigration court process typically takes years; some 2023 arrivals to New York City have been scheduled for initial hearings in 2027 . . . By most measures, the U.S. asylum system does not meet its objectives. Those eligible for asylum do not receive it in a timely manner, and migrants deemed ineligible are not returned to their countries of origin. Increasing arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border continue to overwhelm enforcement and protection screening capacity, and asylum adjudications cannot keep up with new filings . . . A new era of global displacement is underway that includes major movements within the Western Hemisphere. Insufficient resources and litigation largely dictate policy on the ground, and the pressures on destination cities that are receiving tens of thousands of migrants for which they have not been prepared has shifted public opinion even among strongly pro-immigration elected leaders, who are calling for more effective border enforcement measures, reduced numbers of asylum seekers, and increased federal funding to support migrant services.
Curiously enough, Bush-Joseph notes that:
President Barack Obama inherited a better resourced immigration enforcement regime than his predecessors and focused on removing from the U.S. interior noncitizens who had been convicted of serious crimes and recent arrivals, earning the nickname "deporter in chief." His administration conducted a record number of removals, averaging 344,000 per year.
Elaine Kamarck, in Brookings, poses the migrant crisis as a surge management problem, calculating that the the number of border patrol staff has remained nearly constant between 2018 and 2023, at just over 16,000, even as the number of migrants grew from hundreds of thousands to millions. Kamarck cites a Syracuse University TRAC dashboard on the number of pending cases in the immigration backlog, which as of May 2024 comes to just over 3.5 million. The solution Kamarck recommends is to close the border temporarily:
There are many people out there with legitimate claims to be in the United States. Their cases should be settled, and those who don't qualify should be sent home. Biden should close down the border temporarily so that those who are already here can be fairly evaluated. Some will meet the criteria and many more will be sent home.
Pew finds that Republicans favor deporting illegal migrants and securing the southern border, and Democrats prefer giving migrants a legal pathway to staying in the country. However the immigration judges decide each case, they reach a conclusion on whether a migrant can stay, but the current situation for millions of migrants is a lengthy limbo of waiting for a court to consider their case—the migrant crisis itself presents a problem of scale along with the lack of adequate resources. On top of the massive backlog, an additional issue surfaces. Of the migrants already in the country, what is the cost of keeping them here while they wait several years on the backlog? It is worth the reminder here that resources do not manifest from thin air, and government spending comes from either taxpayers or taking on debt. Let us consider a view on finances, and then I will put forth my view on the matter, but let me begin by saying that I agree with the statement that everyone deserves adequate access to resources, opportunities—I am not against this, but how do we convert this ideal into reality?
It costs resources to process this influx of migrants, but we shall see that the costs mount further when the government subsidizes their housing while they wait for an asylum hearing. But first we must reflect on the state of the government’s finances—it is no exaggeration that the federal debt is rapidly becoming a serious problem. Federal debt held by the public has been rising rapidly, according to data from the Federal Reserve; as a percent of GDP, it stood at 36.8% in Q1 2000 but has risen to 96.4% in Q4 2023 (all percentages mentioned below in this topic are in proportion to the GDP; this measure indicates the country’s ability to pay its debt). In particular, this debt increase means that the interest the government pays is also rising. The Congressional Budget Office showed that in fiscal year 2023, the net interest was 2.4%, about half of the cost of Social Security, the largest government expenditure, which came in at 5%. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget declared last year, “Interest is now the fourth-largest government program, behind only Social Security, Medicare, and defense.” CBO in 2020 projected that by 2050, net interest would grow to 8%, and earlier this year provided a broader budget projection over the next thirty years; in this new projection, net interest grows to 6.3% in 2054, overtaking Social Security’s 5.9%. CBO warns about the rising debt:
From 2024 to 2054, growing deficits would push federal debt held by the public far beyond any previously recorded level . . . Such large and growing debt would have significant economic and financial consequences. Among its other effects, it would slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, heighten the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse outcomes, and make the nation's fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates.
This projection is predicated on “the assumption that current laws governing taxes and spending will generally remain unchanged”—this is the default course if the country remains on its current track. CBO also shared options for reducing the deficit, considering many areas of reducing spending and raising revenue. And how high can the country’s debt go? According an ominous article last year from the Penn Wharton Budget Model:
We estimate that the U.S. debt held by the public cannot exceed about 200 percent of GDP even under today's generally favorable market conditions . . . Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly.
Some perspective is needed: this is only one model’s estimate, and we should not easily succumb to fatalist portents.
With an eye towards this growing debt, a Senate hearing was held last year with the admittedly provocative title from the Democrats in the majority, THE RICH GET RICHER, DEFICITS GET BIGGER: HOW TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY AND CORPORATIONS DRIVE THE NATIONAL DEBT. The slate of witnesses provide a fair overview of liberal, conservative, and non-partisan stances, predicated on statistics, modeling, projections, and various outcomes of past policies. I’m not going to comment on their testimonies because I have nothing further to add, but a very brief summary of the issue is this:
balance = revenue - spending
Because spending is greater than revenue, the budget balance is in deficit. This fact is not contentious, and that it is a growing problem is perhaps one of the few points of agreement between the parties. However, Democrats wish to remedy this with higher taxes on the wealthy to bolster revenue, while Republicans want to curtail spending through fewer programs and a smaller government. The writer himself is partial to the Democrat view, but agrees that spending must also decline.
The writer must mention a most enlightening moment in the hearing! Senator John Kennedy, a Republican, first confirming that one of the witnesses, Bruce Bartlett, was attending the hearing on the side of Democrats, commences (at 1:42:39) his approach which runs at all odds against every other senator’s reliance on decent sense, contrary to everyone else’s facts and figures, rhyme and reason: he divines his victim’s convictions through the victim’s old tweets. Senator Kennedy, we see, adheres to the motto: “By thy tweets shall ye be known!” He proceeds to read out a series of Bartlett’s openly political tweets, and after reciting each tweet with a barely conceiled contempt, he looks up at Bartlett with an innocent disbelief, asking if he read the tweet correctly. And once Senator Kennedy finishes going through the tweets, he calmly concludes his inquiry with a sharp retort: “Mr. Bartlett, I appreciate you answering my questions. It helps me to determine the credence or credibility to give to your testimony.” Though the writer doesn’t think Senator Kennedy’s approach yields much in the way of clarity, the writer admits he likes the senator’s style. Of course, later, Senator Tim Kaine sets right the context of some of the tweets.
We were discussing the cost of this wave of migrants. With the federal debt growing at the current rate, I am rather against the government recklessly expanding its spending. USAFacts calculated that, “The government spent $22.4 billion . . . on immigration and border security last year [fiscal year 2023].” This would be 0.08% of GDP, a fairly low number, but considering the current trajectory, when the government should aim to reduce spending, it would be a mistake to let spending run loose. Since we have lingered on the debt issue for longer than the writer intended, we shall consider only briefly the issue of state and local debt, because states and cities are also in debt, though not as drastically as the federal government. In particular, we shall consider the debt-y New York: the state comptroller projects rising state debt, as does the city comptroller for the city. It is rather interesting to note that the state limits its self-justifying vanity to a single bold heading, “New York State Ranks Second Highest in Outstanding Debt Nationwide”, while the city’s report dedicated an entire section to note that despite a high debt burden, the city’s debt, when viewed in context, compares favorably to those of other large cities which it calls the “Peer Group”. This is the rough breakdown of the city’s debt, as of June 30, 2023, in billions of dollars:
Gross Debt Outstanding $98 New York Water Finance Authority (NYW) $32.2 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) $49.1 Health and Hospitals (H+H) $ 0.48 Total $179.8
But in its official accounting, the city does not regard this total as its debt load. Only the first line item is relevant to the city’s official debt number, or what the city calls “indebtedness”, which is then measured against the city’s debt limit; the three other entities issue their own debt and are separate from the gross debt. Further, not all of the $98 billion counts towards the debt limit, as some costs are excluded from the city’s definition of indebtedness; the total indebtedness at the end of FY 2023 was computed to be $96.9 billion (though this number is brought down further in the accounting through an exemption called the Transitional Finance Authority).
In light of this debt, what is the cost of supporting asylum seekers in the city? We now trace the city’s resource burden to support migrants. The city comptroller shares a census for the asylum seekers in city-funded shelters, writing that, “As of March 10, 2024, the City had approximately 64,600 people seeking asylum in City funded shelter”. As Mayor Eric Adams said last summer, “Our compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not.” At the time, an updated budgetary forecast showed that the cost of supporting asylum seekers “is projected to cost our city $12 billion over the course of three fiscal years without policy changes and further support from the state and federal governments.” I think it is easy to ask for money from elsewhere, but the state and the federal government are also both in debt. In December, the city comptroller released a report on the cost of funding asylum seekers: $4.26 billion in FY 2024 and $4.49 billion in FY 2025. To be sure, it is true that this funding may be viewed as the initial cost of investment to expand a labor force that will generate additional tax revenue over time. But how much do they generate? The comptroller’s office released a fact list about immigration’s benefits to the city, which I do not have an issue with. However, again, we must be careful not to conflate legal and illegal immigrants. We are here considering specifically illegal immigrants, and, in particular, the asylum seekers the city is funding. The fact list cites an American Immigration Council infographic on the tax contributions from immigrants in 2021, in which, again, we should not be misled by the high revenue and spending power of immigrants in general, but only of illegal immigrants. The infographic doesn’t isolate asylum seekers, and the closest approximation we have is in the “undocumented immigrants” section, which shows that they contributed $3 billion in total revenue: $1.8B for federal and $1.2B for state and local. Assuming the best case, that these contributions are entirely from asylum seekers, the city receives a only portion of the $1.2B, which, when measured against the projected FY 2024 and FY 2025 costs ($4.26B and $4.49B, as indicated above) to fund asylum seekers, nets in a loss. It may be contested that these are ongoing tax contributions as opposed to the one-time cost of funding, and that the contributions accumulated over several years may flip the net into a gain: true, but the funding should be compared to the opportunity cost of not paying down the existing debt, which will lower interest payments over time. As we saw in the city’s debt composition above, who knew that water could be so expensive? Or that maintaining and running subways and keeping them from falling into disrepair could come at such a massive deficit? The state comptroller laments in a report on the MTA’s debt:
Budgeted debt service . . . is projected to reach nearly $5 billion by 2031, which is 83 percent ($2.3 billion) more than in 2023 . . . Continued backloading of debt to achieve short-term savings . . . will also result in higher costs to the MTA's riders, toll payers and taxpayers in the long-term. If the MTA has to issue more debt for investments in the system amid potential funding gaps from its funding partners, then this unadvisable, costly practice is likely not only to continue, but potentially grow as it attempts to manage the operating budget impact.
The city released a report on the MTA’s budget, and in Figure 3, we see that debt service, at $2.8 billion, costs more than running the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad (yes, the two railroads are not spelled the same way).
In reasoning from the infographic above, we have assumed that asylum seekers have legal authorization to work, but what warrants this assumption? According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to even apply for an Employment Authorization Document (EAD), an asylum seeker must first apply for asylum and then wait 180 days. On paper, this is how long it will take, but as of May 2024, the city’s immigration backlog, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC, sits at about 150,000. Theresa Cardinal Brown agrees that the asylum system is broken on a 60 MINUTES episode, saying, “We just don’t have the personnel, the resources, the infrastructure, or the right processes to manage what’s happening there well.” With large numbers of asylum seekers, Brown reiterates what we saw earlier at the federal level, that it may take years of waiting on the backlog; Brown says, “On average, people [asylum seekers] . . . might wait three to five years” to get an asylum hearing, and that “It could be four years, four and a half years, before you [an asylum seeker] can ask for work authorization.” As shown in the episode, many migrants have come to work and earn their keep, but the current laws simply don’t permit them to do so without protracted waiting. Proposals have been suggested to reduce the wait time. Last year, Senator Susan Collins (a Republican) introduced the Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act of 2023 to the Senate, which, the National Immigration Forum describes as reducing the wait period of 180 days to 30 for asylum seekers who entered the country through an official port of entry. Similarly, according to the Immigration Forum article, Representative Chellie Pingree (a Democrat) proposed to the House a bill with the same reduction, only without the port of entry qualification. Neither of these proposals has been passed yet, but even if either does and the wait period were shortened, we must not forget the backlog and the preliminary wait time of “three to five years” that Brown estimated to reach an asylum hearing. Last September, Mayor Eric Adams made an effort to hasten this first step by opening a help center to aid asylum seekers to prepare and send in applications for asylum, yet even with this assistance, “[T]he city expects the number of people currently eligible to apply for work authorization to be a relatively small percentage of those now in care.” In spite of Adam’s attempt at a remedy, one may be forgiven in finding fault with the city’s approach that, in the face of this problem, Adams insists, “New York City needs significant and timely support from our state and federal partners to tackle this national issue”—as though asking someone else for help should be the city’s default solution rather than a self-determined, self-prescribed, self-sufficient path to financial sustainability, because, after all, this has become the city’s problem, and looking elsewhere for charity resembles irresponsible complaining.
One month after setting up the aslyum assistance center, Adams’ administration, perhaps with an newfound eye towards fiscal responsibility, eventually “announced that it would implement a new policy limiting shelter stays for newly arrived families with children to 60 days”, according to the city comptroller. But the comptroller’s report itself is a critical investigation of the new policy, complains that it is “haphazard”, and recommends that the city should end it. For some reason the comptroller is more sympathetic to migrants who, by no fault of their own, are unauthorized to work and contribute than to the city’s fiscal health. Contrast the current situation with that of the Italian immigrants during the city’s tenement days around the early 1900s, who, as the Library of Congress records, were able to work, though struggling, but the current laws prohibit this new wave of migrants from doing the same. We must remember: Opportunities do not grow on trees, money doesn’t fall from the sky, and funding for asylum seekers comes from either tax revenue or incurring more debt—which adds to the current burden and diminishes the city’s resources for everyone else—while this cost simultaneously does not entail a corresponding prospect for a positive return.
Without a foreseeable path to quickly enable large portions of migrants to work and finance their own housing, under the current surge in migrants and the present laws preventing them from working, I am quite against accepting more migrants from entering the city and, by extention, states like Texas that are busing them across the country. My contention on illegal immigration is not about race, culture, religion, or crime, but an inadequate and incapable asylum system entrenched in a wave of divided politics, amplified by the confluence of polarized news, massive economic inequality, elite overproduction, and popular immiseration, situated against a backdrop of growing government debt. For legal immigrants who have a pathway to employment, promising and authorized, and who can contribute to the economy, I say: “Come one, come all! Come help us pay our debts!” To everyone else, I’m afraid the country at this time has its own problems and cannot handle the expense to subsidize everyone’s well-being.
For those liberals among us who still habor visionary longings for a utopic fantasy, perhaps the better course of action is to stop generating so much grating noise in public and complain about the mistreatment of migrants and expect some magical intervention to drop from the sky but to put our money where our mouth is and take it upon ourselves to financially support one or two (maybe three! or why not four?) migrants from our own hard-earned paycheck! To thee I say: you live up to your proclaimed beliefs, and Uncle Sam (and his wallet) thanks you for your services to your country! And to thee someone else has said,
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it . . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
Had Emma Lazarus lived in our age and were commissioned to write the generation-defining poem for the migrants of the world arriving along the great southern border, perhaps she would have called it, THE NEW WALL:
Not like the golden country of opportunity,
With dollar mountains from sea to shining sea;
Here at our desert-beaten, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty barricade with steel grates, whose metal
Is a soaring thirty feet, and its name
Wall For The Exiled. From the sun’s heat too hot to touch
Glows a country with its own problems; its mild eyes renounced
The campus protests that twin parties frame.
“Keep, travel’s momentum, elsewhere welcomes!” bellows the steel
With silent grates. “We can’t help, our tired, our poor,
Our huddled tribes yearning for a better shore,
The wretched sums of our teeming debt.
Send these, mercy from populists,
I lift my interest rates beside some outdated laws!”
Although the next country is close enough
that they can hear their roosters crowing and dogs barking,
they are content never to visit each other
all of the days of their lives.
—#80, TAO TE CHING, tr. J.H. McDonald
Race and Gender as Secondary to Class, and the Material View
I will in this section argue that race and gender inequalities are not, on their own, the essential sources of conflict, but are surface distinctions which serve as groupings for an underlying disparity: race and gender are instances of a more fundamental concern. I contend that race and gender are often mistakenly conflated with the principle unit of inequality, that race and gender are merely secondary concerns, and that preoccupations with them blind researchers and the general public to the core differentiator—the essential tension is class, and the primary conflict derives from class disparity. Class advantages confer power, resources, opportunities, privilege, representation, leverage over law and politics, deference, and cultural reproduction. Indeed, if class inequalities are reversed in favor of the historically oppressed, in favor of the marginalized races and the disadvantaged gender, the current discontent among these groups will cease, for it is neither race nor gender in themselves that are the crucial factors in this struggle, but power and privilege, which are direct products of class. This primacy of class and its distinction from race and gender are crucial: by embracing class as the principal unity of analysis, we can recognize the importance of the conventional approach to the problem of diversity and inequality: the material view, which is does not accentuate divides between groups by race or gender.
We first consider race. The material view stands in contrast to the approach of race theorists who propagate divisive agendas by recoursing to ethnic pride, cultural relativism, and essentialist views on race as intractable constructs. Philomena Essed, in her 1991 book, UNDERSTANDING EVERYDAY RACISM, uses the example of Rosa N., an ethnically Surinamese medical doctor in the Netherlands:
The accounts of Rosa N. cannot be seen as unreflective. We shall see that her evaluations are underpinned by years of deliberate questioning of her life in the Netherlands and searching for more information about the Dutch and about racism. Moreover Rosa N. has had many opportunities to systematically test her real experiences against her beliefs about racism. In addition, being a solo Black working in an all-White environment, she has had to strategize and assess possible risks attached to specific reactions to racism.
I do not question Essed’s study or analysis in the Netherlands where she was researching at the time and in her comparison with the United States, but her recommended solution is, I find, tenuous, incomplete, and disproportionate:
Once we recognize the fact that racism is systematically integrated into meanings and routine practices by which social relations are reproduced, it follows that it is not specific agents but the very fabric of the social system that must be problematized. This requires that we reformulate the problem of racism as an everyday problem . . . These cannot be countered by fragmented policies. One cannot pursue pluralism without addressing the hidden presumption that the dominant culture is superior and need not be receptive to change . . . [T]he elements in a program to increase a critical understanding of race and ethnic relations . . . [require] that hidden implications of the ideal of cultural tolerance are countered, that the mechanisms of cultural racism are exposed, and that the overall denial of racism is resisted by massive dissemination of oppositional views through the media and in the education system.
In the current affairs, several decades after Essed published her views, social discourse has evidently turned in her direction, and general awareness of racial issues has become prevalent—I do not doubt that this is a step towards progress on racial inequality, but, at the same time, I find that what Essed advances, the simple fact of consciousness of pervasive and systemic racism, is inadequate to compel the corresponding corrective action, and mere consciousness breeds false initiatives, virtue signaling, vague ideals, and rampant misunderstanding. Cognition of race matters is insufficient to address the patent material inequality, and relying on perspectival shifts to explain such inequality only misleads the public to justify disadvantaged communities rather than take measures to remedy the disparities. Essed elaborates on her race-based framing of cultural divides:
Hidden under the surface of diversity, there is a strong tendency among Whites, in the United States as well as in the Netherlands, to assume the superiority of Euro-American values. Hidden also is the expectation that, in due time, Blacks must accept that the norms and values of the Euro-American tradition are superior and that adaptation is the only way to progress in society . . . The ideal and practice whereby interests and perspectives of the White group are used as the norm is an enduring and inescapable feature of the experiences of Blacks. Eurocentrism is interwoven in social relationships, in the language, in habits of thinking, in institutional relationships, and more generally in the conditions under which individuals or groups gain access to resources. Eurocentricism is so much ingrained in the social cognitions of the dominant group that Whites are often incapable of understanding the world from the point of view of Blacks.
How far is Essed, along with other race theorists, willing to defend her views? Is economic prosperity specifically Eurocentric? Are Blacks and racial minorities, who have their differing norms and values, apathetic to material progress? Again, I do not question the premise that different cultures have their own value systems and perspectives, but it is foolish to take this relativism to an extreme and propose that it is the characteristic ethos of a certain culture and its people to refuse comforts, to uniformly deny self-interest, to spurn advancement.
Additionally, it is incredibly short-sighted to proclaim the demise of Eurocentrism in favor of the prominence of an alternative, whether Black or otherwise. Let us appreciate the difficulty of detaching from Eurocentric systems: the persistence of the Latin language in binomial nomenclature to name the species of the natural world and also the Greek letters in mathematical notation. The modern writing systems in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Phillipines are based on the Latin script, and consider, even more drastically, the wholesale adoption of Spanish in Central and South America and Portuguese in Brazil. It is likely more distressing and inconvenient, if not impossible, to return to what may be considered pre-European influence on culture and language. Indeed, it is quite a curious task to imagine how far a particularly courageous one could go were this daring spirit to attempt to cease employing the very language one finds oneself and most of one’s country using, or even the language one is currently reading. And while it may appear to the naked eye that the internet supports the full panoply of languages, were one to uproot the predominant encoding known by the mystical name, UTF-8, one may notice that the English alphabet, against all others, fits so neatly into the soil that its letters take up the smallest footprint in this age of environmental crises.
This is all very well, but we suggest the material view’s solution: why should these belong to one group and not also everyone else? Consider England’s history: a sixth-century villager in remote and pastoral East Sussex, in defiance of the recently arrived Anglo-Saxons and their newcomers’ language of Old English, holding on tenderly to the treasured language of his forebears, Common Brittonic, did not suspect what later would become the language of the land. How silly it is to suppose that English does not belong to the descendants of the villager because the villager himself was simply stubborn. Nor did, having established themselves in the land, the progeny of the country’s new residents, the Anglo-Saxon villagers of Suffolk in the eleventh century who resisted the sudden Norman French incursion and their foreign language—
This year King William [the Conqueror, who two years earlier successfully invaded England and was crowned king] gave Earl Robert the earldom over Northumberland; but the landsmen attacked him in the town of Durham, and slew him, and nine hundred men with him. Soon afterwards Edgar Etheling came with all the Northumbrians to York; and the townsmen made a treaty with him: but King William came from the South unawares on them with a large army, and put them to flight, and slew on the spot those who could not escape; which were many hundred men; and plundered the town.
—ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE, entry dated A.D. 1068, tr. J. Ingram and J.A. Giles
—suspect that these intruders would later morph their native tongue. To whom does the English language belong? This latest invading group, or the Anglo-Saxons before them, or the Britons before them—where does this end and the roots stop moving? It is true in a sense that each group adopts new changes to the language and makes it theirs, but why should we limit our understanding and stop at such lock-step and intermittent language-group pairing and not reflect on the broader picture, that culture and groups are a mutually informed, and both are continually evolving and accumulating upon precedents? Each successive group molds language and cultural artifacts to their needs and preferences, and, through the union of their changes to the given formulation, acquires ownership of all the prior forms.
The difficulty of separating from the Eurocentric is echoed in an essay collection published last year, DECOLONIZING THE ENGLISH LITERARY CURRICULUM, edited by Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, Although the express intent of the editors and the contributors was to consider approaches to, as indicated in the book’s title, decolonize the English literary curriculum, one should not be misjudged for noticing a persistent recognition at the task’s difficulty. The editors write in the introduction:
In departments of English, where we teach the history of literature and language from Anglo-Saxon to World Literature, chronology is Eurochronology to a large extent, and to situate oneself in literary tradition is to inhabit structures that are historically Eurocentric, patriarchal, classist, xenophobic, or racist. We can, where relevant, read literature as a textual as well as territorial inscription and remain vigilant of its implication in a given culture's criteria and contestation of value. Decolonizing the English literary curriculum would also entail a concerted effort to retrieve forgotten and discredited literary forms and figures, proletariat and women's voices.
Here, we must ask of this phrase—”structures that are historically Eurocentric, patriarchal, classist, xenophobic, or racist”—whether it would not remain true were we to subtitute Eurocentric with any among: Middle East-centric, Afro-centric, or Asia-centric.
Related to all this centrism, I wish to briefly delineate the difference between materialism and a recent trend in the humanities called new materialism, which deplores the human-centric worldview and promotes the agency in all living and inanimate matter: I do not question new materialism’s central premise that humans play an almost insignificant part in the universe’s scheme, but we should be careful not to take philosophical musings to an extreme and believe human societies, political orders, social relations, and economic systems should prioritize nature over humanity. Our relation to the world, our knowledge of it, our actions within its scope, cannot but be anthropocentric, and it is only within the limitation of this human-based framework that we can operate. It is naive to pretend, in the new materialist manner, that what we humans call “agency” can be ascribed to rocks, air, mountains—what does inanimate matter care for human finitude and follies? What need is there shift the central subject away from us and towards the eternal world? It is impossible overstate the prominence of the great many non-human organisms and inanimate matter, which have existed before us and will persist long after we’re gone—we are not qualified to make assertions on whether nature is passive or whether it is a receptacle of our actions or whether it is has agency on the cosmic stage; inasfar as nature appears to be so, it is because of our limited vantage and our interests in nature, not because of nature in itself, which we cannot comprehend in its entirety. Does a tadpole make such preposterous claims about the coral reef? What could a single leaf, splayed in dull sedation, knowing only how to take in air and sunlight, see of itself in the raging rivers, the torrential rain, and the immense forest with its deep roots and the hordes of predator and prey?
To change our skies, our oceans, rivers, hills,
To cross the plains afoot, and hear new sounds,
Though still the austere silence of the night
Abides around us, and to speak replies,
Though voiceless. Other cases of the sort
Wondrously many do we see, which all
Seek, so to say, to injure faith in sense—
In vain, because the largest part of these
Deceives through mere opinions of the mind,
Which we do add ourselves, feigning to see
What by the senses are not seen at all.
For naught is harder than to separate
Plain facts from dubious, which the mind forthwith
Adds by itself.
—Lucretius, ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, tr. W.E. Leonard
New materialists seem confused in their priorities and out of touch with the pressures of reality; we are concerned about global warming and its devastating effects on nature because the natural world is the premise of our habitat and the site of our resources, and our interests are bound up with harms to the environment. We are not intrinsically concerned with factors we do not know and which have little effect on us. Do we indeed care about the multitudes of landslides and avalanches and floods happening all the time in remote regions, all the violent local quakes and slow seismic movements which neither enter our awareness nor directly affect our interests, and then do we place greater value in such forces than in our own economies? Even if, as new materialists claim, the traditional divide between humans and the myriad non-human phenomena is a false dichotomy, since humans are a part of the natural ecosystem, it is a gross posturing of an inflated ego to state that we care for all natural things as though we are not mortal and our time and attention are not finite, as though we don’t assign comparative value to the objects in the phenomenal world, as though we are guardians of this majestic universe in which we have somehow been given stewardship over its treasures when we are just a passing trickle of rain in a vast constellation completely heedless to our puddles and droplets. One significant difference between materialists and new materialists, then, is that materialists can make peace with knowing when they do not know. If new materialists are convinced of the certainties of such non-human animism, why do they not take up their word and renounce human society altogether and live the ascetic life in the mountains where they are completely free to commune with nature? Why all this noise and human self-interest from folks who quite readily denounce the centrality of human affairs?
Few people come
to this mountaintop;
cranes do not flock
in the tall pines.
—Chia Tao, OVERNIGHT AT A MOUNTAIN MONASTERY, tr. Mike O’Connor
There are beside these Authors and such as have positively promoted errors, divers others which are in some way accessory; whose verities although they do not directly assert, yet do they obliquely concur unto their beliefs. In which account are many holy Writers, Preachers, Moralists, Rhetoricians, Orators and Poets; for they depending upon Invention, deduce their mediums from all things whatsoever; and playing much upon the simile, or illustrative argumentation: to induce their Enthymemes unto the people, they took up popular conceits, and from traditions unjustifiable or really false, illustrate matters of undeniable truth. Wherein although their intention be sincere, and that course not much condemnable; yet doth it notoriously strengthen common Errors, and authorise Opinions injurious unto truth.
—Thomas Browne, VULGAR ERRORS
The voyager was moved with pity for the small human race, where he was discovering such surprising contrasts.
"Since you are amongst the small number of wise men," he told these sirs, "and since apparently you do not kill anyone for money, tell me, I beg of you, what occupies your time."
"We dissect flies," said the philosopher, "we measure lines, we gather figures; we agree with each other on two or three points that we do not understand."
—Voltaire, MICROMÉGAS, tr. Peter Phalen
We return to the difficulty of the task of decolonizing the English curriculum in the Quayson and Mukherjee text. Nasser Mufti writes in the chapter, VICTORIAN STUDIES AND DECOLONIZATION:
[N]ot only were the leaders of decolonization bourgeois intellectuals trained in the Western academy, but they were also complete Anglophiles and Francophiles . . . [T]he leaders and intellectuals of anticolonial thought in the British colonial world never had a problem with Victorianism. They freely utilized, quoted, and valorized the White, conservative patriatchs of nineteenth-century British literature and culture. From the perspective of W.E.B. Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar, and C.L.R. James, "decolonizing" the Victorian canon would be absurd, as it is this very canon—formed with and alongside colonization—that they loved and relied on to theorize the project of decolonization. They might tirelessly work for the liberation of the colonial world, but they do so oftentimes by way of the writings of Victorians like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Tennyson. From this perspective, it becomes possible to adapt Spivak's maxim: it should not be possible to research Victorian studies without remembering that Victorianism was integral to decolonization.
Mufti even makes a scholarly quip at the dubious decolonizing task:
The wholesale institutional embrace of "decolonize" should give one pause. As I am sure many chapters in this book note, and as has been noted by others, it would be a gross misunderstanding to mistake the verb "decolonize" for the noun "decolonization." The verb is new and emerges out of a middle-class encounter with the complicity between culture and imperialism. This is why it is seemingly possible to "decolonize" everything. The noun, however, is much older, has a closer relationship to the "postcolonial," and primarily describes anticolonial nationalism and Third Worldist self-determination of the mid-century . . . To put it perhaps too starkly: while decolonization "reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives," "decolonize" reeks of stale conference hotels and online workshops organized by Dean's initiatives.
James Ogude, in another chapter, #RHODESMUSTFALL AND THE REFORM OF THE LITERATURE CURRICULUM, reflects on another aspect of the difficulty at the task:
On the one hand, we have a traditional cohort of students, who are predominantly White, but who also include a section of the Black elite for whom English without Shakespeare and the Great Tradition is incomplete—they push back at any attempts to bring about curriculum transformation. On the other hand, we have a cohort of Black students who are insisting on asserting a new identity through the literatures they read and are demanding change now . . . The push-and-pull situation has proved to be counterproductive for genuine curriculum reform, as curriculum creators strive to please these competing constituencies. The end result is what can hardly be described as a decolonized English curriculum, but the result of competing interests ranging from the interests of those senior faculty who are not prepared to let go of their old practices, and a new but energetic cohort of scholars who are seeking change but remain at the mercy of the senior scholars who see transformation as a threat to their own careers . . . We have to understand decoloniality as a process and perhaps a much more protracted one when it comes to curriculum change in a discipline such as English with so many competing interests. If one wants to see glimmers of change and challenges to the English literature syllabus, then one has to look elsewhere—far from the mainstream sites of scholarship and the academy.
If this is true, where shall one look? The historical record suggests that one need not scour all the obscure corners of the world for some rarefied bounty because the resolution is already before our eyes: the manifest material changes that alter each generation in the body of the population and its regenerated perspective on the new state of the country, as a blending of the old and the new. If the successive series of newcomers to England could influence the language, if the modern English people consider the English language to be their own, all the intrusive changes from their ancestors be damned, and if the English have conferred the language on much of the world, how could it be that the language should not belong to those who speak it and who—who would dare to suggest?—will continue the long march of a language’s evolution which reflects the populations that use it?
[W]hat distinguishes Irish civilization for [James] Joyce is its ethnic hybridity: "Do we not see that in Ireland the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have united to form a new entity, one might say under the influence of a local deity?" . . . The Irish language is almost as dead in Joyce's Dublin as Arawak is on [Derek] Walcott's Saint Lucia. A visiting English ethnographer, staying with Stephen and Mulligan in their Martello tower, confidently addresses an old milkwoman in Irish, only to find that she thinks he's speaking French. "I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself," she confesses when he sets her straight; "I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows". With Gaelic lost outside Ireland's rural west, Joyce's Dubliners are caught between the stiff British English and the liveliness of their demotic brogue. It is a mark of their outsider status that neither Bloom nor Stephen speaks in Irish English . . . Again, like Walcott, Joyce seeks to reinvent English for his own purposes. He began by writing Dubliners in "a style of scrupulous meanness," as he told his publisher, using "meanness" in the sense of "penury," as he thought he couldn't afford an extra adjective in his sentences. By the time of Ulysses, he was moving into a far more expansive—at times hallucinatory—language, which reaches its fullest embodiment in Finnegans Wake . . . A puzzled voice asks, "are we speaching d'anglas landage or are you sprakin sea Djoytsch?" Ireland is both: a land that is at sea.
—David Damrosch, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BOOKS
It is the natural course of affairs that a language morphs over time along with the people who use it. Such cultural artifacts combine and recombine in concert with the changes among the people. And these days, no one complains about the origins of the Arabic numerals while the world goes about using them.
We conceive of this problem as essentially material: there cannot be real equality so long as different groups retain their patent material distinction, their clear separateness. So long as there remains material disparities between groups, irregularities in the grounded world, in manifest materiality, directly perceived through interactions and encounters with people and the constituents of social reality, of the artifacts of accomplishment, the edifices of human vestige of prior eras, divides along demographic lines are inevitable: the equality ideal exists in the same manner as psychic longing and unrealistic wishing. In the material view, no value is attached to any cultural association: no idea, achievement, object, person, culture, perspective is inherently associated with a grouping insofar as it is Western, Middle Eastern, African, Eastern, nor in such further subdivisions as British or French, Egyptian or Saudi Arabian. This is not to say that no such boundary exists to delineate such groupings, but that such groupings hold no inherent value and do not dole out the fixtures of people, places, and things to permanent compartments. In the material view, culture, spaces, people, are permeable, transitory, moldable, breathing, evolving, not confined by definitive, unbridgeable categories. In the material view, there is only what works and what succeeds in attaining a goal. There is no Western perspective, no Eastern perspective, no African perspective, to the extent that the perspective is intrinsically associated with the West, East, or Africa as a monolithic cultural frontier reflecting the unassailable character of some territory, but variations on the one unity of the human condition, each approach open and malleable to the others. There are no rigid cultural divides, and therefore no defining any approach as within or against any single perspective. No culture belongs to anyone or defines anyone, and no pride, no vanity, no ego needs be attached to association with any group. In the material view, convergence happens over time between cultures and people. This problem is, then, generational, and we should not be misled by the conceit that these issues will be solved in our lifetimes, and, even then, that they will be solved by us.
As Kipling saw it, people (real men, anyway) are all much the same; it is just geography that obscures the truth, requiring us to take a trip to the ends of the earth to figure things out. But in the twenty-first century, soaring social developments and a shrinking world are making such trips unnecessary. There will be neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth when we transcend biology . . . The great difference between the challenges we face today and those that defeated Song China when it pressed against the hard ceiling a thousand years ago and the Roman Empire another thousand before is that we now know so much more about the issues involved. Unlike the Roman and the Song, our age may yet get the thought it needs.
—Ian Morris, WHY THE WEST RULES—FOR NOW
It should be noted that this demographic change occurs only when the newcomers are not fenced into their own community, but rather when the new immerses with the old, and especially when the new occupies elite positions. This is precisely the case in our present political climate, not in the form of a sudden incursion, but through the gradual adoption of inclusiveness in academics, media, and political office, as liberals promote diversity.
[I]t is better to risk being consigned by critics to the "hell" reserved for alleged Westernizers and imperialists—however unjustified such criticism would in fact be—than to stand around in the vestibule waiting for a time when everyone will like what we are going to say. And what we are going to say is this: that there are universal obligations to protect human functioning and its dignity, and that the dignity of women is equal to that of men. If that involves assault on many local traditions, both Western and non-Western, so much the better, because any tradition that denies these things is unjust . . . Real cultures contain plurality and conflict, tradition, and subversion. They borrow good things from wherever they find them, none too worried about purity. We would never tolerate a claim that women in our own society must embrace traditions that arose thousands of years ago—indeed, we are proud that we have no such traditions. Isn't it condescending, then, to treat Indian and Chinese women as bound by the past in ways that we are not? . . . As Aristotle so simply puts it, "One may observe in one's travels to distance countries the feelings of recognition and affiliation that link every human being to every other human being." Kwame Anthony Appiah makes the same point, telling the story of his bicultural childhood. A child who visits one set of grandparents in Ghana and and another in rural England, who has a Lebanese uncle and who later, as an adult, has nieces and nephews from more than seven different nations, finds, he argues, not unbridgeable alien "otherness," but a great deal of human commonality.
—Martha Nussbaum, SEX AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
As this is a peaceful transition and not one with a forceful and immediate imposition, it retains certain properties of organic development and population drift. It seems there may be at least two phases involved in this process. The first phase, in a direction opposite to unification, rather emphasizes diversity, and it may well be the inundation of all the details of oppression, as we have seen in recent years on multiple fronts, but it is folly to subsist at length on such fledgling expressions and publicly enforced hysteria, as though society can carry on indefinitely with guilt, inhibition, and, by high-handed political pressure, promoting token diversity and inclusion, unloading a wave of sudden righteous signaling, mere appearances, and incoherent, arbitrary calls for progress under some tepid banner of supposed progress. After all, there is more that oppressed groups can offer than just proclaiming injustices, and they, too, are able to produce and compete when given adequate resources. For oppressed groups to stake a permanent flag in the ground, they must go beyond generating outcries and protests and voicing histories of persecution, beyond anger, loss, and pity—they must generate value and interest; rather than representing fear and displacement, they must embody excellence and triumph, prosperity and pride; to do so, they must accomplish. They must move into the next phase, which consists in this: those in historically marginalized groups must bolster fields other than that which serves their particular demographic group, to advance human civilization in areas other than race theory or gender studies. In this phase, there is hardly a need to advocate for diversity and inclusion because the various groups, with their capital, abilities, and ambitions, will represent themselves by their own right. And in doing so, their cultural attachments, associations, and identity attain attractive value and are absorbed into the predominant group, whose members are, like anyone else, naturally drawn to self-interest. The distinction which originally demarcated them as the other becomes a distinction within the norm, within the expectation, as they meld into the body itself, and they fold into the mainstream. What were formerly oppressed groups become heralded as a source of pride and another example in the long American tradition, and any influence of self-advantage are forgotten with the passing of time.
Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
The biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
The border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,
Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
At some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
The great shadowy groups gathering around,
Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand and word, ascending,
Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent with their music,
Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.
—Walt Whitman, OLD CHANTS, LEAVES OF GRASS
Here I wish put in a word to warn against continued political polarization through further research into gratuitous decolonization projects.
There is yet another fault in the Discourses of some men; which may also be numbred amongst the sorts of Madnesse; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before in the fifth chapter, by the Name of Absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others, from intention to deceive by obscurity. And this is incident to none but those, that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible, as the Schoole-men; or in questions of abstruse Philosophy. The common sort of men seldome speak Insignificantly, and are therefore, by those other Egregious persons counted Idiots . . . When men write whole volumes of such stuffe, are they not Mad, or intend to make others so? . . . So that this kind of Absurdity, may rightly be numbred amongst the many sorts of Madnesse; and all the time that guided by clear Thoughts of their worldly lust, they forbear disputing, or writing thus, but Lucide Intervals. And thus much of the Vertues and Defects Intellectuall.
—Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN
Political fracture, societal turmoil, economic ruination, and state dissolution are big prices to pay for a bit of ego, and planets and stars care not for small distinctions.
Every single thing
Changes and is changing
Always in this world
Yet with the same light
The moon goes on shining.
—Saigyō, tr. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite
We now turn to highlight the preeminence of self-interest, which runs in the background as a constant of human desire, and self-interest is the underlying motive of class distinction. As we have seen above with the example of England’s population, groups are not definite and are liable to change, especially at times of demographic drift when over several generations new groups emerge. In this sense, there are absolute, real groups. Yet we must consider another aspect of grouping: individuals, at the level of perception, wish to identify with a privileged group to advance their interests. As we shall see, perceived groups can, on their own, even create a new category of groups. In this sense, groups can also be relative, and they form and reform around the perimeter of personal advantage. People associate with a group as befits the mood of the times and insofar as the group endows benefits to the individual.
To provide an example of group relativity, let us consider how individuals come to identify with groups. We consider the German tribes of which the Angles and the Saxons were a part who later sailed and changed the population of England. We can refer to a text that has survived from that period, which comes from a foreigner’s oppositional stance, Tacitus’ GERMANIA. We appreciate the number of German tribes Tacitus mentions and the Roman’s generally negative view towards barbarians:
The Treveri and Nervii are ambitious of being thought of German origin; as if the reputation of this descent would distinguish them from the Gauls, whom they resemble in person and effeminacy. The Vangiones, Triboci, and Nemetes, who inhabit the bank of the Rhine, are without doubt German tribes . . . Of all these people, the most famed for valor are the Batavi . . . Beyond these dwell the Catti . . . Next to the Catti, on the banks of the Rhine, where, now settled in its channel, it is become a sufficient boundary, dwell the Usipii and Tencteri . . . Contiguous to the Tencteri were formerly the Bructeri; but report now says that the Chamavi and Angrivarii . . . Contiguous to the Angrivarii and Chamavi backwards lie the Dulgibini, Chasauri . . . The Semnones assert themselves to be the most ancient and noble of the Suevi . . . The Langobardi, on the other hand, are ennobled by, the smallness of their numbers; since though surrounded by many powerful nations, they derive security, not from obsequiousness, but from their martial enterprise. The neighboring Reudigni, and the Avions, Angli, Varini, Eudoses, Suardones, and Nuithones, are defended by rivers or forests . . . On the right shore of the Suevic sea dwell the tribes of the Aestii . . . They worship the mother of the gods; and as the symbol of their superstition, they carry about them the figures of wild boars. This serves them in place of armor and every other defence: it renders the votary of the goddess safe even in the midst of foes. Their weapons are chiefly clubs, iron being little used among them. They cultivate corn and other fruits of the earth with more industry than German indolence commonly exerts . . . With the usual indifference of barbarians, they have not inquired or ascertained from what natural object or by what means it is produced.
With these many tribes, it is quite stunning how many of their legacies have survived and how we today still hear of them, but, to preface the observation below of how later generations perceive the past, let us delineate the relativity of groups: mirroring the prevailing values and prejudices of the time, imagined groups will fragment, reform, shrink, or enlarge, subject to a running series of reconstitutions, redefinitions, reconstructions, and reinterpretations of historical lineage out of the crude circumstance that history as a retrospective imagination resides in the mind of the living. The facts and actualities, divisions and discord, uncertainties and inconsistencies, of past lives, relations, statehood, tribal and local animosity, the entirety of human civilization built century upon century along the greater march of millennia with all the irregular behavior due to individuals and their pressures, are lost to every new generation, which funnels the full raging river of the past through a tiny pore in the dam, filtered by self-interest.
"Over there are the authors who have written about the decline of the mighty Roman Empire, which sprang up out of the ruins of so many monarchies, and on whose fall so many new ones sprang up also. An infinite number of barbarian peoples, as little known as the lands they inhabited, appeared suddenly, inundated and pillaged it, tore it to pieces and founded all the kingdoms that now compose Europe."
—Montesquieu, PERSIAN LETTERS, tr. C.J. Betts
It is rather remarkable that all the descendants of the many German tribes and also of the Gauls and the Franks, and all the various people the Romans deemed barbarians have proceeded to refer to the Roman writers, poets, and historians with such classic authority, that to identify with past scholarship, they flip to the other side, but the dam forcefully stops the flow of the river and the voices of the dead, letting only flattery and self-interest through the pore to the living. On this note, it is quite understandable that the Italian Petrarch should revive Cicero, but one must ponder how much has been forgotten (or willfully neglected?) over the centuries that the English, French, and German philosophers of the Enlightenment resort just as well to Roman antiquity. One even ventures to think that had the (formerly) living observed through the pore a searing divine light of the scorching skies, the messiah, granted a blissful blow of a blinding in the right eye, would have turned around to the people, exclaiming with great delight in interpreting the sign to be convincing proof that they had descended from a sun god.
[M]yself and twenty more went to discover the island, and had not gone above three furlongs from the sea through a wood, but we saw a brazen pillar erected, whereupon Greek letters were engraven, though now much worn and hard to be discerned, importing, "Thus far travelled Hercules and Bacchus." . . . [W]e proceeded on our journey, and far we had not gone but we came to a river, the stream whereof seemed to run with as rich wine as any is made in Chios, and of a great breadth, in some places able to bear a ship, which made me to give the more credit to the inscription upon the pillar, when I saw such apparent signs of Bacchus's peregrination.
—Lucian, TRUE HISTORY, tr. Francis Hickes
Such group relativity and redefinition has occurred in America as well. Bronwen Walter writes in OUTSIDERS INSIDE: WHITENESS, PLACE, AND IRISH WOMEN:
I want to question the oversimplified white/black binary construction of 'race' which is so pervasive in Britain and the United States . . . Such an illusion of coherence is a product of modernist and colonialist discourse, which focuses on the 'other' and categorises itself as a a neutral 'same'. In reality, hybridity is a characteristic of all cultures . . . In order to give back meaning to the apparent emptiness of the 'white' category it is necessary to explore the specificity of white minority experiences . . . It [Richard Williams' analysis in his 1990 book, HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES AND SOCIAL VALUE: THE CREATION OF BLACK AND IRISH IDENTITIES IN THE UNITED STATES] underlines the need to avoid essentialist definitions of groups according to shared origins. Being Irish in the United States has not been and is not the same as being Irish in Britain . . . [I]n Britain the Irish have been racialised as different, while in the United States they have been racialised as the same, but ethnicised as different. A central aspect of Irish people's movement into the centre of the American nation from an initial location on the margins was their 'whiteness' . . . David Roedinger (1991) [in his book, THE WAGES OF WHITENESS,] offers a broader explanation for the emergence of whiteness as a significant social category. He relates this to the context of class formation rather than simply competition for jobs, and develops Du Bois' notion that the white working classes in America were persuaded to accept low monetary wages because of the compensatory 'wage' of public and psychological deference associated with being 'white'. They agreed to accept their inferior class position because they were 'not slaves' and 'not blacks'. Beyond this, whiteness was 'a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labour and to the necessities of capitalist work discipline' . . . An important issue is the extent to which the whiteness of Irish women enabled them to displace free black people in domestic service. If this is the case then women were in the vanguard of creating the 'wages of whiteness' whereby they accepted lower wages in return for preference over black people in a competitive labour market. Acceptance as white constituted part of the reward. This could be interpreted as a market decision in which individual Irish women were willing to undercut African-American women's wages because of their own need . . . [T]his initial phase of competition was not in itself a 'race' issue, a term which could not be applied until systematic exclusion by unions used whiteness as a condition of employment in certain industries . . . The hegemony which had originally been centred on the 'Anglo-Saxon race' alone was not finally widened to include other white Europeans until there was a need to reconsolidate the racial order after the tremendous disruption to it threatened by the abolition of slavery.
And with the dawn of this new group came the possibility of such a term and accusation as Eurocentrism, predicated on self-interest. That class, resources, and material affiliation are the essential components of race analysis is echoed in the 2005 book, RACIAL ENCOUNTER, by Kevin Durrheim and John Dixon, about their research on continued segregation in post-apartheid South Africa. They inform their analysis with American research, writing:
Goldberg (1998) [in this paper] suggests that a new segregation emerged in the USA in the era ushered in by the 1954 Brown context combined to produce a form of segregation that was conservationist, preference driven, and class differentiated. Whereas the old segregation had been activist, produced by active political and legislative intervention, and self-consciously designed to produce segregated spaces, the new segregation simply tries to preserve the social hierarchy already produced by the history of segregation. It does this by 'desegregating' society, dismantling the legal and political edifice of segregation and attacking them as illiberal. In their place, the new segregation is preference driven: 'it is produced by doing nothing special, nothing beyond being guided by the presumptive laws of the market, the determinations of the majority's personal preferences' . . . The new segregation is not statutory but comes into existence through individuals exercising their preferences to live in neighborhoods of their choice and to send their children to schools of their choice. Finally, the new segregation is not monolithic, but rather class differentiated. It is race-neutral, rejecting the illiberal monolithic exclusion of people on the basis of skin colour in favour of an individualistic system whereby people occupy the spaces they can afford . . . Goldberg's thesis is that the immediate agent of the new segregation is no longer state legislation but individual subjects, who bring about collective patterns of segregation in the routine choices and preferences they enact in their everyday lives. The ways in which individual preferences produce collective patterns of segregation are readily evident in our observations on Scottburgh beach . . . Individuals have the freedom to sit wherever they like on the beach, and yet they exercised these choices in a way that produced the kinds of racial clustering we observed. In such post-apartheid contexts, attitudes take on a prominent role in shaping preferences and sustaining segregation.
Although they observe the overlapping effects of race and class, Durrheim and Dixon warn against explanations that reduce these forms of class-derived racial self-segregation solely to class-based interpretations of these behaviors and preferences. However, they do not offer a substantive argument for their stance; it is my view that race on its own has certain effects on grouping, but relations between groups and also within a given group are defined and sustained primarily through class difference, through material inequality, which generates further consequences in power disparity. It seems to me more accurate to characterize race as operating within the more general domain of class, and the behavior of continued racial segregation in the post-apartheid and post-Jim Crow era reflects the the material inequalities between racial groups in which individuals prefer associations which serve their interests.
Like Durrheim and Dixon, Lawrence Bobo proposed a similar idea on the modern, free-market form of racial discrimination since the collapse of legalized segregation. Bobo, in the 1997 book, RACIAL ATTITUDES IN THE 1990S gave his approach a name he included in his chapter title, LAISSEZ-FAIRE RACISM. In Bobo’s words:
Rather than relying on state-enforced inequality as during the Jim Crow era, however, modern racial inequality relies on the market and informal racial bias to re-create, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality. Hence, laissez-faire racism.
Bobo claims that the modern view towards disparate racial outcomes is that the shortcomings are due to individual choices and cultural deficiencies:
Laissez-faire racism is crystallizing in the current period as a new U.S. racial belief system at a point when African Americans are a heavily urbanized, nationally dispersed, and occupationally heterogeneous population; when state policy is formally race neutral and committed to antidiscrimination efforts; and when most white Americans prefer a more volitional and cultural, as opposed to inherent and biological, interpretation of blacks' disadvantaged status.
Bobo further describes between power relations between groups:
The real attitude object is relative group positions. This attitude of sense of group position is historically and culturally rooted, socially learned, and modifiable in response to new information, events, or structural conditions, as long as these factors contribute to or shape contexts for social interactions among members of different groups. Attitudes toward integration or toward blacks are, fundamentally, statements about preferred positional relations among racial groups.
Despite acknowledging this factor of group positioning and also the fact that this discrimination occurs within the forces of the free market, Bobo resists describing this group dynamic as class-based. Even earlier this year in a lecture, Bobo heavily relied on economic metrics as a barometer for racial equality. But in the book, he isolates the non-redeeming effect of class on Black individuals and families, writing:
[S]igns of negative racial attitudes are borne out by a number of tangible indicators, such as the burgeoning evidence of racial discrimination experienced by blacks almost irrespective of social class background . . . African Americans . . . remain economically disadvantaged and racially segregated despite growing class heterogeneity within the black community and despite the successes of the civil rights movement
I disagree with Bobo on this point that these groups are not class-based. His examples do not adequately capture the influence of class because the individuals in question are exceptions to the rule in a society which is predominated by another group, which regards these class-advantaged individuals Bobo mentions not solely through the individual’s class but also through the individual’s group’s class. We must resist the temptation to examine an individual’s class standing and derive immediate conclusions about societal dynamics at the intersection of race and class as though one person exerts considerable impact on relations within societal affairs. The broad scale of the historical arc and its momentum are not physical laws wherein every example must conform to the hard fact of reality: an individual in society is situated within the aftermath of historical pressure and prior conditioning. We should speak not of an individual’s class but of the class of that individual’s perceived group—to be more specific, as no group can be described as a uniform class, we must speak of the distribution of the group’s class composition and ask towards which direction it skews. To speak of experimenting with higher class is to elevate not just an individual’s standing but the group’s distribution, and then this elevation must persist over generations to alter the tract of historical inertia. As class consists not only of resource possession and market share but also political power, academic authority, flattering media narratives and celebrity clout, class privilege pervades the various sectors of society. Through higher class standing, the group becomes aspirational: it has power and resources and representation, it sets social values and agendas, it occupies an exclusive echelon, and association with the group affords privileges. In the face of this change, the current populace either resists, ignores, or conforms to the new group, but the next generation, growing up in its jurisdiction, brought up in its image, and taught its customs, automatically identify with the new power. This range of predicates is what experimenting with class entails, not in the examples of limited scope Bobo considers in which individuals operate within the power of another group. The difficulty of this task and the scope of such a demographic shift is what we must consider when we wish to understand the effects of class. However, we need not plan out and implement such a long and arduous course of events since we can recourse to a thought experiment to appreciate its manifestation. While in Bobo’s example, an individual with higher class standing is an exception to the rule, as the individual, regardless of his class, is viewed not only through class evaluation but also through his relation to the hegemony and therefore does not reap the full advantages of class; on the contrary, under this new scheme of the elevation of the individual’s group, class hegemony reverses: the individual under these new social parameters becomes part of the hegemon, and race is only the incidental trait that tenuously coalesces the members of this hegemon into a group. Although the group remains racially the same as before, class advantage and class privilege have shifted the group’s position. It is not race, then, that is the essential factor in a market-oriented society, but class and class power.
We have considered how race is only a secondary attribute to class in what are usually called race relations. Much of the reasoning I have outline above can be extended to tensions arising from gender differentials—it is class, resources, and power which undergird the surface divide. The accumulation of resources and capital which constitute a class construct encompasses the natural inequalities in ability and ambition, of labor and discipline. Commenting on the cause of lingering gender inequality decades ago, despite women having attained some degree of freedom and independence, Beauvoir writes on the importance of achievement in THE SECOND SEX:
Most women, though, do not understand the problems that their desire for communication poses: and this is what largely explains their laziness. They have always considered themselves as givens; they believe their worth comes from an inner grace, and they do not imagine that value can be acquired; to seduce, they know only how to display themselves: their charm works or does not work, they have no grasp on its success or failure; they suppose that in a similar way, to express oneself, one need only show what one is; instead of constituting their work by a thoughtful effort, they put their confidence in spontaneity; writing or smiling is all one to them: they try their luck, success will come or not. Sure of themselves, they reckon that the book or painting will be successful without effort; timid, they are discouraged by the least criticism; they do not know that error can open the road to progress, they take it for an irreparable catastrophe, like a malformation . . . [T]hey become irritated and discouraged when recognizing their errors rather than drawing valuable lesons from them . . . Instead of giving herself generously to the work she undertakes, the woman all too often considers it a simple ornament of her life; books and paintings are only an inessential intermediary allowing her to exhibit this essential reality publicly: her own person . . . The writer who is original, as long as he is not dead, is always scandalous; what is new disturbs and antagonizes; women are still astonished and flattered to be accepted into the world of thinking and art, a masculine world: the woman watches her manners; she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode; she thinks she has to excuse her literary pretensions by her modesty and good taste; she relies on the proven values of conformism; . . . she points out that she is a woman with some well-chosen affectations, simpering, and preciosities; so she will excel at producing "best sellers," but she cannot be counted on to blaze new trails . . . And to an even greater extent we can count on the fingers of one hand the women who have traversed the given in search of its secret dimension: Emily Brontë explored death, Virginia Woolf life, and Katherine Mansfield sometimes—not very often—daily contingence and suffering. No woman ever wrote The Trial, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Women do not challenge the human condition because they have barely begun to be able to assume it entirely. This explains why their works generally lack metaphysical resonance and black humor as well; they do not set the world apart, they do not question it, they do not denounce its contradictions: they take it seriously . . . Her "world of ideas" are not necessarily different from men's, because she will free herself by assimilating them; to know how singular she will remain and how important these singularities will continue to be, one would have to make some foolhardy predictions. What is beyond doubt is that until now women's possibilities have been stifled and lost to humanity, and in her and everyone's interest it is high time she be left to take her own chances.
Very much in line with my view on the issues of both race and gender, Janet Saltzman Chafetz describes the problem as she sees it in GENDER EQUITY:
Power permits men to devalue women's work and assign devalued work to women. The ultimate target of change is, therefore, the demise of male superiority in resource power. However, in saying this I am simply using other words to say that the ultimate target is the demise of gender stratification . . . While it is of fundamental importance that women earn rewards (resources) equal to men from their work, if they remain excluded from that minority of work roles that constitutes the elite, any improvement in their relative status is at best tenuous . . . Elites are vitally concerned with protecting—if not enhancing—their own positions . . . Equal access to elite roles constitutes the most difficult and intractable problem in achieving gender equality. Yet without it, all other improvements in women's relative status remain incomplete, fragile, and easily lost . . . In a fundamental way, my theoretical logic has led me to a conclusion that I find discomfiting . . . As long as men are more powerful than women, especially at the macro level, what women do and value will be relatively devalued according to general social definitions. Only in assuming nondomestic, and specifically elite, roles can women hope to contribute substantially to the formulation of general social values and policies. Yet in order to achieve such roles, more often than not women must sacrifice to a substantial degree those very values and behaviors that are often defined as distinctively feminine. To enter elite roles, they must resemble the elites already there . . . Equality usually entails assimilation, and traditional values rarely survive that process . . . Many radical feminists reject the entire notion of power and elites as part of a future society based on feminist values. They define such inequality as the product of male dominance (patriarchy) and, therefore, as a central target to be eliminated. I might wish to agree with them ideologically, but sociologically I see no chance that human societies will return to substantial social egalitarianism.
If we consider the examples of Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their life trajectories and outcomes, I’m not sure if it is justified or proper to feel entitled to the contentment of “I show up, therefore I am,” because examples of success and triumph seem to me born from continual struggle with industrious capacity for work through tribulation.
For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, 'tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.
—David Hume, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE
Even a feminist as radical as Germaine Greer, who favors viewing women not in relation to men but as independents on their own terms, predicates her position on differential quality, on hierarchy even within the woman’s realm, on merit. Her book, THE OBSTACLE RACE, uncovers women painters and their works and struggles in the history of art, whose representation has conventionally been prevailed by men. Greer describes how it is specifically material achievement that should be a woman’s aspiration, not indulging or celebrating the mere presence of women in formerly men’s spaces or the sole fact that she produces work, regardless of quality:
The intention [of this book] is to show women artists not as a string of over-rated individuals but as members of a group having much in common, tormented by the same conflicts of motivation and the same practical difficulties, the obstacles both external and surmountable, internal and insurmountable of the race for achievement . . . If we look fearlessly at the works of dead women and do not attempt to erect for them a double standard in the mistaken notion that such distortion of the truth will benefit women living and working today, we will understand by analogy a good deal about our own oppression and its pathology. We will see all the signs of self-censorship, hypocritical modesty, insecurity, girlishness, self-deception, hostility towards one's fellow strivers, emotional and sexual dependency upon men, timidity, poverty and ignorance. All these traits of the oppressed personality are only to be expected; the astonishing and gratifying thing is that so many women conquered all of these enemies within some of the time, most often when they were young, before marriage and childbirth or poverty and disillusionment took their toll. Their defeats can teach us about the nature of their struggle; their successes assure us that we too can do it . . . Most of us, despite our schools' insistence that anyone can draw, are not artists: it is to our advantage to become the women artists' audience, not in a foolishly partisan way so that anything a woman does is good in our eyes, but to offer the kind of constructive criticism and financial, intellectual and emotional support that men have given their artists in the past. The first prerequisite is knowledge, not only of women's work but of the men's work to which it relates, and not in vague generalisations but precise examples. The young Californian women who came to the 'Women Painters: 1550-1950' exhibition in Los Angeles were often disappointed to see how closely the women's work related to that of the men, whom they knew more about, and many of them lost interest right there. That should have been the starting point, for understanding how women artists sometimes led men, were plundered and overtaken, is an important part of recovering our history.
In stressing the significance of class, I am not saying that this variable should be the sole element in the discourse on societal inequality, but that it is the essential root; nor am I saying that individuals can be reduced to their class position and valued according to it, but that much of the attention given to race and gender should instead be redirected towards class. Richard Reeves remarks in DREAM HOARDERS of the common perception in the country which he spends the rest of the book shamelessly and truthfully dismantling:
Drawing class distinctions feels almost un-American. The nation's self-image is of a classless society, one in which every individual is of equal worth, regardless of his or her economic status.
Considering someone’s socioeconomic class, especially when class is the more substantive factor, should not be more taboo than that person’s race or gender, which in the norms of the present is rather commonplace. It is self-deception to carry on with our days negligent to class divides which presently continue to grow. To this end, diversity initiatives should encompass not just race and gender but also class background.
I wish to briefly add my view on diversity. For all the current climate promoting diversity and inclusion, I contend no one can speak for his or her or their group better than the person’s own self. What does representation in television and film entail? The essence is a script, a director, actors, and funding—and how is even a legitimate, authentic script going to come from someone without the cultural exposure, background, mindset, linguistic familiarity, experiential grounding for such representation to be valid, compelling, genuine beyond projected abstraction? Kabbit Chipper recently reflected in The New York Times on the sudden preoccupation with multiracial representation. But who are the people creating these representations, where is their money coming from, and what part of the market are they catering to? Chris Gilliard also recently jeered in The Atlantic on how the pressure for diversity has led to generative AI that retrospectively distorts history. I think the push for diversity is the right step, but it ought to be done properly, not through flagrant deviations from reality or absurd fantasies. As a matter of fact, I think this push for diversity is an intitial step towards competitive progress and better innovation, not as an end on its own insofar as it is expected to sustain itself. Better yet—training wheels off, political ideology tossed to the wind, empty sympathy dismissed, can a work predicated on diversity stand against its leading competitors? If so, we’re talking about a different game, and I’m listening.
I contend that, in the end, the ideal of diversity and inclusion must prove itself as a sustainable component in a productive society, that it is ultimately not propped up by artificial means but is rather a natural outgrowth of competitive abilities among all demographic groups. I argue for, after the lapse of diversity initiatives, which cannot last indefinitely, an organic growth of diversity not through top-down imposition but by natural occurrence, and the resultant scope of diversity reflects the distribution of abilities. I argue that for diversity to sustain itself, abilities themselves must manifest throughout demographic groups. Specifically, attributes such as female-led, Black-founded, Asian-represented, will not need promotion and elevation outside of the marketplace’s demand by consumers who choose what interests them, because such attributes will already be integrated into the flux of economic competition, of supply and demand—that demographic groups can represent themselves not through intrusive political pressure but because of integrative competitive ability. Perchance organique greens muncheth le rabbit, so organique kale in der liberal Salat, aye diversity the rub! Durst dream contumely, whips and scorn? Bee thee, or nay thee bee? Bee be bee? As o’er ‘tis undiscover’d co’ntry, ton’ght sle’p d’vers’tee—he hath a dream! Doth nein! In mute grey or in color? How, be one race another? Calamity of long life, no traveller returns. Sling an arrow unto poor bee, sweet is the honey. How can one bee but be organique, representation in the high tree?
For all artists the problem is one of finding one's own authenticity, of speaking in a language or imagery that is essentially one's own, but if one's self-image is dictated by one's relation to others and all one's activities are other-directed, it is simply not possible to find one's own voice . . . Feminism cannot supply the answer for an artist, for her truth cannot be political. She cannot abandon the rhetoric of one group for the rhetoric of another, or substitute acceptability to one group for acceptability to another . . . The point is, after all, not to question irritably whether women artists are any good in order to reject them if we find that they are not as good as another group, but to interest ourselves in women artists, for their dilemma is our own. Every painting by anyone is evidence of a struggle, and not all such struggles are conclusively won.
—Germaine Greer, THE OBSTACLE RACE
I make the following comments as a guiding principle on future direction because it is tempting to be blinded by the prevailing mood of the time and the tendency to accentuate demographic divisions. Certainly, discrimination exists and measures should be taken to remediate the ensuing inequalities, but we should not, in our discontent, protests, resentment, reactionary attitudes, in our polarized society informed daily by divisive media, lose sight of what the end goal resembles. So long as one sees race or gender as a critical factor in societal relations, it will remain a preconceived projection onto situations even where such a factor is not relevant, as with the whole line of other demographic attributes as age, religion, even class. What I am saying is not that prejudice does not exist, but the direction to which the public should aspire is not to press social divisions as though they are principal elements in themselves which commence with the first word and continue until the last, to persist into perpetuity, but to reach a situation where it is no longer necessary to remain cognizant of these traits. In an ideal society of equals consisting of people from all ages, religions, genders, races, from all walks of life, it is difficult to imagine situations completely free of demographic difference, and emphasizing those very fault lines may not only be counterproductive but also constitute precisely the reason for actual division through a perception of separation. Where one sees race, so every racial divide slides into racism; so too with gender and the rest.
We shall only solve our problems if we see them as human problems arising out of a special situation; and we shall not solve them if we see them as African problems, generated by our being somehow unlike others.
—Kwame Anthony Appiah, IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE: AFRICA IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURES
Much work remains to be done to reach racial and gender equality. However, in an ideal and equal society, the fact of becoming a woman is a difference, but not one that warrants undue, raucous weight. And, in such an ideal society, the propositions of gender theory having prevailed, the dominant social norm has embraced the idea that gender is a performative, fluid construct, where any gender can be adopted with impunity and inconsequence. In this society, what, then, is the point of calling attention to anyone’s demographic attributes? Indeed, the aspirational end should not be a public rallying cry of: “I am a woman in this place, and I am proud,” but rather in the manner of bemusement, of responding to a question that is beside the point, of minor annoyance at having to bother with an inquirer who just walked into the room and has no idea what has happened: “I am a woman in this place, but it doesn’t matter.”
Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "Admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!"
—Keats, LETTER TO J.H. REYNOLDS
Desire Pyramid:
-There no inherent value in class, but only as a relative
-Each segment aspires to the one above while rebuffing the one below
_____________: boredom
/\
/up\
/____\
^ ||
| ==
_______
/ \
/ up-mid \
/___________\
^ ||
| ==
_______________
/ \
/ mid-middle \
/___________________\
^ ||
| ==
_______________________
/ \
/ lower-middle \
/ \
/_____________________________\
^ ||
| ==
__________________________________
/ \
/ working \
/ \
/________________________________________\
The strife and journey towards wealth, education, culture, travailing over race, gender, religion, class, national borders, age, generations, may just be more things to occupy our time, and after reaching the goal through all the complaint and struggle, all the protests, contention, resistance, all the backlash and reinstatement, all the new norms and novelty, all the flickering triumph and reassurance, one may, in the aftermath of the victory, immersed again in the commotion of daily life, the dust having settled, realize that the reward might not be as spectacular as one had imagined.
First Field
The writer was lounging in a coffee shop one afternoon nursing his thoughts to tune of his whims when on the television, news broke of O.J. Simpson’s death, and out came a whole pouring of footage of the highly publicized events of his life, a retrospective of his football career, the car chase, court trial, the robbery, and commentary over this montage. The writer reflected to himself: for all the attention and media coverage of this man’s incidents and episodes, he’s dead now, and what will all these outrages have mattered in the end? This observation is not limited to this person, but to everyone: what lives on after people perish, and how many will remember that person? And then decades later, after even these people pass on, how many of those remaining still remember or even come to know of it at all? Taking this idea further: of the records of human activity over history, of all the books in the libraries of the world, the whole of lives, eras, civilizations, how many read them? Who knows of them? What passes on?
A hundred years hence
Who it is
With such curiosity
Reads my poems
—Rabindranath Tagore (1896)
Books, authors, celebrities, names—what lives on? A generation or two later, after the tide of their fashion and renown, what remains? Surely this must be why ancient scholarship, texts, and writers are lost, and even the insights from just two generations prior are prone to collect dust: what does it matter that they physically reside somewhere if they are not read and comprehended? Do they exist if no one knows?
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some dormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew around the happy orchard.
—Charles Lamb, OXFORD IN THE VACATION
Though they may be stored on a library shelf, on an internet page, in the archives of a magazine or broadcasting network, how many these records are, so vast and unyielding, impossible to consume even any meaningful portion, so many that they, sitting in their timeless chambers, may as well not exist, unknown and fading, unless they also live in someone’s mind. It may be that we do not accumulate upon an ever growing pile of expertise in a continual forward movement of progress, because the pile sits on drain grates over a void, and only that which is most recent and seemingly relevant to the present eyes survives. Is there a carrying capacity of known knowledge?
Walking, you're just like me,
Your eyes are on the ground.
I used to lower mine, you see.
Stop passer-by, at this mound!
When you've picked a cluster
Of buttercups, poppies, a few —
Read, I was named Marina,
And how old I was, too.
Don't think, this is — a grave,
That I'll appear — too scary!...
I myself when I shouldn't have,
Loved to laugh much too loudly!
And the blood rushed to my face,
And my hair was curly...
Passer-by, I held your place!
Passer-by, stop: and read me!
Break a bramble, and after
Pluck from it a berry,
No strawberry's larger, sweeter
Than one from a cemetery.
But don't stand there gloomy,
Your head on your chest!
Think about me lightly,
Think of me, and forget.
Ah, how the sun shines on you!
Golden dust all round...
— Don't let it upset you,
My voice from underground.
—Marina Tsvetaeva (1913)
Let us consider a field populated by people, with all the trappings of objects, society, nature. We make two observations:
It is impossible to know everyone
It is impossible to read everything
In this field, other individuals, like us, are constained by time, energy, attentional bandwidth, bound by locale, and within these same parameters they, too, are confronted with the same problem: how to operate within this field?
Fortunately, an individual is not presented with the overwhelming magnitude of the task and the infinitude of options but is confined by pressures: social and familial ties, linguistic restrictions, societal expectations, educational and work demands, and so the scope of the problem diminishes so drastically as to fit into an individually manageable scale. Still, within these confines, there remains free time and choice. How do individuals spend these limited resources? We assume that everyone operates according to some priority of values and self-interest. Some prefer hedonism, some piety, some duty, some freedom, some adventure and passion, some community, some are inclined to the outdoors, some to intellectual pursuit, some to religion, some to wealth, some to simply enjoying the moment. Each, then, operates according to what best serves the individuals’s interests. But the field is noisy and full of others who seek to further their own gains through deception. How, then, does an individual determine where to go, who to believe, what to consume? Every direction is vast beyond any individual’s comprehension, and whichever one chooses, one can frolic on the surface and at best can only make scratchings at depth.
I know my foolishness, a mere ant trying to shake a tree;
Such is the tyro's urge, ever to criticize.
With old age, leaving behind a thousand poems—
By whom will their strengths and weaknesses by judged?
—Yuan Haowen, tr. John Timothy Wixted
Who to know, what to know, what to consume are not entirely up to an individual’s exploration and choice, for time, energy, finances, and attention are precious and limited resources, and out of convenience an individual must depend on social information: hearsay, reviews both professional and amateur, accolades and awards, notoriety, reputable references from trusted sources. Everyone in the field subject to these pressures, we may draw an inkling of an individual’s path through the field, haphazard, swaying, unfocused. If we model individual human trajectories based not primarily on reason, optimization, logic, but on randomness, environmental factors, coincidental encounters, happenstance, stumbling, blundering, grasping in the dark forest where reason is only the thin beam of the wavering flashlight shining ahead, we may understand more accurately a person’s behavior, knowledge, experiences over the course of a lifetime, not through lofty, honorable principles and ideals but a grounding in the material world of circumstances, availability, demands, options, in purview of the community’s knowledge, the circumstances of birth. Yet each individual, out of self-protection and self-interest, projects a persona of resolve and determination so that in the absence of any real clarity, one bluffs, and others perceive the posturing as certitude and conviction.
Explanations of one's soul, such as: Yesterday I was so, and for this reason; today I am so, and for this reason. It is not true, not for this reason and not for that reason, and therefore not so and so. To put up with oneself calmly, without being precipitate, to live as one must, not to chase one's tail like a dog.
—Kafka, DIARIES 1910-1913, tr. Joseph Kresh
How easy it is to throw about numbers like a population of 100,000 when we can personally know hardly more than a few to any depth or even ourselves, and is it not true also that people change with time? How many people can one know, how many places can one see, how many books can one read?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
[. . .]
In leaves no step has trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
—Robert Frost, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
No sooner do we get to know someone, experience a few things, than some years have passed, and we are no longer the youths we once were, full of vibrance and brimming with life, eager to venture forth—and in our former place are new faces, fresher energy, another generation.
Down on the ancient wharf, the sand, I sit, with a new-comer chatting:
He shipp'd as green-hand boy, and sail'd away, (took some sudden, vehement notion;)
Since, twenty years and more have circled round and round,
While he the globe was circling round and round,—and now returns:
How changed the place—all the old land-marks gone—the parents dead
—Walt Whitman, TWENTY YEARS, LEAVES OF GRASS
And no sooner do we finish a book or a magazine article than many others have sprouted up, and in addition to the enormous trove of all that has already been written are the many more recent publications, endlessly growing.
When I was sick, it didn't bother me so much.
Now that I'm better, I'm starting to feel old.
But who can be strong and healthy forever?
Suddenly, old age will come.
—Yang Wanli, I RECOVER FROM AN ILLNESS ONLY TO FEEL OLD AGE COMING ON, tr. Jonathan Chaves
What we fill our time with may be more prone to the whims of the moment, an arbitrariness within an unknown space, overrun more by uncertainties and vagaries than is suggested by any feigned conviction. If this is true, then the garlands, praise, firm resolves, definitive reasons given for our prior actions, are mere rationalizations springing out of vanity and which serve our own interests. And so after the field’s many endeavors and self-deception, we come back to our original position: we are just visitors on earth, and we don’t know as much as we think we do.
Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature . . . This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.
—Blaise Pascal, PENSÉES
At last true words surge up from deep within our breast,
The mask is snatched away, reality is left.
—Lucretius
You don't have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don't have to look out the window to see the way of heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.
—#47, TAO TE CHING, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin
Why aim so stoutly at so many things
In our short life?
—Horace
Confinement: Kant, and Desire: Schopenhauer
We saw in the meritocracy section how advantage passes down over generations. It is worth asking: why does the upper middle class continue to hoard privilege?
What do established elites wish to attain in the restless struggle and merciless meritocratic competition? We can readily resort to answers based on evolutionary instincts, although this competition hardly poses any threat to survival, or predicated upon the risk of elites fearing their children will lose their esteemed position, but these would be only cursory responses that do not address the fundamental issue. Instead of these preliminary questions, we must inquire deeper and seek the underlying framework on which these questions, among many others relating to incentives and purpose—what motivates people? What causes the striving and movements of animals? The question: what is the nature of desire?
The writer bids the reader have patience, for we must entertain two philosophers because—who knew?—they remain relevant. This section delves into some of their ideas and builds up to the question we have posed. Kant writes in CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, among its ensuing concepts, the dense philosophical treatment of an idea, of which the following example is a consequence. A snake looking at a red apple doesn’t see what we understand to be red. We can, with our technology, map a snake’s visual system onto ours so we can see what the snake does, but how many visual systems are out there we don’t about? As we keep expanding our technology to encompass them, how do we know we’ve covered them all? And for colors, our retinal composition is limited to what lay between violet and red. But the red apple: that it is red, tastes sweet, is round, indeed every one of its attributes we perceive, must come through the senses peculiar to our bodies. Because of this constraint by limited senses, the red apple is a snippet, just one side out of many, of what the red apple actually is in its totality, which we cannot perceive. This is one form of limitation on the possibilities of our knowledge. Yet Kant’s reasoning goes one step further: our mental faculties, too, are limited. Our capacity for understanding operates within the domains of space, time, and causality, confined to spatiotemporal observation and chronological causation. For instance, we cannot jump between these three: we cannot reason in time as we do in space. Spatially, we can reason with the whole of a line drawn on paper, but we cannot reason with the totality of time as though we can comprehend at once all movements that happen over time; if we could, it would be in our power to turn and rotate that temporal line, skip back and forth at will, as well as understand how it interacts with what else may lay on the paper. But we don’t; our mental modes are bound by our particular renditions of space, of time, of causality. Just as a snake sees thermal heat and perceives this as the whole world, so the red apple is our image, our construction, as much as that red apple has attributes beyond our perception. More generally, Kant merged the two philosophical strains of his time, rationalism and empiricism, by claiming that our understanding of the world must consist of both our inborn mental intuitions and of our experiences of external objects, but in this merging Kant showed also that both fronts, our internal reasoning capacity and our perception of the external world, reside in limitation, providing a systematic bound on what we can possibly know.
Kant is not saying that things do not exist and our experiences are imaginary and solely in our minds—rather, things external to us very much do exist, but our perceptions of them are limited by our confined sensing and mental modes. If we plucked an apple from a tree, we perceive the apple as having been separated from the tree and other apples, but is that separation of space real, or is it perceived to be so by our limited faculties because we do not see that in two additional dimensions, the apple and the tree, like all things, are in fact physically still connected? We, as perceiving subjects in the world, cannot understand the world independently of our perception to it—we are complicit in creating the space, time, and causality in our understanding of the world. Kant is saying it is nonsense, if we remove ourselves from the scenery, to assume that the world as we know it will remain fixed as we humans have perceived it, because this construct is our representation of the world which we ourselves, with our particular sensory inlets and our particular mental apparatus, bring to the table—this image is our life-world, and if we disappear, so does this representation.
dat red apple isn’t red?
dis art nonsense!
me mine eyes deceiveth?
In order for order, we think invariant time,
invariant space and of all in earthly terms
as walls, say, ceilings and level floors,
as beginning somewhere, ending somewhere else.
But, even to say no walls, no floors, no ends,
even as negatives, these aren't the words
for an all that resists whatever order we make.
—William Bronk, RESISTANCE, METAPHOR OF TREES AND LAST POEMS
The Human Condition [a painting] was the solution to the problem of the window. I placed in front of a window, seen from inside a room, a painting representing exactly that part of the landscape hidden from view by the painting. Therefore, the tree represented in the painting hid from view the real tree situated behind it, outside the room. The tree existed for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in his mind, as both inside the room in the painting, and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves. In the same way, we sometimes situate in the past a thing which is happening in the present. Time and space thus lose that unrefined meaning which is the only one daily experience takes into account.
—René Magritte, LA LIGNE DE VIE
A crayfish does not represent one, but two or three entities; his consciousness is not centralised in our sense. Anyone who wishes to penetrate the soul of the fox must succeed in experiencing the powers of scent as his central sense and in relating all impressions to this sense, as, in the case of men, they are related to his sense of sight. In the case of a bird the problem is different again, and so on and so forth. This probably explains why most truly great minds have preferred 'nature' to human society. The latter limits, the former liberates and helps us beyond the confines of humanity. And in so doing it raises our consciousness of the true root of things. For at the root all creation is one, and from the root emanate all the forces of evolution.
—Hermann Keyserling, THE TRAVEL DIARY OF A PHILOSOPHER
According to Rousseau, other people manifest their own incapacity to see in two primary ways that he assumes of any observer or reader. Either they look through others' eyes, relying merely on public opinion, or they see only themselves in someone else, and in doing so confuse their projections of themselves for the other person . . . In the Neuchâtel manuscript of Les Confessions, Rousseau comments at length upon the phenomena: "I have often noticed that, even among those who pride themselves the most on knowing men, each one scarcely knows but himself, if it is true even that someone might know himself; because how does one really determine a being by the relationships that alone are in himself, and without comparing him with anything?" . . . Rousseau wants to stress the lie involved in speaking about someone else . . . Other men only begin to know themselves when they realize how difficult a task self-knowledge is.
—John C. O’Neal, ROUSSEAU’S NARRATIVE STRATEGIES
We are now ready to encounter Schopenhauer. He has a reputation for pessimism, so I don’t want to linger on him for long, but his insights on desire, in my view, stands on firm ground and motivates some of the later ideas in this post. I want to divide this discussion of his ideas into two sections: his metaphysics (which I will explain briefly, though I’m not so sure on how valid it is) and the psychological consequences (which are very real and poignant; this is the point of this topic). First, metaphysics: Schopenhauer writes in THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, in the Payne translation:
We have learnt from the great Kant that time, space, and causality are present in our consciousness according to their whole conformity to rule and the possibility of all their forms, quite independently of the objects that appear in them and form their content . . . Whatever the thing-in-itself may be, Kant rightly concluded that time, space, causality . . . could not be its properties, but could come to it only after, and in so far as, it had become representation, in other words, belonged only to its phenomenon or appearance, not to it itself . . . The form is originally foreign to it, . . ., can therefore never be completely fathomed. Therefore, although all mathematics give us exhaustive knowledge of that which in phenomena is quantity, position, number, in short, spatial and temporal relation; although etiology tells us completely about the regular conditions under which phenomena, with all their determinations, appear in time and space, yet, in spite of all this, teaches us nothing more than why in each case every definite phenomenon must appear just at this time here and just at this place now, we can never with their assistance penetrate into the inner nature of things.
Schopenhauer conceives of the world as a duality: on the one hand is a single, undifferentiated unity of will, the unknowable thing-in-itself, which we cannot possibly perceive because it does not reside in space or time, and on the other is our representation of this will, which is all the phenomena in this world we do perceive. But further: space and time in the phenomenal world fragment the will into pluralities—and here begins the psychological section—all forces and living creatures are instances of the will, everything striving and struggling in its will to live, competing against one another, failing to recognize everything and everyone else is also oneself, all part of the will. Each individual desires and fights for its survival and growth, yet the objects one desires—satisfaction, happiness, gratification—dissipate soon after one attains them, and they never last and are therefore only illusory. More precisely, this passage summarizes Schopenhauer’s psychological ideas:
We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.
Expanding further, Schopenhauer writes in a manner faithful to his popular image:
[T]he satisfaction or the pleasing can never be more than the deliverance from a pain, from a want . . . It is, however, hard to attain or achieve anything; difficulties and troubles without end are opposed to every purpose, and at every step hindrances accumulate. But when finally everything is overcome and attained, nothing can ever be gained but deliverance from some sorrow or desire, so that we find ourselves in just the same position as we occupied before this sorrow or desire appeared . . . The satisfaction and the pleasure we can know only indirectly through the remembrance of the preceding suffering and want, which cease with their appearance. Hence it arises that we are not properly conscious of the blessings and advantages we actually possess, nor do we prize them; but we think of them merely as a matter of course, for they gratify us only negatively by restraining suffering . . . That all happiness is only of a negative, not a positive, nature, that just on this account it cannot furnish lasting satisfaction and gratification, but merely delivers us from some pain or want which must be followed either by a new pain, or by languor, empty longing, and ennui—this finds support in art, that true mirror of the world and life . . . Every epic and dramatic poem can represent only a struggle, an effort, a fight for happiness, but never enduring and complete happiness itself. It conducts its heroes through a thousand difficulties and dangers to the goal, yet, as soon as this is reached, it hastens to let the curtain fall; for then there remains nothing for it to do but show that the glittering goal in which the hero expected to find happiness had only disappointed him, and that after its attainment he was no better off than before.
longing and hunger for
images. Boredom, once
grasped, sand droppings—
just things to get out of the way
want for something else
All postponement of something they hope for seems long to them. Yet the time which they enjoy is short and swift, and it is made much shorter by their own fault; for they flee from one pleasure to another and cannot remain fixed in one desire.
—Seneca, ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE, tr. John W. Basore
To the point of our discussion on desire: Schopenhauer offers a concrete example of the will’s representation in the phenomenal world as the will-to-live:
[C]onsider that indefatigable worker the mole; to dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it; it has its embryo eyes merely to avoid the light. It alone is a true animal nocturnum, not cats, owls and bats which see by night. What does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure? Nourishment and procreation, that is, only the means for continuing and beginning again in the new individual the same melancholy course. In such examples it becomes clear that the cares and troubles of life are out of all proportion to the yield or profit from it . . . The variety and multiplicity of the organizations, the ingenuity of the means by which each is adapted to its element and to its prey, here contrast clearly with the absence of any lasting final aim. Instead of this, we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium [war of all against all], everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need, and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on in saecula saeculorum [forever and ever], or until once again the crust of the planet breaks . . . Thus, what are a short postponement of death, a small alleviation of need and want, a deferment of pain, a momentary satisfaction of desire, with the frequent and certain victory of death over them all? Taken as actual causes of movement of the human race, what could such advantages achieve? This human race is innumerable through its being constantly renewed; it is incessantly astir, pushes, presses, worries, struggles, and performs the whole tragi-comedy of world-history . . . [E]veryone guards and protects his life like a precious pledge entrusted to him under a heavy responsibility, under infinite care and daily necessity; and under these life is just tolerable. Naturally, he does not see the why and the wherefore, the reward for this, but has accepted the value of that pledge in good faith and on trust without looking into it . . . This is the will-to-live manifesting itself as an untiring mechanism, as an irrational impulse, which does not have its sufficient ground or reason in the external world.
What is Schopenhauer’s solution to this consuming desire? For all the pessimism implied in the phrase “denial of the will-to-live”, Schopenhauer’s intention in doing so was commendable: to return to unity, to renounce individual striving, that through self-denial, one negates one’s egotism:
Man attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, true composure, and complete will-lessness . . . We would like to deprive desires of their sting, close the entry to all suffering, purify and sanctify ourselves by complete and final resignation . . . [T]he man who sees through the principium individuationis [individuation principle, through which one strives against others towards a happiness that once attained will prove to be ephemeral and illusory], and recognizes the true nature of things-in-themselves, and thus the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself in all places simultaneously, and withdraws . . . The phenomenon by which this becomes manifest is the transition from virtue to asceticism.
Now that we’ve indulged in some Schopenhauer, I wish to qualify his claims. Schopenhauer says no happiness lasts; this is true, but it doesn’t take much work to acquire small moments of happiness which suffice to get through the days. In reality, most people aren’t plagued by the endless struggle and fruitless labor Schopenhauer suggested but are rather content. This observation, though, is rather on point and worth emphasizing, to disabuse ourselves of some attainable state of permanent peace and rest: happiness from any single attainment does not endure and requires continual replenishment by further appetite and more work: this is mankind’s relation to happiness. Yet this serial struggle doesn’t present so immense a problem unless one pursues the extremes of happiness to the point of avarice, gluttony, excess. In most folks, this is not the case. Yet how should one respond to these confinements of our condition? My stance is that if there is any truth in Schopenhauer, it ought to be confronted and answered, both theoretically and practically. From one vantage, the Nietzschean: the positive affirmation of life. Yet considering the variety of philosophical perspectives and broad range of human circumstances, it is not my place to issue some unilateral decree of piety and correctness. However, I doubt any stance on non-desire, self-denial, and renunciation will acquire any substantial traction among any country’s populace. Schopenhauer himself was a hypocrite and didn’t conform to his own philosophy; having been born into wealth and then inheriting that wealth when he was young, Schopenhauer never quite did renounce life so much as avail himself to worldly pleasures. The harsh asceticism he proposes, then, loses practical credibility. As a consequence, we must assume that the due course of action is to admit to desire, and that out of that desire, people will endeavor and labor, a factor contributing to social inequality. This is our view on human desire: people should be free to endeavor and labor towards their aspired goals, the objects of their desire, and on the whole this is not harmful; yet, as I discuss later in the social capitalism section, this same motivation at extreme concentrations of wealth depraves society into vanity, privation, and endlessly unsatisfied appetites.
Savage man and civilized man differ so much at the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first sighs for nothing but repose and liberty; he desires only to live, and to be exempt from labor . . . Civilized man, on the other hand, is always in motion, perpetually sweating and toiling, and racking his brains to find out occupations still more laborious: he continues a drudge to his last minute; nay, he courts death to be able to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality.
—Rousseau, DISCOURSE ON INEQUALITY
Import of Work
We emphasize in this section the crucial significance of working. That’s right—working itself confers benefits. Charles Duhigg, in a 2019 article in The New York Times Magazine, writes on the importance of work:
Even for Americans who live frighteningly close to the bone . . . a job is usually more than just a means to a paycheck. It's a source of purpose and meaning, a place in the world.
He cites a study on janitors about why some enjoyed their jobs much more than others—they placed more meaning in their work, seeing it as impactful and helpful, sometimes even putting in an effort beyond their job’s duties. Duhigg provides this example to highlight the significance of meaningfulness for job satisfaction, but Duhigg’s article concerns the same issue as Brueggemann’s book: on how the wealthy and successful nevertheless often feel miserable about their jobs. Duhigg writes of a former classmate who became an investor:
He earned about $1.2 million a year and hated going to the office. "I feel like I'm wasting my life," he told me. "When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless."
Clay Cockrell, a therapist to ultra-high net worth individuals, shares in The Guardian the trouble with his clients’ absence of purpose, their sense of a lack of impact, even irrelevance:
Why bother going to work when the business you have built or inherited runs itself without you now? If all your necessities and much more were covered for the rest of your life – you might struggle with a lack of meaning and ambition too. My clients are often bored with life and too many times this leads to them chasing the next high – chemically or otherwise – to fill that void.
What they lack is meaningful work. Thoreau writes in his JOURNAL:
To be a man is to do a man's work; always our resource is to endeavor. We may well say, Success to our endeavors. Effort is the prerogative of virtue. The true laborer is recompensed by his labor, not by his employer. Industry is its own wages. Let us not suffer our hands to lose one jot of their handiness by looking behind to a mean recompense, knowing that our true endeavor cannot be thwarted, nor we be cheated of our earnings unless by not earning them.
David Hume observes in his essay, OF REFINEMENT IN THE ARTS:
Indolence or repose, indeed, seems not of itself to contribute much to our enjoyment; but, like sleep, is requisite as an indulgence to the weakness of human nature, which cannot support an uninterrupted course of business or pleasure. In times when industry and the arts flourish, men are kept in perpetual occupation, and enjoy, as their reward, the occupation itself, as well as those pleasures which are the fruit of their labour. The mind acquires new vigour; enlarges its powers and faculties; and by an assiduity in honesty industry, both satisfies its natural appetites, and prevents the growth of unnatural ones, which commonly spring up, when nourished by ease and idleness . . . When sloth reigns, a mean uncultivated way of life prevails amongst individuals, without society, without enjoyment.
Further back: Aristotle, too, discouraged passivity, believing in the vigor of work and activity. Aristotle writes in NICOMACHEAN ETHICS:
[W]e must rather class happiness as an activity . . . Happiness, therefore, does not lie in amusement; it would, indeed, be strange if the end were amusement, and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself . . . The happy life is thought to be virtuous; now a virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. And we say that serious things are better than laughable things and those connected with amusement . . . That this activity is contemplative we have already said.
In Aristotle’s case, man’s ideal activity is intellectual. Aristotle reasoned that each creature has its strengths and ability and, from these, their proper and suitable pleasures; for man, it is reason and contemplation:
If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us . . . [F]or man, therefore the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.
But mindful of the reader’s concerns about the practical matter of being human, embodied in a physical form needing material sustenance, Aristotle writes:
[B]eing a man, one will also need external prospertiy; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention. Still, we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things, merely because he cannot be supremely happy without external goods; for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we can do noble acts without ruling earth and sea.
So convinced of this divine aspiration, Aristotle proclaims: “[F]or the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue will be happy.” But this extreme of pursuit runs up against the troubles observed by Rousseau as excessive refinement and indulgent surfaces concealing vanity and self-interest. Although Aristotle advocated moderation in all pursuits and pleasures, he was uninhibited when it came to endorsing the contemplative life, the thinking philospher—and we see that, brought to an extreme, this activity is not as Aristotle described, as virtuous pursuit and self-sufficient happiness, but as endless, destructive striving: the Schopenhauerian. An updated, realistic Aristotelian happiness may rather be: simple living, simple thinking—modesty in all things, even contemplation.
If from all this [series of fruitless desires], which with ordinary degrees of willing is felt only in a smaller measure, and produces only the ordinary degree of dejection, there necessarily arise an excessive inner torment, an eternal unrest, an incurable pain in the case of a person who is the phenomenon of the will reaching to extreme wickedness.
—Schopenhauer, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, tr. E. F. J. Payne
Moderation in all endeavors may well be a noble aspiration, but we are concerned less with facades and public preaching, less with virtue signaling and conformist principles, less with lofty words that we promote but do not ourselves enact, less with inhibitions and guilt and hypocrisy, and ask directly: what do we want out of life? How do we reconcile moderation with our corrupt impulses, our mortal preoccupations, our base self-interest? One desires and wishes, one longs and searches, one travails and attains, yet we find no contentment or satisfaction, all our effort and struggle gone in vain, the grass on the other side always greener. How should we resolve this dilemma, then? I ask: what if this is not a binary choice between wanting and its negation? Let us suggest an alternative approach: instead of choosing one to the exclusion of the other, what if we assert that we desire everything? What if we acknowledge that we can here engage in frenzy and energy and there partake in peace and serenity? What if we accept our fickle human nature and embrace our myriad cravings? What if we desire to be everywhere at the same time? The food, the people, the journey, the intellectual sublime, the musical variations, the cathartic sways, the scorching fire and excitement, the roaring seas on the high tide, and then desert, camel, the still sand; people come and go as do we, but for a time a wanderer can blend in with the multi-generational locals of a remote town, to return to the bustling crowds of sensory multitudes, culture, coincidence. What if fulfillment lies not in stillness with any one choice but in a continual movement through all choices?
A wanderer,
let that be my name—
the first winter rain
—Matsuo Bashō, KNAPSACK NOTEBOOK, tr. Sam Hamill
I doubt sometimes whether
a quiet & unagitated life
would have suited me—yet I
sometimes long for it
—Byron
Second Field
Another view of the field. In the field, everyone both perceives and signals. Each operation has two modes. Let us suppose each group* has two people.
*A group is a category of people by a measure of similarity: race, gender, geography, religion, age, interests, traits, abilities. Any grouping may be further subdivided into subgroups based on the remaining measures, and the subgroups as well in turn. However, we prefer no particular order of group-subgroup nesting, and so we may select different group arrangements. Each grouping order realigns people into separate partitions, and no person remains in a fixed position. In this example, for simplicity, we use only a single level of grouping.
Perceiving: looking out of one's window
(□) (□)
/|\ /|\
/ \ / \
|_____________|
/\
(□) | (□)
A /|\ -------------/ ------> /|\
/ \ group / / \
/
(□) -----------------/ (□)
B /|\ --------------------------> /|\
/ \ individual / \
-group is easy and convenient and is the default mode
-individual costs more time and attention; this mode is limited because no one
can get to know everyone, much less adequately
-these two modes are not mutually exclusive; everyone perceives in both modes
towards different people, even towards the same person (e.g. individual
perception as confirming or defying the group perception)
-in the diagram, only out-arrows from A and B are shown but in the field,
out-arrows are present between all to all; A and B are themselves perceived by
others, too. Because this diagram is limited, consisting in only three groups,
each with two people, it is possible to draw out-arrows between every pair,
but in the field of life, out-arrows exist only between people who come into a
shared physical vicinity or through some medium (book, painting, video, audio
recording), in both the present and the past, between people with enduring
relations and people who come and go
Signaling: projecting one's window to one's conception of others' windows
(□) (□)
/|\ /|\
/ \ / \
|_____________|
solidarity
__ / | \
(□) | / | \
/|\ |---> \/ \/ \/
/ \ |--->
__|
separation
__
(□) |
/|\ |--->
/ \ |--->
__|
-here, a pertinent grouping is political ideology
We make a few observations about perceiving and signaling:
-perceiving and signaling are both functions of information transmission, of
communication, subject to the lossy nature of communication and the
misdirection by self-interested parties, both benign and malicious
-the transmitted image constitutes a separate layer from the actual person.
Neither image perceived nor impression signaled needs to match the actual
-perceiving and signaling are not innocent from one's self-interest. Perception
is limited by time and attention, and tends to be directed towards enhancing
one's self-image or serving one's desires. Signaling, likewise, projects an
inflated, self-flattering impression
-what someone's window perceives of another is a combination of the other's
signaling and actual, whose proportions depend on the type of interaction. The
more extended, varied, and numerous the interactions, the more opportunities
for one's window to perceive the actual. In the absence of any meaningful
interaction, what one perceives of the other is not the actual but is the
obstructing painting made of colors and forms derived solely from the
perceiver's own room: prior experiences, general knowledge, prejudice,
self-interest; what one sees are the appearances one obtains from limited
experience and inadequate knowledge
-not shown is another arrow: the self-reflexive. In this case, one perceives
one's own signaling, which is an impression that may be different from one's
outward signaling. The diagrams show perceiving and signaling as they relate
to grouping, but the functions apply in the general scenario of relations
between people
-if relations in the field are conducted along these channels, there arise
further questions: how much can one know of others? how much can one know of
oneself?
Perceiving:
The experiment that led to writing Black Like Me was done at the very end of 1959, before the first "freedom rides" or any other manifestation of national concern about racial justice . . . Most white Americans denied any taint of racism and really believed that in this land we judged every man by his qualities as a human individual . . . I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics . . . They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us . . . Always, in every encounter even with "good whites," we had the feeling that the white person was not talking with us but with his image of us.
—John Howard Griffin, epilogue to BLACK LIKE ME
I propose that the imagination of "red state" unanimity, and the connection of its presumed, conservative politics to the traditional Heartland ideal, taken up by popular media as the repository of all that is "really real"—if "taste"-challenged—within U.S. culture, can have impact in the real social world. A Kellog Foundation study of "perceptions of rural America" conducted in 2002, found that the three most common images of rural America were: farms and crops, pastures, and animals, even though today less than a quarter of all rural counties—primarily clustered in the red state region—depend on farming for their primary source of income and less than two percent of all rural residents earn their primary living from farming . . . I urge further critical examination of the apparent ease with which both "official" culture and popular discourse have embraced a shorthand narrative about national identity that insistently asks us to accept "natural and universal" realities that are, in fact, contentious, "selected, partial, and incomplete."
—Victoria Johnson, HEARTLAND TV
There is no doubt that the reality which we experience normally is only a qualified section of the whole realm of reality, whose character is conditioned by our psycho-physical organism (this is the real significance of the teaching of Kant: 'My world is representation'). And this certainty allows us to draw a further conclusion, namely, that, if we should succeed in acquiring a different organisation, then the merely human barriers and forms would lose their validity.
—Hermann Keyserling, THE TRAVEL DIARY OF A PHILOSOPHER
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
—Wallace Stevens, TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON, HARMONIUM
Signaling:
[E]ach participant [of public life] is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing his wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to pay lip service . . . [I]f a baseball umpire is to give the impression that he is sure of his judgment, he must forgo the moment of thought which might make him sure of his judgment; he must give an instantaneous decision so that the audience will be sure that he is sure of his judgment . . . [I]f a secretary is to tell a visitor tactfully that the man he wishes to see is out, it will be wise for the visitor to step back from the interoffice telephone so that he cannot hear what the secretary is being told by the man who is presumably not there to tell her [Why not also a him? How can anyone doubt the writer doesn't support feminists?] . . . Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task . . . Shared staging problems; concern for the way things appear; warranted and unwarranted feelings of shame; ambivalence about oneself and one's audience: these are some of the dramaturgic elements of the human situtation.
—Erving Goffman, THE PRESENTATION OF THE SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE
The word persona is really a very appropriate expression for it, since it originally meant the mask worn by an actor, signifying the role he played . . . But, as its name shows, it is only a mask for the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, and tries to make others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply playing a part . . . Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, represents an office, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a product of compromise, in making which others often have a greater share than he.
—Carl Jung, TWO ESSAYS ON ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Some masks come off; some don't.
—THE FACE OF ANOTHER, dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
How delightful it would be for those who live among us if our external appearance were always a true mirror of our hearts, if good manners were also virtue, if the maxims we spout were truly the rules of our conduct, if true philosophy were inseparable from the title of a philospher! But so many good qualities seldom go together, and virtue rarely walks amidst such pomp and state . . . Today, as more subtle study and more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to a system, there prevails in our manners a loathsome and deceptive conformity: all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold. Incessantly politeness makes demands, decorum issues orders. Incessantly we obey rituals, never our own intuition. We no longer dare to appear as we really are, and under this perpetual restraint, people who form the herd known as society, finding themselves in these same circumstances, will all behave in exactly the same ways.
—Rousseau, DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND ARTS
A person standing in an occupied elevator will examine the floor signal lights as if this activity were required in order to ensure getting off at the right floor . . . Lifting a heavy object which might expose him in naked effort, a man enacts utter strain unseriously. Pushing open a heavy door, a young lady enacts loud sounds of muscular exertion. Running across part of a hotel lobby so as not to miss friends who are leaving, an individual "over-runs," mockingly throwing himself into a gestured race that would carry him considerably faster were it part of actual running . . . [W]hen an individual is in a public place, he is not merely moving from point to point silently and mechanically managing traffic problems; he is also involved in taking constant care to sustain a viable position relative to what has come to happen around him, and he will initiate gestural interchanges with acquainted and unacquainted others in order to establish what this position is. In a public place, an individual appears to be indifferent to the strangers in his presence; but actually he is sufficiently oriented to them so that . . . he can transform the strangers around him into an audience to receive his show.
—Erving Goffman, RELATIONS IN PUBLIC
If someone should try to strip away the costumes and makeup from the actors performing a play on the stage and to display them to the spectators in their own natural appearance, wouldn't he ruin the whole play? . . . Everything would suddenly look different: the actor just now playing a woman would be seen to be a man; the one who had just now been playing a young man would look old . . . This deception, this disguise, is the very thing that holds the attention of the spectators. Now the whole life of mortal men, what is it but a sort of play, in which various persons make their entrances in various costumes, and each one plays his part until the director gives him his cue to leave the stage?
—Erasmus, THE PRAISE OF FOLLY, tr. Clarence H. Miller
Combined:
a second thrust at knowing
we grow only fonder
the ways we do not know
—Ein Wise Male-performer
You are looking into fog and for that reason persuade yourself that the goal is already close. But the fog disperses and the goal is not yet in sight.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, NOTEBOOKS, 1914-1916
As rain water, (falling) on the mountain top, runs down over the rocks on all sides; similarly, he who sees difference (between visible forms) runs after them in various directions.
—KATHA UPANISHAD
As rivers seek the sea,
Much more deep than they,
So my soul seeks thee,
Far away
—Christina Rossetti, CONFLUENTS (1875)
I was recently walking through Walmart when I stumbled upon the book aisle. I was surprised because I didn’t know they had such an aisle, but it’s tucked away in the back. I walked through, and one book on the top shelf caught my eye. It was the green book, THE GIVING TREE, which I hadn’t read since it came out in 1964, just as I was entering my luminous fourth decade. It was the copy with the author Shel Silverstein’s handsome face at the back. I suppose he was trying to mimic my facial expression that stuck out to him in his photographic memory after we met, and how successful he was! Studies show that flashing that particular kind of friendly smile is guaranteed to keep the children coming back, scientifically proven with 98% accuracy! Like the tree in the book, I give generously. Surely, had they flipped the book around so that the back cover were on display, I would have detected the book aisle as soon as my right foot placed itself upon the grounds of the store, whereupon I’d have made a straight beeline, hopping over merchandise racks and fences and trenches and definitely over the land mines to catch a glimpse of what my once-facial expression had inspired. I admire that photo as if it were my own face, so vain am I, only one degree separated. Well, there was actually one occasion when I was almost photographed. My birth year is closer in time to the Civil War than the Great Depression; don’t get me started on how many struggles I’ve seen in my lifetime or about being drafted twice, but Dorothea Lange almost caught me in a photo because when she snapped MIGRANT MOTHER, I was sitting just nearby. But there I was in the hidden aisle, reading THE GIVING TREE, face-palming Silverstein’s face. I had every intention of purchasing the book, but I must have underestimated my powers because my casual perusal ended up finishing the book—how proud I was that my reading abilities could handle a children’s book! If I were being truthful, I would say there Kevin was in the aisle, flipping through a book, when he turned and saw some real competition: browsing the books too were a mother and her toddler daughter sitting in a cart! The thought occurred to him: who can finish the book faster? Yet while he read, he quickly lost himself in the pages, recalling with the mixture of distant memory and interceding life experience all the details of the story, how the young boy at first was happy playing on the tree’s branches, then as he grew older how he successively took away apples, branches, and finally the whole trunk, until one day the tree was no more than a stump. The boy wanted more and more things, never content nor happy, until the end when as an elderly man he returned to the stump for company, not wanting anything more.
I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.
—Anna Akhmatova (1912)
The New York Times shared footage of the Marubo tribe, a formerly isolated group living in the Amazon rainforest, given access to the internet. Disrupting traditional life are scenes of modernity: villagers glued to their phones.
Man is born with needs, and he creates needs for himself. The first class belongs to his physical constitution, the second to habit and education. I have shown that at the outset men had scarcely anything but natural needs, seeking only to live; but in proportion as life's pleasures have become more numerous, they have become habits. These in turn have finally become almost as necessary as life itself . . . The more prosperous a society is, the more diversified and more durable become the enjoyments of the greatest number, the more they simulate true necessity through habit and imitation. Civilised man is therefore infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of destiny than savage man . . . Along with the range of his pleasures he has expanded the range of his needs and leaves himself more open to the hazard of fortune . . . Among very civilised peoples, the lack of a multitude of things causes poverty; in the savage state, poverty consists only in not finding something to eat . . . If all these reflections are correct it is easy to see that the richer a nation is, the more the number of those who appeal to public charity must multiply, since two very powerful causes tend to that result. On the one hand, among these nations, the most insecure class continuously grows. On the other hand, needs infinitely expand and diversify, and the chance of being exposed to some of them becomes more frequent each day.
—Tocqueville, MEMOIR ON PAUPERISM
Princes always like to see among their subjects the proliferation of an appreciation for enjoyable arts and luxury that do not result in the exporting of wealth. For they very well know that, in addition to nourishing the pettiness of soul that lends itself to servitude, the artificial wants that a people imposes on itself only enslaves them more . . . The primitive people of America, who go naked and live off what they hunt, have never been conquered. Indeed, what kind of yoke could be imposed on people who are in need of nothing?
—Rousseau, DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND ARTS
Towards Social Capitalism
We consider here the country’s present state of inequality and then reason towards a more sustainable economic form. Let us consider the current landscape of wealth ownership in the country. Based on the total population count from the 2020 census and the total net worth data segmented by percentile grouping from the Federal Reserve, we compute the per capita net worth for each percentile segment (the top 1%, because of extreme internal wealth disparity, is additionally partitioned into the top 0.1% and the remainder of the 1%. Their total net worths are displayed in the dotted lines):
2020 population Q4 2023 Group Net Worth Per Capita Net Worth
0.1%: 331,449 $19,822,597,000,000 $59,805,873
rest of 1%: 2,983,043 $24,528,460,000,000 $8,222,630
1%: 3,314,492 $44,351,057,000,000 $13,380,951
next 9%: 29,830,435 $53,662,232,000,000 $1,798,908
next 40%: 132,579,712 $45,029,230,000,000 $339,638
bottom 50%: 165,724,640 $3,649,512,000,000 $22,021
Total 331,449,281 $191,043,088,000,000 $576,387
Inequality is apparent, but I don’t think inequality itself is the culprit behind the country’s mounting tensions; rather it is the extent of the inequality. Using the Fed’s data reaching back to 1990, we can view the rising inequality using the same metric of per capita net worth per percentile group. We note that the 1% in general has done well, but it is specifically the 0.1% that has eclipsed everyone else. (Note to those readers who observe that the per capita net worth numbers from the Fed data don’t match the ones in my table above: what keen and pedantic eyes. For the sake of simplicity, I relied on the Census’ 2020 population count, not the updated one the Fed uses; in addition, I wanted to provide a recent estimate on the country’s financial distribution at the end of 2023—my table’s per capita net worth numbers are higher than the Fed’s 2020 and 2023 numbers because my calculation used the lower 2020 population and the higher 2023 net worths. However, the overall trend of inequality remains the same.)
Conceptually, for the sole purpose of illustration, using the numbers from the table above, if we suppose the entirety of the net worths of the wealthiest were redistributed to the whole population, barring every difficulty, legally and logistically, in this exercise bypassing all laws of private property, somehow suspending stock market valuations in spite of wholesale dumping without purchasers on the other end, this magical selling applying also to real estate, land, boats, and paintings, and throughout this process suspending all taxation, we can see the scale of such a redistribution. These proceeds would go to every person:
Redistribute net worth of top 1%: $133,809 Redistribute net worth of top 10%: $295,711
These are considerable sums, but not quite enough on their own to fund retirement. Such a scheme, however, seems to me quite undesirable, and among the many conceivable reasons is the foremost: a sudden cash infusion into the economy will likely have similar inflationary effects as the three stimulus plans enacted during the pandemic, even if the last of which was admirably called the American Rescue Plan Act. These plans offered cash aid in the thousands of dollars, as the Pandemic Response Committee has documented, in three rounds, at $1,200, $600, and $1,400, per person. Considering how extensively the Fed has had to, in the aftermath, sustain a higher federal funds rate to combat the inflation caused by these thousands, it would be appalling to imagine how either of the above redistribution scenarios, with payouts greater by two orders of magnitude, in full or staggered, will affect the economy. Alternatively, the funds could be redirected towards infrastructure projects, public works, and sustainable energy. However, it is not the writer’s place to suggest a realistic redistribution scheme. Nevertheless, we insist on emphasizing the extent of economic inequality.
For it is not perpetual Feastings and Drinkings; it is not the love of, and Familiarity with beautiful boys and women; it is not the Delicacies of rare Fishes, sweet meats, rich Wine, nor any other Dainties of the Table, that can make a Happy life: But, it is Reason, with Sobriety, and consequently a serene Mind; investigating the Causes, why this Object is to be Elected, and that to be Rejected: and chasing away those vain, superstitious and deluding opinions, which would occasion very great disquiet in the mind.
—Epicurus, MORALS
More indications of the growing inequality: a 2015 article in the Financial Times reported the decline of the middle class since 1971 and the expansion of the poorest and wealthiest ends. The Economic Policy Institute published an article in 2015 on wage stagnation, noting a stark trend since 1973 on a growing gap between productivity and wages. From 1947 to 1973, productivity (up 96.7%) was nearly identical to hourly compensation (up 91.3%), but from 1973 to 2013, productivity (up 74.4%) continued to grow but this growth diverged from a nearly stagnant hourly compenstation (up 9.2%), and the EPI attributes the divergence between economic productivity and wages to the staggering growth in the compensation of CEOs at large companies. And in 2018, the Pew Resarch Center released similar findings, noting that from 1964 to 2018, average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, did not grow meaningfully, that “today’s real average wage . . . has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago.” The article doesn’t have data on CEO compensation, but its data does indicate, although on a shorter time horizon, that most of the wage gains between 2000 and 2018 have gone to the top earners at the 90th percentile. From another angle, with the Fed’s data on income (before taxes) by quintile since 1984: economic output measured through GDP per capita has steadily risen, yet the income (before tax) of the top 20% has continued to distance itself from everyone else’s (more of the Fed’s data that may be of interest: income by decile, more granular, although on a shorter time scale, from 2014 to 2022. And income by education). Simultaneously, a distinct and continuing rise in corporate profits started around 1990, unabated by federal tax collection, which has remained relatively flat compared to the soaring profits, leading to the growing power of corporations.
With this sharp rise in corporate profits against stagnant corporate tax receipts, have corporate tax rates faltered? We consult their historical tax brackets: the IRS documents them from 1909 to 2002, with the Tax Foundation supplying another complete listing that runs up to 2020. We observe that a dramatic shift towards more lenient taxes at the higher end began in 1984, when more brackets were created towards the top and the highest bracket rose to $1,405,000, up from $100,000 in 1983, although the rates for the new dollar-equivalent brackets remained either similar or identical to the old 46%. Very quickly, though, starting in 1987, the rates started declining, as the top rate fell to 40%, with the next lower rungs following suit. Another dip came in 1988, with the top rate falling to 34%. Fast forward to today: since 2018, thanks to Trump’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act—which flattened the progressive rate structure introduced in 1936 during the New Deal, with higher rates applying towards higher income brackets—one single corporate income bracket stands at 21%.
[H]e who is in want and destitute would perhaps call a halt once he got an estate or discovered a hidden treasure or was helped by a friend to pay his debt to his creditor; whereas he who has more than enough and yet hungers for still more will find no remedy in gold or silver or horses and sheep and cattle, but in casting out the source of mischief and being purged. For his ailment is not poverty, but insatiability and avarice, arising from the presence in him of a false and unreflecting judgement; and unless someone removes this, like a tapeworm, from his mind, he will never cease to need superfluities—that is, to want what he does not need.
—Plutarch, ON LOVE OF WEALTH, MORALIA, tr. W. C. Helmbold
A Brookings analysis highlights Trump’s tax cut’s damaging effects on the federal revenue: “The new law will reduce federal revenues by significant amounts, even after allowing for the impact on economic growth. It will make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal.” Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman observe in a 2020 paper similar corrosive effects of the lower taxes on inequality:
In 2018, the US tax system looks like a giant flat tax that becomes regressive at the very top end. The working class and the middle class pay substantial taxes because payroll taxes are large and state and local sales and excise taxes are regressive. The very top pays low effective tax rates because of the demise of the federal corporate tax, which in 2018 collected only 1.5 percent of national income, down from 5–7 percent in the 1950s. The effective individual income tax rate falls at the top end because the very rich earn income through corporations and can avoid reporting individual income.
With several decades of decline in taxes on high corporate income, some practical ramifications of the power of the expanding corporations: David Bessner wrote in this year’s May issue of Harper’s Magazine an article about growing corporate control in the film and television industries, with major studios merging and then themselves being bought by asset-management firms, explaining that the relatively recent proliferation of intellectual property like the Marvel Universe is a result of these films’ appeal for lower risk and securing the bottom line. Another recent article, by Jerry Useem in The Atlantic, elaborates on how the corporate shift has also occurred at Boeing, which in its concern for the bottom line has been outsourcing manufacturing to other companies, including another American company, Spirit AeroSystems, that constructed the aircraft on January’s Alaska Airline Flight 1282 in which a door plug blew out soon after takeoff. The writer needs to mention that he takes no issue with economic growth or corporate profit when they are fairly taxed and social conditions remain equitable, but it is troubling to witness the decades of largely unchecked corporate gains and the rise of corporate preoccupation with profits at the cost of societal stability.
Now a person filled with an extremely intense pressure of will wants with burning eagerness to accumulate everything, in order to slake the thirst of egoism. As is inevitable, he is bound to see that all satisfaction is only apparent, and that the attained object never fulfills the promise held out by the desired object, namely the final appeasement of the excessive pressure of will. He sees that, with fulfillment, the wish changes only its form, and now torments under another form; indeed, when at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of will itself remains, even without any recognized motive, and makes itself known with terrible pain as a feeling of the most frightful desolation and emptiness.
—Schopenhauer, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, tr. E. F. J. Payne
It would not surprise anyone that tax rates are a subject of dispute. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute reports that higher taxes do not inhibit economic growth. Of course, conservatives bristle at taxes, as in this piece from the Cato Institute that likens taxes to the Great Depression. Garrett Watson suggested in a Tax Foundation article that Trump is considering, if elected again, reducing the flat corporate tax rate further, to 15%.
"And what good does it do to you to own the stars?"
"It does me the good of making me rich."
"And what good does it do to you to be rich?"
"It makes it possible for me to buy more stars, if any are discovered."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, THE LITTLE PRINCE, tr. Katherine Woods
Let us take a step back and consider the broader view: although the wealthiest in the country who have benefited in the past few decades certainly play a part in this troubling inequality, the less fortunate compose the remaining part the struggle. In fact, the elite-mass model is not sufficient to capture the many interactions on the stage of human relations, for conflict is not restricted to tensions between classes—conflict also permeates within each class. The most disadvantaged and disenchanted struggle among themselves for scraps, the middle-classes wrangle with each other to reach greater comforts and status, the wealthy compete among themselves to reign above others and for further reassurance of their exclusivity. This is bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. Voltaire reflects in CANDIDE:
I own to you that when I cast an eye on this globe, or rather on this little ball, I cannot help thinking that God has abandoned it to some malignant being. I except, always, El Dorado. I scarcely ever knew a city that did not desire the destruction of a neighbouring city, nor a family that did not wish to exterminate some other family. Everywhere the weak execrate the powerful, before whom they cringe; and the powerful beat them like sheep whose wool and flesh they sell. A million regimented assassins, from one extremity of Europe to the other, get their bread by disciplined depredation and murder, for want of more honest employment. Even in those cities which seem to enjoy peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by more envy, care, and uneasiness than are experienced by a besieged town.
We take the view that a society’s economic prosperity is reflected not through wealth measured in absolute terms, but as a relative between the poorest and the richest. That one’s well-being and prosperity are gauged relatively to those of others, that one’s sense of satisfaction is not anchored on fixed ground, that the instruction manual cannot prescribe an endeavor towards an unchanging goalpost after whose attainment one is content and assured, because desires are constantly shifting, the further others pull ahead the more one must strive to keep pace—the whole procession of this mutual evaluation characterizes the social nature of appetites, demands, necessities, which in civilized society are not so much as formed on absolute terms as on relative comparison. How could someone complain over a lukewarm meal if all anyone knows is meager rations? In the absence of excess and indulgence, how can someone complain about lacking what others do not have? How can someone contrive urgency and desperate need when no one glosses luxuries, vanities, and false promises, all generated under tumultuous noise and gushing coloration, every party incentivized by profit, flattery, and imagined triumph? What is social is necessarily relative; each member of society dangles in a web sprouting outwards in multiple directions, and each is a perch assessing relative position.
Back in 2007, politically sedate compared to today, Robert H. Frank noticed the income and wealth inequalities of the prior few decades and writes in his book, FALLING BEHIND, that in addition to the material privation, those who have been left without incur a psychological toll along with its material consequences:
Experiments have shown . . . that happiness levels differ substantially according to who happens to be in the room when the question is posed. Subjects rate their own happiness levels about two points higher on a ten-point scale if someone in a wheelchair is present during the survey . . . An adolescent in Adam Smith's eighteen-century Scotland would not have been much embarrassed by having a slight overbite, because not even the wealthiest members of society wore braces on their teeth then. In the intervening years, however, rising living standards have altered the frame of reference that defines an acceptable standard of cosmetic dentistry . . . Increased spending at the top of the income distribution has imposed not only psychological costs on families in the middle, but also more tangible costs. In particular, it has raised the cost of achieving goals that most middle-class families regard as basic. Consider, for example, the price a middle-class family must pay in order to secure housing that is adequate by community standards. Increased expenditures on housing by top earners resulted in increasing housing expenditures even among those whose incomes have not risen . . . With real incomes little higher than they were three decades ago, how are middle-class families able to spend so much more than they used to on houses, cars, watches, interview suits, and gifts? The answer, it turns out, is that they are working every possible angle
which includes working longer hours, shrinking savings, larger debts, and longer commutes to work from more affordable neighborhoods.
The wealthiest cadre, accustomed to every comfort, possessing many freedoms, nevertheless bored and restless, push on to newer frontiers, but each advance lays behind it another step for the less fortunate, admiring and envying at a distance, already subject to a lifetime’s ordeal of toil and industry, to overcome. The appearance of satisfaction from these comforts in spite of no real satiety is sufficient to open a further gap between the classes. The wealthy indulge in another desire and another appetite and create another necessity, and those left without must endure yet another relative privation. The greater the distance between the wealthy and the poor, the more dissatisfied, disgruntled, disenfranchised vast numbers in society become over what are for them unattainable desires, unaffordable cravings, manufactured and marketed, and inequality amplified and sustained generates societal instability. Through the introduction of the social web, what to an individual was formerly absolute affluence, gratification, and delight transmogrifies into relative impoverishment, trouble, unending worry, irritation, malaise, bottomless hunger.
How comes it, Maecenas, that no man living is content with the lot which either his choice has given him, or chance has thrown his way, but each has praise for those who follow other paths?
—Horace, SATIRES, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough
Viewed as a relative, the well-being of individuals in a civilized society cannot be secured as a stationary collective of wellness acquisitions in the form of some definite income or wealth threshold, home ownership, academic credential, or professional occupation, but as a highly variable standing within an ever-shifting field of innumerable parties with competing interests. The relative nature of the social enterprise implies that the pursuit of happiness is a ceaseless endeavor, and no matter the extent of technological cultivation, regardless of the satisfaction of actual needs, in every age, men, women, and those in between perceive their joy and contentment through a social lens directed at the exhibitions and displays of everyone else, and it is the fate of the civilized to continuously compete and strive. Although this social arena is certainly composed of perceiving signals, as each competitor necessarily perceives others, and while it is true that signaling here retains its lossy scope and susceptibility to misdirection, it is a mistake to take a perspectival view and hold the misguided stance that materiality no longer matters: the dynamics of relative comparison and the whole premise of perceiving and signaling as a means to serve one’s interests indicate that materialism is the principal mode of evaluation by which each contender sizes oneself up against others—there cannot be post-materialism because materialism is all there is.
Given the workings of this social fabric, ensnared by this social web, caught between hunger and appetite, driven from itch to urge, seduced by the web’s refined needs and artificial enthusiasms, enamored by thrill and captivated by fascination, pressed from stimulant to shock, cursed by the presence of resplendent others, swinging through the electrifying to the frenzifying, baited by social envy and lured into social boasting, tugged and nagged and pricked in a web of incessant sociality of all against all, what a fate for the unfortunate lad born into this miserable social affair! How can this wee innocent navigate between one temptation and another advertisement promising deliverance and ecstasy, igniting the senses from all directions, rousing depths of rabid desire, and setting ablaze a great longing which threatens to burst forth from within?
I can find no happiness
In talk of devotion
From one who has become
A vine that creeps
To tree after tree after tree.
—THE TALES OF ISE, tr. Helen Craig McCullough
Precisely, how to mitigate the material disparity between groups? While it must be permitted that nothing motivates man and woman more than self-interest, that they will risk and push and advance only in view of their reward and pride, is it also possible within such a society to prevent a general mood of merciless competition, a backdrop of many needs and little satisfaction? People being capable of both comaraderie and destruction, we ask: what are the societal conditions which permit people to pursue feasible happiness and prosper in a community rather than hoard resources and fortify their defenses against others? What social and economic conditions balance the scales to mitigate jealousy, envy, avarice, resentment, in favor of trust, contentment, stability, where community relations are healthy and sustainable? Within the natural configuration of economic inequality, what mechanisms permit the semblance of social equality so that the underlying inequality does not violate democratic principles? We answer by affirming the position of social capitalism, a system which grants individuals the freedom to grow and pursue their desires but which restrains the distance between least privileged and the most by governmental intervention at the extremities by heavy taxation at the very top for redistribution. We take an adversarial view towards human desire at the uninhibited extreme, that although desire should be given priority for individual liberty, it is also a force to be tamed and controlled. As Thomas Hobbes observed of human desire in LEVIATHAN:
So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it a home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of Fame from new Conquest; in others, of ease and sensuall pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind.
It must be noted, however, that we are not defending a welfare system which demotivates those able-bodied yet unemployed to live off the state’s aid indefinitely. Just as unrestrained desire which seeks continually in vain to sate itself is harmful both to the person and others, so is the absence of desire, of helplessness and reliance on state aid, of lethargy and apathy. The hazardous potential of the unproductive ought to be kept in mind, but a solution to the country’s inequality cannot stem primarily from further depriving the least privileged. Providing schooling, job training, and opportunities is possible only with resources, and motivating the underserved must begin with investing in their functioning relation to the economy. In the broad scheme, it is the wealthy that concentrates economic power in their own reserves.
The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people. The desire to provide security for oneself and one's family is natural and wholesome, but it is adequately served by a reasonable inheritance. Great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security. In the last analysis such accumulations amount to the perpetuation of great and undesirable concentration of control in a relatively few individuals over the employment and welfare of many, many others . . . Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, MESSAGE TO CONGRESS ON TAX REVISION (1935)
More explicitly, in our stance on social captalism, we make one core assumption: no impulse motivates man more than self-interest. Man, when given unhindered access to resources, accumulates to no end, and that, to avoid boredom in spite of possessing extreme concentrations of wealth, continually hoards and expends, causing suffering to others. We make clear our view that inequality is inevitable, as unequal aptitude, ambition, and circumstances manifest in differential performance, and man needs to be incentivized by rewards for greater contribution. However, under this schema of varied productivity, social capitalism provides the redistributive mechanism to reduce the range of the ensuing inequality.
That popular immiseration is an outcome of unhindered greed on part of the rich to absorb an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth is clear from our assumption.
Those who are devoid of discrimination and fail to distinguish between real and unreal, the fleeting and the permanent, set their hearts on the changeable things of this world; hence they entangle themselves in the net of insatiable desire, which leads inevitably to disappointment and suffering. To such, death must seem a reality because they identify themselves with that which is born and which dies. But the wise, who see deeper into the nature of things, are no longer deluded by the charm of the phenomenal world and do not seek for permanent happiness among its passing enjoyments.
—KATHA UPANISHAD
Furthermore, from the vantage of state stability, if we follow the consequences of Turchin’s interpretation of societal conflicts over history, and supposing that natural talent and ability is evenly distributed throughout the population, across urban and rural geographies, across race and class, we don’t want everyone pursuing opportunities towards the elite strata; in fact, a healthy society requires that many gifted and talented youth voluntarily choose careers that reward them less than their potential. This restraint reduces the pool of elite aspirants, mitigating the pressures of elite overproduction. I am against the hypothetical utopia where everyone with ability should be encouraged to pursue opportunities suitable to their capacity; reasons abound for why youths may not opt into the elite pathway: some may prefer a more ordinary and peaceful lifestyle, a fraction may balk at the decades of meritocratic endeavor, others may lack discipline, many are not shown the ropes, and the scions of the established elite may renounce the pressures and limelight of their parents’ position. The point of contention is not education itself; I agree with Turchin when he commented in a panel on the education part of the problem: “It is not education as we typically understand it . . . It’s not to educate oneself. It’s rather to get the credentials that would allow one to compete in the labor market and also to enter the ranks of the elites.” Towards those liberals who hold a differing view on overproduced elites, who harbor sentimental yearning for all children to avail themselves to every opportunity, we should remind ourselves of an observation from La Rochefoucauld:
Humility is often nothing other than the pretense of submission that one adopts in order to undermine others. It is an artifice of pride that debases itself in order to elevate itself; and although it can transform itself in a thousand ways, it is never better disguised nor more capable of misleading than when it is hidden under the guise of humility.
For not a one among them is a sly, self-serving hypocrite. And:
If there are some men who have never appeared ridiculous it is because no one ever looked closely.
To those readers who find these words too direct, perhaps the truth can be found more palatable when caustic observations are deflected by the thinly veiled conceit in Voltaire’s CANDIDE:
"Sir, you think doubtless that all is for the best in the moral and physical world, and that nothing could be otherwise than it is?"
"I, sir!" answered the scholar, "I know nothing of all that; I find that all goes awry with me; . . . and that except supper, which is always gay, and where there appears to be enough concord, all the rest of the time is passed in impertinent quarrels; Jansenist against Molinist, Parliament against the Church, men of letters against men of letters, courtesans against courtesans, financiers against the people, wives against husbands, relatives against relatives—it is eternal war."
"I have seen the worst," Candide replied. "But a wise man, who since has had the misfortune to be hanged, taught me that all is marvellously well; these are but the shadows on a beautiful picture."
Inequality among civilized people in an advanced economy is unavoidable, but within social capitalism, the distance between the lowest and highest can be shortened. Social capitalism emphasizes moderation in the country’s economic and social sphere, just as it enables moderation at the individual level.
The temperate man occupies a middle position with regard to these objects. For he neither enjoys the things that the self-indulgent man enjoys most—but rather dislikes them—nor in general the things he should not, nor anything of this sort to excess, nor does he feel pain or craving when they are absent, or does so only to a moderate degree, and not more than he should, nor when he should not, and so on; but the things that, being pleasant, make for health or for good condition, he will desire moderately and as he should, and also other pleasant things if they are not hindrances to these ends, or contrary to what is noble, or beyond his means. For he who neglects these conditions loves such pleasures more than they are worth, but the temperate man is not that sort of person, but the sort of person that the right rule prescribes.
—Aristotle, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
In an economically and socially mobile society, some ascend, and this is the side that invariantly receives most of the public’s attention, but the fact is that some descend. Centuries ago, once-illustrious noble families, on their decline, quietly receded and simply faded away, not mentioning their waning fortunes. For this reason, I find one writer, Lynn Sterger Strong, particularly commendable for her 2019 article in The Guardian about being downwardly mobile and what this entails. What further impresses me is that she takes responsiblity for this, and her tone conveys the truth without excessive blaming, without false sympathy, without dampening sugar coats: this simply happens as a fact of life, and she is forthright, grounded, clear in mind in a way that reveals maturity and seeing reality as it is. For the most part, she acknowledges that it was due to her and her husband’s choices that have led to their circumstances; only briefly does she mention that part of the reason is the country’s fault, of her employers’ not providing health insurance and benefits.
Kathryn M. Neckerman and Florencia Torche responded in 2007 to the country’s growing inequality in the prior few decades by surveying its the damaging effects on health and social relations. A question: how to make the portent of decline less agonizing and the actual decline less mortifying? Here is another benefit of shrinking the distance between the poorest and wealthiest: it constrains the possible range of decline and also the dread and pain of loss.
When you see another in power, set against it that you have the advantage of not wanting power. When you see another rich, see what you have instead of riches; for, if you have nothing in their stead, you are miserable. But, if you have the advantage of not needing riches, know that you have something more than he hath, and of far greater value . . . Do you not know of what nature the thirst of one in a fever is? It hath no resemblance to that of a person in health . . . If you would not be disappointed of your desires, or incur your aversions, desire nothing that belongs to others; be averse to nothing not in your own power, otherwise your desire must necessarily be disappointed and your aversion incurred.
—Epictetus, DISCOURSES
More practically, a social capitalist system requires a strong government with the power to reduce the massive accumulation of wealth; attaining a more equitable environment from the current state of inequality may well demand a wealth tax, as Saez and Zucman have detailed in a 2019 paper. It is the incentive of the wealthiest to avoid and evade taxes, which Florian Scheuer and Joel Slemrod mention in their 2021 wealth tax paper, and the power to detect offshore accounts and enforce the tax should remain within the government’s capability.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, ADDRESS AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY (1936)
Capitalism encourages individual desire and ambition, to strive for one’s material, social, reputational, intellectual gain proportionate to one’s effort against one’s languor, indolence, and complacency; capitalism conforms to human nature in a stratified state, to the will to live, the will to power, to perform against everyone else, and in doing so creating value, products, economies, growth, flourishing societies. Overlaid on this foundation, the social aspect of this capitalism constrains the human desire to accumulate more at the expense of others and of oneself, against the blind will for destructive aspiration, unsustainable inequality, rogue greed which hoards power, privilege, and inheritance. This social redirection inhibits the individual’s will at the extremes of capitalist affluence in service of the general will.
When our lives are that simple,
we want for nothing.
We can relax,
and the world becomes a better place.
—#37, TAO TE CHING, tr. Ron Hogan
This social aspect constitutes a constraint; that is, its social nature is not positive, but negative—social capitalism is a capitalism deprived of the destructive tendencies of extreme greed and the human impulse to accumulate privilege, power, and political influence, by either instituting self-serving economic policies or passing on preferential human capital in a free, meritocratic market to entrench generational exclusivity. The social constraint is a guardrail against the destructive slide into unchecked and self-reinforcing power, against popular immiseration, against societal collapse. Here a Schopenhauerian description is fitting, not in the metaphysical sense but explicitly: the blind, insatiable will—not the will to live but the will to power, will to greed, will to excess—drives those with wealth to hoard privilege with a striving completely out of proportion to the rewards.
I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it's thirsty for!
Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.
All this fantasy
and grief.
—Rumi, A THIRSTY FISH, tr. Coleman Barks
The primary issue afflicting the country is not immigration, as painted in the Republican narrative, or lack of diversity, as advanced by staunch Democrats, but growing economic inequality and class precarity. Immigration and diversity are, of course, valid points of contention, and I have examined them in prior sections; while they are convenient platforms to assemble political identity, they are not the essential culprits for the current polarization: rather, it is the increasingly unbridgeable power differential between the elites and the masses. The political fracture will not be resolved solely by sealing off the border or expanding ethnic and gender representation. The financial elites have for decades channeled more and more of the fruits of the nation’s economic productivity into their own assets, and in concert with this is the meritocratic concentration of privilege in academia and the professions, hoarding educational opportunity as a vehicle for upward mobility. Yet for common folks: wage stagnation, rising costs, degrading living standards, and privation relative to the prosperous elites. Behind this accumulation of privilege is the recurring central driver of trouble: human desire is insatiable and knows no end, and those in power do not voluntarily relinquish their advantage. Turchin writes in END TIMES:
The American ruling class today finds itself in the predicament that has recurred thousands of times throughout human history. Many common Americans have withdrawn their support from the governing elites . . . Large swaths of degree holders, frustrated in their quest for elite positions, are breeding grounds for counter-elites, who dream of overthrowing the existing regime. Most wealth holders are unwilling to sacrifice any personal advantage for the sake of preserving the status quo. The technical term for it is 'revolutionary situation.' For the ruling class, there are two routes out of a revolutionary situation. One leads to their overthrow. The alternative is to adopt a series of reforms that will rebalance the social system, reversing the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The American ruling elites did it once, a century ago [with the New Deal]. Can they do it again?
This will not be simple; I concur with Daniel Markovits when he makes it overtly clear in THE MERITOCRACY TRAP how difficult the task ahead is: “The meritocracy trap was constructed over generations and will take generations to dismantle . . . Any victory will be long-fought and hard-won.” Even while wary of the task’s difficulty, Markovits remains hopeful that meritocracy and generational privilege can eventually be retracted. I appreciate his undeterred resolve, but I do not share his rosy vision because such a mission opposes the very nature of human desire—depriving people of aspiration and opportunity, taking away their avenues to accumulate private wealth, cutting off the natural instinct to bequeath skills, connections, positions, and cultural capital to their children, and preventing parents from passing on a competitive edge are all surefire ways to demotivate a population and hamper innovation. I do not imagine that it is possible, even in a hypothetical scenario in which economic wealth has been sensibly redistributed, that meritorious parents will refrain from grooming their children for advantaged fields in a society that offers differential rewards—and it is this exact mechanism, incentivizing quality and productivity, that leads to economic prosperity. It is easy to broadcast egalitarian ideals and harbor images of true equality among all, but to do as we say is a different matter entirely when private interests are concerned. Ambition, drive, productivity, and innovation depend on pulsating desire, yet it is precisely this desire which simultaneously yields material disparity and societal inequality. If it seems impossible to attain absolute equality, it is because our subject is corrupt, as human desire continually churns towards heights of its own success, aspiring to do better than its neighbors.
What of lasting happiness, virtue, contentment, free from comparison and relative evaluation? Of happiness and satisfaction, I make no claim or guarantee, for it seems to me that Schopenhauer’s descriptions are accurate, and such attainments do not last; they evade one’s grasp by their slippery or evaporating nature, and no sooner does one acquire that which one has long desired than one quickly loses interest, and to regain the spice of life, one turns elsewhere to reacquire excitement, the horizon itself, once reached, receding further away. The only certainty is the striving itself, human life condemned to an unending movement, perpetual desire, bustling activity that knows no rest. The recognition of this fickleness of human nature, never satisfied, keen on appearances, unable on its own to be content but only in comparison to one’s lack of contentment or to that of another—this fact should not unsettle any more than many other unpleasant inevitabilites.
Today, I understand that to love, act, and suffer is indeed to be alive, but only in so far as we become transparent and accept our fate as a single reflection of a rainbow of difficult joys and passions . . . [F]aced with the humblest or the most heart-rending experience, man should always be "present"; and that he should endure this experience without flinching, with complete lucidity.
—Albert Camus, NOTEBOOKS 1935-1942, tr. Philip Thody
The opposite of this striving is renunciation, the ascetic, monastic denial of self, which seems to me unsustainable in any but a select few who are sufficiently swayed against worldly ambitions. As for the rest of us, the great many who find ourselves teetering on a wire between the poles of indulgence and resignation, we who can have no lasting contentment, moderation is a refuge, and time offers a final consolation, as youthful energy one day runs out, and old age: grey hair, wrinkled skin, blue skies, the land of one’s settlement, a community, a semblance of peace, calm days without fanfare but also without strife, a sense of the whole again until the whole comes to claim us.
She was near tears herself.
It is a life in which we cannot be sure
Of lasting as long as the dew upon the lotus.
And he replied:
To be as close as the drops of dew on the lotus
Must be our promise in this world and the next.
—Murasaki Shikibu, THE TALE OF GENJI, tr. Edward Seidensticker
It may be asked: is the outlook on human desire, as a perpetually unfulfilled drive, this bleak? But I respond: why should this be? The notion of bleak is merely an invention of the human mind, and not a very useful one at that. An emperor penguin in the Antarctic, waddling over mile upon mile of snow and ice, journeying to find food and shelter, to keep warm by huddling with other penguins, continually struggling to survive in a freezing wasteland, protective of its baby penguins against predators from the sky and predators in the sea, limping over vast stretches of frozen terrain, and with nothing else to protect itself against the ferocious and unending glacial winds than crowding together with fellow penguins in the same wretched circumstance: in the face of this continual battering, at every turn another in the cascade of ice, sea, wind, and sky, does the penguin labor over such a fruitless question as the purpose of all this trouble? In the middle of its march, does it stop to mull over what could possibly be the prize at the end of its daily struggles? Does it demand refuge in some higher order or grand fantasy it itself has invented? Viewed from above, what a breathtaking scene!—all those mountains of snow, those soaring precipices of jagged white cliffs, that gleaming reflection off the pristine ocean that stretches back to the horizon—against all this, how tiny that group of penguins straddling so clumsily over this immense space, how they lurch with their tiny feet, how they glide on their bellies, how they stay close to others for warmth, how beautiful they seem, several hundred living creatures in this inhospitable home of barren ice, how precarious their lives are in this desolate landscape as spectacular as it is grim, magisterially silent to their cries. In spite of all this, does the penguin derange itself, disturb the small moments of beauty, by bewailing its situation? Does it feel entitled to some beneficial end, some land of redemption graced by divine spirits? Trapped in an identically grueling situation, what could be the purpose of meritocrats continually struggling to maintain their position and passing on their privileges to the next generation so they can socially reproduce their status? Why do frenzied capitalists chasing blind profit create myriad desires and mislead the public into thinking such fabricated necessities provide any satiety? Why all this comparison and conceit? Why all this roving, jostling, all these ordeals and labors and strife to acquire things that never quench the thirst? Why the many pomps and excitements and frictions of human motions, all sassy and abuzz? So echoes Schopenhauer: “[H]e does not see the why and the wherefore, the reward for this, but has accepted the value of that pledge in good faith and on trust without looking into it.”
[T]here was, unfortunately, a little animalcule in a square hat who interrupted all the other animalcule philosophers. He said that he knew the secret: that everything would be found in the Summa of Saint Thomas. He looked the two celestial inhabitants up and down. He argued that their people, their worlds, their suns, their stars, had all been made uniquely for mankind. At this speech, our two [interstellar] voyagers nearly fell over with that inextinguishable laughter which, according to Homer, is shared with the gods . . . The Sirian resumed his discussion with the little mites. He spoke to them with great kindness, although in the depths of his heart he was a little angry that the infinitely small had an almost infinitely great pride. He promised to make them a beautiful philosophical book, written very small for their usage, and said that in this book they would see the point of everything. Indeed, he gave them this book before leaving. It was taken to the academy of science in Paris, but when the ancient secretary opened it, he saw nothing but blank pages. "Ah!" he said, "I suspected as much."
—Voltaire, MICROMÉGAS, tr. Peter Phalen
We take such pride in our ancestors, the achievements dutifully recorded in the annals of human civilization, the great trophies and marches of antiquity, the dignity of the ancients, and how we, their descendants, share that glory, but what is our collective memory, dating back a few thousand years when, juxtaposed against the entirety of all we know, it has been for millions of years that lions have been hunting and preying in the African prairies? All this prowling, starving, and feasting has repeated over and over across stretches of time beyond our nibbling occupation of the earth—behind these innumerable cycles of births, struggles, and deaths, what reason could there have been all this time?
A heavy downpour. Stand and face the rain, let its iron rays pierce you; drift with the water that wants to sweep you away but yet stand fast, and upright in this way abide the sudden and endless shining of the sun.
—Kafka, DIARIES 1914-1923, tr. Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt
What convinces us new arrivals that we can ascribe any higher purpose to the many creatures around us or even to ourselves? We float in a tiny capsule amidst billions of years of evolution. Is the scope of our timespans and the joys within its frame not sufficient? Human desire knows no bounds, even venturing to seek purpose for itself when much of it effects only self-flattery. But let us follow these arguments and celebrate among the crowds with hurrah, fanfare, and confetti: it may well be true, according to some old book, that it was for us that dinosaur bones have waited beneath the earth for millions of years.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sin,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
—Walt Whitman, SONG OF MYSELF, LEAVES OF GRASS
I mentioned early in this post that I agree with Christianity’s tenet that man is dust of the earth, but a key difference remains on the rest of the claim: I do not believe man is made in the likeness of any heavenly deity, for such self-praise seems to me merely a comforting illusion, and man is nothing more than agitated dust, never settling, never content with his inconsequence, never at peace with his lot in the margins, and never failing to voice all the dings and pangs of his infernal cacophony.
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
—Li Bai, ZAZEN ON CHING-T’ING MOUNTAIN, tr. Sam Hamill
Gender Studies
A very important digression on the matter of the scope and impact of gender performance. Gender studies: A Schopenhauerian Approach. “The world is my idea”—the great Schopenhauer rightly opened his majestic book with this line. Every breath I (they) draw brings me closer to death under masculine hegemony. The world suffers and quakes and strives irrationally around the thing-in-itself, the imperceivable and incomprehensible unity of will—Schopenhauer was right in identifying the will as the central driver of the life force, but we gender theorists do him one better: we clarify that the will, evil and terrible, residing in the dark, is undeniably masculine: what Schopenhauer labored to describe had always been the blind masculine will. All creatures are propelled by this vile, unyielding will: the will-to-masc that surrounds us all. Only within the confines of our limited cognition of the masculine will do the electromagnetic laws, the force of gravity, the fabric of reality, exist: they are not the independent thing-in-itself, which itself must be a single, dominating will, free of space and free of time, unmoved by cause and unhindered by sympathy: the unitary thing-in-itself is the black heart of masculine will! All phenomena we perceive, all thoughts we entertain, all sensible stimuli, are only objectifications of the will, which within the cage of our humanity are mere representations of an insatiable masculinity.
Such a long, long way we have to go,
even farther from the stone masks
standing erect, in utter silence, and we'll go
wrapped in their pride, in their distance.
What brought us to the island?
It won't be the smile of flowering men,
or the crackling waist of lovely Ataroa,
or the boys on horseback, with their rude eyes,
that we'll take home with us:
just an oceanic emptiness, a poor question
with a thousand answers on contemptuous lips.
—Pablo Neruda, MEN, THE SEPARATE ROSE
Let us brave gender theorists set forth on the quest of our lives! Danger is its name! O waly, waly, the whole phenomenal world being our image, a monolithic complex of masculine will, represented in every force and object, we set ourselves the risk and adventure to the treacherous lands of the countryside, the land of ash and flame whence the masculine will was born and where its lord still holds sway; in our preparation, we summon everything we have in our power so that we may be adequately equipped to do battle with this nemesis orchestrating all which stands against the good in the world. We bring our advanced technology, our money and media, our enlightened ideology, a military campaign so adequately equipped which yet nevertheless compromises none of our smug smiles or our latte-sipping righteousness, and when we come near the objective of our mission, when we approach the well-hidden door to their lair, we kick it down with such inclusive and diverse force, wearing our hazmat suits and witch doctor masks, armed with our firehoses and axepicks, and were we, standing at the entrance to the source of all perils corrupting the earth, to stop at that very moment before we throw in the smoke balloons and paralyzing juice, we may find looks of confusion from regular folks having a drink after work. So vested in our suits and armaments, playing the boom box, marching under the banner of the rainbow flag, do we hurl the smoker and blinder? We look into the eyes of these men and women lounging in this dungeon of malice, trying to detect with our telescopic and microscopic and X-ray-scopic university-training, what manner of creatures these are. Are they disguises like much of everything else, objectifications and representations of the masculine will? We stumble on this scene: a discerning viewer will notice the man sitting at the bar. We make the astounding realization that he is the father of the patriarchy. No wonder we couldn’t find him before! He’s been hiding out here in Appalachia all along! Or could it be that they are just some fine, decent folks living their lives? Waving hammer and sickle, parading in the wave of anger, we pause and wonder: could this be true? And if they are just ordinary, tax-paying, honest men and women minding their business and going about their day in their local communities and economies which are, admittedly, quite different from our globalized spectacle, do we let them off the hook for being images and phenomena of the indomitable masculine will? Or could it be that they are regular people? If so, would their very beings morph into pan-phobic machines if we see them at a Trump rally? Could it in fact be that they are simple folks who don’t appreciate lies and hypocrisy, as a certain James, who supports Trump, says in this video?
When I called Craig [a rural American] a few months after our first conversation, I asked him again about his feelings on gay marriage to clarify his response. He was more open and explicit in his opinion this second time around. "I think everyone should be free to be who they are and who they want to be. But some of these things get so stigmatized. How do I say it?" Craig paused. "You should be free to be who you are, but don't stuff it down other people's throats. Be who you are."
—Currid-Halkett, THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS
Though we know that we cannot possibly perceive the black heart of man, we understand that the singularity, without space or time, is most discriminatory and objectionable. How intolerant! How exclusive! It is one thing to be outside of space, but also of time? Though Schopenhauer stopped himself at a radical denial of this will, we suggest a new horizon, a new denial through immersion in the complete opposite: we venture towards an utmost difficulty: all-space! and yet that will not suffice for our battle cry for inclusion! for we must also endeavor towards all-time! Rather than the denial instrinsic to the will-to-masc, we propose a revolution of nothing less than disruptive pronouns! This is no hegemony that lay beyond any human capacity, but rather a movement which is the totality of inclusion, an all-encompassing completeness, a merciless they-ism! They and them, them and they! By the utter negation of the will-to-masc, we become flexible, expressive, truly incredible. We thus come full circle in our pan-inclusivity and end where we began: “The world is my idea.”
I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway—and sooth—and sue
And watch all time—and pry into all place—
And be living a lie—who would become
A mighty thing among the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain'd to mingle with
A herd, though to be a leader—and of wolves.
—Byron, MANFRED
Speaking plainly, I agree that gender is performative, but there is a limit. In our present political climate, gender issues loom large and occupy a clamoring presence, but academically and intellectually, the premise is rather mundane. That a convention is constructed does not immediately imply it is false and trifling; as true as gender is constructed and performative, so are personalities, cultural inculcations, social conventions, linguistic norms, monetary exchange. To reveal that gender is performative is scarcely innovative. Beauvoir herself writes of the female role as a social construction in THE SECOND SEX:
One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other. Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated . . . [I]t must be repeated again that within the human collectivity nothing is natural, and woman, among others, is a product developed by civilization; the intervention of others in her destiny is originary: if this process were driven in another way, it would produce a very different result.
Goffman wrote a book called GENDER ADVERTISEMENTS predicated on the messaging, displaying, and performing of gender roles. More generally, the observation that gender is performed must be situated along a series of discovered social constructs: Jung’s persona, Goffman’s social theatrics, social class in Veblen’s conspicuous consumption and Brooks’ bohemian bourgeois; as a matter of fact, culture and cultural socialization are also social constructions, as is the exchange of economic labor in a capitalist society. Marx, in CAPITAL, describes the social nature of monetary exchange:
The owner of a commodity is prepared to part with it only in return for other commodities whose use-value satisfies his own need . . . [H]e desires to realize his commodity, as a value, in any other suitable commodity of the same value. It does not matter to him whether his own commodity has any use-value for the owner of the other commodity or not. From this point of view, exchange is for him a general social process . . . We have already seen, from the simplest expression of value, x commodity A = y commodity B, that the thing in which the magnitude of the value of another thing is represented appears to have the equivalent form independently of this relation, as a social property inherent in its nature . . . What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money [which forms the inherent social property] . . . Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action.
It may even be said that no form of interpersonal relation is not a performance, a dance of perceiving and signaling which hardly abide by the factual person. Further, it may be proposed that no one can be genuinely themselves in a social field, and that one can with immense difficulty know only degrees of oneself, and in doing so exert great effort in vain to pry oneself free from social constructs. Man and woman are social creatures, and this inherent trait immerses all humans to social upbringings, social rewards and inhibitions, operating in a social arena, so that much of what is individual is derived socially, either internally replicated or defined in opposition to a general other. As Pascal observes in the PENSÉES:
Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, "My book," "My commentary," "My history," etc. They resemble middle-class people who have a house of their own, and always have "My house" on their tongue. They would do better to say, "Our book," "Our commentary," "Our history," etc., because there is in them usually more of other people's than their own.
The limitation I wish to suggest to gender performance is this: just as personality and culture are fluid and performed but still retain value as functioning mechanisms in a social sphere, so must gender performance comply by the codes of social operation, of mutual communication and order. Suffice it to say that as with personality and culture, equality in gender performance may entail social equality but also economic, preferential, material inequality. Man and woman exist in a social field bound by rules, conventions, contractual obligations, both explicit and implicit, and it is along these socially conventional channels that society operates. If the forces, pressures, and codes in the field seem to resemble a masquerade, fraudulent while also inhibiting and conformist, we may well relate to Rousseau’s first line in THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” For those who desire liberation from such social oppression, some sympathy may be found in the introductory comments to Camus’ THE STRANGER, written by Peter Dunwoodie:
Meursault is accused of indifference after putting his mother in a home or refusing to look at the corpse, yet he acknowledges that, once settled, she was happier with people of her own generation and, after her death, his first thought on reaching the old people's home is to see her body. He is accused of callousness because he smokes or drinks at her wake, yet he had thought about it beforehand and decided 'it doesn't matter.' Accused, in short, of not displaying the conventional attitudes and reactions . . . If Meursault strikes observers as indifferent and amoral, it is not because he is a detached, unemotional outsider, but because he is living and responding within a radically different scheme of values.
Or Camus’ own explanation, in the Preface to the 1955 American University Edition of THE STRANGER:
I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game . . . [T]o get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author's intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn't play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened . . . So one wouldn't be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth . . . It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created.
But for ordinary folks whose appetites do not find it palatable to rebel against every social norm, whose courage do not quite match that of a man such as Mersault who “agrees to die for the truth”, we are, then, as good as mandated to play the game, to perceive and signal in accordance to their intended functions, to exchange in surfaces. This is, Goffman affirms us, “the human situation.”
The truth isn't flashy.
Flashy words aren't true.
—#81, TAO TE CHING, tr. Ron Hogan
There is no need to argue
When truth is shining through
—#81, TAO TE CHING, tr. Jim Clatfelter
Revisiting the diversity question: Vincent Parrillo in 1994 introduced a concept to describe a common error in reasoning about the country’s past and future racial composition:
The Dillingham Flaw is then any inaccurate comparison based upon simplistic categorizations and/or anachronistic observations. By the latter term I refer to the tendency to apply the connotation of modern classifications (e.g. "British") or sensibilities (e.g. ecumenicism) to an earlier period in time when either did not exist or had a very different form of existence. Generalizing about 18-th century Americans from the British Isles, for example, fails to address and include the geographic segregation, social distance, even hostility, that existed between English Anglicans and Scots-Irish Presbyterians. They were not a single cultural group called "British"; a great cultural abyss existed between them . . . [P]rojections are problematic in that they might become a reversal of the Dillingham Flaw, projecting contemporary categories forward into the far future. Perhaps new categories will emerge in addition or in lieu of the present ones. For example, interracially married couples are twice the number they were in 1980 . . . Another possibility is that Hispanic Americans may not be a minority group, as many European groups no longer are. They may have become absorbed into the collective identity of "mainstream American" or extensively intermarried with other groups by then.
Those writing and reading at present, situated in the current era’s mores and values, confined by the short-sightedness of inflated, self-important egos, predicated on the existing systems and social structure, class inequalities, race and gender difference, the prejudices and interests entwined with the inequalities of the immediate material reality, may in fact matter quite a bit less than we suspect. It wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to say that the present distinctions over which we labor, over which these many struggles accumulate, over all this energy, repulsion, resistance, may matter not.
The majority of the 50 million [inhabitants of the Roman Empire] would have been peasant farmers, not the fantasy creations of Roman writers but smallholders across the empire . . . For these families, Roman rule made little difference, beyond a different tax collector . . . In Britain, for example, so far as we can tell from archaeological traces, there was little significant change in the lives of peasant farmers over more than a millennium, from the end of the Iron Age immediately before the successful Roman invasion in 43 CE, through the Roman occupation, and into the Middle Ages. But there is almost no evidence surviving for the attitudes, aspirations, hopes or fears of these farmers and their families.
—Mary Beard, SPQR: A HISTORY OF ANCIENT ROME
When the immigrants in early twentieth century America and their descendants accumulated wealth, set up their own institutions, acquired renown, exerted their presence, did they not alter the country’s populace and culture as they immersed themselves in it? Technology, material substance, norms, and perspectives change, and the particular problems and turmoil of our times will play out as only another glimmer in the timeline of human history. Why should we expect the people of the future to hold the same differences and grudges we, in our myopic egotism, believe are larger than life?
It seems to me, Usbek, that all our judgments are made with reference covertly to ourselves. I do not find it surprising that . . . all the idolatrous peoples represent their gods with human faces, and endow them with all their own impulses. It has been well said that if triangles had a god, they would give him three sides. My dear Usbek, when I see men creeping over an atom, I mean the earth, which is merely a point in the universe, and setting themselves up as direct models of Providence, I am unable to reconcile such extravagant pretensions with such tininess.
—Montesquieu, PERSIAN LETTERS, tr. C.J. Betts
How we flatter ourselves when, on the grounds of our every plight and endeavor, we commence from the unquestioned principle that our views are precious and important and worthy of preservation—how in a century we’ll remain as spirited and passionate about our antipathies and fear as today we surely still hear the raucous disapprovals of the established Bostonians against the Irish and Italians disembarking on the eastern seaboard—because without a doubt we shall over all those years ahead remain as vibrant and youthful as those who in two or three generations will then come of age.
I have a walking stick—
don't know how many generations it's been handed down—
the bark peeled off long ago,
nothing left but a sturdy core.
In past years it tested the depth of a stream,
how many times clanged over steep rocky trails!
Now it leans against the east wall,
neglected, while the flowing years go by.
—Ryōkan, tr. Burton Watson
We complain and generate whirlwinds of noise as though future generations can’t judge for themselves, as if our present resentments, taken up for their sake, for the good of our children and their children, to secure the ongoing vibrance of posterity, do not instead come solely from our own self-interest.
By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome people routed. You sit musing as if you were in broad nature again. They cannot stand it. Their position becomes more and more uncomfortable every moment. So much humanity over against one without any disguise,—not even the disguise of speech!
—Thoreau, JOURNAL
Confined behind our tiny windows, we know little of the present, hardly anything of the past, and almost nothing about the future, yet we strut about with a great pomposity like imperious penguins unaware of how remotely they live, raving with certainty over stars, gods, eternal beauty, and salvation when all they know are ice and fish.
True prudence, on the other hand, recognizes human limitations and does not strive to leap beyond them; it is willing to run with the herd, to overlook faults tolerantly or to share them in a friendly spirit. But, they say, that is exactly what we mean by folly. I will hardly deny it—as long as they will reciprocate by admitting that this is exactly what it means to perform the play of life.
—Erasmus, THE PRAISE OF FOLLY, tr. Clarence H. Miller
The resolution to this era’s demographic change may already be at hand and will follow the many others before it in the annals of history; its development has been scheduled with a time horizon that stretches beyond us individuals. It may very well be that none of those currently present will remain by the time the country’s demographics unify into a new group. If this statement strikes some readers with a blunting blow of disillusionment, this humbling fact reveals the depth of our attachment to the state of affairs and the extent of our self-interest. Generational changes cannot be foreseen, and the future cannot be predicted, but this much is certain: we play a small part in the grand scheme of things, and the windows themselves will change.
I idly open a book of T'ang poems
and find a petal of peach blossom, still fresh.
I remember taking this book with me
to read among the flowers
and realize that another year has passed.
—Yang Wanli, READING BY THE WINDOW, tr. Jonathan Chaves
On the global scale, we can glean a bit of the future from population projections. Andrew Stanley from the IMF shared several infographics showing rapid population growth in Africa until the end of this century, noting that by 2100, Africa will contain 38% of the world’s population. It may be that at that point that, along with the many other changes, the further progression of the environment crisis, and continued advancement of technology, more population migration, the state of the world will not resemble the present—consider how drastically the world’s distribution of economic output has changed over hundreds of years, measured through GDP per capita, from Our World in Data. And when those future generations occasion to look back in time, they will gloss over our early twenty-first century as just another in the vast, continuous tract of a dark, irrelevant past, neglecting the fact that this fate too will in no time at all be theirs.
Fifteen thousand years ago, before the Ice Age ended, East and West meant little. A century from now they will once again mean little. Their importance in the intervening era was just a side effect of geography . . . East and West will be revealed as merely a phase we went through. Even if everything in this phase had gone as differently as could be imagined—if say, Zheng He had really gone to Tenochtitlán, if there had been a kind of Pacific rather than a new kind of Atlantic economy, if there had been a Chinese rather than a British industrial revolution . . .—the deep forces of biology, sociology, and geography would still have pushed history in much the same direction . . . And East and West would still be losing their significance.
—Ian Morris, WHY THE WEST RULES—FOR NOW
Wisdom? It's not wise
to lift our thoughts too high;
we are human, and our time is short.
A man who aims at greatness
will not live to own what he has now.
—Euripides, THE BACCHAE, tr. Paul Woodruff
Viewed another way, this collective amnesia is beautiful because through all the struggle and torment and pain and ambition and resentment and ego and vanity, in the end, nothing has to do with us, petty and selfish and deceitful creatures—what a relief it is to realize we have no significance, no crash or fire, no impact reflecting the mass of groans we reply to every plight, no weight upon us whatsoever, our measly noises eking out just one breath in the cosmic landscape, a distraught cry born of dread and exasperation against the infinite, drowned out in the nothingness—
For gain or loss I no longer care,
And right or wrong is no more my affair.
Thousands of springs and autumns pass away,
So will disgrace and glory of today.
Perchance I may regret, while living still,
I have not drunken good wine to my fill.
—Tao Yuanming, AN ELEGY FOR MYSELF, tr. Xu Yuan Zhong
Why does everything have to have a purpose? . . . It's all a big nothing. What makes you think you're so special?
—Livia Soprano, THE SOPRANOS
The years have passed
And age has come my way.
Yet I need only look at this fair flower
For all my cares to melt away.
—Sei Shōnagon, THE PILLOW BOOK, tr. Ivan Morris
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
—#20, TAO TE CHING, tr. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
Perceptions from Media, and Art: Serious vs Popular
With our realm of knowledge confined to our narrow perceptions and limited experiences which form our inner painting, and given the difficulty of knowing many and varied individuals, our reality is simply what we have come to know, one small fraction of the whole. Behind the painting is a window to the outside: but how to know that our windows, or someone else’s, accurately captures the actual? In the daily crowds of society where strangers exchange hardly a few words or, even if they do, remain behind idle pleasantries, what is the scope of the relation among most people? Between one person and another, what can each know of the other beyond the images created from one’s own coloration? Part of the significance of media representation is predicated on our limitation of not knowing others, that instead of grappling with the overwhelming complexity and drowning quantities of people in an attempt to know individuals, we frame much of our interpretations of people, groups, and reality through received presentations on the blockbuster screen: stock characters, readily understood tropes, marketable motivations, simplified portrayals, story arcs that within the short span of their alotted screentime must resolve to some conventional satisfaction. Script writers by the pressure of the market must conform to the audience’s expectations for the usual dichotomy between light and dark, good and evil, protagonist and antagonist, in another iteration of the hero’s journey with the same repeated excitement and denouement, and the creative minds behind a project must, again due to market and social pressure, inject some moralizing undertones, to abide by some agreement that the audience is not critical or reflective enough to see that the naive scheme does not represent the multifaceted layers of reality which are usually informed by multiple vantages and competing interests. Yet, because we are cloistered in the narrowness of our experiences and perceptions, after finishing one of these shows or movies, our horizons do not so much as expand as obtain further reinforcement of the same unquestioned assumptions, our minds and outlook remaining inhabited by standard archetypes, manufactured images, and cookie characters right from the stencil, invoked over and again.
Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of its productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable. The brief interval sequence which has proved catchy in a hit song, the hero's temporary disgrace which he accepts as a "good sport," the wholesome slaps the heroine receives from the strong hand of the male star, his plain-speaking abruptness toward the pampered heiress, are, like all the details, ready-made clichés, to be used here and there as desired and always completely defined by the purpose they serve within the schema . . . Nevertheless, the culture industry remains the entertainment business . . . Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again . . . The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what is imprinted is the automatic sequence of standardized tasks. The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association. The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not through any actual coherence—which collapses once exposed to thought—but through signals . . . Culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which is actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu.
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
How much of reality is reflected in news outlets and media, which regularly exhibit politics divisively, provoking intrigue on a daily interval that nears scandal? Who enjoys thinking about politics? The conventional binary in the political narrative reduces the complexity of society into a conservative character and a liberal one, offering two immediately understandable tropes, but how much do these two personas represent the many interests of actual people? It is certainly true that a pickup truck can drive down the highway, militantly flying a gun-toting flag, but many others are driven by regular folks with families and two kids that come out of the pickup on a weekend visit to the mall. Those who post the American flag on their porch can be far-right extremists, but they can just as well be moderates who want to display their patriotism or support for freedom. Likewise, the liberal bastion runs the gamut from fanatics of identity politics, socialists, unrealistic and hypocritical academics more familiar with provocative words than sustainable financial planning and economic costs, and lay virtue-signalers who hop on the bandwagon, to those who don’t endorse any of these positions and work on substantive research towards progress. How much of this range and its proportions are circulated in media which tends towards outrage and sensationalist headlines?
A book published a few months ago, WHITE RURAL RAGE, painted the familiar portrait of angry, discontent rural Americans, consistent with the predominant media portrayal. I do not claim that the book is untrue for a part of the rural communities, but is this the full picture? Some rural readers who read the book commented on the Substack of one of the authors, Paul Waldman, saying how the book misrepresents them. Tyler Austin Harper, in The Atlantic, writes that the book is misleading and has drawn controversy on its validity. But it may be the convenience of accepting the conventional narrative that propels the narrative to further and continued prominence. Case in point: the book, alarmist, clear in its blame, feeding the ready-made mold of rural ailment, became a bestseller. Currid-Halketts’s THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS, counseling reflection, openness, listening, the complexity of people and communities, did not. We can view one region in documentary form: Peter Santenello visits a town in Appalachia, talking to the locals, who despite the decline of the coal industry they depend on, who are relatively disadvantaged, aren’t angry as advertised in popular media. It may be of interest as well that Santenello found Joe in Appalachia who had been living the simple life in nature for fifty years out of his eighty, away from modern trappings—who, it must be observed, is almost as old as I am. The people in any group are different: some may respond with anger and extremism, but some may be mildly resistant, some repulsed, some despondent, others apathetic, still others weary of false and misleading characterizations towards which they have no adequate channel to respond.
The limitation of our knowledge has ramifications beyond constructing our reality only as we perceive it. How to practice what we preach when it comes to treating everyone equally? Without some wholesome exposure to others, especially those whose actualities do not align with our perceptions, even the most well-meaning folks among us will be equipped with only the abstract ideal, an untested conviction liable to disappointment and negligence—how to treat people from different regions, diverse backgrounds, and unfamiliar cultures equally? How to see them as they are and respond accordingly instead of seeing and interacting with them from the perceptions of our internalized images? Rather than relying solely on uncontested principles lacking the resilience obtained from experience, why not simply get some good, hearty exposure to the variegated multitudes of people not like ourselves? Without actual exposure, behind the ideals of equality we boast most loudly to ourselves, how much do we know of others behind stereotypes and sensationalized media images?
What will [an artist] do to obtain praise, if he has the misfortune of being born in a nation and at a time when fashionable scholars let superficial youth set the tone, where people sacrifice their taste to the tyrants of their freedom, where masterpieces of dramatic poetry and marvels of harmony are abandoned because one sex dares approve only what befits the pusillanimity of the other? What will he do, Gentleman? He will lower his genius to the level of his times and will prefer to compose ordinary works that will be appreciated during his lifetime, instead of marvels that would be valued only long after his death. Tell us, exalted Voltaire, how many virile and strong works of beauty you gave up for our false delicacy, and how much of what is great and noble did that mentality of gallantry, which delights in what is shallow and petty, cost you? . . . If by chance there can be found among extraordinarily talented men a single one who has strength of character and who refuses to bow to the mentality of his century and disgrace himself with puerile works, woe unto him! He will die in indigence and oblivion.
—Rousseau, DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND ARTS
Slavoj Žižek has commented on one effect of popular entertainment:
Canned laughter on TV, when laughter is part of the soundtrack itself—a very strange thing—like you watch some stupid TV show, tired in the evening, like CHEERS, FRIENDS, and you don't even have to laugh. The TV screen laughs for you . . . After seeing a show like CHEERS, even if I don't laugh . . . at the end I am relieved, as if I have laughed. Here we have emotions, an emotional discharge, but it doesn't happen psychologically to me. It's kind of objectified, but nonetheless it works.
However, entertainment is important too, and levity, frivolity, and easy merriment are necessary alongside serious art forms. Mary Bittner Wiseman describes their contrast in her book, THE ECSTASIES OF ROLAND BARTHES:
Barthes distinguishes the traditional and the avant-garde texts in the following way: "Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." . . . The custom of the Cartesian is to make truth a supreme value resident in the reference of a representation (signifier) to what is represented (referent) . . . The conceptual scheme in play is one whose deepest cut is between objecive world and subjective self, with language handmaiden to the world it represents and the self whose thoughts and feelings it expresses . . . What this view of language implies for literature is that literature copies the world and the passions and actions of its inhabitants, and authors speak to readers indirectly through their works . . . The challenge of the literary avant-garde cannot be met as were similar challenges to received thought posed by abstract art and non-Euclidean geometries: the one changed the conception of paintings from copies of the seen world to realities in their own right; the other changed the conception of geometry from a realistic description of actual space to a conventional description of some possible space. What is shaken by the avant-garde text are not simply beliefs about the relation of literature to what is outside it . . ., but, as Barthes registers in his characterization of the text of bliss, the reader's assumptions about the world, its past, its culture, and its people, his self-consistency, and his relation to language.
too shallow
二二二二二二二二
// \\
\/ ||
__________ _________
,~~| text of | | text of |~~,
entertainment , | pleasure | | bliss | , transcendent peace
.~>|__________| |_________|<~.
|| /\
\\ //
二二二二二二二
too hard
perspectives: crossing is nonsense; each is enjoyed on its own right
an addict for pleasure
stumbles always further in vain
another, bliss without joy
perished stone
For if we eliminate all human emotions, there is no difference left, I will not say between men and animals because animals have their feelings, but even between men and tree-trunks, or stones, or any other inanimate object you like to mention.
—Cicero, LAELIUS DE AMICITIA, tr. Michael Grant
Watching and listening, studying, thinking, dreaming, attending to the varying moods of the pond, writing in his journals, trying the virtue of the great world outside by the simple truths of his secluded existence—all that brought his [Thoreau's] career to fruition . . . [T]he Transcendentalists were not systematic philosophers, bent on arranging the pattern of life into a logical sequence. Quite the contrary: they believed in living by inspiration . . . Their philosophy was little more than a collection of 'thoughts,' of individual aspirations and manifestations distilled from the sunshine and the mist over the river.
—Brooks Atkinson, introduction (1937) to WALDEN:
Hermann Hesse moved to a mountain village in 1919, writing and painting in the natural preserves of the gardens, ponds, trees, flowers, and mountains, collecting a year’s worth of prose, poetry, and watercolors into a serene, soulful little book called WANDERING:
Like the day between morning and evening, my life falls between my urge to travel and my homesickness. Maybe some day I will have come far enough for travel and distances to become part of my soul, so that I will have their images within me, without having to make them literally real anymore. Maybe I will also find that secret home within me where there will be no more flirting with gardens and little red houses. To be at home with myself! How different life would be! There would be a center, and out of that center all forces would reach. But there is no center in my life; my life hovers between poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there. A longing for loneliness and cloister here, and an urge for love and community there. I have collected books and paintings and given them away. I have cultivated voluptuousness and vice, and renounced them for asceticism and penance. I have faithfully revered life as substance, and then realized that I could recognize and love life only as function . . . Red house in the green! I have already lived through you, I can't go on living through you. I have already established a home, I have built a house, measured wall and roof, laid out paths in the garden, and hung my own walls with my own pictures. Every person is driven to do the same—I am happy that I once lived this way. Many of my desires in life have been fulfilled. I wanted to be a poet, and became a poet. I wanted to have a house, and built one. I wanted to have a wife and children, and had them. I wanted to speak to people and impress them, and I did so. And every fulfillment quickly became satiety. But to be satisfied was the very thing I could not bear. Poetry became suspect to me. The house became narrow to me. No goal that I reached was a goal, every path was a detour, every rest gave birth to new longing. Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning. There, where contradictions die, is Nirvana. Within me, they still burn brightly, beloved stars of longing.
Hesse ends his WANDERING from the vantage of a visitor looking upon the townsfolk in the small village he’s settled in where he knows he doesn’t belong, with a poem entitled EVENINGS:
Abends gehn die Liebespaare Evenings the lovers walk Langsam durch das Feld, Slowly through the field, Frauen lösen ihre Haare, Women let down their hair, Händler zählen Geld, Businessmen count money, Bürger lesen hang das Newste Townspeople anxiously read the latest In dem Ubendblatt, In the evening paper, Kinder ballen kleine Fäuste, Children clench tiny fists, Schlafen tief und satt. Sleeping deep and dark. Jeder tut das einzig Wahre, Each one with his own reality, Folgf erhabner Pflicht, Following a noble duty, Bürger, Säugling, Liebespaare— Townspeople, infants, lovers— Und ich selber nicht? And not me? Doch! Auch meiner Abendtaten, Yes! My evening tasks also, Deren Sklav ich bin, To which I am a slave, Kann der Weltgeist nicht entraten, Cannot be done without the spirit of the age, Sie auch haben Sinn. They too have meaning. Und so geh ich auf und nieder, And so I go up and down, Tanze innerlich, Dancing inside, Summe dumme Gassenlieder, Humming foolish street songs, Lobe Gott und mich, Praise God and myself, Trinfe Wein und phantafiere, Drink wine and pretend Daß ich Pascha wär, That I am a pasha, Fühle Sorgen an der Niere, Worry about my kidneys, Lächle, trinke mehr, Smile, drink more, Sage Ja zu meinem Herzen Saying yes to my heart (Morgens geht es nicht), (In the morning, this won't work), Spinne aus vergangnen Schmerzen Playfully spin a poem Spielend ein Gedicht, Out of suffering gone by, Sehe Mond und Sterne freisen, Gaze at the circling moon and stars, Ahne ihren Sinn, Guessing their direction, Fühle mich mit ihnen reisen Feel myself one with them, on a journey Einerlei wohin. No matter where.
Urbal-Rural Divide
I wish to draw a close to this post by returning to the urban-rural divide, viewing it through the difference between moderation and Schopenhauerian striving. City folks have the worldview which works within the meritocratic, globalized, highly competitive and comparative environment, and I suppose it’s this vantage of valuation and judgment they bring with them when viewing rural America. When they see rural America’s privation of the urban sparkle and spectacle, the images of aspiration, and the necessary means to succeed in it, all the preparations, the resources, the people, the immediate assumption is rural backwardness, the anger and resentment from not having, whereas it seems to me that the urban trappings, the intensity of desire, the commitment to striving, the endless series of attaining which yields no satiety, have not taken such firm roots among the people outside the cities, and rural folks simply don’t hunger for nearly as much. This is not to say that people, urban or rural, don’t wish to succeed in the worldly economic system the cities represent, but that it is helpful to understand that many rural folks, in the course of daily life and foreseeable horizons, don’t desire as rapaciously as city meritocrats and retain something of the uncorrupted simplicity of ordinary living.
With no one to see or look on, wealth becomes sightless indeed and bereft of radiance. For when the rich man dines alone with his wife or intimates he lets his tables of citrus-wood and golden beakers rest in peace and uses common furnishings, and his wife attends without her gold and purple and dressed in plain attire. But when a banquet—that is, a spectacle and a show—is got up and the drama of wealth is brought on, "out of the ships he fetched the urns and tripods," [from Homer's ILLIAD] the repositories of the lamps are given no rest, the cups are changed, the cup-bearers are made to put on new attire, nothing is left undisturbed, gold, silver, or jewelled plate, the owners thus confessing that their wealth is for others.
—Plutarch, ON LOVE OF WEALTH, MORALIA, tr. W. C. Helmbold
In the cities, it is not enough to go to college and get a job—it is prized to attend selective, elite schools, preferably highly ranked high schools and then similarly reputed colleges and ideally graduate or professional school too—it is not sufficient to attain happiness on the absolute terms of doing what one finds enjoyable but that every choice becomes comparative: one must do better than one’s neighbor and continually make the effort to sustain that position. It is only through Rousseau’s decrying of the excesses of luxuries and refinements and feigned airs that one can appreciate the natural happiness of simplicity, the breath of relief and rest, a sensible temperance when free of constant comparison. As Currid-Halkett observes:
[I]f you live in rural America and you are told only 0.5 percent of people attend an Ivy League and the top 1 percent includes tautologically, just 1 percent of the population, do these feel like issues that concern you? You've got a house, your kids live nearby, you see them and your grandchildren almost daily, food is reasonably priced, you don't pay for private school, your kids don't attend $70,000 per year private universities, and everyone is doing alright. How much can you really care that you're not a member of an elite class? No one I spoke to felt left out or left behind. They didn't express the angst that so many urban meritocrat parents experience as their kids apply to top universities. The rural Americans I spoke to conveyed a contentment that none of my friends in coastal cities with meritocratic jobs and pedigrees ever express.
The liberal view, situated in the urban, globalized milieu, constitutes a perceiving window, an outlook, with its confined vantage, prejudice, and separation from the actual, hostile to rural folks, and part of this hostility comes from behind the window itself. I wish to mention something Victor Davis Hanson writes in his book, THE CASE FOR TRUMP. As an indication of how much the victimized sentiment stings, nowhere else in the book does Hanson sustain so lengthily one specific topic, that for twenty-six consecutive pages he provided example after example, from the 2016 election campaign, major newspapers, magazines, and social media, of liberal disdain and insult towards “the forgotten working class of the interior.” Hanson quotes Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail: “You know, to be just grossly generalistic [sic], you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” And after quoting Melinda Byerley who wrote something to much the same effect, Hanson writes of her:
[A] the founder of the Silicon Valley company Timeshare CMO . . . voiced the traditional progressive palliative that Trump's rise was attributable to racism and misogyny, rather than to economic discontent and a weariness that the losers of globalization were scapegoated by the winners as responsible for most of America's supposed historical pathologies. Byerley also might have revealed progressive insular arrogance . . . Progressives were also more honest and candid about what they really thought of their red-state counterparts when there was no longer a need for election-era prudence and pretext . . . What is again odd about these examples of open progressive contempt for the American interior is not just how ubiquitously politicians and journalists voiced them, but also how candidly and indeed confidently they repeated notions of smelly, toothless, lazy 'garbage people.' In that sense, who hated Trump and what he represented also explains precisely why so many went to the polls to elect him, and why Trump's own uncouthness was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them. As one side loudly snickered about the stinky white Trump demographic, the other quietly voted . . . Thematic was not just mockery of red-state America, but self-congratulation on one's superior virtue and cultural enlightenment, as if one explained the other. Another aim of collating these pre- and post-election dismissals of half of America is to again remind that Trumpism was fundamentally a reaction, not a catalyst . . . For a movement that denied its antipathy for Trump and was fueled by a class-based contempt for his supporters, it was remarkable how frequently critics resorted to a 'deport them' anger at Trump voters . . . The point is not to pile example upon example of silly elitism, but to convey how deeply a coastal culture despised its own antithesis, a disgust that transcended and predated Trump himself.
When the liberal elite unduly accuses the prejudices and failings of social relations in the country, embedded in the country’s history, solely to a disadvantaged group as though these failings can be found only in the countryside and not also among themselves, Schopenhauer’s conception of the world as vacillating from suffering to ennui and back to suffering assumes a new meaning: blind, insatiable will.
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
—William Blake, LONDON, SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
Finis
‘Tis rambling all day finally returneth to me first aim: doth thou accusé moi, troppo serio? I caution thee: thou must forgivest the faults of mine old age! Please do consulteth thy internets to see the hair color of almost all whom ich doth mentioneth today, for it is mine own too: are they not all grey or greying? Methinks mine photo doth givest thee die falsche impresión; appearances wert keen to deceive, but I am in Trueth as old as they! Some years in mine foggy past, I remember not how long ago!, mine sturdy haunches seteth sail on Voyage to Atlantis, and therein discovereth me what none other hath found because, at that Revelation when Sun shone upon meself, this thirsty mouth of yours truly dutifully quenched die Elixir: towards eternal youth! Das der truth! If thou doth nein believest moi, I must tellest thee that me wert in der same room on das dark, stormy night unter ein Full Moon and howlingeth wolves as me watcheth mein Kumpel Schopenhauer, who in goldendays was yet in Prime, not yeth widely known, struggleth to make ein nameth for himself, asketh mine assistance, scribbleth in some papers he later calleth PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA, “I shall be told again, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless—because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace!” Wit das last word of serenity, he doth layeth down his pen with anything but! And at that very moment, I saw ariseth ein der corner of the room, near die fireplace, ein shadowy terror against die wall that waiteth, waiteth, and then waiteth some more as it stood thither treacherously, posing eine great threat to diese two poor souls lost in ein cabin staring back at’it wit’our two sets, gaping eyes! Nein! Das ist nicht meiner shadow! What art thou, Kreatur der Nacht? At its very sight, Schopennie falleth unto schizophrennie and thither doth lay openeth his palms and reciteth zee BOOK OF PSALMS:
Lord, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Many are saying of me, "God will not deliver him." But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high. I call out to the Lord, and he answers me from his holy mountain. I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear though tens of thousands assail me on every side. Arise, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.
Doeth this, he! Breaketh some teeth? My oh my, violent be this man mefinds meself stucketh with on this dark Nacht! Verily, verily, I obeyeth. Who art I to defieth Scho-Scho? Me raiseth mine hand, striketh his foes, breaketh some teeth! But not a tooth cometh broken! Nein! Wishful theenking, Schopennie? Closeth thine eyes, prayeth big magic hand to strike thy foes? Wenn sein prayer faileth dissipateth das Nachwand, Schopen goneth hideth in das corner! Ist das truth! And hath mine poor ears wahrgenommen some harsh words in sein native tongue? Nawt ein mein Deutschland! Whine all das ruckus back there? Naeihnn! Mein name ist nicht von Hauer! Ist Mandrake! Das shadow cometh spreadeth le fluoride, das monstrous commie plot! Me turneth back to the shadow—nay, shattow, I sayest unto thee: art thou Nincompoop? And then the shadow announceth itself! What was this shadow, askest thee? Increíble! It waseth Plato! Plato doth come seeketh knowledge! I saith Plato! who in his search for knoweth could not resteth in peace! Up what hath this Schopenhauer stirred? But the shadow in fact came apologizeth! The shadow tosseth his dark cloak on the wooden chair and began reading from his APOLOGY, “After a long consideration . . . I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself.” Well, no doubt he came to the right place, coming to see diese two cranky grandfathers in der Nacht! But the shadow must have been blind, for it could nicht sehen that in the room was the presence of two others, and it hath thoughteth it talketh unto itself when it continueth readeth:
I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.
Hath this Play-Doh bade his contemporary Thor-Oh a grieving blow, for these two appeareth beforeth mineth eyes? Shadows, the two of them! One cometh seeking knowledge, while the other—? WALDEN! Saith I unto them: silence, shadow! Mine deareth reader, thou must understandst how meplexed when the shadow doth harden his heart! Shadow, thou art punk! Announceth Thorough:
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.
Away, shattow! Thou hast maketh too much noise in diese crowded cabin! Me hath forgotten when mine head turneth away from the rambling, but when I gazeth a-gane at die fireplace, there remaineth dee treacherous shadow, groweth taller, more horrifying than beforeth, its facial details all the moreth unavoidable to one’s curiouseth eyes! This shadow was blind I tell thee! Blind! With empty eye sockets! Thou must believeth mine story! But—aar—aargh! Mine memory lapseth! Was’it der shape of ein pumpkin on the wall staring back at moi or did it resemble…an owl? THE BLIND OWL, says Sadegh Hedayat!—
At an age when we have not yet learnt the language of men if at times we pause in our play it is that we may listen to the voice of death.
Aye, but mine day wert yet this one! Rest assured, mine dear reader of this ancient, dusty tome thou hast discovereth on some disheveled bookshelf nary a spelunker hath braveth! Thy writer of thine incarnate words thou art readeth hath more glorious a place to perish than with this poor company! But oh! Ho ho ho! Oh! Old bones ache! Acheth they me! Mine little pinkie waveth like ein world-weary wand in the stale old air and conjureth the bones of Janeth Austeneth! She hath choseneth tonight to taketh it upon herself to present to die world that which she did not on her first wakeness to chanteth from within her NORTHANGER ABBEY against a dismissive audience:
[T]here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel."—Such is the common cant.—"And what are you reading, Miss—?" "Oh, it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
It is only a novel! A novel? What is diese of which thou speaketh?
Rousseau elaborateth in his CONFESSIONS:
I intend to present my peers with a man in all the truth of nature [Me be all ears!]. And this man will be me [Yes please!]. Myself alone [Really? Me can nicht waiteth!]. I feel my heart, and I know mankind [Thou knowest moi? Ich bid thee grateful for mine bright spirits!] . . . If I am so little master of my mind when alone, one can imagine how I must be in conversation, a situation in which one has to think about a thousand things at once. Just the thought of the many social conventions, of which I am sure to forget at least one, is enough to intimidate me. I cannot even understand how anyone can dare to speak in company, for with every word one utters one must weigh all the people present and know their characters and their histories so that one can rest assured that nothing one says might offend anybody . . . In a tête-à-tête there is another difficulty that I find even worse: the need to speak continuously; when someone says something to you, you must answer, and if nothing is being said, you must revive the conversation. This unbearable constraint alone would have been enough for me to turn my back on society. I find no effort more terrible than the obligation to speak on the spur of the moment and continually.
Thy shadow on the wall runeth away? Nein! Schoppie doth needeth adviceth from hine contemporat Alfred Douglas, who doth writeth ein 1849 book aptly calleth THE ETIQUETTE OF FASHIONABLE LIFE:
It not infrequently happens that gentlemen of superior talents and abilities, and ladies of amiable dispositions and first-rate accomplishments, appear lost in society, simply for not having sufficient acquaintance with the somewhat complicated rules and regulations of fashionable life.
Describeth thee, Schoppee? Or Rue de Sous? Shoo-Shoo and Rue-Rue, whither did ye go? An Joyce laments, FINNEGANS WAKE:
Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie? of a trying thirstay mournin? Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain's chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog and magog and the round of them agrog.
Comeneth zounopireateth ouimeleth peredeth aseheth kokoleth tereteth! From whispers from the wind—or was it voices in me head?—I hath gathered from hearsaith that someone me nevereth heareth who goeth by nameth Noam Chomsky hath saith in einem interview at die Universität von Washington:
What does it mean for the language to be pure? Or when people say they want English to be pure. What are they talking about? Was Shakespeare pure? In fact, [in] every stage of history, languages are—there is, first of all, there is no such thing as a language. There are just lots of different ways of speaking that different people have that are more or less similar to one another. And some of them may have prestige associated with them; for example, some may be the speech of a conquering group or a wealthy group or a priestly caste or one thing or another, and we may decide, OK, those are the good ones, and some other ones are the bad ones, but if social and political relations reversed, we'd make the opposite conclusions. Take Black English today. Black English is considered not quite proper English. On the other hand, if Blacks happen to have all the power and own all the corporations, and whites were working for them, it would be the other way around. Black English would be the language of culture and science and so on, and the stuff that you and I speak would be considered a degenerate dialect which you'd have to get people out of so they'll be able to think . . . So what we call "good English" is a system, which is partly artificial I should say, which is taught to people because it was legislated to be "good English." Now some of what is taught breaks the rules of any conceivable human language. That's why it has to be taught over and over again. So I don't know if people still do it in school, but when I was in school, you had to learn all sorts of complicated nonsense about "shall" and "will" which nobody could ever remember. I mean I forget what it was—"I shall", "You will", or some strange thing. There are certain principles of human biology which determine what a language can be, and no language can be like that. In fact, you can trace that back, and you can find out who invented it, you know, some bishop in the 17th century or something invented it and decided that's the way it's supposed to be. Now that kind of thing of course has to be taught because it's totally artificial. Or you have to teach people how to say "He and I" instead of "Him and me". Well, English, it sort of works the other way. I mean, if nobody was bothering you in English, you'd probably say "Him and me," but you're taught in the standard language not to do that. That's some other invented language which is called the literary standard in which you don't do it. And you ask the question, "Why do you have to teach people?" Well you have to teach them because it's artificial. It's not their language. And often it's not just not their language. Sometimes it's not even any possible language.
I must digress: I first came to know Jimmy McMillan, who ran for governor of New York in 2010, when I bumpeth into heem at Local Bodega and could immediately! detect the wonder of his musical presence. Me quickly learneth that he ist Politiker, but this was no boring Democrat or Republican spewing some routine pitch pushed along the old conveyor belt but something a fair bit more ex-seeting, something even his rivals would concede is incredibly practical! In fact, he declareth heemself to the world: the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. Could there be any room for scrutiny as to where mine very importanteth loyalitad drifted or who woneth mine very important voteth? He may not hath made it to office, but as evidence of how his message resonated with the peepôl, he grew popular on this complicated apparatus called der Internet which confounds me still! after all these years! trying to adapt to this strange new digital world! And he even released a music video three years later when he ran, unsuccessfully again, for mayor of the city!
Seeing that I have already shared one of my secrets, I must relate another! Hear ye! Back in 1971, when I was approaching the end of my golden middle-age years, Antonia Chayes indulged herself in the same habit that has too often overtaken the better of moi—recalling one’s younger years. She recalls some moments from her youth in her essay, DISARMED AT MIDDLE AGE: “I was often wilted by the middle-aged spinster who taught me English—’Good writing is learning what to leave in the inkwell, which is most of what you have written.’” Sí, señora.
↑ ↓ 2023-06-22, 四. Some Thoughts on the Value of the Novel in the Twenty-first Century.
Today’s post is a collection of thoughts that have occurred to me at one point or another, some ideas and some questions I’ve considered, many of which I have not quite answered.
The starting point is this question: why should someone read a novel given that modernity offers many other sources of pleasure? The basis for this question stems from the very real fact that we are all mortal, with finite timelines, and so we are each posed, consciously or not, with a question: what to occupy this timeline with? This question comes in the broad, abstract form of ideation, in planning for the future, of reconciling with the past, but also in the momentary decisions one makes as one goes through one’s day. Within this context, the initial question arises again: why should one read a novel? The time spent reading a novel could instead be allocated to any alternative, to any competing call for attention, for one’s finite time. The immediate competitors to the novel are: streaming television and film, podcasts, natural language AI, yet this problem extends as well to non-verbal mediums: music, concerts and music festivals, theatre, concert dance, or more casual activities like catching up with a friend or meeting someone at a bar who has his or her own story which has the benefit of being real, not generated by someone’s faulty imagination, or even some wholesome outdoors activity, or succumbing to the ever-distracting presence of social media. Reading a novel is incredibly impractical because it yields no material gain, no apparent benefit. Why should someone picking up a book, scrutinizing the pretty cover and skimming the summary and reviews on the back, assessing whether or not to buy it, be convinced that this book won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time? It would hardly surprise anyone that literary readership has been declining over the years, as we shall we further below.
To be clear, I am not saying that one should pick one activity to the exclusion of others, but that within one’s lifetime, one is going to dabble in these various activities—and when it comes to enjoying things like novels, films, and music, readily accessible in the modern age, why settle for anything less than the best? Even the most avid reader is limited in how many books he or she can read in a lifetime. So then why pick this novel and not the one next to it on the shelf, or any other in the library or bookstore? Why read this author and not any other? Indeed, if one is a novelist, how can one know what one writes is not derivative or repetitive, not a mere echo of another novel which is already available at the nearest bookstore, or that what he writes will remain relevant in ten, twenty years? What new insights or ideas does this novel provide that hasn’t already been said? How can a novelist be certain he is not an imbecile peddling egotism, proclaiming that his narrative is worth more attention than others, forgetting that everyone else also has a story and can also use words? I suppose it’s a form of naivety or an arrogant ego to put out a novel and expect anyone to read it because one is asking the reader to spend some of his or her finite time on a humble, little novel rather than on Shakespeare or Dante or Proust or Cervantes. As Virginia Woolf writes in her essay HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?:
Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind . . . And we may be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its most superficial quality and that we have only to alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.
If the conventional wisdom is that Americans at present are reading fewer books than earlier generations, how many people are still reading? I wish to start by mentioning a strange phenomenon: book sales, at least in recent years, are not declining. WordsRated charted how many printed books sold in the U.S. between 2018 and 2022, and the trend is not that book sales are definitively dropping, but that sales have been more or less consistent, rising some years and lowering in others, hovering around 750 million sold per year. Yet according to a Gallup article with data from 1990 to 2021, Americans are indeed reading fewer books—though according to this poll the decline is not precipitous, only lowering from an average of 15.3 in 1990 to 12.6 in 2021. The caveat, though, is that both of these numbers are generously high—the question Gallup used was an umbrella catch-all for “how many books [Americans] ‘read, either all or part of the way through’”, and these numbers are not limited to printed books, but “all forms of books, including printed books but also electronic books and audiobooks.” The Gallup poll notes that this drop is not due to a broad drop in book readership across the population, but due primarily to a drop among avid readers: “The decline in book reading is mostly a function of how many books readers are reading, as opposed to fewer Americans reading any books . . . The drop is fueled by a decline in the percentage of Americans reading more than 10 books in the past year.” Yet Caleb Crain came to the opposite conclusion in an article in The New Yorker: “[T]he average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from 26.3 per cent of the population in 2003 to 19.5 per cent in 2016. You could call this a compositional effect, but it’s a rather tautological one: reading is in decline because the population is now composed of fewer readers.” This variance may be due to their different data collection methods; Gallup surveyed 811 participants by asking them over the phone how many books they read in the past year, while Crain, writing that, “It’s pretty much useless to ask how many books somebody read last year, because almost nobody remembers, and many exaggerate, to seem smarter”, used the annual data since 2003 from the American Time Use Survey, which asks participants “to recall how [they] spent [their] time during the 24-hour period on the day before [their] interview.” However, even this method isn’t perfect, as Crain writes, “A subject who doesn’t report any reading may not be a non-reader in any absolute sense. All we know for sure is that she didn’t happen to do any reading on the day under scrutiny.” Yet whatever the reason is for the diminishing readership numbers, this seems to be the consensus: book readership is on the decline. But why are book sales not matching that decline, that books are still selling fairly well even though fewer Americans are actually reading? LitHub points out this anomaly, noting the book sales data from the Gallup poll above, then mentioning, “In fact, these days Americans are reading less than they have in over 30 years . . . So what’s going on here? Why are Americans buying more books, but actually reading fewer of them?” The article suggests some possible reasons, then lists some from their Slack channel, including a facetious comment, “books are only for taking photos of and posting to Instagram, not for reading, silly.” And if that’s one reason, who am I to judge? Perhaps Erving Goffman was right in 1956 when he wrote in THE PRESENTATION OF THE SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE that:
[A] Vogue model, by her clothing, stance, and facial expression, is able expressively to portray a cultivated understanding of the book she poses in her hand; but those who trouble to express themselves so appropriately will have very little time left over for reading . . . And so individuals often find themselves with the dilemma of expression versus action. Those who have the time to perform a task well may not, because of this, have the time or talent to make it apparent that they are performing well. It may be said that some organizations resolve this dilemma by officially delegating the dramatic function to a specialist who will spend his time expressing the meaning of the task and spend no time actually doing it.
Again, I’m not judging; it’s other people’s lives, which is none of my business. I’m merely making an observation, suggesting it as perhaps a problem for novelists, one that should be addressed, and even then, it’s not that I have any more than vague ideas moving forward. Whether or not people end up reading the books they buy, the most popular books are starting to get self-conscious about saving the trees: according to an analysis by WordsRated, New York Times bestsellers have been getting shorter, decreasing “by 51.5 pages from 2011 to 2021, from 437.5 to 386 (11.8%).” And what is the scope of the population that doesn’t read? According to the Gallup poll, which uses the loose definition of reading as consuming in part or in whole any book form, 17% of Americans don’t read at all, “a percentage that has held steady” between 1990 and 2021. This consistency is mirrored in a survey from The Pew Research Center which uses same loose definition of reading as Gallup; the percentage itself is different, but the trend is the same: “The 23% of adults who currently say they have not read any books in the past year is identical to the share who said this in 2014.” In a stricter conception of reading by WordsRated—which is obviously a research group that takes itself very seriously—oh, so serious!—defined as finishing a full book either in printed or ebook form, 51.57% of Americans have not read a single book in the past 12 months in a 2022 study—maybe the folks in this survey weren’t trying to seem smarter, perhaps because they, like WordsRated, take themselves very seriously.
What are the costs of declining book readership? The National Endowment for the Arts issued in 2002 a report called, menacingly, READING AT RISK, using data collected by the Census Bureau at three points over the course of twenty years—in 1982, 1992, and 2002—to show the decline in literary reading, with the percentage of adults reading dropping from 56.9% to 54% to 46.7%. The report cautions:
While oral culture has a rich immediacy that is not to be dismissed, and electronic media offer the considerable advantages of diversity and access, print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment. More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts – as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.
—in short: The sky is falling! And so on. As the report suggests, there may indeed be a correlation between reading and participation the activities in “civic and cultural life,” because their data “shows the levels of ‘crossover’ participation, that is, the number of literary readers who also participate in a range of additional cultural and leisure activities.” According to the report:
Analysis of the . . . data . . . show that people who read literature are active, attending a variety of arts events, volunteering in their communities, and participating in sports. In fact, literary readers are much more likely to participate than those who do not read. For example, literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, over two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend sporting events, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to participate in sports activities. In fact, people who read larger numbers of books tend to have the highest levels of participation in other activities, especially arts activities.
The crossover effect may not be as dramatic as the report suggests. The report’s tables do show that readers engage significantly more in those other activities, but correlations are not causations: more educated and more affluent folks, as the report points out as well, read more. They would also participate in those other activities at higher rates.
Another possible cost of declining book readership: a 2016 paper on graduate business students found a correlation between the complexity of students’ reading with that of their writing:
Our findings reveal strong correlations between students' most common reading content and their writing on widely-used measures of writing sophistication . . . Students who read academic journals, 'literary' fiction, or general non-fiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication than students who read genre fiction (mysteries, fantasy, or science fiction) or exclusively web-based content aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed. In fact, when we examined the scores on L2 measures of syntactic complexity, writing with the lowest syntactic complexity was associated with heavy or exclusive reading of web-based content from the likes of BuzzFeed, Tumblr, and Reddit. In contrast, students with the highest scores of syntactic complexity in their writing read academic journals more frequently than their peers . . . In particular, our ability to read and write involves Broca's area, which enables us to perceive rhythm and syntax; Wernicke's area, which impacts our perception of words and meaning; and the angular gyrus, central to our perception and use of language. In addition, Broca's and Wernicke's areas are wired together by a band of fibres, the arcuate fasciculus, while the angular gyrus itself sits as the junction between the occipital (visual functions) and temporal (auditory functions) intersect. This neuroanatomy may predispose even adults to mimicry and synchrony with the language they routinely encounter in their reading, directly impacting their writing.
Neuroplasticity, as Nicholas Carr argues in THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS, is how our mental capacities are growing more and more distracted, subject to superficial websurfing:
Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don't fire together don't wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones . . . The researchers found that when people search the Net they exhibit a very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they read a book-like text. Book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don't display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those brain regions when they scan and search Web pages . . . But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online . . . Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or nor we should click on it . . . [Comprehension] declined as the number of links increased. Readers were forced to devote more and more of their attention and brain power to evaluating the links and deciding whether to click on them.
Be that as it may. I am not suggesting anyone take on the probably impossible task of withdrawing from technology altogether and become a cave-dwelling Luddite—the world will move on, technology will continue evolving, taking up a greater share of our lives as we become more dependent on it, however much any cantankerous curmudgeon complains about corrupting new technologies and disorderly younger generations, but that it may be worthwhile to recognize the costs and what it is that’s changing. A further question: if writing levels are declining, who’s to say assistant writing software like Grammarly won’t help? Or perhaps even generative AI? Maybe at some point we will have outsourced most of our writing to technology. An opinion paper this year provokes the reader in the title: SO WHAT IF CHATGPT WROTE IT? The paper presents a long list of precautions, biases, and limitations, concluding with the thought that “it is imperative to enact new laws to govern these tools.” But how well can ChatGPT write an academic paper? A recent radiology article was written mostly by ChatGPT, with the author, Som Biswas, then doing the editing. Biswas writes, perhaps not without protest by some readers, “Herein, we see that artificial intelligence has come to a level at par, if not above, human authors.” ChatGPT itself describes how it can be used in medical writing: “A chatbot trained on medical writing could potentially assist a medical writer by generating draft text for a document . . . The writer could then review and edit the generated text as needed to ensure accuracy and clarity.” Another recent article, from Lea Bishop, was written through a Socratic dialogue with ChatGPT, in which Bishop writes aggressively, though with a refreshingly honest directness, in the introduction:
Your entire life experience up to this point in time is consistent with the belief that only human beings can compose 'natural-sounding' paragraphs. . . . Like the human evaluator proposed by Alan Turing, you were fooled. You were unable to distinguish ChatGPT from a human being. From this day forward, you will commonly be unable to distinguish a machine writer from a human one. This article will help you wrestle with that strange new reality.
She then adds, “And in case you were wondering, I did in fact write the second and third paragraphs myself. You’ll just have to take my word on that.” If artificial intelligence writes better than humans, we may at least no longer have to suffer the fallibilities of unconsidered human-writing like garden-path sentences and what Helen Sword calls zombie nouns. As Steven Pinker writes, “[F]or every ambiguity that yields a coherent (but unintended) interpretation of the whole sentence, there must be thousands which trip up the reader momentarily, forcing her to backtrack and re-parse a few words.” And what about longer pieces of writing? In the coming years, with improved versions, how well can ChatGPT write a novel? Would it just need some light editing by a human assistant? If you knew it was written by AI, would you read it? How can you tell? What about short, comforting, saccharine snippets of poetry? Would it matter? Would such a future be reprehensible?
Let us now take a step back and situate the declining book readership problem within a societal context (I apologize if this section is long, as it’s not the main concern of this post, but this grew and grew as I was writing it). No one likes to think about class or inequality; it simply is not pleasant to consider unequal access to resources due to causes not entirely under one’s control, but its effects on book readership, among other things, are unignorable. The Pew study above mentions:
Several demographic traits are linked with not reading books, according to the survey. For instance, adults with a high school diploma or less are far more likely than those with a bachelor's or advanced degree to report not reading books in any format in the past year (39% vs. 11%) . . . In addition, adults whose annual household income is less than $30,000 are more likely than those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year to be non-book readers (31% vs. 15%). Hispanic adults (38%) are more likely than Black (25%) or White adults (20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months.
—the paragraph concludes with a sentence in parentheses: “The survey included Asian Americans but did not have sufficient sample size to do statistical analysis of this group.”—hey, at least they tried. Crain’s article in The New Yorker links to a line chart showing the average hours per day spent reading within each income quartile, based on data from the American Time Use Survey, with Crain summarizing it unsurprisingly as, “it turns out that the rich read more.”
As it happens, the link between class (here, I use the terms ‘class’ and ‘status’ colloquially and interchangeably, whereas in sociology the terms are distinct, as Weber defined class as an objective economic position and status as a subjective perception of social honor and prestige) and cultural consumption has been the subject of research. I wish to preface this section with the origin of this kind of research, because of its perpetual relevance and also because of the incisive writing whose truth has no doubt animated, inflamed, and penetrated no fewer than just a handful of bookish academics. Though earlier sociologists (Durkheim, Weber) had studied social class, empirical studies on the link between class and cultural consumption started with Pierre Bourdieu, whose book DISTINCTION: A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE JUDGMENT OF TASTE (published in the original French in 1979 and translated into English in 1984) proposed the concept of cultural capital, among other forms of capital, and showed that differential preferences towards aesthetics, the arts, along with the different ways of self-presentation, of speaking, of familiarities, are segmented along class lines within a stratified society. Bourdieu described how the ruling upper class sustains class distinction in part through its dominant taste that is universally accepted in society as proper and legtimate. As Bourdieu writes:
In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier . . . The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil [sic] a social function of legitimating social differences.
Bourdieu writes more specifically:
It must never be forgotten that the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated 'aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics. The members of the working class, who can neither ignore the high-art aesthetic, which denounces their own 'aesthetic', nor abandon their socially conditioned inclinations, but still less proclaim them and legitimate them . . .
Within the research community, Bourdieu’s thesis of high art and low art as understood, appreciated, and consumed by its corresponding social class is also called the homology argument, but in 1992 Richard Peterson and Albert Simkus introduced an alternative model, the omnivore-univore hypothesis, based on their study of musical taste among status groups. According to the paper:
There is mounting evidence that high-status groups not only participate more than others do in high-status activites but also tend to participate more often in most kinds of leisure activities. In effect, elite taste is no longer defined as an expressed appreciation of the high art forms . . . Now it is being redefined as an appreciation of the aesthetics of every distinctive form along with an appreciation of the high arts.
Peterson published another paper on the subject the same year, developing it further a few years later, proposing “a qualitative shift in the basis for marking elite status—from snobbish exclusion to omnivorous appropriation.” It seems that the omnivore-univore model has gained acceptance as the prevailing representation, as suggested by this paper and the ones I’ll mention below which build on the omnivore view. With this new representation, as we shall see, some details have changed, but the underlying motivation remains. As Jerome Barkow writes in a 1975 paper:
Whenever anthropologists discuss competition and jealousy, speak of potlatches or counting coups, describe displays of ritualized boasting and ostentation or even the emergence of social stratification, they are making a basic assumption: men seek prestige and status, deference and respect. Such an assumption calls not for challenge—there is no reason to suspect its validity—but for analysis.
Who are these cultural omnivores? According to Peterson, the traditional highbrow exclusives have been replaced by these open, inclusive, accepting, egalitarian elites. But do these new elites harbor any desire for distinction? Tak Wing Chan writes in a 2019 paper seeking to answer this question:
[T]here are two views on this matter. Under the first view, omnivores are essentially tolerant, cosmopolitan individuals who are generally open to different cultural styles. Under the second view, cultural omnivorousness is an expression of distinction, a new form of cultural capital, and a novel way to demonstrate cultural and social superiority.
Some researchers advocate the second view, while Chan is among those who believe in the first, writing in the paper:
[T]hese results suggest that omnivorousness is an expression of cosmopolitan postmaterialism rather than a new form of distinction . . . Having considered the evidence . . . it seems to me that the first view receives far more empirical support than does the second . . . [I]t would be unjustified to regard cultural omnivorousness as the symbolic expression of class domination or of status competition. Instead, it might be more useful to think along the following line. Some individuals are more open, tolerant and cosmopolitan than others.
When he wrote this paper, Chan’s view did not change from the initial conviction he had 13 years prior to the paper’s publication, when he and John Goldthorpe wrote in an earlier paper, published in 2006, that while “data adequate to test this possibility are not yet available”:
[S]o far as our present findings go, they incline us to favour the 'self-realization' rather than the 'status competition' view . . . [W]e would believe that a rather radical rethinking is now required of the nature of status relations in modern societies, and likewise of the part played by differences in cultural consumption in these relations. We would ally ourselves with proponents of the omnivore–univore argument who claim that, whatever validity the ideas of symbolic 'struggle' and 'violence', as advanced by Bourdieu and his followers, may have had for the earlier history of modern societies, they appear out of place the contemporary world. However, new ideas are then needed. Thus, while in the case of present-day Britain, a status order can still be discerned, it would appear to be less sharply demarcated than previously; and there is other evidence to indicate that status differences are now less openly asserted from above or deferentially acknowledged from below. In turn, therefore, it could also be that the connection between status and cultural consumption is itself tending to weaken, and even on omnivore-univore lines.
I suspect Chan has been unduly optimistic about what seems to be an inextinguishable component of human nature. Yet in the 2019 paper (the rest of this section on Chan’s view is based on this paper, not the 2006 one), Chan recognizes that due to public disapproval, omnivores would not admit to holding superior tastes:
[S]ince supercilious attitudes, or at least their public expression, have become less acceptable, omnivores are unlikely to admit to feeling superior to others. Moreover, they might not be fully aware of the status motivations that drive their cultural consumption. For these reasons, we do not have survey evidence that would directly reveal what omnivorousness means.
He then describes the reasoning that led to his conclusion:
Nonetheless, it is possible to determine whether cultural omnivores have a distinctive profile of attitudes in other domains. Such information will give us a sense of the kind of individuals omnivores are . . . [I]f cultural omnivorousness is, at its core, a form of distinction in the Bourdieusian sense, then we would expect omnivores to be quite status-conscious. In particular, when asked how they see themselves generally, i.e. outside the context of cultural consumption, we would expect education and occupation, the two most important status-conferring attributes to be especially salient to cultural omnivores.
I have two qualms about Chan’s paper:
1) His survey data is not relevant to his question
The survey from which he obtains his data asks its respondents this question (trimmed to only the relevant variables that happened to be the first two):
We'd like to know how important various things are to your sense of who you are. Please think about each of the following and tick the box that indicates whether you think it is very important, fairly important, not very important or not at all important to your sense of who you are. Please tick one answer on each line.
1. Your profession?
2. Your level of education?
. . .
Respondents fill out this survey at an arbitrary time in the course of their day. This is my question: would those who aspire to cultural distinction and who wish to maintain it remain aware of an attitude of superiority in every occasion, at every waking moment, unsolicited, not triggered by an awareness in relation to another’s taste, and to such a degree that it would, just as continuously throughout the day, spill over to their regarding their profession and education as important? And this, by the way, would be among omnivores whose manifest appetite is variety and inclusiveness and acceptance of those from different backgrounds, who are additionally aware that “supercilious attitudes, or at least their public expression, have become less acceptable.” In short, I disagree with Chan’s claim that such data, obtained from omnivores “when asked how they see themselves generally, i.e. outside the context of cultural consumption”, would be relevant to the question at hand—how omnivores signal their distinction.
2) I disagree with his reasoning
This is his reasoning translated into a form more analyzable: placing high importance on the self’s (1) education and (2) occupation indicates status-consciousness, and, further, this status-consciousness reveals subtle aspiration towards cultural distinction. This is the logical progression on which Chan bases his conclusion that omnivores are not concerned with status competition. So if he doesn’t find that omnivores place high importance on the self’s education or occupation—and in the study he doesn’t—then they must not be status-conscious about cultural distinction. Where I disagree is that the absence of highly valuing one’s education or occupation does not necessitate a corresponding absence of status-consciousness.
To be specific: what does he do in his study? Using latent class analysis on data of musical and visual arts consumption, he generated three latent classes: univores, omnivores, and paucivores (whose cultural consumption is in the modest middle between those of univores and omnivores). Then, using this “threefold typology” as the independent variable, he does regression analyses on 25 dependent variables, which are grouped into 7 domains, of which only one—sense of self, which includes how much respondents value their education and occupation—is relevant to my point, since it’s the one Chan used to lead to his conclusion that omnivores disregard cultural distinction (he comes up with other conclusions in the paper). Chan, discovering that omnivores don’t place greater importance on their education or occupation than univores or paucivores, leaps to the conclusion that they are not more status-conscious and therefore do not think their “cultural omnivorousness is an expression of distinction.” It is this leap to the conclusion that I take issue with because many affluent folks these days prefer to be inconspicuous, don’t identify with privilege, and may not think their education or occupation particularly important. Matthew Stewart describes these folks in an article in The Atlantic, THE 9.9 PERCENT IS THE NEW AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY, in which he writes:
I've joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners . . . To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I'll call—for reasons you'll soon see—the 9.9 percent. We've dropped the old dress codes, put our faith in facts, and are (somewhat) more varied in skin tone and ethnicity . . . It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century . . . Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did . . . In between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is a group that has been doing just fine. It has held on to its share of a growing pie decade after decade. And as a group, it owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined . . . You'll find the new aristocracy there. We are the 9.9 percent . . . So what kind of characters are we, the 9.9 percent? We are mostly not like those flamboyant political manipulators from the 0.1 percent. We're a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact, we're so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we're 'middle class.' . . . We gaze upon the 0.1 percent with a mixture of awe, envy, and eagerness to obey. As a consequence, we are missing the other big story of our time. We have left the 90 percent in the dust—and we've been quietly tossing down roadblocks behind us to make sure that they never catch up . . . In my family, Aunt Sarah was the true believer. According to her version of reality, the family name was handed down straight from the ancient kings of Scotland . . . The 9.9 percent are different. We don't delude ourselves about the ancient sources of our privilege. That's because, unlike Aunt Sarah and her imaginary princesses, we've convinced ourselves that we don't have any privilege at all.
Chan notes in his paper that other researchers believe in the opposing view, that omnivorousness is the new marker for distinction. Because I know I have observed the finer points of courtesy and have not been obvious, I wish to make it known that I am also convinced of the opposing view. Chan acknowledges these other researchers in his paper (to adapt this quote from an academic paper to an internet page, I’ve taken out the year of publication and page numbers and added the link to the referred paper/book):
Ollivier asserts that omnivorousness is "the new 'aesthetics of elite status' which replaced highbrow snobbishness as a means of class distinction." She maintains that it is 'a new form of cultural capital, in the Bourdieusian sense'. Warde et al. see 'more than a hint that in Britain an omnivorous orientation is itself a way of negotiating and demonstrating a form of distinction.' In a study of an elite boarding school in America, Khan posits that omnivorous consumption 'is itself a symbolic marker . . . this omnivorousness, become their own mark of distinction.' Similarly, Coulangeon argues that the '[c]ultural privilege of the elite [in France] seems to be increasingly defined by the combination of involvement in highbrow culture with openness to cultural diversity . . . it also goes hand in hand with a kind of self-segregation of the elite which is not fully consistent with the concept of cosmopolitanism . . . openness to cultural otherness is not incompatible with distance from the others.'
To add more context, I wish to add a few more words from the first two papers in the above paragraph. Michèle Ollivier writes:
Openness to cultural diversity, I argue, represents a new aesthetics and a new ethos, but it builds upon, rather than displaces, the older categories of high and mass culture in which it remains thoroughly embedded. Far from being dismantled, social and artistic hierarchies are being reconfigured in more individualized ways. Modes of openness rest on different models of agency which are themselves hierarchized along class and gender lines.
And Alan Warde et al.:
[W]hilst there is strong evidence of a decline in overt snobbishness in the UK, there is also evidence that omnivores have a more intensive involvement with 'legitimate' culture which goes alongside a selective appropriation of popular culture. In particular their dislikes reveal limits to openness which imply, paradoxically, a role for an omnivorous orientation in processes of distinction.
I wish to present the findings of a few researchers on the question of whether omnivorousness connotes an implicit status signal. Warde et al. also (the same authors as the above paper) write in a paper published in the year prior that although omnivores are more tolerant, their broad appetite may in fact be the new status signal:
The evidence of our interviews is certainly that omnivorousness accompanies tolerance; there was no evidence of the drawing of cultural boundaries to exclude other social groups, and few indications of snobbishness when expressing personal cultural tastes. Yet at the same time, extensive engagement is probably now considered a marker of good taste . . . Most studies which have compared the patterns of participation of omnivores with those of more traditional fine arts audiences, have found that omnivores attend theatre, opera, classical concerts, etc. more than do those who restrict their activities to high culture. Competence in consecrated culture remains restricted to a limited segment of the middle class. That segment may now have wider tastes in addition, but command of consecrated culture remains a token of distinction which probably still operates effectively as a form of cultural capital.
A paper from Gindo Tampubolon provides an analysis that
raise[s] questions about the omnivore-univore thesis and existing literature on cultural consumption. The findings also show that contrary to some recent studies, cultural consumption continues to be structured by social class. Most intriguing, however, is the result that culture is seen by avid cultural omnivores to be hierarchical. The received understanding of omnivores as tolerant and possessing inclusive tastes across culture hierarchy . . . diverges from evidence of both division within and culture hierarchy perceived by the omnivores. The apparent divergence can be resolved by acknowledging that the concept of omnivores as those whose tastes are inclusive pre-supposes and guarantees the existence of culture hierarchy.
One paper from Gerbert Kraaykamp et al. is interesting because it distinguishes omnivores from highbrows exclusives, examining
class and status effects on specific cultural activities as well as on patterns of cultural consumption by distinguishing four types of cultural consumer: omnivores, highbrows, univores and inactives.
And how are omnivores and highbrows different? The authors write:
Both of these taste patterns include highbrow culture, but the omnivore pattern is argued to be on the rise as new way to signal status, while the numbers of highbrow exclusivists are thought to be diminishing . . . The results . . . suggest that there is no status difference between cultural omnivores and highbrow 'snobs' . . . Engaging in popular culture as a highbrow participant does not seem to harm one's status, indicating that the omnivore taste patterns is by all means respectable, and even preferred among younger generations with ample economic resources who live in urban areas with generous cultural infrastructure.
The paper notes that:
the effects of class and status are strongest for highbrow activities. These are still very much socially stratified, thus contradicting bold arguments that class or status has become irrelevant for taste formation.
A paper from Jürgen Gerhards et al. examining the relation between class membership and highbrow consumption in 27 European countries found that, “In all of the countries considered, highbrow consumption is afffected by class position. Highbrow activities are typical among the upper social classes and form an essential part of a distinguished lifestyle.” However, the paper also highlights the possibility of greater access: “Growing societal prosperity and increasing education, however, have two consequences: First, they enable a larger proportion of the population to participate in highbrow consumption. Second, these factors decrease the shaping influence of social class on highbrow lifestyles.”
But what is different about highbrow culture so that only the educated consume it? Kraaykamp et al.’s paper above notes that:
As highbrow culture is often complex, innovative and/or experimental, specific competencies are needed to enjoy and comprehend it. Several scholars, however, also argue that aspects of prestige and honour are associated with the consumption of highbrow culture . . . The act of consuming cultural events may be perceived as a group-specific token to signal a certain status position to the outside world . . . In that respect, decisions on cultural choices often seem to reflect status considerations. Social differentiation in cultural tastes exists because there is mutual agreement on aesthetic standards and values within classes or social group.
Bourdieu again:
The hostility of the working class and of the middle-class fractions least rich in cultural capital towards every kind of formal experimentation asserts itself both in the theatre and in painting, or still more clearly, because they have less legitimacy, in photography and the cinema. In the theatre as in the cinema, the popular audience delights in plots that proceed logically and chronologically towards a happy end, and 'identifies' better with simply drawn situations and characters than with ambiguous and symbolic figures and actions or the enigmatic problems of the theatre of cruelty, not to mention the suspended animation of Beckettian heroes or the bland absurdities of Pinteresque dialogue. Their reluctance or refusal springs not just from lack of familiarity but from a deep-rooted demand for participation, which formal experiment systematically disappoints, especially when, refusing to offer the 'vulgar' attractions of an art of illusion, the theatrical fiction denounces itself, as in all forms of 'a play within a play.'
More relevant to my original question, in a 2007 paper, SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND CULTURAL CONSUMPTION IN HUNGARY: BOOK READERSHIP, Erzsébet Bukodi examines the effects of statification specifically on book readership, writing:
Results show that status, education and income are the three main bases for stratification in book reading in this country . . . People's reading behaviour is strongly associated both with their own and with their parents' social status . . . Further, only individuals at the top of the status hierarchy possess an adequate amount of educational and financial resources to consume the most 'canonised' forms of culture; in this case, serious literature and work-related non-fiction texts.
There’s a stray case in Hungary in that it became a democratic country only recently, in 1989, so the changes in cultural consumption patterns among status groups can be studied. Bukodi released the same year as the paper above a working paper, entitled SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND CULTURAL PARTICIPATION IN HUNGARY: A POST-COMMUNIST PATTERN OF CONSUMPTION, about these changes since the fall of communism.
First, it is interesting to note that even under communism, status competition remained a factor, as Bukodi writes:
[T]he stratification of communist societies could be better described as a status order deriving from differentiation in education, occupational prestige and income, but one which incorporates inconsistencies, especially as regard occupational prestige and income. Consequently, individuals in high status positions could not always distinguish themselves by a high level of material consumption, and thus, for them, participation in high-brow cultural activities would appear to have been especially important and desirable . . . High-level professionals, high-ranking administrators and well-trained technocrats formed the 'knowledge class' of the 1970s and 1980s, and constituted a status group with its own cultural means of establishing social closure, in a rather similar way to that suggested by Bourdieu.
Yet since the country transitioned to a democracy, the omnivore cultural pattern, as in other democratic countries, began to prevail:
[W]hat is suggested is the emergence in the post-communist period of a new social strata whose members come from relatively advantaged backgrounds, who enjoy relatively high levels of both cultural and economic resources, and who seek to make the cultural omnivourousness in which they are able to engage — rather than exclusiveness — the crucial marker of the high status that they wish to maintain.
In general, research papers examining the relation between omnivores and status often use data on musical taste or attendance at opera, ballet, theatre, and museums, but omnivores’ preference for variety extends beyond traditional art forms. Warde et al. have found that omnivorousness and distinction applies as well to dining out and consuming ethnic food. Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann have found that omnivores’ aspirations towards distinction apply even to the writing of food, specifically in American gourmet food culture, that omnivores aim to camouflage themselves as identifying with the common folk, yet this artifical disguise is precisely what signals their distinction:
[W]e identify a set of specific discursive strategies that food writers use in order to socially construct authenticity, and second, we show that authenticity is employed to provide distinction without overt snobbery . . . [T]he democratizing effects of an emphasis on authenticity are accompanied by distinction processes. Authentic food frames are inextricably involved in a discursive negotiation between ideologies of democracy and distinction. These ideologies are not either/or influences on the framing process, but interact in a dialectical tension. Authentic foods are frequently portrayed as more democratic—they are the foods of common, 'simple' people, produced and consumed in a 'simple' fashion, connected to age-old traditions, and frequently presented as superior to stuffy, rule-bound haute cuisine. The democratic nature of an emphasis on these qualities of food is made explicit in food writing. What is left implicit, however, is the exclusionary effect of an emphasis on authenticity . . . [A]uthentic food items are primarily accessible to cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class individuals with ample grocery budgets who are capable of extensive global travel, allowing them to eat only authentic 'Parma' ham or to acquire authentic fish sauce from a remote Vietnamese island . . . Although unusualness in general is highly valued, there is a particular type of unusualness that gourmet food writers value especially highly: unusualness caused by rarity, which allows a relatively subtle validation of distinction along with cultural and economic capital . . . In our view, omnivorousness as practiced in the American culinary field calls for a nuanced reading and analysis, rather than a refutation, of Bourdieu's work on social class and culture in general, and social class and food more specifically. The broadening of the culinary repertoire from a narrow and refined French canon to a world of authentic, exotic, yet still privileged food manages to preserve the essential qualities of food necessary for it to serve as cultural capital and distinction, despite democratic ideology condemning overt displays of cultural status.
One paper from an economics and business perspective by South Korean researchers Yoo Jin Kwon and Kyoung-Nan Kwon finds implications of omnivorous distinction (maybe even some hypocritical humor?) in marketing:
Our study revealed an interesting aspect of the social consciousness of omnivores: culturally tolerant people do, in fact, perceive taste hierarchically. We conclude this orientation as exclusively inclusive nature of educated tolerance in cultural issues. Omnivores' consumption styles and their self-perception of superior taste indicate that their prestige is sustained by their cultural styles, which are simultaneously broad and exclusive . . . Marketing communication should be tuned to both appreciation for cultural diversity and confidence in taste (i.e., superior self-perception). Our results show that conventional marketing messages emphasizing snobbish elitism or exclusive distinction is unlikely to appeal to these high-status individuals . . . American consumer culture now values adaptability to different cultural contexts and proficiency in the consumption of diverse values of commodities.
I’m going to end this research section on cultural omnivores by referencing this paper by Jordi Lopez Sintas and Tally Katz-Gerro. I don’t think the paper itself is particularly interesting, as it doesn’t come up with strong conclusions. It uses the 20-year dataset from the National Endowment of the Arts mentioned earlier and observes the rises and falls, the inconsistencies and common fluctuations seen by those who work with data, of cultural consumption across categories, coming up with two new taste patterns: quasi-omnivorous and entertainment, which like most research probably won’t acquire traction. What I find interesting is something in the title: FROM EXCLUSIVE TO INCLUSIVE ELITISTS—omnivores are elitists, whether exclusive or inclusive, whether or not they identify with that label.
This cultural snobbery is related to the present political polarization. A large part of it stems from a geographic divide between urban and rural areas, and it has been observed in the Netherlands too, as Kraaykamp et al. in the paper above write:
According to Bourdieu . . . a person's leisure is commensurate to a person's job. Thus, manual workers who use their muscles are more interested in activities contesting physical strength, whereas persons in intellectually demanding jobs are more likely to participate in activities testing information-processing capabilities . . . If we compare the univores with the omnivores, we see that coming from a more rural area raises the odds of being a univore. Here, supply side effects may be the explanation; pop concerts are found over virtually all the country, whereas highbrow culture is mostly located in urban areas.
In the American case, Victor Davis Hanson writes in THE CASE FOR TRUMP:
The new divide . . . is becoming far more encompassing, especially since 2008. It is an ominous one of an estranged middle class and increasingly expressed in political, cultural, social, and—most alarmingly—geographic terms . . . [T]he so-called blue-state model of social media, steep taxes, big government, social liberty, smaller families, sophisticated culture, and high incomes has become the more culturally influential . . . The great universities . . . are on the coasts. They hone the skills necessary to do well from globalized commerce and trade. When I dine on University Avenue in Palo Alto, the food, the ambiance, and the people's diction and dress might as well be on Mars, so foreign are they when compared to eating out in my rural hometown, three hours—and a world away—south of Fresno, California . . . American muscular jobs and smokestack industries began disappearing as the world became more connected . . . The resulting stagnation in the hinterland was almost justified by elites as an 'I warned you' sort of morality . . . The former nobility of muscular labor and hard physical work transmogrified into foolish adherence to mindless drudgery. Confident coastal affluence and chic were seen as almost preordained, or at least the proper rewards for the right people. Trump saw that by championing the 'forgotten man,' he was not so easily caricatured as a heartless Mitt Romney or rich man Jeb Bush . . . The condescending blue-state narrative was almost as if opioids and trailer houses had driven away hardware stores, 160-acre farms, and tire factories, rather than the globalized disappearance of jobs fueling the malaise of the unemployed . . . Gentrification and the gospel of good taste spread. Blue states began to focus on the cultural concerns and lifestyles of the upscale, and on generous state sustenance of the poor and often minority. Privilege and success were camouflaged by a veneer of trendy progressive politics . . . Coastal elites rarely seemed to stop, reflect, and ask themselves by what particular standard they were dismissing those of the interior, much less whether their contempt was only fueling ever greater countercontempt.
When Trump was still in office, Alissa Quart wrote in The Guardian:
[Cultural inequality] is one way to understand the suspicion a chunk of Americans have – correct or not – that only a small, elite slice of the country defines what tastes and values are acceptable . . . Kathy J Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has seen this sentiment in her fieldwork. 'The feeling of cultural inequality comes out of the perception that it is urban culture that gets everything,' she says, meaning that her interview subjects feel that cities are receiving inordinate financial rewards as well as media attention and cultural respect . . . [A] cultural elite may be disliked for reasons that are as not particularly economic: college professors, experts, NGO staffers and psychotherapists are not corporate titans, after all . . . Trump and his family may be mining this anti-elite anger, but they are, of course, preposterously upscale, living in Trump Tower, attending expensive private schools, flying about in private jets (now with in-flight Secret Service) and dining in five-star restaurants. Part of how they've gotten away with it is that they, like Bank of America, are part of a corporate elite rather than cultural elite. And nowadays the cultural elite can have a markedly different ethos than its corporate brethren.
That’s quite enough context. I wish to add a few of my own thoughts on the matter of what may be called a highbrow elite, of cultural snobbery which is related to coastal, urban snobbery, based not on empirical prevalence but on ideological ideals, and perhaps this criticism is part of my own reflections, but it may perhaps also be informative to some stray literary critic, or a producer of highbrow art, in whatever form it may be, or a serious connoisseur of the arts, or an English professor who shudders at the mere thought of the digital humanities providing any value, amenable to a more expansive view.
For someone to maintain a sense of taste and preference in creative products is perhaps natural, inevitable, necessary, but to additionally harbor a sense of literary or artistic or musical superiority—snobbery—towards those who lack familiarity through adequate exposure with what are conventionally considered the aspirational variants—literary fiction, poetry, classical music, arthouse film—would be inappropriate, improper, because such an attitude amounts to what Bourdieu called symbolic violence, of class distinction and class maintenance. At a time when inequality in the country is especially pronounced, such an attitude constitutes kicking someone when the person is already down. If this is the decent perspective given the context, then a further question arises: is it possible for someone to maintain a private, individual preference for what would be categorized as high culture without also sustaining some condescension towards forms which one simply doesn’t enjoy, without also thereby letting one’s preferences color one’s social relations? Is such a preference simply a matter of taste, or is such taste, enjoyed by those who tend to be affluent and educated or by those who wish to associate with such people, never innocent from implicit class violence? Can someone from the upper middle class, possessing broad cultural awareness, inhibiting himself from indulging freely in his whims as he converses with someone from the working class, having only the most generous of intentions, doing his best to extend common courtesy with a generous smile, and politely dodging topics that demand the trouble of a lengthy explanation and risk coming across as arrogant, be said to be free of symbolic violence? Are class divides ever exempt from class violence? As William James writes in THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind . . . But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups . . . We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves.
Or as Thomas Hobbes writes in LEVIATHAN:
I say the similitude of passions, which are the same in all men,—desire, fear, hope, etc.; not the similitude of the objects of the passions, which are the things desired, feared, hoped, etc.: for these the constitution individual, and particular education, do so vary, and they are so easy to be kept from our knowledge, that the characters of man's heart, blotted and confounded as they are with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible only to him that searcheth hearts.
Or as Santayana, writing most recently of these three, which seems like only yesterday—yes, I wrote this entire post in one day—wrote in 1922:
But whether the visage we assume be a joyful or a sad one, in adopting and emphasizing it we define our sovereign temper. Henceforth, so long as we continue under the spell of this self-knowledge, we do not merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience) and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part. So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush. We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams. The portrait we paint in this way and exhibit as our true person may well be in the grand manner, with column and curtain and distant landscape and finger pointing to the terrestrial globe or to the Yorick-skull of philosophy; but if this style is native to us and our art is vital, the more it transmutes its model the deeper and truer art it will be. The severe bust of an archaic sculpture, scarcely humanizing the block, will express a spirit far more justly than the man's dull morning looks or casual grimaces. Every one [sic] who is sure of his mind, or proud of his office, or anxious about his duty assumes a tragic mask. He deputes it to be himself and transfers to it almost all his vanity. While still alive and subject, like all existing things, to the undermining flux of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul into an idea, and more in pride than in sorrow he has offered up his life on the altar of the Muses. Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses its old dimensions and its old pace. Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become 'persons' or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.
What matters the writings of Borges, Umberto Eco, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, and of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, cloistered in layers of difficulty, even esoterica, if their delights and clarities remain hidden behind unscalably high walls of self-enforced exclusivity, their efforts and works known to only a few who bear amongst themselves a pride of cultivated refinement and in-group identification? And carry that pride they will, well along the silent corridors of the library stacks, as stately and noble as they are deathly still, scarcely another soul in sight.
Didn’t a famous physicist say that any idea, however complicated, if adequately understood, can be explained simply? Why shouldn’t this concept apply also to the simplest of things, mere stories, the nature of which are rather basic, the very stuff anyone can tell and understand? Is it possible to merge the accessibility of popular entertainment with the elevated poignance, the crisp individualist expressiveness, the fresh innovative spirit, the novelty and radiant, unfortunate truths, those characteristics of writing traditionally considered highbrow and exclusive? Instead of remaining caged within one’s chosen discernment, selecting a particular audience, why not choose instead to expose the broader public to possibilities beyond a myopic horizon, the same old, same old, to unorthodox tastes, to flagrant new flavors, to let them judge whether these renditions are not better? After all, a classically trained pianist playing at Carnegie Hall does not also expect everyone in the audience, though able to enjoy music, to have studied it. Why should a writer impose the corresponding requirement on the reader? I bounced this idea off a poet, who concluded his long, recalcitrant response with the proverb: “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” When he walked away, I had no decent reply, but half an hour later, some staircase wit dawned on my apparently feeble mind. My response is based on the popular question: if a tree falls in the forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound?—
poems printed on what paper
cryptic like morning vapor
wait! what’s that sound?
a symphony in brass
or just a head full of gas
The contemporary competition in an oversaturated market between elites, between elites and counter-elites, the status competition in its various forms: financial, intellectual, artistic, and through educational credentials, through what Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, perhaps matters little to the many more who are locked out of this competition, not having the means in the first place to participate. As Hesse writes in THE GLASS BEAD GAME, though for a different context, “But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking nothing but abstractions . . . Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread.” It is important to keep in mind that income and status do not necessarily correspond to positive contributions to society—some occupations, prestigious or not, demanding or not, well-compensated or not, may well be effectively just taking up space, making some noise, and giving the impression that work is being done, as David Graeber describes in his undeniably subtle book BULLSHIT JOBS. Sally Rooney writes of her experience debating:
Coming face to face with the irrelevance of your own strivings demands some kind of response. You can wallow in the pretend celebrity if you want, continue attending competitions every weekend and dutifully appearing in selfies with beaming novices, in the belief that you are actually important. Or you can self-justify in the guise of getting some perspective: maybe try thinking of reasons why your particular niche is actually of great cultural significance, or ways in which your skill set applies to 'real life' . . . Participation in a game, any kind of game, gives you new ways of perceiving others. Victory only gives you new ways of perceiving yourself.
Or as Vladimir says in Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT: “That passed the time.”
But back to the original question, of the novel’s precarious place in modernity, embattled on all sides by newer delights, slowly waning into irrelevance. It is my general view that the proper response to a formidable challenge, whatever it may be, is to take the trouble to confront it, to open up one’s old habits and ingrained perspectives to the possibility of change and improvement, to self-assessment, to comparison, so that at the end of that endeavor one emerges better than before, matured and humbled and aware of broader horizons, not to retreat or cower behind an isolated, sheltered reprieve whose comfort and relief are of the temporary and fragile sort. A satisfactory solution, once attained, applies everywhere and always until challenged again, and does not float above a thin veil of willed neglect below which lies an emptiness and decrepitude afraid to encounter light. When that challenge remains unresolved, one feels uncomfortable, as one should. My view is that the sense of reward and gratification come after having attained that solution, not before, not in the unsustainable form of illusory success and wishful thinking, of patting oneself on the back when just outside one’s window, the harsh reality encroaches by the minute. Applied to the question at hand, my view is that the novel must be able to compete against its multiple modern competitors—streaming television, on-demand films, natural language AI, social media—because why should I sit down to read a 500-page novel after finishing the day’s work if I find greater pleasure, meaning, and happiness just enjoying myself with easy entertainment? Why should a novelist expect this of anyone else? I can buy a book, but if I don’t proceed to read it, putting it off to some other day, then again and again, it’s just some decoration sitting on a table. Perhaps it is a form of respect for others to not generate random noise hurled into the wind, expecting others to listen, imposing upon them one’s arbitrary whims and feel entitled to their time.
Putting aside the highbrow considerations for a moment, let’s consider that book readership outside of school is declining among children, about which Katherine Marsh wrote an article earlier this year in The Atlantic, referencing data from Pew, which, Marsh writes, “showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984.” What’s the cause? According to Marsh:
The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn't the whole story . . . I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books . . . In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early '80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment . . . We need to meet kids where they are; for the time being, I am writing stories that are shorter and less complex. At the same time, we need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can't let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it's not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling.
If the educational system is one culprit, some may suggest that its emphasis on testing hinders not only teaching reading but also that of history, math, and science—what’s the point of blindly memorizing facts or mechanically solving equations as if Google or calculators don’t exist when soon after graduation students with the grace of natural amnesia forget their classroom lessons with jaw-dropping haste, their only takeaway a bitter recollection of how learning is not fun or satisfying? This is an interesting question, but this topic is beyond the scope of this post. An extension of the question: what’s the point of reading a book if it leaves so scant an impact that the reader forgets about it a few months, or even a few days, later? I don’t have the answer, but let’s return briefly to Woolf’s HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?:
In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions . . . To admit authorities, however heavily furrowed and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
Or, alternatively, Kazuo Ishiguro says:
I've been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that's what my work is about. One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet—or maybe not so quiet—room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point, but for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings, that they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories: the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?
Long-form writing, whether in a novel or critical essay, if it is to have value beyond the author’s monologue, must hold it own. If it cannot, it is not long for this world, and nor should it be. What does the novel as a medium offer which others do not that warrants its continued existence? The novel lacks the flowing melodies of music and the visual splendors of film and the dramatic delivery of a speech by a flesh-and-blood actor on stage—the novel is, truthfully, a bland affair of printed, flat words on a stale page, often ensconced in a thick tome of yawning intimidation. Novelists, and poets too, have just one tool at their disposal: words—and through words must flow in worlds and images, music and silence, company and solitude, reveries and quietude and rambunctious dissipation—all the while remaining approachable, humble, accessible, amusing to the sensibilities yet sober, penetrating, relatable, grounded in reality, unveiling insights as only a novel can, that which is unable to be found anywhere else. Death, then, to the novels unable to do so. The modern novelist is tasked with the burden of handling not only the competition from other novels but also the more immediate gratifications from other mediums, to use words to keep all else at bay, to say: words alone must suffice.
stumbling onto a fishing pier, black night surround
San Diego after tourists retreat
one fisher’s neon green bait sitting in the abyss
a quiet sea breeze, sudden flush of peace
↑ ↓ 2021-06-29, 二. On Authenticity In Art, Politics, and Taxes.
David Foster Wallace mentioned a few interesting ideas when he said:
Let me insert one thing, which I'll bet you've noticed from talking to writers, is that most of the stuff we think we're writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight out, you know, question-and-answer, and in some sense it probably can't be talked about directly, and that's why people make up stories about it.
The idea of being a citizen would be to understand your country's history and the things about it that are good and not so good and how the system works, and taking the trouble to learn about candidates running for office . . . When people don't do that, here's what happens. The candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements because television advertisements are all most voters know about the candidates. Therefore, we get candidates who are beholden to large donors and become, in some ways, corrupt, which disgusts the voters and makes the voters even less interested in politics, less willing to do the work of citizenship . . . Talking about this now, I feel ashamed, because my saying all this sounds like an older person saying this like a person lecturing, which in American culture sets me up to be ridiculed. It would be very easy to make fun of what I'm saying, and I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff as I'm saying it. And this is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now and probably also a Western European. There are things we know are right and good and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like, 'Yeah, but it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else, and who cares? It's all bullshit anyway.' . . . The paradox is that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also make them very easy to market to, because I can say to you, 'Feeling uneasy? Life feels empty? Here's something you can buy or something you can go do.'
There's probably more demand for serious books in Europe, but here there's a small pocket of probably, I don't know, half a million, say a million readers, many of whom are from the upper classes and have good educations and have been taught the pleasures of hard work in reading or music or art and like that. I mean, when you're talking to me, you're talking to someone who doesn't have very much power in the culture and who's not very important except in a fairly small—I don't know what the analogue would be. It would be something like contemporary classical music in the U.S., which there are people who enjoy it and listen to it, partly because of training and partly because they are disposed to be willing to do a certain amount more work reading it. But compared to popular music and rock and roll and hip-hop and stuff, classical music is nothing, economically or commercially or in terms of how many people have heard of it or how much an influence it has on the culture . . . I think in the U.S., people who have been doing serious stuff, which is harder and stranger, have always played to a much smaller audience . . . Reading requires sitting alone in a quiet room, and I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read—it's not just bored—there's an almost dread that comes up here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. And you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America, it isn't quiet anymore. They pipe music through, and the music is easy to make fun of because it's usually really horrible music, but it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet ever anymore. And to me, I don't know if I can defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with, when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that's almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for half an hour instead of thirty seconds, that doesn't get fed at all . . . I think it's true that here in the U.S. every year the culture gets more and more hostile. It becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand.
In the United States, there is another divison, between corporate publishers and non-profit publishers, who are often very small and do a lot of poetry and avant-garde fiction. If you are 'lucky' enough to be published by a corporate publisher, you get more exposure, you get reviewed in the New York Times instead of just in your local paper, you get translated into other languages, but literary stuff loses money for corporate publishers almost all the time, and one of the ways they try to keep from losing money is marketing the stuff—having the author go around and talk and read—the thing they most like to do is send you to a bookstore and you give a reading . . . and that generates free advertising for the book.
Sally Rooney’s take on it:
Writers turn up to events full of people from a particular class, with a particular educational background, and essentially the writer sells them the product which is cultured existence in the form of a commodity, and the commodity is a book. And people can purchase this book and therefore purchase their way into a seemingly cultured class. And all the money that changes hands in the book industry is actually just people paying to belong to a class of people who read books.
David Foster Wallace goes on:
When there's a question-and-answer at the end of a reading, the question is easy to answer if it's dull or stupid. The good questions are the questions that can't be answered in a Q-and-A format. They're ones you have to sit down with a pot of tea or a pot of coffee. They are things that can only be answered in conversation between two people, and so I always feel vaguely fraudulent . . . It makes me nervous and self-conscious to try to talk about stuff that I find almost impossible to talk about, or else to just go, 'So how long are you in town?'—'Oh, three days.' . . . The whole going around and reading in bookstores thing, it's turning writers into penny-ante or cheap versions of celebrities. People aren't usually coming out to hear you read. They're coming to see what you look like and see whether your voice matches the voice that's in their head when they read, and it's all—none of it is important.
If you do work like this, you pay certain prices. You don't make as much money, not as many people read your stuff, but the people who are reading it and are interested in it—the thing I like about doing this kind of stuff is that I'm pretty sure my readers are about as smart as I am. I think if you're someone like Crichton or someone who's a Harvard M.D. but you're writing for a mass audience, things get very strange. I don't worry that people who are reading my stuff are misunderstanding it or banalizing it . . . This is something else about being an American. When I hear 'existential' now, half of me rolls my eyes—'Oh, what a big sexy philosophical term.' And it becomes hard to speak seriously about it because all I can hear is being made fun of how serious and boring and dull I'm being.
I know that there's a paradox in the U.S. of, the people who get powerful jobs tend to go to really good schools, and often in school you study the liberal arts, which is philosophy, classical stuff, languages, and it's all very much about the nobility of the human spirit and broadening the mind. And then from that, you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to write copy that will make people buy a certain kind of SUV . . . I'm not sure really that it's ever been all that different. There are things about my job that I don't like, but this is one of them I do like, is that I get to use everything I've ever learned or think about . . . I know that there is, at least in America, an entire class of—and now I'm talking about a very specific class here—I'm talking about upper and upper-middle class kids whose parents could afford to send them to very good schools where they got very good educations, who are often working in jobs that are financially rewarding but don't have anything to do with they got taught was important and worthwhile in school.
What it seems like here is that, television and corporate entertainment, because it's so expensive, in order to make money it has to appeal to a very wide audience. Which means it has to find things that a lot of people have in common. What most of us have in common here are our very most base, uninteresting, selfish, stupid interests—physical attractiveness, sex, a certain kind of easy humor, vivid spectacle. That's stuff I will immediately look at, and so will you. So it's in our very most base and childish interests that make us a mass. The things that make us interesting and unique and human, those interests tend to be wildly different between different people.
David Foster Wallace said this in 2003. Not much has changed, and nor will it, but indeed he suspected correctly that things have never really been all that different. In 1880, Dostoyevsky wrote in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV:
Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, [people] distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display. To have dinners, horses, carriages, rank, and slaves to serve them is now considered such a necessity that for the sake of it, to satisfy it, they will sacrifice life, honor, the love of mankind, and will even kill themselves if they are unable to satisfy it . . . I ask you: is such a man free? . . . And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.
I’ll now switch to politics. This first paragraph is directed not at sensible, well-meaning Republicans but those who follow and agree with Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Republicans, scream election fraud all you want; two can play that game. Populists, if you are so wary of intellectuals, to science, to thinking and evidence, do you go to the dentist when you have a toothache? To the hospital when you have cancer? Trusting intellectuals is not socialism. Physical distancing and wearing masks during a global pandemic caused by an airborne virus is not socialism. Raising taxes on the rich is not socialism. The personal income tax, corporate tax, and estate tax are not socialism. If you think higher taxes for the rich also means higher taxes for struggling farmers, you’ve been duped by people who sell their agenda by calling it your individual liberty when they buy their islands, hide in their bunkers at the outset of a pandemic, and, when Earth is not enough, race each other to fly to space. How disgraceful have you become not only as a political party but as people when you refuse to investigate an attack on your own Capitol? Consider for a moment the possibility that those you revile as intellectuals spend considerable time thinking about problems you yourself do not, and sometimes facing truth requires putting aside blind national pride. How is it possible with all the knowledge and advancements of modernity we have in America a movement steeped in anti-intellectualism? Let me get to the point. Religious fundamentalists teach distrust towards intellectuals to silence alternative worldviews in an increasingly secular society where they are losing power as their followers, becoming self-sufficient, break away. And what happens when anti-intellectualism is taken to the extreme? History offers a few data points. In 1915, Ottomans, fearing Armenian independence, began their genocide first with the intellectuals to remove leadership. In the 1960s Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in China in which for a full decade academics, scientists, professors, and any intellectual ranging from those employed in the institutions down to recent college graduates, all associated with the bourgeois, were implicated and were marched in public in humiliation, beaten, killed, or sent to work on farms, and schools and universities were closed, sending scholarship and literacy down a monumental backslide in a country that had for many centuries prized education, all to consolidate power for himself in the name of glorifying the people, whose descendants now are more drawn to material excess than the humility of the long time prior. We in American have not yet descended so low, but when the people elect someone who withdraws from the WHO, seriously considers pulling out of NATO, promises to revive the coal industry, and repeatedly disregards the recommendations of scientists during a global pandemic, do we suppose we are heading in the right direction? In antiquity, Plato advocated for a philosopher king, and through all the progress we’ve made since then we’ve come to be threatened by duplicitous capitalists appealing to irrational fear and incompetence. After the Capitol rioters succeeded in seizing the building, looting and destroying, they meandered about, having ridden the tide of hysteria and rage to find themselves without any idea what to do next, pawns to someone afraid of losing power.
I’ll now talk reasonably. This section talks about taxes and also, because this topic relates to wealth, politics. Full disclosure: I’m not an economist or a tax lawyer, nor do I believe I’m going to change anyone’s views on this. The question of whether the rich are already being taxed enough seems nearly as difficult as the question of whether a God or gods exist. You already have an answer you believe in, and what you see will either confirm your position or raise your suspicion at its correctness. For those who like me are not experts in tax research and who are interested in my side, which calls for equitable redistribution of resources, the notable researchers are these French economists: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. Raj Chetty also does promising and very interesting work on the country’s inequality and unequal access to opportunity. But case in point on the difficulty of the tax question: in 2011 Saez, with Nobel laureate Peter Diamond, calculated that the optimal tax rate for the highest income bracket in the U.S. is 73%. Currently, it is 37%. The principle behind this high rate is optimal tax theory, which aims to maximize everyone’s well-being without inhibiting innovation. For comparison, AOC’s proposed tax rate is 70% on—this is key—only income higher than $10 million. The great majority of American families do not reach that threshold. Then, a paper like this points out the logistical impracticalities of raising taxes. And this from Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, modifies two parameters in the model. The author writes of the original paper, “They argued that, if the Pareto parameter is 1.5 and the ETI is 0.25, then ‘τ* = 1/(1 + 1.5 × 0.25) = 73 percent’. If that formula is accepted uncritically, then the conclusion follows from the premises. But neither the formula itself, nor the two parameters (Pareto and elasticity) need be accepted uncritically. If this was a recipe for baking a cake, it might be prudent to question both the recipe and the ingredients.” The author also writes, “with empirically credible changes in parameters, the Diamond‐Saez formula can more easily be used to show that top U.S. federal, state, and local tax rates are already too high rather than too low.” However, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank supports the high rate, writing, “The policy implications of this research are that increasing top marginal tax rates can raise substantial sums of revenue and potentially dampen the rise of income inequality without unduly restraining economic growth.” I think this kind of disagreement is ridiculous. For comparison, even though machine learning research has a lot of bloat and myriad models, parameters, and modifications to explore, at the end of the day there is consensus on a model’s performance because researchers don’t question the evaluation metrics. But when it comes to taxes, because money is involved, where a right-leaning think tank says the rich are already paying their fair share, a left-leaning one has data suggesting they don’t. Opposing these facts are also these. And what does the public think? One poll shows 60% of Americans say that it bothers them a lot that some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share, and that views on the country’s tax system is increasingly colored by political affiliation.
I think the interesting question isn’t: Are the rich paying their fair share of income taxes? but rather: Why is inequality still rising when the rich are already paying so much? By “so much”, I mean the fact that in 2018 the top 1%, according to the two conservatives’ links at the end of the paragraph above, the numbers also corroborated by another Tax Foundation article, earned 21% of all income but paid 40% of federal income taxes, and the top 10% earned 48% of the income but paid 71% of the taxes. Before I go further, I think it’s important to put these numbers in perspective. Using a flat rate for simplicity, taxing 20% on someone making $100,000 does not have the same effect on the standard of living as 20% on someone making $10,000,000, which would produce a much larger share of the taxes between the two. I think the answer to this question: Do the rich pay their fair share of income taxes? is: yes. But this is not the right question because income is only part of the picture. You might wonder how inequality is still rising if the wealthy pay their fair share of income taxes. Conservatives are hesitant to talk about the other variable: existing wealth. The real equation of annual net worth growth is:
net worth growth = income + wealth growth - debt growth
where
income = salary, wages, interest, dividends, etc. wealth growth = stock appreciation, real estate appreciation, etc.
Among the rich, wealth growth dominates. I’m going to focus on wealth growth from stocks which, in our current system, favors those who already own them, and those with more shares benefit disproportionately from rising values and begin to own more and more, i.e. the game is rigged. Piketty wrote a more complete discussion on this kind of growing inequality in CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Piketty traced the history of wealth and inequality and observed that when investment growth alone outpaces the rest of the economy, the inevitable end is rising inequality. His recommended solution is a progressive wealth tax, which is what I also believe in. It is crucial to keep in mind that the wealth tax is separate from the income tax most people are familiar with. The wealth tax is imposed on already acquired wealth which for the rich is the main instrument for wealth growth, a method that is out of reach of most Americans. The U.S. has never had a wealth tax, and it is not hard to imagine who might go to extraordinary lengths to prevent one and why they might call it unconstitutional.
In 2019, the Federal Reserve released a paper describing the rising wealth inequality:
At the highest level, the [Distributed Financial Accounts] show significant wealth concentration and a clear increase in wealth concentration since 1989 . . . In 2018, the top 10% of U.S. households controlled 70 percent of total household wealth, up from 60 percent in 1989. The share of the top 1% of the wealth distribution increased from 23 percent to nearly 32 percent from 1989 to 2018. The increase in the wealth share of the top 10% came at the expense of households in the 50th to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution, whose share decreased from 36 percent to 29 percent over this period . . . [T]he bottom 50% of the wealth distribution experienced virtually no increase in their nominal net worth over the last 30 years, resulting in a fall in total wealth share from 4 percent in 1989 to just 1 percent in 2018. The rise in wealth concentration stems primarily from increased concentration of assets . . . with trends for assets largely mimicking those for overall wealth. The share of assets held by the top 10% of the wealth distribution rose from 55 percent to 64 percent since 1989, with asset shares increasing the most for the top 1% of households. These increases were mirrored by decreases for households in the 50-90th percentiles of the wealth distribution . . . [W]e observe that the share of real estate held by the top 10% of the wealth distribution has increased by 5 percentage points from 39 percent to 44 percent, suggesting that increases in wealthy households' share of real estate holdings have contributed to the increase in concentration . . . [C]orporate and noncorporate business equity have been large drivers of wealth concentration. The distribution of these assets has long been skewed: in 1989, the richest 10% of households held 80 percent of corporate equity and 78 percent of equity in noncorporate business. Since 1989, the top 10%'s share of corporate equity has increased, on net, from 80 percent to 87 percent, and their share of noncorporate business equity has increased, on net, from 78 percent to 86 percent. Furthermore, most of these increases in business equity holdings have been realized by the top 1%, whose corporate equity shares increased from 39 percent to 50 percent and noncorporate equity shares increased from 42 percent to 53 percent since 1989.
The paper contains charts of the data, but it’s easier to go to an interactive version for the stock dataset from the Federal Reserve’s database. We see that stocks are predominantly owned by the wealthy, and their share has grown in the last 30 years. The share among the top 10% in Q1 1991 was 79.7% and rose in Q1 2021 to 88.7%. We also see that since at least as far back as 1989, the bottom 50% have never owned more than 1.8% and in 2021 owned 0.6%, which is next to nothing. Another dataset shows the net worth distribution, and the same pattern emerges. The share among the top 10% in Q1 1991 was 60.3% and rose in Q1 2021 to 69.8%. The bottom 50% never owned more than 4.3% since 1989 and in 2021 owned a mere 2%. The Pew Research Center also has data showing the growing wealth inequality. When we also account for wealth, the question “Do the rich pay their fair share?” takes on a different meaning. The income tax numbers that conservatives toss about are only skirting around the issue. That the top 10% earned 48% of one year’s income but paid 71% of the year’s taxes no longer puts the burden on the poor when we see that the bottom 50% have almost nothing to tax. According to the Tax Policy Center, the portion of income from salaries and wages also diverges by income class. For households with an adjusted gross income less than $500,000, most (71%-81%) of the income came from salaries and wages—from working. For households whose AGI is at least $10 million, that portion shrinks to 17%. The majority of their income likely comes from bond interest and dividends—from their wealth by either investing or owning shares of their own company. Inequality also plays out in college admissions. An article from The Times visualizes data from a study co-authored by Raj Chetty and Saez, finding that:
At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League . . . more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. Roughly one in four of the richest students attend an elite college – universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual rankings. In contrast, less than one-half of 1 percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families attend an elite college; less than half attend any college at all.
It is important to distinguish between groups within the top 1%, which has its own massive internal inequalities. The Chicago Booth Review has an article that differentiates the average income in 2015 between four segments in the top 1% (0.5%-1%, 0.1%-0.5%, 0.01%-0.1%, and the top 0.01%), and even in this echelon, the wealthier acquire wealth faster; each step from one group to its next higher group is a jump on an exponential curve, from $485 thousand to $901 thousand to $2.9 million to $18.9 million. The richest group, the 0.01%, are the 1 percenters of the 1 percent. Inequality.org gives a more concrete look at the wealthy, splitting the top 10% into five groups and gave a brief descriptive profile of each one. One investment manager suggests that there is a large divide between the bottom and top halves of the top 1%. In 2011 he emailed Bill Domhoff at WHO RULES AMERICA? the trouble he saw in the economy’s inequality, particularly as caused by the top 0.5%. He remained anonymous to protect his identity since his clients are primarily the ones he is criticizing, as they “largely fall into the top 1%, have a net worth of $5,000,000 or above, and — if working — make over $300,000 per year.” He writes of the lower half:
The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well . . . The net worth for those in the lower half of the top 1% is usually achieved after decades of education, hard work, saving and investing as a professional or small business person. While an after-tax income of $175k to $250k and net worth in the $1.2M to $1.8M range may seem like a lot of money to most Americans, it doesn't really buy freedom from financial worry or access to the true corridors of power and money. That doesn't become frequent until we reach the top 0.1% . . . Our poor lower half of the top 1% lives well but has some financial worries. Since the majority of those in this group actually earned their money from professions and smaller businesses, they generally don't participate in the benefits big money enjoys. Those in the 99th to 99.5th percentile lack access to power . . . Unlike those in the lower half of the top 1%, those in the top half and, particularly, top 0.1%, can often borrow for almost nothing, keep profits and production overseas, hold personal assets in tax havens, ride out down markets and economies, and influence legislation in the U.S. They have access to the very best in accounting firms, tax and other attorneys, numerous consultants, private wealth managers, a network of other wealthy and powerful friends, lucrative business opportunities, and many other benefits. Most of those in the bottom half of the top 1% lack power and global flexibility and are essentially well-compensated workhorses for the top 0.5%, just like the bottom 99%. In my view, the American dream of striking it rich is merely a well-marketed fantasy that keeps the bottom 99.5% hoping for better and prevents social and political instability. The odds of getting into that top 0.5% are very slim and the door is kept firmly shut by those within it.
The investment manager then describes the upper half:
Membership in this elite group is likely to come from being involved in some aspect of the financial services or banking industry, real estate development involved with those industries, or government contracting. Some hard working and clever physicians and attorneys can acquire as much as $15M-$20M before retirement but they are rare. Those in the top 0.5% have incomes over $500k if working and a net worth over $1.8M if retired. The higher we go up into the top 0.5% the more likely it is that their wealth is in some way tied to the investment industry and borrowed money than from personally selling goods or services or labor as do most in the bottom 99.5%. They are much more likely to have built their net worth from stock options and capital gains in stocks and real estate and private business sales, not from income which is taxed at a much higher rate. These opportunities are largely unavailable to the bottom 99.5% . . . The picture is clear; entry into the top 0.5% and, particularly, the top 0.1% is usually the result of some association with the financial industry and its creations. I find it questionable as to whether the majority in this group actually adds value or simply diverts value from the US economy and business into its pockets and the pockets of the uber-wealthy who hire them. They are, of course, doing nothing illegal . . . A highly complex set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.
In a 2014 addendum, the investment manager wrote:
One might think that physicians, America's highest-paid professional group, would be largely exempt from the economic currents affecting most other Americans. This isn't so. Medscape, a key physician website, reports that as of 2013, mean income for male physicians in all specialties was $259k; for female physicians, it was $199k. Family practice doctors and internists earned the least, averaging around $175k. Orthopedic surgeons earned the most, averaging around $405k; they are the only physician specialty falling within the top 1% by income . . . If our hypothetical physician saves and invests for 35 years, he will have contributed less than $2 million dollars to retirement plans . . . Thus, an average physician — while doing very well by most people's standards — is unlikely to earn or accumulate enough to place him or her in the top 1% by income or net worth at the end of their career. Opportunity for most Americans, even physicians, is decreasing, even while net worth and income accelerate for those at the very top of the system. If an average physician today is unlikely to make it into the top 1% (Piketty and Saez's end-of-2012 data show that the 1% income line is crossed with an income of $396k per year), then it seems pretty clear that crossing that line via income, savings, and investments will be impossible for nearly every American in the future.
He wrote also about someone who put up with finance enough to retire early, and her account of investment banking reminded me of academia, only the currency there is not money, and there’s not so much as damage to anything as a large part of it will never see the light of day and has no other purpose than publication:
Recently, I spoke with a younger client who retired from a major investment bank in her early thirties, net worth around $8M. Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit the system when they became rich enough.
What does net worth growth look like for those in the highest echelon? Let’s look at Stephen Schwarzman’s in 2020. I have nothing personal against Schwarzman; he has a history of philanthropy, and he’s signed The Giving Pledge. I’m just using his wealth as an example. According to Reuters, Schwarzman received $86.4 million in compensation and $524.1 million in dividends from his Blackstone shares, for a total income of at least $610.5 million. What about his wealth growth, considering solely his earnings from Blackstone? According to the same link, he owns 19.3% of Blackstone, which had 682.91 million shares outstanding in 2/2020, so he owned 131.8 million shares. Using stock price data from Yahoo Finance:
Share Price, 2/2020 Share Price, 12/2020 Price Change Wealth Growth
$53.84 $64.81 $10.97 $1.4B
Forbes shows his net worth in 4/2020 was $15.4 billion and rose to $19.1 billion in 9/2020, so he has more earnings than from Blackstone alone. Because the government does not tax wealth, it is only when Schwarzman sells his shares that his earnings get taxed. If Schwarzman holds on to his shares for at least a year, which he already has, he avoids paying the higher rates of the ordinary income tax brackets (10%-37%) and gets charged the lower rates (0%-20%) of long-term capital gains. But what happens if Schwarzman doesn’t sell his stocks? From a recent ProPublica report:
The notion of dying as a tax benefit seems paradoxical. Normally when someone sells an asset, even a minute before they die, they owe 20% capital gains tax. But at death, that changes. Any capital gains till that moment are not taxed. This allows the ultrarich and their heirs to avoid paying billions in taxes. The 'step-up in basis' is widely recognized by experts across the political spectrum as a flaw in the code.
Dividends from stocks, however, do count as taxable income, but investors can avoid that burden by choosing companies that reinvest in themselves rather than pay dividends; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway does not pay dividends. If the rich avoid receiving income, how do they pay for their large purchases? I’ve not yet mentioned the third variable in the net worth growth equation: debt. It turns out that if you’re ultrawealthy, you can borrow money to avoid taxes. According to the same ProPublica report:
For regular people, borrowing money is often something done out of necessity, say for a car or a home. But for the ultrawealthy, it can be a way to access billions without producing income, and thus, income tax. The tax math provides a clear incentive for this. If you own a company and take a huge salary, you'll pay 37% in income tax on the bulk of it. Sell stock and you'll pay 20% in capital gains tax — and lose some control over your company. But take out a loan, and these days you'll pay a single-digit interest rate and no tax; since loans must be paid back, the IRS doesn't consider them income. Banks typically require collateral, but the wealthy have plenty of that.
Abigail Disney, an heiress of the Disney family, is among the exceptions in America’s aristocrats in that she has a conscience to admit the failings of the system. She writes in The Atlantic a response to the ProPublica report:
Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. The naked fact of the matter is that not a single one of the documented methods and practices that allowed these billionaires to so radically minimize their tax obligations was illegal. What's worse, these methods and practices—things such as offsetting income with losses in unrelated businesses; structuring assets to grow rather than generate income, then borrowing against those growing assets for cash needs; and deducting interest payments and state taxes from taxable income—are so downright mundane and commonly applied that most rich people don't see them as unethical. The more interesting question is not how the men in ProPublica's report were able to avoid paying much or anything in federal income taxes, but why. What motivates people with so much money to try to withhold every last bit of it from the public's reach? . . . Having money—a lot of money—is very, very nice. It's damn hard to resist the seductions of what money buys you. I've never been much of a materialist, but I have wallowed in the less concrete privileges that come with a trust fund, such as time, control, security, attention, power, and choice. The fact is, this is pretty standard software that comes with the hardware of a human body. As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can't stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won't want to go back to coach. And once you've flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again. Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity. The older I've gotten and the more clearly I've understood these things, the more the impulse to betray my own class has taken charge of my judgment. What's shocking about the ProPublica report is not just that the tax bills are so low, but that these billionaires can live with themselves.
Abigail Disney also references David Foster Wallace’s THIS IS WATER commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyon College: “All I know is that if you are a fish, it is hard to describe water, much less to ask if water is necessary, ethical, and structured the way it ought to be.”
To an average American family earning $70,000 a year, an additional $10,000 makes a sizable impact. To someone in this stratosphere, an additional million or two makes no meaningful difference. In the end, there are two choices for the ultrawealthy: 1) signing The Giving Pledge to give to charity most of the fortunes made in their lifetimes by their own accomplishment, which Schwarzman and Buffett have done, and 2) starting a new capitalist dynasty like these families whose heirs know it is best to stay away from the limelight, instead protecting their wealth by calling for lower taxes and lobbying in various forms, such as repealing the estate tax, calling it the death tax to scare the common American to whom the tax would never apply.
The wealth tax isn’t a new idea; it’s already been proposed in politics. Bernie Sanders proposes a wealth tax that would:
only apply to net worth of over $32 million and anyone who has a net worth of less than $32 million, would not see their taxes go up at all under this plan . . . This tax on extreme wealth would have a progressive rate structure that would only apply to the wealthiest 180,000 households in America who are in the top 0.1 percent. It would start with a 1 percent tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple. That means a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000. The tax rate would increase to 2 percent on net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3 percent from $250 to $500 million, 4 percent from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6 percent from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7 percent from $5 to $10 billion, and 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. These brackets are halved for singles. Under this plan, the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class.
This last sentence, of course, would not make the referenced class happy. Elizabeth Warren’s more lenient version of the wealth tax raises the minimum threshold at which the tax starts and has lower rates: “Zero additional tax on any household with a net worth of less than $50 million (99.9% of American households).” The tax for the wealthy is: “2% annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion”, and for billionaires: “4% annual Billionaire Surtax (6% tax overall) on household net worth above $1 billion”. Furthermore, research suggests that more equitable distribution of economic growth leads to more opportunity for all. Raj Chetty found that:
rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the 'American dream' of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.
We have data that confirm that taxes successfully redistribute income and reduce inequality. Our World in Data visualized income distributions before and after taxes, as they currently stand, for multiple countries and found that “inequality is not only reduced by redistribution between individuals at a given point in time, but also by achieving redistribution over the course of life.” OWID also has an interactive visualization comparing inequality between the U.S. and several European countries. The U.S. notably has the highest inequality, and lowest inequality is in the group of Scandinavian countries which have higher taxes to support a broader system of government services.
I should mention explicitly that I do not support socialism. It didn’t work out well for the countries that ran that experiment, but unbridled capitalism leads to growing inequality and does not yield equal opportunity for all. Inequality is presumed and necessary in capitalism, but what is the right level of inequality? One paper proposed that the fairest inequality is a lognormal distribution. The paper hasn’t generated much interest, and I suspect this is a hard problem, not to mention the politics involved, so this question is not one I’m going to explore.
I don’t think the main driver of the economy relates solely to taxation, but a classic Republican claim is that lower taxes jumpstarts the economy. I’m not convinced. If an old-school Republican points to Reagan’s economic success by lowering taxes, I’ll point out that Clinton did better in terms of GDP and job growth with higher taxes on the wealthy. The Federal Reserve has job growth data since 1939 in absolute terms. Clinton did lower taxes for businesses, but it was for small businesses, not the wealthy. It certainly wasn’t a trickle-down utopia. And Mike Pence recently wrote:
Under the Trump-Pence administration, we proved that low taxes are the key to creating prosperity for Americans of every background and income group. In 2017, we passed the historic Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which delivered more than $3.2 trillion in tax relief to American families and businesses. Within months, our economy took off like a rocket. America gained more than 7 million new jobs, unemployment plummeted to the lowest rate in 50 years, and more than 10 million people were lifted off of welfare—the largest reduction in poverty in modern history.
Actually, they didn’t prove anything. The two job growth links above put Pence’s claims in context. In addition, we can compare Trump’s numbers and Obama’s. FactCheck.org summarized the numbers at the end of Obama’s term: “The economy gained a net 11.6 million jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to below the historical norm.” The numbers Pence mentions were not caused by Trump’s TCJA. The unemployment rate data show that by the time Trump took office, unemployment was already in decline, a trend Obama started when he became president in 2009 immediately after the recession. If Trump improved on Obama’s performance, we would see a steep drop in unemployment starting in 2017, but we don’t. Again, Trump’s TCJA didn’t prove anything. What about Biden’s tax proposal? Lately there’s been a lot of intimidating news about it, with some calling it outright socialism. I will not give them more coverage by linking to them, but Biden’s tax hike is not socialism. According to the Tax Foundation’s Biden tax tracker, Biden’s tax hike to fund his infrastructure plan would “raise the top marginal income tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent”. How does this compare to the historic rates? The Tax Policy Center has tabulated the top marginal rate from 1913 to 2020. Biden’s new rate of 39.6% is the same as Clinton’s when he was in office between 1993 and 2001. What Biden is proposing is not socialism. For a complete listing of the tax bracket history, the Tax Foundation has a document that shows all the rates between 1913 and 2013. Furthermore, no one called the taxes socialism in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was 91%. To be fair, this high rate should be construed with a grain of salt because in fact the effective tax rate for the rich was not much higher than it is these days. One analysis shows that “between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall. In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent.” This was perhaps because few households fell into the top bracket or simply due to tax evasion. However, my point is that even the 91% rate of the 1950s was not rampantly labeled socialism the way Biden’s proposal currently is. It’s not socialism. The Tax Policy Center has also analyzed Biden’s tax increases: “Nearly all of President Biden’s proposed tax increases would be borne by the highest income 1 percent of households—those making about $800,000 or more . . . At the same time, Biden would cut taxes for many low- and moderate-income households and reduce them substantially for those with children.” All the scare about impending doom sounds to me like the wealthy don’t want to pay more taxes to help relieve the country’s inequality.
The idea of fixing economic inequality is only a start. This is the solution that’s obvious in light of the data, and it’s what progressives push for, yet policy changes, redistributing wealth, and improving opportunities are not adequate solutions when we assume we understand the working class without actually seeing their perspective and troubles. If you are reading this, you in all likelihood are not in this class. David Shipler’s THE WORKING POOR: INVISIBLE IN AMERICA offers a profile:
The man who washes cars does not own one. The clerk who files cancelled checks at the bank has $2.02 in her account. The woman who copyedits medical textbooks has not been to a dentist in a decade. This is the forgotten America. At the bottom of its working world, millions live in the shadow of prosperity, in the twilight between poverty and well-being. Whether you're rich, poor, or middle-class, you encounter them every day . . . Those with luck or talent step onto career ladders toward better and better positions at higher and higher pay. Many more, however, are stuck at such low wages that their living standards are unchanged. They still cannot save, cannot get decent health care, cannot move to better neighborhoods, and cannot send their children to schools that offer a promise for a successful future. These are the forgotten Americans, who are noticed and counted as they leave welfare, but who disappear from the nation's radar as they struggle in their working lives. Breaking away and moving a comfortable distance from poverty seems to require a perfect lineup of favorable conditions. A set of skills, a good starting wage, and a job with the likelihood of promotion are prerequisites. But so are clarity of purpose, courageous self-esteem, a lack of substantial debt, the freedom from illness or addiction, a functional family, a network of upstanding friends, and the right help from private or governmental agencies. Any gap in that array is an entry point for trouble, because being poor means being unprotected. You might as well try playing quarterback with no helmet, no padding, no training, and no experience, behind a line of hundred-pound weaklings. With no cushion of money, no training in the ways of the wider world, and too little defense against the threats and temptations of decaying communities, a poor man or woman gets sacked again and again—buffeted and bruised and defeated. When an exception breaks this cycle of failure, it is called the fulfillment of the American Dream . . . The working individuals in this book are neither helpless nor omnipotent, but stand on various points along the spectrum between the polar opposites of personal and societal responsibility. Each person's life is the mixed product of bad choices and bad fortune, of roads not taken and roads cut off by the accident of birth or circumstance. It is difficult to find someone whose poverty is not somehow related to his or her unwise behavior—to drop out of school, to have a baby out of wedlock, to do drugs, to be chronically late to work. And it is difficult to find behavior that is not somehow related to the inherited conditions of being poorly parented, poorly educated, poorly housed in neighborhoods from which no distant horizon of possiblity can been seen . . . For practically every family, then, the ingredients of poverty are part financial and part psychological, part personal and part societal, part past and part present. Every problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain reaction with results far distant from the original cause. A run-down apartment can exacerbate a child's asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother's punctuality at work, which limits her promotion and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing. If she or any other impoverished working parent added up all her individual problems, the whole would be equal to more than the sum of its parts.
Shipler wrote this in 2004 after spending time with people living in poverty. The people he wrote about were demographically representative, across gender and race. A more recent book provides the view specifically into the white working class who support Trump, and policies would not help them without knowing their problem, that their stresses cause them to dissociate from participation, that, for many, they cannot see it in themselves to improve. J.D. Vance writes of Appalachia’s despair in HILLBILLY ELEGY:
This isn't some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it's becoming more and more mainstream. We can't trust the evening news. We can't trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can't get jobs. You can't believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it's in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It's obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the 'Obama economy' and how it had affected his life. I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown's temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault.
This feeling extends to the broader white working class. Arlie Russell Hochschild called this feeling STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND:
You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage. You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not. Just over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line . . . You've suffered long hours, layoffs, and exposure to dangerous chemicals at work, and received reduced pensions. You have shown moral character through trial by fire, and the American Dream of prosperity and security is a reward for all of this, showing who you have been and are—a badge of honor . . . Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You're following the rules. They aren't. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches . . . Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end? Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you don't control or agree with . . . But it's people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you . . . You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored . . .[Y]ou are slipping backward.
It is this is feeling that found a voice in Trump in whom belated identification has become hope, in whom anger has been given an authorized outlet. What’s a possible solution? I’m not qualified to offer one.
But strangers—Shipler also wrote a book about them, though through a racial lens: A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS: BLACKS AND WHITES IN AMERICA. It was published when I was 4, and I can still remember clearly the night of December 3, 1997 when my celestial glory, newspaper and coffee in hand, sat down in front of the TV, eagerly waiting for him to appear on C-SPAN. Clinton, then president, was holding a town hall to discuss race, and a recording is now available online. The snippet I’m talking about is between 28:09 and 44:13, and this link defaults to its start. Shipler said:
I feel that we're in a different phase of race relations in this country than we used to be, and in some ways it's a more complicated phase. Bigotry, for the most part, is not as blatant and obvious and outrageous as it used to be. A lot of it has gone underground. It takes subtler forms, encrypted forms. Prejudice is a shapeshifter. It's very agile in taking forms that seem acceptable on the surface . . . I think for us as white Americans to understand some of this, we have to reflect on some of the differences in experiences we've had as opposed to those that Blacks and other minorities have had . . . I think in a dialogue of this kind, the key is to listen, not just to talk . . . I'm hoping that if we listen to each other, we can begin to diminish the size of that chasm and perhaps even make this society of ours into less and less of a country of strangers.
Clinton added, “I don’t think there is any legal policy answer to this. I think
this is something we’ve really got to work our way through.” Beverly Daniel
Tatum was present too and said, “There’s a lot of silence about these issues,
and I think breaking this silence is something many people are afraid of doing.
And as you pointed out we can’t really fix this problem or continue the
improvement until we’re able to engage in honest dialogue about that.” On the
opposing side, Abigail Thernstrom, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a
conservative think tank, spoke about how far we’ve come since the 1960s and how
integrated the country had become. I think she meant well, but I think when you
pick certain data points, you can paint a better picture than how things are,
and relying on surveys for issues like race reveals less about outcomes and
behaviors than the prevailing fashionable attitudes of the time. When it’s hot
out, it won’t help to check the weather channel if your house is burning. Show
me your data, and I can show you segregation on a
map
based on the 2010 Census (EDIT: this link is no longer valid because UVA has
blocked access since the end of 2021 in light of the 2020 Census. However, to
show my point and for the purpose of providing continued access to historical
data, the
Racial Dot Map
remains available, courtesy of the Internet Archive. For updated maps based on
the 2020 Census, refer to the
one
from CNN or the
one
from Environmental Systems Research Intitute),
research
that finds “differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth
explain little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income”, and
a
study
that:
measured implicit and explicit attitudes about race using the Race Attitude Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a large sample of test takers (N = 404,277), including a sub-sample of medical doctors (MDs) (n = 2,535). Medical doctors, like the entire sample, showed an implicit preference for [w]hite Americans relative to Black Americans. We examined these effects among [w]hite, African American, Hispanic, and Asian MDs and by physician gender. Strength of implicit bias exceeded self-report among all test takers except African American MDs.
I can agree that by 1997 there had been progress compared to the 1960s, according to the data that Thernstrom mentioned, but the message she’s conveying is that much progress had already been made, which begs the question, “Why are people still worked up about this?”, which leads to a dangerous complacence. But an important thing to recognize is how in 1997 we can sit down and talk about these things, disagreement or not. Two decades later, how far have we come as a country? Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic the importance of openness to ideas, starting with a class I was vividly alive to be physically in:
Back in the 1980s, comparative-literature majors at my university had to take a required course in literary theory. This course—Lit 130, if memory serves—offered prospective scholars a series of frames and theories that could be applied to the reading of books . . . We suffered through a lot of turgid academic writing, but the class had its uses. I learned, among other things, that one can read the same text from multiple points of view and therefore see different themes in it. When a Marxist reads Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, he might become interested in the way in which wealth, power, and the determination to have both shapes the lives of all of the characters. When a feminist reads the same book, she might discover that patriarchal attitudes toward women, who are judged and valued for their marriageability, shape the lives of the characters too. The Freudians, as you might surmise, would notice a whole different set of motifs . . . In his congressional testimony last week, General Mark Milley endorsed the underlying philosophy of Lit 130, which also happens to be the underlying philosophy of a liberal education: Read widely; listen to everybody; make your own judgment about what's important. Here is how he put it: 'I do think it's important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.' The phrase widely read means that you can and should read things you disagree with. You can definitely read Marx without becoming a Marxist. You can read critical race theory without becoming a 'critical race theorist,' however you define that . . . You can also read American history in this same spirit, the way you would read a great piece of literature, seeking to understand the complexities and the nuances, the dark and the light, the good and the bad. You can be inspired by the Declaration of Independence, horrified by the expulsions of Native Americans, amazed by the energy of immigrants and frontier settlers. You can understand that the United States is a great and unique country whose values are worth defending—and realize simultaneously that this same country has made terrible mistakes and carried out horrific crimes. Is it so difficult to hold all of these disparate ideas in your head at the same time?
Applebaum then critiques those on both extremes, the rabid critical race theorists who can’t tolerate dissidents and the far right that refuses to deign even a nod to critical race theory:
Soldiers should know, Milley declared, that African Americans were counted as less than fully human until 'we had a civil war and Emancipation Proclamation to change it.' It took 'another 100 years,' he noted, to get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All of that should sound completely uncontroversial. It's just a recitation of facts about American history, things that most people learn in elementary school. But to Fox News's Tucker Carlson, the mere suggestion that you should seek to understand your own society, including its flaws, makes you a 'pig' and 'stupid.' Laura Ingraham, another Fox News host, called for defunding the military in response to Milley's statements, on the grounds that 'he's chosen to indulge the radical whims of Democrats.' The Carlsons, Ingrahams, and other culture warriors who now dominate the world of conservative infotainment seem now to believe that the study of American history—the knowledge of what actually happened on the territory that lies between the two shining seas—should be forbidden. The Republican-controlled state legislatures and school boards that are currently seeking to ban the teaching of 'critical race theory' have this same intention . . . But there is another kind of person who might dislike Milley's attitude. Critical race theory is not the same thing as Marxism, but some of its more facile popularizers share with Marxists the deep conviction that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world. Moreover, some have encouraged people to behave as if this were the only way of seeing the world. The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person's heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president. This is a major stumbling block, not so much for the legal scholars (some of whom actually merit the title 'critical race theorist') but rather for the popularizers and the scholars-turned-activists who want to force everybody to recite the same mantras.
Listen to both sides! What a great idea that seems to come from common sense!
And what is the racialized experience like? Step back to 1992, when I, then -1 years old, frolicking in the ether and couldn’t wait to materialize, about thirty years before George Floyd’s murder drew national attention, Jane Elliott ran her brown eye/blue eye experiment, which reverses the direction of discrimination, on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The video is half an hour long. If you are white and are too uncomfortable to watch it to the end, how do you suppose you can understand the many for whom this experience is America’s reality that the country has decided not to see? For people of color, they would find in Jane the voice of grievance that working class whites have found in Trump. Indeed, the experience of watching this video breaks through the simple, naive, token emotions of one-dimensional happiness and joy of popular, commercialized entertainment and touches briefly something of the heights of literature, which is that humor and rage, truth and tragedy, mania and sanity, life and its passing, are all one and the same.
When working class whites have been positioned at the front line to combat others who have been historically oppressed, when neither group owns any significant share of the country’s wealth, is it not then obvious who is fanning the flames? I don’t think some mastermind is orchestrating some conspiracy, but that those who live in everyday insecurity, when aggravated, fall into a competition to get ahead of each other, and those who are more privileged stand guard over their own possessions as they watch the chaos unfold, laying out a narrative that even touching a fraction of the millions or billions in their portfolios which they do not use stifles progress and innovation or pushes the country towards socialism, when they clutch their purses and think, “What business is it of mine to step in?”
Even with Trump out of office, views on him have largely remained unchanged among Democrats and Republicans, and what we will have in coming elections is more of the same contention, polarization, and distrust across parties because the underlying issues of inequality remain, susceptible to dirty marketing tactics by unscrupulous politicans more interested in their lining their pockets than running a government. The trend, however, is that younger generations are more liberal according to this and this, more open to changing traditions, and the Congress that entered office this year is already more diverse in race, gender, and religion. A projection indicates that by 2039, Gen Z and Millenials will consist of nearly 70% self-identifying Democrats. Given these trends, it may not be too off the mark to claim: if the country manages to not descend into civil war, then politics in the next decades, whoever the next Trumpist demagogue is in 2024 and thereafter, will resemble the stock market, waves of short-term volatility as distractions to the inevitable trajectory towards progress when the younger generations, more open, more tolerant, more willing to fix problems and move forward, constitute growing shares of the electorate.
Yet progress of this kind poses another problem to a healthy democracy when it turns into a one-party monopoly. The victory at the top also comes with the isolation of not having a sparring partner of equal standing. What will become of the Republican Party? How will conservative populism evolve to confront the problems of modernity when it can no longer appeal to a declining constituency invigorated by toxic bravado, narrow-minded calls to a past era that is not returning, smokescreening actual issues by yelling, “Look at those evil people changing things!”, instead of constructive solutions. How will the new platform of the Republican party mitigate the dawn of a glamorous new serfdom at Apple Park, Zuckerberg Park, and Bezos Park with equitable job growth, balance the tax rate of less than 4% among the 25 richest Americans and a certain politician who has a history of avoiding taxes with HILLBILLY ELEGY, THE WORKING POOR, and HARVEST OF SHAME, while also addressing climate change instead of thinking it a hoax? How much is ExxonMobil paying you?
And what will happen to the Democratic Party once its principal opponent fades into something of the past? Will its coalition that put itself together, each group advancing its own interests by absorbing its neighbors’, held into one by intolerable, toxic fumes coming out of the other side’s pulpit, break into foolish fragments as predictable as human nature, white women prioritizing white women, Blacks voting for Blacks, Asians for Asians, Hispanics for Hispanics, and white men, caught between race and gender, choose race and side with white women? The results from last week’s NYC Democratic mayoral primary suggest just this kind of racial delineation. Putting the candidates’ proposed policies aside, a neighborhood’s voter preference strongly resembles its racial composition. The Times released an interactive district-level map of how the city voted, which can be compared with a map of the city’s racial distribution Manhattan’s core, predominantly white, voted for Kathryn Garcia. The Asian neighborhoods, and oddly also the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, voted for Andrew Yang. And Harlem, the Bronx, and large swaths of Queens and Brooklyn, in the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, voted for Eric Adams or Maya Wiley. I don’t think these results are a coincidence, and if this is a precursor to what will happen to the Democratic Party, then perhaps all one can do is shrug in disappointment. If you say race is not a problem and you are white, let me know again when I point out that the minorities of today will soon no longer be minorities and that Christianity, even considered as the sum of its denominations, may very well not be the predominant religion for much longer. This is the inconvenient problem of race, not as discriminatory racism which also needs to be addressed, but as the country’s identity shift. Perhaps fortunately, this is a problem of time, and the free solution is the passing of the decades, when the younger generations have already been slowly acclimating to the changing face of America which in a gradual shift will not seem out of the ordinary, like eyes seeing their reflection every morning but don’t notice the wrinkles accumulating on the face. If you say race is not a problem and you are not white, consider what will happen when white Hispanics start voting like whites, Blacks push for expanding affirmative action, Asians insist on maintaining policing. What will become of race then? Time will tell, but perhaps it’ll only be a problem when people remain walled up in self-interested isolation, but why not be spurred by the idea of trying something new? Why not? How many in the American heartland still conceive of New York as just the one in the past as sung by Sinatra without also realizing there’s also the modern ones by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys?
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Back to the present. I’ll end this section on politics with comments of how each party feels about the other. It reads like a dysfunctional relationship. Their words, not mine, but the Republican views I disagree with are the ones that have no easy compromise and ones I don’t think are promising to address because they existed even before the current hysterical polarization, distrust, cancel culture, and utter lack of communication between parties, and which are not the cause of the country’s intolerance towards the other side but which only seem exacerbated because of growing economic imbalance, when one side is naively scapegoating in a rapidly changing demographic and the other stings with unaddressed racial and gender inequalities. These issues are: abortion, gun rights, implementing religion values in the law, and whether the Constitution should be adapted to the modern country and not remain catered to the one two hundred years ago. I’ll also take the liberty to add that two hundred years ago was when people weren’t able to buy assault rifles, when slavery was legal and the original text proclaimed, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons”—until one century later when an amendment repealed such nonsense.
↑ ↓ 2021-04-04, 日. On Religion and Roger Scruton.
I’m an atheist, and today’s post situates my views in the context of religion, and why the religion question largely doesn’t matter.
First, I will state some of my doubts. To even begin to convince me to believe in God, you must answer this question of mine: why Jesus or Yahweh or Allah when I can also choose Zeus and Hera, Shiva and Brahma, Isis and Osiris, Odin and Ymir, Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, Ababinili and Agu’gux, Hadad and Anu? Why one god and not four hundred? Would God have been the next titular character had Joseph Campbell extended his HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES? I can’t shake off the observation that those who are religious are religious because of a sense of community and not because they are wholly convinced from first principles in the existence of God. To convince me to be religious is to show me that faith is not just the happenstance religion of the society into which we are born, assigned at birth and immured as the sole option when we are too young to resist our parents and our friends, too young to think and doubt, too young to realize that by adulthood we will be too accustomed to holding on to faith out of nominal identification with that community and not out of true belief.
I’m not speaking of religion in the way Alan Watts did when he used a marketing ploy to slip God under the cover of mesmerizing rhetoric. The God he spoke of was not the omnipotent deity of the Judeo-Christian tradition but a god embedded in the personal and everyday, everywhere and needing no more worship than a spiritual awareness. What a great cheat! How he committed the intellectual laziness of conflating one god with another by using the same terminology! The notion of God is too loosely defined. Do we agree with Maimonides when he explained that the Jewish God is such a perfect unity that he could not be described in any positive sense, and we cannot say God has arms or legs, or that God is omnipotent, or that God has thoughts, for any such statement limits the greatness of God? Surely one can follow this description as one can follow a thought experiment, but no one can persuade me away from my immediate thought: what a wonderful fiction!—though such a character is certainly too dull for my book.
To live motivated by the thought that disorderly conduct towards your fellow men earns you a one-way ticket to eternal condemnation seems to me immensely self-centered because such a guiding principle suggests we have an eye towards our own fates when we choose how to behave towards others, and that propriety is not a self-evident principle derivable from common sense and reason. How low does this suggest of us and our fellow men that we can’t be decent without fear of punishment? Bertrand Russell wrote, “Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear, and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad. I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less [sic] true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about a man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanising myths, in the end the fresh air brings out vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.” One can enter the sublime by sitting in church in the front pew, enjoying Bach’s music playing under the towering apse just as one can enter it by lying back on the open grass, under the constellations of the night sky, all on one’s own, contemplating the stars whence one came; one can be spiritual without a god. Humanity’s pursuits—reaching for transcendence, enjoying music, living virtuously, seeking meaning and purpose—what does God have to do with them? Everything we’ve done, we’ve done without Him.
The most compelling argument for believing in God I’ve come across is Roger Scruton’s. Scruton did not dodge the hard questions, did not consider his views an obvious truth, was not intolerant to conflicting views, and was not so deluded in his own beliefs that he couldn’t accommodate cross-examination. During an interview he was asked, “God. We got rid of Him, finally. We finally recognized we are totally alone in the universe. Oceans of time before us, oceans of time after us—Schopenhauer—yeah? And amidst we are, giving meaning to our lives, just one little second in eternity. And now you’re coming up with God again. In three or four minutes you’re talking about a moral God.” The interviewer continued: “If we see our presence in the universe at this very moment in time for 60 or 70 or 80 years as one whisper, and we can’t give meaning to our own lives because there are no preconditions, there is no God, there is no moral statement in the universe itself, of the universe itself. Isn’t that more challenging than returning to the old idea of a moral God?” Taken aback for a second from so direct a question, Scruton replied: “If you want to live your life being challenged, that’s fine. There are lots of things more challenging than my worldview, but it doesn’t follow they’re for that reason more true. It’s possible for someone like Rilke to live with a kind of death of God feeling, to say to himself, ‘For God has been taken from the world, along with so much else. I will now remake everything according to my own inner light and find consolation there.’ And to some extent, that’s what I do, but not everybody is Rilke. Most people, deprived of this kind of consolation, don’t rise to the challenge at all. They sink a long way beneath it, and they live without that aspiration to be something better that they would otherwise have had. And so I’m very much opposed to taking this sort of thing away from people. If you lose it yourself, then of course that could be regarded as a misfortune, or you might regard it a great liberation, as Nietzsche tried to do. But that’s your problem. You deal with it. I have my own way of dealing with it, and I think I have dealt with it. I worked my way back to something, not really the God of organized religion, but I worked my way back to something like a God idea. I’m giving it a place in my life which enables me to stand to some extent in judgment of myself, as I think I should.” Fair enough. This answer satisfies me, and I can respect Scruton for it. The necessary consequence, of course, is that Scruton thinks we were both created in the image of God and that I have fallen from favor, while I think his belief in an unprovable deity ludicrous. No further word can be said that can change our minds, but this doesn’t matter because the thwarted conversation is postponed until the infinitude that comes after the day when both of us are dead, when, as far as we’re concerned, everything ceases to matter. I may not agree with Scruton’s views, but I can respect him for adequately examining his convictions and living by them to the very end.
I am not Richard Dawkins. I don’t impose atheism on anyone. Freedom of religion is one of the founding principles of the country. If you are religious, be satisfied in your community, and I mine, which proclaims: We have no god to love, and no god loves us, we do not believe in deities whose business it is to lord over our miniscule lives, for we believe not in gods but in humanity. I can find the religiously devout among those I consider at the pinnacle of humanity: Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, William Blake, just as I can find among them atheists. My gripe is not against religion itself but the lack of the necessary search and labor to convince oneself beyond, “It’s what everyone around me believes, and we fear those who don’t.”
In America, we have a party that knows it is losing power and instead of a graceful handover and adapting to the times, it resorts to pathetic measures like gerrymandering and restricting the voting rights of Americans who are not on their side, the whole party patently struggling to hold on to dear life. I can respect Scruton, but I can’t respect the whole line of Republican senators who ride on disinformation, sending the wrong message to working class Americans to vote against their interests so the rich can have lower taxes, those Republicans who sell religious and national purity like Mitch McConnell—whose wife happens to be Chinese and who is responsible for his wealth—and Ted Cruz, and their predecessor William Buckley who would have rather resorted to lies and elitism rather than accept progress. Why all the opposition to change? Martin Luther posting his NINETY-FIVE THESES on a church’s door sounds pretty radical. A group of 102 religious pilgrims seeking religious freedom sailing on the Mayflower to a new, largely unknown continent sounds pretty radical. The French Revolution sounds pretty radical. This is the pattern of human civilization: today’s radical is tomorrow’s past, as certain and unyieldable as the iron law of history. As Schopenhauer put it, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” For the logical among us, think of it this way: jump forward on the timeline and look back; today’s radicalism is already in the past. This is not to say all change is progress. Marxism, Nazism, Communism, Fascism, anarchy, populism, nuclear fallout, and nativism are not avenues of progress. Progress is determined by what works as a push forward for humanity, not by self-interest, power-mongering, greed, and blinkered nationalism.
The remainder of this post discusses Scruton. In considering my differences against Scruton, I can’t help but also notice the immense similarities, and I recall Schopenhauer’s world as illusion, world as appearance, reality as but a surface veneer. Schopenhauer took this idea from the ancient Vedic tradition, which also had so inspired Hesse that one of his recurring projects was an attempt to reconcile the West’s dilemma between rationality and the animal within against India’s amorphous nature of reality. Peel away our differences—he a conservative and I a liberal, his Christianity and my atheism, his British reserve, stiff upper lip, preoccupation with dignity, ever aspiring to serenity and order, and my fearless charge towards intensity, passion, flame, grabbing life by the horns, he who returns ever again to equilibrium when I say, “Why bother resting? After this brief stint, we have all eternity for equilibrium”—and there is more in Scruton that I can respect not only because of his unmitigated journey towards authenticity, but because the underlying ideas guiding the way he lived his life are also mine.
Scruton defended Heidegger’s notion of dwelling as “this attempt to reaffirm with your connection with a particular place at a particular time and a particular social web . . . Every serious idea is dangerous. In a civilized mind it is not. It is an instrument of peace. I’m talking about peaceful existence in a single place, an unthreatening form of being”—Scruton not only agrees with this as an intellectual idea but lived by it. Scruton expands on this idea with Hegel’s homecoming spirit: “In all of us there is a desire for homecoming, where we find ourselves having ventured out into all these dangerous experiments of individual living, at last coming back, swallowing all our pride, and humbly acquiescing in a social order which is bigger than ourselves.” In these words Scruton also captured the trajectory of his life, as he recounted his early years: “I was very fortunate in having an unhappy childhood so that my desire from the very beginning was to escape from it . . . I was very much aware of the difference between me and everybody else, that there was something in me that needed to be addressed. I had a question in my life. I didn’t know what the question was, but I knew that it needed an answer, and I had first to identify what the question was. So the things that my contemporaries took pleasure in, like football, cinema, whatever it might be, pop music, had very little significance for me, even though like all my contemporaries of course I played the guitar, a bit of bass guitar, and all the usual—things one had to do. But even while doing it I regarded myself just as ridiculous as the people around me.” It was only later that Scruton gradually came upon how to pose the question: “Someone like Heidegger would say it was the question of Being. What and why am I? What is this soul doing in this environment, and how can it possibly come to be in that environment in a way that will bring peace to itself?” In middle age, Scruton described his fear of choosing to abandon his position as a professor as “being afraid to give up a career that I thought to be certain and secure, but I knew that I should give it up because it was not me, my career as a teacher. I finally got the courage to give it up, but I left it very late.” And in describing the broader fear of living, Scruton said, “When you’re confronted with this sort of fear, you might run from it into false consolations, things which are not real consolations because they involve no overcoming . . . I can see what it would be to take refuge in wine completely, and allow that to soothe one through one’s day and to soothe one through one’s inadequacies, to enable one to put this fear to one side. That is not a consolation. A consolation to me comes from having confronted trouble, and eliciting from the heart of the trouble the resolution of it.” Scruton examines himself in the way of someone who has the habit of doing deep reflection: “I have always worked very hard at my literary gifts, but in every direction they’ve suggested, philosophical essays, fiction, anything that seems to come to my pen, but it’s always been enormous work, and I’ve always connected it deliberately with my subjectivity, the peculiar confusion which I inherited by being born the thing that I was. And I made them slaves, my literary works, of my need, and each of them had the task of unraveling this confusion . . . except for a few academic articles, all this has been a completely personal voyage of discovery . . . so this was a very personal thing, which had nothing to do with the normal Bildung of a normal academic philosopher. My life was a kind of Bildungsroman in which the academic part was a sort of continuous and enjoyable mistake. I shouldn’t have been a teacher, or I shouldn’t have been locked away in libraries. My heart and soul have always been in other things, I’ve always been involved in other things, which have always been more important to feeding what I really think.”
Scruton’s first marriage failed, but his second marriage, at 52, to Sophie Jeffreys, after a “slow, quiet, respectful courtship,” not in the searing passion of uninhibited romance but in the quaint charm, quiet serenity, coquettish allure, and mutual attraction hidden beneath preserved dignity so apt to the British manner, lasted until his death. Scruton composed a piece for the piano dedicated to his wife “which would convey something of her composure and orderliness.” He called it BOREAS BLOWS NOT, referencing Herodotus: “Boreas blows not through the young virgin who lives alone in the house with her mother. Because at the time, Sophie was living alone in her house with her mother. So it was a description of Boreas the north wind refusing to blow, or unable to blow, through this secure little cottage.” Scruton made for himself and his wife a version of this little cottage, with a yard in the front for the horses he kept for fox-hunting. In his cottage in the countryside of Wiltshire, on a plot of land he bought that he named Scrutopia, Scruton lived out his years with his wife among books lining the walls and a grand piano in the center of the living room. True to his word, Scruton dwelled, playing Bach in his village’s church every Sunday. Scruton dwelled, returning to the countryside into which he was born: “My childhood was in a semi-detached house by a railway line in which we were, you know, very poor, very much living in the old class resentment of the English . . . It has nothing to do with this. This here is created by books and music in the middle of a countryside which I love and among people doing innocent old-fashioned things with animals. That’s as far as one can get.” In Wiltshire, Scruton lived until his death in January 2020. May he rest in the peace of eternity that I too will one day join, hopefully having attained the same peace in human terms.
↑ ↓ 2021-02-11, 四. On Race, Diversity, and Immigration.
Today’s post is delicate for obvious reasons. Reader be warned, this may make
you more uncomfortable than my other posts, but this is an important issue to
explore.
___
Let’s cast aside the political polarization for a moment and have a mature conversation on race and the future identity of America. It’s not popular these days but I don’t think it’s inherently racist to talk about race and its practical consequences, from both perspectives: the white’s and the person of color’s. There are very real issues that have to be addressed. The recent rise of neo-Nazies, conspiracy theories, and white supremacism is not possible under a well-functioning democracy. It only happens when people are insecure and under threat, and this threat stems from 1) poor white folks who feel the country has forgotten them and 2) the rapid demographic changes are altering the country’s identity. I have nothing insightful to say about the first reason on top of the obvious need to address the problem. This post addresses the second reason.
Discontent
Here are the facts. Estimates project that the country will become majority non-white in 2045. It’s very soon— I’ll likely still be alive when it happens. What do whites, who are losing representation, think of this? A survey found nearly as many view it positively (26%) as negatively (28%).
I’d like to first write a bit with the 28% in mind. At the extreme is the far-right. Richard Spencer, Lauren Southern, and Gavin McInnes are saying, “We built the wealthiest nation on Earth, we introduced democracy and defended it, we created a free state for all, we created the modern world, and who are these foreigners coming over and stealing our inheritance from us?” This is indeed the reality, and I have to say, they have a point. There’s a conversation to be had, certainly not one I can settle but let’s examine this further. My view in the end is that resources, opportunities, and equitable values should not be hoarded within lines as arbitrary as race.
It’s worth repeating: I don’t think it’s racist to talk about whites wishing to preserve Western civilization. It’s a matter of defensive self-conservation. The far right is the loudest but in today’s intolerance that’s the only venue to voice this defensive stance. Again I don’t think this is racist but their concern is they’re being pushed out. I read this from somewhere online—to my fellow liberals, this might be useful to see where the right is coming from—consider a white person moving to China and demanding that Chinese culture be moved aside, that the Chinese should lose rights for racial equality, and that the Chinese should be disarmed and have no option to push back. It’s not racist but such actions provoke self-defense even by a neutral bystander. The question is whether it’s fair to believe the dominant culture of the country (white culture) would be happy becoming just another minority group and losing the power it’s had since the country’s inception. I’d like to believe so because the way forward for the country is to accommodate all Americans but I suspect many white folks, openly or privately, don’t—specifically the 28% in the survey who didn’t even bother pretending. The question isn’t about equality. The country’s changing racial demographics is like saying: imagine a Britain that’s not predominantly British or a China that’s not predominantly Chinese. And no matter our skin color, if any of us takes a stroll along the Seine in Paris and see more Muslims in hijabs than the original French, does Paris feel French? This is the unsettling reality. Suppose for a moment that we lifted every poor white American out of poverty and secured their future prospects. Even then, would they be happy with no longer being able to identify with what the country is becoming? Conservatives feel their homeland is being hijacked even while we progressives see inequality at every turn. It’s a problem in Europe too with the Syrian refugee crisis. Whiteness, Christianity, and the European identity that built the country are being threatened and what we’re doing is blanket-blocking any mention of it as racist when there’s a valid point here.
This problem extends to academia. A very recent vanguard in the humanities has essentially been saying: “we” have been oppressed, colonialized, underrepresented, and now that we’re empowered we’re going to take what’s ours and air our dirty laundry. I’m not saying their push for equality is wrong but that they leave no room for the other side in a climate of cancel culture. Think of all the academics whose entire careers are based on what is now blatantly called imperialist and colonialist. The premise of the country as a free state where all are equal is not possible when we are separating ourselves into piecemeal subcultures defending our turf. America cannot be an either/or but has to be an inclusive both/and. Among many other adjustments, the required coursework reading may very well have to change from the exclusively white Western canon and the field may need some serious reflection on its context and history, but this doesn’t mean dissolving the discipline, as Dan-el Padilla Peralta is open to doing with the classics. Let’s recall that even ideas as radically departing from traditional Western perspective as those in Edward Said’s ORIENTALISM didn’t call for destroying the whole field.
What is happening is human nature: everyone pursues his interest, and it is the country that plays mediator for all citizens. Can we each stop demonizing the other side? It is useful to keep in mind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance and take a step back from our particular place in society to think larger. With America soon to become majority non-white, we have to make peace with that fact. Now, onto something more interesting.
Towards a Brighter Future
This is sobering: a study last year found that when people are forming teams and adding members, they deliberately reduce diversity when they are shown whether a potential member boosts or drops the team’s overall diversity. This behavior looms large. For all we tout diversity in our public relations messaging, for all the apparent diversity in cities, residential neighborhoods are largely segregated by race, even in our most diverse cities: New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago. And this map shows the race distribution in the country using the 2010 census data, with one dot per person, each dot colored by race. This is the undeniable state of affairs: de facto segregation. Residential segregation translates to school segregation. These maps show segregation consistent with the country’s racialized geography, and this is over half a century after Brown v. Board of Education. Whatever image of a racially integrated country we may have in mind is not just overly optimistic but entirely wrong. PRRI surveyed racial compositions in 2013 of social networks within racial groups and revealed shocking homogenity. Among whites, 91% of friends are also white, among Blacks, 83% are Black, and among Hispanics, 64% are Hispanic. And Asians? No data for us. We’re invisible. But these numbers remind me of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s WHY ARE ALL THE BLACK KIDS SITTING TOGETHER? because of its title and how it cuts at the core of the matter. What is disheartening is I have not even the slightest instinct to say these numbers are out of touch with reality. What about the entertainment we consume? A study found “[w]hite participants showed significantly less interest in seeing movies with mostly Black casts than in seeing movies with mostly [w]hite casts.” Another study found that whites and Blacks have few favorite TV shows in common. And books? I couldn’t find a study on this, but let’s be honest. If we can’t even bring ourselves to watch movies and TV across race, how many do we suppose have read James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, or Toni Morrison? Or Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk?
So we don’t live together, don’t go to the same schools, aren’t friends with each other, don’t watch the same movies or TV shows, and if we meet each other at work what guides our conversations is a societal restraint from broaching race that precludes any serious discussion and mingling. How then are we to make friends across racial lines if we don’t have much in common, can’t point out the obvious, and skirt about the issue by talking shop, and when we invite that friend to our circle of largely homogenous friends we are also transferring the burden of restraint to them? And what are we talking about when we say with such conviction that we understand the Black plight or that of other minorities who have been less abused and less disenfranchised over the course of the country’s history if the immensity of our unquestioned confidence comes from—indeed betrays—our own realities, our projected mythologies and imaginations exchanged among friends, cloistered in our communities where everyone looks and thinks like ourselves?
Racial inequality is something we can’t help but pick up on. We adults don’t talk about it because we’ve learned restraint, afraid of saying the wrong thing, and instead keep quiet or look away. Kids notice it too but are more open to speaking their minds. In the podcast NICE WHITE PARENTS, the host Chana Joffe-Walt describes this kind of situation when white students, who bring more funding power, started enrolling at a predominantly Black and Hispanic middle school: “These boys, even at 11 years old, they’ve absorbed the same messages that [the school] wasn’t so good before. It was a bad school. He and his friends, they’ve turned the school around. That’s what he’s learning.” This is what the boy in question said: “The kids wouldn’t pay attention. And they had, like–got to, like, zone out every little thing. And I bet they learned very little. And now this generation with us, I think we’re doing a lot better. And I think that we’re learning at a much faster pace.” This comment isn’t racist so much as it’s an innocent observation of a consequence of our education system and a history of suppression, and what he is saying is something we all notice when we come across it, but the current political and social climate casts over us a pall that mutes what we already know as wise silence.
Here I digress to put in a word on immigration. Like any proper New Yorker, I am a flaming liberal. I support the idea of equal opportunity for all whether in this country or in any other. In spite of this, I don’t think the answer to the immigration question is to throw open our doors and let everyone in. There is a limit to how many the country can tolerate without bankrupting the social system. David Frum notes the practical concerns of immigration, that immigrants cost the government more than they contribute in taxes. A part of me says this is the price of an egalitarianism, but this deficit also surfaces a brutal reality. How can we accommodate indefinitely more immigrants when our country is already steep in debt and millions of our own, those we look in the eye as our fellow Americans, are struggling? Frum advocates focusing our immigration policy to accept highly skilled immigrants—doctors and engineers—who earn their keep and help the country remain innovative. This, of course, means a continual brain drain from their home countries, which strangely enough has been found to increase wages and democratic values back home. I’m not convinced, however, that losing a nation’s best and brightest helps a developing country stand on its own and catch up rather than merely benefiting indirectly from Western progress. But this is the price of supplying American innovation, securing American well-being.
Diversity—why is it so difficult? I’m an atheist, yet I’ve sat with a Protestant as he prayed for me, I’ve linked hands with Catholics saying grace before a meal, I’ve attended Mass, I’ve sat in classes full of Catholics. I’ve joined the Muslim retreat at the Blue Mosque as the muezzin called and witnessed the hall’s worshipers kneeling on the floor in prayer. I put on a kippah in Jerusalem and stood face-to-face with the Wailing Wall. I sat among the local community in Mumbai at a Hindu engagement ceremony. So what that I’m an atheist? We should keep in mind that what feels foreign to one is home to another, and it was the arbitrary slight of chance that we ourselves were not born into another’s community.
Diversity is the country’s future, and it is a future when the landscape of writers and directors will have changed, along with the TV-watching and movie-going market whose preference commands what the entertainment industry produces. One day, this era’s fight for social justice, equal representation, true equality under law and its enforcement, will have been but one chapter in the transition to a more equitable world. And one day, we will not think it out of the ordinary that a lead actor is brown though we notice it and are aware of the long struggle that made such casting possible, and we will not be uncomfortable watching a person of color rejoice or sulk or have the full range of experiences of any ordinary human. One day, the unsightly practice will have passed when the camera deigns a moment for the diversity shot and then cuts away, returning to the default whiteness. The country’s future is mixed, and we have to accept this as a reality, not boil over with veiled resentment.
William Buckley wrote, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” What nonsense. How shortsighted is his view of history that for him, history extends no further than the past several hundred years since the Great Divergence that marked the West’s emergence as the world’s wealthiest and most advanced civilization, and he happened to have lived in the period when such self-flattery is possible. The one constant that endures time is change, and just as no individual lives forever in his youthful peak, no society is immune to its evolving fortunes. How many came before who met worse fates have had to accept change? Russians, Indians, Chinese, Persians, Turks, Aztecs, Egyptians, and all those who belonged to once thriving civilizations: if it is any consolation, others have been here before, and the decline of white power in America is one peaceful tick of change in the ocean of our inflated self-importance. How many in those prior civilizations screamed that the end is nigh, yet the world has moved on, and they carry about themselves in it as routinely as the earth revolves around the sun? It’s always irked me how any mentioning the fall of the Roman Empire carries an air of puritanical nationalism, that it is with resentful resignation that such greatness came to an end. It certainly was great, but we give the invaders who brought its fall the exceedingly flattering name of barbarians even though they too had families and lives, pursuing their interests just as the Romans theirs, and these barbaric tribes don’t seem barbarians any longer when we name them properly: the Franks settling in modern France, the Visigoths in modern Spain, the ancestors of the moderns. We sympathize so intensely with the Romans because we see only one side, and the fact that we continue to use the word barbarians descends from this lineage—it’s what the Romans called outsiders. It is worth reminding ourselves the truth Carl Sagan pointed out in COSMOS: “National boundaries are not evident when we view the earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.” That blue crescent formed 4,500,000,000 years ago, of which we humans developed agriculture in the last 12,000 and began laying the foundation for civilization. It is outright foolish to think that human culture has peaked and should change no further. The future of the country is diversity and what must happen: acceptance and unity, not separation and exclusion. Why not imagine a future where we contain Whitman’s multitudes? Across canyons and valleys, lush green praries and eroded rock strewn over sand-blown desert, towering mesas and redwood forests, we find small towns and major metropolises decorating the land under the snow-capped mountains, for we are all of us American: brown and yellow and black and white and blue and red, bound not by prescriptions of the isolated echo chambers that came before but by a full forward march, hand in hand, towards a history that will bear our names in pioneering pride. When we were children we saw ourselves as adventurers and explorers, looking out at a world full of mystery, curious at everything, unafraid to learn, elated to be alive. Where has that sense of awe and wonder gone?
↑ ↓ 2021-02-09, 二. In Defense of Abstract Art.
Why view abstract art? When we stand before an abstract painting, what is it that we’re looking at in the indeterminate swirls that don’t even remotely resemble a person, a place, or anything familiar? I wish to address why I prefer abstraction.
If we can represent nature by reducing it into a set of equations, why not too visual expression into art’s purest form? And what is visual art on the canvas but the strokes of a brush painting in the four variables of color, shape, size, and space? Consider Mondrian, Rothko, and Kandinsky. They use these variables to their own vision, and even with such a small arsenal, how can we say their compositions are anything but wholly unlike each other? It is often mentioned that abstract paintings lack technical difficulty. To this I say that the difficulty of abstraction is in the conception which requires a certain maturity, not in the elitist sense, but in the capacity to grasp symbolism to its devastating potential. One way to conceive of the world is to view nature and the universe as the eternal constants in which we measly humans flicker by, but another, equally valid one is to place ourselves at the central vantage point because what will it all have mattered if we don’t exist? To appreciate abstraction is to take the leap from merely mimicking reality, scrupulously copying down its concretized distinctions and its various shades of light, to human expression, the crux of what it means to be alive.
I remember the first time I encountered Barnett Newman’s VIR HEROICUS SUBLIMIS. I was pulled to it as if by a magnet, drawn up close to the life-sized red canvas, the red consuming my entire field of vision, and I felt shivers running down my spine. Staring straight ahead, I felt transported to another realm, and what ran through me for a full minute was a whole world of sensory saturation. The canvas encased all passion, all desire, all rage, all triumph, and it was surging excitement, jubilation: the sublime. What I felt was nothing less than the chaos of the universe, human folly, birth and death, our meaningless motions, coming together in a form so simple. It is an overflowing power even though the painting does not laboriously enumerate all human mistakes under the sky, it does not have any semblance of a character or story, it doesn’t have any material substance other than color and size, for this impalpability mirrors what we have in the end: nothing. And this sensory experience is the meaning of the work, needing no other indication than the title: Man Heroic Sublime. Some attempt to approach the painting using traditional methods, examining its construction and the artist’s background. To do so is to have missed the point. They place undue emphasis on the vertical lines, the zips, and deconstruct the order in which Newman painted them—it’s a rather simple exercise of withholding some vertical space with tape and then either painting between a pair or painting around one. But this is not the right way to look at the painting, and we do not understand the painting through its technicalities any more than we get closer to understanding what enables life by analyzing the brain’s atomic makeup. The zips merely serve to provide a sense of size for a painting that stands taller than any viewer.
I am not suggesting that expression and meaning is limited to abstraction’s dominion. Consider Norman Rockwell’s undeniably political THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH, or Caspar David Friedrich’s proud WANDERER ABOVE THE SEA OF FOG, or Giorgio de Chirico’s dreary THE MELANCHOLY OF DEPARTURE, or the contrast of human transience and the mountain’s unfazed apathy in Hokusai’s EJIRI IN THE SURUGA. Let’s not forget Yayoi Kusama’s more visceral infinity mirror installations that manifest her internal world, rife with obsessions, a black room illuminated by floating lights all around, all receding into the horizon, a world on fire from which there is no escape, a world into which the public voluntarily steps. Or the same concept rendered more explicit in Edvard Munch’s THE SCREAM, which unlike the former cannot be misinterpreted as just a pretty picture. What I am saying is abstraction’s poignance arises from its simplicity that is too often overlooked, a simplicity that not only enhances a painting’s lyric capacity but elevates the art by inflecting upon its very medium so that the artist, the process, the art meld into one. Why should a Ronnie Landfield stare at us less directly and speak to us from further away than Vermeer’s GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING? In one brush stroke dashing across the surface, one color reaching upwards, dancing among many in our human dynamism, we see not a landscape or a portrait but a visual ode singing the tune of our inner complexity.
To stay clear of art’s mystique, I must mention the regrettable reality is that any mention of art is preceded by its reputation. In this sense, art is like wine tasting. Wine tasting and, even more importantly, the acquired diction developed to describe it unfortunately connote class aspiration, class maintenance, and the whole system of media that reinforce wine’s continued esteem and consumption. We don’t dwell a second on wine’s unfermented cousin, the unremarkable grape juice, but we go to considerable lengths to distinguish between wines by variety, region, year, and color. Though we may sensibly separate a heavy malbec from a mild pinot noir, when we start throwing around phrases like “flavor of blackberry”, “notes of earthy vanilla”, “hints of seasoned red plum”, and “a rich dark chocolate lingering in the aftertaste”, all the while affecting a poker face as we swirl and sniff ourselves into high oblivion, should we not ask ourselves if there might not be a more productive use of time than making an impression? Any genuine appreciation for wine is quickly extinguished when artifice enters the conversation. So too is art when we chase the big name, attach a price tag, and enshroud it in undue mystery. The art market has not escaped the American variety of ruthless capitalism, and decades of rising economic inequality has permitted the rise of rogue billionaires who patronize rogue artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Why do some artists fetch handsome sums at Christie’s or Sotheby’s while many of their peers struggle, forced to sell their work on the street? There is a market whose taste is determined by an exclusive community, and the clients, keen on entertaining guests of similar standing, viewing a painting as an investment, patting themselves on the back for procuring a rarefied treasure for the spouse, transact in prestige which, too, can be bought. The truth is that the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, and those in the professional class whose wealth has passed the threshold where capital allocation alone suffices for comfortable living have not, over the course of their upward career trajectory, had the time to calibrate artistic taste. The real artist, dedicated to his craft as a parent to a child, for whom art is a means of living, is at the mercy of the tastemakers, the curators, the established critics. Such is the art market. But American capitalism, ever eager to place its hand on every exchange, bends the market to its own morality. This is not art for art’s sake but raw capitalism. Let us appreciate art on its own accord, art for all. As Jerry Saltz says, anyone can look at art—including abstract art.
writing fiction is like
doing pure math
simply pen and paper.
painting a world in abstract
color and shape
size and
space
↑ 2019-09-29, 日.
There is a pond outside, wavelings rippling across the surface, a soft, gentle, constant wind billowing over its still mass. Two adolescent geese are floating near the edge, wings folded, necks tall and curved like cranes, feathered chests thrust out like a hen sitting on her eggs, enticing to the hands like a pomeranian’s coat. It is a cloudy afternoon, a uniform grey pall, bleak and gloom looming in the skies above, time seemingly halted, the movements of the guiding lights in abeyance, left without an announcement when late afternoon becomes early evening. Perhaps it is the changing of the seasons. A mild chill this morning, headwind of the winter ahead.