Ruminations

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.

2021-07-10, 六.

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?

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.
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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.