I’ve been reading the post-rationalist thinker Sarah Perry’s Every Cradle Is a Grave (2014), a book whose premises, points, and conclusions I often disagree with. It makes an anti-natalist case for suicide. Still, Perry tries to be clear and fair in her argumentation. Her aim is not to score rhetorical points in her own anti-natalist in-group, and she is aware that what she says will be upsetting or reprehensible to some of the people who read her. That basic level of care can help even a polemic.
When we mirror this openness and fairness for a book, or a conversation, it facilitates the growth and flourishing of that thing into unforeseen patterns.
I told a friend recently that one of my biggest red flags in writers, or in online personalities more generally, was the sense that someone aimed primarily to wrap themselves in the warm fuzzy blanket of peer accolades rather than to attempt to seek out the truth or to come to a better understanding of something than they had previously. You see this kind of thing all the time. You can practically hear the person’s inner voice: “ooh, ooh, this is the part where I Drop. The. Mic. (Hope this post does numbers!)”
I hate that. Give me instead, any day, a person who argues passionately but who has, always, a seed of doubt and a sincere desire to reach the person with whom they’re arguing. I understand public debate is about winning the crowd rather than winning over the interlocutor, but in the dark hours of the night, I never think about the crowd—I think about the other person.
This has to do (I think) with care and the apportionment of our attention.
In her fourth chapter, Perry explores the idea of “experience machines,” drawing on Nozick. She argues that the fact of meaning in our lives is a consequence of some form of experience machines even if we don’t think of them this way. Religion and aesthetics are two areas that provide people with a grid for understanding the world and explaining—or coping with—friction, grief, tragedy, and so on. Perry writes,
“Experience Machines vary along the dimensions of being effective (producing desirable, meaningful experiences and preventing or at least domesticating negative experience), honest (not hiding the fact that they are cultural artifacts designed to produce experiences), and voluntary (rather than forced upon adherents). These traits are not necessarily independent; I suspect the most effective Experience Machines that have evolved in human societies are probably some of the least honest and least voluntary, and I’d expect honesty and voluntariness to generally correlate negatively with effectiveness.” (p. 74)
This paragraph, and in particular that last clause, halted me for a minute because it captures something succinctly. I have often been ineffective because I have tried to be honest about my own ignorance and my own perception of ambiguities; and I have often been ineffective because I value the extent to which my actions, or anyone else’s, are voluntary.
I give ambiguity so much epistemic weight. Yes, something could be this way, but we can see how it might also be this other way. Ambiguity has been a great ur-theme of a lot of my professional and personal “thought work,” although I haven’t fully begun to realize it as such until the past few years. In a lack of clarity, in the problem of discernment, there is a powerful human adventure: you step into the unknown.
Love, care, and friendship must be elective even if they emerge in conditions that are outside our control. A conversation, and even, in fact, a debate, holds out its hand toward these qualities of love, care, and friendship. It needn’t be heavy and somber; it can be witty and light and clever.
None of this is entailed, though, in the game of winning influence through “takes,” or what we sometimes mock as the Discourse. In the Discourse, the game is about recognition, but about recognition in a very particular way: it is about amassing the recognition of those whom you’ve no obligation to recognize back. You won’t lose sleep over them.
It is, however, “effective.”
John Berger’s recollection of his publisher Erhard Frommhold in Bento’s Sketchbook:
“And somewhere behind our agreement was the tacit recognition that any original political initiative has to start off as being clandestine, not through a love of secrecy, but because of the innate paranoia of the politically powerful.”
“In the ’70s, Erhard was sacked from the Verlag der Kunst, of which he was by then director, and was accused, on account of several of the books he had edited, of formalism, bourgeois decadence and factionalism. Fortunately he was not jailed. He was simply condemned to performing socially useful work: as a gardener’s assistant in a public park.”
As the internet continues to become more centralized, and as our data and metadata corral us into various behaviors, we find ourselves conditioned to police deviations from norms. Remember, everybody knows everyone else’s business in the small town—and if electronic media create a global village (which I think they do, kind of), the downsides of all-too-local life become inscribed on that globe. We might not know our neighbors two doors down, but we know and pass judgment on Twitter’s villain of the day. I think that we are less well-equipped to handle this ubiquitous reconfiguration of the scope and scale of our world change than we appear to be—and we don’t always appear to handle it that well.
Our environments are shaped deeply by the technological and media apparatuses. These allow our experience of time, space, and information, indeed our very conceptions of humanity or “Man.” (At some point in the future I will start weaving in commentary from, or on, the likes of Sylvia Wynter or Friedrich Kittler.) The question of media’s effects on us, individually and socially, rubs shoulders with the question of our own free will and all our various conceptions of selfhood.
Leopold Kohr argues that horrible tyranny is a function of large size, and that as human societies scale up, the capacities for worse behavior and abuse of power are not only broader but in fact inevitable. I am sympathetic to this perspective. I think Kohr is largely convincing but I also accept that we cannot simply “retreat” into a simple, non-electronic, non-global village and concern ourselves with creature comforts. We have to live in the world we have now, and it is this world that we must try to change for the better.
But effecting change seems to inspire, for so many people, two paths: try to gain power, or, signal to people in a community that one is also firmly in that community. These are effective strategies and viewed as noble goals.
There is at least one more possibility: turn your back on power. Throw one’s lot in with losers, rejects, and sleepwalkers. I wish I could embody that kind of refusal although I don’t think I have yet. Sarah Perry’s book poses a question, what would a world look like that didn’t stigmatize or prevent suicide look like? The world disincentivizes one’s ability to end one’s life. I think about a comparable, but very different question, what would a modern world look like that didn’t stigmatize the refusal of power? Can you kill your own will-to-power? (Or, in the narcissistic manifestation of the era, maybe it’s better to ask, Can you silence your own whine-to-power?)
This entails some risk. We are raised and prodded to seek power, including recognition and influence. We are entreated to give our attention to the gods of the attention economy, but we are also expected to want to rise to a higher status, to strive to be those who, as I suggested, are recognized but do not have to recognize back. Turning your back on this means something will register as “off” to some of your peers. It’s “tone deaf,” or worse—treasonous. (The aesthetic and the political are not the same thing but they overlap and touch some of the same ineffable territory.)
I sometimes read people online rhapsodizing about finding their people or their tribe. Commentators sometimes discuss American culture’s “blue tribe” and “red tribe,” as well as a “gray tribe” (depending on what you read). There are definitely other ways to slice it up, including ways that do not borrow the word “tribe” to describe factions or in-groups. I love people, and I long to belong, but I have rarely felt comfortable about belonging or conforming to groups in this way.
Robert Kugelmann, writing more generally about Ivan Illich, mentions how he was aided in his reading by a distinction in Levinas between two kinds of knowledge. There is autonomy, “symbolized by Odysseus, the man who comes home. This is the way of the same, the assimilation of what is, expanding and making more powerful the grasp of reason, whether it be to contemplate or to change and grasp nature.” Then there is heteronomy, symbolized by Abraham, “the man who left home never to return, venturing into the other, the foreign, the strange, in response to a call and in hope.” Illich, of course, embodied the latter.
I have great respect for those who put their own skin in the game for critique or for those who maintain their dignity when they are under attack. Someone like Sara Ahmed, for instance, who publicly laid out her reasons for resigning from her academic position—that integrity and commitment is rare and deeply admirable. Steven Salaita’s long article about being a bus driver after his own academic freedom debacle is a demonstration of what I take to be great personal courage and equanimity. It’s important not to romanticize the situations which prompt people to resign or be terminated from their work; I am saying only that the way that Ahmed or Salaita have responded seems laudable.
There are those making good money at institutions, still, who might say they are speaking truth to power. They might be sincere. But every honest person in that position must also ask to what extent they are also embodying power, speaking its truths to the powerless.
If you’ve read this far, thanks for your time. I am trying to sketch out something but you are seeing the public tip of a mostly private and murky iceberg. So if my associative leaps don’t make much sense, that’s of course on me. I’m Charlie Kelly in the mailroom.
“All flowers in time bend towards the sun / I know you say that there's no one for you / But here is one” (song)