Equal Signs.

Cooler weather means warmer clothes; clothes that cover up my shoulders and bundle up my arms in cozy sweaters and long, protective jackets. I love fall and winter clothing, and I wear scarves even when it is hardly cold enough to justify them. But the delights of fall fashion have developed one particular drawback – I am not as aware of and connected to that equal sign seared into my back, that has been there for almost a year now.

The other morning I stood with a mirror in my hand just to observe it for a minute or two, and run my fingers over it again. I had a nightmare last week that somehow it had been damaged, had been taken away from me. Not even a full year and already it seems a part of myself I couldn’t bear to part with. Taking time to meditate on its perpetual presence immediately calms me, gives me a sense of stability, a reminder of who I am and what is important to me.

I’ll never forget the weekend when I finally got that tattoo. My sister and I had plotted it after the depressing passing of Prop 8, and the moment her brilliance thought it up I instantly knew it was the right thing to do. When it came time to do the deed, I felt a surprising sense of calm. Part of me had been expecting to feel fear, doubt; that when I would finally get right down to it, something would tell me “no.” But this never happened. And I didn’t even need someone to hold my hand – Michelle was out getting money from an ATM. The tattoo artist called me over, I sat down, and without any ripple of doubt I got that beautiful equal sign etched into my back. The moment did not so much reveal itself as intense, tinted with religious fervor; it was just obvious, that this was the right thing for me to do. I had always wanted some relatively small, meaningful tattoo – something to represent an idea that I could trust not to lose my devotion to as the decades went by. But I could never think of anything before. And from the moment Michelle suggested it to the moment it was complete, I knew that this, this was the one thing I could count on to always have faith in.

Because the equal sign on the back of my shoulder is not just about gay rights, or the freedom to marry. It is about the idea of pluralism, of democracy and freedom of thought. It is my testament to the belief that any idea which allocates human dignity unequally amongst human beings is wrong – and that every idea that furthers our appreciation of the endless diversity and startling creativity of mankind is a beautiful thing. The reason that I like to stop, every now and then, and look calmly at my equal sign is not only because it reminds me of who I am, and who I want to be – but because it reminds me of who we all are.

I have mixed feelings about Bill Maher.

Let’s start by describing them as 75 percent positive. When Bill Maher comes forward and says things like this – that America is stupid – he is absolutely my hero. Because this shit has got to be said; by someone, in some way, and an articulate and talented comedian saying it makes it all the better. His recent documentary, Religious, is another example of Bill Maher being kick ass awesome. Very few people, I have observed, speak truth to a cultural consensus of stupid more than Bill Maher.

However, I realize that Maher’s truth telling is deeply satisfying to me because well, I already agree with him. So here is someone spouting what I understand to be the plain truth in a fashion more witty, and more smart than even I could hope to manage. Alright, that makes me want to do cartwheels in my living room. But of what use is this to moving the broader, more mainstream debate in the right direction? It’s easy fodder for the right wing pundits, who can quote Maher as ample “proof” that the left is anti-American, elitist, etc. And who is Maher convincing other than those who already lean in his direction? Well, as always, I hold out hope for the third party, the youngster or politically neutral that, although they’ve never really thought about this before, find themselves laughing with Maher and hey, they like this guy. They have enough cultural knowledge to get his jokes and, impressed by his intellect and charisma, start to ponder these larger questions and tend to fall in his direction. However, how large is this audience and, how much will commentators and comedians like Maher help it grow? These are all open questions for me at the moment, and they speak directly to my own process of trying to figure out what kind of pubic commentator I want to be.

However, despite these doubts about the efficacy of Maher’s commentary, I still cannot imagine that the country would be better off with a softer, more moderate Maher. Someone needs to be saying these things, if only to preserve the intellectual dignity of this citizenry and to ensure that future historians will not look back on the record and conclude in dismay that simply no one was critical enough to see America for what, in many respects, it really was.

My second complaint is more clear cut. It is about women. Maher strangely does a complete one-eighty from his usual insightfulness when it comes to women. Whereas when observing religiosity in America, Maher sees how traditional culture keeps people from questioning and challenging the religious status quo, when it comes to gender he reproduces a host of old patriarchal stereotypes with no sense of how reactionary he is being. Women, in the mind of Maher, are always emotionally dependent on men*, and always looking for someone to impregnate them. Men, on the other hand, are biologically designed to cheat on their wives after a certain period of time.** Maher never wonders whether these images, and certain current realities, have less to do with some inherent aspect of womanhood, and more to do with  centuries old cultural pressures and conditioning. After all, if I grew up in a culture where I was informed that how I looked mattered more than how I thought, and that if I wasn’t eminently fuckable to the modern American man, I wouldn’t be loved, Christ, I think I might I have some emotional dependency issues. Oh wait, I did grow up in such a culture. It has always been clear to me, since elementary school, that the fact that I do not significantly suffer from these disabilities is the exception rather than the rule.

Do not get me wrong. I do not think Maher is a misogynist – he clearly has great admiration and respect for women and, I imagine, informs all of his partners honestly that if they are looking for a romantic, two-way relationship they’re looking in the wrong place. However I suspect he has extrapolated his personal experience with women to all women generally, with no idea of how statistically unreliable that is. If too many women piped up after sex, asking him, “what are you thinking?”, perhaps that is because Maher is desirable enough to make women fascinated with him, but is himself not quite capable of seeking out women who will defy such stereotypes.***

But no one is perfect. At the end of the day, Maher’s swallowing of the cultural consensus of stupidity – when it comes to women – is tolerable when compared to his insightful and fearless criticism of some of the more immediately harmful tendencies of American culture.

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* For a taste of this, see a clip of Bill Maher’s otherwise commendable “The Decider,” standup. Elsewhere in the same program, Maher jokes about the apparently universal tendency of women to ask “what are you thinking?,” right after sex, which would be a funny joke for the element of reality it touches upon if it was not coupled in Maher’s comedy with such unexamined and banal generalities about women.

** Please consult the last 15 minutes of the podcast of the May 8^th broadcast of “Real Time,” where Maher describes asking a male to be monogamous as equivalent to asking him to eat nothing but toast for the rest of his life.

*** Consult footnote one.

Please stop saying the idiocy of the Republicans is going to turn the party into a minuscule minority.

It’s not. What it is going to do is galvanize the already sizable right, and seduce a good chunk of the “moderates” that are supposedly so turned off by this circus of stupidity.

Liberal pundits, I’ve noticed, seem to be fond of declaring the internal combustion of the Republican Party. They’re losing their minds, they say. They’re desperate, they say. They’re imploding all over the place because they don’t know what else to do, they say. True, true, true. But then they assume that this is all very bad for them; that the supposedly mostly moderate American public is able to discern between reasoned debate and ignorance on display.

There are two major problems with this. Firstly, anyone on the right does not view such spectacles as Joe Wilson insulting the president on Wednesday as a serious reason to reconsider their own opinions. The connection between the shameless tactics of those opposed to health care reform, and the content of their opinions, will not be made. If anything, it will be made in the opposite direction – such behavior is called for because we are on the brink of the beginning of socialism in the United States so, why would you expect anything less?

Secondly, I wonder why the liberal columns I so often read, talking about how the Republican Party is going to have to compromise some of its hard lines if it wants to win at the ballot box, ignore the implied meanings of the word “moderate.” Sure, a majority of Americans could possibly be described as moderate, insofar as they are neither vehemently opposed to everything possibly described as liberal nor are they Godless liberal elitists, like myself. But the very meaning of the word moderate is operative here – of medium quantity, calm or mild. Moderates are not going to get all worked up about conservatives showing themselves for the intellectual frauds that they are. Moderates aren’t going to draw those conclusions in the first place. Moderates are going to shrug their shoulders, and say “Well it looks like a lot of heated debate is going on here, and I’m not sure what I think,” but then when someone tells them their taxes are going to be raised, they’ll quickly make up their minds about what they think. And then they’ll vote Republican, if they vote at all.

Why this persistent faith in the power of the moderate American voter? Don’t these pundits understand how primaries work, how lobbies work, how campaign contribution works, and who votes? Don’t they know that indeed, probably the weakest voice in a center-right country where “it’s socialist” suffices as a knock-out argument is this pathetic excuse for a moderate voice?

These pundits are merely looking in a mirror; they like to think of themselves as moderate, reasonable, open to compromise and capable of discerning truth from bullshit. And thus in a moment of severe although unintentional self-flattery, they tell themselves that this is the true America, the silent better angles of our nature. Perhaps some much needed introspection will occur when their optimistic forecasts turn to showers two and four years from now.

But then again, I really hope I’m wrong.

So what the fuck can I say?/thoughts on Kazin and Lakoff.

Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion has a conclusion that speaks directly to questions I’ve recently been turning over in my mind. Kazin confronts openly the problem progressives have with populism – considering how it has been co-opted by the Right in the last forty years, many progressives distrust “the people” as such. Intellectuals and scholars, Kazin writes, are “usually guarding a not-so-secret wish that other Americans were as rational and tolerant as we imagine ourselves to be.”[1] He is certainly writing about me.

He is also writing about me when he confronts the other intellectual problem I run up against – I could be open to listening to a defense of “the people,” the whole arc-of-history-leans-towards-justice idea, but I have a problem with the concept of “the people” itself. What does that mean, after all? I wince at rhetorical flourishes about the character or dreams of “the American people,” as though such an entity had any holistic integrity. It also seems like rhetorical and ideological tyranny; if we go ahead and try to define “the American dream,” too narrowly, does that leave everyone else who rejects said dream as un-American? And if we define it too broadly– as the dream of basically a decent life with happiness and fulfillment – then we can’t possibly be talking about anything specifically “American” anymore, since obviously the whole planet is populated with people looking for a decent and fulfilling life. And thus the concept seems empty, silly, and as Kazin writes, even “offensive in its assumption that ‘the American people’ share anything beyond a geographical space.”[2]

But Kazin advises me not to give up on said concept. Populism “lives too deeply in our fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced,” and rather than disabusing Americans of their myths entirely, progressives ought to “argue within the bounds of national traditions instead of railing against them and dreaming of a leap from history.”[3] But then George Lakoff, who wrote a nice little pamphlet about how progressives need to learn to reframe the debates the conservatives are currently in control of framing, seems to tell me I also need to believe in the frames I present, that I cannot and should not be dishonest about what I am arguing for in order to earn adherents.[4]

So here I am at a bit of an impasse. I completely agree with Kazin that the reluctance of intellectuals and scholars to be aggressively political is “a cultural disease,” and I agree that “intellectuals should contribute their time, their money, and their passion for justice.”[5] But I don’t know how to go about doing so while always respecting “the bounds of national traditions,” because I simply don’t believe in a lot of those traditions. I don’t believe that America is exceptional, insofar as every country is exceptional for a host of different reasons. I don’t believe that America has actually been a particular agent of bringing justice and freedom to the world (although we have certainly aspired to be, and that counts for something); not any more so than Britain or France, at least. I don’t believe in a unified “American people,” and am acutely annoyed when even the likes of Obama depend on such hallow concepts to garner political support. At the same time, I find the reverse narrative of some of the 1960s radicals to be equally silly, that America has been particularly evil or impressively tyrannical. While the dynamics of all countries are unique, I see America as an end product of what all other countries are – entities run and crafted by human beings, plain and simple, with all the good and the bad that this implies.

I do have a positive vision, of course. I’d like to see an America united only in its appreciation of diversity. I’d like to see freedom of religion flourish without the devoutly religious believing that such freedom includes the right to penetrate into the public sphere in a manner that actually reduces the freedom of everyone else. I’d like to see an America which values humanity and justice more than patriotism or particularity; I’d like to see an America where there would not be any political creed or opinion clearly “out of bounds” of some mystical “American tradition.”  It seems, after reviewing Lakoff’s several “types” of progressives, that I am mostly a civil libertarian progressive.[6] My ultimate values are openness and pluralism.

So how can you take such a message to the public and possibly sell it, no matter how you frame it? I’d be arguing for an abandonment of nationalism, after all, in favor of a general universalism and tolerance. America is not solely responsible for our modern doctrines of freedom and liberty, I’d point out, although she certainly deserves credit for some of it – but we ought to give equal credit to the British, the Dutch, the French. It would be a Western creed, for sure, but not particularly American. Because to me, the real story of America is one of contradiction, of conflict. Perhaps the title to Edmund Morgan’s book says it best: American Slavery, American Freedom. It has always been that way, has it not? Idealism coupled with brute oppression, and the second concept strangely dependent on the first for its definition. Who shares in this American freedom has expanded, for sure, and I do think people can be responsive to an argument for expanding it even further – but there’s just the thing. Is it really “American” freedom, or just freedom, plain and simple?

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Thoughts and suggestions welcomed – no, desired.

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[1] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 289.

[2] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 287.

[3] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 290, 289.

[4] George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), 100-101.

[5] Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 289, 290.

[6] George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant, 14.

I am a product of privilege.

I know this. I’m not sure how many others do. It is common for Americans to think of themselves as “blessed”: they are blessed with loving parents, a safe home, or beautiful children. Less often do you hear expressions such as, “I am blessed to live in a suburb,” or “I am blessed to have been born towards the top of the class hierarchy.” In any case, what we do acknowledge as blessings are not usually recognized as coming from reigning social structures, but from God or some obscure sense of providence, “Oprah’s God,” if you will. And while we proclaim humility – being blessed is a passive activity after all – we simultaneously collect the credit for our blessings. Providence smiles on those who work hard and pray hard.

It is providence, not privilege, so many believe. And providence is just. How hilarious that the concept of the elect has wormed its way into how Americans justify economic disparity. And I’ve been sitting, and wondering a lot lately, how to make any dent in that self-satisfied explanation. How do you tell someone, who has likely indeed worked hard, who likely indeed has made good choices in their life – how do you explain to someone why no one can take complete credit for their successes in life? That we are all caught up in a larger system which, as a colleague of mine puts it, largely determines our options and opportunities from the start? Pride takes quite a hit, in a situation like that; and the American psyche is nothing if not built on pride.

Let’s leave aside that question for the moment. Because when I stare into the thick, unrelenting wall of ignorance for too long, I feel a low rumbling of anger and desperation. Directionless, fantastical images of somehow violently tearing down that wall pop in and out of my head; but they lead nowhere, offer no solution, and contain the same sort of endless hopelessness that characterizes most instances of American history where someone actually tried to burn it all down.

And that leaves the other question. How to live, then, as a product of privilege? I can’t deny the privilege, tear it up into pieces and forsake all its benefits – I hardly have the stomach for it, and to leave behind my privileges is also to leave behind my meager chance for making a difference. But for those who are aware of it – who live with a continual acknowledgement that they did not in any way earn much of what has enabled them to thrive – it can be a heavy contradiction to carry. Not at every moment, not even frequently, I would say. But there are certain moments where reality adjusts itself just so, and you see clearly. See clearly the huge canyon between you and another human being, a difference so vast and yet, meaningless; random in its selection, unjust in its goals, and bone crushing in its operation.

I have other fantasies too, positive and powerful ones, of figuring a way to chip away at this obstinate, ugly wall. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are no clear enemies – those who ought to see what’s around them, those with good intentions and good hearts, also participate in maintaining the barricade, and I feel helpless to get through to them. And what could I possibly think of that someone else hasn’t? What could I possibly say? How could I possibly say it? What has worked then, in the past? Could it work now? Why not? What works, people, what works? If you have any idea at all, please let me know.

Moscow.

It has taken me awhile to get to writing about Moscow. There is no particular reason for it; busy, as always. But rather than doing a flowing narrative, I am going to go over my trip through moments.

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Arrival, when the plane touches down. I’m excited, thrilled to finally be landing and relieved that this has actually happened. Looking through the window I see buildings go by with Russian script; the fact of where I am starts to sink in, and my heart races with excitement. I feel validated, as though all the abstract reasoning I had for coming here is finally vibrant and alive within me.

Thirty minutes later, in the cab. The man who was waiting for us, holding a sign with Amanda’s name on it, has kind eyes. He looks strikingly like Yuli Daniel, the dissent whose serious visage stares out at people from the wall of my bathroom sink. On the ride into Moscow, he talks about the architecture; this building was from the Stalin period, this other from Khrushchev. It is startling to hear someone speak of these rulers not as part of a pop history quiz nor in the loaded political vocabulary of the pundit, but simply as leaders of their own country in which they live. People who left their mark. Russia becomes real.

Fifteen hours later. It is two o’clock in the morning, and Amanda and I are out in the middle of Moscow. We slept for twelve hours upon arrival, and now we are starving. We spent at least an hour charting a Google map to the nearest 24 hour diner; it doesn’t seem that far away, and even has an American name, so perhaps just out of the sheer momentum of being here we go. The streets are all blanketed with snow, and they are almost completely empty. Everything is strange in its stillness, an odd way to be introduced to a city. The entire time I am figuring this is not the brightest idea, and yet am strangely calm. We are unable to find the street we are supposed to turn on, so we give up and walk back to the hotel. We end up ordering room service.

Around eight hours later. It’s snowing. Amanda and I can’t figure out how to get over to Red Square. We can see it, but a river of a street divides us, cars bellowing down the road without a cross walk in sight. Jay walking is completely out of the question. Finally, we find a place to cross. Wondering about in what looks like a major shopping district when it isn’t a cold, snowy morning, we’re about to get frustrated. Then suddenly Amanda cries out “Oh, shit!” and I turn to see the cathedral of St. Basil’s looming down at us. “Oh holy fuck,” comes my response, about half a second after Amanda’s. It is the first time either of us have been genuinely startled by a building.

That evening. I wake up at four in the morning. I can’t go back to sleep. I e-mail my parents, Daniel. I take a warm bath in the luxurious bathtub in our hotel room. I turn on the TV and watch some program on the Discovery Channel, which is British in audio but with Russian script for all the commercials. Odd. I do not know that this will be what I am doing almost every night here.

The next day. We are in the subway. We found the circle line and are now getting out at every stop, eager to see the famous Moscow metro. I’m staring up at the ceiling, looking at a huge mosaic of Lenin in Red Square. There is one of Stalin too, and a bust of Lenin at the end of the station. The bust sits next to what looks like rough scaffolding, plywood walls that seem to hide some sort of construction project. Lenin sits there as though he is tacked on, just another neglected part of the rubble. I do not think many Russians stop to look at him anymore. I think they have not even bothered to remove him.

That night. I am sleepless again, and frustrated about it. I take three baths. But I do learn some interesting things about the Amazon, and discover a charming BBC show where people try to make a certain amount of money by selling off old antiques.

The next afternoon. Amanda and I are in this strange marketplace that the flight attendant in Atlanta told us to come to. From a distance it looks like an imitation of Disneyland, with tall fairytale castles and whimsical buildings. Up close it is quite dilapidated, a wooden, themed marketplace stacked with peddlers. Amanda buys a babushka that starts with Obama and works its way down to Reagan; I get one with Lenin to Putin, and the woman selling them to us laughs when I quickly make my choice. The booths sell a lot of Soviet tourist trinkets, from flags to pins with the hammer and sickle. A nice man helps Amanda choose out one of the pins. The people are friendly and eager to please you with a purchase. All the Soviet Union seems to be to them is an opportunity to make some money.

The last day. Walking through Red Square, wedding receptions are all around us. Amanda and I see an old woman in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. She is hunched over, talking to her grandson and pointing towards Lenin. She must be telling him the story of the Revolution, and what Lenin did afterwards. She must be trying to instill in him the values she holds so dear, the values she sees slipping away every time a new mall replaces an old government building or her granddaughter asks for the trendiest new coat. It is perhaps the saddest and yet the most beautiful thing I see on our trip. I wonder about how Lenin failed her, how humanity failed her. I think about the limits on our dreams and what can happen when we can see nothing else. I think about the irony that the Bolsheviks thought they were bringing on the salvation of man. And yet I still think it’s beautiful that there is something in all of that in which she still believes.

An hour later. I’m wondering through the statue garden. I was determined to find this place, and the project will fill almost the whole day. The garden does not only have old, torn down statues of Soviet leaders, but dozens of other artistic projects. Perhaps the most striking is Jesus crucified on a missile. Not too difficult to put that one in context. Some of the statues are so haunting as to be difficult to look at; leave it to the Russians to produce the visual equivalent of existential angst. I go to see Stalin, whose nose is chopped off. Nearby there is a cage of stone heads, lanced behind barbed wire. They are supposed to represent his victims. Stalin’s victims. I am glad we came here last. This was the right place to come at the end.

An hour later. Amanda and I walk through Red Square for the last time. Gum, the largest mall in Moscow, is lit up behind us. Its light reflects in the shiny, polished stone of Lenin’s mausoleum. The irony seems almost purposeful. What a strange, silent and aching place.

The next morning. We say goodbye to the man from the taxi service. He is the same one who picked us up, and he brought us into the airport to show us how the gates work and where to watch for our flight status. Amanda gives him a nice tip, and his whole face softens into clay as he thanks us. His eyes seem to sink into his face, and I wish I had the courage to ask for a picture with him. It was such a beautiful face, and I never want to forget it. I will try always to keep it in my memory, placed alongside the dark eyes of Yuli Daniel.

And it all looked so good on paper.

The class I TA for just covered affirmative action, and as a result I had to listen to some of the students weigh in on the topic. One student found the admission policies of one school to give excessive weight to race; 20 points out of a possible 150 point system. Race, he said, is not something one can help; and therefore, it is wrong to admit anyone on anything other than “the merits.” He was also annoyed with giving points for poverty, since he failed to see how this relates to anything.

Another student responded that poverty and minority status have a high correlation, and so it is wrong to suppose that a merit based system is really colorblind considering the poor quality of schools in inner-city neighborhoods. But her opponent insisted that wealth, unlike race, is mutable, and so should not be taken into consideration (this would imply that he reversed his original reasoning about why race shouldn’t be considered, but they didn’t plan this out, clearly).  She asked how one gets a good job when you can’t go to college? He retorted that you work hard for a while and then you go. Much to my relief, this drew aghast laughs from about a third of the class.

But I do extend some sympathy towards his position, not because it is right, but because it is quite seductive. I only vaguely remember my views on affirmative action when I was an undergraduate, but considering my conservative political outlook at the time it probably ran something much like that. The injustices of the past are in the past; to take them into consideration and reward those for their skin color is to perpetuate the old injustice in a new direction, and if anything encourages racism and discourages merit. The idea is so simple, so pure; so how can it be wrong? Who could argue against a “merit based” system?

The problem with this is that it assumes a merit-based system has, or ever could exist. It never has, it never will. That is not to say that someone with nothing to show for his high school education can make it into a quality university – hard work and dedication usually do play a role in the outcomes of our endeavors. However, I wonder if the student against affirmative action ever stopped to ask himself how he managed to do well in high school. It probably had something to do with going to a good school, because he grew up in an affluent suburb. It probably had something to do with having parents who not only could provide him food, clothing, and education but whatever else he needed to keep himself ahead of the game. It probably had something to do, in short, with not growing up in a broken neighborhood filled with crime and steeped in a culture which offers no encouragement to bright students. And I then wonder if he figures he deserved all of this from the start, from the moment of his birth, if he earned his privileges and advantages. The obvious answer is that he did not. From the beginning of his life, everything about his circumstance gives the lie to the idea of a “merit based” world.

Some people would continue to insist, of course, that the lack of an equal starting line is just a part of the great American struggle; hey, the Asians overcome racism, so really you’re not fully American until you accept the status quo while simultaneously triumphing over it.  But the problem with the self-made man is that he is quite rare – more rare than our politicians and media machines would like you to think. If you think it happens all the time, that’s because those are the stories you hear about – you hear about the Colin Powells of the world and not, as it happens, the millions of others who don’t happen to have extraordinary talent or inspiration on hand. And that’s why I would characterize the conservative excuse of “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” as absurdly unrealistic. How it is that an essentially negative view of human nature couples with an insistence that we organize society around the exceptional few is beyond me. It is just plain inconsistent; and it does not offer any effective solution for dealing with reality, in the meantime, of humanity on both the aggregate and individual level.

But that’s all an aside. For the student in the class, it is all still perfectly clear. It’s all about merit, man. And if the supposed “merit based” system without any affirmative action just happens to be of benefit to the people with privilege built-in, then all the better. How convenient that philosophical purity backs up class and racial purity as well.

I want to go home.

From my paper for my minor project, designing a course on early modern Europe, in this case specifically on:

Philosophy and Governance in Western Europe: 1640-1800

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As a whole, the course finds no singular narrative convincing – while the history of early modern Europe is not, as Hegel would have it, a history of conflicting ideas ultimately producing progress, neither is it, as Marx would have it, merely a story of materialistic determination in which ideas only play the part of window dressing. Rather politics, government, economy and philosophy all mutually shape and compel each other towards new realities. Yet the course is at heart sympathetic to the goals of the Enlightenment, and insistent upon the fact that reason remains the primary tool with which Western society attempts to determine what it will become. Ultimately we will return to Habermas, on a perhaps sad note, asking not what we regret losing from pre-modern Europe, (as the discussion is often cast), but what we regret losing from early modern Europe. Today, our contemporary Western culture hosts a public sphere that is a sad and shallow reflection of the critical debate once inspired by the Enlightenment.[1]

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[1] Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Chapters 5-6

The invisible community.

There has always been a tension within me between the poet and the clear headed rationalist. The former stalks about in-between intense musical chords of string instruments and her personal struggle beside a wine glass cements her place in history – the latter rises above the usual folly of humanity by clearing her mind of the clutter of sentimentality and insincere thought.

Depending on my state of mind, which I favor at any given point, and in what combinations, varies. Yet overall it is fair to say that ever since college I have usually tried to hold my poet-side down; to reign in that primordial urge inside of me to communicate my subjective experience of life to others, and to receive either commentary or admiration in return. I usually fail, however, to contain the beast, and the results vary as well. However, when they are bad – when I have made a fool of myself or simply appeared foolish – my other self rears up mercilessly, and I can feel nothing but an overriding contempt for that stupid girl who so stupidly opened her mouth, or picked up her pen.

I come to think of this not because the conflict has been acute lately – quite the contrary. I have been finding my emotions, meanings and passions to focus increasingly on, and join with that which preoccupies my rational mind most of the time. This has, as already discussed, led me to start seriously considering how to best lay plans for making my best attempt to matter, somehow, to this world. But therein lies the question at hand – in order to do so, how must I present myself to the world? How do I go out and argue for ideas, while those ideas are being transmitted, not purely as though out of ether, but from a human being, full of – amongst other things – poetry?

The model I see all around me is one of limited restraint – the intellectuals I know and admire do not seem particularly afraid of letting their human sides show, but they do not offer them very often for consumption. There is a tacit understanding that for ideas to really convince, they need to be separated, at least in principle, from subjective experience. I would certainly concur – but I am not sure it helps explain why the ideas are worthy, valuable, and powerful to rip them from the context through which they are spoken. In other words, I do not know that I can better advance my idea of what would make a better world if I cannot explain how it is for me living in the current one.

And this of course, means perhaps much will come out in this act of conveyance that the most austere among us will define as strictly “personal,” and perhaps it is only this. But I hope not only to be a writer of facts and logic, but of consciousness and experience – I hope to keep and include my poet. And if I am going to do that – if I am going to aim for that larger net, that wider goal – I have to go ahead and give myself up to the world, whatever they might end up doing with these sides of myself or however they might judge me. For once I have wedded my fate to history, there is no part of myself that does not rightly belong to it.

And if you think about this, inevitably this happens to all participants in the moving of society, whether minor or major – their family, relationship and mental histories are looked over and researched articulately, some of the top names earning entire books solely on the matter of their psychology and how that contributed to the thoughts and deeds they gave to the world. Why not simply make it easier for everyone by giving them the book, handing over the diary – it would at the least satiate that poet yearning for connection to an audience, and would do so in the long run goal of satisfying much more than merely my overly reflective self.

“That echo chorus lied to me.”

A significant portion of my consciousness is occupied by an awareness of suffering. But not only the immediately conceivable injustice of politics or oppression, but of personal suffering — existential suffering. This personal suffering is rarely if ever given political expression or cultural legitimacy; it is a suffering regulated to the corridors of silence, where it stifles without an audience, and equally without a solution.

Where better to clarify what I am talking about than Oprah? In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby pinpoints what has always made me anxious about Oprah. Central to her show is a narrative – one narrative – about the meaning of human trial and suffering. Suffering which arises out of misfortune is an opportunity in disguise to learn some new profound, spiritual lesson; and if you only have faith in this design of providence — often explicitly referred to as God’s providence — one will find the path to internal peace and, if your misfortune was due to some personal defects, redemption. There is, in other words, no meaningless sufferings. Every guest on Oprah’s show follows this script — and it is a script — of salvation through pious suffering. To my knowledge, she has had no one on the show to counter this narrative with the denial of providence, or an ultimate moral reason behind suffering.

Now, I am all for making lemonades out of lemons. But the pervasiveness of this doctrine, epitomized not only by Oprah but pretty much any media outlet that comments on existential questions, results in the condemnation of those who fail to find such edifying meaning in their suffering. There is something fundamentally wrong with people, in other words, who are depressed despite the best medication and therapy available, who persist in denying God or any objective meaning to human experience. They are the ungrateful, the weak, the failed and the arrogant.

What is responsible for the fact that what is in fact very historically rich experience is virtually ignored in American culture? I could probably research and write a whole book on it, so I hardly have an answer to offer immediately — but I would suspect it has a bit to do with stoicism, and a bit more to do with stoicism mixed with Christianity, and then a whole lot to do with the general belief in God that such Christianity has engendered, whether or not this providence is understood in strictly Christian terms. Throw in a bit of capitalist contempt for those deemed unproductive and unappreciative members of society, and you have a rich recipe for collective denial of persistent, unaccountable suffering — a denial of our own powerlessness over the human condition – and this denial makes life for those who dwell in it all the more isolated and unbearable.

Put simply, our culture usually denies that sometimes life just sucks, hard, painfully and long, and without any good reason. For sure you can learn things to your benefit from this suffering, and much art of great worth has been produced out of it, but this by no means is a reason for arguing that ultimately all the sad should reach some level of happiness, or that all sadness ultimately finds purpose and was intended for it. For those who believe they do not measure up to the level of control and happiness our Oprah-consuming world posits is waiting for all those sincerely seeking, there is nothing but a endless well of self-loathing waiting for them; there are hardly any voices to tell them that such is the human condition, and those who experience and realize its harsh realities cannot, through sheer mental exertion, do anything to change it.

I do not argue this in the cause of nihilism, or to bring despair to the world. Quite the opposite. For it seems to me that in light of this, all we can do is love and support each other, to help each other through. For some people, life is mostly the struggle, a sometimes continuous one that lacks storybook moments of triumphs. That does not mean it cannot have personal meaning or joyousness for them; but rather our society says to them persistently: “You ought to be happy as I am happy. Something is wrong with you if you are not.”

I believe that this attitude in fact brings much more suffering, much more loneliness upon the world than would otherwise be so if our culture as a whole lived with a consciousness and acceptance of the reality of existential suffering. But to stigmatize the unrepentant or unreformed individual who persists, and remains in an existential crises is merely the culture’s way of avoiding such a general shock to itself. In America, at least, the possibility that there is no ultimate, objective meaning haunts our deepest nightmares; it casts in doubt all we work for, strive for, believe is right and moral. It does not necessarily have to – but it does force us to bring our own souls to bare when formulating meaning, and it does mean we cannot demand of others the same experience, mission, or experience. And for those who have not been there, and fear both the darkness and know not the beauty of the endless internal universe, this is an idea worth all their anxious energy to deny.

Compared to some I’ve been around, but I really tried so hard

That echo chorus lied to me with its hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

–Neko Case.