So where I found a tiny subculture of those who felt at odds with sex stereotypes and their bodies, Keira Bell was greeted by 15 years’ worth of mass acculturation to this avatar-first understanding of ‘identity’. She was embraced by an international, well-networked digital community, dedicated to promoting the idea that our ‘selves’ are self-created and independent of our bodies, and backed up by serious lobbying money and a well-developed medical infrastructure. […]
But in turn the traces and scars offer a clue to a more grounded and human understanding of self than the digital one. The scars, wrinkles and other traces now building up on my gradually ageing physiology are ‘me’ in a sense that’s far more profound than Sebastian ever was. And seen thus, ‘who you truly are’ isn’t something that comes from within, to be greeted with awed affirmation by a hushed and waiting world. Rather, it’s something that emerges, over time, in conversation with that world.
“the tyranny of pure analysis”
[T]he whole enterprise is based on an error. Millions of careers rest on the false belief that by analyzing human phenomena from the outside, and by gathering more and more knowledge through research, we can get an accurate representation of reality to substitute for knowing these phenomena from the inside, through intuition. […]
Analysis has generated thousands of empirical concepts that large numbers of people are believed to share. Examples include “rational decision making,” “wellness,” “whiteness,” and “addiction,” to name just a few. Much of our economy is built around these words in the form of services sold or models constructed, while millions of people are employed to perform research around these concepts or simply offer services in their name. Yet much of this is based on an illusion. The concepts may represent certain aspects of people, but they are not parts of people, as people’s minds cannot really be broken down into parts.
The philosopher Henri Bergson illustrated the futility of relying solely on the analytical method when he described breaking down a poem into letters, and then, without knowing the poem’s meaning, trying to reconstitute the poem through the letters alone. It can’t be done, he said, because the letters are not “parts” of the poem; they are merely symbolic elements used to express the poem’s meaning. Rather than fragments of meaning, the letters are merely fragments of symbols. Applying analysis to the poem’s letters without any intuition of the poem’s meaning yields a ridiculous outcome.
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical. What we think of as parts are just fragments of feelings, thoughts, or sensations that run through the mind and have been given names, but which cannot be assembled to estimate the meaning of any person’s life. To understand that we need intuition.
“Burning Man is a Capitalist Lie”
[F]or denizens of Black Rock City, there’s an outside to the experience of hardship and scarcity. The Google multimillionaires who helicopter into Nevada for a week of self-expression and gift economy against the (usually) arid backdrop of a dusty lakebed enact a crystallised essence the American civilisation’s founding myth of abundance manifested ex nihilo and brought into being through resourcefulness and creativity. But in truth they’re play-acting at the ideal, having pre-resourced that resourcefulness and creativity via a much more cut-throat reality of material competition in which there are, unlike in Black Rock City, winners and losers.
And unlike their fellow-countrymen in the “flyover states” — the losers, in fact, in the real economy that enables the Burning Man fantasy one — most of Black Rock City’s citizens have the option at any time to pull the ripcord, and exit desert survivalism and gift economies for an air-conditioned condo in some of the world’s most expensive postcodes. Unlike those who inhabit that scarcity all the time, they can enjoy the generosity and camaraderie that comes with scarce resources, safe in the knowledge that they have largely foreclosed the risk of genuine material suffering or interpersonal violence that so often accompanies real scarcity.
My own [Burning Man experience], and the flyover-state tour that preceded it, happened before widespread fentanyl abuse blighted the American interior. The period since my visit has also seen the Great Crash, and widening income inequality. It’s a safe bet that in the intervening period the contrast has only grown starker, between those in the Land of the Free who can afford to play at trying to flourish in a world of scarcity, and those for whom that’s just everyday life.
inescapably gnostic
I understand that every generation wants to find its “thing,” its scene, a new level of probing the boundaries of life’s possibilities to set it apart from what the previous generation accepted as reality. And there’s no denying that Gen Z has done away with some of the more straitjacketing stereotypes that Christians should have done away with long ago. But the solution that our culture is offering, the so-called positive vision of valuing souls as the drivers of our bodies, which are mere instruments on which to express one’s freedom and felt identity, is inescapably gnostic. It should not go unnoticed that this ideology has gained rapid entrée into the courts of polite consensus precisely when we’ve never been less physically present to each other, to ourselves, or to the earth. When seven hours of the average person’s day is spent on a screen, with a limited if emotionally powerful toolbox of words and images, it’s no wonder that a disembodied reality finds so much purchase among us. Except that this fantasy is not constrained to the screen: its technologies are not merely digital but surgical and chemical, doing violence to bodies, to psyches, to families, and to public squares.
naive and healthy
I found this simple line from Anne Snyder insightful:
I entered the real world naive, but healthy.
Is it not the case today that many seem hellbent on sending kids out into the world “informed” but shockingly unhealthy?
There are many things that have drawn me to Hannah Arendt over the years, but one that I often think about is this story from her 1982 biography, For Love of the World, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl:
Arendt chastised American progressive education for artificially depriving children of their protected, prepolitical time and space, the school; for destroying the natural authority teachers should have over children; and for enjoining children to behave like little adults with opinions of their own. Adults must not, she urged, forgo their responsibilities for children as children, they must not refuse to children a sheltered period for maturation, for being at home in the world. “Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation (by virtue of natality] brings; but precisely because we base our only hope on this, we destroy everything if we try to control the new [so] that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative.” Hannah Arendt was very strict about this principle, and she maintained it in her own political action. Some years later, when a branch of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam contacted her for a donation, she agreed, but then she changed her mind after reading their pamphlet: “When we talked over the phone, she informed the committee’s fund raiser, “I was not aware that you intend to involve high school students, and I regret to tell you that I will not give a penny for this purpose, because I disagree with the advisability of mobilizing children in political matters.” Her rule of thumb was “from eighteen to eighty,” and she was flexible only at the upper limit.
As was so often the case with Hannah Arendt, her plea for conservatism was the vehicle for a revolutionary impulse. So-called revolutionaries, who try to insure the longevity of their revolution through education produce indoctrinated, unspontaneous young: “To [forcefully] prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chances at the new.” Educators should introduce children to the world, give them the tools for understanding it accurately and impartially, so that the children can, when they mature, act in the world intelligently.
I’m glad I went back and read this again, because I think about it all the time. For one thing, it simply emphasizes what we all should know intuitively: that children should be given a broad span of time to mature while feeling safe and confident. I remember years ago my sister showing me a video on Facebook of a friend of hers, a teacher, marching little 5-year-olds around in front of a classroom with picket signs of some kind. (I don’t recall if this was before or after reading Arendt’s biography.)
Now, I have no doubt that this teacher believed she was merely involving the children in something meaningful, instilling in them a strong sense of civic duty and whatnot. But Arendt’s response to this behavior toward children is twofold. 1) Rather than installing a strong sense of civic duty in them, it more likely will instill a strong sense of anxiety, about one or any number of issues, and possibly do so from an age before which they have no memory. And 2) the tragedy is deeper and the irony thicker because, by trying to control the next generation’s revolution, you smother that revolution, you rob them of the chance to offer what is new or revolutionary in themselves.
Opp thoughts
While we were down in Phoenix last month, Meghan and I made it to the movie theater, and for only the second time in three years together. Of course, it was to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
One of the most important (and obvious) metrics for measuring the success of a film is the engrossing factor. If a movie is able to pull you into itself for the duration (three hours, in this case), then no matter what else, the movie is, perhaps in the most significant way, successful. By this measure, Oppenheimer was absolutely successful. I was completely engrossed. And I’m sure it was successful for all the reasons that knowledgeable movie critics would give. As far as I can tell, for instance, this may be one of the most historically accurate movies ever made. That achievement is quite interesting in itself. (Although, I’m less certain of how accurately it portrays Oppenheimer’s by-all-accounts complicated personality. The Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer is something of an enigma, but not a particularly complicated one.)
But I am not a movie critic and, outside of conversations over beer, I have no desire to be one. Neither am I a(n) historian. While I’m sure I was engrossed for all the same reasons that over 90% of critics and audience members were, I was also very caught by the film for more personal reasons.
The big moment, the apex of the movie, was not particularly enjoyable for me. I have no problem admitting (and neither does Meghan) that when it comes to movies, I am the crier in the relationship. Those moments are probably quite predictable most of the time. But who gets choked up over Trinity, over a remake of the first successful nuclear bomb explosion? Me, that’s who.
Oh, I’m sure the combination of music and silence and all the artistic buildup to that moment in the film did its work on me. But I also know what I was feeling, and that I have felt it before. I put up an essay from a history class that is about as much as I have ever said about that feeling. Here’s how it starts:
When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war.
… with the thought of war or any instrument whose chief purpose is war or with anything that reminds me of it.
I used to love fireworks, deeply, especially the sound and the boom you feel in your chest. Fun, excitement, awe, inspiration, brilliance — I felt only good and empowering things. Now, I’d rather be buried in the ground with a straw to breath through until the celebration is over. I grew up shooting guns about as regularly as anything else, and I loved those, too. But when my friend took a few of us to the shooting range for his birthday in late 2017, it was all I could do to avoid a panic attack. As I write that, it sounds even to me like a bit of an exaggeration, but if it is, it is only a slight one. The fact is, I did not enjoy any of it for one second and couldn’t wait to get out of there. And that was just such a complete and sudden one-eighty for me. I just don’t like any of it anymore, and I think it’s absurd that I ever did.
(There’s a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead where John Ames’s father digs up a gun he had buried, smashes it to pieces on a stump with a borrowed maul, and throws the separate pieces of it in a river. “I got the impression,” Ames says, “he wished they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely.” I feel exactly the same way.)
And yet, a very large number of us can’t seem to get over how cool it all is. And most of the time I can’t really blame anyone. The fact is, that change in me didn’t happen because I pulled my heart up by its bootstraps. There is an inherent separation between the makers of the instruments of modern warfare and the lives they leave buried and bleeding in the rubble. And it plays on another inherent separation in humankind altogether, one that can only be bridged by experience and by empathy.
“Who could convey this understanding across the barriers of his own human experience?” asked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Who could impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far off sorrows or joys, who could give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions which he has never himself experienced?”
One of the things that has struck me the hardest is that, even as a member of the military, I didn’t experience this, had no thought about the hundreds of sorties I supported, where they went or what happened when they got there. But that’s normal, isn’t it? It’s sad and it’s horrifying, but isn’t it normal? It’s certainly been normal with the history of nuclear bombs.
Why is it, for instance, that every single adult that I can remember while I was growing up had the same exact write-off response to the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How could we justify it? No debate. No difficulty. No deep regret over vaporizing and crushing and radiating civilians. In my experience, having this conversation with the previous generation is impossible. The narrative is too deeply embedded for any reexamination: It had to be done. The Japanese would never have surrendered. The Bomb saved lives. And so on. Bottom line, it was un-American — and, somehow, un-Christian — to think or say otherwise.
Perfectly normal.
I’ve lost track now of where I was going with this, or maybe I’ve already said what I wanted to say. When the bomb went off on the screen in that theater, I felt the same way I feel when they go off in real life. I didn’t see scientific achievement; I saw mass murder and violence. I saw children on stretchers, in ICUs, and in graves.
Here’s what Rand Richards Copper wrote in Commonweal after seeing the film:
After watching Oppenheimer, I streamed The Day After Trinity. (“Trinity” refers to Oppenheimer’s name for the bomb test site, inspired by a Donne poem, and the “day after” refers to yet another hearing, in 1965, at which Oppenheimer was asked about talks on halting the spread of nukes, and responded, “It’s twenty years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”) It may seem paradoxical to suggest that a documentary more acutely conveys the tragedy of Los Alamos than a feature film does. Yet for me at least, it did. In the decades since the Manhattan Project, many commentators seeking to capture the dreadful awe that accompanied the advent of the atomic bomb have invoked Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—and Nolan leans heavily on it, using it not once but twice. The documentary pursues the horror more subtly, in a banality-of-evil way. It contains a small but terrible moment, when the Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber displays a section of a wall removed from a classroom in Nagasaki, bearing the outline of a window sash imprinted on it photographically by the blast. “You see the angle here?” Serber says, holding it up. “That shows you that the bomb went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.” And Serber can’t quite suppress a smile—quickly followed by a look of sickly confusion. All these years later, he still feels pride.
That look does more to evoke the scientists’ moral disarray than does the pose of abject contrition in which the last third of Nolan’s film freezes Robert Oppenheimer. Serber’s smile reveals candor about the thrills of scientific discovery, even as his sickened look betrays an awareness of what resulted when those thrills were channeled into the priorities of what Eisenhower himself would call the military-industrial complex. What does it mean—for science and its practitioners, for civilization itself—when mass death becomes, well, a project?
Neil Postman made a similar point in 1985:
[T]o the modern mind … the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it.
Postman’s next line echoes in my head on a regular basis.
It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.
And yet we do praise ourselves regularly for just how so-damn-smart we’ve gotten, don’t we? One of the things that struck me the most watching Oppenheimer was how surprisingly boyish the whole enterprise seemed. I’ve had the tendency my whole life to think of many of these historical scientists as men of greatness. But what I saw in that theater — and maybe this is the most historically accurate thing of all — were only boys playing with chemistry sets.
Maybe this is simply one of the tragedies of growing up, realizing that there are no adults in the room. Or very few, anyway. In this case, just big kids and their chemistry sets. “You see,” the little boy said with a proud smile, “it went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.”
Satyagraha: A Brief Christian Perspective
An essay I wrote for a history class in 2017
When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war. And as a Christian, I have been compelled to ponder afresh words very different from the ones my commander spoke, and words that are vastly more common to a church setting: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God (Matt. 5:9).
If you asked a random stranger today who he or she thought has been the most influential promoter of peace in the world, there is a good chance the answer would be Mahatma Gandhi. With the early 20th century in the background, his fame is not difficult to understand. Gandhi’s popularized commitment to nonviolence stands in such contradistinction to the aura of his time — a century suffused with as much violence as the world has ever known — that the merit of his methods seems practically self-evident. In a modern century as bloody as any before it, a commitment to nonviolence stands out as a light shining in the dark. And that is, I think, the way Gandhi saw it as well, and why he named his version of nonviolent resistance satyagraha (roughly translated as “truth force”), both to differentiate it from the philosophies from which he borrowed, and to promote it as the ultimate force for good. Satyagraha was, hence, not just an alternative to war and violence, but it was a complete replacement, able (alone) to accomplish what violence never could.
In the West, there is probably no greater example not merely of the failure but of the complete inability of violence to resolve conflict or hatred than the American Civil War. As the Civil Rights era struggled to complete the unfinished business of the postbellum years, it was clear that war had not solved the underlying issues of slavery and racism in America. In 1868, Father Paul Joseph Munz wrote, “The North can free the slaves with force, but it cannot civilize them and deliver them from contempt and mistreatment.” While the first victory had been won by force of arms, the ultimate victory would require another approach. To fight contempt, we need a very different force than the one war offers. For this task, only a nonviolent force will do, and to this end Martin Luther King, Jr. employed Gandhi’s methods with great success.
With the virtue of Gandhi’s method in mind, King said he believed that “more than anybody else in the modern world, [Gandhi] caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.” As I think about that statement, I have to wonder why I’m so inclined to disagree. Jesus did teach, after all, in the Sermon on the Mount, to turn the other cheek rather than resist an evil person (Matt. 38:39). In a moment of introspection, I’m tempted to think that the part of me that thoughtlessly cheered at the notion of destroying homes and lives is the same stubbornness and pride that keeps me from embracing a more passive political stance. I’m sure that may still be part of it, but it has been fourteen years since I heard my commander give that speech, and today I am not the least bit moved by it. Yet, even stimulated by a fresh hatred for violence, I still find something in satyagraha distasteful. In fact, the very same thing that makes me hate violence is also what drives me to reject Gandhi’s approach. In all its historical detail, I’m sure the problem would be more complex, but as I see it, it is Gandhi’s approach to truth that causes the most significant problem.
Let me return to Iraq for a moment. I had been there for about a week when she showed up — a beautiful eleven-year-old girl, barely clinging to life. Though I cannot use her real name, I’ll call her Jaleesa. I remember setting up for the surgery, not knowing her face or who she was, knowing something only in the abstract: a transfer was coming in and we needed to do an emergency laparotomy for an abdominal blast wound. Within fifteen minutes, she was in the room. As the surgeons began operating, one of the national doctors realized that she had been his patient only a day or two before, on the other side of the Tigris River. He had performed an emergency surgery after she was badly wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. Not believing she would live long, he stitched her up as best he could and left. Yet here she was again, about 10 miles east, still fighting to live.
Jaleesa stayed with us for a couple weeks, receiving several operations and spending much of the time with a hideous-looking ABRA system holding and stretching her belly together. Eventually she was transferred to a hospital in Erbil, where she died about a week later. It is both wonderful and shameful for me to admit that I don’t think I have ever loved anyone as much as I loved that little girl. In the many hours I spent with her, in the operating room or sitting next to her bed, I grew to hate the thought of what a bomb can do. And whether war is right or wrong, necessary or not, I grew to hate that part of me that was ever inspired by such things. How many little girls like her had been casualties of what I so thoughtlessly cheered for? (Think about that the next time those fighter jets fly over your favorite football stadium.) At this point, however, rather than turning to a theory of nonviolence, this is where I would put Gandhi to the test, and where I inevitably find his theories wanting.
Imagine for a moment that Gandhi was there in Mosul that day, watching from a distance. An ISIS fighter is about to drop a shell into the barrel of a mortar, the arc aiming at his 11-year-old daughter. With a sniper rifle in his hands, if Gandhi pulls the trigger, the ISIS fighter dies; if he does nothing, his daughter spends the next several weeks in pain, and dies. It’s not a very original scenario, I know, but it remains an important one. What do we think Gandhi would do if he were there? We can be fairly certain what he would do because he told every mother and father in Britain to do the same thing when he encouraged them to “allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered” by the Nazis rather to resist them. I don’t doubt that it is an interesting philosophical and historical thing to ponder — what the world would look like if the Allied Powers refused to fight — but it remains impossible for me to consider it noble, if it isn’t in fact criminal, for Gandhi to choose nonviolence if he were given the opportunity to save Jaleesa — that he would choose a principle over a child.
As I said before, I think the fundamental problem lies in Gandhi’s view of truth, or, more specifically, in his view of God. Bhikhu Parekh wrote that Gandhi did not ultimately believe God was truth, but that truth was God. For Gandhi, God was either reduced to or overshadowed by a principle: “His cosmic spirit was therefore not a creator but a principle of order, a supreme intelligence infusing and regulating the universe from within.” In other words, Gandhi believed that ultimate reality was an impersonal force. And therein lies the problem: what is truth without love, and what is love if it is not personal? Committing myself to a universal principle of nonviolence does not provide me with a noble answer to the problems of violence. Instead, it conveniently removes me from the personal nature of those problems. Rather than being moved by personal love, I am forced to ask what an impersonal force requires of me. This, I think, is why Gandhi could tell every British parent to let the Nazis kill their children (and why he could so arrogantly advise the Jews to adopt his method — as though resistance to the British was somehow on par with resistance to Germany).
Gandhi borrowed much from the Christian faith, and he quoted from the Bible often, but, as Parekh points out, his studies “did not involve understanding religious traditions in their own terms.” Aside from the fact that this approach itself is inherently untruthful, it means that he misunderstood the fundamental point of Christianity. Jesus did not simply point to the truth, as Gandhi would have liked to believe, but he claimed to be the truth. For the Christian, ultimate reality, virtue, knowledge — these are all found in a person. To overcome doubt in times of trouble, the author of the letter to the Hebrews encouraged his readers by reminding them where to fix their attention — not on a principle of virtue or hope, but on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of faith.” For the Christian, the question is not what principle to adhere to, but how best to love and protect life in honor of the Life to which they continually look. Even love itself is not a principle that exists on its own, but something found in the character of the person who reveals God to us. The truth is always and in every way personal because we find and know it most clearly in a person, not in a force. For Gandhi, it was the principle, which (ideally) provides only one option. For the personal, however, the question of whether violence is justified will always remain an open question, with different situations leading to different answers. That means that someone could very well be compelled to use violence in the name of love and truth, an idea rooted in the personal nature of morality, which Gandhi seemed intent on eliminating.
It’s important to note that I’m not talking about repaying evil for evil. It was not uncommon for us to treat members of ISIS at the hospital, and it has not escaped my mind that one of them may very well have been the one to kill Jaleesa, or any of the other victims we treated or never got the chance to treat. Trying to understand how violence may justifiably be used against a man in one situation does not imply that one may not try to save his life in another. These situations are difficult, and they require careful attention, not quotable maxims. In Iraq, the duty was not to maintain strict adherence to a principle of nonviolence, it was to love and care for the victims of war — in this case, to love and care for a person named Jaleesa. In her entire life, before or after her injury, she was never in need of a principle, or a “supreme intelligence.” Once she entered the room, the abstract procedure became personal. The truth was no longer that we needed to perform a surgery, but that we were compelled by love to save the life of a little girl. She did not need a principle to comfort her; she needed love and protection that was personal.
Though fourteen years have passed since that speech, I can still feel the chills as I think about my commander’s words now, but I feel them for very different reasons. Many questions remain, but at this stage in life, I think I can say that I long for an end to violence as much as anyone. For Christians, especially in a world that seems to take the “authority” and “power” of violence as a given, Gandhi’s method of satyagraha still stands as a modern reminder that Christ showed a better way. Contrary to King, however, I think for anyone who wishes to understand that way, Gandhi’s satyagraha will be a disappointment. And I think it should be disappointing, for the immense personality of Jesus Christ cannot be summed up by the words “Thou shalt not kill.” And everything that it means to walk among the world as a peacemaking child of God cannot possibly be simplified to a principle or an impersonal force.
oceans of facts, deserts of knowledge
From an essay I wrote in 2019, in a class on the history of genocide:
In the past, one person hears “Russia” and thinks of godless communists; another hears it and thinks of heroes as compared to capitalism or colonial rule. But is either one concerned with the truth? And haven’t we seen the most bizarre flip recently between which sides of the political aisle want to emphasize Russian corruption? Is it possible that what Paul Hollander said of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who were enamored with communism—Duranty, Wells, Shaw, Sartre, to name a few—is still true today?
“Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels. They were inclined to give every benefit of doubt to these social systems and were successful in screening out qualities that might have detracted from their positive vision. … While manipulations of the visitors’ experiences—or as I call them, the techniques of hospitality—doubtless influenced the judgements…I do not believe that these techniques were decisive. What was decisive was the predisposition of the intellectuals themselves.” (Hollander, 1981, p. 6)
How does Hollander explain the “predisposition” to overlook such corruption and suffering? Ideologies and partisan commitments. I know it is cynical—and I’m not saying that nothing has improved—but it’s hard to see how present-day Ukraine should be struck with much confidence from the west.
John Eskonas, on The Death of the Fact:
Few things feel more immutable or fixed than a ball of cold, solid steel. But if you have a million of them, a strange thing happens: they will behave like a fluid, sloshing this way and that, sliding underfoot, unpredictable. In the same way and for the same reason, having a small number of facts feels like certainty and understanding; having a million feels like uncertainty and befuddlement. The facts don’t lie, but data sure does. […]
But in a world of superabundant, readily recalled facts, generating the umpteenth fact rarely gets you much. More valuable is skill in rapidly re-aligning facts and assimilating new information into ever-changing stories. Professionals create value by generating, defending, and extending compelling pathways through the database of facts: media narratives, scientific theories, financial predictions, tax law interpretations, and so forth. The collapse of any particular narrative due to new information only marginally reshapes the database of all possible narratives.
Hannah Arendt:
And though this continuing instability gives no indication of what the truth might be, it is itself an indication, and a powerful one, of the lying character of all public utterances concerning the factual world. It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
Rebecca West:
There has also been in America a wave of cynicism, entirely mindless, destitute of all content, save “Oh, yeah” and “So what,” which, by a strange twist, results in a bland acceptance of the whole universe that has never been surpassed by Christian Scientists. An automatic scepticism regarding stories of atrocities leads to a rosy belief that every member of an invading army behaves with the courtesy of a cinema theatre usher. The Serbs must have been mistaken in believing that the Germans and the Austrians passed through village after village, wrecking houses, smashing the furniture, emptying corn and pouring wine and oil into the mud, and trampling on the icons. Any peasant in the invaded countries over thirty can tell you that it was so, but innumerable Americans, over and under thirty, can tell you that it was not so. This battlefield was therefore to them an area of pure nonsense, discreditable to the human race.
And so it is to some extent to many English intellectuals. If the Serbs had done something … something … something, they need not have fought. So one feels, when one is young, on hearing that a friend has to have a dangerous operation for cancer. Surely if she had not eaten meat, if she had not eaten salt, she need not have had cancer; and by inference one need not have cancer oneself. Yet cancer exists, and has a thousand ways of establishing itself in the body; and there is no end to the ways one country may make life intolerable for another. But let us not think of it any more, let us pretend that operations are unnecessary, let every battlefield seem a place of prodigious idiocy. Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there?
The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know. This battlefield is deprived of its essence in the minds of men, because of their fears and ignorances; it cannot even establish itself as a fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts.
“following” the “news”
And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.
Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.
Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow.
Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.
When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.
the articulacy from nowhere
It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years.
This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.