I really enjoyed this book. It’s not very linear, so in some sense it’s one of those books that could be adequately appreciated in the first 50 pages and put down. But I liked lingering with it. Maybe it’s that I’m 38 years old, combined with the fact that a baby, a house, and marriage (in that order) are all happening now and not 15 years ago. But the thought of how life is compared to how it could have been is increasingly familiar.

The house-hunt really played into this. As many people will tell you, looking for a house is practically guaranteed to be a stressful experience, especially in a market that remains as chaotic as ours. (Though, has it ever been “easy” for the average person, anywhere, ever? And have I really had it bad, ever?) One of the biggest causes of that stress has to be the multiplicity of imagined lives you can run through in such a short amount of time. Each house found is a house hoped for. From the moment the first image of a house is seen, you start imagining life in it — life in this house, what you might do in this kitchen space and in this backyard, living on this street with these neighbors and in this town. (Oh, and a bookshelf right here.) On it goes, with a mind-blowing amount of wishful imagery and narrative stuffed into any single minute between the offer and the answer.

In seems unavoidable: house-hunting brings on the psychological equivalent of insecurity and regret. (Much like the marketing and consuming industry in general.) But then, this is only a more clearly causal and condensed version of what life tends to bring about anyway.

Take, for instance, Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves Us“:

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

This is one of those poems that turns on itself in the best way. At some point down the lines, you realize that you, the reader, have actually taken it and yourself a little too seriously. And the more times you read it, the earlier the sarcasm and delightful self-ridicule come in.

Miller expounds on this poem early in the book, and he reminds you just how deep the Rabbit Hole of Unled Lives goes. More diagnostically, Miller highlights what the poem is ultimately getting at: our complete inability to trust our self-analysis of the past.

From the vantage point of life now, you look back on your youth. While you might suffer from the memory of past possibilities, you might also welcome their flattery. The realtor’s loving god allows him to be warmed by the gilded halo of his unmet potential. If, then, he crowns that god with thorns—if he betrays god’s love with his failures—the guilt he suffers is merely the price he pays for keeping faith in his capacities. The more harshly you punish your failures, the more securely you can believe in your exalted potential. You side with your judge and congratulate yourself, righteously and ruefully, on your high standards.

The act of looking back at those past, unled lives is never a fruitful one. It’s an onion-peeling expedition par excellence, one that invites an elusive amount of egotism. And it helps to know this. It helps to catch yourself in the act, to laugh at your ego, and to shrug it off (“…for all you know…”) for the vanity that it is.

[The speaker of “The God Who Loves You”] wants you to let go of the thought that you might be a loving, all-knowing narrator of your own existence. He wants you to let go of the lives you haven’t lived.

. . . as if the value of a life, like the value of a house, could be assessed by looking up comps in the neighborhood. Don’t use that language, the speaker says: it takes you from yourself. Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.

I love that sentence, the utterly relevant imperative of it: “Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.”

The book is chalk full of thoughtful commentary like this on other pieces of art, from poems to books to films. I can’t say that I like all of Miller’s commentary; he sometimes goes to places that I certainly didn’t expect — places, that is, that I still don’t expect him to have gone. But I’m sure they are meaningful for him. (I had a similar feeling in Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan. A lovely book, but with some surprising, idiosyncratic turns.) And in terms of substance, there probably isn’t much in the book that you couldn’t find a way of encountering by spending a good amount of time pondering and rereading Dennis’s poem. But more of the same substance is not at all a bad thing, and it was worth reading through to the end.

The book ends on what I wish it had spent more time with, or at least more time subtly hinting at throughout: the thrill of merely being at all.

Commenting on a character’s walk through a garden in a Thomas Hardy novel, Miller breaks into something that rings not unlike a Pauline doxology:

This has happened, it happened here, and it needn’t have happened at all. . . . For a moment, what might have happened drops away, and we’re left lingering with what has happened in this one radiant world, with snail shells denting our feet, and the descent of music into our neglected garden.

John Warner:

… genius is something that must be literally cultivated.

If there’s anything I tried to impress on my talented students, it’s this. Yes, sometimes great stuff will come to you like a bolt from the blue, but if you want that to happen, there’s lots of things that help make you more attractive to the gods above hurling a lightning bolt your way.

I’ve never known a successful writer who sits around waiting for inspiration. They go out and seek it. They walk around a field in a lightning storm wearing a knight’s suit of armor holding a fifty foot long metal poll in one hand and flying a kite with a key attached to the other.

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They like to say during the summer that drinks are ice cold. I hope not, because that means that they would be impossible to drink. Because they would be solid.

~ Mitch Hedberg ~

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Today I was doing the awkward and stubborn act of simultaneously taking the dog for a walk and reading poetry, holding Jack back from the gophers with one hand and Kay Ryan occupying the other. (I was actually dumb enough for a short time to have the leash and book in one hand and just the bookmark in the other.) I don’t recommend the combined practice, but today it was worth it.

A couple months ago, I shared a poem by Richard Wilbur:

April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.

I love the poem, and I could not love the idea more. From the first line the contrast is felt: soft and softening air over still-cold ground. And the contrast is already mixing, the dull pasture inscrutably coming to life. Dead things, though not quite stirring, are showing signs of movement, of change. It’s unclear what’s happening, but what was once firm ground is now blessedly doubtfully so.

It doesn’t stay there, though. The observing mind, blessed by doubt, does begin to make sense of the scene. It relaxes into something more natural than either cold certainty or lukewarm confusion. And what results from the melting and the doubt is not just potential life, but the best symbols of life.

The analogies speak for themselves. And while uniquely and beautifully exploited by Wilbur, they are not exclusive to him.

Here’s Ryan’s poem “Spring,” which I read on the walk today:

Winter, like a set opinion,
is routed. What gets it out?
The imposition of some external season
or some internal doubt?
I see the yellow maculations spread
across bleak hills of what I said
I’d always think; a stippling of white
upon the grey; a pink the shade
of what I said I’d never say.

Life begins to flourish when nature thaws. Why not also with us?

What if the most important thing we impress upon people — ourselves, our kids, our friends — is the need and the wisdom and, frankly, the rationality of being open to the change of mind and the flaring of affection that will and should happen to us as we go, grow, age?

And I wonder if this says something special about the “middle ground” — that thawed and living place where more of us would find ourselves and each other over time if we’d leave our frozen certainty and embrace something a little more genuine and authentic, something with and for the soil, rootedly and entanglingly human.

Peggy Noonan:

The question of what Mr. Trump believed strikes me as beside the point. Based on long observation, he doesn’t “believe”; he’s not by nature a believer. His longtime method of operation is to deploy concepts and approaches strategically to see what works. Put another way, he makes something up, sticks with it if it flies, drops it if it doesn’t, and goes on to “believe” something else.

I have been arguing exactly this for the last 8 years. Any time someone tries to explain Trump’s motive, or his objective or rationale or ethos, it doesn’t work. Not ever. In some sense, he’s a pragmatist, as Mark Edmundson has effectively argued, except that even that is too much credit. His motive (if it can even be called that) is performative, self-serving etceteras — to no end.

Noonan gets this: Trump doesn’t “believe” anything, just makes it up as he goes along. The only thing wrong with her description is that she unwittingly let that word “strategically” slip in. In my view, Trump is so completely and astonishingly unguided that it’s nearly impossible to describe him accurately without including some form of rational, meaningful thought.

Frankly, this is perfectly understandable. Of course Trump’s defenders will make excuses and find “reasons.” But even those who hate the man can’t seem to refrain from accidentally giving him credit. And I get it. Humans aren’t supposed to be this thoughtless. And the American plan was to make sure we got the best and brightest and truest elected. Our version of democracy, according to Hamilton’s Federalist No. 10, was supposed to

refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.

Obviously, this is an ideal that has not been met. No system is free from corruption or decay. And no society can maintain any high standard when nearly an entire population of millions have been trained to look away. Trump should not be a surprise; he’s the answer. He’s the answer to everything we have subtly or not-so-subtly asked of ourselves for a very long time.

But I’m getting away from my point.

Of course, I don’t really know why Trump does what he does and neither does anyone else. All we can do is go off what we see. And we can see a lot.

So, at the risk of being just as wrong as everyone else, I’ll take a stab at it.

When I read Noonan’s description, I recalled my biology degree days. Specifically, the function of flagellum, which I think provides a great example for comparison. Again, barring any perfect knowledge, I would say that Trump’s motive, along with many of his enabler-followers, is about the equivalent of, and certainly no higher than, a thing known as chemotaxis in bacteria, or what has been called a “biased random walk.”

Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

The overall movement of a bacterium is the result of alternating tumble and swim phases, called run-and-tumble motion. As a result, the trajectory of a bacterium swimming in a uniform environment will form a random walk with relatively straight swims interrupted by random tumbles that reorient the bacterium. Bacteria such as E. coli are unable to choose the direction in which they swim, and are unable to swim in a straight line for more than a few seconds due to rotational diffusion; in other words, bacteria “forget” the direction in which they are going. By repeatedly evaluating their course, and adjusting if they are moving in the wrong direction, bacteria can direct their random walk motion toward favorable locations.

When a bacterium’s flagellum rotates in one direction (counter-clockwise), it moves forward. When a bacterium senses less “favorable” conditions, its flagellum rotates the other way (clockwise), causing the little organism to “tumble” in circles. The bacterium then spins around like a bottle until it reverses its flagellum back the other way, randomly “picking” a new direction to go.

Noonan’s description fits this almost perfectly. The only correction I make is that, while there is in some sense a reason why bacteria does what it does, it is not a “strategy” but the explicit lack of one. It is biased, but it is not strategic.

In Edmundson’s article referenced above, he says, “If Trump ever used words to render reality, I never heard it.” Neither have I. And that’s what we have to go off. I have never once sensed that Trump’s brain ran on anything more strategic or meaningful than chemotaxis. He might even be the spinning flagellum itself. That is the best and most accurate analogy I can possibly think of.

But now I can’t help feeling a little guilty, thinking that maybe all I’ve done is give bacteria a bad rap and still given Trump too much credit. I can see some little E. coli bacterium (probably the beneficial kind we all take for granted) looking up at me with a grimace and asking, “What am I, an asshole?”

Been reading a lot of Hannah Arendt lately, partly through other writers, and a quote from this passage in her essay “The Concept of History” keeps popping up:

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.

I’ve never been much of an “Amen!” shouter, but Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, very nearly turned me into one. I don’t remember the last time I was more onboard with the ethos of a book.

I think the book is pretty engaging for almost anyone paying attention these days, but I found it deeply relatable on nearly every single page. (With one glaring exception, which I’ll get to.) At one point, Crawford describes an online video of a motorcycle stunt rider getting kicked out of a parking lot by a guy with a clipboard. And the funny thing is, though it’s been over 15 years since I caused any real trouble with a motorcycle, I have been in that exact situation, many times, in many parking lots.

Here are a couple of pictures from that bygone era.

I think I can say that I remember those days fondly, but I don’t miss them. It was an extraordinary thing having an obsession that occupied nearly every day for about four years — even a less-than-supremely-intelligent one like this that nearly got me killed on several occasions. (An 80-mph faceplant on Rt. 84 Texas asphalt is about as enjoyable as it sounds. Thank God for helmets and five-hundred-dollar leather jackets.) I loved bikes, and I learned a lot in that time, but looking back all I can see is something that can only really be enjoyed with a certain (high) amount of youthful obliviousness to any grander picture.

Another thing that drew me to the book is the experience of sitting at a red light when there is no one else around and waiting for the color of green permission. This has often struck me as one of those bullet points on a list titled “This Is Why Aliens Don’t Talk to Us.” I can remember driving home from late shifts at the hospital and coming up to a complete stop at a new light on an empty Rt. 27 at one o’clock in the morning. Then waiting . . . and waiting. Growing rage in the glowing red glare, thinking, “There is absolutely no good reason why I shouldn’t keep driving!” Even if there was a police officer watching me sit there (obediently) at that red light, with no other moving cars or pedestrians within a half-mile radius, I can imagine him tapping his partner on the shoulder and saying, “Look at this idiot just sitting there.”

That was years ago, but I still haven’t quite gotten over it. And it’s not uncommon now for me to make up my own damn mind at many of these traffic lights. I will always stop, and I will never proceed straight through a lighted intersection even after a stop. (Unless, of course, it’s one o’clock in the morning.) I get and appreciate the safety and efficiency they provide. (Though Crawford is not short on examples of the money they provide as well.) But one thing I will almost never do, at any hour of the day, is sit at red left arrow that is telling me to stay stopped when it should be telling me to yield to oncoming traffic as I turn. I am not a robot, and I was not made and did not evolve to act like one.

Meghan actually gives me a fair amount of shit for this. (Though, she does this with a twinkle in her eye that tells me that it’s actually okay and she understands and I’m right and I don’t have to apologize to the traffic light.) We affectionately call this sort of thing my “caveman,” referring to an inner dialogue of sorts, wherein I imagine what some ancient Homo sapiens sapiens might think of some modern behavior or habit. [Insert classic commercial link] This does not always result in the sort of “rebellious” thing that you’ll find in Crawford’s book. My “caveman” is, for instance, perfectly onboard with the anti-straw movement. It’s good that it happens to be environmentally friendly and it’s irrelevant whether or not it makes a measurable difference. The caveman simply looks at me, sitting at a table at some restaurant and being delivered a nice sturdy cup (that could last my entire life), filled with fresh water (that is almost certainly perfectly healthy and refreshing), nicely cooled with ice (if you’re into that), and looking up at the deliverer of this wonderful cup of water and asking with pure clueless and spoiled modernism, “Could I please have a straw?” It’s at this point that the caveman either (justly) kills me for being a danger to the community, slaps the drink out of my underserving hands, or rolls his eyes and walks away, never to speak to me again. He also tells me that I’m ridiculously pampered for needing to be given disposable plastic cups and spoons everywhere I go. But you get the idea.

(Just to be clear, I am aware that the use of drinking straws has very ancient routes. My “caveman” is not anti-straw per se. He’s just anti-“where’s my straw?” I trust you can see the difference.)

None of this is to say that I look down on anyone who uses a straw at a restaurant. Or that if a straw is placed in front of me, I won’t pick it up and use it myself. And, frankly, it’s not to say that you will never find me sitting dumbly patiently in a left-turn lane at a red arrow, not willing to risk the ticket or just too lazy to trust my own senses and make the a priori greenless turn. I’m just saying that when I do any of these things — auto-insist on straws, assume the supply of throw-away cups, relinquish active thought to overhanging light bulbs — I have an inner caveman who makes me question the act. And that that same inner, anti-disposable-cups-and-straws-for-life caveman and I really liked Crawford’s book.

The major theme of Why We Drive is the way in which forms of automation (yes, including the automation of traffic lights, though these are very low on the automation spectrum) not only take over for human actions and capacities, but abolish all the human potentiality of which it necessarily knows nothing.

We don’t give much thought to the moments of release that open up when there is some slack in the plan, but I think we would miss them if our movements were more thoroughly coordinated. Sometimes, what you are doing when you drive your car isn’t very well captured by the word “transportation,” which suggests a simple point-to-point goal to be achieved with maximum efficiency. Such simplifications have always been the price paid for bringing new domains under technocratic control.

In the same way that my vocabulary — and my whole experience of language — necessarily shrinks when I Google the definition of a word instead of searching the pages of a dictionary or asking another human, so also my experience of movement in the world — be it walking or biking or driving — is reduced, in capacity and actuality, when it is automated. (And this movement is reduced in advance when the idea of it is reduced to a word like “transportation.”) Google could map the entire universe and put it at my fingertips; it would still be a shrinking of my human experience of it. (“For profit. For profit. For profit. For profit.”) Rather than removing us from our collective tasks, if technology is to be rightly understood and humanly beneficial, it should be something that, as Crawford puts it, “amplifies our embodied capacities.”

That last line is very reminiscent of Sarah Hendren’s book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. (Both these books were published around the same time in 2020.) Hendren does not necessarily share Crawford’s interest in the ways a custom-remodeled VW can alter your driving experience. But she is very much interested in the ways we use (and view!) technology as a means of amplifying our embodied capacities.

In fact, Hendren goes further, saying “The body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.” Every tool we use becomes an extension of our embodied capacities, and we are almost never not using some tool or other, be it a pencil or a car or a computer.

But, the example of a computer as an extension of our embodied capacities can be problematic. Crawford at one point laments that “technology” has become something of a dirty word, almost always now meaning “tech devices.”

But really, we’re not referring to anything material. Rather, what makes a device “tech” is that it serves as a portal to bureaucracy. You cannot use them without involving yourself with large organizations, each with a quasi monopoly in its domain.

Contrast that to the traditional automobile:

The automobile is a thing, not a device in the sense we are exploring here. It simply is what it is, what it appears to be: an inanimate machine that obeys the laws of physics. You can use it without involving yourself with an office building full of people at some undisclosed location.

We may tend to think of our iPhones as glorified, modern versions of Bell’s Box Telephone or even AOL Instant Messenger. But the thing that makes them “tech” or “devices” is that they are not primarily these things. It might be better to call them glorified versions of slot machines — data-collecting slot machines designed to make you think they’re something else, while they harness, manipulate, and sell every second of attention they can get without any restraint whatsoever. That’s not technology; that’s “technopoly.”

But I’m headed down a rabbit hole, one filled with soap boxes. So let me turn back around.

“Technology” needs a significantly renewed, and broadly understood, definition. And Hendren has her own call for that redefinition. She points out that when we look at individual lives, their stories

beg for us to return our attention to the body and the person as the site of infinite adaptation, but they also beg for an expanded definition of technology — not a simple contest of “better” and “best,” but a broader canopy for how bodies meet the world of tools and environments for getting life done.

Not better and better (nor faster and faster), but personal. Hendren goes on to describe what might sound like a dumbing down of technology. Rather than looking at technology as invention and patented innovation, we can can look at the “long arc” of significance and utility in every-day technologies that get overlooked, broadening and enriching the world of simple technologies all around us — and the embodied lives of those who use them.

I went to a medical conference several years ago specifically to hear a talk by a doctor named Dick Bransford. I don’t remember much about being there, but I remember why I went. I had met Dr. Bransford in Liberia a month before. It was my first time on the cleft lip surgery team. Late one night, chatting in the kitchen of a hospital compound near Monrovia, he told me the topic of his lecture was something like “State of the Art vs. State of the Need.” Since that time I have scribbled the phrase “state of the need” in the margins of dozens of books. And I think this is exactly what Hendren is getting at. (I think she and Dr. Bransford would have got along quite well.)

There is a line from Francis Bacon in the opening to one of Hendren’s chapters:

“Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand.”

The automation of such things as driving, searching, writing, thinking — as opposed to the embodied extension if these activities — necessarily eclipses any bodily or mental benefit otherwise gained, any experience otherwise suffered. You might say that to meet the world through automation is one way to meet the built world. You might even argue that it’s a bad way to meet it. But you might also say (and I certainly think this is correct) that to meet the built world through automation is to not meet the built world, or any world, at all.

As Crawford puts it:

One wonders about the societal effect of delegation at scale, or rather mass absenteeism, through widespread automation and its attendant outsourcing of human agency. What will it mean to stand at one remove from one’s own doings, not episodically, but as a basic feature of living in a world that has been altered in this way? Can one even speak of “doing”?

It is one of my daily tasks to find ways of avoiding the ever-increasing ubiquity of that “basic feature” of modern living. Needless to say, my caveman and I are talking a lot these days.

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As for that exception to Crawford’s otherwise inspiring book . . .

Hendren’s book is wonderful, front to back. But Crawford’s has one section (a half-chapter or so) that I think could be thrown out. In fact, it’s a chapter I think I hated, and it’s a good thing it appears half-way through the book. Toward the end of the chapter titled “The Motor Equivalent of War,” Crawford finally gets to the point of that title. It was quite the change to sit down the with the book one early morning and to realize that all those “amens” had vanished. At best, this chapter is unnecessary and a little naïve. At worst, it was written by a man with no experience of war except what he has read and imagined and played with in his mind — something not far from the opinion of a child in love with cars and G.I. Joes, who has never been to war and certainly never held the dying. (Obviously, I do not know this about Crawford, nor am I the least bit inclined to describe his character in this way. Nevertheless, this is the way that some of this chapter sounded to me.)

I could absolutely grant that there is an experience — often idealized but sometimes even realized — where a fighter sees in his “enemy” something of a worthy opponent. And that this “spirit of hostility and friendship combined,” as Crawford, quoting Johan Huizinga, puts it, amounts to something that is (humanly speaking) quite remarkable. It’s difficult not to think of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call, for instance. But stories like that are remarkable in part because they are so unlike what war always is and always has been: the worst that humanity is capable of. That honor and respect and friendship can be found in war, and even between enemies, says absolutely nothing about war as a feature of natural life but is a testament to the potential depths of humanity’s soul any place it happens to find itself.

So while I highly recommend Why We Drive, I also hope that that chapter gets ignored by its readers and thrown out or rewritten in any future editions.

Justin EH Smith:

Among the several works of classical literature I have read recently, Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, is particularly instructive as to the inanity of this modern imperative to stay informed and to adopt public positions on issues. The story unfolds around the beautiful young Verena Tarrant, whose parents have launched her onto the speaking circuit as a gifted orator in defense of the feminist cause. Her father is a mesmeric healer, and early in Verena’s career the public performance begins by his laying hands upon her, which induces a sort of hypnosis in which the girl is better able to traduce her arguments in favour of the cause of women. A patrician by the name of Olive Chancellor, understood by James and all but the most clueless of readers to be a lesbian, attends one of Verena’s performances, falls in love, and pays off the Tarrants in exchange for bringing Verena into her home, in an arrangement known as a “Boston marriage”. But Olive also makes the mistake of bringing along her distant cousin from Mississippi, the smooth lawyer Basil Ransom. Ransom cares not at all for the feminist cause – he finds it ridiculous – but also falls in love with Verena. From the moment they lay eyes on her, Olive and Basil are both “zoomin’” the same girl, and the rest of the story tells of the gripping battle between cousins over their shared love object. As to the substantive issues, James takes the only position worthy of a novelist: chivalry, feminism, the life of the salons, are all just so much human comedy, and the players in this comedy are to be lightly mocked, but also loved. They are human and this is the best they can do.

Social media allows users no opportunity to cultivate a Jamesian disposition to humanity, instead presenting to us the teams captained respectively by Olive and Basil, and acting as if we have all already signed up for the game, and affirmed all of its rules. One compelling reason to decline to play, however, to log off, may be learned from the novel itself: the US cultural wars are best thought of as trench wars, and the trenches have not budged since 1886. Olive and Basil are familiar types, with thousands, perhaps millions, of lesser instances tweeting out their team affiliation each day, except that, in the absence of James’s humane narration, we are given no reason to love them.

It may sound arrogant to say, but Smith’s point, his experience, is one of those things about reading (anything, but especially fiction) that you either get or you don’t. Either way, reading and writing were meant for this kind of strange but wonderful insight. Each of us needs to work on our “humane narration,” to hold out the “possibility of adoration” where we may feel least likely to find it, and to thereby “decline to play the game.” The corollary imperative: Find what prevents you from humanly loving and tolerating the people you don’t love or tolerate, and do something about it.

One of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the last year is Lauren F. Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice. Winner quotes Miri Rubin, speaking of what

social pathologies teach us loud and clear: that any attempt to categorize people, to place them in exclusive groups is a lie, and it requires an enormous effort of mendacity and persuasion to keep such lies believable. So much so that no claim can be coherent, that it cracks, and its cracks can become visible to us.

It seems correct to add that any system or technology that works to convince us otherwise — that works to hide the cracks in our sure understanding of others — is equally a lie. There have been a number of articles lately that make it sound like people are finally figuring this out in a significant way.

Speaking of “the mass exodus from Twitter in late 2022,” Smith says that it simply and finally dawned on people that “they deserved better.”

To say that they deserved better is to say that they deserved virtual connections that complemented their human connections rather than warped them. It says that monetised social interaction is not social interaction in any proper sense of the term, and it says that we already have the technologies to build social networks that are not based on data-extraction and profit-driven algorithms.

First of all, that last sentence is hilarious at face value. “You mean there’s a way to build social networks without the web of data and ads and algorithms? Fascinating!” It reminds me of the ad for Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality living room ski goggles. They’re great, we’re told, because “when someone else is in the room, you can see them, and they can see you.” How nice of technology to deliver such an experience for us.

But that’s not completely fair and I get what Smith is saying. There are much better uses of computer and internet technology than the ones that have been offered by the major platforms and the psychopaths who run them. And one description of what it looks like to “fight back” against every good thing that they by design destroy is to maximize your demonetized human interactions. I am fairly certain that this would have exponentially wonderful effects in any age, but especially in our own, partly because the effects are proportional to the effort needed to accomplish those demonetized human interactions — which is substantial. (And on that note, I will simply point you to the year of anti-inflation.)

So far, I’m not convinced that anything significant has changed. Beside the fact that most of the people Smith has in mind are just leaving one degrading social network for another, I still don’t know what good knowing all of this does for us. It seems important to note that “deserves better” should often — and certainly in this case, does — mean “deserves better than what they/we give to ourselves.” It’s not only (if even mainly) about what tech companies do. The quantity of people willing to make any major changes even by way of minor inconvenience still seems like a very small number.

Nonetheless, the fact remains, we need more face-to-face interactions, more time demonetized, unplugged from any data production or consumption. We need these in and of themselves, but as Smith points out, we also need them if our online lives are going to have anything real to reflect or project.

At its best, the online component of a social network should really only be a representation of a network that is anchored in a different sort of reality. The online component cannot be the thing itself, but only a visualisation of it, a record of a life lived elsewhere than through the screen.

Needless to say, the online component has become “the thing itself.” (Preceded, of course, by the televised and radioed component.) It’s the thing we wake up to, the thing we check more-or-less constantly, keeping us perpetually distracted, reflexively erasing every pause throughout the day and straight through the evening, to the moment before we close our eyes, sleep, and repeat. It’s amazing to think, evolutionarily or anthropologically, what humans have endured and experienced in nature, and what we’ve come to.

Toward the end of William James’s famous speech/essay “What Makes Life Significant,” he offered a summary of what he was getting at by quoting Fitz-James Stephens:

Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.

It should be clear that the very last thing that social media — and “tech” in general — has ever done or will ever do is force any of us to have some “definite view” of our relations to each other or to the real world. It’s specific purpose — once again, by design — is the exact opposite. But we don’t think of it this way. Not at all. It flies under the radar as just another necessary step of technology or another neutral medium of communication.

Of course, one can’t say the words “medium of communication” without summoning the spirit of Neil Postman. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he points out that almost every modern change in technology and communication has occurred with neither public conversation nor private resistance.

But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. … It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations, among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years.

That was in 1985. We’ve had nearly 40 more years of technological change, and not an ounce more of public conversation, let alone of “public consciousness.” Only compliance.

I see no reason why online social networks should be anything more than “records of a life lived elsewhere.” And I do think it’s possible to have social networks that actually work to be online representation of reality. I think micro.blog manages something very close to this. The caveat for me is that I know no one else on micro.blog. And I mean no one. It gives me something like a quasi relationship with a few people a month who happen to comment on something I post, or vice versa. I’m not complaining. I’m not looking for much more online interaction than what I currently have. (Though I enjoy finding some folks worth “following,” and in terms of a healthier way to interact online with strangers, it is wonderful.) I’m just saying that — again, for me — even the best version of online social networking fails to achieve much of an accurate representation of reality.

Since most of the people who actually benefit from it have something to sell, maybe the reality of online life is this: For the average individual, there is no online option. When it comes to being online, everyone I know will either do the thing that everyone else is doing (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) or they will do nothing. Which means, for every single practical purpose, the focus needs to be on that “nothing.” To use William James’s phrase, online life will at best “touch only the surface of the show.” The rest — the nothing-to-do-with-the-internet — is “the great ocean on which [we] sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds.”

I can use the technology to provide a space for sharing (e.g. commonplace blog, newsletter), but I will not find online “community” and I will not share in any sort of meaningful reality there. And maybe that’s just the entire nature of reality itself telling me that there is a giant crack in our experience of each other and of the world, an obvious and actively overlooked incoherence in it all that just needs to stop being ignored.

Alan Jacobs:

Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.

Gilbert Meilaender:

And we might, were we at all sympathetic to the “opponents” of transhumanist desire, wonder whether it would have been better to remain human—characterized by a needy openness that exists only by virtue of constant exchanges with a world we do not master—even if our capacities were fewer, our status (in some sense) lower, and our suffering greater.

John Milbank:

[S]ince Christ’s personhood was displayed most forcefully in his sacrificial death, even the death of a Christian civilization may exhibit instances of Christian witness and hold out the hope of resurrection.

It is in this light that one ventures to assert that, for the Christian or Christian-formed outlook, civilizational decline is always ironic. Although it betokens separation and therefore evil, for the personalist perspective separation is always secretly outplayed by further personification and further unification since, from the outset, the only fullness of unity lay in manifold self-expression and the only hope of return to the One lay in linking the fullness of this self-expression—which may well be fully achieved in disintegration—back to a loving unity with the One itself.

In the light of this ironic attitude, the post-Christian project of liberalism can appear only to be parody. The very idea of grounding security upon the isolated individual could have occurred only to people emerging from a personalist legacy, however much they have subverted its real truth. Similarly, the idea of founding order upon disorder is a parody of the message of the Cross.

. . . The personalism of theophanic character taken as displaying the transcendent absolute, or God, is much more individualistic than individualism, and so can outplay it. The self-immolation of the Cross is much more disintegrating than decadence and so can also outplay it through the enactment of total self-sacrifice, self-giving, and self-surrender. The self-assertion involved in expressive giving (even to self-destruction) is much more freely expressive of “right” than are rights themselves, and much more acceptable, since the genuine personal gift must, by definition, cohere with every other gift, whereas a “human right,” being only by definition a self-assertion, might not. A house built upon the sand of antagonism, even regulated antagonism, is doomed to fall, but no authentically different reality really stands against anything else. Hence Christianity, perhaps unlike any other creed, has nothing ultimately to fear from release: Deeper than every jolt lies the confirmation of benign recoil. That is the core of the Christian metaphysical trust in the nonultimacy of ontological violence, the ultimate peaceability of being or reality as such.

In one sense, the message here is simply not to give up, but to retain hope in the face of the most extreme-seeming disaster. But in another it is to have trust that the Christian process is still elaborating and unravelling itself. If no other civilization after ours is in prospect, then that may indeed be because Christianity is the final civilization. There can be no further disclosure of the divine after that of simply the human as such, at the cosmic center: No rationalism or materialism can overtake it without a dualistic denial of the centrality of the symbolic and the liturgical and their mediation by feeling in human historical existence. Jesus removed our interpersonal, social, symbolic, and gift-exchanging existence away from their being embedded in political and purchasing power. He demanded instead that they be embedded in the social and then subordinated to the social and interpersonal as much as possible.