Peggy Noonan, on last week’s Superbowl ads:
What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.
Who are you? Where do you stand on [fill in the blank]? Are you for A or B?
No, it’s almost never put in those words. But it might as well be.
Almost every day I am given some form of two alternative stances that, if I don’t outright despise, I cannot simply choose between. Nor—to step upon the ol’ soapbox—can I aim to hold them in some (harmony-implying-but-ultimately-bullshit) “tension.” And though I do, on some rare occasions, consider myself a “centrist,” I never actually think of myself as occupying some average-of-the-whole or some equidistant space amid the clamoring noise-makers. Well, that last one might be accurate, but only because it describes how I feel whenever I read the news or hear about the latest imperative fear. That is to say, the experience of being stuck in the middle is descriptive and sad, not hopeful and prescriptive—and I want prescription!
Not only do I want some real prescription for life, I need it. It’s quite difficult to figure out “who you are” or “where you stand” when much of the time all you can tell is what you are not and where you do not stand. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s enough just to know what to say “no” to. But “authenticity,” however anyone understands it, requires more.
I was looking for a quote from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity and decided to just reread the book. I think the first time I read it, I was reading for an objective knowledge (and by “objective knowledge” I mean “critique”) of the “culture of authenticity.” This time, I was reading it just for me—always a better way to read!—partly to take a look at my own “atomism” and “fragmentation,” of which there is plenty.
Here’s the line I was looking for:
We are expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.
I happen to love the reality, the many implications, of that statement. For all its frustrations, I love the entangled and entangling reality of life. I love that authenticity is hard to define, that it can be good or bad. I love that trying to chase authenticity is almost always self-defeating, but that if you stop trying so hard you might find it where you least expect. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed.”
If authenticity reflects the question “who am I?”, then the ethic of authenticity seems to reflects that question as we are meant to ask it of ourselves. Like most books that address widely entrenched notions and beliefs, the resolution it points toward is far from being clearly laid out. But the description, diagnosis, and general way forward are, I think, exactly right. (And the book is no less relevant for being over 30 years old!) The overarching warning Taylor repeats is quite simple: don’t be shaped or confused by two mutually-condemning forces. When it comes to “authenticity,” to “being true to oneself,” we should understand it as a good that is abused, and to join either the “boosters” or the “knockers,” as Taylor puts it, will help no one. We need to find better ground to stand on:
. . . not in a middle ground so much as on a completely different ground. I suggest that in this matter we look not for the Trend, whatever it is, up or down, but that we break with our temptation to discern irreversible trends, and see that there is a struggle here, whose outcome is continually up for grabs.
That last part seems very important, and my growing, entrenching cynicism needs to hear it. This is not simply a third viewpoint, a perch from which to watch the world burn or to wait while the two sides (of any given debate) eat each other alive. In fact, this “completely different ground” is a little deceptively described. It is an opportunity for an involved presence, one that is unwilling to concede any permanent losses but, instead, looks for a persistence of possibility—within the space being criticized! Much like James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence,” rather than offering pessimistic critique, and better even than an impassioned contention for the truth, Taylor thinks what we need is to “enter sympathetically into its animating ideal and to try to show what it really requires.” (What does this remind me of…?)
The opposite, as Gilbert Meilaender once put it, though on a more sentimental level, would be “a failure to love that which we criticize and seek to change.”
And so I’m back to the middle after all. But I’m still not thinking of my being “in the middle” as defined by some midpoint. No, I am, or want to be, “in the middle” as defined by being among.
The problem, of course, is that most of this is really hard, long-suffering work. It takes a lot of faith to see a persistence of possibility, even in myself alone. Here, or anywhere that matters, there are no shortcuts allowed, and no final victories either. Instead, “we understand [our predicament] as open to contestation, as a locus of probably unending struggle.”
It may not sound very cheery, but given the helpless alternative, I’m hearing it today as good and hopeful news, and as an obligation to pursue it.
Two quotes against the reign of pragmatic politics.
I find that people are moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction, and has been increasingly an affliction, is that we condescend to one another. . . . When Abraham Lincoln, a virtually totally uneducated man, wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by an standard, because he had that kind of respect for the kind of people he was speaking to. [People in politics today], I’m afraid, they speak in this kind of minimized language that you would use to sell a defective product. . . . To whom are we condescending? How have we allowed ourselves to have such negative assumptions about people in general. Democracy cannot survive if we continue to condescend at that level, where we don’t give good information, we don’t articulate things with the sensitivity that they require to be articulated if they are to be meaning at all. […]
[You cannot free and enlarge the people around you] if you have contempt for people in general, you have no articulated aspiration for their well-being, no great interest in protecting dignity that you really don’t assign them in the first place.
Now if something like this is true, then it matters to be able to say it. For then one has something to say, in all reason, to the people who invest their lives in these deviant forms [of individualism]. And this may make a difference to their lives. Some of these things may be heard. Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion.
In a world always hostile to fresh voices, one needs the encouragement
of a friendly eye or ear, good-humored banter, and lively debate.
To see a far-off speck of light and walk toward it alone
is far harder without companions and friends.
~ Nadezhda Mandelstam ~
The value of a book like this—along with her first memoir, Hope Against Hope—is truly, ultimately beyond words. Yet, so fortunate are we, words still do their work, and the work behind Nadezhda Mandelstam is immense. It wasn’t really until the closing chapter of Hope Abandoned that I came to appreciate just how incredible it is that she was able to write and publish so much of her life in these memoirs, not to mention the poems and writings of her husband, Osip Mandelstam.
In the introduction to Hope Against Hope, the biographer Clarence Brown described Nadezhda Mandelstam as “a vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.” That description still gives me chills to read. Who on earth would not want to hear what she has to say? Who would not want to sit down with her at a table with a coffee or a beer and hear her stories? I have not read Alan Jacobs’s recent book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, but I hope that it contains deep elements of this, of the privilege of pulling a person from the past off the shelf, traveling around the country with her and regularly sitting down with this soul who “went before you”—not to mention with someone so astounding, with one who lived so hard and finished so well. That is, anyway, what the thought of “breaking bread with the dead” evokes for me. And that is often how I felt in reading Hope Abandoned.
In a nutshell that does little justice to her full life, Nadezhda Mandelstam was the primary keeper of her husband’s poetry, both during his life and, especially, after his second arrest and subsequent death in a labor camp in Vladivostok in 1938. The poems were sometimes written on scattered pieces of paper, but more often they were dictated to Nadezhda and transcribed by her. And what’s more, some of these poems survived for long stretches only through memorization, as she and Osip were forced to move around the Soviet Union as internal exiles, from Moscow to Cherdyn to Voronezh, constantly fearing arrest and the confiscation of all their work. Nadezhda believed (in hindsight, at least) that it was her pre-ordained task in life, through no shortage of pain and trial, to preserve and share that poetry, in the hopes of stirring “numbed and dormant spirits” to life.
It should always be borne in mind by our friends in distant parts that this was true of every one of us, and of every scrap of paper we managed to save. The survival of each single article or manuscript is the result of a miracle. I am very conscious of the fact that in certain conditions it is more painful to live on in order to preserve such things than it is to die, but, as is well known, we are not hedonists, and were not created merely for our own happiness or pleasure. . . .”
There is no end to things that could be said about someone so single-minded and unflagging. In reading Nadezhda Mandelstam, everything she says convicts your attention, but not for the sake of her story or her generation alone. On any page or corner you turn, you might find yourself face to face with your own time, to find that a woman speaking of 1920’s or 1960’s Russia could just as easily be speaking of you, wherever you are in 2023. And I think she believed this as well, not with the arrogance of some self-described sage or scholar, but with the humility of one who trusted history to be meaningful, even if, in the end, it was nearly impossible to find hope anywhere.
Over and over, she has things to say to us today, things that she believed with a depth of experience that few of us could ever appreciate. She believed in a deep and overlooked civic courage, but saw that cowardice disguised as bravery was everywhere. She believed that nationalism was a sign of sickness and a distorted way to seek healing.
She believed that to renounce people was to give up on the gift of life; that a great temptation of the 20th century was for people “to believe their commissars [i.e., cultural authorities] instead of their grandmothers”; that the first thing to go is conversation (though “talkers” always remain), followed closely by any real quality of personality; that only fools sing praises to the strong; that one could just as easily—more easily—put a modern gloss on memory as to see and remember a thing clearly for what it was; that some buckwheat and a tin of tushonka laid out on a suitcase could, for the heart that refuses to curse fate, be called a banquet.
And of course, so central to her story, she believed, with her husband, that poetry was opposed, in its very essence, to all that she saw around her, to all those who actively or passively gave way.
Poetry did not agree with them at all. Poetry brings out the reader’s personality, deepens it, and makes him an accomplice in the poet’s cause—something quite impossible for men who control the destinies of whole peoples. The two things are mutually exclusive.
That mutual exclusivity is what made poetry such a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it,” Osip repeatedly said. That’s because true poetry, the Mandelstam’s believed, had an ingrained “healing power,” that it produced and was itself a part of a vibrancy of life, the opposite of which was “unanimity”:
Lovers of strong-man regimes fail to realize that the stability and efficiency of a society stands not in direct but in inverse proportion to the increase in the use of dictatorial powers, and that “unanimity” is a sign of decay, not of vitality. […]
Terror works only when when people are impressed by the very idea of it; bribes can be placed only in outstretched palms, and “unanimity,” by the same token, is possible only when people are ready to abandon independence of thought in order to enjoy the feeling of being surrounded by the like-minded. Such types do not appear en masse in a single day. A long period of preparation is needed.
At the heart of the matter lies a mode—a need and a practice—of understanding. And it is a mode of understanding that is deeply, intrinsically open to… well, open to understanding. It is a language trying to breathe new life back into itself. Language, as much as it works in the service of knowledge and communication, can also—sometimes through natural stagnation, sometimes through force—become a barrier to any genuine thought. An increasingly dead and superficial use of words and phrases will inevitably lend “an air of consummate shallowness to knowledge that might otherwise have been living and tangible.”
Our ordinary everyday speech consists to a very large extent of set phrases, hackneyed combinations of words which stand in the way of any new thought struggling to burst forth. In poetry words have to penetrate the fog of ready-made, congealed speech in order to convey poetic ideas as effectively as possible. Such words gain strength in the very process of overcoming the obstacles, as they thrust up through the mounds of debris under which they are buried, emerging in fresh combinations to bring out whatever ideas are seeking expression.
The poet is one who seeks to convey that inchoate expression. And, whether poet or reader, it matters that you are open to what you seek, even if you don’t know precisely what that is. In fact, it is exactly the point that you don’t know in advance. What matters here, you might say, is that an impatience with poetry—with poetic understanding, poetic depth or direction—is an impatience with that-which-you-don’t-understand. Can you see where this is going?
All over Soviet Russia, the Mandelstam’s encountered others who seemed incapable of seeing or hearing other people. Language—written or otherwise—pervades life, and a person who is willing to use words only for what he already wants or needs, whether for safety or for power, will be, at best, dangerously close to seeing and using people in the same way. Such a person will only ever be protected morally by the culture around them. If the culture fails, it is almost certain that they, too, will fail.
Nadezhda Mandelstam saw this failure—of culture, of language, of character—quite literally everywhere, even leading to Osip’s death. And yet, while being utterly critical, she also managed to sympathize and to refrain from throwing stones. How could anyone act, how could anyone “do the right thing,” knowing what it would cost? She asks this, sometimes explicitly but always implicitly, of herself as well as others: “How could we go on living and laughing knowing all the time what end awaited us?”
Yet she does go on, living and laughing. She and Osip (referred to as “M.”) had their share of suffering, and about this she always speaks plainly.
M.’s horror of the cold and his craving for warmth and sun were a consequence of the years of hunger and malnutrition. In relatively good years, when we had enough food, he did not mind the cold at all, so that by the end he was quite reconciled to it—only to undergo, before his death, cold and hunger more than sufficient for a whole lifetime. I know myself how cold you feel when you are hungry—though I experienced it not in the camps but as a “free” Soviet citizen. The hunger suffered in a camp is unimaginable—all the sons of bitches who still block up their ears and close their eyes should know this.
That direct, “vinegary” character is peppered across her memoirs, and it can’t help sending a chill down your spine, but also, often, putting a smile on your face, if only for the candidness. But even with a smile, any reader knows that this is nothing if not serious business.
If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me, I invite him back into the age we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part of what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning.
Not once, however, not even in moments like these that speak of cold and hunger and pain, do I recall her even appearing to complain about the life they lived. Justified though she surely would be, and despite the title of the second memoir, it does not appear that she ever abandoned hope.
And this is another feature of her writing: a capacity for hard-boiled lament. It may be that ever-present tinge of hope in her perseverance, or it may be her matter-of-fact voice, or it may be that she rarely, if ever, offers a word of sorrow for herself apart from what it meant for those around her. Of course, it is all of these things and more, and I am happy to call the quality of her voice a mysterious thing. But it should catch your notice that, when you are done with these memoirs, you have just read over a thousand pages about the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century, a dead-honest account of life in one of the harshest regimes in human history, and yet you feel that you have not read one sentence that could be called a complaint. Lament, yes. But complaint is nowhere to be found.
In the early 1960’s, after finally getting Osip’s poems published in the United States, Nadezhda says that she was at last able to let go of her remaining fears.
Now [M.’s poetry] is indestructible, and I therefore feel totally and absolutely free, and I can breathe easily (despite the lack of air). How many people will understand what joy it is to breathe freely just once before you die?
How many of us will ever know what it’s like to live our whole lives holding our breath? Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nearly her entire life trying to speak, waiting for that moment when she could breath a sigh of relief. The terrible irony is that a woman who could not speak without risking her life somehow managed to speak more clearly and truthfully than most of us could ever hope to.
The most astonishing thing is that there are still a few people with just enough life in them to try making their voices heard, but only through an immense volume of water, from the bottom of the ocean, as it were. Among them I count myself—and I know, if anybody does, what superhuman efforts are needed just to preserve a handful of manuscripts. Yet I could not have departed this life without telling something about the blithe soul who once lived at my side, never letting me lose heart; about poetry and people, the living and the dead; about stopiatnitsas like myself, most of whom go on carefully hiding their past. . . . I say there can be no limit: we must go on talking of these things, over and over again, until every justice and every tear is accounted for, until the reasons for what happened (and still happens) are made plain to see.
In a 1974 review of Hope Abandoned, Robert Altar spends a good deal of time differentiating between Osip’s and Nadezhda’s relationship to Christianity, Nadezhda’s having gone on to become much more explicit, if still quite unique. He does this, he says, too address the problem it makes for the historian’s proper understanding of Osip. I think he is probably (mostly) right about this difference, and that it is a difference that Nadezhda herself was well aware of. But, perhaps too often, people have tended to read Nadezhda as a means of getting to her husband. Given the way she writes about her own life and of Osip’s, this is a perfectly understandable thing, and one for which she would take little offense.
She saw her life as inextricably bound to Osip’s. And she knew that behind her experience in life, there was a voice that needed to be heard. Only when she was able to share Osip’s work, to ensure that his death was not his end, could she find rest. Would that any of us knew a fraction of that self-sacrifice.
I am, however, very glad that, not only did Nadezhda live to preserve her husband’s poetry and legacy, but that in the process she was, and is, able to present her own life and legacy as well. Truly, for Osip or for Nadezhda, there is no way of understanding or hearing one without the other.
As Robert Altar put it in his review, “It is a miracle of fortunate coincidence that so extraordinary a poet should have had as a wife so extraordinary a witness.”
Well, amen.
The capacity of memory, both collective and individual, to gloss over, improve on, or distort the facts is particularly evident at periods when the foundations of a society are collapsing. Those disorders to which memory is prey—the tendency to embellish or suppress “awkward” detail, the need to vindicate oneself—show how dangerous it is to rely on one’s own conviction of being right; since this is all too often based on a false criterion, our main task is to find a true one. There is also the problem that, while distorting our recollections and thus hindering a proper appreciation of individual or historical experience, memory is yet the one feature that distinguishes us as human beings. How can we resolve this contradiction and arrive at the unadulterated truth, so that we stop deceiving ourselves and others and draw the right conclusions from our bitter experience? We have all played our part in the work of destruction, and heaven help us if it is taken to its logical conclusion.
Also a reminder that it is the task of that “memory,” at least at times, to “to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos.” That is, “to bear our lives more than to shape them, to hope more than to plan, to hold out more than to stride ahead.”
In this way, the proliferation of digital imagery swamps our sensory apparatus, which is increasingly desensitized to visual experience. Or perhaps it is better to say that the multitudinous cacophony of images we casually scroll through day after day trains us to be merely passive consumers of visual stimuli, disinclined to attend to the world with the care that may ordinarily be the condition of wonder. . . . I must work against the grain of my structured experience to register the significance of what I see.
Writing in the early days of manned space exploration, Hannah Arendt noted that recent progress in science, once translated into everyday life, “has brought with it a veritable avalanche of fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery,” which might evoke a certain kind of amazement, but an amazement ultimately at our own ingenuity. “All of this makes it more unlikely every day,” Arendt warned, “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.” Or, as the playwright Max Frisch once quipped, technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Digital technologies have only accelerated this trajectory, which raises at least one critical question: Can the experiences of wonder arise from a technological environment built to rationalize, manage, and control the world? An environment that seeks to make the world uniform and predictable? If we think of wonder—not simply amazement or even awe—as being specifically tied to the gratuity and contingency of what is, then having our attention primarily directed toward what has been planned and fabricated would diminish the odds of experiencing it. In The Human Condition, Arendt warns against a techno-scientific spirit of “rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking).” A gift that, in this spirit, a person may wish “to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.” In making this exchange, we might be unwittingly giving up the experience of wonder too.
This pairs very well with a throwback to Jonathan Pageau in 2014, from his post “Most of the Time the Earth is Flat“:
Men always had artificial spaces, painting, sculpture, maps, but the telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. . . . So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.
What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in. When at the very core of vision, the shape of your cosmos leads you to believe that technology provides a perception which is more true, more real than your experience, more real than walking out of your house and looking at the sky, then the telescope and the microscope will soon be side by side with the camera, the screen and the accelerated time and space of the car window. The metal and glass frame will swallow us and human beings will lose themselves for their incapacity to fully inhabit the world.
We have enslaved the earth also by requiring the economic landscapes of farming, forestry, and mining to feed, clothe, and shelter us, warm and cools us, and keep us shopping, without maintenance or recompense or any of the affectionate kindness and care which it requires of us…
~ Wendell Berry ~
“…and keep us shopping.”
That line comes from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole. I may be about to hijack Berry’s point, at least in this essay of his, which is about prejudice and human freedom. And though this may not be the best place in Berry’s work from which to take these points, it is part of a larger theme which he has not stopped speaking on for decades. For instance, I am similarly crushed by these lines from Berry’s Mad Farmer Manifesto: “When they want you to buy something/ they will call you.”
Maybe it was just the way that Berry dropped that particular line— “and keep us shopping”—that hit me this afternoon. Maybe it combined with the already-in-place goal of buying absolutely zero clothing this year, which also paired well enough with this year’s (good) riddance of Amazon Prime membership. But Berry, in the same chapter, also makes this deeper point:
Our economy obstructs, actively and purposefully, our still surviving wishes to grant intrinsic and transcendent worth to all the members of the living world as our neighbors, fellow creatures, “the least of these my brethren.”
Granting the primary appeal for fellow creatures, human or otherwise (and granting a dialed-down mode of transcendence), I take this to mean that we do not value most things for what they are, or can be, in themselves, but instead place arbitrary and monetary and fickle values on them. I assume that this applies to all things, and I assume that it will take just as active and purposeful an effort to counter this obstruction.
In this chapter, Berry also describes certain “goods,” the value of which “cannot be inflated.” What he has most directly in mind is knowledge, skill, work. But I feel content in expanding this to include the value placed on material things as well. Money, and any item with its value attached to it, is not only inflatable but “continuously inflatable”—it cannot have a fixed value.
In Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, there is a passage on Ezra Pound that makes a similar point:
Pound’s stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called The Two Nations Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank’s founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1964 for potential investors included this sentence: “The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” Pound repeats this sentence over and over in the Cantos and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money “created out of nothing” cannot have real value or real increase, but the “hell banks,” through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.
I have no particular concern for “evil banks.” And I have no concern in overturning the monetary system. What I am interested in is overturning my own life, and the assumptions that I don’t believe I should be entirely excused for holding. I am only interested in what I should and should not be doing with the things around me and how they are valued, or not valued.
Berry would take this hostile monetary measurement one crucial step further. Not only does it gnaw away at the true value of things, but it blinds us to the remedy, to love:
By this measure, the world contains many things, some essential things, that are unpriced or priceless, and therefore are worthless. By this measure, my talk of a sacred bond of love as a necessary motive becomes nonsense.
It’s going to take me a bit to figure out all that I mean by this—and by what means all that I mean by this will be carried out. Maybe all that I mean is that I want to focus on the things in life which are not easily, or at all, replaceable. Things which, though they have been or may be purchased with a monetary value—I cannot, after all, extricate myself from my time—they nonetheless are not or will not be held with a monetary value. Nor should they be held with an eye to the next best version. All of which means that I should be actively and purposefully finding and determining the irreplaceable, the uninflatable.
There are two ideas that I’ve been thinking about that combine very well with all this. One comes from Charles Baxter in the introduction to Wright Morris’s Plains Song:
The Japanese have a word—sabi—that refers to any object that after many years has acquired a quality of what we might call “noble shabbiness.” This noble shabbiness might be imagined as the weathering of a piece of furniture that has been worn smooth by use and age. Nothing you buy at the mall can possess sabi. Only those objects that have been worked and touched for a long time can have it. Sabi is found not in the beauty of youth but instead in the beauty of wear and tear, the beauty of something that has stood the test of time and is still standing in spite of everything. Sabi is the acquired soul of a created thing as it grows old.
One way to think about what I want for this year is simply to have this possibility in mind—to make room in my life for something, anything, to obtain a noble shabbiness. I want even small things that last and have incalculable, even if untransferable, value.
Of course, things don’t always stand the test of time “in spite of everything” but often stand only because they have been cared for, they have been loved. Hence, the second thing, from Roger Scruton:
Time was when everything usable was also repairable: chairs, sofas, carts, hats, accordions, carpets, all were in a state of flux, as new defects revealed themselves and new patches were affixed to cover them. Objects entered the world of human users only to pass at once from Being to Becoming.
Repair was not so much a habit as an honoured custom. People respected the past of damaged things, restored them as though healing a child and looked on their handiwork with satisfaction. In the act of repair the object was made anew, to occupy the social position of the broken one. Worn shoes went to the anvil, holed socks and unravelled sleeves to the darning last—that peculiar mushroom-shaped object which stood always ready on the mantelpiece. […]
The truth is that repair, like every serious social activity, has its ethos, and when that ethos is lost, no amount of slap-dash labour can make up for it. The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love also the process of repair and all that pertains to it.
Which brings me back to Berry, to the maintenance, the recompense, and the affectionate kindness and care that life, and each thing in life, requires of us, of me.
It may seem strange to think that the antidote to continuous shopping is a love of things, but, properly understood, it seems exactly right to me. To love and care for things rather than replace them or bury them behind the new and the more. Berry’s solution to the Menifesto mentioned above was simply this: “everyday do something/ that won’t compute.” And the first thing he lists is love. Nothing in this world is more resistant to computation than love. And if it won’t compute, it won’t inflate.
So, for me, that is the goal of 2023. This is the year of anti-inflation.
If you make your peace, your reconciliation, or even your quarrel, with your life in this world in terms only of what you yourself presently know or can understand, you almost certainly are going to be surprised. “Life,” said Erwin Chargaff, “is the continual intervention of the inexplicable.”
By contrast with the little handful of public or newsworthy sins, the traditional lists of commandments, sins, and virtues have a human and a humanizing amplitude. They serve as a working definition of our species: Here is what is expected of us and what we are to expect of ourselves as human beings, and here are the ways we succeed or fail. The public sins, by proposing one or two things that good people don’t do, make goodness easy. But the traditional lists, by their amplitude, stand resolutely in our way. They have seen us coming. To know them, to take them seriously, measuring ourselves by them and remembering the commandment against lying, is to take a real test that lasts a life time. Honest answers may not come either easily or finally. For example, you yourself may not have killed anybody, you may have nobody’s actual blood on your hands, but to whom may you have given your proxy to do your killing for you? Or if you think you have no prejudice, can you remember that other people’s memories of you may be truer than your own? And which is most important: innocence of prejudice by the standard of political correctness or the ability to do the right thing even if you are prejudiced?
Taking that test is likely to reveal to us that we may recognize sinners less by their sins than by our own. If this doesn’t make us more virtuous or more humble, it ought at least to improve our sense of humor. A sense of humor and what Alexander Pope and Jane Austen called “sense” are in fact ways of knowing and taking seriously our inescapable involvement and complicity in the good and the bad that human beings do.
The “good Samaritan” of Luke 10:30-37 may well have been prejudiced against Jews, but the Jew he saw by the wayside was a man fallen among thieves, who had robbed and beaten him and left him half dead. The Samaritan saw in that man not a Jew but a neighbor. Your “neighbor,” literally, is “somebody who lives near you,” but the word is defined in Luke as “somebody who needs your help.” The Samaritan, then, “had compassion” on this neighbor, “went to him, and bound his wounds . . . and took care of him.”
That prejudice exists in degrees identifies it as a human affliction, and suggests moreover that all humans, to some degree, are afflicted by it. Prejudice, carefully induced, motivated soldiers to kill one another in wars. It also causes some well-meaning people to assume that all who are in some way oppressed would be virtuous, sensible, and responsible if only they were not oppressed. In either case prejudice precludes authentic knowledge, therefore authentic judgement, therefore any appreciable degree of justice. It distorts or counterfeits reality. One enacts the only remedy when, as a neighbor, one looks through one’s prejudice or brushes it aside, to see the face of a neighbor, an actual neighbor, worthy or unworthy, who in any event will have to be dealt with as a person, not as a representative of some category.
For Rorty there was a clear political implication to the pragmatic view of language. “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity,” he writes in Achieving Our Country. This is an idea that Barack Obama—one of the few contemporary politicians one could imagine being familiar with Rorty’s work—understood well. Obama told a story about American history in which his election was a culmination of imperfectly realized ideals that had been guiding America since its founding. Donald Trump—in a much more instinctual way—likewise understood this idea, and it is no accident that his political career began with the birther movement. He was telling a competing story about what it meant for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be elected president. In the political and cultural world we have inhabited ever since, Truth has most certainly gone on vacation.
It has been said many times that Trump was—in his own bizarre fashion—a postmodernist president. Those who say this generally use the term “postmodern” loosely. They mean that Trump cared nothing for tradition, had no regard for truth, that he lied all the time. But Trump is far better understood as our first pragmatist president. Trump knew—and knows—that Truth has gone on vacation; his acolytes know it, too. They are not nihilists, as they are often labeled, for they clearly do value something. And they are not deconstructionists, for they are prepared to latch onto pragmatic truths that will get them what they want.
Trump’s language is, or seeks to be, performative. He speaks to advance his cause and confound his enemies. To achieve this, he will say virtually anything. His followers—disillusioned people who have been stripped of ideals—are responsive to his reckless pragmatism and employ it themselves; they are always ready to use words to “get a gasp.” If Trump ever used words to render reality, I never heard it. Like a committed pragmatist, he uses words to influence his listeners and accomplish his goals. We Americans, natural pragmatists, understand this in a way that no European electorate ever could. His way of using language is all too often ours, which is one of the reasons so many of us are receptive to it.
To be sure, politicians have always wielded language in dishonest ways to serve their agendas. But there is, in general, some articulable and more or less idealistic end—the dictatorship of the proletariat; the creation of God’s kingdom on earth; the dismantling of an unjust social order; the preservation of a just one; liberté, égalité, fraternité—by which the means are justified, even if only cynically. What distinguishes Trump is that he has never claimed—at least not for very long—to have any enduring values in mind. Many voters who were themselves idealists of one kind or another—including, most notably, pro-life Christians—supported his candidacy in explicitly pragmatic terms. Trump invited them to do so not through his half-hearted claims to share their values but through his repeated insistence that he was a winner who would deliver what they wanted. It was this more than anything that made him our first true pragmatist president. […]
Anything can be caught in the pragmatic game and seen for what it is: not a necessary fact, but a contingent one. And if all ideas and morals and institutions are contingent, then we can do away with them through ridicule, the kind that asks, implicitly or overtly: What good are these things? What good are they to you and me, right here, right now? And if they are no good to us—if they do not give us what we want: the nomination, the election, mass applause and allegiance—then let’s dump them immediately.
