A really beautifully written piece in The Hedgehog Review taking aim at exactly people like me with their nostalgia for a vanished center.
That’s kind of the assumption that runs through this Substack - and that underlies the work of writers I’m very sympathetic to, like Bill Deresiewicz and Bari Weiss - which is that we had some sort of viable social fabric, built on a consensus that often went unspoken, and that over (roughly speaking) the last five years we can literally feel that fabric tearing apart. To throw up terms on a whiteboard, that ‘center’ had to do with tolerance, pluralism, negative liberty, the sublimation of violence through civic institutions, the Constitution, the principle of productive oppositionalism, representation as a viable form of discourse, and so on. And Barba-Kay’s piece is a useful corrective to that reflexive nostalgia - contending that that center never really existed and, if it did, it wasn’t what we thought it was.
Recently, I’ve gotten surprisingly absorbed in Revolutionary-era history and have been struck by what seems to me the cynicism of every decent historian of the era. Their point is that America was never united - not in the Revolution itself, which was met with widespread ‘apathy,’ not in the Constitutional Convention, which was after all a secret meeting and widely perceived in the States as something like a coup, not in the halcyon period of the 1790s, during which, as the historian John Howe writes, “American political life was gross and distorted, characterized by heated exaggeration, and haunted by conspiratorial fantasy. Events were viewed in apocalyptic terms with the very survival of the republic in the balance.” And then, of course, the next half-century of American politics is the story of more or less steady disintegration.
So Barba-Kay’s point is well taken - we don’t necessarily have to do so much hand-wringing for the lost center because it was never really there. And when people of a certain generation talk about the center, they have a few things in mind - 1.a post-war governing consensus that ran from FDR to Nixon, that shifted only lightly depending on who happened to be the president at the moment; 2.a spirit of bipartisanship embodied in Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill throwing back drinks after work hours; 3.a trust in science and in the integrity of ‘mainstream’ institutions. When you dig into any one of those things, you discover, not so surprisingly, that there was less to them that meets the eye. That post-war consensus was really a security state that outlived its usefulness - with even presidents of the United States tapping out pleas for help on their cell wall. Bipartisanship had a similarly Schmittian sensibility in converging on principles of social order and driving out meaningful political discussion. And the institutions have revealed themselves, when faced with financial pressures or Twitter mobs, to be astonishingly cowardly, which makes one start to realize that, even in the golden era of trusted Walter Cronkite and the hard-charging newsrooms, the institutions were never quite so independent-minded as their mythologies portrayed them to be.
Barba-Kay’s critique is above all an indictment of the misplaced sentiments that brought Biden to the Democratic nomination and which will likely make him, as Barba-Kay soberingly notes, a brief interregnum between Trump 45 and Trump 47. I have to admit that what I was thinking about at the moment I pulled the lever for Biden as opposed to Bernie was exactly the sort of antiquated thought that Barba-Kay pillories - a desire for moderation at all costs, some vision of a well-respected-yet-anodyne centrist leader who could work the aisle. (And then cut to: Joe Manchin declining even to take Biden’s phone calls). On the subject of Biden, Barba-Kay is really very funny (“the vinyl president panic-purchased from the AARP catalogue,” the “suppressed exasperation - the strained note of if-you-don’t-knock-it-off-back-there-I’m-going-to-turn-this-car-around") and he’s also right - there is no way home, the center that Biden represents has really vanished.
And, in Barba-Kay’s jaunty worldview, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing: plurality is a better political mode than consensus. There’s no reason really why we should have two parties that cancel each other out every election cycle - other countries make it work with multiple parties and coalition governments. “We need contrast and conflict in order to take shape - we bring ourselves into focus by clarifying what we are not,” Barba-Kay writes. That may be somewhat gnomic but it’s actually a reasonable watchword for entering into a different political era - in which the body politic splinters, in which communication is disparate as opposed to moderated by mass media, in which a host of contradictory-seeming political perspectives can take shape (c.f. the libertarians for Bernie).
There was a ferocious sentiment in the early republic, even before the development of parties - the battle of ‘factions’ over issues. That’s deep in the DNA of American democracy. And if there’s been a pleasant myth that we’ve managed to triangulate those disagreements back through ‘higher powers’ - the well-orchestrated legal system, the sage editorials - well, times and technologies have changed, it’s become clear that the ‘middle’ simply doesn’t have the authority it did, and, if there was any doubt, Uncle Joe proves the point. I don’t exactly know what Barba-Kay’s pluralistic politics would look like other than Twitter mud fights, but the point is that it may not be so horrific as it now seems - and that now’s the time to turn off NPR, drop the pose of the outraged center, get back to something closer to the bareknuckle spirit of the early republic in which everybody made up their own mind about everything and in which politics wasn’t just a genteel tweaking of policy but a constant fight over principle.
Mary’s Gatskill’s Reactionary Realism
I’m really thrilled that Mary Gaitskill is writing on Substack - that says so much about the possibilities of a space like this and, at the same time, about the collapse of more traditional modes of publishing. As one would expect of her, she is in a fighting mood - both on a political front with Wokeism and, interestingly, in an aesthetic domain in which she seems intent on making enemies with other luminaries of American fiction (in this case, George Saunders and Joyce Carole Oates).
Gaitskill’s contention is that, collectively, culturally, over the course of her lifetime, we have lost the ability to describe the physical world - and this trait, which used to be at the core of writing (just think about the landscape descriptions that seemed to open every novel), has disappeared from the education of writers. This might seem to just be old fogeyism on Gaitskill’s part except that she’s really making an argument about artistic trends and lays the blame squarely on a decadent aesthetic that took over American fiction somewhere around 2000 and never released its hold (it’s similar to what James Wood called ‘hysterical realism’). Saunders is really the great villain of it - the sense in his fiction that nothing is real, that we’ve moved inside the television or are playing with caricatures in some Lego-like simulated reality and that in our consumerist, post-truth reality it’s the fake that’s somehow real - and, remarkably, Gaitskill catches him on the record saying “Like anybody does that? Who looks out the window and thinks about trees?” And for good measure, Gaitskill goes after Oates as well, who is quoted as saying, bafflingly enough, that people have “moved on” from describing the world around them. And then the Candylandish style of writing that’s most closely associated with Saunders makes contact with Wokeism circa 2020 and, in that puritanical mode-of-thought, the very impulse to describe the physical world comes to be seen, through an abundance of superego, as an impolite act. (In horror, Gaitskill recounts how her students have told her that they don’t like to describe faces because that necessitates “assigning value to people’s appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards.”)
What Gaitskill makes the case for - and it’s insane that, to her and to her presumed audience, this comes across as reactionary - is heightened attention to the physical world, a fiction that’s rooted in description and wonder, an understanding that “fiction is about life and life is mostly not about words.” Given that fiction is in its post-modern cul-de-sac, that somebody like George Saunders with his fantasias and his tote bag-ready epigrams is considered a great writer, and that, of course, the digital world has obliterated the art of seeing for the society as a whole, Gaitskill has no hope whatsoever that her prescriptions will be taken seriously. “Very few people even try to write this way, in part because this caring attention to such detailed descriptions of the physical world or imagery based on that world has for a long time been undervalued or not valued at all,” she writes.
All of which is to say that Gaitskill - who is very nearly my favorite living person - has made herself the crucial writer for our time. This Is Pleasure, her short story length treatment of #MeToo, restores literature to pride of place in whole domains - politics, morality, the intricacies of real-world sexuality - that her fellow novelists had long since ceded to the op-ed writers. And the début of her Substack makes it clear to me that she’s understood the fundamental challenges that fiction writers face in the digital era - that life is moving too fast for publishers’ calendars, that the marquee publications don’t allow their writers (except, occasionally, somebody like Gaitskill) to write uninhibitedly, that the Saunders-like fantasias are in the end a concerted bid for irrelevance - and that she realizes as well that there is always a place for icy, acute realism and that it is possible for top-shelf writers to engage both politically and artistically and to emerge as genuine public voices.
In the past few months, without looking for it at all, I happened across three different critiques of John Stuart Mill - by Aleksandr Dugin, Allan Bloom, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - all of them holding him accountable for, in so many words, everything that’s wrong with everything. That got my attention - since Mill had always struck me as just about the most benign and uncontroversial of all of the major philosophers. But not so, apparently. For Bloom, Mill’s openness came at the expense of the Lockean doctrine of natural rights, generating a rudderless and ultimately untenable mode of existence - which was also the critique of Solzhenitsyn and of Byung-Hul Chan. Karl Popper saw Mill as hopelessly at the mercy of trends, while Dugin viewed Mill’s brand of liberalism (‘freedom against’ as opposed to ‘freedom for’) as a ticking time bomb that would ultimately doom Western civilization.
There’s something very sweet, then, about this argument from Helen McCabe and from The New Left Review, which attempts to save Mill from the usual critique of unmoored individualism. In this version, Mill is redeemed by love - by the influence of his much-maligned girlfriend Harriet Taylor. Through strenuous textual analysis, McCabe concludes that Mill and Taylor were essentially one entity - “they were both socialists and they both wrote On Liberty.” The usual technique of seeing Taylor as Mill’s batty socialist girlfriend - and Mill as ‘returning to his liberal senses’ after her death - collapses. And, strangely enough, the leading light of Victorian liberalism is revealed - much to the satisfaction of The New Left Review - to have been an avowed and life-long socialist.
There’s no attempt here to claim that Mill had an economically viable socialist program in the same way that he sort of figured out liberalism. His socialism seems to have been entirely vague and aspirational: “the problem of the future,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “is how to unite individual liberty of action with common ownership in the raw materials of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.” Alexander Zevin, who writes the piece in The New Left Review, concedes that “there is a gap” between liberal realities and socialist aspirations and that “how we get there from here is still the question.”
But, to me, there is something curiously optimistic about coming across this little piece of philosophical trivia. It suggests that Mill didn’t feel so locked into individualism or laissez-faire as his critics would tend to assume - and, from within our current ‘Age of Assholes’ (this to be the subject of a later piece), in which we’ve more or less given up on abiding ideas of equality and on any sort of communitarian action, it’s still possible to glimpse some chain of ideas in which ‘negative liberty’ gives way to a more constructive mode of being. This isn’t necessarily historicism or a myth of ineluctable progress. McCabe calls Mill’s socialism “organic, peaceful, piecemeal, incremental” - and sees it as a natural, if almost vanishingly gentle, complement to his core liberalism. “All human interactions are reconstituted so as to fully allow for the free development of everybody’s individuality,” she writes.
What this reminds me of is a common-sense approach to personal development beloved of therapists and of spiritual types - an emphasis on the importance of boundaries and of autonomy as a first step towards maturity. In vipassana, for instance, it’s normal to spend ten full days concentrating on nothing but oneself - the sensation of one’s breath on one’s upper lip, every single itch and the emotion and thought associated with that itch - and only on the last day, when one is really in very pure, cleaned state of mind, to say the metta prayer and spread compassion outwards. In spiritual terms, the idea is that a person cannot do any good in the world until they have done ‘work’ on themselves. In Mill’s political philosophy, a similar process of cultivating the self and evading the tyranny of ‘custom’ are seen to be essential (and that’s the basis of the hyper-rational, hyper-individualistic liberalism that we associate with him) but from his own perspective all of that is prologue to his “theory of transition - a shift that would be so gradual as to be almost imperceptible,” in which individual virtues start to be shared on a communal basis. (“I celebrate myself / For every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Walt Whitman, saying pretty much exactly the same thing.)
More forthright, brutal methods of creating socialism have miserably failed. And Mill would seem to be a very weak counterpart to Marx - and was mocked as a ‘utopian socialist’ by Marx and Engels. But there’s something in here that I find to be just about the first optimistic political thought that I’ve had in a long time - an idea that somewhere in the heart of liberalism and the open society (as represented by Mill) there is an organic move away from vertigo and alienation and towards something that is at the same time autonomous and communal.
Wow! Where has this been all this time? Thank you for sharing!