Dear Friends,
First of all, many thanks for ‘subscribing’ and engaging with this. I started Castalia in the middle of the year - my first-ever online writing. For a while, it was pretty lonely (blood relatives only, essentially). By this point, it’s almost exactly what I was hoping it would be - a chance to write completely freely and to be in communication with a real community of like-minded people. Hard to ask for more. So, many thanks.
Over the holidays, a couple of people asked, in different ways, if there was a guiding ‘ ‘idea’ behind these posts. There sort of is - and I’ll try to be a little more explicit about what the core ideas are in the early posts in the new year.
I wanted to start with a ‘Curator’ post, since I recently came across a few articles that expressed - very eloquently - much of what I’m getting at.
Best,
Sam
AGAINST PROGRESS
The first is a fairly short piece by Bill Deresiewicz, whom I’ve been citing a lot. Deresiewicz’s point is that it’s really crucial to attempt, internally, to separate out the two meanings of the word ‘progressive.’ Progressive, on the one hand, means alignment with a slate of social and economic issues - LGBTQ rights, equitable economics, reformation of the criminal justice system, etc. There is absolutely no argument with any of these issues. These are policy points - they are debated at the granular value and with reference to the moral compass of all individuals of a democratic society at any given moment. My personal disposition, like Deresiewicz’s, tends to fall on the progressive end. That meaning of ‘progressive,’ though, is very different from the more common use of the phrase - which is that there is an implicit ‘arc to history,’ that ‘social justice’ is a subset of sweeping and comprehensive ‘progress.’
Simply put, I just don’t believe in progress in any sense - whether technological or sociological - and I find it more than a bit disconcerting that progress, at least in the West, tends to be taken so utterly for granted. There are a variety of historical reasons why it has come to be the backbone of our society - the implicit religion - but, in the end (and this is what I find to be the good news when it comes to progress), it’s possible to disengage from it, to stop believing in it; and that inward shift (at least as I’ve experienced it for myself) turns out to be surprisingly liberating.
What’s most worth noticing about progress is that it’s a modern phenomenon. The ancient world put together extraordinarily advanced civilizations without reference to any theory of progress - the Greeks and Romans, like most ancient cultures that I’m aware of, believed themselves in decline from a past Golden Age and believed history itself to operate in cycles. As William Inge - called the ‘Gloomy Dean’ for his critique of progress - wrote in 1920, “The deepest thought of antiquity was neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It was that progress and retrogression are only the incoming and outgoing tide in an unchanging sea.”
The short history of Western progress, as best I understand it, starts really with the Jewish tradition of the Messiah - and a vision of a fulfillment at some future date. Within Judaism, the Messianic tradition tends not to generate any particular theory of progress - the tradition posits the arrival of the Messiah as a self-contained, mysterious event - but, once taken seriously, it drastically reshapes the nature of time, placing the emphasis on linearity and on the mystical future. As Walter Benjamin puts it, “We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.” With Christianity, the sense of eschatology becomes more pronounced - the Second Coming is understood a specific, paradisal event at some point in the future that will terminate all the cycles of history (the apposite phrase being ‘end times’) - and, within the logic of Christianity, the temptation becomes overwhelming both to assign a date to Christ’s arrival, as in the millenarian traditions, and to attempt in some way to facilitate the Second Coming through some variation of ‘Good Works.’
With the long decline of religion in the West - the receding of the ‘sea of faith’ - a curious compromise emerges. The founders of the Scientific Method, Francis Bacon predominantly, essentially keep the eschatological structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition while swapping out the content, subbing ‘material amelioration’ for Christ or the Messiah. As Thomas Macauley wrote in 1837, “To make men perfect was no part of Bacon’s plan. His humble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable. The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. Bacon fixed his eyes on a mark which was placed on the earth and within bow-shot and hit it in the white.”
If the problem of the messianic religious traditions had always been the lack of tangible results - c.f. the apocalyptic cults that find themselves sitting around a living room at the appointed time when they are supposed to be swept away to the next life and then having to rapidly adjust their calculations - Bacon and his cohort delivered the goods. Technology and applied science - via the related Baconian endeavor of “placing nature on the rack and torturing her for her secrets” - proved so persuasive that an analogy readily suggested itself. If it was possible for technology to advance measurably and dramatically, then the same leaps forward should be possible in every other human endeavor. For Bacon, interestingly, the terms of progress were explicitly religious. His really critical work is called the ‘Parasceve’ - meaning ‘Preparations for the Sabbath’ - and subtitled ‘Towards a Natural and Experimental History.’ In other words, the sweetness of the Messiah’s arrival (the ‘Sabbath’ at ‘end times’) could be generated through the development and dissemination of scientific technology.
As centuries unfolded and the dark side of Bacon’s vision began to become apparent - the shiny new toys weren’t particularly making anyone happier; and the laboratories had an uncanny habit of churning out lethal weapons of mass destruction - the content of the eschatological vision subtly swapped itself out again. This was Whig history or Progressivism or Social Justice - everything would become better but would be fulfilled above all through an agreement on social theory, and the society would work in unison to achieve that end. Hegel was the critical philosopher in this line of thought - perceiving history as having a direction - and its most famous manifestation was in the revolutionary ideology of Marxist-Leninism, the belief that the ‘meaning’ of the present was as a preparation for the future; and with the corollary that present generations should always be willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the future.
Far more than the economic content of Communism, that vision of social eschatology turned out to be the trenchant belief-system. The content of it seems to differ widely. The technological optimists and futurists are pretty much strict Baconians. The Longtermists are Baconians with an odd social gospel surrounding the rights of ‘future peoples.’ The Fukuyamans accept Hegel’s ‘End of History’ but swap in democratic liberalism as the promised utopia. And the social progressives incline towards a cult of youth - a somewhat airy set of premises that, much as technology constantly upgrades itself, so each fresh generation will be a little less bigoted, a little more enlightened, a little more equitably-minded. This is a hard sentiment to shake, since every new parent, every college commencement speaker, finds themselves drawn to it, but, alas, there’s almost nothing else in human experience that supports this perspective. As Deresiewicz writes, “I have lived long enough to know that history is perfectly capable of slamming into reverse and backing up at 50 miles an hour. It happened with Ronald Reagan. It happened with Vladimir Putin. It happened with Trump.”
Around the time I was in college, I came across a school of dissenters to Hegelianism - this was Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, etc - and I found their perspective to be an almost perfect intellectual antidote to the dialectical materialism that had been so prevalent in their era. Faced with competing totalitarian ideologies, they simply stepped aside from the ‘march of history,’ contended that the paganist ancients had been right all along in seeing the larger arc of history as cyclical rather than progressive; and made the case for a philosophy of ‘pluralism,’ which held that it was possible for there to be multiple intact systems of belief that were fully functional within their own domain but that might contradict one another (and for the multiple systems to co-exist). Start to think pluralistically and, suddenly, so many fraught ideological conflicts dissolve into ash.
It becomes important to note, always, that pluralism is not the same as relativism. It’s not that everybody’s right. It’s that there are distinct systems that have their own inner logic - so that the correct naming of the trinity, for instance, may be a perfectly accurate statement within the logic of Roman Catholicism but has no applicability to science or to nontrinitarian Christian denominations. And this mental shift (surprisingly under-utilized) turns out to be really freeing. As Deresiewicz notes, in our current mental framework (and this is a malady above all of liberals but is pervasive in the society-as-a-whole), almost all of our decisions are made with some reference to a vision of the future. “History, in the progressive myth, is a kind of plus factor in political struggle: an invisible force, like something out of physics, that adds its strength to ours,” he writes. But it’s really not so difficult, actually, to just stop thinking in this way. To know that the future is not end times; that future generations will be just as fractious and silly as we are today; and that, as Deresiewicz writes, “history - then, now, and forever - is nothing but sides [i.e. politics].”
If ‘the future’ loses its authority as some kind of ultimate arbiter, then we find ourselves in a more interesting, actually more fun, political dispensation. We are forced back on our own resources - forced to examine our own consciences, our own intuitions. We don’t exactly have to worry about being on the ‘right side of history’ or ‘how history will judge us’ (we have no idea what the politics of ‘future people’ will be; and there’s no reason at all to think that they’ll somehow be more enlightened than we are now). Instead, it’s up to us to painstakingly, conscientiously, figure everything out - the same way it has been for everybody always.
IN FAVOR OF FAILURE
The second piece that really caught my attention was a heartfelt discussion of literary ‘failure’ by Stephen Akey in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
At a deep level, Akey’s point is somewhat similar to Deresiewicz’s. ‘Success’ is one of these shibboleths, like ‘progress’ or the ‘the future,’ that means much less than it would seem to once one really thinks about it but that has an enduring hold as a collective myth. The notion is that, as ‘history will judge,’ then ‘success’ is a similarly unassailable arbiter. If the collective pronounces something ‘good,’ then it is sort of socially promoted to ‘history,’ which is expected to pay attention to whatever we decided we liked and to enshrine it forevermore, make it ‘immortal.’ That sounds really good to a lot of people, and, as a dynamic, it’s responsible for (I would say) the vast majority of the art that gets produced.
But something curious happens to people over their careers as working artists. They find that success matters less to them than they might have anticipated. An artwork turns out to have a mind of its own; and seems often not to care about success or even being ‘good’ so much as about being expressed. And artists find that the entity or voice within themselves that’s generating the work of art has surprisingly little to do with their everyday self - so much so that it starts to seem bizarre even to sign or to take credit for a work that the artists themselves often don’t particularly understand, which is why artists are forever insisting, much to the bewilderment of non-artists, that the ‘painting painted itself’ or the ‘characters wrote themselves’.
The whole process of how a normal person becomes an artist (and in some ways stays themselves and in some ways becomes a completely different ‘entity’ or set of ‘personae’) is mysterious and oddly threatening, and people who haven’t had this experience take fully satisfactory revenge on the artists by endlessly evaluating and rating them and, in general, making their lives miserable. And no one is better at this act of revenge than the artistic industries, which transform the whole process of making art (and everything that’s fun and wild about it) into something much more like a sport or a business, in which ‘success’ can be measured in things like sales of advance copies or presence on year-end book-lists. (And which ultimately makes art seem like not that big of a deal at all - something for the back pages of newspapers.)
A few very serious artists repudiate this set of transactions entirely and, typically, are never heard from by society-at-large. Most are resigned to it. Many attempt to manipulate their work to suit the marketplace - and they tend to create terrible, dishonest work that also happens to be successful. And then the whole shoddy cycle perpetuates itself.
The way out of the mental trap of artistic success is comparable to the way out of the myth of progress. You simply stop believing in it, even if everybody else does. Year-end lists, Nobel Prize lists really tell you nothing at all. The way you end up approaching art, both others’ and your own, ends up being similar to what Shunryū Suzuki called ‘beginners’ mind.’ You are always starting from the beginning, with no preconceptions.
It’s not so easy to think in this way - and the reason is the terror of ‘failure.’ Art-making is a very vulnerable process to begin with, it requires an emotional opening-up, and the greatest vulnerability of all is the very real possibility that you will get to the end of a work, will have put everything of yourself into it and it will just suck, nobody will understand or like it, and you will end up worse off than you started. The artistic industries are very good at manipulating this emotional cycle - it’s really what they live off of - at telling some people (which is the same as offering a promise to everybody) that ‘no, no, you are not a failure, there is a light at the end of the tunnel’ while telling just about everybody else, ‘yes, your worst fears were all absolutely correct, you really are a miserable failure.’ The antidote to this mode of thought is not as simple as reading Karl Popper or Isaiah Berlin freshman year of college. It’s tough, internal, lifelong work.
And Akey, as he describes it in the Los Angeles Review of Books piece, seems to have done much of this emotional lifting. “No one and nothing will ever persuade me that I’m not a good writer - which is the necessary minimum for anyone who aspires to write,” Akey writes. That’s a more significant achievement than it might sound. After all, why shouldn’t someone who’s been presumably writing his whole life, who, on the evidence of the LARB piece, is a terrifically eloquent, honest writer be a ‘good writer’? Well, because the industry that has set itself up as the body that evaluates him, that he is generally considered to be a subsidiary of, has had absolutely nothing to do with his work. As Akey writes, “The whole ecosystem of the publishing industry might as well be taking place on another planet; I’ll never go there. As far as that industry is concerned, I don’t exist. To the extent that unknown writers like me do exist, some functionaries of the publishing world ardently desire that we would just go away, or die. We clog their inboxes; we encumber them.”
To which the rejoinder is that all this sounds like so much sour grapes. The publishing industry exists because, without it, no one would ever be able to read one another’s writing; and the only reason any of us are reading Akey’s ode to failure is because he managed to get it in The Los Angeles Review of Books, which is, of course, a published magazine. But Akey’s point is more subtle and more universal than that. It’s not really some sort of trade unionist critique of the publishing industry - it’s a critique of the whole mentality that underscores publishing. Writers, like all artists, like everybody, have to earn a living somehow, have to justify what they’re doing to their parents, have to engage in some kind of social exchange through their work (in the case of writers, by finding readers). “Writing is a conversation,” writes Akey. “I write to converse with readers in the way that my favorite writers converse with me. There’s plenty of stuff I do just for myself: birdwatching, hiking, practicing scales on the piano. But writing is different. I do it only in the hope, however slender, of having that conversation with readers.” For a long time, publishing - i.e. connection to a printing press and to some mercantile method of distribution - was the only game in town for allowing that conversation to happen; and writers had to make their peace with the publishing industry one way or another. But the internet - a method of distribution that cuts out the publishing middleman - creates if not so much a revolution in publishing itself than a revolution in how we think about publishing; an ability to see it entirely as a tool, a necessary evil, as opposed to the myth that the industry is somehow an independent, reliable arbiter of what is ‘good’ or ‘successful.’
Akey isn’t so much blaming the publishing industry as developing a pride in failure, an inner strength that simply doesn’t intersect with the publishing industry at all. But, as he writes, gently, “The machinery that keeps the literary industry running does seem slightly more oppressive than it needs to be.” Again, the buck doesn’t really stop with publishing. The publishing industry is just doing what it thinks the reading public wants - and, by all indications, the reading public wants stars, awards, interviews, lists, rivalries, gossip, all the apparatus of success as opposed to the somewhat dreary material of literary content itself. And, in his gentle way, what Akey is really doing is encouraging readers to go through the same bracing, liberating internal process that he did - forgetting about the binary of success and failure, opening the aperture wide to take in what Akey calls the ‘infinity of failure’ (which really means all the great, dedicated artists who are flat-broke and/or unknown), and seeing art as an activity that’s utterly outside the social status game, that is an infinite internal world (at least as infinite as the universe of ‘failure’).
CHRISTOPHER LASCH
The articles by Deresiewicz and Akey express, eloquently and passionately, something that I’ve believed for a long time. The other articles I wanted to spotlight this week are introductions to writers I’ve definitely heard of but haven’t actually read and who turn out, at least in these summations, to be focused on puncturing ideas of progress, each in their incarnation in a particular historian era.
has a strong piece in Jacobin on the more-referenced-than-read Christopher Lasch. Lasch was dealing with the cult of progress in the context of the ’60s New Left. His insight, per Lorentzen, was to recognize that the vision of ‘progress’ had a way of co-opting the Left’s best impulses; instead of working assiduously towards common good solutions, referencing ideology as an attempt to transcend the problems themselves. The result, wrote Lasch, was “rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups” - all the same patterns that had doomed earlier, equally well-meaning generations of Leftists.This, so far, is a familiar critique of the Left - the insufferability issue. But in the Left’s drift towards neoliberalism, Lasch noticed something else - the way that the Left could be taken prisoner by the market, just as much as the capitalist Right. “In a basic sense, both liberals and conservatives were advocates of Enlightenment ideas of progress: liberals in their commitment to science, the Right in its allegiance to capitalism,” writes Lorentzen. “In their different ways, Lasch argued, both the liberals and the conservatives were running cover for consumerism.” The point being that the teleological temptations of ‘progress’ were just too strong. The Left was determined to be on the right side of history. Science seemed, similarly, to be on the right side of history - it seemed to be axiomatic that technology made life better. And the most obvious application of science was in consumerism - after all, the companies paying for R&D had to get their investments back somehow - which resulted in the New Left somewhere around the 1970s pretty much entirely abandoning its focus on labor inequities and turning instead towards a middle class-friendly “cult of choice and therapeutic remedies.”
Lasch turns out to be a reasonable place to start in understanding the intellectual dark ages of the last few decades of the 20th century - how exactly the old debates about equitable governance collapsed into a lazy neoliberalism. His most famous formulation of this was in his depiction of society-wide narcissism. Lasch wrote:
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism — which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires — not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs. The consumer feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, “information overload,” and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown, like the giant power failure that blacked out the Northeast in 1965 or the radiation leak at Three Mile Island in 1979.
This is a haunting idea that demands attention. Narcissism - the way I understand it - is really a failure to develop a coherent, bordered self with personal integrity. The self becomes chaotic and confused and demands a ‘narcissistic supply’ from the external world. The analogy to narcissism tends to be used to understand bullies and charismatic figures; it’s more complicated and more interesting to see it as a description of a passive consumerist population, so lost in its own narcissism that it views the surrounding society as similarly chaotic and confused (and, ultimately, as being beyond understanding).
I would have to think more about how these ideas all fit together - and whether the society-wide narcissism that Lasch perceives in America (and which is hard to argue with) is really linked to the belief in inalienable progress. But what Lasch is saying is at the very least suggestive. The tendency to subordinate oneself to the dictates of ‘progress’ and the ‘future’ leads to a certain passivity, a belief that ‘society knows.’ And if society turns out, largely, to be the market (as appeared to be the case in the late 20th century), then market economics, no matter their inherent cruelty, are turned to as the ultimate arbiter of value. As Lorentzen writes of Lasch, “His is a vision not of heroes and villains, nor of friends and enemies, but of a system that has, through accumulating unintended consequences, atomized the citizenry, undermined the idea of ‘the common life,’ and rendered the world instead ‘a war of all against all.’”
LIONEL TRILLING
Trilling - another thinker I haven’t gotten to who turns out to be acute on the ‘myth of progress’ - takes aim at the progress cult as it manifested in the Left of the 1930s.
It turns out that very little has changed. The Left - always so high-minded, so sincere, so sure of itself - falls prey over and over again to its weakness for collectivism and for eschatology. If the current mania is for social justice, no matter the bizarre leaps in common sense that that might involve; and if the mania in the ’60s and ’70s was the unholy alliance with narcissistic consumerism as per Lasch; in the ’30s the mania was straightforwardly Marxist-Leninist, with all the internal purity tests and the apologies for Stalinism.
What bothered Trilling most - which is the same thing that bothers me about wokeism - is the poverty of its aesthetics. He disliked the trust in “agencies and bureaus and technicians,” the “earnest, sincere, solemn” politics. He lamented the “fatal separation” between modernity’s narrowly socioeconomic approach to life and the “deep places of the imagination,” as Michael Knox Beran writes in his piece on Trilling in City Journal. He was upset that “America’s thought leaders favored doctrinaire books ‘that praise us for taking progressive attitudes’ and wallowed in a ‘literature of piety’ with ‘neither imagination nor mind.’” He claimed that culture was giving way to a ruinous “politics of culture.” And Trilling found that the intellectuals of his time - unassailably Left - were dedicated narrowly and entirely to a facile “unmasking of the established American order.” Towards which Trilling identified his role as “unmasking the unmaskers - showing that the very ideals they were committed to were betrayed to very death by their way of dealing with ideas, as instruments of piety rather than thought.”
That summation makes Trilling seem kind of blandly reactionary, but what’s arresting about him, in Knox Beran’s depiction, is a very deep - and politically and aesthetically-themed - melancholy; and which kind of determined his whole career. He wrote of an interest in Matthew Arnold, “derived from an affection for some of his poems whose melancholy spoke to me in an especially personal way.” And that affection brought him to Arnold’s critique of the liberalism of the 1860s, creating “incomplete and mutilated….stunted and enfeebled” human beings, narrowly rational, narrowly ‘scientific,’ but “stimulating too few sides of human nature.” Arnold was concerned about liberalism in its atomized, laissez-faire iteration, but something about the critique resonated with what Trilling was encountering in the “social and group emphasis” of 1930s ‘cooperationist liberalism.’ And, from Arnold, Trilling thought he had found a different way of being. As even Trilling’s admirers noted, though, this other way of being was a bit hard to describe - Morris Dickstein thought he was being “purposefully obscure”; Knox Beran writes that The Liberal Imagination is “maddeningly vague.”
For Trilling, in his own life, the easiest way to understand that way of being was through a chain of transmission that ran from his teacher John Erskine straight back to Arnold. That was, essentially, the humanities - a belief that it was possible “to recover the thicker culture that molded character and aspiration in older communities,” as Knox Beran writes. This sounds patrician but it wasn’t exactly that - more a vision of personal cultivation that emphasized both imaginativeness and independence of thought. “Only a sufficiently rich artistic culture, integrated in the civic infrastructure of particular communities, could produce citizens of such ‘humanistic versatility,’” writes Knox Beran of Trilling’s vision for education. “Only ‘great works of the imagination’ could ‘foster and even institute this large-mindedness, this magnanimity.’”
I can see the problem of ‘vagueness’ and ‘obscurity.’ Who knows if the program of education that Trilling had in mind was ever realizable - it seems he wasn’t thinking just of Great Books courses, or Core Curricula, more some very Athenian way of integrating a humanities education with a ‘civic infrastructure.’ But there is something, even in the ‘vagueness’ of Trilling’s thought, that I find suggestive. He was unconvinced by scientific determinism and collectivity just as much as he was by progressive ideology. What mattered was personal integrity and the ‘thicker culture,’ which believed in the infinite richness of the self as opposed to whatever new data set or five-year-plan the priests of the future had most recently cooked up.
The "messiah" for me, from a Jewish tradition, remains "the yet to be"-- as does art that I attempt in my own writing--and in those yet to be found or "discovered". Not implying here that the artist has anything to do with the "messiah" but I am saying I totally understand the view that the great painting paints itself and the great story writes itself -- as if the creator did not actually do it.
To go on: Walter Benjamin, whom I've read deeply has a quote from one of his more often read pieces that I love. I'll offer it here: “To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through that representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.” —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, “The Storyteller”
Enticing thesis about progress. Czechs tend to think in this way: historical ups and downs with no hope of a golden age. As a man I think similarly: every age would have had its benefits and tradeoffs. It’s harder to think this way about my daughters, by which I mean that their lives in America would have been vastly different before 1920, and that I'm not sure they or I can regard that earlier period as no better or worse than the period where they could vote, own property, and so on. I’m also uncertain about whether the Anthropocene is just another collapse, as per Jared Diamond, or whether some of these historical and cultural changes are more irrevocable? But I hear you on the impoverished aesthetics of this strain of progressivism. Dystopian climate activists are as humorless as Prohibitionists.