Dear Friends,
I’m sharing my ‘Curator’ post. This is kind of its own genre. It’s somewhere between an essay and thinking out loud. I think of it as ‘riffs’ on the most interesting or provocative pieces I’ve read recently on the ‘artistic/intellectual web.’ At the partner site
, reflects on combining writing and parenting.Best,
Sam
MOYN AND DOUTHAT ON LIBERALISM
There are a pair of articles trying, by somewhat sneaky methods, to find their way around liberalism. One is a profile of Ross Douthat in The New Yorker. Another is a piece by Samuel Moyn, Douthat’s sometime sparring partner, in The Boston Review.
The premise, in both pieces, is that liberalism is a kind of dead shark, that nobody can quite figure out what’s to follow it, but that as a movement it has lost its energy if not guiding thread. Douthat puts this most explicitly when he says, “I don’t see an alternative to liberalism available at the moment which is worth shattering society in order to obtain. But if you said, ‘Philosophically, are you a liberal?’ No, I’m not.”
The seminal event for Douthat seems to be his bout with Lyme disease, which made him, according to Isaac Chotiner, writing for The New Yorker, “in some ways a different columnist.” The result of it was that Douthat became deeply suspicious of the scientific consensus. “I think the medical establishment is wrong about Lyme disease because I had Lyme disease,” he says, and that led to what Douthat grinningly calls a series of “conspiracy-adjacent views.” For Douthat, the central point is that the liberal mainstream is simply not willing to engage with the sheer untamed wildness of the world — both what he calls “the obvious supernatural realities” and the similarly berserk collective unconscious of the body politic. As he puts it, “A lot of people in the world of The New Yorker and The New York Times decided in the Trump era that they didn’t even want to know where these ideas were coming from.”
What Moyn is up to is a bit different. If the image with Douthat is that he’s waiting for liberalism to lose its momentum entirely so that some other, more Catholic, ‘integralist’ vision can supplant it, Moyn is stepping back into the past and trying to decouple liberalism from the current understanding we have of it — and to demonstrate that liberalism really means something different from what we think it does.
He does so through an odd sort of Freudian analysis of what he takes to be Lionel Trilling’s bad faith. Trilling is seen to be the paradigm of Cold War liberalism - which Moyn refers to as “distorted” and as a “liberalism of fear that committed itself above all to avoiding cruelty.”
Moyn follows a series of formative experiences for Trilling, in which Trilling renounced his Fellow Traveler pose of the 1930s, became suffused with Freud, came to believe that our true natures were constantly at odds with more idealistic desires, and that idealism could lead only to dystopia. Summarizing Trilling’s exoteric views, Moyn writes, “What would it take, Trilling asked, to invent a reformed liberalism that would stop being surprised by evil — a liberalism aware that people are imperfect and that utopianism makes things worse, not least by co-opting good intentions and high ideals for bad ends and violent evils?”
That, Moyn argues, was the move that created the dead shark. It was akin to Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty” or to Marty Nolan in Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise saying “They make absolute claims, we make relative ones, that’s why our side is better in the end,” or to George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy claiming that “the lack of moderation” of his clever, fanatical Soviet adversary “will be his downfall.” Cold War liberalism carved out a certain protected space around itself. Because it was so avowedly anti-Communist or anti-totalitarian, it also became anti-utopian. It became intrinsically suspicious of any attempt to better the world and, like some kind of corrupt paper fortune teller, ran its calculations over and over again and landed always on unfettered capitalism, the U.S. Constitution, and the exercise of hegemonic American power.
In Moyn’s view, the ‘liberal’ intellectuals of the Cold War were just magi casting supportive spells to bolster, first, CIA mischief and then the Reagan Revolution. “By renouncing what had once made liberalism radical in a twin move of resignation and self-protection, Trilling cut himself off from the hopes he had once nurtured, even as he memorialized them,” Moyn writes.
But, but, Moyn proffers, Trilling didn’t really mean it. If you read Trilling closely, read his novel The Middle of the Journey, apply the kind of Freudian analysis to Trilling that Trilling was so keen on himself, what you find is not that he believed idealism to be wrong but that he felt he had prematurely renounced it. “The novel ends by mourning the death of idealism, which is very different than just giving it up as a mistake,” writes Moyn. Warming to his theme, he continues: “Whether liberalism deserves to survive depends entirely on whether it can recover what Trilling preserved from the controls he mistakenly placed on it. If liberalism is to be freed from its Cold War foreshortening, one advocate for doing so might be Trilling himself.”
This very Alexandrian exegesis is representative of what Moyn is currently bringing to the cultural discourse. The equation is that a) Trilling is at the heart of contemporary liberalism but b) based on a close reading, Trilling came to his liberalism more from sorrow than conviction, which means that c) a critical capstone in current conceptions of liberalism may safely be removed and a more idealistic, more full-throated liberalism may take its place. Logic like that leads Moyn to, for instance, suggesting a rewrite of the Constitution — with the premise that protective, traditionalist liberalism has run its course, that it’s time for liberalism to reinvigorate.
This strikes me as real academic thinking. What exactly would a Constitutional rewrite look like? What gives Moyn the slightest idea that the public plurality he has in mind would land anywhere close to his reinvigorated liberalism?
What Douthat, as a kind of latter-day Trilling, is contending seems more plausible. That there is widespread discontent with anything resembling liberalism, which is seen to be the in-house doctrine of coastal elites; that a working-class revolution is emerging (and emerged faster and more nastily than expected with Trump); and that, before embarking on any utopian schemes, it’s necessary first to grapple with the actual mood of the body politic. Douthat isn’t concerned about stagnation within liberalism as he is that liberalism still wields untoward power, still becomes enamored of its utopian schemes which seem to redound always to the benefits of elites. “A secular state that manages sex, death, and reproduction is Douthat’s dystopia, and in several of our conversations he brought up newly permissive euthanasia laws in Canada and other countries,” writes Chotiner.
It’s a bit difficult to referee the differing visions of Moyn and Douthat in part because they have such different conceptions of what liberalism is. (Chotiner tells an anecdote in which this explicitly came up: Moyn introducing a class that the two of them were teaching together by saying “this is actually a class that’s about a dispute within liberalism,” to which Douthat took great exception since he didn’t consider himself a liberal at all.) For Moyn, liberalism has lost its nerve, is defensive and reactive and in need of rejuvenation. For Douthat, liberalism is charging blindly forward and losing contact with real people: he seems to hope that it exhausts itself in such a way that a great Catholic revival is the only alternative.
What I guess I would argue is that Cold War liberalism isn’t quite the discredited entity that Moyn assumes it to be. The preponderance of intellectuals in the era of Trilling and Berlin really did believe in some fulfillment of history achieved through social engineering; the ‘negative’ liberalism that Trilling, for instance, espoused was an important corrective to that. If American hegemonic power proved to be a blind spot for somebody like Trilling, that’s historically somewhat understandable — and the same tools of skeptical liberalism can be applied to American power just as much as was once done to reigning beliefs about the March of History. Skeptical liberalism isn’t blocking us from progress as much as protecting the individual and serving a useful note of caution. Meanwhile, it’s hard for me to argue with any of Douthat’s positions — of course, intellectuals need to understand where the ideas that are so resonant in the American right are coming from; of course, the only effective political coalition would be basically centrist, would take working-class perspectives into consideration — although Douthat, as he himself would likely admit, has little idea of (barring the great Catholic revival) exactly what political future he stands for or envisions.
So, all in all, maybe I wouldn’t sign up for Douthat and Moyn’s class. Liberalism turns out to be a mystifying term. Nobody has an alternative (maybe Moyn thinks he does but it sounds dangerous to me). And, in its dead shark way, liberalism trundles forward — if not a proactive vision for societal harmony, then at least a set of terms and beliefs that help to mediate the social discourse, that offer a useful reminder of where we have come from (and what some of the worse alternatives were), and that give us at least some very broad agreement on the direction that, one way or another, we hope to head in.
LORENTZEN AND SMITH ON THE MID-CENTURY MESHUGGAHS
There are two other articles, more distant from each other, that I would like to pair — Christian Lorentzen on Don DeLillo for Bookforum and Justin E. H. Smith on his misunderstood, godforsaken generation (that’s Generation X) for Harper’s.
The point is that something world-historical, unprecedented, earth-shattering, etc, really did occur in the mid to later part of the 20th century and above all in the American cultural sphere. This was, as Smith, movingly writes, “the hope of being able to play the piano with our feet — the long-held hope of human liberation.”
The premise is that the shock of what happened in that era was so intense that society, as a whole, has simply decided to move away from it, forget all about it, decide that it never was. Smith, whose midlife crisis has been playing out interestingly across a wide variety of publications, has choice words for that consignment to oblivion. “My grievance against the boomers is that they betrayed their earliest intuitions, that they went and corporatized rock music, that they stopped believing in the revelatory power of the visions they had while on drugs, that they stopped defending the libido,” he writes.
For his part, Lorentzen sees Don DeLillo as, uniquely, the voice of that era. What DeLillo picked up on was that the world really was becoming something very different from anything that it had ever had been — and “he recognized in these transmissions, these sense impulses, the poles of an emergent reality.” What that was was technology, of course, but also a particular way in which the individual was sort of pixelated across public space. A person’s primary identity was somehow no longer being a physical body, with their class markers, their social reputation. A person was really the photographic negative of all of their various impressions, of the cultural touchstones that marked them, of their almost subcutaneous connectivity with the energy of their era. It was the professors of the American Studies department in White Noise sitting around interrogating each other about their first memories of the various public events that had affected them — and of the Boomer professor who loses all credibility when he can’t remember where he was the moment James Dean was killed. It was in the crowd scenes, the Moonie wedding in Mao II, the Shot Heard ‘Round The World in Underworld — the electricity rippling between strangers. It was, arrestingly, in DeLillo’s obsession with monsters, bomb-throwers, and nihilists. Lorentzen digs up the origin story of DeLillo-as-novelist — how taken he was with the idea that the University of Texas shooter had, together with his hunting rifle and ammo, packed a stick of deodorant in preparation for his long siege.
The point there is that a person isn’t just acting in the ways that we would expect them to act; that a person is constantly aware of their perception, of how their smallest gesture might conceivably play out across a million television sets — and, so, the sniper in the midst of a grisly, heinous act of incomprehensible and yet performative violence is careful to ensure that he doesn’t smell bad.
DeLillo, famously, was particularly concerned that terrorists and nihilists had stolen a march on novelists. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness,” he wrote. In the era of phenomena, violence and sensation had penetrated the cultural sensibility in a way that an earlier (modernist) generation of artists had only hinted at. The task for writers, then, was to adapt. And DeLillo saw himself as creating a new kind of novel — which would be canonized by the critic Tom LeClair in the 1980s as the “systems novel,” distinct from psychology or sociology, with characters “mere loci of ‘communication and energy,’” moving through the books, as Lorentzen writes, “not fully aware of the forces operating on them, unable to comprehend the whole picture, moving by instinct and hunch, and knowing any sense of control is an illusion.”
So the question becomes whether the ‘systems novel’ was really an advance; whether DeLillo was just a really good writer; or whether the kind of psychological infrastructure of the DeLillo novel was specific to a certain point in time, when mass communication was at its ascendancy, when the psychic life of the individual was particularly intertwined with, in a word, pop culture.
The sense is that, if the ‘systems novel’ clicked for Pynchon and DeLillo, it’s been more difficult for later writers to execute. My contention would be that David Foster Wallace, the clear heir apparent to that school of thought, actually didn’t really figure out how to do it — that his fiction wasn’t successful, although he was able to achieve all the longed-for system-y effects by writing in first-person in his essays and allowing his individual psychology to sort of drift through the entirety of the cultural phantasmagoria.
Lorentzen’s evident desire is to recapture that old magic — the “dream of an artwork that encompasses the whole world; of a novel that tells everybody’s story; of characters who feel and act and speak for us all; of the image that nobody doesn’t recognize.” That existed, as he writes, in high modernism, but tended to occupy a particular stream-of-consciousness — a specific person, a specific locality. The Pynchon/DeLillo novel pushed out from there, didn’t get caught up in person or place, but picked up on the electric grid connecting everyone. If that seems harder to do now — if DeLillo himself, mid-career, completely gave up on trying to do that, instead writing slim novels that focused on some distant echo of the culture-at-large — it may well be, in part, that the electric grid isn’t actually wired so tight. We don’t exactly believe in societal progress in the way that was taken for granted in the mid-20th century. Our lives are archipelagoically intertwined with one another’s in the era of social media, but that is very different from the call-and-response of center and periphery in the age of Pynchon and DeLillo, of Slothrop’s V-2-triggered-erection, of the deodorant-wearing mass murderers. We are somehow lonelier and more individualistic now — and what that may mean is that the fiction that is right for our era is slower, sadder, more psychological and less hyperactive, more Middlemarch than V.
Smith offers an interesting thesis as to what that mid-century spasm of psychic activity was really about. He writes:
we had a belief inherited from our hippie parents that our libidinous selves were nothing to be ashamed of and that we would be free to live out our days, as Czesław Miłosz put it, “under orders from the erotic imagination”; with a more or less confident acceptance of the durability of liberal democracy; a belief in the eternal autonomy of art as a source of meaning independent of its quantifiable impact, its virality, or its purchase price; a belief in the ideal of self-cultivation as a balance between authenticity and irony; a belief that rock and roll would never die.
The idea is that we actually were very close to a social utopia. “For a brief moment in the mid-to-late twentieth century there seemed to be deliver[ance] on the hope held ever since all kinds of utopians founded their communes and got naked and dreamed,” Smith writes. The real trick was about accepting “the orders of the erotic imagination,” about “defending the libido,” believing that sexuality — above all, as expressed through creativity, through rock ’n’ roll, through liberatory forms of expression — was truth.
Eventually, the reaction came. The Boomers, it turned out, were just playing around and they gave it all up to have jobs that really were pretty much exactly what their parents would have wanted of them. The counter-revolution, by the 1980s, seized hold of the narrative — arguing that that whole episode had been drugged, oversexed hippie kids with no idea of how money or “the world” really worked. The Boomers have chosen to forget; younger generations think of 1968 as just some cute aberration; and it is poor, overlooked Gen X alone that bears the psychic scars for having glimpsed heaven and then having that promise betrayed.
As the poet laureate of Gen X, that’s what Jonathan Franzen was getting at in his depictions of Gen Xers prematurely washed up on the far shore of adulthood — of Chip in The Corrections, for instance, having “only tragic perspectives since he was about two years old.” And the literary friendship/quarrel between Wallace and Franzen turns out to be instructive. Wallace continuing the magic of the hyperactive spirit of the ‘60s and suffering the inevitable vertigo and overstimulation. Franzen attempting to argue that Gen X had its own peculiar fate — coming of age in a period when the tide was going out, doomed to quietism and tragic perspectives, torchbearers for the distant memory that life could be more thrilling, more rapturous.
That’s what Smith is, with real intensity, contending. Writing with impressive vulnerability, Smith reveals himself to be in a bad way. He is experiencing his life “as a ghost,” trying to convince his psychiatrist that he is experiencing “derealization,” a basic problem with “comprehending that the world still exists.” Lowering from the language of existentialism to that of the medical-industrial complex, he posits that this may be “a full-fledged psychotic break,” although his unromantic psychiatrist prefers “midlife crisis.” Like any good Gen Xer (Chip Lambert is probably saying the same kind of thing to his psychiatrist), Smith believes that his problems are not his alone but representative of the socio-psychological forces of his era. Smith writes:
As for eros, it is certain that my testosterone levels have plummeted over the past decade, and that this would have been unavoidable no matter the state of the world. Yet here again we find an almost too-elegant alignment between self and world, between endocrinology and politics….it is significant that I and others of my generation have had to bear the peculiar double load of arriving at this treacherous period of the life cycle at precisely the same moment that people of all ages recognize to be a time of great cultural and political upheaval.
Washed onto the purgatory of middle age, testing his psychiatrist’s patience, Smith denounces, essentially, everything that has happened in the society since the golden period of the ’60s. It’s point Zuckerberg; nil for everyone else.
The way Smith charts it is that 1976 was “Year Zero, the moment when the world as I knew it came into being….the start of our transition from the aesthetics of the floppy and shaggy to the jagged and angular.” Interestingly, Smith is far from the only intellectual to come up with this historical scheme. Michel Houellebecq also assigns eschatological significance to the same doldrums of the 1970s. He writes: “ A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society between 1974 and 1975. In the summer of 1976 it was apparent that it would all end badly.”
Houellebecq, a far more difficult person than Justin E. H. Smith, believes that what happened was that, in the ‘60s, libido finally got its chance to express itself and, freed from all the usual repressions and mysteries, “sexuality could be seen for what it really was — a useless, dangerous, and regressive function.” He continues: “when you think about it sexuality has to be an absolutely evil force.” In that cosmology, the rise of technology, Zuckerberg Invictus, is the inevitable result of that unpleasant discovery. It was found to be better for people to keep a polite distance from each other, for our lives to be mediated more and more by screens and by biotech, for the hippie vision to be discreetly dropped.
But Smith is in the throes of idealism, or at least nostalgia, and I can only be sympathetic to what he is saying. Something beautiful was discovered in the ‘60s. It was abandoned before it had time to really ripen. In its somewhat inchoate expressions of sexuality — Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love; Chip Lambert in Vilnius, David Lurie in his administrative hearings in Cape Town — Gen X was standing up for the exigencies of erotic imagination. Younger generations — Gen Z especially — have decided that they want nothing to do with it, that they certainly, as Smith writes, “do not wish to hear about the plight of libidinous aging males,” and that they are satisfied with a new prudishness. As Smith writes, “a rather intense generational standoff” is the result. And, as a millennial — another generation that is being rapidly supplanted — I can’t not lean towards Generation X. This era of weak bonding, detachment, emotional dishonesty, is no good for anyone. The electric grid that DeLillo and Pynchon felt may not be there — the sense of a tightly-intertwined, hyper-accelerating society — but it is possible to be a bit more connected and centripetal than we are. An aesthetic that’s more floppy and shaggy would be good. A greater belief in emotion and exploration would be welcome. What would be nice somewhere, somewhere, in the society is ‘the dream of a common language,’ the belief that our sexuality, our existential core, our imaginative universe, unite rather than divide.
I think that Native American art has largely fallen away from our ancestors’ imaginations. The intensity of subsistence living mixed with passionate earth-based spirituality has been replaced by replication of a thin white leftism. A sort of self-colonization.
Perhaps a good-willed effort to find consensus on what constitutes ‘reality’ would be axiomatic for a cultural revival, Sam.