I suppose it’s fair to say that during the pandemic I got radicalized. But the shape this took was very different from how I would ever have pictured radicalization before. It wasn’t so much that some new set of beliefs started suddenly making sense to me. It was more that nothing made sense - I was listening to news and watching movies and streaming and doing all the things that everybody else was doing but somehow had no connection to any of it, felt that none of it was for me.
This wasn’t really about party politics. I happened to be in a liberal environment, so it was liberal mores, a certain conformity in liberal thinking, that I happened to find most frustrating, but it wasn’t as if I was compelled to join the other side. What I was going through was more disorienting than that.
The way I came to think about it was that all normal social interaction had broken down, which didn’t mean, though, that I wasn’t dealing with society: I was, but like everybody else, I was dealing with it in a completely abstracted way, as the culture, a set of opinions, tastes, decrees that materialized in some sort of digitized space, had a pronounced sense of centrality to it but no very clear human correlate.
The Covid restrictions were the most obvious source of estrangement. The culture had pivoted to a single axis point - there was the overriding problem of the pandemic, which meant lockdowns, which meant waiting-around-for-vaccinations and accepting-no-alternative-to-the-vaccine once it was available, which meant everything through the box, and the reduction of everybody to consumers. Actually, the blue collar workforce was quietly mobilized immediately after the ostensible lockdown - deliverymen, etc, and then not long after that people working in their retail jobs. But for those who were considered to be doing well, the white-collar workers, who were incidentally the most strident virtue-signalers, the culture became the screen and any in-person interaction tended to be subsumed by questions about liability risks.
I wasn’t necessarily opposed to the lockdowns - for the first year or so, I was a perfectly good scout and believed that extreme measures were justified by the extremity of the circumstance - but, through that, something vivid about the culture was distilled for me and I became convinced in some deep, molecular way that I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
If there was anything that really epitomized the shift in my thinking it was reading Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State. In spite of appearances, Belloc’s book wasn’t really about politics or economics - although its underlying premise had been picked up by Friedrich Hayek for The Road to Serfdom. It was in a style that nobody really writes anymore - philosophy and reflection packaged as politics and history. Belloc’s counter-intuitive read of history was that the High Middle Ages had been the flourishing period, which had then been ruined by modernity, particularly by the sort of technocratic centralized regime developed by Queen Elizabeth and then franchised to the rest of the world from there.
To deal with Belloc, it wasn’t really necessary to read land records of early modern England or to argue medieval economics. His point was about two ways of construing culture. There was culture that centralized - in which a a regime claimed that by consolidating power to itself, greater efficiency and harmonization would follow. And there was culture that distributed, in which autonomy and differentiation were emphasized. The two impulses were in constant tension always - on a political plane and, maybe even more so, in an imaginative landscape in which the forces of centralization insisted that there was no alternative really to centralization, that culture had a tendency always to streamline.
Over the past centuries the triumph of centralization had been total - and it was possible that on the political plane there was a certain inevitability to that, the forces of centralization had, almost by definition, a superior ability to marshal power and violence. And, from my perspective, there was, as Belloc had nicely documented, a clear straight line that led from the consolidation and optimization of the crown’s power in the late 16th century to the rampant and indissoluble inequities of the Industrial Age to the state I was in at the present moment, staring at my screen all day and waiting for lawyers to sign off on my scheduled shoots.
Belloc didn’t necessarily have a proposed solution. For him, even a radical idea like the militant socialism so prevalent at the time The Servile State was written was more of the same - another means of even more extreme consolidation by the center (with attendant, inevitable corruption). The way to deal with it was a little more spiritual and closer to Emerson - just to not buy into the logic of center, to not accept its claim to inevitability, to tithe nothing more to it than was absolutely necessary.
Seen in that light, the center became something broken and in its way even a little sweet - a greedy child amassing as much as possible to itself and frenetically working up justifications. At its heart the center would always be a protection racket and would always, fundamentally, chaotically, look after itself, never its perimeter. There was nothing necessarily so horrifying about the center - some wild resistance wasn’t really necessary - but it was a mark of maturity to create one’s nexus of meaning outside of it, with like-minded people if one was so lucky to find them and by oneself if one was not.
I’m going through much the same thing probably so it seems.
but remember antecedents in my past to this set of feelings about the culture:
the most vivid recollection: walking from campus from a philosophy class a beautiful afternoon and seeing an ordinary billboard advertising something even more ordinary
certainly whatever it selling - car, soup, hairspray? - would not inspire the level of sexual enthusiasm in a young vital woman such was what was ostensibly captured in leering flagrancy by the photo accompanying the ad -
Who knows why My brain lashed out immediately with rectitude disgust saying, “well this is the very definition of perversity. woman feigning passion she cannot authentically feel. A vision however OBVIOUSLY wrong nonetheless is designed to infiltrate the imagination and drive the desire to buy. Perversity: to cause, to incite
, to invite the endless enemy: desire! And then my inflamed mind looking up to glee I guess fake winsome poster sized eyes, dripping the lust over a detergent, pantyhose, lightbulb? heavy with the fatal knowledge “this is not right and cannot continue“.
But of course it all DID continue, apace. Like most bad ideas, consumerism doubling as a secular religion went essentially bananas at about this point. This refusnick recollection of mine is 35 years old. I was then a woman reading newspapers, magazines, books, watching movies, having conversations, mostly with people. This activity generally done under the rubric of “Keeping up with What’s Going On”
Under this jurisdiction you find yourself taking on all sorts of unbidden fantasies.
I couldn’t imagine the way it would all come down to Ferguson first, then Nov 8, 2016, (I’d been having such a nice time until Florida was called. (Lindsay had made a fabulous Bouche de Noel that I could barely look at and suddenly had to leave). Then next it was the babies in cages being alright with some, that whole Congressional testimony about whether providing water sanitary conditions for migrating children was in fact legally required under US law sticks out, but really all these set pieces were only to be the opening ceremonies of the Cruelty Olympics which turns out would fetch a much vaster and well heeled audience then the real thing and just as suddenly making all the worst people I’d ever heard of infinitely historically wealthy.
Yes, all this does something to a person and it’s all very hard to sort out. It has something to do with politics but not mostly. It has something to do with art, or the auto reveal of art in a harrowingly decadent age, and wondering how is it we’ve become so much less powerful. It’s quite shocking .
As usual I’ve written much too long on your comments. I have such a strong resonance with all this.
As always thought-provoking, thanks for putting this down. Would be interested in your thoughts about how the U.S. Federalist system of states with considerable powers -- at least compared to any local jurisdictions in England or France or other W. European nations -- allow both our politics and culture to be less heterogenous. While a state like Maryland where I live did lock down, I have a sense that life went on with a lot less Covid disruption in many states, or the lock-downs were only in bubbles like Austin in Texas.
One could argue that the U.S. has (had) only a few points of agreement -- like reverence for the Revolution -- and beyond that local differences are celebrated. Perhaps the liberal bubbles -- which admittedly are a good percent of the country -- are becoming increasingly interchangeable.