What Poetry is For

It is so lonely to feel deeply about the world and be met with the complete failure of language to communicate it. Poetry gets us marginally (but importantly!) closer than rhetorical language, like how standing on a roof gets one a few feet closer to grabbing a star than standing in the dirt. It makes the loneliness of being here a little easier to bear. 

– Kaveh Akbar, “Galloping Towards Delight: A Conversation with Kaveh Akbar and Ilya Kaminsky”, published in Magma Issue 83, Solitude, Summer 2022

Who's Excited about the Future?

Michelle Goldberg has an essay in the Times arguing that one reason our mood is so sour is that nobody is excited for the future:

The dearth of optimistic visions of the future, at least in the United States, is central to the psychic atmosphere of this bleak era. Pessimism is everywhere: in opinion polls, in rising suicide rates and falling birthrates, and in the downwardly mobile trajectory of millennials. It’s political and it’s cultural: at some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed. When the Sex Pistols sang, “There is no future” in the 1970s there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, The Decadent Society, my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.

There is certainly nothing new about imagining grim futures; I grew up with nuclear winter and the population bomb. I am not that scared of climate change, which I think we could reverse if we had to. (Think nuclear winter.) Yet I also have a sense that in our time the future has lost its gleam. What is there to be excited about? Walking on Mars, I guess, but that seems to be getting farther away rather than closer. Some people are enthused by self-driving cars, but I mainly see that as a job killer and anyway I would rather have good public transit. Twenty years ago the internet seemed like a transformative wonderland, but now the undeniable wonder is degraded by the cancerous spread of spyware, clickbait, cyberbullying, dark pornography, and conspiracy theories, not to mention vanished bookstores and shuttered record shops.

Meanwhile, threats loom up everywhere. Many of the smartest people in the country are working on how to keep superhuman AI from killing us all. People are turning against democracy just when surveillance technology may make any dictatorships we do set up impossible to overthrow. Ethnic and religious strife gnaw constantly at all attempts to create peace, and our weapons keep getting more deadly as the institutions we set up to bring humanity together crumble. Looking around the world I get a sense that we may simply not be capable of living the free, peaceful future the Enlightenment imagined; too many of us need hate or turmoil to survive.

I am not an especially gloomy person. I think often that I may have been born in humanity's happiest time, with astonishing wealth and the receding threat of world war. But even I have trouble finding reasons to be thrilled about the future. I would be interested in suggestions for things to look forward to, if anyone has ideas.

Election Day Sunset in Catonsville

Seeing this at around 5:30 PM I thought, "Wow, that's beautiful. On the other hand it's a sunset. What is the omen here? I need to consult an oracle."

The Poles of Life

I heard another story this week of a kind that we all know: child of a middle-class family refuses to knuckle under to the demands of education, job, and marriage, ends up at 25 a wreck of drugs and desperation, possibly on the way to prison.

It made me think about these poles of existence that seem to define our age: a disciplined life of getting up and going to work every day, minding your manners, cleaning up as you go, vs. a break for freedom that ends with a slide into the abyss.

Serious American literature, the kind written by men who win prizes, is at least half about this dilemma: Philip Roth, John Updike, Richard Russo, Jonathan Franzen, all have obsessed over the demands of middle class existence and the longing to break free. I remember trying to read one Updike novel that made the suburban life of a middling office worker seem so bleak and horrible that one wondered how it could possibly endure, and why revolution did not break out tomorrow. One of Philip Roth's prizewinning books, Sabbath's Theatre, is about a man who poses as an artist and a revolutionary in order to avoid work and be taken in by sympathetic, left-wing families, the better to seduce the bored women behind their staid husbands' backs.

Most people who feel this conflict have ways of managing it. Some of the men I play basketball with used to head off every winter for away football games that turned into three-day benders. People go to the beach, read sexy romance novels, watch superhero movies, climb mountains, ride motorcycles, write blogs, have affairs, fantasize about retirement. Something, anything, to make us think we are not just rule-bound creatures of the hive, to make us feel wild and free.

I have a sense that responses to all of this undergird a lot of our politics: liberals are people who worry more about the oppressions of the system, conservatives those who worry more about the slide into chaos. Think about people in the 60s and 70s who admired young hippies and defended the violent excesses of radicals: surely part of the underlying motivation was dislike of our hyper-ordered, tightly constrained world and admiration for those who burst its boundaries. Or people who defend the police no matter what and think school children should say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" to their teachers: this is necessary, they think, because the alternative is drug-addled, slum-shack purgatory and an early grave. And the tolerance of those same conservatives for the "gentleman's clubs" outside every southern city: here is one of the safety valves that helps people keep their lives under control the rest of the time.

One thing that seems to unite millions of Americans is a desire to escape from the regimentation of the system: to make your own rules instead of following somebody else's; to follow your own agenda, or your own dreams; to do what is good or fun rather than what is required. We idolize rock stars, gangsters, off-the-grid survivalists, anyone who is able to break free of the bounds that hold us to the suburban earth. Even those of us who like what we do for a living fantasize about saying to hell with the rules and the bureaucracy and the paperwork and just doing it.

Yet here we are, getting ready to go back work again tomorrow, because for most of us the alternative is ruination.

You may think I'm being overly dramatic, and ok, maybe so, but this is exactly the tone of the person who told that story I started from: follow the rules, go to school, go to work, pay your bills, keep on the straight and narrow, or end up in drug rehab hoping the judge is in a merciful mood.

The Loneliness of the Adult Male Sperm Whale

The caption to this National  Geographic photo, by Mike Korostelev, is

In the Azores, an archipelago approximately 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, a group of sperm whales huddles beneath the surface. While adult males are solitary creatures when not breeding, females and juveniles assemble in pods of 10 to 20 members, often vocalizing and touching each other when socializing, as seen here.

And this set me wondering. What is it like for an adolescent male sperm whale to leave the pod and set off on his own? Is he lonely? Does the longing for companionship drive him to fight other males for access to the females during mating season? Or is he happy to be free? Does maturation among male sperm whales cause them to lose the need for companionship they had in their youths? I am convinced that all mammals have feelings, so I'm sure that sperm whales feel something. But I cannot imagine what a male sperm whale feels during his decades of lonely life in the deep ocean.

Feminism and the Patriarchy, or, Can Everybody Have Power?

From a rather tedious Times piece on which singers and actresses consider themselves “feminists,” I extract this little rant from magazine publisher Andi Zeisler:

“I don’t care if people don’t identify as feminist,” Ms. Zeisler said. She does have a problem with misinformation and the perpetuation of the idea that feminism is “this zero-sum game that if it elevates women, then it denigrates men. That’s just wrong and has never been what feminism is about. That’s the Fox News version of feminism.”

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, so let me take this excuse to do so. I was raised on rhetoric like Zeisler's; I must have read or heard ten thousand times that feminism was not about diminishing men, but on the contrary would also liberate men. Honestly I never gave the question much thought, because my politics are so thoroughly egalitarian that it just didn't matter to me. As far as I am concerned, women deserve equality with men, and that's that. It has only been over the past decade or so, as I contemplate the collapse of family life among America's poor, the steadily shrinking percentage of men who work, and the vast dissatisfaction of so many Americans with existing social arrangements, that I have begun to question whether what Zeisler says is true or even logically possible. How can everyone gain power at once? If some people get more power, doesn't that mean -- nay, doesn't that logically require -- that somebody else gets less? If there is a democratic revolution and the aristocrats or the generals are overthrown, isn't the power gained by the people necessarily taken from the aristocrats or generals, so that they end up with less? Isn't power in fact a zero-sum game, so that giving more to women necessarily means taking it from men?

Consider this model: there is only so much power in a family. Decisions have to be made: where to live, whether to have children, whether to buy a new car. In some theoretical patriarchal model of the family, the husband makes all of these decisions. In an equally theoretical egalitarian model, all these decisions have to be negotiated between the spouses until some kind of consensus is reached. Doesn't that give the man less power? Isn't that what power means?

Could it be the reason that America (and Russia, and maybe lots of other places) is so full of angry men is that patriarchy was a good deal for men? And that the social changes of the past 50 years have stripped men, and especially white men, of power and privilege that were very valuable to them?

I do understand what 1970s feminists meant when they spoke of liberating men. The model they had in mind was that under the patriarchy men had to assume a certain well-defined social role and act in certain limited ways. Men were supposed to be tough and strong and responsible and get up and go to work every day no matter what. They had to wear the right clothes, whether that meant suits or cowboy boots; they had to talk in the right manly way; they had to follow sports and talk sports talk; they couldn't ever show weakness or admit to preferring art to football. The code was enforced by vicious taunting of pansies and fairies and eggheads and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Feminism was supposed to liberate men by breaking down this stereotype and freeing men to act however they wanted. Some might prefer to keep acting like tough guys, but others could explore their "feminine sides."

But as my readers know, I have grown skeptical of the notion that more freedom necessarily makes people happier. I think a lot of people miss those well-defined social roles. More, I think that a lot of families sort of half recreate them, leading to a confused mishmash of traditional gender roles with egalitarianism and idiosyncrasy. Which works perfectly well for a lot of people, but is not necessarily all that liberating for anyone. The distance between the reality of overworked two-career couples, busy all the time but never satisfied with the state of their homes and still feeling pinched for money, and the shining dream of a free, egalitarian world seems very great.

My politics have not changed; I still believe that equality of race and sex are values of supreme importance. Whatever solutions we come up with can't involve a return to patriarchy and race privilege. But I more and more think that we are watching in our time the painful dissolution of an ancient social order. The breakdown of obvious gender distinctions -- men fight and work in fields or factories, women have babies and tend to homes and gardens -- has left everyone more free but also more confused. We have great trouble answering fundamental questions -- What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? -- that scarcely troubled most people in history. We are paying a price for this in unhappiness and loss of direction. In America the biggest losers in this shift have been working class men, and especially white working class men. In the old order they had strict limits on their behavior but if they followed the rules and went to work every day they got real rewards in power and status, and they knew who they were. Today the only privilege that still counts is the privilege of money; the rich are doing just great. But all of the non-rich are descending into a sort of social stew in which nobody has any advantage or any clear role and we all swim about as best we can.

Some people are doing about as well with this arrangement as anyone ever has; in fact the overall level of satisfaction in our society is ok, and we have certainly made great strides in equality and fairness of several kinds. But some people, especially men, are floundering. I see the conservative politics of our time as largely an angry reaction to these changes from men who don't really know what has gone wrong but feel deeply that they are not the men their grandfathers were.

God Cannot Stand Continuance

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom, or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. Only you may yourself, by that time, have become one with God, and have taken to liking it.

– Isak Dinesen, “The Monkey.”  Via Andrew Sullivan.

Conspiracy Theories are Useless

The proper epistemic reaction to many conspiracy theories is (at best) a studied agnosticism. Typically we are not in any position to seriously credit or discredit these conspiratorial possibilities…[But] a more solid ground for the rejection of conspiracy theories is simply pragmatic. There is nothing you can do…The futile pursuit of malevolent conspiracy theory sours or at least distracts us from what is good and valuable in life. Squinting at the increasingly imperial edifice of global civilization and wondering what’s really behind all this? gets us nowhere.

--Lee Basham

Rainy Day

It rained Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and all day Sunday, and it has been raining off and on all day today. I have been sick with a miserable cold, so the world and I have been in much the same mood. It has been cozy, but I am ready for my cold to be gone and the sun to come back out. Alas, I don't think I will be well for a few more days yet, and the five day forecast shows a good chance of rain every day.