Wright's Writing

Valedictory.— Our civilization is approaching the end. We’re peering over the precipice, and chaos boils below. The time has come to sum it all up, to take account of where we are and what we’ve done, and to pass judgment. We, the generations now living, have been lucky or unlucky enough to be present as history nears its climax; we have an abundance of human experience to survey and draw conclusions from, conclusions to pass on to posterity as it surveys the even more breathtaking ruins we’ll leave behind. We want to go out with some dignity, with positive lessons to impart to our descendants so that they know not all of us were idiots. We’ve lived long enough to learn life’s truths; we’ve suffered enough to be wise. Let’s cast our glance from the future to the past and grasp the threads of human thought while there is still some link between what was and what is, some memory of what is rapidly fading. Perhaps some future explorer will discover our buried treasure, our Dead Sea Scrolls, and read about lost worlds, and be carried away by tales of folly and adventure. In the meantime, a few glimmers of honesty and perspective may light up our world and reveal it to itself…

 

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Advice for writers.— In general, it’s a good idea for writers to imagine how their work would be seen by posterity. Would their descendants view it as parochial, time-bound, and faddish, or would they still find intrinsic and timeless merit in it? Would it hold up in a different cultural context? If not, the writer should rethink his work so as to give it more universal relevance, thereby heightening its artistic and intellectual value. It’s true that one cannot, even in imagination, entirely rise above one’s culture and view its artifacts from the outside; nevertheless, insofar as we’re humans and not mere cultural byproducts, the exercise is partly within the bounds of possibility. Indeed, people are constantly judging their societies and particular social practices from a human, semi-“objective” standpoint; such are moral judgments, properly so-called, grounded in the timeless and universal morality of the Golden Rule, i.e., respect and compassion for others. Aesthetic and intellectual judgments, too, are not mere epiphenomena of a particular culture but are natural, though socially influenced, expressions of innate structures in the human cognitive and affective faculties. The writer’s, in fact the artist’s and philosopher’s and scientist’s, task ought to be to transcend the limitations of time and place and appeal to the highest standards of the innately human. Ideally his work would be “immortal.”

 

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Enlightenment.— Said Samuel Johnson, on art: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just [i.e., true] representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied. The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” This statement is a sufficient indictment of most postmodernist art, and most things culturally postmodern. It’s time we turned away from relativism, solipsism, social atomism, fragmentary perspectives, ironical self-consciousness, instant gratifications, pop art, pop philosophies, and commodified creativity. Honesty and truth are overdue.

 

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On the use and abuse of “perspective” for life.— There are delights and dangers in adopting a broad perspective on oneself and one’s society. Looking at the “big picture” can either electrify or paralyze one’s will. The latter possibility is obvious, given, for example, the big-picturesque horrors of global warming and capitalist global pollution. Oceanic garbage patches the size of continents, slums the size of cities, cities disintegrating into slums, and a planetary future incinerated in the vortex of capitalism are not things that quicken the will to live. Internecine violence running riot from Mexico to the Middle East, from central Africa to Russia, as governments outdo each other in the art of cultivating murderous resentments, does not inspire confidence in one’s ability to make meaningful change. Despair on a cosmic scale, encompassing life from low species already extinguished to high species threatened with extinction, suffocates “optimism of the will,” “pessimism of the intellect” alone remaining.

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The added burden of such modern afflictions has done nothing to ease the ancient burdens philosophers and poets have bewailed since the Upanishads. Earth is a pale blue dot in the infinite expanse of desolate space. What matter our little earthly tribulations or triumphs? Someday we’ll all be gone, Earth itself will be gone, and it will be as though nothing ever was. No art, no music, none of the sound and fury of a Faustian but forgotten history. “All is vanity!” The flower of youth wilts, as poets have lamented for millennia, withering into a decayed old age and finally death. Pleasures are evanescent; time consumes all, like Saturn devouring his children. The transience of everything makes life seem meaningless—as does, in another way, the immensity of Earth (however microscopic it is on the cosmic scale), the prodigious mass of humanity compared to which the individual is too puny to mention. People come and go like flies. –The plaintive cry of Ecclesiastes still resonates two thousand years later.

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On the other hand, the “big picture” need not be utterly demoralizing. To contemplate the grandeur of the universe can be a nearly religious experience, Kantian in its sublimity. “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe,” Kant said, “the more often and the more intensely we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” One feels vanishingly insignificant but gloriously exalted at the same time, uplifted to dazzling infinity as one glories in the ability to reflect on this black unbounded cosmos. The relative immensity of Earth, likewise, and one’s being a mere momentary individual among billions, fills with wonder and awe, even love for all fellow creatures stranded inexplicably on this floating island in space. Time itself overawes. Translucent as a pellucid mountain river, the life-engendering flow of time carries us along to experience the beauty of change. The broad human perspective illuminates hope and the reality of change.

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To glance over the modern world is to know the temptation of despair, but it is to know possibility as well. Fatalism is a factually incorrect philosophy. Horrors happen daily, but from a broad perspective one sees also constant kindnesses and life-saving interventions. A billion moments of moral beauty every day; ten billion meaningful connections between this life and that life. Even lost in anguish, even surrounded by modern ugliness, one can see beams of hope piercing the gloom. To know the true urgency of humanity’s situation, however, should entail not wretched immobility but galvanized movement, passionate activism. When people join together they can make meaningful change.

 

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The Goethean possibilities of history.— A major advantage of living at this time, so late in history, is that the past is a kaleidoscope of cultural achievements, or rather a cornucopian buffet whose fruits one can sample—a kiwi here, a mango there—a few papayas—and then choose which are one’s favorite delicacies—which are healthiest, which savory and sweet—and invent one’s own diet tailored to one’s needs. History can be appropriated by each person as he chooses, selectively used in the service of his self-creation. The individual can be more complete than ever in the past! Only, to bring the magnificent array of possibilities down to earth and so give all people the means to sample history’s treats requires a revaluation of society’s values and transformation of its structures. It’s time we spread the banquet not in the gilded halls of the elite but in the humble homes of the people.

 

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Götterdämmerung.— Albert Camus: “We [moderns] read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely commentaries. This is what Étienne Gilson says, considering that the age of philosophers concerned with philosophy was followed by the age of professors of philosophy concerned with philosophers. Such an attitude shows both modesty and impotence. And a thinker who began his book with these words: ‘Let us take things from the beginning,’ would evoke smiles. It has come to the point where a book of philosophy appearing today without basing itself on any authority, quotation or commentary would not be taken seriously.” The reality that he describes is nothing else than institution-think. Expertly calibrated, self-replicating capitalist-friendly institutions dominate culture, and such institutions cannot get to the heart of the matter or exalt the sort of world-engendering creativity that highly ennobles. What they can do is manufacture minute monographs, reduce to the common denominator, and make ever less relevant to human concerns. I recall what I wrote once in college:

 

Looked at the Tufts University philosophy department website; I might apply there. Part of its mission statement is “to provide students with the skills necessary for Ph.D. research, as well as to foster the independence of mind required for genuinely creative philosophical work.” It depressed me to read that, as if a draft of nihilism had wafted by: life felt picayune suddenly, mechanical, scholarly—training people to think!—and denying philosophy even as they preach it! Well-oiled parts of the machine, functioning smoothly, cooperating with contemporary ways of doing things. What philosopher has ever cooperated? Philosophy is rebellion, war with authority in every form; it is a way of life, not ‘tidy thinking’ or scholarship or a specialty. Spartacus was a philosopher; Daniel Dennett is not.

 

The verbose perverseness that passes for philosophy now signifies a perversion of the human spirit, a discursifying of it, a domesticating institutionalizing of it, perversely appropriate to a society that has “repressively desublimated” all that is profound and creative in life. The late-capitalist categorical imperative of culture is to trivialize at all costs and for all profits, to privatize, atomize, marketize, professionalize, impersonalize, and stupidize, all in order to replicate and accumulate, to replicate and accumulate institutions and a New Man, homo bureaucraticus. Or, ultimately, homo economicus. Certainly philosophy, of all things, cannot flourish in such an environment, nor can anything else that demands to be free and unconstrained by institutional limits. The existentialist cry of the mid-twentieth century—followed by the barbaric yawp of the Sixties’ youth movements, preceded by the anti-capitalist vibrancy of labor movements in their heyday and earlier Romantic culture for the modernity-ambivalent elite and saturnalian revelry for the untamed multitude—has died, or faded from cultural prominence, but its echo cannot die until humankind itself does. The cycle continues, and we’re about to see another of its revolutions…

 

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Modernity vs. humanity.— Herbert Gutman’s “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919” (1973) reminds us of what a rich world we lost with the standardization and atomization of society. Such diversity and humanness, artisanal craftsmanship and pride, free-wheeling festivals of life outside the factory. Actually, already in the mid-nineteenth century the dehumanization was apparent, according to Mike Walsh in the 1840s: “A ‘gloomy, churlish, money-worshipping spirit’ had ‘swept nearly all the poetry out of the poor man’s sphere,’ said the editor-politician. ‘Ballad-singing, street dancing, tumbling, public games, all are either prohibited or discountenanced, so that Fourth of July and election sports alone remain.’” Local and national power-structures pressing the masses into dull rectangular shapes. The nascent nation-state suppressing local variety, spontaneity being dangerous to centralized power.

 

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Homo ludens vs. homo institutorum.— The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said it simply—one of those simple but profound truths worth remembering: “It is creative apperception more than anything that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” Creativity is not uniquely human, but humans are uniquely creative. We have a need to create, and to love, and to inquire—to express ourselves and see ourselves reflected in the world. We have the urge to play, an urge innate in our biological nature. “Creative impulses are the stuff of playing. And on the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s experiential existence.” The child plays with his toys and his playmates, exploring his new world in the realm of fantasy, like the poet and the artist. The musician plays music, as the athlete plays a sport. In theater, one watches a play. The scientist and the philosopher play with ideas, perhaps in great seriousness but with those elements of fun, creativity, “tension,” and voluntary submission to implicit rules that Johan Huizinga invokes in Homo Ludens (1938) to define play. Social life is essentially playful, very clearly so as regards flirting and dating, in which the tension of play takes the form of sexual tension. And when things get more intimate the partners engage in sexual foreplay—and intercourse itself can be delightfully playful. The ubiquity of games in human societies, from simple hide-and-seek to chess and complex card games, in addition to the thrill of friendly competition in indefinitely many forms (athletic, intellectual, artistic, etc.), shows how the agonistic spirit suffuses the human mind. The spirit of play, in short, is the spirit of freedom, “superfluity,” joyful self-expression, and immersive engagement with the world.

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At the other end of the spectrum are modern institutions. Humans, it turns out, are capable not only of play but also of dull and dead seriousness. We have the capacity to obey authority, and to imbibe its individuality-denying, repressively collectivistic norms. We join institutions or are subject to them, to the impersonal rules that dictate how we are to act and think, and without even noticing it we participate in the near-extirpation of our individuality (at least in the institutional context). The self-effacing, amoral, mechanical mentality of the typical bureaucrat is the obvious example, which, as Hannah Arendt observed in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), can lead straight into complicity in monstrous crimes. But more benign manifestations exist. Theodor Adorno already remarked in the 1940s that “even the so-called intellectual professions are being deprived, through their growing resemblance to business, of all joy. Atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life.”[1] In leisure time one might still “play” and be creative, though mass-produced culture was sapping even leisurely pursuits of their authentically creative and spontaneous element; but in the context of the “job,” the rote conformism of seriousness had crowded out freedom and self-expression. Ultimately corporate capitalism itself, with its hideous architecture of concrete hierarchies to control society and amass profit, was and is responsible for such pernicious tendencies—for the bureaucratic collectivism that requires but a nudge to become fascist totalitarianism, and for the detaching of hapless functionaries from the consequences of their actions so that professionals and bureaucrats and intellectuals can all become little Eichmanns engineering distant horrors, and for the kitschifying of culture that brings totalitarianism into the sphere of play, and for the routinizing and vulgarizing of creativity that empties life of its meaning. The two principles are at opposite poles: creative play, and capitalist-institutional atomization.

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It is the tragedy of modern man that “two souls, alas, dwell within my breast.” We seek self-affirming self-expression—authentic engagement with others—even as we let ourselves be regimented by authority. The path to reclaim play, i.e., our very humanity, is the path to reclaim democracy, human dignity, and social justice: tear down the walls that divide us from ourselves and others. Bring back the “ballad-singing, street dancing, tumbling, [and] public games,” and scandalize the bosses with your flouting of their rules. Resurrect the public.

 

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On the Holocaust.— Even seventy years later, having learned nothing, Western intellectuals still love to proclaim with the ponderous air of authority that the Holocaust was “thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization,” as Richard Rubenstein paraphrases in his book The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (1975). It was contrary to all our glorious Western values of freedom, truth, beauty, rationality, and other pretty words that intellectuals pretend to admire. Let’s leave aside the fact that “the West” has never had a monopoly on such values: they’re not Western values but human values, which people from prehistory onwards have implicitly subscribed to and acted on. More pertinent is the fact that for centuries the West has been more committed to quite different values, such as insatiable greed, plunder and enslavement of foreign peoples, genocide of native populations, vicious exploitation of wage-laborers, murderous hatred of the “Other,” ever-increasing policing of society (in both “soft” and “hard” forms), and atomizing bureaucratic collectivism that dehumanizes everything it touches. None of this has been because Westerners are uniquely evil or have a different human nature from other peoples; it has been because a new kind of society arose, structured around the institutional imperative to accumulate capital at whatever cost to the natural and human worlds. At the same time as horrific tendencies of racism and nationalism gradually developed under the influence of an 'inter-nationally' organized imperialistic capitalism, trends of depersonalization, regimentation, authoritarian control and monitoring of populations, and manufacturing authority-friendly popular attitudes through propaganda grew more pronounced. The relatively “personalistic” slavery of the antebellum American South gave way to the impersonal industrial slavery of the South in the 1890s and later. The violent and tumultuous conquest of society by profit-driven market relations, not humanizing but atomizing and instrumentalizing, spread reifying habits of thought that reduced humans to numbers, calculations, agglomerations, categories, ideologies, foreign objects to be used and discarded. Ever-larger concentrations of capital and industry made possible and necessary ever-larger bureaucracies, with their diabolical Weberian “formal rationality” and “efficiency”—exquisite subordination of every human impulse to the order from on high, the administrative rule, the technique for the smooth functioning of power. Corporate capital and national governments matured together, intertwining in their policy formation and administrative machinery, the interests of one often becoming the interests of the other, each requiring for the sake of its power that social dissent be regulated or eradicated and domestic capital continue accumulating. In an over-competitive capitalist world, the obsession of big business with big profits led to nationalistic protectionism, tariff wars, conquest of colonial markets, the “scramble for Africa,” an international arms race that exalted “blood and iron” as supreme values, and ideologies of national and racial grandeur to justify all this imperialism. A brutalization of the human spirit proceeded apace, particularly as savage colonial wars and amoral colonial administration trained bureaucrats in the efficient use of pure violence to attain the ends of power. World War I brought imperialist brutality home to Europe, intensifying it exponentially in the process. Afterwards, millions of shattered, defeated, resentful, homeless men roamed the continent, seething with rage against this society that had forgotten them, directing their rage at scapegoats readymade by the ruling class’s ongoing demonization of them: Socialists, Communists, Jews, foreign peoples, effete intellectuals—anything and anyone whose targeting would distract from class structures. Again capitalism plunged into crisis: the Great Depression happened, which raised fears among ruling classes that organized labor or even Communists would attain political power. To prevent this, in a political environment of gridlock and dysfunction, conservatives and big business turned in desperation to the fascist movements that had spread in the 1920s, which they thought they could control. They installed Hitler, and elsewhere in Europe fascist parties made significant headway. Under Hitler, finally, all the nefarious tendencies of Western civilization that had been building for decades and centuries were unleashed in a danse macabre that culminated in the most unfathomable enormity in history, the Holocaust. The racism, the institutional and ideological “categorizing” of people, the enslavement and genocide of the Other, the efficient doing-away-with superfluous people (the Jews were made stateless so that no government had to protect them), the impersonal cost-benefit mode of thinking, and the totalitarian aspects of bureaucracy, states, corporations, capitalism itself, were all perfected—the principle of submission to authority was deified. It should be noted that Nazism and the Holocaust were singularly compatible with corporate capitalism: big business all over the West cooperated with and funded the Nazis (at least until that became politically inexpedient in Allied countries during World War II), who performed a useful service in destroying the German labor movement; and Jewish slave labor was gratefully used by politically connected companies. Nor is there any inherent reason why business should object to genocide, which, in fact, can be profitable for firms lucky enough to get the contracts.* Clear elective affinities exist between the anti-humanism of capitalism—everything subordinated to the mania for profit, workers ideally being pushed down to a starvation diet for the sake of profits (or, even better, being eliminated entirely through mechanization and automation)—and the anti-humanism of Nazism, which subordinates everything to the mania for power. The superfluity of humanity to capitalism was made literally manifest in the superfluity of individuality, personality, and millions of physical beings to state-capitalist totalitarianism—such that the death-factories can perhaps be considered an apt symbol of modernity itself. –In short, far from being a betrayal of Western values, the Holocaust was the apotheosis of some of the most deep-seated, albeit implicit, Western values and social structures. Even if it hadn’t happened, the catastrophe it signified would have anyway, namely the elimination of human connections in mass society and in the dominant institutions of modern civilization. This plague of multifarious inhumanity has by no means been overcome since World War II; it has only assumed different forms in an age in which explicit racism and virulent nationalism have—at least until recently—gone out of style.​

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*As Rubenstein argues, “both genocide and slave labor proved to be highly profitable enterprises… The business of mass murder was both a highly complex and successful corporate venture,” as it has always been during the imperialistic age from the 1870s to the recent Iraq war. After all, “the same attitude of impersonal rationality is required to run successfully a large corporation, a death camp slave factory and an extermination center. All three are part of the same world.” The Cunning of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 60, 62. The thoroughly capitalist nature of the Nazi regime is made clear in Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986).​

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To see the Holocaust in a grain of sand.— While the industrialized murder of six million people is in a category all its own, one can observe in daily life many of the tendencies that make it possible. The thinking that sees the machinery of death as solely a thing of the past, an incomprehensible anomaly that we have decisively overcome in our more enlightened age, is deeply embedded in us but, as the “enormous condescension of posterity” always is, deeply wrong. One needn’t invoke the obvious monstrosities to show how a semi-Holocaustic spirit, a spirit of distanced disregard for all human and natural considerations (including the very survival of the species), still suffuses our society. One needn’t, for instance, point to the U.S.’s bureaucratically administered near-annihilation of Vietnam for the sake of preventing a national liberation movement from starting a “domino effect.” One needn’t mention the U.S.’s provision of arms to Indonesia between the 1970s and 1990s with which to slaughter hundreds of thousands of East Timorese, nor the Reagan administration’s torture of Central America to “shock and awe” the population into acceptance of reactionary governments and domination by U.S. business. One needn’t invoke the Clinton administration’s murder of maybe half a million Iraqi children by means of economic sanctions, nor the second Bush administration’s destruction of Iraq to get control of the country’s oil and benefit politically connected companies like Halliburton, nor, in general, any of the thousands of heinous Western political crimes documented in books by Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, left-wing historians like Gabriel Kolko and Walter LaFeber, and too many other critical voices to list. It’s not even necessary to mention the most recent abominations of drone warfare—murder by video-game—or killing of particular people (including American citizens) by executive fiat, or indefinite detention without trial, or construction of a surveillance state that dwarfs anything even dreamed of by Hitler or Stalin. All this is in direct continuity with traditions that eventuated in the Holocaust, but to discuss these obscenities is superfluous. It makes it too easy for me to make my case.

           

No, I see the machinery of death—can’t help seeing it—in the very words spoken by low-level bureaucrats, in gestures of contempt by police officers (quite apart from rampant police brutality), in someone’s command to “Get away, this is private property!,” in a corporation’s laying off a thousand workers for the sake of the bottom line, in pop culture’s erasure of individuality, in academia’s enforcement of “politically neutral” scholarly norms, and in the very anonymous structure of capitalist mass society. When an airport security guard callously rifles through someone’s luggage or behaves in an intentionally brutish way—indeed, when an airport employee simply commands you, in the I-will-not-be-contradicted tone of authority, to step back behind the line because it’s not your turn yet—the kernel of moral horror and human degeneration is evident. When an employee says, “I’m sorry, it’s the rules; I didn’t make them, I just follow them,” he has already placed one foot on the path to Nazism. All it takes now is the right circumstances and a succession of nudges for him to become a gas-chamber attendant or an SS officer. For he has forsaken rationality, independence, freedom, sympathy for others, and absolved himself of responsibility and the need to have a conscience. Because of its rarity, few things impress me more than when someone “doing his job” momentarily disregards the rules and makes an exception for you out of his sympathy. “The fee is twenty dollars,” he says, “but forget it, I’ll waive that.” A glimmer of humanity! “Maybe there’s hope for the species after all,” I then think. But I’m quickly disabused of that delusion when I reflect on the absence of rationality and compassion in social relations themselves, a fact that pressures us all to act in socially irrational and impersonally cruel ways.

           

Even the most seemingly innocent and ubiquitous actions can have the seed of anti-personal amorality—lack of identification with others, or groupthink and mindless conformism, contempt for people who are “different” or don’t follow the common norms—that bears fruit in Nazism and genocide. He who ignores a homeless person on the street has the stain of moral corruption in him, however he rationalizes his behavior. (So much the worse for humanity that we all do that, from time to time.) He who automatically recoils from a working-class black or Hispanic or white man approaching him in the subway with a friendly air, just to talk, must be profoundly alienated from his fellow human beings, a stranger to them, unconcerned with the majority of them, in fact slightly disgusted by those who show a little independence vis-à-vis conventional styles of dress and behavior. Their fates, their lives and hardships, leave him cold; he simply doesn’t care. This is usually true, indeed, even with respect to strangers who belong to one’s own social stratum: since they’re strangers, what happens to them is not a matter of concern.

           

“Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent,” George Steiner said.* Are you indifferent to the suffering of another person, whether in the neighboring house or on the other side of the world? Then, in a sense, you’re an accomplice to it. You let it happen—or you may even indirectly participate in it, say by paying taxes to a militaristic government. After World War II people reproached themselves and were reproached for their silence as the Holocaust was happening, their having done nothing to make it stop. Well, why is that question not asked now? The world is in as much agony as ever, and most people are as silent as ever. Nothing has changed. Even now, as in the 1940s, people are being systematically murdered, tortured, enslaved, made superfluous by the hundreds of millions (being herded into gargantuan slums where they merely subsist animal-like, or, in the U.S., being imprisoned en masse for having black skin and not having a vital economic role in society). The point isn’t only that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”; it is that modern, impersonal evil largely consists of people doing seemingly nothing—following rules, showing indifference, ignoring the plea for help. That way lies barbarism.

           

Of course there are other manifestations of the barbarity. It isn’t only because of individual stupidity that millions of Americans deny global warming, detest homosexuals, revile “liberals,” and nurse secret race-hatred. It isn’t only, or even mainly, an individual’s genes that make possible the phenomenon of the latently fascist “authoritarian personality.”** There are far more diabolical social forces at work. Such stupid and prejudiced attitudes, which by their nature cannot be based on dispassionate reasoning about facts or impartial openness to experiences, to new people and new ideas—such attitudes well up out of the impersonal, defensive, diffusely resentful, beset-from-all-sides mode of experience that has disfigured so many millions of minds since mass society made the individual superfluous. Without self-validation, one becomes a moral and intellectual homunculus. To some extent we moderns are all les étrangers, but evidently some feel more so than others—often from their greater material grievances—and embrace in their alienation emotional notions of belongingness versus otherness, Us versus Them. Contempt and hatred for the outsider, comforting submission to the authority of the insider. The question is, who will get to these alienated masses first, the left or the right? As it turns out, the right has far more resources than the left, since the right is precisely big business, and so the winners in the race are usually the forces that blame all woes on everything except the one thing that matters, class. And so instead of a more productive semi-submission to left-wing authority—(for, after all, there is an authoritarianism of the “left,” an undemocratic institutional and personality structure, deplorably common among leftist political parties and fringe groups)—what you get is a counterproductive submission to fascist authority. And thus a pullulating of radically illogical thinking, which, combined with mass anonymity and impersonality, gets you—the Holocaust. Or, more recently, enthusiastic marching into global environmental destruction, the goose-stepping elite leading its goose-stepping followers straight off the cliff.

           

The market mode of behavior is therefore, humanistically speaking, the twin of the authoritarian, or rather totalitarian, mode of behavior. Corporations, of course, are totalitarian entities (hierarchies that rent employees, suppress dissent, enforce a common ideology, etc.), and capitalism is just fragmented totalitarianism, profit-making machines competing against each other and trying to destroy each other. An unfortunate externality of which is the destruction of life and nature. So, in addition to plowing full steam ahead to end millions of species and hundreds of millions of human lives, companies have now accomplished the grotesquerie of profiting by means of this very apocalypse. Capitalism can make money from its own self-immolation! For example, companies are buying water rights and farmland because “drought and food shortages can mean big profit”; the greater frequency of natural disasters means insurers can raise rates; and melting ice in the Arctic exposes oil reserves for BP and Shell to exploit.*** Just as a brave new world of species-holocaust lies ahead, so new frontiers of profit thus tantalize our intrepid corporate world-conquerors. Vive capitalism and its commodification of all!

           

–The point, however, is that the potential for humanity’s self-extinction by means of Weberian formal rationality—methodical calculation, quantitative reasoning, mechanical adoption of the proper means to an end—is implicit not only in the operation of any bureaucracy but also in the simplest market transaction. For each side seeks personal profit of some sort in disregard of “externalities” and non-market values. Someone with an idealist turn of mind could even interpret the modern world, in Hegelian fashion, as a progressive, dialectical unfolding of all the human and anti-human dimensions latent in the logic of the market transaction, revealed as the all-devouring market economy has colonized the world. All the modern reduction of people and nature to commodities, and the mass movements of workers’ resistance, and the extermination of whole peoples, and the despairing cultural reactions against market-driven alienation, and the subordination of society and politics to the power of money—a left-wing Hegel would say it’s all there, in potentiality, in the mere act of selling a product to a customer for a profit. –Cosmic evil can be present in a grain of sand.

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*George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 150.

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**Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950). The spread of contemporary semi-fascist movements and parties has revived interest in this concept, and recent work largely validates Adorno and his colleagues’ conclusions. See, for example, William F. Stone, Gerda Lederer, and Richard Christie, eds., Strength and Weakness: The Authoritarian Personality Today (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993).

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***Julia Greenberg, “6 Industries That Will Profit From Global Warming,” Wired, February 27, 2014; Matthew Campbell and Chris V. Nicholson, “Investors Seek Ways to Profit From Global Warming,” Business Week, March 7, 2013.

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Collectivism.— Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount; in the latter, the principle of the mass. The one means the rule of mutual self-actualization, self-respect, sympathy for others, democracy, human diversity—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” to quote Karl Marx. It is, in short, authentic community and sociality, healthy equality, a state of society in which, to quote Hegel, individuals recognize the self in the other and the other in the self, humans as human, rational beings as rational—freedom and dignity personified, one’s desire for the other’s recognition calling forth one’s own powers and potentialities. Perhaps never fully realized on a large scale, this anarchist ideal of free and dignified (though not conflictless) community can at least be approximated—as it is, for example, in many grassroots-democratic activist groups, not to mention families, friendships, and relationships between lovers—and must so be in order for the social animal called homo sapiens to really belong to himself and be at home in the world.*

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On the other hand is the all-too-common kind of large-scale collectivism, the reducing-to-the-common-denominator kind. This is often present to some degree—along with the “good” kind of collectivism, existing in tension with it—even when a small group of people, be they friends or acquaintances or strangers, interact socially. One is pressured, almost imperceptibly, to conform to the ideas and norms that emerge from the group’s behavior, the senses of humor, the opinions that command the most assent, the reactions to particular charismatic or uncharismatic people in the group. Even on this innocuous level of everyday sociality, the group spontaneously develops something like a collective consciousness that molds and guides one’s own consciousness along the path of uniformity. All participants must recreate in the common space that has been cleared, drawing from the common touchstones, the tropes, social techniques, group interests—sports, television, movies, popular music. Defying the accepted norms, however slightly, gets one ostracized—frequently by being ignored, an effective method.

           

Collectivistic coercion takes more pernicious forms, however, in institutions and institutionally determined mass thinking and action. Here is where the real crimes against all that is good in life take place. Examples have already been given; let us only quote a few thoughts from the anarchist Alexander Berkman, who fathomed the depths of modernity’s extreme collectivism:

 

Our lives and habits, our behavior and manners, even our thoughts and feelings are pressed into a uniform mould and fashioned into sameness. The spirit of authority, law, written and unwritten, tradition and custom force us into a common groove and make a man a will-less automaton without independence or individuality… The authority of the past and present dictates not only our behavior but dominates our very minds and souls, and is continually at work to stifle every symptom of nonconformity, of independent attitude and unorthodox opinion. The whole weight of social condemnation comes down upon the head of the man or woman who dares defy conventional codes… In science and art, in literature, poetry, and in painting this spirit compels adaptation and adjustment, resulting in imitation of the established and approved, in uniformity and sameness, in stereotyped expression.

 

While tendencies of repressive collectivism exist in all social life, outside institutional contexts they are not truly repressive, per se. It is only with stultifying institutional authority, market relations, policing and soldiering, and the professionalizing of the mind that one gets…the mass holocaust of individuality. Personally, having spent much time in academia, I am most familiar with intellectuals’ collectivism, and so will focus on it here.

           

I must confess to an emotional disgust with the “stereotyped expression,” the cowardly uniformity of the intellectual world in all its crannies, from the mainstream media to the cobwebbed corners of academe. It’s hard for me to be objective about something with which I am so intimately familiar. It’s gotten to the point that the very idea of being published in a scholarly journal or by a traditional publisher makes me uncomfortable, because it associates me with the Machine. To submit to being “polished” like a pretty pebble in the tumbler of bureaucratic culture seems to me a violation. The benefit to it, of course, is that it’s the only way to be taken seriously—although if you dissent too much from favored dogmas, even having the imprimatur of a respected institution or publisher won’t be enough to earn you the good will of most intellectuals. 

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The basic point is simple and obvious: institutions select for obedience and conformity, such that if you act independently you will almost certainly be kicked out or ostracized. If you’re slavish, you will meet with greater success. The essence of any large institution is thus collectivism, submersion in the mass and subordination to impersonal rules. Contemporary conservatives who decry “socialist collectivism” (amusingly accusing Obama and other such center-right politicians of it) are unaware that the institutions and behavior they adore, namely corporations, market-determined behavior, and acknowledgement of other people only as instantiating the types “employee,” “manager,” “executive,” etc., are the most collectivistic of all. In the truest sense of individualism, it’s impossible to imagine a more anti-individualistic structure than the market or its corporate apotheosis, in which people’s individuality is (ideally) erased. Because of this erasure, though, these institutions do exemplify a perverted individualism, in the same way that bureaucracy and totalitarianism do: all that exist are atoms, windowless monads of suppressed humanity.

           

Being farther from the operations of power, academia is less pathologically fragmented and collectivistic than the market economy or the corporate world. The difference is fairly marginal, though, given that every facet of academic culture embodies fragmentation and collectivism. Scholarship is intensely specialized, people spending entire careers studying subtopics of a subtopic; the fetish of “expertise” reinforces the notion that all that matters is familiarity with a specialized and conventional scholarly literature; careerist imperatives overwhelm any interest in truth, realistic understanding, or genuine originality (at least in the humanities and social sciences). Economics, for example, is a particularly egregious case, because its main functions are to mystify and to provide ideological idealizations of capitalist behavior. Already in the 1980s, economists were complaining that

 

Economics has…become so broad and so complicated that, within the fields, one group of specialists barely speaks the same language as the Ph.D.s across the hall. And so much of what is published seems more to proselytize for an ideology than to make sense of the chaotic world… It’s no wonder that a single economic development can be interpreted as a godsend or a disaster, depending on the interpreter’s frame of reference.

 

Even in more serious disciplines than economics, though, the worship of ideology—i.e., collectivism—over intellectual integrity is so obvious that only the blindly indoctrinated could fail to see it. In history departments, for instance, the “fashionable theory of economic nondeterminism” of politics and society about which Gabriel Kolko complained in the 1960s, and which has reigned since at least the 1950s, now takes postmodern forms of obsession with gender, sexuality, and “discourse.” As a result, the incredibly important work of Kolko and likeminded New Left historians, like that of other materialist scholars such as the political scientist Thomas Ferguson, is almost never mentioned among academics. Indeed, it is unmentionable, because of its subversive implications and its implicit critique of postmodernist idealism. A radical like Kolko is not “one of us,” he is not mainstream enough, and so is to be ignored. The fact that his work explains the sources of American foreign and domestic policy is irrelevant; what matters is that other academics don’t mention him, so it would be impolitic to do so oneself.

           

We tend to forget that intellectual artifacts are not simply produced by individuals pursuing their own idiosyncratic interests; they are, in most cases, expressions of institutional priorities and configurations. They are collective products, testaments to institutional agendas, power-relations, and the kinds of work that can make it through academic, media, and publishing filters—which of course tend to filter out anything that is challenging to their own power and interests. In forgetting this institutional context and background, we forget that there are overwhelming pressures for only innocuous and conventional work to be rewarded, and for critical voices to be marginalized. The vast majority of people in an elite institution will be successfully indoctrinated with its ethos and agendas, so that the interests of the institution become their own personal interests. As a result, they react with extreme emotional hostility to anyone who doesn’t follow the rules with utmost fidelity—thereby revealing the essential meanness and smugness of collectivism. All may be pleasant and polite on the surface, as long as norms are followed, but scratch this veneer and an abyss of petty hate and contempt opens up. Whether you’re a scholar booted from academia for criticizing Israel or a graduate student who incurs the wrath of professors for not submitting to hyper-specialization, the “herd of independent minds” will brook no dissent.

           

The rule of collectivism also produces a ubiquitous stupidity. I’ll have more to say later about the subject of stupidity in America; for now, I’ll confine myself to the observation that narrow institutional points of view are almost never sensible, self-critical, or grounded in reason and realism. They are dogmatic and stupid, based on myths about the importance and value of the institution in question (and therefore the people who identify with it). So, to the extent that someone identifies with an institution—as most professionals do—he will exhibit traits of dogmatism, stupidity, and self-overestimation. For example, journalists are trained to think that their profession, in its present reality, is both “objective” or “neutral” between opposing points of view and inherently adversarial towards power, two ideas that are obviously false (and mutually inconsistent); politicians are generally convinced of the nobility of their motives and their relative innocence regarding social problems or state crimes; most academics believe the self-glorifying myth that ideas and philosophies, rather than institutional dynamics, are what move the world. And nearly all professionals are basically ignorant of the functions they really serve in the political economy, their complicity in the evils of the world, and the by-no-means-flattering reasons they have been able to rise in their professions (namely because of their obedience, lack of intellectual curiosity, and willingness not to challenge norms). They often even deny such truisms as that society has a ruling class and that the wealthy have wildly disproportionate control over politics, the media, and mainstream ideologies. In other words, naïve self-deceptions are ubiquitous among the institutional automatons who constitute the “elite.”

           

In addition to an underlying meanness, smugness, and stupidity, intellectual collectivism breeds a remarkable pretentiousness. Whether it’s a philosopher poring over a sentence by Nietzsche, a literary or film critic writing a turgid essay on some little facet of a poem or a movie, a poet laboring for hours and days to come up with the most dense and paradoxical imagery possible, or a postmodernist disguising a trivial idea in jargonistic, pleonastic prose, intellectuals excel in pretense. Academic conferences can be unbearably pretentious, full of people taking themselves seriously to a comical degree—priding themselves on their vocabulary, their articulateness, their specialized knowledge—subject to the delusion, apparently, that what they’re talking about has some sort of significance (which it rarely does).** The endless “calls for papers!” to submit to yet another conference remind one of how insular and therefore feckless the intellectual world is. But because academia takes itself very seriously, it encourages self-serious behavior in the people who submit to it. “Pretentiousness,” in fact, often just means “institutionally sanctioned behavior.” Since institutions are artificial and anti-human, the behavior appropriate to them strikes us as artificial, even ludicrous (or, sometimes, downright evil, as in the case of the corporate sector).

           

Incidentally, it isn’t only academics. Far from it. One turns on the television, flips to CNN, and sees Serious People discussing issues of high moment, such as whether Edward Snowden is a traitor or a hero, or what to think of the president’s latest rhetorical performance. “Panels” provide “expert” “commentary” on “both sides” of an issue. It is all intensely serious and important, and one is overawed by the intellectual fireworks on display.

           

The ubiquity of such pretentiousness in elite culture serves an important function: it signifies that authority is being taken seriously. That’s generally what elite pretentiousness is, just a taking-seriously of authority, a refusal to acknowledge how absurd and risible are the performative dimensions of authority. The rules about what can be said and what can’t be said, and how to say what can be said, protect the supposed legitimacy of authority, which is to say authoritarian collectivism (for that’s what authority means: a collective submission to power). If you’re forbidden from “questioning the motives” of your fellow politicians, or from asking a scholar “Who cares?” about the (usually uninteresting) thesis of some little article he has published, or, in general, from saying “Come on, let’s be real and admit what we all know but are pretending to deny!,” then institutions can function smoothly and authority can operate without a hitch. That’s the categorical imperative that explains much of what is ludicrous and awful about the world.

           

For all these reasons, I take a different perspective from most people regarding who it is I respect and who I don’t. I’m inclined to respect someone who’s lower on the totem-pole, because he still may have an independent mind (and also is typically not such an asshole as his superiors are); the successful and admired, on the other hand, I usually consider rather contemptible. Ceteris paribus, someone who’s a “top scholar” has already lost most of my respect (unless he or she proves me wrong). Few things are sadder than an institutionalized mind.

           

Certainly there are overwhelming pressures to submit; but one should at least try not to mentally submit too. A little nonconformism is a good thing.

 

*See Alexander Berkman’s thoughts on equality in ABC of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1977/1929), 25: “‘But will not life under anarchy, in economic and social equality, mean general levelling?’ you ask. No, my dear friend, quite the contrary. Because equality does not mean an equal amount but equal opportunity… Do not make the mistake of identifying equality in liberty with the forced equality of the convict camp. True anarchist equality implies freedom, not quantity… Individual needs and tastes differ, as appetites differ. It is equal opportunity to satisfy them that constitutes true equality. Far from levelling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development. For human character is diverse, and only the repression of this free diversity results in levelling, in uniformity and sameness.”

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**The one question that doesn’t exist in their otherwise amply stocked arsenal of interrogatives is the most important one: “Why does this matter?”

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Social Luddism, a necessity.— No one has ever said it better than Mario Savio in 1964, in the context of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Just as we have a duty to remember and reflect on every great horror of history, so, in a different sense, do we have a duty to remember and reflect on words like these, spoken in a moment of high disgust with the bourgeois world: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” This is the immortal message of anarchism—man’s primordial and instinctual cry for freedom. And it is the passion that has birthed a better world from time immemorial, and will continue to do so until the human species is extinguished. Authority vs. freedom and rationality: that is the underlying “dialectic” of history.

 

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I dance, therefore I am.— A piece that’s good for restoring the love of living after you’ve been corrupted by contact with authority is Beethoven’s King Stephen Overture. It’s joy in fun and fun in joy. Enjoy! :-)

 

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The secular divine.— My God: Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. I discovered that piece earlier this year [2010]. I thought it was a little strange at first, unstructured and meandering, but…you know, it’s quintessential Beethoven, the affirmation of everything in spite of everything, the redemption of the universe. I often get tears in my eyes when watching great music performed by…people, people who have devoted their lives to art and you can see it when they’re singing, the hours and years of practice and passion as they belt out their notes, their devotion to music. That beautiful soprano with the blond hair coiffed perfectly and the makeup and earrings on—the most beautiful thing about her is that she’s a woman, just a normal person who wants to look pretty like all women and has a family and sees her friends every day and has to do maintenance on her house every year—and yet here she is standing between an orchestra and a chorus, belting out Beethoven, singing—humans can sing! (how superfluous!)—singing about how “graceful, charming and sweet is the sound of life’s harmonies!” The three men and the three women singing about God’s grace being bestowed on humanity when love and strength are united, and peace and joy advancing in perfect concord, and then the chorus trumpeting that we must “accept the gifts of high art!,” and the orchestra and piano and the conductor swinging his arms wildly singing along with the chorus (you can only see his lips moving but you know he’s shouting as loud as the singers)—can you picture these men and women sitting and standing beside each other in front of a rapt audience, not fighting or arguing or talking of money or politics or responsibilities but singing about art? It’s a miracle, the great miracle of life.

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A community, timeless and universal because they’re performing music scribbled two hundred years ago by a deaf man who lived alone in his cluttered and filthy apartment—scratched-in ideas transported from one man’s head to a concert hall where worshipers pay homage to the thing most worth paying homage to, art. It’ll all be over soon (two hours), but its very transience enhances its beauty.

 

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The clean air of the Baroque.— Notwithstanding the uniquely life-affirming character of Beethoven’s music, Bach has pieces that are more invigorating than anything except, perhaps, standing atop some Himalayan peak a breath away from the heavens. (The difference is that the air of Bach, unlike that of the Himalayas, has a superabundance of oxygen.) –To momentarily escape from the polluted atmosphere of modern culture into the “luminiferous ether” of the Baroque and Classical periods, which transmits light straight into one’s money-stained soul—Bach’s translucent Partita No. 5 for keyboard, Handel’s limpid Water Music, Vivaldi’s sun-drenched Four Seasons—restores youth and life. It’s actually possible to breathe in this air of freedom from commodification!

 

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Antitheses.— For the last couple of hours I watched videos on YouTube of William Buckley, Norman Mailer, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and such characters. It was almost an unreal experience. These people and evidently their circles were/are not ordinary, in the worst possible way. I was watching degenerates, narcissists, poseurs, boors, and bores. No doubt brilliant in their own diseased way. But I couldn’t help thinking I was in the electronic presence of personified decadence. Hitchens of course was the embodiment of sleaze, his whole being icky, greasy, slimy. Those are the adjectives that come immediately to mind when I look at him. The perfect emblem of this group of people, this whole literary cocktail-party subculture, would be a picture of Hitchens’ face in the midst of an attempted smile. A grotesque, false image. Pop culture meets pretentious intellectualism meets Roman orgies.

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–The essence is simple: with those people, as with most pop culture, I can feel myself being lowered—to the particular (and the vulgar). With Chomsky, as with good classical music, I can feel myself being elevated—to the universal. It’s pollution vs. cleanliness. Shiny pollution vs. radiant cleanliness.

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