Culture

The Economy of Desire and the Failure of Politics

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

In the opening chapter of The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch explains the premise that motivated its writing: “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.”

He goes on to add that the “ideological distinctions between liberalism and conservatism no longer stand for anything or define the lines of political debate.”

In his view, both the Left and the Right, for all the “shrill and acrimonious” debate, share an underlying “belief in the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development.” Both sides resist any talk of “limits, so threatening to those who wish to appear optimistic at all times.”

Unfortunately, according to Lasch, this program fails on at least two counts. The first regards the political consequences of maintaining “our riotous standard of living”:

“This program is self-defeating, not only because it will produce environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape but because it will widen the gap between rich and poor nations, generate more and more violent movements of insurrection and terrorism against the West, and bring about a deterioration of the world’s political climate as threatening as the deterioration of its physical climate.”

And that was Lasch’s view in the heady, halcyon days following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The True and Only Heaven was published in 1991. From where we stand, it would appear to be a rather prescient paragraph.

The other count on which the shared premise fails amounts to a misreading of the human condition. Historic liberalism, dating back to Adam Smith, presumed that “human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them.”

Consequently, “Insatiable desire, formerly condemned as a source of frustration, unhappiness, and spiritual instability, came to be seen as a powerful stimulus to economic development.” (The reading of a few old books might have tempered this radical reconsideration of desire and its fulfillment.)

Lost in the ensuing evolution of culture was a certain “moral realism” with “its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress.”

Lasch passed away prematurely shortly after the publication of The True and Only Heaven. Today he is best remembered for The Culture of Narcissism and his contrarian views do not sit comfortably with either the Left or the Right (in my view, all the more reason to take him seriously).  I picked up his book to re-read his chapter on nostalgia and memory (more on that later), but as I flipped through the opening chapters I was struck by how viable Lasch’s critique remained.

For more on Lasch you might consider Eric Miller’s recent biography: Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch. If a short essay will do take a look at Patrick Deneen’s “Christopher Lasch and the Limits of Hope.”

On the Reading of Old Books

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Following on the Christmas holiday, here is a little something that is, given the book from which it is taken, tangentially related. Both of these paragraphs are from C. S. Lewis’ Introduction to an edition of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. They each contain a great deal of wisdom about the reading of old books. First, on actually reading the old books:

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

And secondly, on the epistemological benefits of reading the old books:

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

That said, then, to quote from one very old book, tolle lege.

10 Things Our Kids Will Never Experience Thanks to the Information Revolution

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

Early in the life of this blog, I linked to a very useful post by Adam Thierer at Technology Liberation Front mapping out a spectrum of attitudes to the Internet ranging from optimism to pessimism with a pragmatic middle in between. The post helpfully positioned a wide variety of contemporary writers and summarized their positions on the social consequences of the Internet. It remains a great starting point for anyone wanting to get their bearings on the public debate over the Internet and its consequences.

Adam subsequently included a link to my post on technology Sabbaths in his list of resources for further reading and he has since then, and on more than one occasion, been generous enough to kindly mention this blog via Twitter. He’s now writing regularly at Forbes and offers excellent commentary on the legal and regulatory issues related to Internet policy.

On the aforementioned spectrum, I believe that Adam positioned himself on the optimistic side of the pragmatic middle. I’ve generally been content to occupy the  more pessimistic side. Precisely because of this propensity, I make a point of reading folks like Adam for balance and perspective. I was not surprised then to read Adam’s recent upbeat article, “10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution.”

I trust he won’t mind if I offer a view from just the other side of the pragmatic middle. This will work best if you’ve read his post; so click through, give it a read, and then come back to consider my take below.

So here are my more contrarian/pessimistic assessments. The bold faced numbered items are Adam’s list of things kids will never worry about thanks to digital technology. My thoughts are below each.

1. Taking a typing class.

I took a typing class in ninth grade and as much as I disliked it at the time, I’m extremely grateful for it now. It made college and grad school much less arduous, and has served me well given the countless professional uses of typing (on a computer, of course). Kids may figure out a rough and ready method of typing on their own, but in my experience, this is not nearly as efficient as mastering traditional typing skills. Unless the PC vanishes, expert typing skills will remain an advantage.

2. Paying bills by writing countless checks.

I too write very few checks and have been using online bill pay for years now. But here’s what’s lost: the sense of money as a limited resource that derives from both the use of cash on hand and the arithmetical practice of balancing a check book.

3. Buying an expensive set of encyclopedias

I remember rather fondly when the encyclopedia set arrived at my house; over the years I spent quite some time with it. Yes, I was that kid. Never mind that, this is a point that easily segues into the larger debate about digital media and print. Too much to reduce to a brief note; suffice it to say that digital texts have not exactly been linked to a renaissance of secondary education. That price tag for the set was a bit stiff though, probably why I got a World Book set instead of the gold standard Britannica.

4. Using a pay phone or racking up a big “long distance” bill

No argument on the big bill, but consider that what has been lost here is the salubrious social instinct that conceived of the enclosed phone booth in the first place.

5. Having to pay someone else to develop photographs

Hard to argue against having to pay less, but consider the psychic consequences of the digital camera. We’re obsessive self-documenters now and have never met a scene that wasn’t a picture waiting to happen. And when was the last time you actually printed out digital photos anyway. Interestingly, vintage photographic equipment is making a comeback in some circles.

6. Driving to the store to rent a movie

Gone with it are the little rites of passage that children enjoy like being allowed to walk or ride the bike to the video store for the first time and the subsequent little adventures that such journeys could bring. Of course, it’s not just about the video store. But the trajectory here suggests that we’ll not need to leave our house for much. I think it was Jane Jacobs who noted the necessary socializing influence of the countless personal and face-to-face micro-encounters attending life in the city. Suburbs diminished their number; the convenience of the Internet has reduced them even further.

7. Buying / storing music, movies, or games on physical media

These same objects also functioned as depositories of memories … when they have their own unique, tangible form. Lost also is the art of giving as a gift the perfect album or film that fits your friend and their circumstances just right. No need, iTunes gift card will do.

8. Having to endlessly search to find unique content

Adam tells us exactly what is lost: “I will never forget the day in the early 1980s when, after a long search, I finally found a rare Led Zeppelin B-Side (“Hey Hey What Can I Do”) on a “45” in a dusty bin at a small record store. It was like winning the lottery!”

9. Sending letters

Guess I’m a nostalgic old-timer. But seriously, tell me who wouldn’t get a thrill from receiving a letter from a friend. Lost is the expectation and the joy of waiting for and receiving a letter. Lost too is the relationship to time entailed by the practice of letter writing and the patience it cultivated.

10. Being without the Internet & instant, ubiquitous connectivity

Lost is solitude, introspection, uninterrupted time with others. But in fairness this does bring that unique blend of anxiety and obsessiveness that the expectation of being able to instantly communicate engenders when for whatever reason it is not immediately successful.

Admittedly, this is hardly intended to be a rigorous sociological analysis of digital culture. The “Never” in the title is hyperbolic, of course. Many of these losses are not total and they are balanced by certain gains. But as I wrote my more pessimistic rejoinders, I did notice a pattern: the tendency to collapse the distance between desire and its fulfillment. We do this either by reducing the distance in time or else the distance in effort. Make something effortless and instant and you simultaneously make it ephemeral and trivial. The consequence is the diminishment of the satisfaction and joy that attends the fulfillment.

If this is true and this pattern holds, then what our kids may never know, or at least know less of thanks to the information revolution is abiding and memorable joy and the satisfactions that attend delayed gratification and effort expended toward a desired end.

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Be sure to read Adam’s response, “Information Revolutions and Cultural/Economic Tradeoffs”

 

Civility, Politics, and Friendship

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

I was not exactly a student of Christopher Hitchens’ work, but I often enjoyed his style, even when I didn’t quite agree with the point he was making. Fittingly, his passing occasioned not only sadness, but also beautiful prose. When your inner circle of friends consists of upper crust members of the English speaking world’s literary establishment, you’re at least assured of being remembered eloquently. And so he was. I found the reminiscences by Peter Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Buckley particularly well penned and moving.

Christopher Buckley’s column reminded me of Hitchens’ classy obituary for William Buckley. And this in turn elicited the thought that I’d happily listen to Hitchens and Buckley go at each other indefinitely while I could hardly stomach two minutes of what we, facetiously one must hope, call a political debate.

To some, the problem with our current public and political discourse is fundamentally a lack of civility. Yet, this depends on what we might mean by civility. A friend recently suggested that the inverse is probably true. We are too civil to speak forthrightly and honestly, it is all obfuscation. In which case it is not civility that is the problem, but civility’s unseemly counterfeits — slimy flattery, ingratiation, or cowardice. In any case, compared with previous ages, our political discourse is remarkably tame.

More to the point, I would say, we have not so much a failure of civility as a failure of eloquence, made all the worse for the narcissism that frequently attends it. Few, I presume, would mind a little incivility so long as it was to the point and artfully delivered. Hitchens was the master of this sort of artfully acerbic incivility, and he deployed it to great effect. Nothing of the sort characterizes our political discourse. We are plagued instead with the shallow and inelegant shouting matches of cable news programs or that manner of speaking without saying anything mastered by politicians.

In his remembrance of William Buckley, Hitchens wrote the following:

“But on Buckley’s imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he’d opened with that curiously seductive intro (“I should like to begin .  .  . “), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment.”

Of what forum on contemporary television could this now be said? More likely if one failed to make their case, it was because they were shouted down by one of the other eight people on the “panel,” or by the “moderator.” And while some of have attributed the decline of public discourse to the entertainment values that drive television, the result has been anything but entertaining. It is all a great bore.

The problem it seems is that we have either a bland surface civility that trades in mere politeness and niceness at the expense of substantive debate and truth telling, or else we have an artless, narcissistic incivility that brings us no closer to substantive discussion. A little incivility by the former’s account in the service of an argument would be more than welcome if it was artful, but unfortunately we get only crass incivility masking the absence of argument and reason.

The better sort of civility depends on respect, humility, and courage.

Civility depends on a fundamental respect for the humanity and dignity of our interlocutors, independent, to some degree, of the opinions and ideas they may espouse. Perhaps the deeper issue here is the danger of constructing identity solely around political positions. We must be able to separate, to some degree, the person from the issue. If our identity has collapsed into our political persuasion in such a way that we cannot rationally argue about political issues without perceiving opposition as an attack on personal dignity, then meaningful argument becomes nearly impossible.

Humility is necessary to entertain the possibility of coming to think otherwise, and entertaining this possibility is indispensable to meaningful discourse. Dialogue is precluded by the belief that you alone are right or that you could not be wrong. If I were to believe that I see all things clearly were others see only partially and unclearly, then I need not listen at all.

Courage is perhaps the most multifaceted component of the equation. It allows for the possibility of speaking the unpopular and challenging the conventional. But while we often think of courage in terms of speaking, it is good to remember that it takes courage to listen as well. It takes courage to listen attentively to those with whom we disagree. It takes courage because most people do not want to be wrong about convictions that they hold dear, and the best way to ensure that you will never be proven wrong is to refuse to listen to those who disagree with you. This is why our “debates” very often amount to little more than sequential monologues.

On this account, the failure of our political class amounts to an inversion of the virtues necessary to civility; instead of respect, humility, and courage we more often than not have self-interest, arrogance, and cowardice.

I might also add humor to this list of needful virtues. That the most unserious of people appear to take themselves with such solemn seriousness is surely a symptom of our disordered society. In this environment, the only laughter to be heard is the scornful laughter of the cynic, or alternatively, the nervous laughter of a society realizing the joke is ultimately on them.

Perhaps all of this amounts to a validation of Aristotle’s view of friendship and politics. According to Aristotle, it was on friendship that the health of the city depended. Might we conclude that the failure of politics is a failure of friendship? Or better, that the failure of politics is symptomatic of the absence of friendship? We can at least conclude, tweaking Aristotle’s dictum, when people are friends they have no need of civility.

Interrogative Intonation …

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A little over a year ago I wrote a post on the popularity of the ellipse ( . . . ) in online communication after I began to notice how frequently I had been employing the mark myself. After laying out a rough and ready taxonomy of uses, I wrapped up with the following conclusion:

“It was the mark of a thought that refused to assert itself …. The ellipsis gives expression to a habit of ironic detachment and preemptive indifference.  And here is where I found the point of contact with larger cultural trends.  The mood of ironic detachment that has settled over so many of us was manifesting itself in three simple dots.  With those dots we were evading conviction, giving off an apathetic vibe, and guarding ourselves from seeming unfashionably earnest.”

Today, via Peter Leithart, I came across the following from John Milbank:

“People who fondly imagine themselves the subjects of their ‘own’ choices entirely will, in reality, be the most manipulated subjects, and the most incapable of being influenced by goodness and beauty. This is why, in the affluent Anglo-Saxon West today, there is so much pervasively monotonous ugliness and tawdriness that belies its wealth, as well as why there are so many people adopting (literally) the sing-song accent of self-righteous complacency and vacuous uniformity, with its rising lilt of a feigned questioning at the end of every phrase. This intonation implies that any overassertion is a polite infringement of the freedom of the other, and yet at the same time its merely rhetorical interrogation suggests that the personal preference it conveys is unchallengeable, since it belongs within the total set of formally correct exchange transactions. Pure liberty is pure power – whose other name is evil.”

I thought at the time I had perhaps overanalyzed. I now feel better about that.