What is it with moral superiority? Why does the need for it consume us? Is it a universal phenomenon, the kind of thing that evolutionary psychologists would concoct an explanation for, or is it specific to a particular time and place—perhaps modernity, the post-Reformation West? Maybe the explanation is as simple as this: it is the only form of superiority that we can all reliably feel, and pretty much whenever we want to. Which begs the question: why must we feel superior at all?
conspicuous crusading
I Got, Got, Got, Got No Time
Recognising things aren’t black and white means recognising nuance. Nuance leads to accuracy. Accuracy isn’t merely about being right, it’s about reality. It’s only when we know how the world is that we change it; otherwise, we’re only working to change a fiction we’ve created in tweeted outrage: whether it’s that Rolling Stone is insensitive or two bystanders were the bombers.
Of course, nuance requires time, which goes against the social media outrage machine.
Good ol’ Tauriq, fighting the good fight. Of course, I don’t think that most of the people he’s talking about necessarily care about being accurate or changing the world for the better. I mean, sure, no doubt they say they do, but like a lot of aspirational statements, that’s only designed to get the maximum status boost from a minimum of actual effort. In the same way that parasitism, by gaining sustenance at no cost, is a brilliant evolutionary strategy, social media “activists” accrue a lot of cultural capital without having to put in the hard, thankless work that a lot of real activism entails. Again, you might even suspect that some of these people have masterfully exploited a narrow niche: they get attention, increased self-esteem, and, in some cases, even money, by doing little more than acting like loudmouthed assholes on the Internet. Much of what Tauriq describes is simply the popular online spectator sport of pointing and denouncing, a game anyone can play, whatever their skill level.
Hue and Cry
Shaming, it seems, has become a core competency of the Internet, and it’s one that can destroy both lives and livelihoods. But the question of who’s responsible for the destruction — the person engaging in the behavior or the person revealing it — depends on whom you ask. At its best, social media has given a voice to the disenfranchised, allowing them to bypass the gatekeepers of power and publicize injustices that might otherwise remain invisible. At its worst, it’s a weapon of mass reputation destruction, capable of amplifying slander, bullying, and casual idiocy on a scale never before possible.
…We despise racism and sexism because they bully the less powerful, but at what point do the shamers become the bullies? After all, the hallmark of bullying isn’t just being mean. It also involves a power differential: The bully is the one who’s punching down.
…Internet speech can be cruder and crueler than our real-life interactions, in large part due to our literal distance from the people we’re talking to and their reactions. That detachment can sometimes be liberating, and it’s often a good thing that people speak bluntly online, especially against injustice that they see around them. But a sense of proportion is crucial. These days, too many Internet shame campaigns dole out punishment that is too brutal for the crime. Using an influential social media account to call out individuals, as Richards did, isn’t simply saying something is “not cool”; it’s a request to have someone put in the digital stocks, where a potentially unlimited number of people can throw digital stones at them. And it turns out to have real-life consequences for everyone involved.
There are a lot of things about the social web that are various degrees of annoying, but this is a phenomenon I truly despise. Assholes are a fact of life, but they can be avoided or ignored in many cases. The panopticon of small town life is stifling, but it can be escaped by moving to a bigger city. But in the age of social media, assholes with a small-town desire to obsessively monitor everyone else’s behavior have mixed technology with self-righteousness to create the ultimate high: a belief that a better world is created by indulging one’s most petty, vindictive, assholish urges. The only thing anyone “learns” by being on the receiving end of one of these vigilante campaigns is to fear provoking mob action, something we should all know by now, and nothing we should be celebrating.
Procrusteans
I consider myself politically progressive, but there are a few major sticking points that keep me perpetually at odds with my would-be allies. I hold in utter contempt anyone who would attempt to dictate to me a list of things I am forbidden to say, and it is generally more from the left than from other quarters that such dictation comes. I am part of that minority that continues to consider political correctness a real threat, and not a momentary excess of the early 1990s, when we heard all that reactionary huffing about how soon enough they’ll be making us say ‘vertically challenged’ instead of ‘short’ and so on. I speak not with Rush Limbaugh but with Vladimir Nabokov when I say that I am horrified by the limitation of free expression, by which I don’t mean the usual ‘expression of unpopular ideas’ beloved of ‘card-carrying members of the ACLU’, but rather the creative use of language where a Schillerian free play of the imagination is the only source of regulation. I believe the desire to regulate externally stems not just from a misunderstanding of how political progress is made, but also of how language functions.
…If my would-be political allies were being grown up about these things, they would understand that what they are really after is not something that can be attained by setting down, once and for all, the complete index nominum prohibitorum. Rather, it is a matter of cultivating virtues like tact and discretion: virtues for which there are no easy rules to be mastered in an a priori way, but which always depend upon the combination of a million different social cues.
“The desire to regulate externally” being, in my opinion, the heart of it. Most of the progressive linguistic police I’ve encountered are extremely distrustful of the anarchic, nebulous nature of language, as they are with anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their conceptual taxonomy. I’ve heard that tendency described variously as “rationalism” or “theorism”, but I’ve started thinking of such uptight people, progressive or reactionary, as Procrusteans. Above all their professed causes, they care most about the internal consistency of their worldview, the supposedly clear, strong connections between their axioms; they’re happy to stretch or amputate any inconvenient facts or realities as needed.
Equinsu Ocha!
There is a deeply ingrained idea coming from what passes for the Left, and distracting the younger and more naive members of the Left, to their own detriment, according to which we can each only speak for our own group, and in relation to other groups the most we can hope to be is ‘allies’.
A good example of this was in the reaction to the phrase that sprang up spontaneously as a call to rally against the verdict: I am Trayvon Martin. This was of course not new, but a recycling of a common reaction to galvanizing events, e.g., the banners around Paris that declared Nous sommes tous américains on September 12, 2001. (I say, with Whitman: I am everyone, I am each of you, at every moment.) By the next morning some bold white internauts had posted video clips of themselves declaring emphatically that they are not Trayvon Martin, that they could not possibly be Trayvon Martin, in view of the many privileges they have that keep them safe from Martin’s fate. By nightfall of the same day white people were abuzz in social media about how other white people needed to stop trying to get attention by announcing how not-Trayvon Martin they were, that this was not about what they either were or were not.
Clearly, the white kids just don’t know what to do with themselves.
The infamous Ward Churchill, in his essay “Another Dry White Season”, an attack on Jerry Mander’s Luddite/Noble Savage romanticism, started off with this paragraph:
They just can’t help it. I swear, they really can’t. It’s too deeply ingrained in the subconscious, a matter of subliminal presumption. No matter how well-intentioned or insightful, regardless of how critical of the dominant conceptual paradigm and “sensitive” to non-Western perspectives, the theoretical writing of Euroamerican men — and most white women, as well — seems destined with a sort of sad inevitability to become yet another enterprise in intellectual appropriation, a reinforcement of the very hegemony they purport to oppose. To expect otherwise, one supposes, would be to expect that a leopard will (or can) change its spots. This remains true despite the authors’ most genuinely held desires that things be otherwise, not to mention their oft and fervently expressed assertions that, in their own cases at least, such wishes have already been fulfilled.
I first read that almost twenty years ago; ploosa shawnje. If one were to observe, like a naturalist, the interpersonal dynamics on display throughout the social web, one might find oneself hard-pressed to resist the conclusion that white people are very, very good at setting themselves up in charge of diagnosing and fixing the problems that other white people have supposedly created. If one were further possessed of a cynical disposition, one might even suspect that this is all just a clever power grab, a way to make sure privileged people still retain their perks. After all, as we learned in school studying the Salem witch trials and reading The Crucible, what better way to shield yourself from damning accusations than to accuse someone else first? I can’t help but notice, when I go online, that it’s often other white men who are pointing angry fingers in my face, shouting how this and that about me needs to change, because they’ve analyzed the problem and they have the plan.
Ideas certainly should stand or fall on their own merits, of course, regardless of who champions them. I just find it amusing to see, when “whiteness” is accepted as valid shorthand for a plethora of problematic ideas and attitudes, how many white people apparently exempt themselves from that judgment and carry on just as before, bringing their enlightenment to the benighted masses, even to the point of attacking and insulting members of those oppressed groups who have the temerity to disagree with their betters. They just can’t help it.
No, No, No, I’ve Never Worn No Uniform
A recent study on atheism and agnosticism in the USA has established six categories of non-believers. The newly identified groups are Intellectual Atheist/Agnostics, Activist Atheist/Agnostics, Seeker Agnostics, Antitheists, Non-theists and Ritual Atheist/Agnostics.
There are no atheist missionaries risking their lives to bring science and reason to uncivilized savages. I am beginning to think that this isn’t something we should be proud of. Perhaps this moral high ground is actually cowardice on our part.
The idea of travelling to Third World countries where atheism is equated with witchcraft, where homosexuals are stoned, and women and religious minorities are oppressed, and telling them the god, upon which all their cultural beliefs are based, is a fiction, frightens me too. The prospect of going into low income neighborhoods and knocking on doors to introduce people to deductive reasoning and explain logical fallacies as they relate to religion is terrifying to me. But if we ever hope to free this world and ourselves of this ignorance, isn’t this exactly the sort of thing we should be doing? We often hear famous atheist thinkers saying they are not trying to convert anyone or spread atheism, but if we are not trying to change minds, then what the fuck are we doing?
How do we expect to change the world if we are not on the front lines? How do we expect to free ourselves from the ignorance, immorality, and oppression of organized religion, if we are not willing to be soldiers of reason just as believers rejoice in martyring themselves as soldiers for their deities? They are out there, every day, knocking on doors, handing out their propaganda on street corners, filling the airwaves everyday with their dogma and rhetoric, spreading their delusion. How the hell do we expect to combat this if we are not at least as aggressive with our counter-message? And if we are not willing to take it to such extremes, why bother writing blogs like this one? Why bother writing our books and creating our little organizations and websites?
For the most part, atheism will fail to develop a political voice. Most people simply aren’t interested in a combative atheism. European history is peppered with wars that were fought over religious beliefs, and the modern response has been to sideline discussions about religion and to secularize political discourses. Previous generations openly committed themselves to Christianity – but the decline of religiosity will thus not result in open commitments to atheism in the political arena.
Atheists who want to fully replace religious rituals face an impossible task: Their rhythms would have to be as lasting as the rhythms of Christianity. Atheists would have to find a way to bridge the gap between cosmic timescales and universal history on one side and the individual and experiential horizon of everyday life on the other side – and they would have to make this bridge non-ephemeral and, thus, ritualistic.
But maybe atheists don’t mind. Their focus is a clear demarcation between religion and politics, and their agenda is the limiting of religious rhetoric in public discourse. Modern atheists care about politics, but they don’t seem to be too keen on nurturing new rituals.
Counting Coup
I am used to this kind of thing by now. There was this whole article written a few years back about how because I was running a site named Bookslut and interviewing male authors, I was a tool of the patriarchy. That’s fine. These types of things don’t really bother me. Mostly because I feel like if you are the type of person to write emails using words like “tool of the patriarchy” and “rape culture,” your goal is not to open a dialogue, it’s to shame me into correcting my behavior. It’s not likely to happen, unfortunately.
I should state up front that I hate the phrase “rape culture.” It’s not because I don’t think we have a culture where rape is normalized, where women are in danger, with television programs with pretty violated dead girls lovingly filmed for our viewing pleasure, whatever. I’m not stupid, I know how this works. But I also think that throwing around the word “rape culture” is a silencing tactic, that shuts down dialogue, that creates an atmosphere of animosity. I think it is stories, not slogans, that change things, that bring people around. And hearing out a person’s viewpoint, rather than scolding or telling them they are wrong, is the only way to find middle ground.
…So yeah. It annoys me when someone sends an email telling me that my language needs policing. It annoys me when someone writes to say, “I just today discovered your site and you are doing it wrong and hurting women in the process.” You are acting as a tyrant, not as a human being when you do that. I have that impulse, too, god knows. But if you’re getting hung up on words, these forbidden words that you yourself are changing into weapons, like slut or bitch or hysterical or whatever else I’ve been called out for using, you’re missing the story. And you’re missing the human being using the words. And I don’t answer email sent by tyrants.
Yesterday, while sitting in the parking lot at work, I saw a bird aggressively confronting his own reflection in a car’s side-view mirror. All ruffled feathers and widespread wings and “Come at me, bro!” attitude. With Crispin’s excellent post still fresh in my mind, it struck me as an amusingly apt symbol of so much social media dialogue — people catching a glimpse of their own projected fears or insecurities, reading malign intent into the shadows of vague or poorly-expressed ideas, squawking, pecking and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
There’s this former co-worker of mine, a devout Christian. Devout, as in, he and his wife were seriously talking about becoming New Monastics. When I met him, he was attending a conservative Christian college. Liberty University, in fact. Ideologically, we predictably disagree on some things — he’s not a right-wing religious nut, but he does seem to have some theocratic leanings where he thinks Christian beliefs should trump civil liberties, such as in cases involving abortion or voluntary euthanasia (that’s just an impression I’ve gotten, to be fair; I’ve never asked him about it flat-out). We argued a bit over whether Michael Behe is anything more than an intelligent design-promoting hack. He has a lot of left-wing political beliefs, though: he’s actually traveled to Palestine to protest Israeli actions and defend Palestinians from being attacked (hoping that the presence of Americans will deter any violence); he’s in favor of single-payer health care; he opposed both of our imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and any potential actions against Iran, but he’s also a former Navy SEAL and still has some of that rah-rah, go troops, U-S-A, U-S-A stuff going on. He got into a shouting match with John Hagee after a speech Hagee gave at Liberty. He voted for Bush twice, but still had enough of an intellectual conscience to change his mind about him and admit what a mistake it was. He voted for Obama after having supported Ron Paul in the primaries. He used to hate Michael Moore, now he loves him. He was thrilled when he saw me wearing a Noam Chomsky t-shirt one day, saying that he was his hero. He drives a gigantic monster truck that he converted to run entirely on vegetable oil, and he drives around in it blasting cheesy 80s synth-pop music like Wham! just to freak out the people who assume he’s a fellow redneck. Other fun discussions included everything from his love-bordering-on-worship of Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins to what he saw as a postmodern perspective in Scrubs as personified by the Janitor.
Most importantly, he’s just a genuinely nice guy. Intellectually curious and unfailingly polite (though I guess Hagee might argue otherwise), his willingness to consider new perspectives and change his mind accordingly made me realize how accustomed I’d gotten, especially on the Internet, to dealing with ideologues who traffic almost entirely in buzzwords and butthurt, who argue with slogans and snark, and who, by all appearances, care more about being right and being praised by their fellows for being right than actually changing any of the things they spend their Internet time raging against. Anil Dash’s perceptive Law of Fail comes to mind here.
Perhaps he’s more incoherent than truly iconoclastic; maybe he’s just never tried to figure out how all these passions and ideas can coexist in the same skull. Could be that if he ever attempts to be thoroughly rational and internally consistent in his beliefs, he might find himself rejecting his progressive leanings and becoming rigidly fundamentalist. Eh, I doubt it, though.
The rather pedestrian point I’m making is, had I met him on the Internet as a bullet list of beliefs and a set of tribal identity flash cards, I doubt I would have seen him as a friend. And I’m certainly not one to promote a ridiculous romantic Internet, fake, boo; real life, authentic, yay! perspective. I’m just saying what she’s saying: if you enjoy being mean and snarky to strangers online to give yourself a little sugar rush of superiority and gain a little status among the rest of the in-group, knock yourself out. But if you honestly want to “make a difference” and change people’s minds, you might want to engage with them in a more personable way. You might even thereby decide that the fate of all good things in the world doesn’t actually hinge on whether you win an argument or bully someone into acquiescence.
How Much Reverence Has a Noble Man for His Enemies!
I read Pascal Bruckner’s essay last week, but the one line that really stuck with me, despite being somewhat tangential to the broader theme, was this one:
There are useful enemies that make you fertile and sterile enemies that wear you out.
I like that formulation. I like the way it limns the subtle concept of an intellectual sparring partner who brings out the best in you through integral opposition while keeping you from slipping into the easy tendency toward moralistic tunnel vision, where winning the argument and trouncing the enemy at any cost becomes the goal. Maybe that’s not so remarkable an attitude among scientists, say, but I find it to be rare in general culture. There are a handful of people I describe as favorites “to think with” — they manage to enlighten even as they provoke; they pull off the difficult trick of balancing stunningly original insight with clear, almost obvious, expression.
Useful enemies don’t have to be individuals, of course; they might be general concepts or themes. One theme I’ve been circling around for the past year or so is the superficial progressive obsession with achieving racial/sexual demographic parity in artsy fields. Well-meaning folks, I’m sure. Nothing more than guilt-ridden honkies looking for a simple, clearly visible metric to reassure themselves that they aren’t accidentally contributing to someone’s oppression. Their vapid “activism” is the sociopolitical equivalent of feng shui — rearranging society’s demographic furniture in order to, like, free up the inequitable energy flow and create good vibes of social justice. But though I mock them, I’m glad for the time I spent taking their arguments seriously and engaging with what they said instead of dismissing them after a cursory glance. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s rules, they were the stones against which I sharpened my own thoughts: why would I resent them for that?
That theme could easily become a sterile enemy, though, if I let it. It could just be something I routinely return to in order to reenact the same old drama, with nothing new to say, both of us going through the predictable motions in a dysfunctional relationship. Especially on the social web, I feel, there’s a phenomenon where one has to perform one’s dislike, even when there’s no point to it. It’s not enough to quietly ignore people or websites that waste my time; I have to announce my ignoring in a passive-aggressive stage whisper to someone else. I see people in forums and on Twitter doing that all the time: seeking attention in a symbiotic relationship with someone they profess to be bored or sickened by. It’s like watching kids who think they’re cleverly disguising their flirting by punching each other and calling names, only it’s pathetic instead of cute. I’ve noted this unhealthy dynamic a couple times recently, and it motivates me to pay closer attention, to be sensitive to when it’s time to add a period and turn the page.
Matthew 5:22
Casanova Frankenstein: It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules.
Swearing, while not its only function, has a lot to do with offending people. Swearing is a necessary social sanction that does a lot of good in the world. There will always be people in this world that deserve to be told off. (Like my neighbor for example.) But in the process of telling each other where to shove it, we also reaffirm and establish who in the world is desirable and who is unwanted. So if I call you dumb, stupid, lame, gay, retarded, or even a girl, I’m not only saying that women, non-cis gendered people, or the differently abled are inherently bad, I’m also invoking all of the power of ableism, homophobia, and patriarchy to make you feel bad. Too many curse words strengthen the kind of social structures that we should be dismantling. I want to quickly and easily compare people to the parts of society that I find gross and unseemly. I want words that compare people to those with ill begotten wealth or obscene power but, so far, calling someone the President of the United States of America doesn’t have the sticking power it should.
Lord, what a div.
Also:
The shift in taboos away from sacrilege and gross-out topics toward more personal and, well, flat-out mean epithets appears to be a move in the right direction. The increasingly offensive nature of these words—and the visceral, emotional responses they trigger within us when spoken or heard—just might amount to a signifier of social progress. “There’s got to be something that people take seriously” and see as out of bounds these days, says Allan. “And right now, it’s human frailties.”
Progress? More like the fickle nature of fashion, aimlessly wandering around in circles. There will always be people who want to shock and push boundaries for the sake of doing it, and there will always be uptight prigs who want to mother-hen everyone else into line with their ideals. The battleground will change, yet the battle will remain the same. In the meantime, our overly-neurotic friend above should relax: calling someone a “fucking moron” does not increase, in some quantifiable way, the likelihood that the U.S. will re-introduce eugenics legislation to overwhelming public approval. The epithet does not seep into the cultural groundwater to accumulate with other social toxins, thus contaminating us all just that little bit more with a desire to sterilize the unfit. Language expresses so much more than simple binary logical propositions.
At Every Turn, an Angel with a Flaming Sword
He abandoned his faith as a teenager and eventually completed a Ph.D. with Roland Barthes, by which point he’d concluded that Christian concepts of guilt and redemption were inescapable. “Baudelaire said that civilization is the abolition of the original sin,” he told me. “In fact, it’s not true; we haven’t abolished original sin but rather spread it all over.” In Bruckner’s scenario, Marxism transposed the idea of Christ onto the working class; paradise would come after the revolution. Then, with third-worldism, colonized peoples became the embodiment of virtue. Now, he says, it’s Mother Earth: “She is suffering, the metaphor of all victims.” Or, as he writes in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, in reference to the ubiquitous phrase “carbon footprint”: “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”
Literature Cops Pulled Me Over and Beat Me with Their Book Clubs
One method of defining human nature is – more or less empirically – as constituted by those characteristics which human beings share in common. On this basis, reading good fiction can’t be one of the constituents of human nature, given how many members of the human species haven’t read Proust, Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald or whoever else it might be.
A conception of human nature can, on the other hand, be an openly normative one, containing an ideal of how to live well. As part of such a conception one might commend reading as making us human or more human. But it is important to note, then, that this is precisely an ideal, held by some people and not by others. It doesn’t oblige anybody. For my own part, I think the locution is regrettable that suggests that non-readers aren’t as human as readers.
Along those same lines, John Gray quipped that it was strange to see those who call themselves “humanists” spending so much time denigrating what is possibly the defining human activity, religious worship. Do you really love “humanity” just as it is, or do you only love the idea of it, what you imagine to be the potential of it? There’s a busybody continuum ranging from mildly annoying to truly dangerous, and while proselytizing book lovers are obviously harmless, it’s interesting to see how minor preferences are so quickly and easily shaded with moralistic colors. However, vicarious experience is merely an increased, intensified version of what’s already there in the reader’s head, good and bad.
As a general rule, I have no great affection for my fellow hairless apes, individually or collectively, but rather than seek to impose my particular vision of the good life on as many of them as possible in the hope of making the world more to my liking, I’d rather spend my time creating that world in miniature and let the rest go about their folly.
Bros Before Prose (Slight Return)
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the Internet has struggling and/or failed writers standing around forlornly at the end of every URL off-ramp. It’s an unforgiving, stingy market for them. Thus I can’t realistically fault some poor fucker with an utterly useless English degree and an unread manuscript for grasping at any straw that promises a slight career advantage, even if it might seem unsporting, say, to invoke racist or sexist discrimination in order to shoulder one’s way closer to the head of the line. Whatever idealistic bullshit you may occasionally read about the moral benefits of fiction, writers, like anyone else, will do what they have to in order to get ahead.
It is tedious, however, to see the faux-civil-rights issue of gender imbalances in prominent literary outlets becoming an increasingly popular spectator sport, complete with all the snark and posturing typical of online drama. But whatever, fine; let’s just say you somehow manage to browbeat all the prestigious journals into presenting an equally-divided pie chart of male and female authors and reviewers in every issue. Then let’s say that a new study reveals that over the course of a year, male authors received positive reviews 58% of the time, while female authors only received positive reviews 39% of the time. Will that be accepted as just the way it goes, or will the same insinuations and accusations of sexism be leveled again in an attempt to game the refs? As you can guess, I’m inclined toward cynicism.
The Overheated Rantings of Some Fool Who Can’t Read
Kickstarter is a private entity, and can police its use however it likes. No one has a “right” to Kickstarter. Out in the real world, however, we know that the rights to publish and speak are ten thousand times more important than the overheated rantings of some fool who can’t read. As PUA guides go, Hoinsky’s is very, very far from being the most aggressive or objectifying. It is an entirely harmless book—as all books are. In fact I found Hoinsky’s Reddit guide to be full of interesting and valuable observations. There isn’t a misogynist syllable in the whole thing. But even if it were as bad as the worst excesses of Frank T.J. Mackey, it is wrong and dangerous to suggest that shutting someone up is the best answer to any problem, ever.
Yeah, I think I heard something about that. Wasn’t there some fatuous, conclusion-jumping blowhard manufacturing drama about it recently? Ah, right, that’s the one. Well, surely, once he had time to calm down and look into it more carefully, he acknowledged letting confirmation bias and ideology get the better of him, yes? Oh.
Skepticism, honey, I know the divorce couldn’t have been pleasant, but you did the best you could. There’s no reason you should have had to put up with his repeated infidelity, and we’re all just glad you got away before he dragged you down into the gutter with him.
Rather Like the Seasons
Fourth, the power of the progress idea stems in part from the fact that it derives from a fundamental Christian doctrine—the idea of providence, of redemption. Gray notes in The Silence of Animals that no other civilization conceived any such phenomenon as the end of time, a concept given to the world by Jesus and St. Paul. Classical thinking, as well as the thinking of the ancient Egyptians and later of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism and early Judaism, saw humanity as reflecting the rest of the natural world—essentially unchanging but subject to cycles of improvement and deterioration, rather like the seasons.
“By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs,” writes Gray, “Christianity . . . founded the modern world.” But the modern world retained a powerful philosophical outlook from the classical world—the Socratic faith in reason, the idea that truth will make us free; or, as Gray puts it, the “myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world.” Thus did a fundamental change emerge in what was hoped of the future. And, as the power of Christian faith ebbed, along with its idea of providence, the idea of progress, tied to the Socratic myth, emerged to fill the gap. “Many transmutations were needed before the Christian story could renew itself as the myth of progress,” Gray explains. “But from being a succession of cycles like the seasons, history came to be seen as a story of redemption and salvation, and in modern times salvation became identified with the increase of knowledge and power.”
Those images became a consuming mystery for me. UFS hadn’t remained segregated after apartheid’s end—it had integrated and then resegregated later. I wanted to know why the white students raised those ancient flags, and why the black students had left Karee. I uncovered a tale of mutual exhilaration at racial integration giving way to suspicion, anger and even physical violence. It seemed to hold powerful implications well beyond South Africa, about the very nature of social change itself. In our post–civil rights struggle era, we tend to assume progress toward less prejudice and more social tolerance is inevitable—the only variable is speed.
But in Bloemfontein, social progress surged forward. Then it turned back.
Rattlers and Eagles All the Way Down
After posting about John Gray’s new book “The Silence of Animals” I found this talk that he gave at the Royal Society of Arts in April. There Gray concisely expressed the argument in his book. He explained that he doesn’t deny the possibility of instances of progress, because such a statement is immediately, empirically false. Rather, he explained that he doesn’t think that the advance of scientific knowledge has any correlation with advances in our ethical and political practices. That is, we could get smarter and smarter, know more and more about the world, and yet the same deep flaws in the human constitution would continue to cause the same ethical calamities to occur over and over again.
Perhaps counterintuitively, language often obfuscates perception rather than clarifying. Whuddameanis, when we see chimpanzees in the wild conducting violent raids on enemy territory, there’s no confusion over the meaning of it. It is exactly what it appears to be. Humans have developed more intricate, complicated methods of attaining power and wealth, as well as a wide variety of proxy simulations of violent conflict, but let me suggest that you try looking at any Internet squabble, not as a potential participant, but as if you’re Jane Goodall describing events at Gombe Stream — ignore the abstract symbols, the linguistic justifications, and just observe the empirical reality, the neverending story of shit-flinging and status-seeking.
I’m not bemoaning humanity’s failure to embody its professed ideals, lest you get the wrong impression. I’m saying that anger, jealousy, greed, melancholy, pride, scheming after power, etc. are fundamental aspects of human nature. Not only that, none of them are absolutely bad things. There are contexts in which all of them are perfectly rational and effective. And even if these “flaws” do frequently snowball into what we judge disasters and tragedies, there is no philosophy or algorithm that can anticipate and prevent them from ever coming into being. Some people dream that broad, sophisticated taste in the arts will maximize empathy in the audience, while forgetting that the artists themselves are often spectacularly flawed human beings despite their intuitive insight into the human condition. Latter-day positivists favor hard knowledge over touchy-feely intuition and think that an ideal, just society can be rationally deduced into existence, even though the distinction between is/ought and facts/values has been demonstrated over and over, and despite the fact that conscious awareness is insufficiently capable of contending with all the variables of existence and manipulating them to its lasting advantage.
The tragedies and dilemmas we encounter, individually and collectively, are not necessarily errors which can be fixed with more knowledge. Increased knowledge will only be used in service to the same old unenlightened desires, possibly even creating new dilemmas in the process. And even when we know how little we know, we find a way to convince ourselves that we’ve learned our lesson and become smarter for the experience.
Atheists are, it must be admitted, particularly prone to this. Despite their pretensions to rational objectivity, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for suspecting that atheists are just another group of tribesmen who slew a rival desert god and ate his brains, believing they were ingesting his powers of omniscience. And so we find the Bad News Bears of social justice fighting (once again) over… hats. Seriously, tempers are getting hot and feelings are getting bruised as these oh-so-rational progressives desperately search for a way to justify the ancient urge to hate the everloving fuck out of someone just because. How ridiculous that anyone would ever fight to the death over the doctrine of the Trinity! How absurd that people would take skin pigmentation to be significant of anything important! How irrational that… hey, wait; that sunnamabitch over there is wearing the wrong kind of hat. And walking on our turf! I don’t like the looks of him. Let’s go fuck him up.
Like I was saying, I’m sure if chimps could talk to us, they’d also explain how, no, this is totally different, we have valid reasons for raiding their territory, they deserve it.
I realize this is just another group of dysfunctional morons on the Internet, of course; I’m not saying they’re an actual threat to anything other than their parents’ pride, no matter how “dangerous” their Napoleon-in-clown shoes leader likes to pretend they are. The point is just to notice how, even among a subculture that prides itself on its supposed clear, rational, scientific thinking, the same old behavioral templates are right there, ready to be filled in with new details. You know the old myth about the World Turtle? Well, when it comes to human psychology, despite all the fantasies and rationalizations, it’s Rattlers and Eagles all the way down.
Far From the Madding Crowd’s Ignoble Strife
Zuckerman, however, is not a knee-jerk naysayer about all things digital. The director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and cofounder of the international bloggers’ website Global Voices, he is extremely enthusiastic about the potential of using technology to connect people across cultures. He wants the Internet to be an empathy machine. The difference between him and the full-throated apostles of cyber-utopianism is that he does not believe that the online world is foreordained to fulfill this purpose, nor does he naively assume that the outcomes of cross-cultural connections will always be desirable.
Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading “War and Peace,” for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment.
The archetypal image of the sage is one of serenity and an almost-otherworldly lack of concern for the mundane obsessions of everyday life. In other words, the accumulation of knowledge and experience, rather than simply being a super-sum of positive integers, tends to produce a state of being that would seem very much at odds with the sort of simplistic, progressive partisan vision of “better” or “nicer” citizens. Knowledge is a double-edged blade that can be used for the same values and desires people have always had; increasingly complex experience isn’t likely to express itself in platitudes.