There is an argument at the core of my last piece that I think I failed to convey as clearly as I wanted to. If I can attempt to summarize it again, it is that modern civilization broke the world, yet the architects of modern civilization still run all of its institutions (governments and economies, corporations, the media, etc). Therefore, I can understand why some people—like my two brothers—have decided to say to those institutions, you broke the world, so tell us why should we listen to a single thing you say (about vaccines, climate change, gender, wealth inequality, 9/11, the moon landing, the election...).
My brothers have invented and adopted alternative realities for themselves, which is easy to do in our internet age when you don’t like the reality that’s being presented to you. In their knee-jerk rejection of absolutely everything, they have gone further in their antipathy towards mainstream institutions than most of us, but the basic sentiment makes sense to me.
This sentiment has influenced my reading list of late, and also acted as a lens through which I seem to be processing a lot of what I read. With that, here are a few things that I think are worth sharing…
The Age of Anger
Pankaj Mishra’s book (Amazon | Bookshop.org) puts our current moment of meta-crisis and rising fascism into a historical and philosophical context that I found deeply clarifying. He uses Voltaire and Rousseau as stand-ins for two contrasting schools of thought (Enlightenment, Romanticism) about how society should function and how humans should function in society.
Using examples from throughout modern history, he examines the logical extremes of each—secular and commercial striving for wealth and power versus spiritual or at least a more internal questing for meaning and purpose as the route to a certain kind of freedom—and shows how extremes of the former lead to massive disparities across every metric of human wellbeing, and then to mass-disillusionment with the status quo (ressentiment), and finally to toxic forms of the latter: i.e. violent and otherwise misguided attempts to achieve something deep, authentic, and meaningful as a corrective.
For a taste, here is Mishra’s keynote on the subject at the Hannah Arendt Center:
The American dream is a nightmare
Over at her wonderful newsletter,
, Lyz interviews Molly McGhee, whose debut novel sounds amazing (available for preorder). Their conversation is chock full of insights that made me pause in the state of mild awe that always comes from meeting my own thoughts outside of myself, and thereby discovering (or maybe rediscovering) them within myself. Here’s one:…I realized, that is what literature is for, and that what I loved was actually the literary experience. Because the literary experience is the opposite of preaching. It is giving you the privacy to sit with a very big idea and to spiritually and emotionally comprehend it. You do not have to have an answer.
Literature is never asking you to have an answer. Literature is just asking you to sit in it and observe it. And to me, that is so powerful because none of us have answers ever. We just have things that are like attempts. We just try to fix things to the best of our ability.
The Future is Cancelled
I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole in the last week or so with this idea that culture has stopped or the future is cancelled. It started when I saw this piece in the New York Times: Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill. It’s worth reading, although I disagreed with the author’s thesis. Or, I suppose it’s more accurate to say it felt more like a description of the state of culture than an attempt to explain anything, so I don’t think he answered the question posed in the headline.
In my state of dissatisfaction with the NYT piece, I recalled something in the same vein that I’d read a few years ago, and which I remembered as doing a better job with the premise. What I couldn’t remember was the title or the author, so I searched for “the end of culture.” This didn’t lead me to what I was looking for, but I did discover that culture had previously ended in 1969, again in 1985, and once again in 2015.
I do think there’s something to the idea that culture is frozen right now in a state of pastiche and nostalgia that’s different from what these earlier essays describe (all are worth reading, if you want to join me in this rabbit hole). Whereas artists of the 20th century were driven to experiment, and culture (or the cultural zeitgeist) was the ever-changing product of whichever artistic experiments happened to catch fire, now our songs, movies, books, et cetera are audience-tested and vetted by algorithms. It’s machines that now dictate what “catches fire,” and artists are now referred to as “content creators.” It’s a contemporary iteration of the patronage system of several centuries ago, this time with tech platforms as the patrons.
Eventually I did figure out that the person whose work I encountered a few years ago was Mark Fisher, whose most notable book is Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Bookshop.org | Amazon). Here is a passage:
When after 1989, capitalism lost its visible antagonists, in the Soviet Empire, capitalism didn’t have to defend itself as such. It just became the horizon of the imaginable. It doesn’t have to be named anymore, it’s all the more powerful because it’s not named…
what counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly… over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.
Separately, Fisher wrote about what he called “the slow cancellation of the future” (apparently borrowing this phrase from Italian philosopher, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi). Here is how Mark Fisher’s summarizes the idea in his essay, subsequently collected in Ghosts of My Life (Bookshop.org | Amazon):
The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed.
Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
Unlike Farago in the NYT piece, I think Fisher offers a deeply thoughtful and satisfying set of reasons why culture is at a standstill. I won’t do his work justice here, so I am simply recommending it.
The 'Enshittification' of TikTok
Cory Doctorow offers one of his clear-eyed takes about something that’s broken in the world. This time it is about why and how so many products we like end up becoming shitty. His focus is internet platforms, but I think his thesis applies much more broadly.
…what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform's priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.
The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.
The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers—as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.
Depersonalization, derealization, and psychedelics
I don’t talk much about my work with psychedelics, particularly ayahuasca, but I really like how this piece from
/ Jules Evans explores hard-to-describe experiences of feeling disconnected from oneself or from the world that can persist after a psychedelic journey or even from a meditation practice.For me, this experience mostly feels like validation that the work is…working. As a result of this spiritual work, for example, I am increasingly able to notice strong feelings in myself without letting those feelings overtake me. I’m increasingly able to handle the strong feelings of other people without reacting or taking them personally or feeling any compulsion to mitigate them. But sometimes this same capacity makes me feel uncomfortably distant from my fellow humans in action, almost as if Richard Attenborough could be narrating it:
The Vaster Wilds
I’ll end with the latest novel by Lauren Groff (Bookshop.org | Amazon), who might be my favorite author of the last few years. The protagonist of this latest novel is referred to simply as “the girl.” She is part of a small group of settlers in early colonial America, and the book tells the story of her flight from the settlement and her fight to survive the brutal conditions of winter in the wilderness. Larger questions in the book explore male and female power disparities, and contrasts between European settlers’ notions of society and the sacred versus intuitive and perhaps indigenous notions of the same.