The scene in the car caught everyone’s attention. The president swearing, arms lunged at the steering wheel, his mind bent on personally landing at the Capitol to greet his gathering mob. Like many of the most unforgettable anecdotes of history, it may be false. Real time apocrypha. 

This doesn’t matter.

Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified on Tuesday for two hours before the House Committee about the growing apprehension in the Trump orbit during the days leading up to Jan. 6. 

Details of her account have been immediately put into question, particularly the memorable SUV action scene. More telling are the details that so far remain unchallenged.

Wheel lunging or no, Trump and his confidants knew about the coming storm. They’d been warned by the secret service. They knew things might get ugly (or even worse, that they might be legally liable for it!). Some appeared indifferent, others (Guiliani, per Hutchinson) were practically exuberant.

According to Hutchinson, when Trump learned, ahead of his grand speech on Jan. 6, that his followers are being kept outside the arena for refusing to surrender their arms (on offer was the full gamut between AR15s and flagpoles sharpened into spears), the president allegedly barked at his team to remove the magnetometers and allow the crowd to flow in. “They’re not here to hurt me,” Hutchinson recalled Trump saying.

Twitter can argue whether or not this apparent willingness to skirt security protocols on a hyper-tense day that began with a rousing populist speech and concluded with a fevered, vengeful march on the nation’s legislature should be considered an act of incitement. At a minimum it speaks to Trump’s ghoulish disregard for peace, his contempt for the duties of his office, and his apathetic shrug in the face of even the most basic social responsibilities. If there’d been news about burglaries in the neighborhood and one of your housemates left the door unlocked, you’d scold the hell out of them, even if nothing ended up getting stolen. If a CEO knowingly ignored a potentially catastrophic flaw in his company’s product, he could get sued. What should we make of a United States president whose primary criterion for de-escalation is whether the bloodlust is directed at him?

But seriously, we know enough about how Trump sees the world not to be surprised. In the midst of the riot – in those rare moments during which even Republican lawmakers had had enough, and the crack of their spine temporarily straightening into place was heard across the country – Trump posted a video where he kindly asked the rioters to go home, but not without emphasizing just how much he loves them. There’s no sign that Trump was perturbed by the riot, but there are many indicating that he was in fact pleased.

So far, nobody seems to challenge this tick-tock of cruel presidential indifference. The current meme of Trumpworld twitter and Truth Social is a virtual Zapruder film analysis of the would-be-car-jacking story, tirelessly scrutinizing the plausibility of Trump grabbing anyone by the clavicles.

They will spend days sharing and debating diagrams of the car, applauding whenever testimonies emerge that contradict Hutinchon’s account of the incident. What they won’t do is say a word about the rest of her testimony. For them, Trump turning a blind eye to warnings about security risks isn’t news (not as much as Hutchinson misnaming the vehicle Trump was in!).

And this to me is the horror of the moment. Among a certain faction of the right there’s an unremitting commitment to raise any possible excuse that might obfuscate the plain and obvious truth: Trump didn’t care. This habit scares me more than Trump as president ever could, because what it seems to imply is that for a large and noisy group of people, even the specter of political violence isn’t enough to dull their partisan blades. Even this grotesque display of what at minimum looks like a president sanctioning – if not fueling – mob justice doesn’t seem to inspire much grace.

In fact, the equivocators have become the mirror image of what many of them claim to hate most: the left’s mob apologists who back in 2020 would strain facts and bend the meaning of words in order to ignore or exonerate violence. 

If you find yourself overcome with melancholy by the end of the American experiment, here’s the reason. It’s not about a president, high on power and pathologically incapable of admitting defeat, trying to steal an election. Nor is it about the few hundred tacky, maniacal superfans who had swarmed the Capitol only to successfully defecate inside lawmakers’ private chambers. Nor, for that matter, is it about the mobs of justice LARPers who had used the cover of a pandemic and racial injustice to loot and vandalize their neighborhoods senselessly and indiscriminately.

It’s about how, by all of these accounts, the illiberal wings of American politics are practically admitting that fomenting political violence and excusing cruelty towards fellow citizens no longer deserve condemnation – as long as it’s done under the right banner.

As a sci-fi skeptic, I keep wondering if I’m even remotely the audience Babylon 5 was intended for. But having been roped in by an ardent fan to watch the whole series, I feel legitimized in my right to kibbitz. I’ll be updating this post with unimportant musings as I make my progress.

S2.E19. First and foremost: is it only me, or is Sheridan written like a Michael Scott character, but directed and acted as if he’s Captain Kirk with a touch of Galactic Jesus? By now it should be clear to all that the square-jawed, Ken-doll captain run on cringe fuel and misplaced self-righteousness, yet somehow enjoys the adulation and loyalty of every member of every race he meets. If I could change only one thing about the show, I’d add Jim Halpert-like reaction shots every time Sheridan speaks, keeping the dialogue as is.

Meanwhile, the arc of Londo’s descent — his vitiation both by his power thirst and the gravitational pull of great events — is almost too good and too multidimensional for this show.

More to come.

The year ends in holiday and with that holiday travel. In the USA, we call holidays vacation. The idea is to vacate the regular toiling of things, to find some rest.  

This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite essays of Aldous Huxley, lost somewhere within one of the 6 volume sets squeezed into the dusty, crowded shelves of my apartment. I can’t even recall the name of it and keep discovering new essays every time I try to find it.

In this lost-out-there-somewhere-essay, Huxley writes about the paradox of travel. He begins by discussing the challenge of selecting ideal travel reading. After critiquing romance, thrillers, classic novels, and fashion magazines, Huxley ardently (albeit satirically) argues that the ideal book to pack on a holiday trek is an encyclopedia. He unearths the etymological links of the word travel to travail, suggesting that there is a weight and burden to traveling; our trips ought to be more about getting lost and discovering something hard fought. The essay highlights the modern contradiction: trips planned down to the very detail. There is no getting lost. There is no surprise. There is no discovery. There are just prepackaged outlines for each site, meal, performance, and road map. 

I was thinking of some of this just before I left New York City the other day for Ireland. I almost didn’t go. With all the bad news about Covid’s global Omicron assault, I began to fear getting stuck trying to come back home. I was just about to cancel all my plans during a Facetime call with my friend Declan, who had invited me to spend the season with him and his family in Westport in County Mayo. We had planned this trip months ago. But now… Declan Irish-joked that if I got a positive test result, I could just cross out the word positive and write in the word negative. 

And with that magical flicker of fantasy and relief, I plunged into the heavy travails of journeying. 

I was not really burdened about Covid. I was also very much thinking (or perhaps more so feeling) the stinging disappointment with my past year. The problem here was that 2021 was for me too good for its own good. I had made and stuck to so many of my ascetic goals and challenging plans this year that I am now unable to deceive myself, as Americans do, that it is only a lack of more accomplishment that ails us. After a year of cold showers, shirtless winter running, healthy eating, and reading all of Proust, I’m still left with the aching deep existential feeling of being lost. 

I do not mean lost in the sense of trying to find the Fountain of Trevi after taking a few wrong turns. I mean it in the Huxleyan sense: abutted against a kind of rut out of which only more ruts ensue.

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The trip. Vacationing. 

But vacating what? The luggage alone proves our paradox.

My version of the Huxleyan critique would aim at how much we pack on vacation rather than what books we choose to take. 

So, here I am at JFK airport, exactly 5 hours before my flight, standing on an impossibly long queue leading to the official check in procedure – that culminates in the act of releasing our ridiculously heavy and over-packed suitcases that are in fact too large or too much anyway to just carry onto the plane, but will be placed underneath the plane, to go with us wherever we go. And what about that madness of standing in a daze at that end of the flight huddled around that random redistribution of our non-vacation vacation baggage? 

No, if it were a true vacation, we would get on planes with no bags at all. That’s right, nothing. Maybe just a paper bag with toothpaste and dental floss. Wallet. Passport. Smartphone. That’s it. A true vacation needs no deodorant, creams, change of clothes. Who needs to shower? We’re leaving society, the rut, the struggle for an escape — off to get lost to get found again.   

The line moved very slowly. I was early and plenty distracted and entertained by the repeated flow of passing the same people until they became almost finished characters in a yet-to-be-written novel. I was in love with the redhead guy wearing the University of Georgia hoody. There was a man just up ahead who kept sneezing. In all of this crowd, there did not seem to be anyone who was talking too loudly except for one, about whom I happily thought, “Well, if you must speak too loudly, it may as well be in French.”  

The Dutch woman heading to her family in The Netherlands directly in front of me was saddled down with all the weight of the world. She was there all alone with her baby in his stroller, an enormous car seat strapped to her back, and two large suitcases on wheels, with an extra backpack yet dangling from one of the shoulders already crushed by the straps of the baby supplies. Once the child started screaming and crying, I offered to push the stroller if and whilst the mum preferred to hold the child. She agreed and I pushed. 

Another gentleman insisted that she had the right to skip this long line. The woman agreed. I agreed too. The airport worker who seemed stunned by the question did not agree. The lone mother and that baby and all their formidable baggage had to keep snaking around like everyone else.

By now, an hour had passed since I said farewell to my Uber driver, who is originally from Ghana. I enjoyed my long commute to the airport. The driver, at one point, called me wise, I think, because I made some statement about how having too much good in society weakens our ability to handle the bad. We talked about Ghana. In the traffic right next to our car, I saw a Nigerian driver, I presumed because of the Nigerian flag dangling from the rear-view mirror. I told my driver about this and how I have traces of both countries in my bloodline found from my Ancestry.com DNA test. I said, “I think I’m going to take these results to Nigeria to see if I can claim some ancestral land. Surely I should be able to recover 19% of homeland entitlements.” 

He laughed and agreed that for that I’d be lucky to even get a room.  

Travel as trip. Trip as travel. I was thinking about Michael Pollen’s book, How to Change Your Mind, in which he recalls the vernacular depiction of psychedelic hallucinations as tripping.  Foreign travel to me has always felt like hallucination – being forced into child-like wonder and radically shifted consciousness. I like that part of traveling. 

I recall something my friend Theodore A. Tripp, III said back when we both were teenagers in college in the late 1980s. I had been scolding him because he did not seem to be taking life seriously enough. I said that he needed to be more realistic, to stop being such an idealist. 

“What!” he shouted. “Thank God I am an idealist! ” 

He then began to enumerate all the unbearable facts of life against which his idealism or fantasies served masterfully to block. 

This was stunning. It came to me on this trip.  

There is a euphoria that envelopes me when I travel abroad, and no place like my trips over the decades to Ireland. I like to attribute this to my need for connection and the deep ache for love that highly communal cultures gratify. But it is way more than that. It is like Ted Tripp’s doctrine of ideals. Travel is for me a fantastical contemplation of the unabsorbable oceans of reality. It is a dry and high perch from which to watch it, feel it, reshape it. 

I am too old and perhaps now also too wise in the Ghanaian sense of the word to think travel can ever really be an escape. There is no escape! 

So, I pack a little bit of reality within both checked and unchecked bags. I roll it over between the priceless conversations brought about in happenstance. Like Thomas Arnold who sat next to me during the flight from New York To Dublin. The joy of meeting him – learning his life and story and girlfriend and quirks and strong and rapid mind and wit and kindness, his worries and trauma and the bright glimpse of future and promise, not to mention his deep interest and capacity to grant the same to me – made the whole of the trip complete before it started. 

It is for this kind of thing that I travel. But not only that. It seems a little easier to fathom a pending threat to Roe V Wade over a Guinness sipped foamily under the fomenting clouds of County Mayo. Easier to suppress my nagging doubts — that my world travels are frivolous acts of whimsy and privilege — and accept them for what they truly are: acts of freedom to be savored and seized for those who, like my perpetually incarcerated little brother, cannot. Easier to feel that with so much bad, there is still good. And with so much good there is still bad. 

I have not yet stopped smiling here on my Irish Christmas holiday in Westport. I think the cliffs here might even rival Moher. 

I did not pack an encyclopedia on this trip. But bundled dustily and now tossed to the side of our many impromptu excursions and family meetups are Batya Unga-Sargon’s Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. 

The Mountain is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery, by Brianna West

The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, by Carlo Collodi

The Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris 

And one of my many wonderful Christmas presents from Declan is a book called, A Poem for Every Night of the Year, edited by Allie Esiri. 

The new year approaches where the old one ends, between which many stunning cliffs and roadways wander. Pointing out across the sea toward the blinding Sunset, which darkened Keem Bay behind and beneath us, Declan grinned with the delight of sharing “his mountain,” as he called it. 

He then said, “That’s America that way.” 

I said, “Is it?”

For the most part, clichés conceal reality, either by euphemism or by being so overused that their meaning becomes foggy and imprecise. Paying attention whenever they leak into an argument or a piece of writing is worthwhile not only for the sake of stylistic polish but to ensure the clarity of the ideas being conveyed. An over-reliance on clichés suggests a lack of scrutiny and self-reflection, that ideas that are both unoriginal and unexamined are being shuffled into the discussion. Sometimes, during exceptionally unfortunate conversations (or a typical Twitter thread), clichés might be passed off as original, newly-discovered truisms to be then promulgated with all the bashless cockiness of a college student who’d recently read Ayn Rand or Howard Zinn for the first time.

But clichés can also be revealing: what they conceal tells us as much about the applier of the clichés as it does about the society that had produced them.

The sheer amount of euphemisms we have for death and sex is a story onto itself. So is the profusion of hackneyed phrases celebrating (sometimes contradictory) aspects of our social status quo. This is a free country and everyone is entitled to their opinions, for example, are simplistic but powerful heuristics that shore up that old and defiantly American commitment to protect open discord. Shouting fire in a crowded theater, in contrast, belongs to the countervailing attitude, equally American in its ignobility, that always seeks to narrowly circumscribe and eventually curtail difference of opinion.

With time, as the battle lines of our culture wars move back and forth, we see an accretion of such phrases, indicating that a different set of ideas had been introduced into our bloodstream and has already ossified: facts don’t care about your feelings, silence is violence, he’s gonna run this country like a business… Beware any interlocutor who lets clichés flow through them too freely. At worst, they’re trying to sell you something (or sell you on someone). At best, they’re not fully attending the fine print of their own arguments, like someone typing on their phones while talking to you. We’d have a more interesting culture war if we all showed a little less tolerance to this.

But the thing that made me think of clichés is freedom. For a full hour today I had convinced myself that America’s international volunteer nation-building force is called the Freedom Corps instead of the Peace Corps. My confusion is easy enough to explain (besides faulting my risible brain), as both freedom and peace appear prominently in the English vocabulary of opaque political feel-goodies, words that evoke this fuzzy feeling of vague righteousness and yummy patriotism. Add equality (or fairness) and we’ve got us the ultimate trio of nebulous political promises.

But here again, the clichés tell us something. Not for nothing do politicians and moral perorators make ample use of this trifecta; it’s a triangle of goods that we expect governments to provide or protect, and it’s been the same since long before we had a word for politics.1 We want a society that’s governed by order, one that’s safe, peaceful, and predictable. We want to feel unobstructed in our pursuits, to move and act according to our moods and passions. And we want to feel that we aren’t left out, that we have enough and that nobody is taking advantage of us (sociologists like Jonathan Haidt even suggest that we have an evolutionary distaste to witnessing extreme inequality, regardless of where we personally fall in it).

But of course like the tacky corporate triangle of management, you can’t have all three. Maintaining the peace comes at the expense of your freedom, as does an assurance of equality (of any kind). Enforce too radical an equality or give the radical liberty of anarcho-capitalists a chance and see just how much order and peace will ensue.

We all want all three, but not under the same terms. One way we overcome these ideas’ irreconcilability is by exploiting their convenient imprecision. Whose freedom? How much equality? What kind of peace? And who gets to decide? A politician or a bumper sticker (or lauded authors that write like both) can promise equity and liberty while trusting the scared, needy, wishful part of our brain to fill in the blanks. Surely freedom extends to me brandishing my assault rifle in public while coughing in people’s faces and stealing medical equipment, but not to you kneeling during the anthem or making fun of me. Surely equality means my right to take stuff from people who have more than me, even if it means looting small businesses (it always ends with larceny, doesn’t it?). Surely peace refers to me being able to prevent you from doing that thing you do that I hate.

Not all the ways in which these trade-offs play are as grotesque, of course. We set ourselves completely different rules of conduct for the many spheres of life: home, work, public square, Rammstein concerts… a change of venue lets us recast our principles with different valence. It also lets us empower different authorities to police these values. Peace is the only thing that government should enforce, says the libertarian, leaving fairness to be negotiated on the level of social norms and personal charity. Whereas a police abolitionist sees fairness as the primary concern of the political sphere, while counting peace and freedom as merely the fortunate byproduct of a fair society.

And when that’s not enough, we carve out exceptions. Just ask the Moral Majority’s hangers-on what they think about family values in the age of Trump, or the propitiators of equity for their thoughts on Harvard’s decades-old policy of rejecting Asian American applicants in the name of diversity.

Clichés are the shortcuts of thought. As anyone will attest who had the misfortune of spending time with me as I languorously strain to find the right word, these shortcuts can be a blessing. But considering how they fog up our political (to say nothing of moral) dials, I think it’s ok if we take a couple more seconds before speaking.

Modern Western lore offers exhaustive, competing definitions for Liberty, famously catalogued by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin into two camps: the negativists, who defined freedom as the absence of obstacles, and the positivists, who took freedom to mean an affirmation of one’s autonomy. On Team 1 you’ll find, Hobbs, Locke and practically all our Founding Fathers; on the other (less Anglo-Saxon) side, Kant and Rousseau.

But the one concept of Freedom distinguished by having annoyed and unnerved virtually all its contemporaries is that of Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza grew up in 17th-century Amsterdam, the glistening, bustling nerve-center of European trade. Around him, the world was in rapid flux and growing dense with contradictions. His were the days of big new ideas, between Galileo and Newton, between Descartes and Leibniz, when a new appetite for inquiry was seizing European scholars, along with an almost gleeful willingness to doubt the hitherto unchallenged.

By contrast, Spinoza was raised in a traditional, close-knit community of Sephardic Jews, where he trained, in what must be one of history’s most generous metaphors, as a lens grinder. The Jews of Amsterdam lived under the strained protection of the Calvinist authorities; they were allowed to thrive, so long as they never forgot their subordinate place. For neither the first nor last time in history, a status-quo of mutual convenience, founded on economic confluence and religious orthodoxy, kept the Jews safe. Dissidence, therefore, terrified the Jewish community, who watched, unsettled, as a fervor of new ideas, along with exotic goods and exquisite art, flooded Amsterdam’s ports.

To the community’s dread, the young Baruch breathed in deep the revolutionary air. He observed how new methods of thinking allowed nations to develop new technologies, and scholars to make successful, real-world predictions. He saw a world of shrinking mysteries, in which the new sciences were filling gaps of ignorance nobody had even realized existed.

Getting at the truth, Spinoza thought, was a matter of using the right methodology — and sticking to it, no matter where it leads. All that’s radical in Spinoza’s work stems from this simple, scientific commitment: Let inquiry form my idea of reality, not the other way around.

Spinoza’s masterwork, Ethica, reads like Euclid’s Elements, building up a tower of grand principles from a humble foundation of a few, easily granted, axioms. Euclid used the method to explicate geometrical shapes and relations. Spinoza used it to explain God.

He must have been aware, even before completing Ethica, of what awaited him at the end of the road. The picture that started emerging from his metaphysics was of a world locked by rigid and sparse laws; a mechanical world with room for nothing but the inevitable. Surely it must have dawned on Spinoza early on that many ideas widely held sacred, like a Creator God or humanity’s freedom of choice, would have no place in his description of reality. Other radical thinkers in Spinoza’s position, realizing their work could undermine the public’s stubbornest beliefs (not to mention their own), have found ways (wittingly or not) to bend their ideas just enough to make them compatible with, well, common sense. Descartes fudged his method of radical doubt (which heavily inspired Spinoza) by cramming in an overseeing, omnific Deity - a total deus ex machina. Later thinkers, more ready to accept the notion of a mechanistic reality, struggled to accept the possibility of purposelessness and so imagined a Watchmaker God, who, if not concerned with the fate of His creation, was at least responsible for winding it up, setting a direction to history. Even God-skeptics exalted Man’s volition, holding freedom of choice as an undeniable fact of physics, and an end in itself.

But not Spinoza. He was prepared to face the full implications of his work.

Everything, according to Ethica, is part of one substance, to which belong all attributes and possibilities. Spinoza calls this whole, almost provocatively, “God.” God is whole in the fullest sense of the word. He is “infinite,” containing all that is and all that could be. This may sound like a capricious universe, where anything can happen and the sun just might vanish at any moment. But it’s exactly the opposite. According to Spinoza, only a world tightly governed by regularity — a world with order its sovereign, where outcomes are as inescapable as the results of a mathematical equation — can be coherently considered infinite. If you think about it, a truly chaotic world, wherein events occur and terminate randomly, actually contradicts the idea of “infinite possibility.” For Spinoza, this meant three things: that only a world logically ordered can be considered “infinite,” that only one such world can exist, and, alas, that it does and we all live in it.

There was enough heresy in Spinoza’s uncompromising model to vex Jews and Christians, but also to upset the fashionable humanists of his day. Just when Liberty was finally beginning to get taken as a natural, human right, Spinoza was irksomely balking at the very possibility of free choice.

As by now you must have guessed, Spinoza viewed a world of free choices as anything but free. Such a world, he argued, would be tyrannized by arbitrariness or, at best, probability. Quite comfortably then, Spinoza’s strictly-causal philosophy does away with both corporal and divine “freedom of will.” It eliminates the vagaries of personal choice, and, unlike Calvinist predestination, offers nothing in exchange — no path charted by supreme authority, no end goal, no purpose. But Spinoza went even further. He argued that getting rid of this “confused idea” of free will is itself the key to achieving real freedom. To Spinoza, true freedom is freedom from misconceptions and muddled ideas, imagined by the prejudices of mind and society. By disabusing yourself of them, you can at last understand and accept life for what it really is: one inexorable and indifferent whole, and nothing more. Only once you can intuit your own incompleteness as part of this whole — are you really free.

There’s another counterintuitive perk in Spinoza’s freedom: Quite the opposite of eliminating individuality, it, in its own way, reaffirms it. We each are nothing but the story that composes us.

We are the totality of our actions, those we did and those we will do. It’s precisely because what we consider to be our choices are in fact part of a deterministic sequence of events, precisely because we will have always followed the same story, that we can consider ourselves discrete individuals. We aren’t aimless bodies thrown around by arbitrary choices, nor are we subject to the whim (or, for that matter, design) of a celestial despot. We are instead each a distinct, unchanging story; if we were anything else, we wouldn’t have been ourselves. As a favorite Hebrew nursery rhyme goes: My hat has three corners; if it didn’t have three corners, it would not have been my hat.

***

The Jewish community ostracized Spinoza in 1656, when he was only 23. In addition to being deeply affronted by his ideas, the congregation feared that Dutch authorities might seize on Spinoza’s heterodoxy as an excuse to terrorize the Jews. Before the writ of excommunication — the cherem — was issued, Spinoza had several opportunities to recant his heresy. He refused, fully aware this meant he would forever be banished from both his community and city.

For the remainder of his short life, Spinoza would unironically insist that his ideas weren’t only patently true (“I don’t think that I found the best philosophy, I know that I found the true philosophy”), but also entirely orthodox (after all, all Spinoza did was to follow more traditional methods to their logical conclusion). This could easily be dismissed as provocative recalcitrance against the community that disowned him, but I see in it something much deeper.

Rather than lead its readers to nihilistic despair, Spinoza intended his work to serve as a guide for the ethical life. Despite all the fatalism in his philosophy, Spinoza was a man of action, of world correction, of justice. He lived his life a staunch defender of civic freedoms and strident advocate of democracy. His theory posited that good and evil are utterly meaningless concepts (for there’s no authority to judge nor a freedom to choose), yet it did absolutely nothing in the way of moderating his political activism.

And there it is — the taste of cognitive dissonance. Holding on to two contradictory ideas at the same time is a beautifully human feat, and one, in my opinion, too often maligned (indeed, social psychologist Leon Festinger originally coined the term to explain the roots of anxiety). For all its bad rep, cognitive dissonance is a marvelous capacity. It gets us through life’s incomprehensibilities, allowing us to accept, even embrace, the absurd. It’s what makes it possible to bear a happy moment while being fully aware of its fugacity. It also serves us an humbling by showing that contradictions may, after all, coexist; it doesn’t even matter whether the flaw is in the ideas themselves, in our own facility for Reason, or even in our very understanding of what a contradiction really is: All the same, the very fact of dissonance exposes our fallibility in truth-telling.

Dissonance is the toughest — and most beautiful — freedom Spinoza, perhaps unintentionally, invokes. To be free is to accept a deterministic world, to concede to life its cruel, cold inevitability and yet to call out its injustices with unadulterated rage. It’s all we can do, to swallow the hopelessness of the fight, and fight it with undimmed defiance.

And what can be more liberating than that?

What’s the feeling you get immediately after finishing a novel? Is it disorientation, as you snap back to reality from the twilight? Is it wistfulness for having to part from characters you’ve grown to care about?

With the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, I find myself returning to another feeling and it’s guilt.

Be warned: there be spoilers in them waters. Please stop and read Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun, and A Village After Back, if you haven’t already. You can thank me after.

Ishiguro’s stories tempt you with alternative worlds, spectrally similar to ours but with a ghoulish twist of fantasy or science fiction. The dark facts of these worlds, however, are revealed to us only partially, through the constraints of first-person narration. Ishiguro fully understands the stipulation of a first-person contract: in exchange for emotional depth, a more direct connection, or even for the defiant joy of uncertainty, we, as readers, will give up our demand for a definitive account of events.

In Never Let Me Go, Kathy H. learns that she’s not only a clone but an organ incubator. The Britain of the novel, having apparently peeled off its Christian conscience and sentimental reservations, has launched a nationwide industry of clone farms, where replicated people are raised, tutored and socialized. They are treated almost like humans. Until, that is, their organs are needed to prolong the lives of others. Kathy learns about her doomed destiny at a young age. But to us, the horror and the injustice are mediated through Kathy’s selective attention — it’s not the ethics of organ farming with which she’s primarily concerned, but with her friend Ruth and her lover Tommy (and the love triangle that forms between them).

This leaves the details of Kathy’s world — the politics, public opinion, the science of cloning — something to be guessed at.1 Why should she, our narrator, fritter any more of her remaining time on contemplating political realities which, for the most part, she already takes for granted?2 We, the voyeurs to her thoughts, aren’t owed an exposition.

By the time she concludes her role as a carer — nursing her fellow clones, including Tommy, as their final life parts are extracted — and moves on to become a donor herself, we no longer care much about the politics either.

Klara, from Klara and the Sun, has a different problem: she’s an Artificial Friend. Part toy part valet, she’s been designed by the best (remaining) minds in a hyper-automated, post-labor America to offer comfort, guidance, and companionship to wealthy and increasingly-alienated adolescents. The cause of alienation — and of the need for AFs — is that to even have a hope at a career, kids must be lifted, that is, have their genes edited to enhance cognitive abilities. (Ishiguro deserves the Ministry of Truth award for euphemisms.) Once lifted, children undergo an extended period of physical weakness during which they remain homebound, educated exclusively by virtual tutors.

For Klara, the problem of perception is not simply that of a limited preoccupation, like Kathy, but of an alien model of reality. Klara, a robot with artificial general intelligence, perceives the world in boxes — literally. Her attention breaks down her surrounding into boxes of data — spatial, motional, sequential, emotional — and stores them up as Lockean “impressions,” memories from which deeper inferences can be drawn. A nondescript copse of grass might merit only one box, but the face of a family member flashing a complicated set of emotions might call for at least 8 boxes (6 of which to capture discrete eye movements).

Again, we rely on the account of a narrator whose grasp of reality is foreign to us, this time qualitatively, Thomas Nagel-y foreign.

Details about the civil unrest spreading through the country in response to monumental unemployment and irreducible inequality predictably recedes into the background of Klara’s attention — these have little consequence to her duty of tending to her human’s wellbeing. Less predictable are the conclusions Klara reaches using the data to which she does pay attention. Embodying the finest network of machine learning, Klara’s mind follows algorithms utterly opaque to her humans, even to her makers. But as readers we get to glimpse under the hood and watch, at times with exasperating frustration, as she follows her cold, imperturbable logic from one faulty conclusion to the next until from them all emerges a rigid, ecumenical system of beliefs and superstitions. By the end, the reader may find himself even wishing against his better sense that Klara’s fantastical suppositions turn out to be true.

Bad logic isn’t Klara’s only vulnerability. As part of her mission to placate the deity whose existence she had herself inferred, Klara decides to sacrifice a part of herself, leaving her irrevocably damaged. Her sensory faculties deteriorate. To her eyes, the world flattens into a two dimensional sketch populated by geometrical blocks, blotches of color and fleeting shapes. Later, the tissues connecting her memories wear thinner and thinner until one bit of recollection begins to show through the other, like diaphanous lines of fabric folded into each other.

Ishiguro’s characters exhibit the ease with which humans shed their humanity piece by piece. Kathy must cede her internal parts by law. Klara does so by her sense of duty. Both fulfill what they accept to be their purpose with infuriating stolidity. If for a brief chapter they contemplate rebelling against the coming darkness it’s only so that they can quickly dismiss the notion as absurd. Fatalism is ultimately taken in stride (if occasionally a staggered one). That their short lives are coming to an end — “completion” for Kathy, “the long fade” for Klara — layers their serenity with melancholy, but doesn’t cause disruption. The system for which they have both been sacrificed is no more reformable than the very order of life and its petulant brevity.

Then there’s Fletcher, who in A Village After Dark, one of the few short stories I consider unforgettable, returns to his old hamlet to discover that he doesn’t recognize a single face there. Like the other two, this story is often described as a post-apocalyptic dystopia but, for my own biases, I read it more as the distorted, demented impressions of a mind in decline. (Though I suppose to take the world of a schizophrenic literally must itself count as dystopian.) Fletcher is angry to find unfamiliar and potentially hostile faces in what he believes used to be his home. Are these the faces of survivors of a cataclysm squatting in his house or of Fletcher’s children and grandchildren, simply decathected from all memories and emotional bonds?

Epistemic flaws are both the device and the tragedy itself. Ishiguro sees the uncanniness of our common experience. It’s all artificial, all reproducible, all unremarkably ephemeral. But it’s also the point of everything, it’s all there is and it’s absolutely inimitable. It’s a valley and an abyss.

The story of a clone waiting to be harvested for parts or of a robot anticipating the winding down of its software or of an old man unable to find his home brings us to the edge of being human — and humanity is always liminal in Ishiguro. It reaches a zenith when we love so strongly that it drives us to make absurd and useless sacrifices, but also and just as much when we simply sit with friends to read poetry or listen to music, and then argue about poetry and music.3 Or perhaps the zenith is really at that cruel moment when finally we catch a clear glimpse at how stupidly easy it is to be blown into consciousness only to be just as easily swept out of it.

It’s at such cruel moments that we tend to leave our narrators, or soon after. In turning the last page, we leave them to their loneliness and long fading, and for whatever reason I just can’t help but feel guilty.

Last week the House GOP took a vote on whether to boot Liz Cheney from her leadership position on account of her electing to impeach Trump. They voted by secret ballot. Cheney won 145-61. Predictions by Trump toadies like Matt Gaetz that Cheney will be routed were shattered. But regarding those who ultimately rallied behind Cheney, as Jonah Goldberg said on The Dispatch Podcast last Friday: "It's a sign of how cheaply they hold their conscience when they only give voice to it in a secret ballot."

It reminded me of something that Jonah’s colleague (and a former guest on Uncertain Things) David French had alluded to before: the American right has a twisted concept of bravery. Think of the innumerable times Messrs. Cruz, Jordan, and Gaetz chest-thumped about taking “dangerous” and supposedly unpopular positions in recent years, touting their courage to stand up to big tech censorship and woke mobs. Pretending to be a lone Jeremiah risking everything to drop truth bombs in the middle of deadly, decadent, doomed Jerusalem has become a favorite posture of every right-leaning pundit, YouTuber, podcaster, and lawmaker trying to build an audience or a donor base. The truth of course is that much of it is little more than pandering. Real honesty is never popular, and real integrity rarely makes for a sustainable business model. But playing the would-be martyr does. Except that instead of being persecuted, arrested, or fed to lions, these modern-day prophets get book deals, lucrative TV contracts, and a monetizeable social media following. (What they don't get is any legislation done, but as Gaetz, Marjorie Greene et al have all but said, true statesmanship is about trolling the libs.)

The right’s rhetoric supplies not just heroes, but cowards: Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and the smattering of Republicans who voted to impeach have committed “craven betrayal” ; Mike Pence is a coward for not breaking his oath; Never Trumpers are lickspittle frauds desperate to be invited to The Swamp™’s cocktail parties. All those people risking their friendships, funding, and reputation to challenge their own team’s groupthink are spineless, lib-washed, martini-sniffing fifth columnists.

The projection at play is too on the nose to point out. After all, the extent to which many on the right seem to be above all else motivated by cultural resentment screams inferiority complex.

But when it came to actually voting on Cheney’s position, this conference of self-proclaimed intrepid truth-tellers called for a secret ballot, a veil of ignorance to keep their true beliefs — their judgment of what's right — hidden from their constituents.

Also bravely speaking out against big tech censorship is RT, the glowing face of Russia's international propaganda. If you haven’t been following RT on Twitter, give it a quick scroll. It won’t be a minute before you stumble across a couple (or a dozen) tweets lambasting Silicon Valley or liberal elites or Mainstream Media for their cancelling of this or that conservative voice1. Now, allow me my own Cruzian chest thump: hipster Millennial that I am, I’ve been criticizing the left’s variant of cancel culture before it was cool (yes, before it got saddled with this ugly moniker). But when RT brazenly playacts the free speech absolutist, I get queasy.

This week’s favorite was a rushing to condemn Twitter for banning the founder of Gateway Pundit, ground zero for delusional Trump worship with a touch of magical realism.

Without getting into the merits of Twitter’s decision (their banning policy has certainly been heavy-handed, incoherent, and stacked against the right, but regulation isn’t the solution), it tells you something that this is what gets RT’s knickers all bunched up. You know, it takes true daring to champion the freedom of journalists, as long as they’re not criticizing you. When not bemoaning the demise of free speech in America, RT is busy casting aspersions on anti-Kremlin activist Alexey Navalny and agitating for investigations against journalists and vloggers who support him. Stories about the poisoning of Russian opposition figures and journalists who went a little too hard on daddy get covered only in order to be shut down as “hoaxes.”

RT will bravely back Jim Holt, but won’t spare a breath for whistleblowers prosecuted by the Trump administration. Those were only mentioned to either discredit their claims or as a whataboutist-springboard to valorize previous whistleblowers who reported on the Obama administration.  In one absurd op-ed, RT argued that liberal media only cares about whistleblowers who spill the tea on Trump. What’s with these people and projection?2

I can go on for hours about the risk-free postures, moral vacuousness, and galling hypocrisy of these people. But what’s really important is to keep pushing through all the acrid sludge shooting out of this firehose and stay alive to what's really happening here: the warfare waged by the Republican conference and RT isn't and never has been about free speech, it's about boosting loyalists, slinging mud at MSM, and maybe making some money in the process.

One last thing3: just because Jim Jordan, Josh Hawley, and RT decry cancel culture, doesn't mean there's no there there. And pointing to the cynical scumbags who croak about it as proof that cancel culture is fake, is no less intellectually fraudulent and cheap than RT pretending to defend journalistic freedom.

I’ve been theorizing about the existence of this creature for a few weeks, but this weekend my suspicions were confirmed: my dear and deeply thoughtful friend Misha — black, gay, mental health professional, and liberal to the bone — came out (he called it his “second coming out party”) as a Trump voter. A voter, mind you, not a supporter.

He made his confession on our podcast Uncertain Things. Vanessa, my co-host, and I were a little stunned. (I was also a little thrilled, sensing the inevitable debate about to ensue.) Misha is a Baldwin-quoting, RBG-mourning lefty. What happened? The discussion was fascinating, and though V and I weren’t persuaded by Misha’s arguments, it was a pleasure to be able to have an open, raw, honest, and loving discussion about points of political contention, and perhaps even to discover the cracks in our own thought silos.

But persuasive or not, Misha’s decision reflected something real: a growing disaffection among the old liberal guard. (Interestingly, other commentators have been noticing it this week too.) I’ll try to summarize some of the themes that seem to emerge, and to which Democrats might want to pay closer attention.

For a fuller picture, I invite you to listen to the episode. (Fair warning though: we got a teensy bit drunker and more explicit than normal. Thus among friends.)

Listen to the full interview.

1. What is this about?

We’re talking about people in NY, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. People who voted blue for years (if not decades). What happened? Well, for the past five years (at least) they watched their own tribe growing intolerant, with the people they had taken for allies suddenly showing contempt for open expression, for freedom of thought, for intellectual honesty, and for undiscriminating compassion; contempt, in other words, for everything once considered the cornerstone of liberalism.

They see members of their own team, the good guys who had just recently fought hard for gay marriage and healthcare, who cared about the environment and sounded off against religious censorship, suddenly turning a blind eye to — if not excusing —political violence and larceny, condemning scientific rigor, and crying for the bowdlerizing and banning of forbidden texts.

And as some long-time liberals watch this bad remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with horror, they begin to realize that their position is a very lonely one indeed.

2. OK. But why Trump?

So what can disenchanted liberals do? Many have opted to reeducate themselves; like the conversos in 14th century Spain, they learned how to participate in the rituals, utter the right propitiations, and evade the Inquisition. Some do so in fear, while others have fully traversed the road to Damascus. But some have quietly grown resentful of their own team, of feeling forced to hide their beliefs among friends. For Misha, what can be a more strident strike against polite society, a more unthinkable taboo, than voting for Trump — not in support of the man or his party (he doesn’t need to be told what a cretin he is), but out of scorn for his own side? Conservative writer Rich Lowry called it "the only middle finger available."

3. What about policy?

This is where I disagreed most strongly with Misha. Wanting to protest the intolerance on the left — or “cancel culture,” or whatever you want to call it — is all well and good. But what about the actual policies that Trump will pursue in a second term? Restricting immigration, destroying environmental protections, reneging on international commitments, redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, killing the Affordable Care Act, and fomenting internecine partisanship and distrust in democracy… Not to mention Trump’s own brand of cancel culture: weakening the first amendment (by strengthening libel laws and inciting violence against the press), cracking down on whistleblowers, and calling for boycotts on businesses and individuals who criticize him.

Misha’s response is unsatisfying: sure, these are bad policies, he says, but ultimately they serve as a necessary counterweight to the illiberal left, while Trump’s own illiberal excess is kept in check by the constitution. (To the latter point I’d riposte: so far.)

It’s disturbing to me the degree to which voting has become a tool for emotional expression, for catharsis. In a saner, less online world, politics would be more separate from the culture war, two non-overlapping magisteria. Both deserve serious attention, but the country can do with a hell of a lot less crossover. You can only heal a sick culture by capturing people’s hearts and minds, not by voting in a goon to punch back.

(Though even on the purely cultural argument, I can’t see how Trump, a president who seems happy — if not proud — to represent only half the country, is a remedy.)

4. What does this mean for the election?

No clue. Misha doesn’t have one either. When I asked him if he’d have voted for Trump if he were living in Bucks County, PA, instead of Harlem he said yes. I’m not sure — in Bucks County he’d find a whole different kind of cultural dominance to push back against. Either way, it’s impossible to guess how many more secret Mishas there are around the country and whether they can tilt the election. But for democrats, the fact that a card-carrying progressive like Misha can find Trump less repellent than his own party, should be a clear and terrifying warning sign.

As the tendrils of tropical storm Laura blast my window with lightning and rainfall, the best an astrophobe such as myself can do is clutch tightly to his half-finished bottle of Ardberg (Uigeadail) and contemplate mortality.

But 6 years of living in the United States have taught me that looking directly into the abyss is uncouth. A sideways glance is preferred, either by means of metaphor or euphemism, or otherwise through a vicarious narrative. Thankfully, a dear and dearly acerbic friend recently bought me a copy of Cicero’s “How to Grow Old” (accompanied by Seneca’s collection “How to Die,” both as a birthday gift, of course), and after all, this is as good a time as any to brush up on Latin. Especially if this whole America thing is coming to a close.

Cicero was in his sixties when he wrote De Senectute (literally, “Of Old Age”), one year before he was assassinated on the orders of his student. An insatiable verbomaniac till the very end, Cicero wrote the text as a reprieve from the reality of his diminishing faculties, as well as from the political shadow engulfing Rome at the time. (Oh, I’ll come back to that.) He also hoped it might offer similar solace to his dear and dearly acerbic friend, Atticus, who was meanwhile harboring safely and luxuriously in a villa in Athens, and to whom the work is dedicated. 

Abiding by good manners, Cicero put his thoughts into the mouth of Cato the Censor, an eminent if ornery crusader of the Republic who had died a whole century before Cicero and is best known today for turning genocidal passions into a catchphrase. (“Carthaginem esse delendam” gets an obligatory nod from Cicero in the text; ignoring it completely would have been like writing a Sherlock Holmes fanfic without inserting a certain phrase which Conan Doyle had never written.) In the text, two young and would-be legendary statesmen approach the elder Cato with a question: How come “growing old never seems to be a burden to you”? Framing device established, Cicero-via-Cato begins to build his argument: only fools, he replies, are bothered by old age.

Sure, the body falls short of its past performance, but that is the way of nature. Pursuit of corporeal pleasures, once an overriding preoccupation, is now moot: the body no longer craves the way it used to, and when it does, there’s little it can do to sate itself, viagra still being a millennium away. (For the more lascivious of his fellow seniors he concedes that lust can still be appreciated “by looking at such pleasures from a distance.” To our imagination he left his exact meaning.) This is not a loss, Cato explains, for only absent these distractions is a man truly liberated: “No drunkenness, no indigestion, no sleepless nights!” At last he can find room in his mind for the true good life.

And the good life, according to Cicero’s Cato, is the life of the mind. Poring over tomes of Greek philosophy, letting the day go by while calculating eclipses and measuring the heavens, and participating in great feasts, not for the “gastronomic delights” they might supply but for the “pleasure of meeting and conversing with my friends” — I doubt I’d be out of step in adding arguing to the litany. That the mind, like the body, might also fail with age is dismissed as “a superstition,” and one which can anyway be circumvented by vigorous and regular exercise, mental as well as physical. Dotage is the mark of neglect, not of years.

Cato also recommends horticulture: literally, as a dependably satisfying hobby, but metaphorically too, as a vantage point from which man can better grasp his own ephemeral place in nature and assess the fluorescence of his life’s work. The joy in the latter is more than just spiritual, at least in ancient Rome. There, elders were venerated, even worshipped. Mos Maiorum was a belief in the supremacy of past generations, and it dominated the Roman mind. Heroic statues were meant to highlight the blemishes of age with sharp wrinkles and a hooked posture; the honorary seats in public events were reserved for the elderly; the Senate (literally: the elders) was the only political body with the power to overturn the decisions of elected officials. For a man who had lived life serving the Republic, ripe age promised accolades and reverence from a new generation.

And maybe this was even true in Cicero’s idealized Rome of centuries past when Cato was still hawking his diatribes before a bloodthirsty Senate. But Cicero was writing these words about graceful old age as old traditions were losing their grip. Gaius Julius Caesar didn’t just upend four centuries of Republicanism by inaugurating himself as dictator-for-life, he also marked the death of Mos Maiorum. The young and rakish authoritarian owed his ascent not to custom and deference to his elders, but to the ardor of the people. Vibrant virility and unkeepable promises won the public’s loyalty. Senators no longer received respect, but were instead expected to unctuously extol the unimpeachable young Caesar. The literally-old guard was allowed, with much gloating, to fall.

It’s impossible not to think that Cicero, a career lawyer, wrote “On Old Age” for the chance of persuading himself. He was an immigrant to Rome — a new man — and had an immigrant’s devotion to its ideals. His own success in climbing the social ladder, claiming even the honor of “consul” (the highest elected office), provided him unshakable proof that the Roman Dream was alive and well. Rome was opportunity. Rome was liberty. In Rome, a man (only a man, of course, and preferably one of means) was free to rise to the summit of the world, to reign over the greatest empire the Eastern Hemisphere had ever seen, and then after a year (the term of a consulship) to step down to allow the immemorial tradition to carry on as he basks at last in the honors of Roman retirement. 

This was always a nostalgic fantasy. Even before the dictatorship, Cicero’s advice wasn’t sought with the frequency he’d hoped for, nor were songs indited about his time in office. In what we can ascribe without a stretch to overcompensation and insecurity, Cicero spent his latter days reminding every guest at every dinner just how glorious his consulship was. “Not without good reason,” one surly friend noted, “but without end.” Old age was drawing on Cicero, but not the grace or dignity he had expected.

Even having Cato recite Stoic wisdom was fanciful. The old Republicans, and certainly Cato, had looked contemptuously at the Greeks and their philosophies. To them the Hellenic schools were too effeminate, indolent, and slavish. A true Roman was expected to crush enemy skulls underfoot, not ponder the cosmos. 

But reluctant to let history spoil a good scene, Cicero proffered to Atticus a version of history in which the old Censor did in fact, in the privacy of his later years, discover the wisdom of the Greeks. Who’s to say it didn’t happen? (Retconning is far from a recent invention.) This too is a sign of the orator’s attempt to cling to a chimerical past. Cicero was possessed by the school of Athnes. In temperament and ability, he was much more an effete Athenian, putting his trust in verbal virtuosity, than a Roman savage. He spent his life trying to square that circle. And though history did vindicate him — among the Romans still remembered are the three Stoics: Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius — by the 7th decade of his life Cicero was close to admitting defeat.

The Republic he had admired as an outsider was being swallowed by the ambitions of one man. In its final years as a Republic, Rome was upturned by riots, mob violence, and partisan rancor. Old age did not become the Eternal City. In its decay, Cicero had to recognize that the system of ideas and narratives that gave him meaning and direction in life and promised him dignity in old age was now dying out, if it had ever even existed.

The reaper in the room

Speaking of death, I should briefly bring up Cicero’s treatment of the subject. Fear of death is, his Cato states, the ultimate reason people dread old age, but this too is folly. “For death either completely destroys the human soul, in which case it is negligible, or takes the soul to a place where it can live forever, which makes it desirable. There is no third possibility.” It was still a few decades before the Catholic clergy would start sermonizing about Hell.

But one type of death does deserve the tears: the death of a child. While “when an old person dies, it is like a flame that diminishes gradually and flickers away of its own accord,” a young person dying is like “a fire extinguished by a deluge.”

“Death comes to the young with force,” he says.  

The year before, Cicero’s daughter Tullia died in childbirth. It was the end of the world for him. His fellow Romans, who had looked askance at him as he taught his daughter politics, philosophy, and art (all of which were the sole purview of men, of course), were utterly embarrassed to see him mourn her death so openly, so unabashedly. It was unseemly, even for someone of whom Livy wrote, “[he] bore none of his misfortunes like a man.”

“What reason is there,” one friend asked him in a letter, “that your domestic sorrow should affect you so sorely?” This was not, I believe, meant to be acidic as it might sound. The extent of Cicero’s grief was genuinely incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In earnest, the friend offered Cicero some Roman perspective: the glory of the Republic, the course of honors and ranks, Roman freedom — things that one must hold as “no less dear than a child” — are all gone. The tyranny of Caesar undid them all. The grand projects of mankind — the city, the Republic, the empire — are man’s only chance at immortality, and nothing, surely not the death of a young woman, can compare to the melancholy of seeing them dissolve.

“Almost all that life can give, she enjoyed,” he concludes, “and she left life when freedom died. How can you or she quarrel with Fortune on this account?”

This isn’t enough for Cicero. For all his desire to live up to the ideals of the Greek Stoics and the Roman elders, he fails at both. “My sorrow defeats all consolation,” Cicero writes in response to his friend. “And yet this thing hurts me — you will not be able to feel the same towards me; all you liked in me has gone.”

Tullia was his closest friend, his partner, “in whose conversations and sweet ways I put aside all cares and sorrows.” She was his comfort as the city to which he had devoted his life fell under despotism, and now she’s gone. “And so I stay away from home and forum alike, for neither public nor private life can any longer comfort the distress which each occasions me.”

“Do try to kill me properly”

Soon after Cicero sent “On Old Age” to Atticus, Julius Caesar was assassinated. The political stage was dominated by even younger would-be despots — Caesar’s lieutenants trying to divide the spoils. 

Cicero decided to give his romanticized Rome another chance. He applied his pen to traduce and denounce the usurpers. He took under his wing a young relative of Caesar, Gaius Octavius. He taught him politics, philosophy, and art. He would shape him into a true statesman. The kid grew to admire Cicero and even called him “father.” For once, Cicero bet on the right horse, because the kid would almost effortlessly vanquish his opponents and end up ruling Rome for half a century — but not before ordering the execution of anyone who might prove meddlesome to his rule, which of course included Cicero.

When the assassin caught up with him, Cicero had one final chance to live the ideals of which he always fell short. And for a change, he did. He offered his neck without a fight. His tongue and writing hand, the only weapons he had known how to wield, were displayed as trophies in Rome for his enemies to snicker at, not long before statues started popping up around the empire celebrating the young and handsome visage of his student.

His belief in the dignity of old age relied, like his more youthful political ambition, on the axioms of Rome as he imagined them. A city of contradictions, where the warriors and the thinkers ennoble each other, and every man has the freedom to scale the height of the world. Whether this story was real or strictly in his mind, it was good enough to keep telling even as lightning flashed and the Republican National Convention made a parody of a dream that for a fleeting moment in history had transfixed the whole world.

I’d like to write about my grandfather, but to pre-empt any potential accusation of over-sentimentality or naval-gazing, I’m about to sneakily sandwich the topic between pseudo-topical reflections on the word “privilege.”

One of the many unfortunate implications of living in a society that sets its watches to Twitter-time is that the meaning of phrases like “privilege” — or “cancel culture,” or “free speech,” or “social justice” — inflate and burn out with staggering speed. 

So let’s dial it back. Privilege is about “singling out.” Its Latin origin, privilegium, can be cleaved apart to “lex” and “privis”, loosely meaning “personal law”, that is, a piece of legislation tailored for the benefit of a single person. Fitting in with the political squalor of ancient Rome, the word carried a venal undertone, implying grubby senators brazenly splitting the spoils of the Commonwealth between their close friends and donors. This meaning fell out of use once Gaius Octavianus Caesar turned Rome into a Republic in name only. (You can’t be a corrupt lawmaker when only one person is allowed to make laws!) From that point on, privilegium meant not a law but a personal assignment by the Emperor. This could mean an outstanding right or duty. Being “chosen” isn’t always a blessing, as the subdued residents of the crumbling Judean province would have readily attested.

Royals in Middle Ages England took the practice further after the fall of the empire, granting privilegia to loyal warriors, through which long-term bonds between monarch and subject were forged. When knighthood fell out of fashion and trade boomed, the word was used to describe special freedoms enjoyed exclusively by certain professions. Religious minorities that were otherwise treated as second class citizens but were lucky enough to receive a “privilege charter” from a Christian sovereign were at least assured protection from casual pogroms (the original #jewishprivilege).

By the time the 20th century collapsed into world wars, the word had grown at once more abstract and more commonplace. A finely-coiffed, Upper West Side socialite might have clinked her glass of cava and announced, “it is my privilege to entertain such a cultivated audience for dinner, please enjoy these veal cutlets in beaujolais reduction,” while her philosophy-major son would have bitterly thought to himself, “privileged bourgeois pigs, your time will come.” Meanwhile in Moscow, where the time had indeed come, old members of the Communist Party were being forced to publicly confess and show remorse for their “privilege” before detailing how they all conspired to assassinate General Secretary Stalin.

From the 70s on, the word swerved away from materialism, as the orphans of Marx wrung it into its now familiar meaning: the psychological and social advantages gained through unelected and immutable attributes, like race or sexuality. “An invisible package of unearned assets,” in the words of Peggy McIntosh, the fairy godmother of ecumenical “privilege” tests.

But around the same time McIntosh was tidying up her PhD dissertation, John Rawls, working across the Quad, came up with what to me seems an even more radical understanding of “privilege.” In A Theory of Justice he did away entirely with “moral desert,” the intuition that anyone can claim to “deserve” in some deep, moral sense any of the rewards they reap through life. The wealth, prestige, and comforts one accumulates are just luck of the draw. It’s not just being born to the right race, gender, and parents that gives you an advantage: it’s also the very society you’re born into (a kid with a knack for numbers would be awfully privileged to grow up in California in the late 20th century, less so in Iceland in the 12th), the people you happen to cross paths with, and even the books you read. Your family and upbringing, your ability to concentrate or to persevere on a math puzzle or to practice an instrument day after day, they’re all unearned privileges. The smallest differences between people, even birth order or time spent watching TV as a kid, can end up delivering fortune to one person and leaving another destitute. (That’s, by the way, Gladwell’s real point in his overquoted “Outliers,” not the 10,000 hour mantra that sprouted from it.)

And then of course there are genes. The further along we get in studying behavior, psychology, and DNA, the further away we move from seeing nurture and environment as decisive factors in shaping a person. Some geneticists, like Robert Plomin, come very close to dismissing nurture altogether.

“Your personality, your mental health and illness, your cognitive abilities and disabilities,” the majority of a person’s “individuality” is accounted for by “inherited DNA differences,” according to Plomin.

Even if Plomin is correct (and understandably he has many critics), and DNA is the crucial determinant of the length of a person’s reach, material circumstances still decide what is available within this reach.

No matter how you slice it: Genes. Family. Society. Privilege is all of them.

The prattling pauper

In the category of noxious cliches, I’d rank “the personal is political” in the top five. But I did warn that this whole spiel was a ploy to get myself to write about my grandfather, so no walk-backsies.

I always considered growing up in his household — with my grandmother, mom, and uncle — to be an enormous privilege. We lived on the humble side, and the uncertainty of whether or not there’ll be a roof over our heads still haunts me today. But for the most part the scarcities of being born, as my mom puts it, “to the wrong percentile,” didn’t dominate our lives. These were filled instead with books and music, the constant company of good friends (marked by Talmudic arguments over instant coffee and an infinite supply of toast and butter), a constant feeling of being loved, and an insistence on finding value in tragedy. Despite everything we lacked and despite the many darker moments that would inevitably creep in, I never felt wanting.

But the world was different when my grandfather was born, in 1924. For the first 20 years of his life, the British occupiers of Palestine watched with English reticence and fecklessness as their subjects — two nationless people — slaughtered each other over a tiny, dry sliver of the Ottoman carcass. The British would rarely intervene, hoping the grisly affair would resolve itself. Neither Jews nor Arabs were privileged. In some ways, to be born in Jerusalem then was to be waiting, without knowing it, behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance.

Both my maternal grandparents were born to impoverished Jewish families with too many children and not enough food, in a city with no running water and no state to protect them against periodic massacres. Things weren’t looking much brighter even after the founding of Israel, as rule over the city was contested between the fledgling Jewish state and the Jordanian kingdom. To the persecutions and food shortages were now added routine blockades and occasional aerial attacks. College, of course, was out of the question.

But my grandfather was nevertheless lucky: he had an ear for language. The Yiddish at home, the Arabic of his neighbors, the Hebrew of the new-generation Zionists, and the English of the stolid patrol officers — he absorbed them all and made them his own. His fluency, combined with an innate, indiscriminate love of people, allowed him to make friends outside his tribe and above his station. It also unlocked for him libraries of thought, over which he’d pore in endless lucubration.

Being a polyglot (and polygluttonous) got him a job at the region’s biggest English language newspaper, The Jerusalem Post. Soon after, his managers sent him to study print in London. He returned to run the paper’s printing press himself. Convivial and garrulous, he joyfully parlayed between his fellow workers (Yids and Arabs), the Israeli distributors, and the Anglo bosses. He unwittingly became a class warrior. He took part in building the Israeli workers union and was even courted by the national Communist party, who urged him to run for office. He declined several times, explaining with his typical earnest-but-friendly verbosity that, alas, he can’t stomach the injustices required for winning in politics. A weak spleen can be a kind of privilege, too.

This tendency for verbal outpour he passed on to my mom. They exchanged books back and forth, blotting them with more margin notes in every transfer. They cluttered drawers and closets, to my grandmother’s dismay, with their correspondences with each other, which (as recent excavations through said closets and drawers confirmed) would go from criticism of poetry and philosophy to paternal exhortations (in one letter he told mom, who was about to join the Israeli army, how to maintain individuality in a setting of mandated conformity: “swim with the flow, without getting pushed around by the currents”).

It was this setting — emotional, intellectual — that inspired my mom to ace her English literature classes and get accepted  — with a full scholarship — at NYU. And there I’m born, giving me dual citizenship: one making me an ethnic minority in one of the wealthiest countries the world has ever known, the other granting me membership in a rising nation that by then had developed its own system of oppression and privilege (of which I’m on the “right” side). 

How many links in this chain were already determined behind the veil of ignorance? The British departure? The founding of a majoritarian Jewish state and the conquest of Jerusalem? The consequential love for literature that my grandfather would pass on to my mom? The twist of neurons in his cerebral cortex that settled this love in the first place?

Did this privilege already include the time bomb that, in his final years succumbing to Alzheimers, turned this love into a pandemonium? 

I also view it as a privilege, though of a darker kind, to have been with him in those days, and to have witnessed the cabinets of his mind, once so scrupulously sorted, begin to overflow into each other, as if a tornado had torn through. It wasn’t quite that he had lost his facility for language, but as if his Yiddish, Arabic, Hebrew, and English were now forming a new language, one that sounded meaningless, but was — as betrayed by the desperate sincerity in his glassy, silent, shouting eyes — trying helplessly to say something.

Is this, again, an inseparable part of the privilege package? Genes. Family. Society. No matter how you slice it.

Privilege for all

The most valuable throughline that connects the works of McIntosh and Rawls is the acknowledgment that society grants privileges, that this process is inevitable and often transparent, but not immutable. (The idea that society can evolve to reduce its structural inequities would have been a hard one to swallow for the ancient Hebrews who wrote the Talmud, which orders the devout Jewish man to begin his day by praising god for not making him a slave, or worse, a woman.)

But the understanding that, barring a Harrison Bergeron Handicapper-General solution, inequality can never be truly eradicated may generate pessimism. For Rawlsians the goal is instead to ensure that the work done by those at the top benefits those at the bottom. For some of McIntosh’s current torch-bearers (see: Robin DiAngelo), this pessimism leads rather to an inward, solipsistic, and almost Augustinian focus on perennial shame and repentance on the part of the privileged.

A thirst for social justice is almost by definition unquenchable, as the goals themselves shift along as society changes. But in the case of privilege it’s practically a doomed cause. The variables that piece together a single person are infinite and ultimately incommensurable, and dwelling on them too much could foster new resentments and prejudices, and ultimately despair.  

Tiffany Jana, the founder of TMI diversity consultancy firm, said in her widely-shared TedX that in her youth she had been so fixated (her word) on all the privileges she didn’t have — being a black woman who had suffered spousal abuse — that she failed to take advantage of the privileges she did have — being exposed, as an army brat, to different cultures and (yes) languages, for instance.

In contrast, Jana brings up Maggie L. Walker, a distant relative of hers, who defied the impossibility of social climbing as a black woman in Jim Crow Virginia and went on to charter a newspaper and a bank and even run a store, all almost 20 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Walker’s story doesn’t show that the weight of inequality is imaginary or even tolerable. But it does exhibit the most powerful way to combat it: by leaning on, rather than denying or condemning, every privilege within reach.

P.S.

If you’re in the mood for more dementia-related rumination, I recently finished making this short video in memory of Saba Ya’akov (whom, by the way, you can see on the cover photo of this newsletter, standing next so his wife, Rivka, and covered in his glorious long coat).

Because, well, 2020, I’ve found myself reaching for poetry lately. 

I’m not a poetry buff (I wish I were). Despite being an English major, and the daughter of a poetry enthusiast who can rattle off verses at will, I find poetry incredibly difficult. If you read it out loud to me, I have some sort of mental block that stops the words from landing into meaning. And so, with each poem I come across, I must read it, multiple times, underline or circle, look up a word or two, until I feel like I can grasp it. But, I think because I have to work so hard to unlock them, I get so much more out of them than prose. They make me feel and think deeply. And, at a time like now, when we’re all at sea, each poem feels like a little guiding life boat of introspection.

In college I took a course on Irish Literature that gave me the opportunity to grapple with the works of the great Irish poets. And, of all of them, W.B. Yeats stuck with me most. As did his — arguably — greatest work: “The Second Coming.” 

When I went back to it recently it was, indeed, as powerful as I remembered. And, when I briefly researched its origins — Yeats wrote it while his wife recovered from the deadly flu of 1918, in the aftermath of World War I, and in the beginnings of the Irish War of Independence — I realized why it felt more resonant to me than ever. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  

The darkness drops again; but now I know  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." That sounds like 2020 all right. And I, like a lot of us I'd wager, am anxious that the rough beast has already been born, that perhaps at this moment it's running the streets of New York City, and the end is nigh.

BUT — I don’t want to end this blogpost there. After all, if there is one thing we believe here at Uncertain, it’s that we mustn’t let ourselves wallow. And while poetry is excellent for deep reflection and inner awakening, I find prose better suited to inspiring forward motion.

And so, to re-invigorate myself (and you dear reader) with some cautious optimism for our collective future, I’d like to share a work of prose from a storyteller I admire: Oliver Sacks. Sacks died in 2015, and I'm not sure when exactly he wrote this, but I think it's more true now than then. Here's a short excerpt of the ending, but I encourage you to read the essay (which isn't long) in full. 

As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.

But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.

Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called “Our Final Hour,” subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—on Earth and Beyond.” More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Si’, ” a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology. Traditional wars have now been joined by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and, in some cases, the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.

These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.

— v

I don’t know why the murder of George Floyd was the tipping point, for me or my country. I don’t know why this, out of so many, was the incident that reached out through the computer screen and constricted my heart with its brutality.  But, I’m ashamed to admit, it was the first time I truly felt the ways in which I am complicit with a society that privileges some (myself included) at the cruel expense of others. 

And so, for the past few weeks, I have been in a state of remorseful reflection. I’ve been gathering and reading anti-racist resources shared by friends and colleagues. And the number one recommendation, the first stop on my journey — as it has been for many left-leaning folks it seems — has been reading Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist. 

Take this preamble as a disclaimer: I am no expert. I recognize that many people are better versed in anti-racist literature, literature that spans decades. I am merely one of the thousands of White people who are, for the first time, being introduced to anti-racist thinking by reading a New York Times bestseller. 

And I am learning, for the first time, a way of defining  “racist” that had never previously crossed my path. 

While “racist” is a “tough little word” that has shifted meaning and evolved over time, I am going to cite and refer to Kendi’s definition throughout this piece: “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” Central to this definition is the idea that there is no such thing as “not racist,” if you are passive, you are supporting the racist status quo, and hence you are racist. Kendi explains: 

The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it.

This expansive definition of “racist” rejects the colloquial, pejorative usage of the word. And, as I’m about to unpack, this definition unlocks a number of concepts that otherwise would be difficult to access or understand. To put this another way, from a theoretical perspective, in a world where we all read academic works and ideas and engage in civil discourse around them, this re-defining of the word would be a remarkably effective tool. 

But here’s what’s been worrying me as I read and learn more about this powerful concept. We do not live in that world. We live in a world where people can (and are) both harnessing the theoretical concept of racism while fully embracing its pejorative power and leveraging its sting. And I fear it’s putting the anti-racist agenda at risk.

But — I jump ahead. First, let’s examine the good that comes from this expansive definition, when the word is used as intended by the academic cadre who coined it. 

The Good

Implicit in the anti-racist understanding of racism is that “non-racism” is impossible, that everything around us in our society is inherently racist because its structure continues to perpetuate inequity between the races. 

This idea is perhaps easiest to grasp when one considers the realm of policy (for Kendi, reforming policy is the number one tool in the anti-racist tool kit). He writes: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.” Even if Kendi is fuzzy on the details of how we even evaluate, let alone enact, policy that would be anti-racist, this idea is intuitive to understand: in the realm of policy, there are always consequences, and there can be no neutral ground.

From there, the conceptual leap towards understanding how our greater society is inherently racist, from our laws to our architecture to our media narratives, becomes easier to swallow. And of, course, when you look back in our history, it’s hard to deny that our society was made to serve White people, without consideration for the needs of people of color, and often designed to explicitly block or deny their rights and opportunities. And despite whatever progress has been made over time, whiteness remains the default in America. 

For me, this point was hammered home by an anecdote from author Ijeoma Oluo in her talk “So you want to talk about race?”:

I will never know what it's like to be able to walk around in a world built for me and never have to say it was built for me. To never have to recognize white culture as white culture. I always have to recognize black culture as black culture because even if I'm going about my day in my blackness, someone's going to make it apparent I am doing something that is outside of the norm. Walking around with my hair, people make it very apparent. [...] the comments about how it's a little, oh, that's wild, that's funky, I like it! It's not wild or funky, it's the hair that grows out of my head.

As Kendi puts it, in America, White people have “the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal.” And, because of that privilege, we need not think about the ways in which our society treats and actively oppresses those who are deemed non-normal, non-standard, non-legal. 

And once you can accept that racism is in the DNA of American society, then it’s far easier to understand why it’s practically impossible not to be racist. Albeit unwittingly, Americans have internalized racism as part and parcel of our acculturation. Here’s how Kendi explains it to Brene Brown on her podcast Unlocking Us:

“To grow up in America is … for racist ideas to constantly be rained on your head, and you have no umbrella — and you don’t even know that you’re wet with those racist ideas. Because the racist ideas themselves cause you to imagine that you’re dry. … This is why I don’t think people should feel ashamed. There were other people and very powerful people and a history that was constantly raining those ideas on your head.”

How could you possibly grow up in America, and not be racist? There needn’t be personal shame around the word, nor should you feel shame if someone points out your racist behavior. Because we all have been racist and, even if we strive to become anti-racist crusaders, we will float in and out of racism throughout our lives. 

As Kendi says, “These are not permanent tattoos. … Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

This is where Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, converge:

I came to see that the way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for white people to understand it. Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system. If, however, I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized, I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth. … Such moments can be experienced as something valuable, even if temporarily painful, only after we accept that racism is unavoidable and that it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic racial assumptions and behaviors. 

For both Kendi and DiAngelo, the de-stigmatization of the word “racist” allows us all to be more reflective of our behavior and open to recognizing when we are, indeed, being racist. It certainly has helped me be more cognizant of my own racist behaviors. And only with this recognition can we possibly begin our transition towards anti-racism. 

The Bad

Before we can dive into the potential negative consequences of this definition, we must first reflect on the racism “spectrum” that anti-racists like Kendi and Oluo describe. On the lesser end of the spectrum lies “racial discrimination”  — ideas, actions, inactions that hurt individuals of color but do not pose consequences to the daily lives of people of color — and on the higher end of the spectrum lies “racist power” — the policies and policymakers that negatively influence and affect the daily lives of people of color. 

Oluo demarcates this spectrum beautifully in her talk: 

The personal outcomes for people of color in our society is not built upon how many racial slurs have been hurled at them in their lifetime. It is not black households in this country have 13 times less net worth than white households because they were called the n-word this many times, and every time, their bank account dropped. That's not how race works.

Furthermore, there are plenty of people who would shout racial slurs at me all day, and outside of that moment of terror, which it does have, they have no other impact on my life. There are plenty of people who dedicate their lives to racism who aren't registered to vote, who don't hold any positions of social power, who kind of stick around with other white people who hate people of color and never leave that weird little hovel. They are impacting me nearly as much as someone who has a Black Lives Matter poster in their window, but then votes for tighter policing because she's a little scared about the way the demographics of her neighborhood is changing. When it comes to my safety and my ability to live, she is making a much bigger negative impact on my life and the life of my family and the life of my friends. And that's where we have to realize that in a system that only requires that you do nothing in order to continue to perpetrate itself, your intentions don't mean squat.

Ijeoma Oluo: "So You Want to Talk About Race" | Talks at Google

Although both Kendi and Oluo clearly delineate the more racist from the less racist, and attempt to get around the complexity by relying on adjectives like “racial” rather than “racist,” they still rely on the same word to describe both sides of the spectrum. 

I see a few potential consequences of this expansiveness. 

One (on the less worse and potentially less likely side): if the definition is adopted widely, it leaves us bereft of a descriptor with enough weight to signal that behaviors and policies are especially repugnant or pernicious. And when it comes to calling out truly consequential policies or actions that have impacted the lives of people of color, I would want to harness all the shameful power that a word can muster, rather than rely on a word that has lost all its sharp edges. The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh puts it this way: “If the word ‘racist’ is capacious enough to describe both proud slaveholders and Barack Obama [as Kendi does ...] then it may start to lose the emotional resonance that gives it power in the first place.” 

For another, it’s hard to de-stigmatize a word when you’re still using it to describe all manner of racist behaviors and policies. Indeed, when it comes to defanging the “r” word, even the scrupulous Kendi sometimes falls short. 

As Sanneh points out in his review, How to be an Anti-Racist is not only anti-racist manifesto but also memoir, and Kendi cannot avoid relying on the pejorative use of the word when he goes back in time to chronicle the painful, racist behaviors that he has experienced:

There are a few moments in the book, though, when Kendi uses the word in a more colloquial, less rigorous sense. In the third grade, he had a white teacher who was, Kendi thought, quicker to call on white students, and quicker to punish nonwhite ones. One day, after seeing a shy black girl ignored, Kendi staged an impromptu sit-in at chapel. Years later, he says that the teacher was one of a number of “racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens.” In a moment like this, “racist” seems less like a sticker and more like a tattoo: the word stings because it seems to convey something distasteful and profound about the person it describes. Even for the exponent of a new definition of racism, older ones are not easily banished.

Kendi has no word but “racist” to describe and shame the people that inflicted harm on his Black body throughout his life. He has no choice but to rely on the charged, colloquial use of the word.  And I would wager that most people are less meticulous than Kendi. 

And so, at best, in a scenario where we as a society all use the word “racist” more frequently, because we are more accurately describing our flawed world and the flawed striving people within it, this mixed messaging could cause some confusion, making it difficult to parse what is more or less racist.

But what happens in a scenario where we not only use the word “racist” more frequently — but also as pejoratively as any colloquial user of the word? Unfortunately, we are finding out.

The Ugly

When the word “racist” is bandied about — ostensibly in its anti-racist form but still wielding its pejorative garb — there is a significant consequence: what is less racist receives just as much attention and energy, if not more, than what is more racist. 

For example, we’ve all now seen examples in the media or on social media where one wrong word or action, no matter where it lies on the racist spectrum, resulted in negative attention, shame, or real harm (i.e. job loss or harassment). I can name a handful (less extreme) examples from my personal life as well. In the past few weeks, I have been on multiple e-mail threads where a would-be anti-racist was shamed and righteously shut down by other “card-carrying” anti-racists for racist language; I’ve ceased contributing those list-serves out of fear of saying the wrong thing. And I have two friends who are contemplating leaving companies they believe in, because they feel they aren’t anti-racist enough for the culture; if they speak up, they know they’ll be labeled racist or worse, and their jobs will be at risk. 

Some would say that this is a small price to pay to advance the work of anti-racism (and, moverover, that when it comes to conversations around race, people of color have been dealing with far worse realities and risks for far longer than White people). But I would argue that this is not the work of anti-racism. Anti-racism, as I understand it, is so challenging precisely because it not only demands advocacy and resistance but also compassion and patience. 

Are these responses serving the cause of anti-racism? Or are they seeking to wield the colloquial venom of the word “racist” so they can punish those who are less advanced on their journeys?   

In the examples above, the offending actions included a defensive tone, an uninformed decision, and an insensitive work practice. Here were perfect opportunities for the kind of understanding supposedly baked into the definition of “racist,” to turn converts to the cause. Instead, these people were left with two options. Either remain silent — as my friends and the email offender have done — and in all likelihood silently question and evaluate their commitment to anti-racism as a movement, or they learn how to make the motions of anti-racism in order to avoid shaming. 

Indeed, unfortunately, there seems more to be gained from simulating anti-racism these days than getting into the real, difficult work of it. Symbolic gestures — the hanging of a Black Lives Matter poster, the taking down of a statue, the posting of a hashtag — eclipse the work required to, say, vote conscientiously or advocate for affordable housing. 

And while this is bad enough for an individual or organization, it’s even worse — and unfortunately more common — for a politician or policymaker. Performing anti-racist actions distracts attention and energy away from dismantling racist policies, the very thing that is most critical to creating an anti-racist world.  

And the stakes are real. Attention and energy matter. If this moment is a tipping point, as it seems that it may well be for my country, if we are poised at the summit of a crest of inequity, then we must leverage that potential energy now — and point that energy in the right direction. 

I’d like to end with a quote from someone who’s been working to fight inequities long before anti-racist was a buzzword and before I started grappling with the concept. When I asked Salima Bhimani about this moment in our history, about the ways that people are responding and reacting, and what they are getting wrong, she replied:

Right now is the moment to harness energy, in this direction of having that north star, of really thinking about what we can achieve in the long-term. This is not short-term. For people who have lived inequities their whole lives, their ancestors have lived them, this is not short-term. We’re not going to change institutions in a moment, in a wink. But what the moment is showing us is that when we apply pressure, when we’re willing to do the hard work, things can change.

So much good work has been done over the last weeks, decades, centuries. My country and I are finally awake to it. Let’s take this moment and find the energy to honor that work and each other — in so doing, I believe things can change. We can create the anti-racist world we wish to live in.

Surely you've already read Harper’s publication of an open letter “on Justice and Open Debate,” which inveighed against “cancel culture” and was signed by nearly 160 men and women of letters broadly on the leftist range of politics (from Chomsky to Rushdie to JK Rowling). And you've probably already moved on from the unimaginative backlash choreography generated in response. Seeing as I just last week expended over 1,000 words on the subject, I thought I too am over it.

But amid the many indistinguishable ripostes, which I can only imagine were written in the middle of a collective pendiculation, one piece stood out. Written for CNN by in-house analyst Brandon Tensley, the column is remarkable not for its originality or cogency, but for providing an almost naked, undigested list of talking points, leaving no strawman unburned. So for the benefit of future me I thought to use this as an opportunity to put down an economical, easily-referable list of the most common bad-faith arguments raised against detractors of “cancel culture.”

Don’t worry, I’ll keep it short this time.

1. Trump’s against “cancel culture”

Ongoingly-President Donald Trump, whose rotund frame tellingly appears on the cover of the CNN article, does blab a lot against “cancel culture” and “political correctness” in his rallies. Yes, that’s true. Similarly, Stalin frequently spoke against fascism and criticized American racism… so…

2. It’s about power

Tensley writes:

The loudest critics of cancel culture tend to frame it as a sort of inquisition -- as a campaign to quash someone or something that some person doesn't like, often for petty reasons. But these condemnations distort the issue at the heart of the debate: power -- who's used to having it, who's trying to be heard.

Correct.

(From my previous post: “in the case of some of the left’s loudest culture warriors, it’s not about who is really the victim and who the oppressor; it’s about who gets to decide which is which.”)

3. Some people survive the “cancel-culture”

Tensley names Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis as two comedians who provoked the wrath of “cancel culture” by lampooning it. “Neither of them,” he writes, “was, well, cancelled, despite claims to the contrary.” Both still get to do their sets, therefore “cancel culture” isn’t real. Following this logic, Barack Obama’s presidency disproves the existence, let alone prevalence, of racism in America.

Chappelle still has millions of fans and millions of dollars, he’s not afraid of self-righteous tweets. But what about David Shor, the data analyst who apparently lost his job for tweeting that some research shows Democrats tend to perform worse in elections during times of violent protests? What about Majdi Wadi, who lost his business because his daughter posted anti-Semitic tweets six years ago? What about people who lack the armor of wealth and notoriety that protects a Dave Chappelle or a JK Rowling?

And what about the people who remain uncancelled because they’ve internalized the danger and simply adopted a strategy of safe insincerity (or taciturnity) in public?

And regarding Tensley’s two examples: Gillis and Chappelle aren’t of the same caliber — not in terms of their celebrity, or the ‘offenses’ for which they’d been criticized, or the cancelling (or lack thereof) they’ve consequently endured. But by lumping them together and using them as stand-ins for the problem, cancel-deniers can skirt any serious, shaded discussion of limits and boundaries in expression, to what extent we need them, and whether it’s wise to leave these questions to the ochlocracy of Twitter.

Nor should we ignore Tensley’s passing claim about ‘claims to the contrary,’ by which he implies that in certain hysterical circles there had been at some point a belief that Chappelle and Gillis were about to get cancelled. In truth, even the hard-right outlet The Washington Examiner, which indeed has all the financial incentives to hysterically play up the risks of political correctness, has published one piece noting in real-time that Chappelle is unlikely to be cancelled thanks to his fame, and another arguing that Gillis’s firing from SNL was not a strong example of “cancel culture.” But you can’t expect CNN to show the same degree of discernment as… the Examiner.

4. Corrective

Also lost [from talks about “cancel culture”]: how the criticism functioned as a corrective. It was in defense of groups that have long been kicked to American society's fringes.

Bringing more voices onto the public stage isn’t the same as traducing the ones who were already there and chasing them out.

In fact, the maligned Harper’s letter opens by unequivocally applauding “calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.” But then, even though Tensley’s op-ed came out three days after the Harper’s piece, he doesn’t see fit to mention the letter at all, despite positioning his column as a rebuttal against “cancel culture’s loudest critics.”

And regardless, in what way does fostering (or making apologies for) an environment which almost 160 writers — of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and political beliefs — consider to be “stifling” and “intolerant” bring us any closer to a fair, open, and free society?

If our goal is to ensure that everyone, whether coming from historically-marginalized groups or expressing aberrant ideas, gets to have a voice in society, then commitment to some type of pluralism is paramount. It’s the culture that prizes open dissent and disagreement, not moral purity, that will safeguard minorities whichever way the wind blows.

Onto the next strawman.

5. Fast forward

Fast-forward to 2020 for another example of how claims of cancel culture often warp reality.

Note the recurring maneuver of avoiding the criticism by claiming that the criticism itself warps our perception of what’s real!

And to prove that criticsm of “cancel culture” indeed warps reality, Tensley leaps from discussing Chappelle and Gillis, glides past every single pertinent example from the past year of people harmed by the the left’s captiousness, and lands instead on… Donald Trump.

See: 1.

6. Trump and the right try to get people cancelled too

"Trump has long railed against 'political correctness.' But he has also tried for years to get people and entities punished or banished for what he considers objectionable words and acts," writes my CNN colleague Daniel Dale […]

Trump is a hypocrite. Good catch.

Maybe the obvious needs stating but yes, there are many horse-manure-storage-units posing as intellectuals on the right who shed tears for free speech when Milo Yiannopoulos gets disinvited from speaking on college campuses but then boost the president when he vows to loosen libel laws and punish mean journalists or people who burn the American flag. They can go to hell.

7. Yes, but…

For his last paragraph, Tensley admits, through the elegant use of a double negative (the written equivalent of gritted teeth), that on some “instances” people on the left have gone too far.

This [column] isn't to suggest that there aren't instances of overblown policing by those on the left.

Thank you. This post too isn’t to suggest that there aren’t instances of overblown reactions to policing by those on the left.

Rather, it's to appeal for a sense of proportion: Some are articulating righteous anger; others, such as the President, are just afraid of a bit of accountability.

See: 1.

I propose a new rule for internet decorum, a la Godwin’s Law of the Hitler Exponent, and thus it reads: If each of two opposing sides in an argument has reached the point where it can justifiably invoke “1984” (or the imputative “Orwellian”) to declaim the other, both must take a timeout and do some soul searching.

This standard may seem harsh, yet it’s never been more necessary because, like the final chancellor of the Weimar Republic, an invidious Orwell comparison lurks only a few steps into almost every contemporary argument. 

We’re at a special moment in our culture war in which the social media soldiers of both Oceania and Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?) are astutely calling out the sinister bullshit being committed by the other side, but not, shock of shocks, by its own. And while each side plays a slightly different game, both take more cues from the Orwell playbook than their indignation would suggest.

Let’s start with the right.

What once viewed itself as an ideological movement (what were they called? con… conservationists? conservators?) now prostrates itself before the whims and temperament of one man. For many, falling in line means jettisoning old ideals and even suspending the testimony of their own senses. It means doublethink: the mental trick of switching from one conviction to its arithmetic opposite (Orwell also called it “Blackwhite”) in order to remain loyal to the leader’s ever-changing version of the truth, however loathsome or absurd. War is peace. Wisdom is ignorance. That gas that made peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square tear up in order to make way for Robert Trump’s big brother wasn’t tear gas.

Lying and hypocrisy are of course inevitable in government. But the devertebration of conservatives has been so dazzlingly swift that within less than four years we’ve witnessed their total ideological capsizing: Remember when a president’s moral character mattered? Remember when Republicans celebrated international trade? Or abhorred Federal overreach and defended states’ rights? (How fond they were of quoting Orwell to condemn Obama’s big government! Ideology is something Neo-Bolshevism did away with too.) 

The litany of casual about-faces goes on, from Lindsey Graham’s stance (should I add scare quotes?) on impeachments, to Ted Cruz’s Schrödingerian super-position regarding Russian interference in 2016, to Rand Paul’s vanishing defense of whistleblowers, to Mitch McConnell’s fitful stand on appointing judges in an election year.

And where the lie hasn’t yet fully passed into history to become truth, Republicans, in good Soviet fashion, have trained themselves to unsee deranged and heinous behavior when the perpetrator is The Gardener of Human Happiness. The president sent armed troops to clear out citizens exercising their first amendment right? “Didn’t really see it.” He accused a 75-year-old man who’d been assaulted by an armored cop of being a domestic terrorist? “I don’t read Twitter!”

Meanwhile, the left…

…has adopted its own Orwell-y trick: redefining language to the point where nothing means anything and everything you say can and will be used against you.

Activists and politicians alike are energetically inflating the definitions of politically-sensitive words and phrases (and even gestures) to the point where their meaning is no longer recognized by general usage, but determined by a tiny coterie of self-proclaimed experts. At the same time, this new vocabulary is supercharged with binary moral valiance: you either use these words the way we say, or we’ll unperson you.

“Abolish the police” doesn’t mean “to formally put an end to” policing, and you’re woefully ignorant, if not racist, if you take it literally. (Though if you don’t take it literally you’re socially irresponsible and possibly racist.) When, for example, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, following the dictionary definition of the word, had the temerity to tweet that “‘abolish the police’ seems like a poorly thought out idea,” he was put through an expedited process of reeducation-by-Twitter-outrage (supplemented by appeals to Angela Davis). He ultimately confessed and begged forgiveness for his tweet crimes.

The term “antiracism,” the innocent-sounding moniker of the worldview espoused by bestselling authors like corporate-diversity guru Robin DiAngelo and historian-cum-activist Dr. Ibram X Kendi, is itself an example of the left’s language game. Even without delving into their respective works (the two aren’t, in my view, of remotely the same stature, but plenty has already been written to this effect), it’s easy to see the power of their position: who doesn’t want to be anti-racist?

But what they mean by the phrase isn’t merely opposition to racism, but the espousal of stringent programs (they differ on the specifics: DiAngelo exists in the corporate-friendly self-help genre, whereas Kendi targets government policy). But to question the efficacy of the solutions (and worldview) they propose is to risk being labelled a proper racist. Both authors make this binary explicit.

DiAngelo completely rejects the prole notion that “if you are against racism then you are not racist.” As long as you benefit from a system that privileges white normativity, you’re racist. She insists that, given her Delphic definition of racism, readers should not be offended if she concludes that “all white people are racist.”

Orwell in “Politics and The English Language” expressed his dim view of academic words that “dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.” The problem isn’t that phrases like “antiracism” muddy and confuse language (small price to pay for social justice). It’s that they’re meant to confuse, a shibboleth for the enlightened to recognize each other and trap offenders.

What about the kids?

Next on the INGSOC agenda is of course winning the minds of children, ideally replacing the bond between friends and family with loyalty to the movement.

First, white parents, ridden by their white, liberal guilt, are appealing to the oracle wisdom of digital news outlets to learn how to turn their children into good antiracists: eating foreign cuisine at age 6 is a good start, as long as the diet is undergirded by intellectual ballast, like the works of Dr. Kendi and DiAngleo, or Black Panther.

The kids can then prove their enlightened fidelity to the cause by turning on each other. High schoolers who organize to doxx and shame fellow students on social media are all but lionized by The New York Times, provided that the doxxing and shaming are done in the name of justice.

Teenagers caught on camera displaying “problematic behavior” (to use The Times’ Newspeak style guide) can expect to find their personal information, including their “full names, school information, social media profiles, contact information, [and] the college they plan to attend,” made public on widely-spread social media blacklists.

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one teenager told The Times.

“Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives. i love Twitter,” tweeted another.

Others said that it’s about “educating” the underaged offenders, or to “prove to them that actions have consequences.”

The problematic behavior being called out by The Junior Spies of antiracism is generally limited to speechcrimes, such as saying the N-Word and the malediction “All Lives Matter.”

If for the right chasing power means merging with the leader’s will, for the left it means the constant purging of wrongthink. But do those purges really bring us closer to a more equitable society? If our goal is racial, gender, and economic fairness, why aren’t news sites recommending economist Thomas Sowell’s studies on the root causes of inequality instead of DiAngelo’s new age preening? Why are journalists who spent their careers exposing injustice being cancelled? Why are innocent people — including people of color, as Yascha Mounk pointed out last week — having their lives destroyed by rage mobs?

To quote Mr. Blair, “power is the end of power,” but in the case of some of the left’s loudest culture warriors, it’s not about who is really the victim and who the oppressor; it’s about who gets to decide which is which.

P.S.

Political hellscape aside, the saturation of Orwell allusions signals that it’s time to retire them altogether, not least because we’ve all, it seems, developed a soft tolerance to the totalitarians on our side. The least we can do is come up with new references.

It reminds me of Christopher Hitchens vowing as he travelled to Prague to write his counter-Revolutionary dispatches that he shall not make any Kafka references, only to be almost immediately upon landing arrested by secret police without cause or explanation; “totalitarianism itself is a cliché,” he later wrote, as references to Josef K. begged to burst out of his pen.

Vanessa’s comment: I would DEF like to extend the no-Orwell rule to journalists covering the tech sector… Orwell clichés should be allowed to die. As should also the phrase "surveillance capitalism.”

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