Reading Corner: Swamp Edition

Welp, we are in the home stretch of the summer, and I'm ready for school to start (although our fall activity schedule is a little more chaotic than I would like because Birdie was really set on being in the fall play at school and the boys are running cross country.  Oy).  Honestly, the summer has been okay.  The nasty hot/humid weather really only started last week; there were quite a few days this summer where I had windows open a lot of the day--that never happens!  Although I will say it has been a doozy since last week.  I guess the weather was saving it all until now.  

My kids and husband went to overnight church camp the first week in August and I had seven glorious days all to myself.  I read, watched a bunch of independent films, wrote a bit, and generally kept my own schedule for the first time in years.  It was a bit of a hard reentry when they returned--why do they need feeding so often?--but we'll get there again, I guess.  One possibly fruitful bit of that week was that I think I'm working my way around a writing project, although I'm not sure it will be anything yet.  Considering I thought perhaps I only had two books in me, it is nice to have the sense that there might be more to explore.  But we'll see.  It might fizzle once I figure out what it is I'm working with.  I've had enough false starts since finishing All This Without You to be cautious.

I said in my last post I've been reading a lot this year, and decided it might be time to write about some of it.  So, on to the reading stack!  

From the top down: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman; The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilcrist; Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington; The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer; Clanlands Almanac by Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish (not pictured: Way Points by Sam Heughan); Lost in Wonder by Esther DeWaal; The Soviet Century by Karl Schlögel; Dominion by Tom Holland; Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker; The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich; (not pictured) Solovyov and Larionov by Eugene Vodolazkin

There was also a trio of Cold War spy histories by Ben Macintyre on my Kindle; each book read like a novel and was thoroughly enjoyable.  Agent Sonya reminded me a lot of the film Red Joan; both stories cover similar histories over a similar time period, so that shouldn't have surprised me.  I started a fourth one, In the Enemy's House by Howard Blum but haven't been as gripped by it, even through their narrative styles are similar.  I tried to read A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (my second attempt!) but gave it up as a bad job about half way through.  I was bored out of my skull and the author was only at 1936!  I just couldn't see reading another 200 pages.  

Unrelated, but we got a lot of raspberries from my garden this year!

The Trueman, McGilcrist, Henrich, and Harrington books all covered similar ground from different perspectives, although I would say the Henrich book really bogged down on specialist material in a lot of places. The book could have been trimmed considerably for a general audience. McGilcrist is a paradigm shifter, and he recently published the two-volume follow up that is twice the length of the first.  My husband is reading that one now but I'm not sure I'm going to tackle it.  The first one was very meaty and good, but I'm not sure how much more I'd get out of the other two volumes.  We'll see.  There are lots of interviews with McGilcrist on his work on YouTube, so if you don't have time for an 800 page book, you can get the Cliffs Notes version there.  

I gave a lecture on Soviet communism to the seniors at my kids' school during the last week of school in June and revisited Yuri Slezkine to prepare for it, so between that and the nearly 900 page Schlögel, it's felt like a whole lotta USSR here the last few months.  I need to set that aside for a while, even if there is a great new Gary Saul Morson book that my husband loved.  It will still be there when I'm ready to tackle it. Tom Holland's Persian Fire was a birthday gift last month so I'm looking forward to reading that one.  Dominion was a great read.  I highly recommend this interview with Paul Kingsnorth if you are interested in the topic.  I read the book on the strength of that chat.

Boo wanted me to read Why We Drive aloud for his night time story this month, so it has been fun to revisit that book.  Matthew B. Crawford is such an amazing thinker and writer and a keen observer of the times we live in.  (He has a Substack now, although I don't have time to read much of it!) I've realized in the past months that I could spend all my time reading excellent Substack authors, but it doesn't feel like a good use of brain space or time.  I think differently through physical books and don't retain information as well when I read on a screen, so it is better for me to be mostly analog.  What writing I've done this month has been long hand as I find that a better way to start the process.

There were a few forgettable novels along the way as well as some fiction re-reads, but it has been a good reading season.  I've got some books on hold at the library that should keep me for the next bit.

Talking Tuesday: Master and His Emissary

 

In his latest substack newsletter, Rod Dreher writes about Iain McGilcrist's work on the brain, and McGilcrist's observation that Western culture has prioritized left brain dominance over balance with the right to great detriment.  (McGilcrist's work is dense, but this short video is a great overview).  Basically, says Gilcrist, the right side of the brain is the master, because it sees big picture, makes lots of different sorts of connections, and is creative but can be prone to madness.  

The left brain must be the emissary of the right so that both sides work together for an experience of reality which deals with the tangible and rational, but also lives in spiritual reality, the amorphous realm of mystery that we can only glimpse in slivers from time to time, because a view of the whole would be too much for us.  Our mystics and seers are ones who get to see more of that realm and live in it more fully than we.  They give us a window on it.  

Left brain dominance cannot see the forest for the trees; it is a kind of tunnel vision that not only thinks itself the master, but no longer perceives the presence of the right brain and is insistent that such a thing cannot exist.  To put it another way, it's like a tree in the middle of the forest sees only itself, and is blind to the fact that it is part of a forest, a larger ecosystem of reality. 

Writes Dreher:

"Reading McGilchrist [IM], it seems to me that the experience of consciousness is like what quantum physics tells us about reality: that it is both wave and particle. We live within a wave field that only becomes particle-ized through observation. When the left brain wishes to fix on something to understand it, it isolates the thing, but what it sees is only a partial picture of reality, because it denies the wave context (and has to, in order to see the particle). Yet a purely right-brain perception of reality cannot perceive the reality of the particle in isolation, so it too provides only a partial picture of reality. The truth is, living in time, we can never fully apprehend reality. But we can know it through participating in it.

IM quotes Herbert McCabe: “When we speak of God, we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery.”"  ~Rod Dreher, "Detaching the Limpet," Daily Dreher Substack newsletter, September 18, 2021.

I've been thinking about these sorts of things all year.  What does it mean to live in the balance of the left and right brains?  How do we participate in the mystery of reality that is not tangible?  How do we orient our telos such that it reflects these things, and what does that mean for day to day living?  

I have no pat answers, but I suppose the questions are perhaps an orientation toward understanding.  It's maddening sometimes, like I have a shine of something important in the corner of my eye that I can't quite make out, but when I try to look directly at it, it disappears.  But maybe that is the point--one cannot approach these things head on, but can only sidle up to them from an angle, hoping for a sliver of insight.

The Soul Cages

Japanese Kintsugi (gold repair)

Kate Davies had a post this spring that discussed why mending is important, not only for creative practice, but for the health of ourselves, our world, our souls.  The post is taken from her 2019 book Wheesht, and I keep thinking about mending as a larger concept.  

(Around the same time, I had a discussion with a friend about where to start with a novel, and I said to start with a big question or theme you want to work through.  I've been a bit stuck about where to go with my next book, but after that question, and reading Kate's post: Physician heal thyself.  I've been thinking about some big questions since then). 

I think it is interesting to consider what resonates culturally, as it speaks to what our deep anxieties and unmet needs are.  From a quick perusal of some popular fantasy fiction (and by popular, I mean fanatic reader followings, with millions of books sold), I notice a few things.  First is the desire for intimacy, but not just with a romantic partner (although that is present), but the desire for intimacy in a family setting.  To be truly known by your family, and if not by your family of origin, then the family you construct in its absence or dysfunction.  

Related to the first, the second is the desire for unconditional acceptance by one's romantic partner and family.  In this unconditional acceptance is the idea that you stick through the hard times, through thick and thin.  I do find there is an element of fantasy there, as the thick and thin times in these novels tend to come from external pressures rather than from self-generated interpersonal conflict, but that's something to tease apart another time.  

Finally, there is a deep desire for an enchanted world, and a fight to be had against the forces of evil. That is to say, a world that exists on more planes than we can perceive or rationally prove, and that has a spiritual dimension to it that is real and life-giving.  In fantasy novels, the enchantment often comes from within the characters themselves in the form of magical abilities, but there is also a kind of magic in the air of these stories that exists as atmosphere.  

I'm also increasingly bothered by stories where the resolution of the conflict is found by the protagonist "following their bliss," even if it means blowing apart a marriage or family, or leaving a rooted community.  I fail to see how that can ultimately feed the soul and make for lasting flourishing.  A plant without good roots will wither and die, even if it looks good initially.  Plants thrive around other plants.  Similarly, a plant that is in the process of rooting itself in the soil will sometimes look a little peaky and sad, but if you give it some time and care, it will often flourish dramatically.  

The meaning in the metaphor is that living rooted in community is messy and difficult.  Relationships are never clean and smooth, and there are always people in life that you'd rather not have to deal with.  But I also think those people are there to rub against my thorny bits, to smooth over my ragged edges.  Does it feel good?  Absolutely not.  Is it good for my soul?  Absolutely yes.

The ultimate goal is God Himself.  To be so consumed by that relationship that it is validated and real--a consummation.  To ascend the mountain and find ourselves at the foot of the Cross, on top of Golgotha, the place of Adam's skull.  Christ voluntarily eats the apple of death in order to pour life into Adam's skull and so reveals the purpose of death: to transform that death back into the glory of Eden in self-sacrifice.  He asks us to die on purpose, to die to ourselves, to our will, to provide the seeds for the flourishing of the world.

This cracking open of ourselves in service of mending and flourishing is bound to hurt, bound be discouraging at times, even oppressive.  But the Comforter has come and if we can keep the summit in sight, instead of trying to eat the apple again and again, perhaps we can make a little more progress on our journey.

Dwell

It is no secret that I value the past, and that I think we as humans benefit from knowing where we come from so that we have a better understanding of who we are.  Christopher Beha has a brilliant (if brief) article in Harper's about how our future-facing predilection does us no favors as a society:

“For most of human history, time was understood to proceed in cycles—the annual cycle of seasons; the generational cycle of life; in a longer view, the civilizational cycle of ‘ages’—each returning us to where we’d begun. For better or worse, people could be reasonably sure that a year from now they would be doing the same thing in the same place, just as a lifetime from now their children would be doing as they had done. There was still plenty of uncertainty—mortality rates were high, natural disasters arrived without warning—and a desire to manage that uncertainty through divination. But the occasional flood or fire or plague was ultimately just another link between the future and the past. The obvious cost of this regularity was fatalism, summed up starkly in Ecclesiastes: ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’
 
“If you wanted to put your life into a larger context that might give it meaning, you looked to the past—the age of heroes, the age of gods, the time of the covenant, the time before the flood or the fall. It was then that some lasting standard had been established against which your own life could be judged. You related your present circumstances to history by telling stories about it.
 
“I’m engaging in just this kind of narrative work here, so you’ll have to excuse some oversimplification. Of course, a linear sense of time has always coexisted with the cyclical one. And periods of great economic, political, and social disruption have seen surges of apocalyptic thinking, when the focus shifts from origins to endings. But in most places at most times, the emphasis has been on continuity, on the regular rhythms of life, and meaning has most often been found in the past.”

~Christopher Beha, Future Sense, Harper's, December 2020 issue (accessed online, 11/18/20).

Last week, I read a bit more in Kate Davies' Wheesht, and the chapter on making within limits was particularly interesting to me.  Like people who fetishize post-apocalytic futures, there is a certain impetus in makers to work outside limits, break boundaries and rules as a kind of freedom from creative constraint.  Kate points out, however, that true creativity is often found in placing firm lines about what you make, and creating within the sphere of what has been established.  Or to put it another way: you can't break the rules unless you learn them in a deep way to start out with, and perhaps you can reach greater heights on a tether than drifting aimlessly, without an anchor to the ground.

This morning, an e-mail reminded me of Paul King's excellent book, The Antimodern Condition, in which he argues (essentially) that to be modern is to live without history, without limits, without tether to place or time, which sounds freeing, but in reality is very anxiety-producing.  I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that ours is anxious age.   

Writes King, 

"Anxiety is inherent to all forms of modernity and is indeed a product of it: modernity creates anxiety and this is because modernity demands change.  Anxiety is the flipside of flux and transgression.  Modernity cannot accept the world as it currently is, and so we are anxious for change.  But then the effect of change is to make us anxious about our futures and our place in the world.  So we are anxious to create change and anxious because of change.  It is not, we might say, a question of status anxiety, but of anxiety as status" (51, emphasis mine). 

I suppose the message of these three things coming together this week is that I must make peace with the world as it is, and take things as I find them rather than as I would wish them to be.  Moreoever, I must work within my limits, something that is admittedly difficult for me.  I am ever-prone to trying to exceed myself physically, and collapse from the strain eventually.  Yesterday, after dropping off my kids at school, I began to think I might start writing again at long last, and mused which of the in-progress stories I should pick up first.  Or perhaps set to formatting the finished novel for possible independent publication?  I was torn.  It felt like picking up the strands of a weaving that I had let fall off the loom when we were locked down for six months.

My musings turned to ash in the afternoon as I received word that the next few months will be punctuated with (thankfully) short bursts of remote schooling for my kids starting today.  (No soup for you).  Piglet will be learning from home through December 4, with the rest following after Thanksgiving.  Piglet is the most independent of all my kids, and has done quite well, but today has still needed quite a bit of help from me to navigate the technology, so my morning has been very punctuated.  For some reason, when my kids are schooling at home, my brain turns to absolute mush and I can't manage to do anything at all.  I'm just stuffing things into the cracks to keep everything running before we drown.  I struggle to feel like a valuable member of society or even of my household, shuffling from task to child to meal preparation and back again, doing everything, but doing nothing particularly well.

I suppose that is the limit for me in this time, and perhaps for all time.  To accept the world as I find it, my children for who they are, and work within those limits. 

Talking Tuesday: Sanctuary

 I finished Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Survelliance Capitalism a week ago, and while I stand by my initial thoughts about it, there were some interesting things she brought up in the final few chapters that I wish she had parsed further.  This is my main criticism of books like this: too much diagnosis, not enough prescription.  As I wrote previously, David Brooks' recent Atlantic article is a elegantly written piece that better articulates much of what Zuboff is arguing, using social science as the dive point.

That said, here are some additional thoughts I have about both Zuboff and Brooks.  Technology (used here to refer the Internet) is embedded in our lives, and short of some wide-scale catastrophe, screens will be part of our lives and our children's lives, and with it, the social media services that form the scaffolding for Internet use.  Social media encourages a kind of Narcissus-like fixation on the self that prevents users from both being able to self-differentiate from tribe, but also to see the other side of an issue.  By allowing ourselves to be lured into spending much of our lives online, we lose the ability to formulate things for ourselves as our attention spans and capacity for deep thought erode, our vocabulary narrows and with it the range of possible thought, and the small predetermined menu of options given us by the tech industry begins to feel like an inevitability, and indeed, the small parameters of our lives (Zuboff, 467). 

Ceding so much power to a handful of tech companies in the form of limitless data collection (the so-called shadow text of any online interaction) means we all live in glass houses with no exit.  Aside from being a guaranteed path to madness, it throws aside centuries of hard-won dignity, individual responsibilities and obligations, and the ability to make a life of one's own (Zuboff 185, 469).  Zuboff proposes that humans have the right to sanctuary, a place where private life can occur and flourish, where the spirit can fly and be at rest (Zuboff, 5, 477).  Such opacity is a basic human dignity, and should be protected against incursions by an increasingly aggressive capitalist mien. 

Matthew B. Crawford makes a similar argument when he writes about the attentional commons in The World Beyond Your Head: that the right to occupy public space free from noise and advertising is increasingly available only to those who can afford it.  Taking that point a step further in Why We Drive, he notes that the attentional commons has even colonized your car, so that now even your driving experience, formerly one of individual agency and freedom from the relentless demands of commercial life, is peppered with data mining and advertising opportunities, further degrading our attention and increasing distractability (Crawford, Why We Drive, 307-308).  "Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations?' (Crawford, Why We Drive, 298, emphasis in original).  Moreover, as Zuboff notes, "In this new product regime the simple product functions that we seek are now hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled mixture of software, services, and networks.  The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying" (237).  It's no longer enough to make a useful thing.  The thing must be "smart" and provide goods back to its maker in the form of data.  Consumers do not want or need "smart" things, but Big Tech's survival depends on convincing large swathes of the population that such things are better than their "dumb" alternatives.  Because: advertising and legibility produce huge profits for a handful of powerful people.

The public sphere is now given over to making humanity as legible as possible to both the tech companies and the governments that have climbed in bed with them, gobbling up data about our habits, preferences, private thoughts and letters, political leanings, religious faith, purchases, health history, and much more.  When was the last time you were in a public place that did not have a screen in it, or loud music playing?  Even if the music is inoffensive, it is still an intrusion into the private space of your mind, and the ability to think deeply without distraction or commercialization.  

There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that is in a converted row house.  The dining area is in what was the living room portion of the house, and was formerly cozy and intimate, with small tables, a roaring fire, and dark wood.  The food was a bit pricey, but very good and fresh.  It felt like a quintessential English pub.  A few years ago, the owners decided to install three 60" television screens in the 200 square foot dining room, making it difficult to maintain eye contact with a dining companion and conversation of any sort impossible.  (I don't care how intentional you are about resisting screen distraction, when three 60" televisions are on and blaring in a 200 square foot room, you cannot ignore them).  The best one can do in this new and "improved" space is to hope that whatever is on the screen something inoffensive like a ball game and your food comes quickly so you can get the meal over with.  It does not inspire me to eat there.  Even outdoor spaces have been colonized for advertising and data collection, as cities install sidewalk chargers for mobile devices that also hoover up any data in the vicinity.

Zuboff points out many other troubling aspects of social media and Big Data, including the ability of Facebook or Google to quietly engineer elections or subvert democratic process, without people ever being aware of such machinations (298-303).  It turns out that democracy is an existential threat to the economic model of Big Tech.  The big firms of Silicon Valley are not regulated by or overseen by the government but have enormous power over how things actually work out legally and otherwise in society, all done beneath a shroud of secrecy.  Ironic really.  Silicon Valley puts everyone in a glass cage, but expects to be able to live in peace and quiet in an iron fortress with no more than a "trust me" assurance that no stones will be lobbed our way.  "The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise....These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes" (Zuboff, 327). 

Living in a glass house is psychologically paralyzing.  Everyone has the right to have secrets and anonymity, or at least they should.  We need places of refuge, places of quiet sanctuary to keep ourselves together and grow strong and resilient.  "Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question "What have you got to hide?"  But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of 'disconnected' time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself.  The real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing" (Zuboff, 479, emphasis in the original).  

We need opacity for the sake of our souls, and true human flourishing is found in the protection of private spaces for the individual and family.  The health of our minds and bodies rests in qualities of "contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment.  These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society" (Zuboff, 479).  Life involves a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, and we stand to lose a good deal if we blindly hand over our privacy in pursuit of safety and security.  There is mystery in the unknown, deep intimate knowledge that can only be gained in an unrestrained milieu.

Unfortunately, as a societal measure, individual privacy entails a great deal of social trust, which is in great decay in the present time.  David Brooks notes the many ways we do not trust each other or our institutions, and how much that has changed in the last 50 years or so.  It is also true that the decay of trust is somewhat cyclical in societies, and share common features.  Brooks writes: "People feel disgusted by the state of society.  Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread.  Contempt for established power is intense.  A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene.  It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation.  Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system.  These are moments of agitation, excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion" (Brooks, The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, hereafter Brooks, Oct 2020).  While Brooks does not explicitly say so, I would also argue that these moments follow what Yuri Slezkine details as apocalyptic millenarianism, in which a disenfranchised minority group seizes control of power and culture to try to achieve a utopia, usually through violent means.

The current drive to utopia is in reaction to the individualism and liberation of the Baby Boomer generation, whose drive to pursue their own happiness placed much of society in a precarious and insecure position.  Boomers had the benefit of an older generation that provided foundation security, but that foundation is now long gone.  Families are rarely intact these days, and the economy is a disaster of unfettered raw capitalism, undigested through the laws of democracy.  Many younger people have been excluded from financial and personal security, and now seek it in any form possible, even if that means social credit systems, government and Big Data surveillance, and the general loss of privacy as a norm and right.  

Writes Brooks,

"Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.  Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

Attachment theory says that several dichotomies or dyads exist within all of us, that either bind or alienate us from our circumstances.  Either we feel safe or at risk, lost or at home, broken or whole.  Capitalism is heavily invested in making our attachments insecure--feeling unsafe, lost, and broken--so that we will be more likely to buy the products and services that promise to alleviate those feelings, or at the least, surrender our data so that we can be aggressively marketed to about our attachments.

Social trust is part of the larger picture of attachment, and the collective experience of the past 40 years or so has betrayed trust again and again, as institutional leaders are shown to be morally or financially corrupt (or both), institutions seek to shore up corrupt leaders rather than root it out, and the economic system fails to serve a large percentage of people.  The reason why institutional health is important is that institutions are supposed provide the basis for personal formation as well as a place to belong.  Instead they become performative and sterile, unable to do any of the hard work of transformation.  "The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  And that's at the macro level.  

On a personal level, our close social interactions are fraught with instability and moral liquidity. "The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  The instability of the economy means shallow roots in physical communities, as people pull up stakes to go where the jobs are, rather than staying close to family and friends who provide the thick bonds of social trust.  While we don't need to be intimately attached to society at large, we do need to be securely attached to one another to flourish, and when we attach securely to one another, that thriving ripples out into larger society.  This bonds are frayed and worn, notes Brooks. "In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away.  Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress [or conversely, absentee parents who leave children to fend for themselves]" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  

In short, we live in a time of chaotic instability and distrust, where finding a secure place to belong and flourish is increasingly rare.  When we cannot trust those around us, we try to make ourselves invulnerable, impermeable to the hurts and disappointments that could be shared in trustworthy relationships.  We look for external ways to measure trustworthiness, and Big Tech is all too happy to oblige, for the price of your private self in the form of data mining.  True intimacy declines in the face of such external measurements (Zuboff, 206-207), and is replaced by entertainment and abstraction.  We seek security in rigidity, ideology, and tribe (Brooks, Oct 2020).  It follows that we are in the midst of a grave existential crisis.  The job of culture is to respond to common problems, but when the problems change, the common response must shift as well, which is almost always fraught.

"The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society.  People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.  The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust.  There's no avoiding the core problem.  Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

So how do we rebuild trust and provide refuge for ourselves and others?  Mostly in the small invisible ways that will not show up on a news feed, or help us economically or socially climb a ladder of success.  It is in cultivating virtues of reliability and dependability in ourselves.  Providing a soft place to land for those we love.  In challenging ourselves to make promises--being open and vulnerable in a radical way-- and hold fast to those promises, we extend a fragile branch of trust to others around us.  If they are able to return it to us, then trust builds.  Trust breeds truth, and vice versa.  So the path to trust is a long one, and will not happen overnight.  

Vulnerability in relationships is hard, because we don't want to be hurt, particularly if we have been hurt badly in the past.  But I think we humans hunger for vulnerability.  I see it in the stories we tell ourselves--the books that are lodestones of culture.  We want to be in intimate relationships, but not all of us know how to achieve that sort of radical vulnerability.  It means handing the inner most parts of yourself over to someone else and trusting that they will hold them and not use them as a weapon against you.  It means having faith that the people you love and trust can hold not just the air-brushed public self, but the flawed inner self--your worst self on your worst day.  We can't begin to trust people with our worst selves if we are forced to live in glass houses with no exit.  

We need places of sanctuary--places free from prying eyes and listening ears and glowing screens.  It is not enough to pursue invisibility within the glass house.  We need fortresses of refuge, behind thick solid walls, curtained windows, and manned defenses.  Keep secrets--yours and others.  Get to know the landscape of your place in the world through real, lived experience.  The future is likely to be digital in many ways.  That does not mean we have to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of inevitability or cede our private lives to the glass-housed public square.  

Build a fortress, and guard it with your life, even if only in your mind.

Sources:

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Crawford, Matthew B. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Talking Tuesday: The Age of Survelliance Capitalism

 

I've been slogging through Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  Her book is important, but it would greatly have benefited from a strong editorial hand, as she is very wordy in a way that is frustrating to read.  That said, there have been some real gems in the book so far.  Her main insight is that the big tech companies that run our world (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter) are all in the business of shaping human beings into something off whom they can make money.  In other words, consumers who are merely the sum total of their desires. In order to do so, these companies have decided it is better to ask forgiveness than permission to smash through existing landscapes, and often not even to ask forgiveness.

The mantra of "move fast and break things," plus the increased fear after 9/11 has meant that not only do these companies regularly get away with it, the government is colluding with them to do so.  When the government pushes back against the lawlessness, they find themselves greatly outmatched by the money and resources available to these behemoths.  I found that part particularly disheartening.  She writes that capitalism is never meant to be eaten raw, and that it should be cooked through the democratic processes of government and society, but the current system is bypassing all those things to present us with a rather raw state of affairs.  Mostly without our consent.  

Writes Zuboff: "Survelliance capitalism's ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts.  Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world's information.  One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks" (127).

Furthermore, these men ask us to "trust them" when called to account for their actions.  It's a sorry state of affairs, to be sure.  Zuboff's book is important, as I said, but it could be much leaner, and it seems like so much of what she writes about is stuff commonly acknowledged at this point: namely that Big Tech wants to shape everything about us for monetary gain, including our private lives, leaving nothing beyond Big Data's reach.  We must, in the way of Seeing Like a State, be made as legible as possible as human beings, and our behavior must be channeled and corralled into acceptable (read: profitable) avenues.  Unpredictable human behavior means lost revenue opportunities.  Therefore, the more a company can guide the user into predictable behavior channels, the more reliable the profit. 

What the internet initially offered was the promise of individualized experience and greater access to information, within an interconnected human framework.  The Internet was held out as scaffolding to thicken the ties that bind us, but in truth, it has served as an acid bath, dissolving much of what holds us together.

In a more elegant rendering of this same thought David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: 

 "We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

...

When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind" (Brooks, The Atlantic).

Essentially, the business model pursued by Big Tech has so completely changed our human landscape, it is almost impossible to bridge the gap between the analog and digital generations.  The analog generation has learned to work in the digital age, but still fundamentally thinks of the world in analog.  Digital natives have a hard time understanding the world before the Internet; online existence is presented with a predetermined menu of options, based on previous behavior, movement, and interests, all controlled by shadowy figures, cloaked in secrecy, who are accountable to no one; certainly not the paean users of their products.  They are not interested in gaining or retaining our trust, rather we are the product to be shaped for profit only, discarded when no longer useful.

I'm not sure what the solution is, given the reality of the world today; it is not possible for most of us to go off-grid and make shift for ourselves.  I'm not even sure it is desirable, after seeing the effects of the isolation of the pandemic, for off-grid life is necessarily isolated.  

We are meant to be in human community, bonded together by common goals and mutual affection and trust.  I suppose one solution is to live as much life off-line as is feasible, and to find some bright red lines to guide usage, while understanding that no matter what steps we take to protect our privacy, any online activity is going to be tracked in some way.  We must do what we can to curtain the prying eyes and deafen the listening ears.  

References:

Zuboff, Shoshana.  The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power.  New York: PublicAffairs/Hachette, 2020.

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and Why We Drive

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you will know my long-standing admiration for Matthew B. Crawford's excellent work.  (I have a whole tag dedicated to my ramblings about it!)  So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, is just as excellent as his previous work. 

The title may seem like a strange one, particularly if you are like me, and you don't especially love to drive or tinker with old cars.  Crawford owns a custom motorcycle shop and has spent a lot of non-academic time messing around with engines.  His book is about the joy of driving and tinkering (what he calls "folk engineering"), but it is also about the dangers of automation on human flourishing. 

It is this last bit where the book really has my interest.  I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, and to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technical stuff he writes about engines sails right past my head.  (Although, it must be said, I am mechanically-minded, and do a lot of the heavy-duty fixing around the house, so I'm not completely without interest in the inner workings of an internal combustion engine). 

Crawford uses the real experience of driving (and pushing the limits of a car's capabilities through driving skill acquired through time and testing) to illuminate how handing over our brains to automated processes actually takes something away from us.  When we complete mechanical tasks, the ideal is a task that requires enough skill to engage the brain, but not so much that it drains the energy for sustained work. 

As our cars have been taken over by computers, flashing screens and alerts, our brains have less to do, which mean that most people have a difficult time resisting the dopamine glow of their smartphones while driving.  With the predictable consequences we've all experienced on the road.  Crawford notes that as long as many of us drive as if our cars were already self-driving, it makes sense to push self-driving cars (5).  On the other hand, if driving required more skill (skills that humans already had), then self-driving cars would be unnecessary. 

Our cultural creative energies would be better served in making skilled demands of people, rather than cultivating some consumer experience.  "Manufactured experiences are offered as a substitute for direct confrontation with the world, and this evidently has some appeal for us.  We are relieved of the burden of grappling with real things--that is--things that resist our will, and thereby reveal our limited understanding and skill.  Experiences that have been deisnged around us offer escape from the frustrations of dealing with other people and with material reality.  They allow us to remain cocooned in a fantasy of competence and empowerment that is safe from the kind of refutation that routinely happens when you...ride a skateboard, for example" (114).

Why does it matter?  Some people are enamored of the idea that big cities could be free of traffic jams and congestion; commutes could be productive work times instead of frustrating time lost behind the wheel.  But Crawford warns that such thinking is dangerous.  The time behind the wheel can be a great time of mental freedom--to let the mind wander and think.  It is in that sort of quiet thinking time that solutions present themselves, or we can rejuvenate our souls. I personally find I get a lot of good thinking done while driving. 

But it is more than for just the freedom to quiet the mind that Crawford advocates retaining skilled driving.  He is not anti-technology; he freely acknowledges the improvements in automotive technology that have made cars safer, but those changes largely occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, invisible to the average driver.  Whereas the automation changes occurring now actually impede safety to a degree by disengaging the driver's mind, and invite further incursion on the driver's autonomy in the name of safety. 

But embodied skill is important, and contributes heavily to human happiness and flourishing.  "The new skills that we add to our repertoire when we learn to use tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions.  The crucial fact that makes this integration possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as it is when we make use of our own hands.  Or a 1963 Volkswagon" (111).

There is a growing body of research that finds physical effort gives psychological rewards that lead to greater human resilience. The basic tasks of securing our bodily needs, long a labor-intensive process involving the whole body, has largely been outsourced to automated processes.  Crawford speculates that the concomitant rise in rates of anxiety and depression may be a partly a result of this disengagement with the physical world, particularly the work of our hands (64).  As our work has gone online and turned to computing and knowledge skills, the loss of skilled embodied work has been a disaster, both economically and culturally.  We were not meant to live in the world of the Jetsons, however attractive the wiz-bang technology of that landscape seems.  Our brains crave agency over our environment and ourselves, and when denied it through effortless-driven rewards, turn to maladaptive practices instead.  The same body of research also finds that when we inhabit the natural world, with the resistance to our will and real-consequences problems to solve, we thrive on solving those problems with far less stress (64).

It is also true that our management of the road requires a certain level of social cohesion that our culture is rapidly losing.  Writes Crawford, "...our ability to share the road together smoothly and safely is based on our capacity for mutual prediction.  This is a form of intelligence that is socially realized, and depends on the existence of robust social norms that can anchor sound expectations of others' behavior.  Automation may become attractive, then, as a response to declining social cohesion: it is an attempt to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty....this is an approach that is likely to cause the further atrophy of our skills.  Among these are the skills of collective self-government, rooted in shared habits of cooperation.  A science of behavior management becomes necessary" (121). 

The basic point is that if you never learn to share your toys, to negotiate the complexities of social interaction in the real world, and let things get messy, as life is wont to do, you will have no idea how to react when there is no algorithm to guide you through a menu of predetermined options.  Crawford repeatedly cites the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E, who have so forgotten the basic embodied skills of humanity that they must be hauled around on automated flying saucers, talking only to screens instead of face-to-face.  He also notes the level of social control the humans allow themselves to be subject to, and cautions his readers against it, for this way lies madness. 

Which brings me to the next point, that of embodied life.  Humans were not meant to serve an algorithmic life, mediated by screens and whatever our Tech Overlords want us to think and see and do.  We were not meant for "cultivated consumer experiences" or the inscrutable wisps of whatever exists in the cloud. 

We were meant to fully inhabit our bodies and our world, in all the messiness that entails.  We were meant to stick our hands into actual dirt to grow things.  To care for actual animals to rear for food and clothing.  To raise our children, with all the bodily fluids that entails.  To stand on the shoulders of giants to move and progress.  "But tradition can itself be an engine of progress.  It organizes the transmission of knowledge.  It also provides an idiom for some shared endeavor, and a set of historical benchmarks, such that one can imagine oneself outdoing particular human beings who came before, and who worked within the same basic limitations.  Tradition thus provides a venue for rivalry in excellence, the kind that sometimes bring a whole community to new and unexpected places" (136).  There is a thingness in embodied space, physical habitation, and real things that simply cannot be replicated online without some loss of ontological self. 

There is a role for technology and the Internet in our world, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tool, and we the wielders of it, rather than the other way around.  When automation becomes a way to deskill humans and rob them of the flourishing that comes with skilled, meaningful work, it has overstepped its purpose.  A tool can become an extension of our bodies through long use and acquired fluency, but it can also get in the way.  Does technology allow us to remain in touch with far-flung family members and to maintain relationships that would otherwise wither?  Yes, undoubtedly.  Does it also get in the way of in-person interaction by inserting itself loudly into intimate conversations?  Absolutely.  Does it allow us access to an unimaginable wealth of knowledge and information?  Of course. But it also provides platforms that debase our common humanity, and reduces the quality of our interactions by increasing the noise in our heads. 

I suppose the (long, rambling) point to all this can be boiled down to the following: Do stuff with your hands in the real world.  Learn to fix things that are broken, how to mend that which has ripped, develop new skills beyond a keyboard, and get your hands dirty while doing so.

There is much more to say about this book, and I hope to revisit it in a future post.

 

Excavating Truth in the Liturgy

*I started this post almost exactly one year ago, as Pentecost was this past Sunday.  Funny how that is--I've been turning idea over in my head for more than a year, a vertical spiral of excavation in itself!  

(2019)
I was standing in the choir this morning, and it was Pentecost, so all the music for the first half of the Liturgy was different than the familiar Antiphons of ordinary time.  I started thinking about repetition in the services and wondering (again) why we repeat everything so much.  I explored this a bit in my novel, but I keep coming back to it; there is a particular scene in the book that echoes in my mind a lot.  It occurred to me rather suddenly that the repetition allows us to excavate the Truth of the Liturgy, much in the same way doing a 12-week run of a play allows a theater actor to excavate the truth of the text in a play.

(2020)

Last month, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a book group discussion via Zoom on Eugene Vodolazkin's most excellent book, Laurus.  I read the book several years ago, and was completely floored by the brilliance of his text and the complexity and facets of the story.  It is one of those books that is hard to describe to others, because the depth of the spiritual meaning lends itself to interpretations on a lot of different levels. 

One theme that Vodolazkin revisits again and again is the malleability of time, and how our modern ideas of time are just that: modern ideas.  Time exists for man, not the other way around, and the meaning we assign to it, and how we experience it, say a lot about who we are as a people.  

(I wrote my master's thesis on how the Eastern Orthodox Church thinks about time and how that thought is embodied in physical space as a historical matter.  So I have some skin in the game on this topic).

In the medieval Russian context of the novel, time operates on a vertical spiral, rather than the progressive horizontal line of the post-modern psyche.  In our context, time ever marches onward, toward a (theoretically) brighter future, because: progress.  What has happened before is hardly relevant then, because it does not help us go into the future.  We need the new, the novel, the curious, in order to maintain our experience of forward movement. 

In the medieval world, the novel was viewed with suspicion, and not easily accepted, simply because it was novel and new.  The idea is that you continue to plumb the depths of what you know for ever greater meaning and complexity.  To take that idea in a concrete context, if you understand the presentism of liturgical time (as in, everything is always present in the Eternal NOW of God--everything past, present and future is always happening), when you go to the service of Pentecost, you are not only remembering the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in the upper room, you are mystically present with them and experiencing the actual descent of the Holy Spirit in that moment.  It means all of history is present, and can be examined for additional meaning and facet. I found myself praying: "Holy Spirit, come dwell with us!" throughout the service this weekend. 

I suppose I find this theme interesting and important because it gives the lie to the consumer self.  That is to say: I am more than the sum total of my desires, and I can transcend these things for greater spiritual meaning.  I've pondered a lot on material things these past months, as we've faced grocery and household shortages, learned different ways of doing (rediscovering older ways, really), and figuring out what is really necessary.  Human connection and understanding are necessary.  (Extremely so, as we've found through our isolation.  We are on yellow phase now, and had some friends over for dinner the past couple of nights, and the kids are having a hard time coping with the sudden abundance of riches in this area after months of poverty in spirit). 

Even the new green growing things in our newly installed kitchen garden are a way of experiencing the vertical spiral of time.  The plants that are there now, some of them will renew themselves next year, and we will experience the plant again, but in a new way, with the knowledge and experience of this summer.  Some of the plants will need to be replanted, and we learn to know a whole new existence.  Some will bolt by summer's end and make way for the hardier plants we can seed in the fall to eat in the early winter like kale and spinach.  There is a whole world in that garden. 

It brings me to the passage from Wheesht that I posted on yesterday's Yarn Along post:

(As an aside to that post, I have often wondered what it was like for the company of Coriolanus to live with that level of anger and muscular intensity over a large number of performances.  Did it stay with them in their lives off-stage?  Did it inform the work that came after?  What knowledge or wisdom emerged from excavating the truths of that play over that many performances?) 

 

It would be tempting to look at the new ways of doing that have developed in our household during the quarantine, or to see the growth of the kitchen garden and think we should leave the city for a more rural existence, but we have no strong reason to leave the city, and many reasons to stay (church, school, work, well-established health care providers, friends and neighbors, all slowly and painstakingly built and maintained over the past 13 years). 

Just as the repetition of the church services teaches me to delve more deeply into the Truth of the liturgy, to find new spiritual truths to examine and understand, the repetition of our city routines and the basic rootedness of it, even when it is hard, even when I get sick of the things that make it hard, is still worth doing and excavating for meaning. 

Sometimes the truth to find is subtle, and only reveals itself slowly, over many turns of repetition.  Sometimes it is more obvious, and shows itself on the first revolution, but adds nuance with time.  Sometimes we can only see the facets when we have gone around it and up or down a few times. 

But it is always worth finding.  Keep digging.

The New Normal

*I started this post last week before the wide-spread closures began, but have tried to update to reflect the present moment.

Last week our school announced a two-week closure, so my kids came home Friday with all their books and will receive their assignments through e-mail.  It's a relief, in a way, because we've been waiting for it to happen, wondering when, and how, and now that it's here, we can just get on with things.  I won't say I'm not nervous about home-schooling four special needs kids for two weeks, or worried about the possibility of a longer-term closure; it is what it is, and we'll get through it.  I completely understand the reasoning (no one at our school has the virus, but the administration has decided in the interest of community safety and prudence, it was wiser to close now, ahead of the curve). *In the days since our school decided to close, the governor of our state ordered state-wide closures, and has also ordered non-essential public spaces to close and essential spaces to limit contact. 

I'm grateful for the foresight of our school administration, for thinking ahead and making plans.  We received detailed lesson plans for each kid yesterday, with additional resources to print out, plus more to come in the mail this week.  (From my own observations, it appears that a large number of schools across the country simply closed, either for two weeks or longer, told parents to school at home and good luck with that). 

It makes sense to flatten the curve of illness so that health care facilities can absorb the impact of large numbers of people getting sick during an already challenging flu season, and that means social distancing.  It's hard to think about the things we will all miss out on during these next weeks, but I was encouraged to read Nichole Roccas' post last week. 

In a way, the flurry of homeschooling means I don't have as much time to dwell on all the commentary online about the current situation.  I'm troubled by the number of people who are flip about the value of human life, and feel they can say the current situation isn't that bad because "only the vulnerable and elderly will die."  My family is vulnerable.  I'm vulnerable.  We are not disposable or fungible.  Every life has value.

What I will say about the present moment is this.  It is completely understandable and human to be afraid.  I am afraid at times.  My children are at higher risk because of their airway malacia, and I have asthma myself.  We don't know how this thing will end, or the final toll, both in human terms and otherwise.  How our societies will change and adapt as a result.  Most of us today don't have living memory of these sorts of things, and the speed and scale of this pandemic is also new, particular to our time and age.  Some good may come of it, as people work together to support one another through these tough times, and certainly some bad, but living in the uncertainty is difficult.

In the meantime, we are staying home, having dance parties a few times a day (I've busted out my early '90s hip hop, plus some other tunes with a good beat), taking a good long walk midday, working through the lesson plans sent by their excellent teachers, doing puzzles, playing games, and waiting to see what happens.  (Hats off to our teachers!  They are the best!)  I'm building breaks for myself into our schedule because I'm introverted and I can't go all day with four small people who talk non-stop without losing my mind.  😁 

For now, I'm off for my midday CSI + knitting break, and the kids have requested a square dance party later. 

Peace be with you.

Adaptation

Like everyone else in the world, I've been thinking about the times we live in lately, of economic instability and weird weather, of viruses and outbreaks, the lack of individual agency in the climate crisis, of all the things that the mass media would have us think portend the end of the world.  It is easy to panic in such an atmosphere, where it feels like everything you know and cherish might come to an end tomorrow. 

These things are cause for serious concern, but they are mostly things that sap our emotional energy with fruitless worry, since in truth, there is little we as individuals can do about any of it.  What will be, will be. I think it is worth remembering that we will all need to adjust to things as they happen, that we need not go into some sort of survivalist headspace that wants to take everything for oneself, to ensure self-survival.  I was reminded of Brian Kaller's excellent writing over the years on these topics--he is an American journalist living in Ireland with his family, and trying to reclaim some of the older ways of doing and being.  I've found him to be a sober and realistic correspondent, intent on reclaiming the small local bonds of community and ways of life that will see people through crises.

I went searching through his archives this morning, looking for a post he wrote a few years ago that stuck in my mind.  He talks about how our model for future change is almost universally dystopian, that some crisis is coming that will fundamentally alter the world in ways that will seem apocalyptic.  He says this vision is fantasy, and does no one any service (nor does it improve anyone's mental health).  Instead, he says we should be focusing on how to strengthen the bonds between ourselves, in community, because that is how we will weather change.  No man is an island, and the man with the most toys does not win in the end. 

He writes:

"[W]e have created a society that runs on coal and oil, which won’t last forever. Even the amount we’ve burned so far has changed the air so much that it is literally changing the weather around the world, creating more intense storms, harsher droughts, and greater extremes of heat and cold. Anyone who walks along the Irish shoreline can see the other main product of our civilisation, the plastic and other rubbish that now clutters the world’s seas, or piles up in landfills that have become the largest man-made structures on Earth.

Yet apocalyptic stories assume that our modern car-driving, computer-using culture will collapse overnight in some catastrophe, whether a robot Armageddon, climate disaster or Rapture – and the fact that we make entertainment about such horrors means that they are not really our fears, but our fantasies. And they offer the worst possible model for how to handle the realistic difficulties we might face in the future. Paranoid survivalists do not help build a delicate web of trust among neighbours, and millenarians will not help build lasting infrastructure for the next stage of history. The more people are convinced that we face a violent and despairing future, the more likely such a future becomes.

In the decades to come, as we have to cope with more difficult economic times, energy crunches and unexpected weather, more of us will have to grow more food ourselves, learn to use less energy from different sources, and buy more products made to be fixed and re-used rather than thrown away. It might be a reduction of our energy wealth by 10 percent, or 50 percent, or 90 percent – depending on your time and place -- but it’s literally not the end of the world, and we shouldn’t confuse the two.

And it will require more of us to form carpools, shopping co-ops, allotment clubs, medical co-ops, home-schooling networks and other such ad hoc organisations, and to cheerfully work with our neighbours to create new relationships – something people can and often do in a crisis, and exactly the opposite of what most science fiction depicts."

~Brian Kaller, "What Science Fiction Ought to Be," Restoring Mayberry blog, 21 June 2018.

Kaller goes on to talk about the sorts of stories that would be interesting and helpful to tell ourselves as our world changes, stories that would help to prepare us for times to come.  It's a great post, and he continues to develop these themes in a later review of a graphic novel. 

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter, and while I won't say anything so insubstantial as "what the world needs now is love," what I will say is what we need now are stories about human resilience and the ways in which people can come together to support one another in times of crisis.  Stories about breaching the walls that divide us, stories about creating common space between us. 

Be prepared for times of crisis, but don't panic, and keep an eye out for those who need help.  Because we all need a helping hand from time to time.

Talking Tuesday: Fear and Clothing

Image via

Sometime in November, on the good advice of Lynn at American Age Fashion, I purchased Cintra Wilson's book, Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style.  The book did not disappoint.  It was my first foray into Wilson's work, and I found her bracing tone enjoyable--hilarious at times.  (Her take-down of Washington DC style had me rolling on the floor). 

There were moments when I thought Ms. Wilson walked right up to the line of being offensive, but she often turned it around by a very insightful observation about her own shortcomings.  The book is organized roughly by regions, and she visits many different parts of the country in her quest to understand the particular sartorial leanings of an area and what it says about the people who live there. 

Where the book really shines, however, is toward the end, when she turns her lens on New York City, her home for many years.  Her observations about how fashion mirrors larger social trends (for good or ill), how human labor is increasingly devalued, and the ways in which capitalism twists our desires are razor sharp.  I found myself dog-earring pages and nodding along.  

Writes Wilson:

"I figured out what was really bothering me, finally, in a sea of $188 T-shirts.  I felt something vital to mankind was being violently ignored to death.  The commodity that is currently the most undervalued thing on earth is the attention, care, and labor of individual human beings. 

When you devalue actual labor--when you falsify and fetishize a look of artificial work and legitimate heavy use in a garment--how does this corrupt our ability to recognize and value actual work?  The dignified patina earned by objects of actual use and usefulness?" (pp. 225-226).

She also makes a few interesting observations about fashion in the culture that I had not considered. First, she notes that there has been virtually no change in fashion for the past 20 years or more, putting our culture in a sort of strange stasis.  This may seem unimportant, given the state of the world, but fashion tends to reflect the larger state of things. 

By way of example, you can date early 1940s garments against late 1940s garments because the lines are so different.  Early 1940s were war years, and the garments are utilitarian, military-inspired, and defined by rationing.  Late 1940s are post-war years, and the clothing reflects the softer civilian milieu and the desire for things to get back to "normal."  You could never look at clothing in 1970 and compare it to 1980 or 1990 and say there had been no change!

The stasis of fashion speaks to our Internet Age, which seems to produce nothing new, but rather recycles cultural nostalgia, comodifying and flattening the original meaning of it until it means nothing (pp. 242-43).  Plus, as Wilson and other culture watchers observe, all the fashion ages are happening all at the same time--there is literally a sartorial niche for everyone, and if everything has a niche, there is no place for fashion to push the boundaries (p. 276). 

Historically, fashion has pushed lines, change boundaries, making conversation about who we are. If there is no boundary, if all the rules have been transcended, there is nothing to be avant garde about. Fashion has become an endless line of cash-grab sequels in the Hollywood model, and we know nothing ontologically.

More importantly, however, is how our late capitalist system has transformed our very selves.  "We have all internalized the pervasive message that the gratification of our immediate individual desire is our highest priority.  We have been subliminally trained to buy things we merely want, as opposed to the things we need--and to indulge ourselves even to the point of self-sabotage whenever we feel weak, unlovely, or unloved....Our will toward consumerism feels irresistible--because it is intended to.  As a society, we choose to remain largely unaware that our desires have been built for us, by experts who have become so insidiously successful at planting seeds in our minds that grow into giant kudzu-sprawls of unanswerable longing that by the time we act upon these desires, we are fully convinced that they were organically grown in our own psyches.  We rationalize big, crazy purchases as being investments in our better selves" (p. 281-282, 285).

With the loss of ontology comes the loss of telos: the end goal of our lives.  If we don't know who we are, we cannot possibly know what the point of anything is.  Who are we living for, why are we living?  What is the legacy we leave for our children? 

This sort of cultural nihilism weighs heavily on me, because I'm far from immune from its darker impulses.  It's like constantly fighting against a current--sometimes you just want to float for a while, and stop swimming. 

My kids are at a stage where it feels like stuff is just sliding through my fingers constantly.  They are growing too fast for efficient hand-me-downs, and knit fabric (most of my kids' clothing) wears badly and is difficult to mend nicely.  I feel the environmental cost of my every purchasing decision very keenly, and it feels like dropping pebbles into an ocean, trying to dam the flow.  (And I'm not even doing a very good job of it).  I'm so very tired. 

I suppose the best way to fight it is to continue to use what we have, thrift well, mend or darn everything I can, purchase fabric and yarn as wisely as possible, and hold fast to the more ancient rhythms of the Church year.

Talking Tuesday: The Inner Tumult of Ascesis

This weekend was the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, the official start of the Lenten Triodion.  We are in the last few weeks before Lent is officially upon us; these weeks given to us by the Church to pause, reflect, get ready, before the big dive at the end of this month.  I've found myself in a pretty contemplative state of mind for several weeks now, just thinking about various things.  I'm trying to read more, watch less, eat less, shop purposefully for the needs of the household, be in front of a screen less.  It is hard to do this--it produces a lot of internal discomfort for me as I use a lot of these things to cope with the difficulties in my life.  It is a crutch and not a good one.

The weaker part of me wants to stop being so purposeful, to eat until I'm full, watch movies until I'm overtired, shop mindlessly, surf the internet for no good reason, just to turn off the noise of the world.  But none of these things helps to do that.  Developing a spirit of quietness and reflection, particularly living in the sort of family I live in, is very very difficult.  A lot of days, I just want to run and hide and stop being an adult for a while.  The pressure of responsibility for the household and for parenting my children well feels like too much.  I often feel as though I live directly under a giant thumb tack, constantly being pushed a little further into my head.  I don't want to live like this, or feel like this, so I think I have to take the ascesis of our Orthodox life more seriously.

I've been dipping into and out of Donald Sheehan's Grace of Incorruption for several months now, and a passage really jumped out at me last week.  He writes that the beginning of our ascetical struggle is when we confront the inner turmoil that is produced by running up against difficult things, and what we ultimately do with that turmoil.   Do we deny the passion and further our ascetical purpose, or do we give in to it and feed the passion for further spiritual destruction?  Do we learn to embrace the questions that come out of inner turmoil, and turn them to God, for His purpose?  Do we allow ourselves to experience the pain and discomfort of denying the body and the mind what it craves so that the Master can chisel us into His likeness?

I've also been reading Lysa TerKeurst's Unglued, and in it, she tells the story of how Michelangelo sculpted the statue of David out of an enormous block of marble.  He was the third in a line of sculptors to take on the project, but he was the one to finish the masterpiece.  When asked how he accomplished such a monumental task, Michelangelo replied, "Easy.  I just chip away the parts of the marble that aren't David."  Lysa TerKeurst's point in telling the story is to say that God is always molding us, always sculpting us, and the chisel can be painful and difficult; we can run away from that process and not allow God to make us who we are supposed to be: the very image and likeness of Himself.  Or we can embrace that pain and discomfort and bodily denial, seek to work with Him in ascetical struggle to conquer the passions, and let the hammer do its work.

No one said theosis was going to be easy.