by
Jon Baskin
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Salih had become a Marxist as a teenager because she could not accept that the world was “a place of boundless suffering.” “The militant,” she wrote, “is someone who responds to a form of collective awareness. He steps into the movement for the sake of correcting the ever-crooked balance between truth and history.” Salih was never able to accept the crookedness of that balance—and it ended up unsettling her own life. She had trouble finding a place for herself, socially and professionally, in Egypt, and wrote part of The Stillborn while traveling alone in Europe. Decades later, she remarked, “I keep colliding with that ever-widening abyss between what is and what should be.”
[...]
Yet Salih continued to value Marxism as a way to see the world: “Marx was the last of the great thinkers, and part of my brain will always tick with a mechanism acquired from the world of his ideas.” Her own bitter experience, however, taught her to be deeply suspicious of ideology and how it could turn into a deadening, stultifying force rather than a means to engage with the world. She invoked Milan Kundera’s notion of totalitarian kitsch: a sort of “violent sentimentalism embodied in a collective dream of salvation.” When you embrace this kitsch and its ready-made certainties, you insist that you have all the answers, and “you refuse the human being as a world unto herself, alive with contradiction.”
The next day, the class watched footage of Kitchen himself, filmed after he was released from jail but before he won his settlement. Someone off-camera asks him to describe his post-release life. Kitchen tells them he hardly sleeps. That the mere sight of a Chicago police car sends him into a full-body terror, which is why he’s had to leave Chicago, the only city he ever knew. “It’s hard,” he says. “It’s hard, it’s hard. It’s like a dream to me, sitting up here with you. It’s like, at any moment, this could get taken away from me all over again.”
It had been easy, perhaps, to joke about Michael Kill: a caricature of an old white villain on the wrong side of history. But there were no jokes to tell about Ronald Kitchen. “Do you know how many of the police went to jail?” asked a black girl toward the front of the class, referring to all the other Midnight Crew members besides Burge. It wasn’t the first time one of Douglas’s students had posed the question, and it wouldn’t be the last. Each time, the answer was the same: zero.
“I’m still confused,” a girl said one day. What she was confused about was all the other cops besides Burge who had tortured. “How did they not go to jail?”
Douglas gave a tight smile, the smile of a person trying not to give in to the unpleasantness of the news they had to deliver. “You expect things to work the way they’re supposed to work, not the way they actually work,” she said.
Douglas pushed Takeaway One because she wanted her students to understand the truth of the world they lived in—but also, it was clear, because she wanted them to be safe. More than once, she drew her students’ attention to the case of Marcus Wiggins, a black thirteen-year-old tortured by the Midnight Crew. “Why would they torture a thirteen-year-old? Why are they torturing a thirteen-year-old? I need an answer.”
A Latino boy in the front row began to venture a response. “For suspected—”
Douglas cut him off. “But why? I want you to look at everybody in this room. ”
He hesitated. “Maybe… because they can. They’re using their authority.”
Douglas nodded, then pushed the point a step further. You might think of yourself as kids, she told them, but that didn’t mean “they” would see you that way too. “You might be playing. You might think: I’m a kid. But no.” This was why it was important for them to be careful. Important not to joke around—not to act like kids—in the presence of cops. Important not to assume that things work the way they’re supposed to work. During a discussion about the Ronald Kitchen case, a rail-thin boy in what looked to me like an updated version of nineties skater wear posed a question: “Like, what was special about Kitchen so the police went after him versus any other kid on the block?”
“I don’t want to say this,” said Douglas. “But it could happen to you.”
“It doesn’t seem that way,” he said.
“But it is that way,” said Douglas.
The way I remember things, I bought my copy of The Game in a Waterstones bookstore on Oxford Street, sometime in 2008—the same year Yang wrote his essay—and I didn’t feel wonderful doing it. I was embarrassed, for a start. Buying the book seemed like solid evidence of inadequacy as well as being faintly seedy. But I went ahead anyway, motivated in large part by the fact that a friend of mine’s older sister (I was twenty, she would have been 22 or 23) had slept with me twice earlier in the year and then lost interest, although not before I’d managed to massively overinvest. It stuns me a little to think about it now, but the disappointment was so fierce it lasted for months afterwards, maybe even the guts of a year. In hindsight, the emotional shock seems both far less important—I mean, thank god—and still real enough to be disconcerting when I consider it. You grow up and get at least a little tougher, sure. But if you’ve ever had a lesson in how completely you can be wiped out by the vagaries of somebody else’s attention, it stays with you.
I bring up this old piece of personal debris because it seems to me now that what Strauss and his kin were advertising was something like a vaccine for that feeling of nullity. Getting women into bed is the overt goal. But (if I can hazard a generalization) what eats at the loser male most desperately isn’t the lack of sex exactly, it’s the sense of being powerless to make yourself matter—the lamest of all invisibility cloaks. Horny and sad as I was as a twenty-year-old, I don’t think it would’ve occurred to me to put it that way, and perhaps it doesn’t occur to most of the people who buy these books. Still, something like that is the trap you’re trying to escape. Like a lot of our culture, The Game feeds off the idea that sex and romance are the central—if not the only—sources of adventure open to most people, and from there it preys on the anxiety of what it would mean to be cut off from those possibilities. And at the bottom of that pit are the terrors of being someone to whom nothing ever happens; a nonperson, somehow excluded from living because you can’t persuade the world to look at you. In his essay, Yang zeroes in on the instinct for revenge flickering inside the pickup artist’s system (“the wicked gleam in the eye of a man putting one over on the world”). It’s the bitterness of people who know what it’s like to be ignored.
[...] As a child, Wertheimer fled Austria with his parents and sister, and soon after returning to their patrimony, the parents died in a car accident. We receive this history in brief, breathless flashes near the novel’s end, biographical information the narrator refuses to connect explicitly to Wertheimer’s suicide. The narrator’s fixation creates a world far more claustrophobic than its reality, one that denies the true horror of history, only because it does not fit within the psychological walls of his music education in Salzburg. His belief in artistic competition, in an art that resembles sports in its rankings and its clear-cut determination of winners and losers, is so all-encompassing that it becomes a scheme by which he can explain a life and deny the world.
That we can even ask such a question suggests that having kids is no longer, as it was for previous generations, a necessary part of the good life. But it reveals something more besides: that as we deprive the earth of its capacities to sustain life, we are losing our own ability to see the point in it. Increasingly, we do not live as if life is worthwhile in itself—as if in the face of pain, disappointment and no credible promise of progress, the struggles it involves and the choices they demand are meaningful.
Some philosophers say that to ask “why be good?” is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding. If there is such a thing as doing the right thing—not right relative to some other goal, in the way that taking out the trash is the right thing to do in order to get rid of that smell in the kitchen, but right absolutely, in the way that keeping a friend’s confidence or standing up to injustice is the right thing to do—it’s the sort of thing one does for its own sake. To ask why one should do that which is obviously the right thing to do, to demand a further reason for it, is to admit that one no longer comprehends the possibility of such a thing as the right thing to do—one cannot tell right from wrong at all. To ask “why have children?” may not be so different. What, after all, is one asking for? A list of benefits?
The choice between the climate-moralizers and the leisure-maximizers, for all their apparent differences, is a false one. At heart they are the same: young people for whom child-rearing, once the expected outcome of adulthood, has become one possible project among many. Weighing the pros and cons, neither group can find a good enough reason to go through with it, and plenty of reasons to avoid it altogether. Even for many of us who want kids, starting a family is something we think we’ll get to eventually, once we’ve checked off enough of our personal and professional to-dos: education, a fulfilling and well-paid job, a few key professional accomplishments, an active social life, meeting “the right person,” adopting a rescue dog as a trial in co-parenting, terminating analysis. The interesting thing is not that there are fewer reasons to have children now than there were before—there has never been a shortage of reasons why it would be better not to—but that we’re asking why in the first place. The evident differences in the negative responses reflect mere variations in personal priorities.
[...] Literature is at once close to home and strange: a world of fantasy and desire, of unwanted guests and uncanny returns. To understand liberalism through literature is to stop asking how it works, or trying to show that it doesn’t. It is, rather, to understand how we could organize our lives around an ideology that we renounce. To build a different system—or even to imagine it—we first have to ask: What is it that keeps us building this one?
At the core of liberalism, Trilling emphasized, was a “primal act of imagination.” Behind all the conceptual infrastructure that made up the liberal world was a visionary desire. Our laws and customs might be the forms of our freedom, but they could not account for its content, for the value we attach to it. The purpose of a liberal society was to free individuals to follow their dreams: the pursuit of happiness, unleashed. But what dreams? By definition, a liberal framework cannot say.
This, according to Trilling, was the paradox at the heart of liberalism—a paradox that, while not fatal in itself, posed a mortal danger to the life of liberal societies. As liberalism progresses, it erects political, economic and social structures with a view to rational improvement, affirming the human capacity to build a better world. But the more power it gains—the more effectively it reshapes the world in its image—the more it loses sight of what exactly this power is for. “In the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind,” Trilling wrote, liberalism “inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the nature of the mind.” Imagining itself as a human creation, liberalism creates a society of machines.
If the outward face of liberalism is idealism, the audacity of hope, its inner essence, Anderson argues, is failure: the experience of dreams deflated. Failure is not, as we might expect, secondary and historical, but primary and essential. The strangeness of Anderson’s argument—and the uniqueness, she argues, of liberalism—is that failure comes first. “Fundamentally,” she writes, “liberalism is prompted by enduring challenges.” Notice the phrasing: it is not that liberal optimism must confront challenges. Rather, it is prompted by them; the challenges are “constitutive.” Liberalism is a belief system that, while promoting a vision of progress to come, grows out of the experience of being “belated and disenchanted.”
Anderson returns often to a description of liberalism as a “lived relation to ideals.” She means that the ideals themselves are formed in the living; that, paradoxically, the life we imagine at once orients us in the world and follows from our experience. It is only in trying to live our ideals that we see what they mean, and in each case that she cites, the lesson is bleak. Her argument weaves through famous Victorian novels by Dickens and Trollope, as well as modernist works by writers like Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison and Doris Lessing. Anderson wants us to notice how each of these books is driven by the experience of political failure: ideals deflated, projects unfinished or abandoned, civic ties corroded. It is in these disappointing experiences, Anderson argues, that something else is born: what she calls the “intractable energies of these moods of doubt, despair, and difficulty,” an energy “at once negative and utopian.”
hm interesting, idk how much i agree with this (isn't that def of liberalism too vague?) but it does pose a fascinating horizon
The to-do lists cannot communicate with each other. I have a five-year plan that nags me every day, but none of it overlaps with the daily task list. Fretting about my supposed long-term goals of completing my book proposal and my novel takes up so much mental energy that basic jobs—paying bills even if I do have the money, filing taxes, changing the sheets, giving the university some document or other—become herculean tasks. I pull at single strands of my hair constantly, unrelentingly, an old habit that fills the ever-expanding moments I spend not doing the things on the to-do lists. The days are remarkably dark; I never knew that I would spend days not seeing the sun. In the dark, it becomes impossible to focus on what is important, and I fret, seized by a nameless fear, a nothing-tightness, that hugs my chest at all times. This nameless fear becomes the subject of much amicable conversation in my New York world, so different from the hectic world of underfunded nonprofits for low-income housing development that I left behind in Bombay. My Bombay life offered little time for self-analysis, and even less indication that I was important, and therefore little time for anxiousness about whether how we spent our time justified our importance; but here, this nameless fear becomes not only a constant internal presence but also, as a perennial subject of conversation, a kind of social currency. The feeling is so omnipresent it would be odd, almost inconsiderate, not to have it, like showing up at a white elephant party with no gift.