by
The Point
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At today’s meeting the safety man is smooth, calm, but even so, he speaks of horrors. He says to the crowd, “How many of you want to go home today with the disfigured face of a monster? Raise your hand.”
Nobody raises their hand.
“How many of you want to go home today with shattered bones in your chest and waking up for the rest of your life coughing blood and wheezing in the dark dark night?”
No hands raised for that either.
“Okay now how many of you want to go home today missing a finger? Okay two fingers. Wait, how many want to go home today missing both your hands, so you just have two stumps hanging there at the end of your wrists? Raise your hands if you want that to be you.”
“Jesus Christ,” someone says over by the drill press.
But heavy rain, and lightning too, does set down on our job site. The foreman comes out of the trailer and up onto the steel structure and he says, “Alright, everybody stop what you’re doing. Let’s go.”
We stream down the stairs, the rain slapping us. Taking two, three, four stairs at a time, sliding down the railings with our work gloves on, and boots slapping the grating, and calling each other pussies, and losers, and asswipes, and assholes, and loads, stiffs, dipshits, and fuckers. The thunder rumbling even louder than the hell of the unit we are leaving, and so earplugs ripped out and thrown onto the ground. The midday sky above is momentarily dark, shaded under gray clouds sometimes tinged with green or even purple—but then the same dark sky is suddenly full of white light. Lightning hitting something along the banks of the river. So laugh and hustle through the rain towards the trailer. Push each other, literally. Be cruel and continue to not give a shit about anything in the world, your life included, but get off the steel, because you’re not expected to work in a lightning storm. The wind picks up and the rain comes down harder. The chickens are long gone from the oak tree. They seek shelter too beneath the cars in the lot, the supervisor’s trailer, the trees on the wood line. And there are no ducks on Duck Island. Open the door of the trailer, pull off your wet shirts and say, “What the fuck is this life!” and put on a dry shirt, sit down and let the storm pass. Decks of cards come out. Magazines flop open. Boots are put up on empty chairs. Eyes are closed. The rain and wind beat against the trailer. All is well for a little while. The tree shakes. The unit hums. We hope it gets worse and worse and worse so we never have to go out there again.
Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades—and without acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that, even if economic inequalities were eliminated, other hierarchies would persist. Some people would still be kinder than others. Some would be better at singing. Some art would be ugly, and some would be beautiful. And, irrational creatures that we are and no doubt would remain, we would not treat everything in accordance with its true value. Some of us would continue to prefer Rooney to Baldwin. Some of us would continue to love bad people more than we love the good ones. Even under socialism, I might opt for a violent Swedish boyfriend.
But this is as it should be. Absolute equality requires absolute identity. A world in which everyone loved everyone else equally would contain no love worth mentioning. All things considered, we are lucky that when they beat you, you cease to be the best.
i do love that debate essay
On page after page, Gopnik portrays liberalism as the only political perspective that is “open to the evidence of experience.” Only liberals, with their capacity for experimentation and “self-correction,” Gopnik contends, are able to perform ungainly but essential tasks like cleaning up the sewers in nineteenth-century London—an achievement he mentions several times and says saved “possibly millions” of lives—or curbing a crime wave in twentieth-century New York. And yet, even as he presses these points, Gopnik shows his incapacity to attend in any concentrated way to the mire of the actual. Most conspicuously, he neglects the most recent challenges to his story about the “triumph of liberal ideals”—from Brexit to Bolsonaro—with the justification that it is not necessary for him to discuss “obvious contemporary political issues,” since “there’s a lot of that already.” Lame as this explanation may seem on the surface, the reality is worse. Gopnik not only fails to attend to the proximate causes of the “shock” with which his book begins; he seems to want his readers to forget some of its most obvious sources. How else to explain, in a book supposedly meant for a generation that cannot remember a time when America was not at war in the Middle East, the existence of sentences like: “Liberals believe in fighting wars as hard as necessary; ending them as soon as possible; and rebuilding the defeated country as charitably as one can.” Or that, in a book meant to trumpet the achievements of modern liberalism, there are so many pages devoted to the cleaning of the sewers in London 160 years ago, and not one word about the lack of drinking water in Flint, Michigan in 2019.
But there’s a serious point in there too. In raging against Thatcher, our generation is, among other things, raging against the forces that shaped us—but rage as we might, they did still shape us, and they continue to do so. Brand himself is a case in point, as he well knows: he can lament the neoliberal erosion of the “unseen bond” of community all he wants, but at the end of the day he’s not exactly Mother Teresa. He admits to feeling nostalgia for the Thatcher years, bound up as they are with his childhood, yet “what is more troubling,” he owns, “is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and [Thatcher’s] neoliberal inculcation begins.”
Might something similar be true for all of us who grew up in the neoliberal era? If so, might not our loathing of Thatcher—or its positive correlate, our longing for the primordial community she supposedly shattered—be rooted in anxieties about our own moral stature? It certainly rings true of me; I am, undeniably, one of Thatcher’s inheritors. The bequest began in an oddly symbolic way: when I was seven or so, the other kids used to call me Thatcher on account of the similarity in our surnames (better that, admittedly, than a subsequent sobriquet that began with “f” and rhymed with “sucker”). Later on, in the complacent, pre-post-imperial environment of an elite boarding school, I came to rebel against the whole of Torydom; by blood I’m half-Indian and a quarter Irish and as a thirteen year-old I was sure that gave me the nobility of the oppressed. But it’s hard to maintain your victim status when you’re on your way “up” to Oxford, and although many do seem to pull it off I wasn’t equal to the challenge. As I gradually realized that I was and probably always would be on the winning side of Thatcher’s great divide, I came to feel complicit in the cruelty of her supposed meritocracy. Privilege may not have been a gift that I ever asked for, but it was a gift I would receive nonetheless. Just as my younger self used to bristle at the accusation that I was spoiled, unanswerable as it was, so my eyes still water at Billy Bragg’s reproach to Thatcher and her plummy progeny: “Just because you’re going forwards / Doesn’t mean I’m going backwards / Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy.”
Economists of all stripes agree that the underlying cause of growing inequality in Western societies is the integration of the global economy, which has simultaneously increased the earning power of the highly educated while decreasing that of the rest. At the top end, HSBC can proclaim itself the world’s local bank; at the bottom end, unskilled labor cannot compete abroad. Even if neoliberal tax cuts and privatizations have exacerbated the problem, they are by no means its source. This leaves leftist politicians, most of whom understand these facts perfectly well, in the depressing position of having to hold neoliberals to account for crimes against equality while having no idea how to avoid such crimes themselves. In such circumstances the only way to keep your hands clean is to stay out of politics altogether; that allows you to blame the whole thing on the political and financial elites who are really in charge, as per Occupy Wall Street. But the position of disdainful superiority is itself unstable. If millionaires on Wall Street are immoral for not wanting to give more of their wealth to the unemployed of Detroit, how can any of us justify not giving more of our own riches—for such they surely are—to the starving of Africa? And although globalization may produce rising inequality within Western societies as a side effect, wouldn’t protectionism harm the poor in the developing world? Insofar as economic inequality is the left’s principal field of battle in contemporary political life, the fact is that it has no real response to neoliberalism. Idealists without an ideal, moralists without morals, to be on the left today is frequently to be both helpless and hypocritical. Faced with such a predicament, hating Thatcher is the easy part.
And this brings us back to the question that socialism has always raised, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, namely ownership. Businesses tend to serve the interests of those who own them, whether shareholders, workers or communities. To make institutions serve people rather than profit, we will therefore have to think about alternative forms of ownership: scholars like Erik Olin Wright and John Roemer have shown that social ownership can come in many forms, and these should be studied with an open mind.2 What is vital, however, as we renew our assault on the neoliberal dogma of private ownership, is to remember that the ultimate goal is not to strengthen the central state or even simply to benefit the poor, but rather to free workers to use their own initiative to serve the common good as they see it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the matter of career decisions. We—my circle, at any rate—tend to despise those who take the “easy option” of corporate labor. As opposed to what, though? It seems to me that to earn a free pass from today’s moralizers all you need to do is not sell out. It’s considered absolutely fine, for instance, to while away your twenties in grad school playing video games, watching reality TV and occasionally turning your thoughts to the writings of some obscure author. A life like that actually gives you some kind of moral purchase vis-à-vis a banker or a lawyer—at least you’re not increasing inequality. Even if we ignore the fact that a disdain for materialism has often been a marker of class distinction, it’s clear that there’s something fundamentally warped about this ethic. It tells us what is bad, but as to the good it is silent.
i mean this is sort of willfully ignorant. you could be fighting for something you actually believe in...
Here’s something that’s weird but true: a photograph is unlike almost every other art form because it isn’t merely a representation of the world; it is a record of the world. Such is the form’s indexical ontology. When we look at a photograph of a tree, we see the physical reality—the miraculous interplay of physics and light—that transpired at the exact instant the photographer activated the camera. Unlike a painting of a tree, which is a stylized representation of the object, infused with the artist’s sensibility (and, probably, his or her tree-related feelings), a photograph records and ratifies the existence of the actual tree. While the precision of a photographic index depends on a number of factors—the camera in question, whether the photographer used a filter, the extent to which the photo was treated during darkroom emulsification or digital processing—a photograph still serves as a reliable
Perhaps it is because the people in Mosse’s photos live halfway around the world and so their suffering seems proportionately remote? Or maybe we have become inured to this type of aestheticization? Maybe the abrupt ubiquity of Instagram and other digital stylizing devices has allowed us to constantly re-imagine our own lives to the point where something that happened only moments ago can get tinted with the patina of history, aged with the waterstains of nostalgia, or deported to the landscape of a pastel fantasia. But I’ve been trying to suggest that there’s something more urgent and concerning going on here, a conflict between two modes of presentation. One approach clears the way for reality to come to us. The other claims to fetch us from the basement of our complacency but actually just takes us by the hand and leads us to a glass window so beautifully stained that we can no longer see out of it. The difference, here, is moral before it is artistic. After all, it’s disturbingly easy to interpret suffering. To look at it, though, to simply bear witness, is more difficult—for it is then that we risk coming away hurt or humbled or changed.
cool