800 Words: Living in the Past - Part IV (Conclusion)

“Optimism is the opium of the masses. A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long Live Trotsky!”

- Milan Kundera

I often think to myself that I’m an advance scout for my own generation. I show them what it’s like to get old quicker and experience disappointment earlier. Growing up as I did in a background that was entirely too privileged to feel the way I do, I feel like I’ve shown many all too blessed people of my age-group what it’s like to fall out of love with the world at an early age, and then to indiscriminately lash out as so many older people do at this world which has proven so disappointing so often, and so prematurely.

For somebody whose life has been extremely easy, I’ve had it pretty tough over the years. I’ve prattled on in these posts in a spiral of seemingly endless self-abasement about precisely why that is, and I wish that there was some means other than writing to turn it all into something productive. But it would be all too easy to pretend to an optimism which neither I nor most people earn. An optimistic attitude may get you something, but it won’t get you much. Regardless of our attitude towards life, we’re born when we are born, and our life unfolds as it does, followed by a death which seldom announces its precise time of arrival. We are neither the captains of our souls nor masters of our destiny; we are along for the ride, and only get a tiny sliver of input in our lives’ direction. Biochemistry determines virtually all of our life for us, right down to our temperamental capacity to change our life circumstances, and those of us who fight against our fates usually end up living out the same pathologies we were trying so desperately to avoid, only more fanatically. However unlikely, it's possible that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice, but there is definitely not a single virtue in the pursuit of extremism - be it the extremity of politics or extremity of character correction or extremity of obsession. If a person wants to correct, truly correct, the circumstances of his life, he well may be able to. But there is an ironclad guarantee that the spiritual and emotional losses incurred along that path will be incalculable to someone - you or someone you love, someone you love or someone you hate, deservedly or not.  As my father recently said so memorably: “There are no solutions, only problems.”   

Unfortunately, the past is all we have, and while the future is not yet written, there is little which history proves except that future will mercilessly repeat the past. The idea that we can aspire to be better people than we are is as dangerous and laughable as it is laudable and inevitable. The world is a treadmill that never stops, and we run on it not to move forward, but merely to stay in the same place. Hopefully, we'll sometimes be in good enough shape that the treadmill won't feel as burdensome, but eventually, we all step off, and sometimes we fall off quite painfully. 

Life doesn’t exist to be triumphed over, it exists to be lived. Whenever I hear people say that they triumphed over life’s vicissitudes like so many battles with proud scars to show, my bullshit detector flies through the roof. Physical wounds heal into scars because they are merely openings to be filled, but spiritual wounds are like the sepsis which fills them when the opening is not properly treated. The infection can spread through you or to others at the slightest opportunity, and it always seems to make itself visible at the least opportune moment. And when that puss is popped like a bad or fatalistic attitude which suddenly reveals itself, the wound is either felt as intensely as when it was first made, or it is passed on like an infection to be someone else’s burden. The soul is a very fragile thing, and perhaps it would be best were we never to be conceived. Otherwise, we subject a soul to the sickness which the world inevitably provides. And when our souls get sick, the pathologies of our sicknesses are passed on, and there is nothing we can do about that. It isn’t just the sins of the father which are passed on, it’s the sins of the friend, of the teacher, of the collaborator.

To a certain extent, I live morbidly in the past. I write about it endlessly - world history, personal life history, history being made, history not yet made. The world is a museum whose collection is still growing, but since most people don’t realize that, most people go crazy chasing certainties in places where nothing is certain. The past and its memories are the only thing in this world of which we can be reasonably sure. The past is fact, the future is opinion.

The fact remains, I wish my life was better than it is. Everybody does - most people have much better claims on that wish than I, though some have worse. But if there is any hope for the future to stop (or at least delay) the repetitions of the past, then the exacting study of the past is the only way which it will happen. There is no guarantee that learning the truth of it will set us free, and plenty of reason to believe it will make us miserable.

Perhaps I fudged that earlier statement a bit: without a doubt, the past is the best certainty we have, but even the past is not exact data. It is a hall of mirrors in which we can all only see what we’re permitted to see (a less charitable person would say ‘what we choose to see’). Perhaps I should amend the previous statement to say this: the future is opinion, but the past is perception. The objective truth is not for any of us to pronounce, but if we perceive a truth, then it is either objectively true, or it is untrue, and we have no way of knowing which. Most people can’t deal with that level of moral uncertainty, and they will do everything within their power to avoid its presence. The rest of us have to deal with burdens of potential truth which are far too heavy when there are far too few of us to carry them - if only more people could occasionally help us, or didn't pretend to help when they only meant hinderance… But we all exist within our own echo-chambers of self-validation, and some people are far more blessed than others to live within that chamber’s cocoon. We’re all a little self-deluded. But no matter what we perceive, there is a true version of what happens, and it may one day reveal itself. And if it did, then like today’s elderly Germans, some of us would have to spend an entire lifetime atoning for what we did and what was done in our name.

There is a moment in Milan Kundera’s most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Tomas, the main character, talks about how the current Czech government - a relatively liberal authoritarian regime - pleaded ignorance to the Stalinist crimes of the past. He argued that like Oedipus, even if this government never saw what was being done in its name (itself an incredibly dubious claim), the new, more tolerant government was morally culpable for what was done because it reaps the privileges of those crimes. Whether or not intentional, the truth of what happened was so horrible that its members must put out their own eyes. For this comment, and a dissident’s exploitation of it, Tomas was disbarred from medicine and never again worked as a doctor. Perhaps the old government would have shot him, but the new government's reaction didn't speak very well of it, and in any event, the newer more liberal dictator - Alexander Dubceck - was soon replaced by a still more authoritarian government for the crime of trying to make dictatorship palatable.

We have no moral obligation to discover such truth or learn it if we’re reluctant to do so; but if we’re not prepared, the truth will confront us at moments too inopportune to ever know how to justify ourselves - because there is no justification. If we truly believe in conscience, then we must admit to our crimes, and never stop atoning for them. We will try our best to explain why we did what we did as best we can, but there is no justification that grants absolution. There is only the nagging hope that one day, maybe, we can do enough good in our lives to eventually counterbalance the evil.

800 Words: Living In The Past Part II - Masscult and Nichecult

“In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had — zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they’re gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all.”

- Pauline Kael

It is enormously common to poo-poo the 1950’s. And there’s no doubt that there was an enormous amount to poo-poo. We were a country segregated beyond belief in ways that we don’t even document. Leave alone the fact that tens of millions of blacks lived in fear and poverty, and simply ask yourselves what it must have meant to live as most of our grandparents did in a prosperous society in which so much conformity was expected from so many people who might have been gay, irreligious, trapped in bad marriages, and sacrificing their purest happinesses for a future happiness that would never come. In all these ways and many more, the 1950’s was an era as pre-modern as any era that came before it. Even the white males who should have most benefited from living in it all too frequently lived lives of quiet desperation. And if the world was ever going to do better, then the ersatz well-being of the 1950’s had to be brought to as ignominious an end as possible.

But the 1950’s and early 60’s brought us Brown vs. Board of Education, Civil Rights, and mass desegregation, the enactment of the Marshall Plan, the widespread and America-enforced dissolution of the European empires, unprecedented prosperity and (still) unprecedented equality of wealth distribution, the polio vaccine and the double helix, the seatbelt and radial tires, color TV and credit cards, Peanuts Cartoons and Dr. Seuss, Playboy and the Pill, the modem and the microchip… and let’s not even talk about the death of Stalin and the Soviet Thaw. This was the era that brought us Invisible Man and Catcher in the Rye, West Side Story and Gypsy, Kind of Blue and Ah Um, the golden periods of Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, James Brown/Ray Charles and R&B, Chuck Berry/Elvis Presley and Rock’n Roll.

Yes, there was far too much conformity, but conformity has its advantages too. Then as now, there were only two consequential political parties in America: one the party of liberalism, the other the party of moderate liberalism. There were only three consequential TV networks, all of whom commissioned the best playwrights in America to write shows for them watched by the same tens of millions who watched crappy police procedurals and gameshows. There were only two major record labels, both of whom used the profits from their bestsellers to make sure that more obscure music which lost money in sales would nevertheless be made available. This America was not yet divided into highbrow and lowbrow, rightbrow and leftbrow, youngbrow and oldbrow. Rather, a great middlebrow stew was concocted in which everybody was forced to appreciate the classics and college football in the same Sunday afternoon - and anyone who did not was an outcast. Because everyone was so alike - with the same cultural references, the same political views, the same aesthetic tastes, the same frame of ethics - it was impossible for the great majority of Americans to view one another as enemies. And within that middlebrow was an upper-middlebrow of more than 20 million Americans spread throughout the whole country - small towns as much as cities - who believed in civic engagement, patronage of the arts, community betterment, and self-improvement through lifelong education. It may yet turn out that the 1950’s and early 60’s, horrible as it was, is the best America was ever going to do. By any objective standard, our time is the more prosperous and advantageous. No sane person should prefer to live in 1950’s America to 2013 America. But spiritually, we are completely impoverished by comparison. The 1950’s was our Golden Age, not because of the material welfare it offered us, but for the hope for a still greater future which it engendered.

The brighter future the 1950’s predicted and endowed is now upon us, and what a disappointment it is. We traded the stifling collectivism of the 1950’s for the unvarnished individualism of the 60’s, and whether all of us realize it or not, the whole country has kept with the 60’s ethos ever since. But what was the price of being able to feel like ourselves? In comparison to that former era, we cannot offer even the slightest hope that America will be a better place for our grandchildren that our grandparents had for us. Our grandparents experienced America in the high Midsummer of its prosperity. It seems ever more likely that we’ll experience the USA which living memory has always known in the grey autumn of its decline and fall.

There are worse things than being a civilization in decline - death and dissolution to name the two most obvious - and decline offers some of the finest contributions of all. Decline is when all which is productive in a culture - be it civilizational or agricultural - is harvested; and in so many ways, America is doing the very best work it’s ever done. Nothing America ever offered the world is more miraculous than the internet or the home computer or email or HTML. We won the Cold War and even if we mismanaged the transition economically, we brought down the Soviet Union without a single shot fired. When Yugoslavia broke into civil war in its wake, we (and Britain) led the halting of the first democide of hundreds of thousands to happen on European soil since the death of Stalin. The American poltiical and economic model has spread to Western Europe with such successful vengeance that they now beat us at our own game, and dare to lecture us consistently on how we’re not meeting the humane standards which they’d never have dreamed of achieving without our grandparents’ unprecedented largesse. It is America which launched the Hubble Space Telescope, confirmed the existence of black holes, and an American who discovered the dwarf planet Eris. It was America which funded and fundamentally researched the entirety of the human genome and the Genographic Project.  Culturally, it wasn’t half-bad either. We were never a nation who produced dozens of great novelists, but we’ve come up with dozens of amazing television serials like The Sopranos and The Simpsons which may yet supplant the novel as the entire world’s long-form artistic narrative of choice. This was the era of Spielberg’s and Scorsese’s maturity, Dylan’s and Springsteen's too. This is the era in which America spearheaded a golden age of international cuisine, and a completely unexpected golden age of non-fiction writing. We've had a 'silver age' revival of stand-up comedy with bizarre geniuses like Louis CK and Chris Rock; we've produced short, light newspaper comics of genius like Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes and darkly complex graphic novels by Alan Moore (admittedly an English immigrant like Hitchcock). But perhaps most importantly, it is this country and this era which will endow posterity with all sorts of miraculous cultural contributions of which we don’t yet know. Just as we now feast on the works of niche artists like Van Gogh, Kafka, Mahler, Nietzsche, Proust, Schiele, niche artists from the last generations of ‘Old Europe,’ who to a man experienced just a handful of their contemporaries appreciate them properly, so there are the modern Van Gogh’s and Kafka’s among us, waiting to be discovered for their true worth - and no doubt many Van Gogh’s and Kafka’s who never were discovered, and never will be.

To feel free to be yourself is as great a blessing as the world ever endows. But that blessing generally comes at the price of someone else’s curse. We have our own identities now, and our own infinities of choice lay out before us to an extent that would paralyze the strongest among us. And because we’re freer to be any self we want than ever before, few if any of us are free to be our best selves and be recognized for having done so. It’s hard to believe that the result does not ultimately limit our quality of life - aesthetically, intellectually, technologically, morally. And if not ours, then our grandchildren’s.

Is there any younger American filmmaker of eminence who can achieve in our generation what Spielberg did in our parents’? Is there any younger musician of fame who writes quality songs with the influence of Bob Dylan’s best (and yes, I’m not even an uncritical Dylan admirer)?  More importantly, is there politician in Obama’s wake who can even speak sincerely as Obama once did about uniting the country? Will any politician follow him into the White House in our lifetime who can even calm the right wing’s worst urges as well as Obama has? I can’t swear to any of it, but I fear that all these questions are self-answering. The reason is all too simple - when a country is no longer united by mutual priorities, and virtually everybody has the ability for self-creation, each person is only exposed to what he wants to see. The entirety of human experience is far more difficult to sum up in a single achievement when there is no incentive to experience things alien to you. A person can have all the talent in the world, and perhaps so much freedom will lead geniuses, “great men”, and good people to finer achievements than they ever could achieve if they were not allowed so much individualism. But for better or worse, fame for having achieved so great a task is a large part of what spurs people to have ambition to achieve and appreciate great things. If talented people no longer have incentive to create greatness for a universal audience, then the aim of most people will necessarily be lower. And if that is the case, then this most ripened of American harvests which we bequeath to posterity will likely be someone else’s country’s to consume, and from which they, not us, will plant, sow, and reap the next great harvest.

800 Words: Living in the Past (Part I)

I do not idealize the past. If there were a button which existed to allow people to magically transport themselves to any past epoch with wholly different cultures, languages, and families. I’d hope it would be destroyed and banned immediately. There are many, many things which I wish were different about living in today’s world, but short wishing exponentially better treatment for the mentally imbalanced and learning disabled, I doubt there’s a single wish for my life which is not a wish of an extremely privileged, entitled person. Even if I’m Jewish, short, balding, overweight, in bad health for my age, learning-disabled, and all too often morbidly depressed, I’m a thirty-one year old ‘white’ male at the beginning of 21st century America. Statistically speaking, there is not a single epoch in a single country yet known in which a person of my characteristics had a better chance for a quality life. My paternal grandfather’s life had most of the drawbacks which I have, but he was born in Northeastern Poland, five years before World War I’s outbreak. By the time he was a teenager, he’d already survived two wars which claimed millions and millions of lives. In his twenties, he would have to survive in a worldwide economic depression and a Stalinist puppet government capable of punishing even the slightest infractions with imprisonment, torture, and death. At my age, he knew that the greatest ordeal of all was rapidly approaching.

The chances that he would live on to prosper in America are as infinitesimally small as the chances that my life will be a failure for its duration. Even now, as a thirty-one year old underachieving ne’er-do-well in a hyper-achieving community, the odds that I’ll wake up tomorrow and that my potential will suddenly flourish for its remainder and that the anguish of my younger years will never be seen again are exponentially better than at (very) least 95% of the earth’s population will ever realize its potential for living a quality life for even a day. When you look at the statistics, it becomes so bleak that it’s kind of funny. No one should envy the circumstances of any life encumbered by major depression, but oh my god how much worse could it be? Is there even a percentage point of a percentage point of the earth’s population who could ever have the opportunity to squander, let alone utilize, as many opportunities as I’ve yet had?

80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day - I can barely get through a day without spending at least $50. I might have my problems, but I have high-speed internet access in order to unwisely broadcast them; meanwhile, 1.6 billion people don’t even have electricity, and 22,000 children die of poverty every day. We don’t hear about their suffering because they live so far removed from any kind of privilege that there is no way to properly chronicle their existence as anything but a statistic.

In the meantime,  I’m almost chronically sick, no doubt in large part from the fact that I can’t stop eating, and I complain incessantly about my various ailments on this blog. These complaints may get more frequent - how long will larger ailments like diabetes and heart disease patiently wait for me to stop getting hungry? I complain about chronic colds, yet 2.6 billion people don’t have any sanitation to prevent the spread of unnecessary infection. I complain about dehydration, yet 1.1 billion people don’t have adequate access to drinking water. I complain about various learning difficulties I’ve had over the years, yet the world still contains a billion illiterate people. I complain about pain all up and down my spine which I no doubt generated for myself by being overweight, yet the growth of 27-28% of the world's children is stunted from malnutrition. And yes, I recently complained about a rather extreme surfeit of diarrhea (the brown thunder) on this blog, which is in especially bad taste considering that 1.8 million children die every year from diarrhea (reading that last figure froze my blood). No doubt, it’s better to be a well-off person in 2013, but for the vast majority of the world, it doesn’t make much difference to what era they’re born into - it’s all shitty. And the way we know that is that the gap between rich and poor is larger now than in any era when history could be reliably recorded. In 1820, the gap in means between rich and poor was 3 to 1; in 1992, it was 72 to 1. How much larger must that gap be now? Even in our era of recession, it is still the great ever era in human history to be a person of means. But it’s no more or less terrible to be a person without means than it ever was.

There are times when, like all nerds of the earth, I might wish myself born into an epoch - past or future, here or there - which might better value my particular qualities. But to fantasize about being born in a different epoch would presuppose that I’d be a person of means, which is a ridiculous conceit. It might be fantastic to live in fin-de-siecle Vienna, but only if your father was a bourgeois gentleman who allowed you a stipend to live off, and only if you could easily escape from mainland Europe in time for the World Wars. It might be wonderful to live in mid-century Greenwich Village, but only if you were white, had a university education, and survived The Great Depression, or WWII, or Korea, and weren’t blacklisted by HUAC. People of later generations than ours might fantasize about living in Silicon Valley, but that presupposes that they’d be gifted with millenial computers, possess the proper connections in the tech world, and can find a niche skill which a better-educated Chinese or Indian worker couldn’t develop for a fraction of the salary.