While we're on the topic of birthdays, by the way, I should note that I am deviously humble on the subject. At work, I never announce my birthday to anyone when it is coming. Indeed, I go out of my way to suppress and bury the fact. I also, however, leave just enough breadcrumbs leading in its direction that the diligent might be able to discover it and share with me their birthday wishes on the day of.
A couple years ago, for instance, I was editing copy of a digital advocacy action that we were sending out to our list at work. There was an event in some developing legislation that fell on January 11 - a date that had by that point just recently passed unacknowledged.
Deep in the winding comment section, therefore, that had grown like Clotho's thread within the Word document as we traded it back and forth, each person adding their own "tracked changes," I deposited a stray clue. "Side note - happens to be same day as my birthday!" I said.
I didn't actually expect to hear more of it. But I was wrong. The response was more than I could have wished. The departmental director not only found the comment, she exclaimed over it, and proceeded to set out to rectify the fact that my coworkers had forgotten to sign and circulate the usual birthday card.
I glowed with bashful triumph - but also with a sense of guilt. The clues one leaves for one's birthday ought to be so slight and unobtrusive that one couldn't possibly be accused of calling attention to oneself. In this instance, I began to fear that I had showed my hand a little too openly.
In Albert Camus's late novel The Fall, the unreliable narrator describes similar devices he employs to ensure that he cannot possibly be accused of forcing people to pay attention to his birthday - as well as the sweet pleasure to be obtained from finding that one's birthday has been entirely forgotten.
I never complained that my birthday was overlooked, he says. People were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself. Several days before the famous date [...] I was on the alert, eager to let nothing slip that might arouse the attention and memory of those on whose lapse I was counting [...] Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity. (Justin O'Brien translation throughout)I relate, although this year I definitely fell short of our hero's ideals. Not only am I divulging the "famous date" on this blog, but in the office I gave the game away in a manner far more obvious than leaving it in a Word document thread one assumes no one will read. Someone asked me about a recent event, wondering when it had taken place. "Oh, it was last Saturday," I replied -- accurately. Then: "Same day as my birthday, turns out!" I added.
I made sure to follow this with: "Just slipped that in there," and laughed -- calling attention to my failure of self-effacingness in a way that hopefully seemed self-effacing.
Examining these small strategies can easily convince one all over again that the human will to power is unavoidable; that it shows up even in acts of the most apparent modesty. People can compete for the title of the least self-involved as much as they can for any other honor. As Car Talk's Tom Magliozzi once put it, "the great thing about me is my humility."
This is more or less the thesis that Camus's protagonist defends throughout the early and middle sections of The Fall. He presents us with the spectacle of himself as a fully honest, decent, and upstanding member of society - a lawyer who defends the poor and cares for the disadvantaged. Someone who is, by virtually any standard, a "good person." Yet he is still, as he reveals to us by stages, a scoundrel. Someone whose most benevolent actions are themselves stratagems for showing up others and asserting power in the world.
It is a convincing portrait, and for much of Camus's novel, one absorbs from him a mood of Nietzschean melancholy. All that is human is corrupt, the book seems to be communicating. All that is apparently noble is, on closer examination, simply a more refined and sophisticated form of self-seeking. Life is a quest for crass advantage, and, as D.H. Lawrence once put it, there is no hope for us, it is useless to care.
As we finish a decade and see it in review, this seems the dominant mood of the whole epoch. The 2010s - at least as they finished out - were by any measure what Auden would have called a "low dishonest decade." Though Auden was referring to the 1930s at the time, he might as well have described the decade before, the '20s, which laid groundwork for the horrors and deprivations of the following ten years.
The decade just behind us was in many senses a retread of the 1920s. Emerging from the Great Recession, we embarked on a galloping red-hot economic expansion that is now among the longest in history. It is growth powered on fumes -- fueled by massive corporate tax cuts in the closing years of the decade, resulting in surging asset values that left those with an investment income feeling giddy, without ever trickling down to the wages or consumer spending that create steady and sustainable growth for those with middle incomes, let alone to the vast stretches of working class America that have been slowly dying of despair.
We were back in the '20s too in the sense that "roaring" economic growth also went hand-in-glove with cultural retrenchment. In the third decade of the last century, American nativism and racism was on the ascendent. As Malcolm Cowley observed in his memoir of the era, Exile's Return, "the Ku Klux Klan had begun its northern journey."
So too, the 2010s gave us Trump's America - a place where aspects of the national political character many of us had thought safely buried and stigmatized screamed back into the mainstream - anti-immigrant populism, tub-thumping defenses of war crimes, blatant hypocrisy and lying, howls of anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Semitic violence bearing echoes of Father Coughlin.
It would be easy for some of us to feel superior to the decade we have just completed, or to its cultural and political milieu. We might pat ourselves on the back, saying that we, at least, stood apart from it.
One of the disturbing things about reading Cowley's reflections on the generation of the 1920s, however - which I have just put down - is how plain he makes it that even those who looked down on the era managed to imbibe its ethos. Those who fancied themselves the "rebels" of the decade were, in their own way, the most representative of its vices.
Many writers and intellectuals of the era proclaimed, in Cowley's telling, a contempt for the American national character, for our crass business-centric culture, for the reign of what H.L. Mencken called the "booboisie." They developed for themselves an alternative ethic and system of worship - what Cowley dubs "the religion of art." Prizing the individuality and freedom from social ties of the putative genius, this new ideology assured the writer they could escape the stupidity of human society and social obligations through worshipping in the temple of the muse.
What slowly becomes clear as Cowley unfolds his narrative, however, is that art stripped of social content is deprived of its meaning. If there are no moral questions, if there are no interpersonal contacts, art has no material with which to work. The religion of art results in a self-seeking hollowness that is every bit as cynical and grasping, at last, as the money-loving material culture from which it supposedly promised an escape.
So too, even those of us who imagine ourselves to be rebels against Trump's America, also partake of its atmosphere. In resisting its dishonesty and crassness and cruelty, we have developed those same qualities in ourselves as well.
I see this in looking back on the second half of my 'Twenties, which correspond fairly exactly to the timing of the Trump candidacy and administration.
To be sure, I see many very positive features about this period of my life, ages twenty-five to thirty. I see the beginnings and the stabilization of a career in service to values I care about, doing work that - for the most part - I love. I see the growth of financial security and independence. These are surely the kinds of things one might hope to gain from one's young adulthood, and I am grateful they came in some measure to me.
Looking back, however, I see in myself as well an accumulating substratum of cynicism. I don't think this was necessarily visible in my outward behavior, where my professional life was still devoted to public-facing advocacy seeking the promotion of human rights and the common good, etc. Nor do I think it was always evident on this blog, where I have continued to pay homage to the same old humane, public-spirited, humanistic values I've always professed, even if it was hard at moments to summon the same purity of feeling behind them.
The message of Camus's narrator in The Fall, however, is precisely that cynics can hide in plain sight - even beneath the mantle of the most outwardly "good" citizens.
I think to the extent the outlines of my own cynicism showed beneath the folds of my disguise, it was in the sort of books that truly grasped and seemed true to me in the last few years - strange and decadent works like Huysmans' A Rebours, or depictions of self-destructive and self-absorbed youth like Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. Books, in short, that conjured the image of the 1920s. Or that were founded in what Cowley called "the religion of art."
Reading Camus's The Fall for the first time a few months ago, I assumed from the book's opening sections that it had been written in much the same spirit: that Camus, despite his official protestations of loyalty to humanistic and democratic values, also contained in himself a hidden and subterranean vein of Schopenhauerian pessimism, emerging only in this short novel published late in his career (indeed, it was the last novel he published in his lifetime).
Camus's narrator, however, is as I mentioned an unreliable one. He begins the novel by showing that he is a decent, good person - just like you. He proceeds to show us the rottenness he has at his core, and how it is reflected in even the smallest and most apparently innocent of his actions. Again, he is just like us.
In so doing, however, he is laying a trap. And toward the end of the novel, he gives the game away; he reveals the trick he has pulled. "I mingle what concerns me and what concerns others," he says. "I choose the features we have in common, the experiences we have endured together, the failings we share. [...] With all that I construct a portrait which is the image of all and of no one. [...] When the portrait is finished, as it is this evening, I show it with great sorrow: 'This, alas, is what I am!' [...] But at the same time the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror."
As we learn more about the narrator's past, we discover that his apparent self-confession has in fact been a self-exoneration. He has acknowledged all of his petty selfishnesses and minor failings so that we will feel kinship with him, and will therefore forgive his major failings, his glaring cowardices, when they come.
It is only late in the novel that we learn what these greater sins were: and given the book's era, and given its author, it will not surprise you to hear they were political in nature. The narrator sought, in the great conflict with fascism, to save his own skin. He fled to North Africa, rather than staying to fight the German enemy, and he decides in that other continent that, as he puts it, "in Africa the situation was not clear; the opposing parties seemed equally right and I stood aloof[.]"
Such moral relativism was surely the watchword of the last decade as well. Trump's thesis on the world is that everyone is equally corrupt and rotten and self-seeking, and therefore no one has a right to criticize himself and his ilk: they would do the same as he does, if they had the power and the opportunity.
This is the same spirit, beneath it all, that animates the more sophisticated and apparently humane cynicism of Camus's narrator, or the cynicism of the intelligentsia in response to Trump. We become talented at seeing the flaws in ourselves and others. We develop a universal impression of human frailty. This makes us at once both all-forgiving and all-condemning. We have an absolute misanthropy, covering all our fellow creatures; as well as an encompassing mercy - since all are alike in sin, then all may be excused.
Suppose, however, that this all-pervading cynicism obscures as much as it illumines. Suppose that, left unchecked, it allows the great crimes to go unnoticed and unpunished, because it reveals the universality of the smallest transgressions. Suppose we lose the ability to distinguish between the merely flawed, as all our political institutions are, and the truly dangerous and pathological, as the Trump administration is.
In order to pass beyond the cynicism and moral relativism of the 1920s, of course, external events had to intervene. The nation had to pass through crisis and catastrophe - through depression and war. As it did so, however, Cowley observes, the intelligentsia was transformed with it. The disinterested and superior disdain - the armoring of the individualistic cult of art - dropped from the shoulders of the writing class. They suddenly discovered that they were part of an interlocking social whole, in whose continued functioning they had a stake, and that even the capacity to produce art has a material basis, and therefore a social and economic foundation.
As Cowley puts it, in the epilogue of his memoir, speaking of the "exiled" generation of the 1920s:
During the years when the exiles tried to stand apart from American society they had pictured it as a unified mass that was moving in a fixed direction and could not be turned aside by the efforts of any individual. The picture had to be changed after the Wall Street crash [....] Instead of being fixed, its direction proved to be the result of a struggle among social groups with different aims and of social forces working against one another. The exiles learned that the struggle would affect everyone's future, including their own. When they took part in it, on one side or another (but usually on the liberal side); when they tried to strengthen some of the forces and allied themselves with one or another of the groups, they ceased to be exiles. They had acquired friends and enemies and purposes in the midst of society, and thus, wherever they lived in America, they had found a home.I of course do not pray for catastrophe in America. We have daily catastrophes already, and enough other ones on the way without needing to invoke providence to bring them down upon our heads.
But I am fairly certain the lesson of the historical record is clear; it does not indicate, let us agree, that economic booms fueled by low taxes, low wages, vast and lopsided accumulations of wealth mirrored by deepening pits of poverty and deprivation tend to last over time. Eventually, the other shoe drops. The curtain falls, as it did on the 1920s, and on my own Twenties.
What values will be strong enough to pull us through the crisis that results? What do we believe in, what do we know to be true about ourselves, that exists independently of material gain and the veneer of prosperity? Americans in the 1930s had to ask themselves those questions again, and I'm sure we will need to as well.
Trump's era gives us nothing to go on, in trying to answer these questions. It furnishes us with nothing for the soul (though it may produce in us "furnished souls," to borrow a phrase from E.E. Cummings). The past five years have been an age of spiritual exile, when we have sought relief in power and prosperity from the gnawing moral vacuum at the center of our public life.
Will the coming decade be a time, like the 1930s Cowley describes, of material deprivation but spiritual renewal? Will we have to be regenerated through the fires of hardship, in order for us to recover our souls? Or could we exercise the foresight and wisdom and dignity of character to allow us to have one - this time - without the other?
No comments:
Post a Comment