November 12, 2021
I have seen several news articles recently about the pessimistic mood that seems to be gripping the United States right now. What intrigues the authors of these articles is the mystery of why this pessimism is gripping the country in a moment when there are many reasons for, if not optimism, at least a moderate amount of tentative, qualified hopefulness.
The pandemic is receding: it is now localized to red states and red pockets in blue or purple states. If you are completely vaccinated, you are basically safe. The economy has come roaring back, bringing enough financial security, at least for some people, to cause a labor shortage in fields that rely on exploitation: a significant number of people are telling employers to take their lousy job and shove it. This is of course not to deny that many people still live lives of quiet financial desperation, but President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, assuming some version of it passes, will address the needs of ordinary Americans in ways not attempted since neoliberalism took over the Democratic Party in the 90’s. Climate change is a frightening menace, but the fact that sustainable energy sources have now become actually less expensive than oil, gas, or coal, plus at least tentative international efforts to confront the problem seriously for the first time, gives grounds for at least limited positivity.
But no. All people seem able to focus on are the negatives: economically on supply-chain disruptions and inflation that are serious but almost certainly temporary; on the forced downsizing of Biden’s transformative, visionary plan by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema; by the seeming helplessness of the investigation of the January 6 insurrection, which does not even seem able to get Steve Bannon to comply with a subpoena; by the brazen plans for a fascist takeover by the Republican party, through gerrymandering combined with bills enabling Republican legislatures to overturn election results; by the undignified infighting that is inevitable in a group as diverse as the Democratic Party.
Serious dangers, reasons for grave concern. But not grounds for the irrational fatalism that seems fashionable right now. Biden’s presidency is widely viewed as failed—uh, what? He has not been in office for a full year, yet he has presided over successful efforts to combat the pandemic plus passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that will do enormous good on myriad fronts, with the Build Back Better bill, even downsized as it surely will be to ensure passage, poised to transform American life for the better in a way hardly seen in my long lifetime.
On October 31, fellow Substack writer Robert Reich, whom I have admired since he was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton in the 90’s, published an article in The Guardian titled “Resilience—the One Word Progressives Need in the Face of Trump, Covid, and More." In it, he acknowledges the ways in which the United States, and in particular Biden and the Democratic Party, have fallen short, and says, “If you’re not at least a bit disappointed, you’re not human. To some of you, it feels like America is failing.” Well, say that it is, at least in the short run. But: “The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience—how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back.” And he adds, “it’s a hard lesson for almost everyone in a culture such as ours that worships success and is embarrassed by failure, and is inherently impatient.”
He offers reasons that such resilience is more than a form of wishful thinking: “One is that things often look worse than they really are. The media (including social media) sells subscriptions and advertising with stories that generate anger and disappointment. The same goes for the views of pundits and commentators: Pessimists always appear wiser than optimists.” Another reason, born of Reich’s half century in and around politics, is that “positive social change comes painfully slowly. It can take years, decades, sometimes a century or longer for a society to become more inclusive, more just, more democratic, more aware of its shortcomings and more determined to remedy them. And such positive changes are often punctuated by lurches backward.” We have been in a five-year-long lurch, but Reich insists that “The lesson here is tenacity—playing the long game.”
Resilience—I like that word. A way of coping with failure and disappointment by looking at the longer term. As I see it, this is where I come into the conversation. Such resilience demands hope, and hope has to be based on a vision that can only come from the imagination—a vision of progress. Reich is willing to come out and commit himself: “I believe in progress because I’ve seen so much of it in my lifetime.” It may puzzle some readers when I say that he is sticking his neck out to say so. After all, the left wing of the Democratic party defines itself as “progressive,” does it not? Because I share with Reich the same long lifetime I too can say I believe in progress because I have witnessed it, frustratingly imperfect and yet real. But the same longevity also leaves me with memories of a time, roughly the 70’s through about 1990, when the left was not what it is now. The American left was a radical left, not the moderate, progressive left of today, and it had utter contempt for the idea of progress: “no more metanarratives,” as some of them put it. Some factions of it allied themselves with the cause of “the oppressed,” but with no vision of amelioration or improvement, only of class, race, and gender struggles against an oppressive establishment, unending because human nature is defined by the will to power, really Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
The political version of this radicalism quickly faded, but an intellectual version of it dominated all the humanities disciplines when I was young, including literary criticism. An entire generation of sometimes brilliant intellectuals believed only in dismantling, critiquing, subverting, deconstructing any ideal whatsoever. The idea of progress was seen as sheep’s clothing of a wolfish status quo who used it as a rationale justifying the predations of late capitalism and imperialism. And it is true that such false “progress” was, until the 2008 financial meltdown and the Trump catastrophe began to break its hold, the dominant view of the upper elite level of the Democratic party. Progress is what is good for a highly educated, upper middle-class, mostly white elite. Those who are uneducated, working class, of color were offered “opportunities” to change their ways—opportunities that were largely illusory in an America in which upward mobility is increasingly vanishing. Reich followed up his article on resilience with one stating bluntly that it’s not all the culture wars: the Democratic party really did fail the working class.
The sad irony is that the left was traditionally the ally of the working class—which now wants no part of it, because it senses, rightly, that the feeling is mutual, except in the matter of procuring votes. I identify as a progressive, and I say this: that what progressives lack is an adequate vision of progress that counters both the false version peddled by neoliberalism or centrism and the outright reactionary view of the right, which rejects progress in favor of turning backward to the old days when America was great and good.
I should not imply that progressives completely lack such a vision. They do have a very real one, and I subscribe to it, the problem being that it has been narrowed to a group of concerns that inevitably get swallowed up in the “culture wars.” The very existence of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the LGBTQ+ rights movement is a moving example of the true progress I have seen in my lifetime. But these concerns are quickly corralled into a holding pen called “identity politics,” where they are caricatured—but effectively caricatured, unfortunately—as signifying “I want extra privileges for my special group.” That is because they tend to lack a wider basis of concern that can only be economic, using that term broadly to indicate the universal, material basis of human life. It is only on this basis that the left of identity politics can forge an alliance with the working and lower middle classes. Bernie Sanders saw this, and it is why he is presently championing Joe Biden’s plans. Otherwise, the working and lower middle classes look at the Democratic Party and see a combination of the elitist neoliberalism of the upper echelon and the identity politics of the grass roots—and go back to listening to Fox News.
Even worse, a debate has erupted over whether the progressive movement is not being increasingly radicalized. African American linguist John McWhorter has just published in the New York Times an essay called “If It’s Not Critical Race Theory, It’s Critical Race Theory-lite” (Nov. 9, 2021), claiming that critical race theory revives many of the radical leftist attitudes of the 70’s and 80’s such as I describe above, and that some of these attitudes have indeed infiltrated educational guidelines in various places. According to him and his sources, critical race theory rejects not only liberalism but the civil rights movement and even the Enlightenment values of reason and science. These are all part of “systemic racism” rather than the means of opposing it, ways in which white people ensure that they will remain on top while at the same time looking virtuous. Actual critical race theory sounds indeed radical. The question is whether the horror stories that are being circulated about white school children being forced to confess their privilege and the like are represent a growing trend of what McWhorter calls “critical race theory-lite” or are isolated incidents deliberately overblown. Moreover, I am skeptical about the school board screamers, who seem to make no clear distinction between protesting such radicalism and protesting any attempt to be honest about the historical record. However, it may be that the progressive movement is due for a self-confrontation. To me, critical race theory and an increasingly censorious cancel culture seem born of pessimism, skepticism, and vengefulness, not resilience.
We forget how dark the 60’s were. People only remember Woodstock and the Beatles, and even then their memory is selective. It was Jefferson Airplane, one of the most popular acts at Woodstock, that gave us “The House at Pooneil Corners,” a dark, extended piece about nuclear annihilation and the end of all life. People were digging fallout shelters in their back yards, and children practiced diving under their desks during civil defense drills, where they lay imagining the bombers coming to turn their school into Hiroshima. Hardly a wonder that the young daughter in Tillie Olsen’s classic short story “I Stand Here Ironing” says that nothing much matters because in a few years we’ll all be “atom dead.” Nowadays climate change has replaced nuclear war as the leading end-of-the-world nightmare anxiety: we are told that an increasing number of young people are developing a new form of depression, “climate despair.”
In the 60’s, as now, the entire country was divided into two hostile factions. The rift appeared within families, angrily divided over the Vietnam war, over race, over the sexual revolution, over the rise of modern feminism, and over culture-wars symbols like marijuana and long hair on men. Then, as now, people wondered whether the country would survive intact. And yet, what we remember of the 60’s, and rightly so, is the vision of hope and progress that told us that something, a countermovement, was working behind the scenes of disintegration, standing unscathed in the burning cities like Daniel in the lion’s den—that “God is alive, magic is afoot,” in the words of Leonard Cohen set to music and sung by Native American folk singer Buffy St. Marie. We remember Martin Luther King and his dream, remember John Lennon urging us to “Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world,” with “No need for greed or hunger.” We remember Pete Seeger, his father an academic and his mother a classical musician, singing and organizing for the union movement in the 30’s and 40’s, surviving McCarthyite blacklisting in the 50’s, throwing his power to inspire and energize behind the civil rights movement, giving it the song that became its anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” a living bridge between the workers’ rights and civil rights movements. And behind him, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his vision of progress, the New Deal.
The 60’s failed, though, right? We went to sleep dreaming of a Woodstock nation and woke to the backlash: a backlash that is an ironic parody of progressivism, evolving, or devolving, from Nixon and his “southern strategy” through Reagan and his “trickle down” lies, through Newt Gingrich to the unholy alliance of Mitch McConnell and the Trump crowd, each phase more demonic, more openly nihilistic, than the last. And yet, oddly, progress results from “failed” revolutions, at least some of the time. The Western paradigm for this is the failure of the French Revolution, which raised not just utopian but nearly apocalyptic hopes, and then disintegrated into the Reign of Terror, Napoleonic dictatorship, and a generation or two of hysterically reactionary governments. The English Romantic poets were lifted on its wave of initial euphoria, then wiped out like surfers by its collapse. Wordsworth, who had actually gone to France to work for the revolution, had to flee the country, leaving behind a French wife and child, returning to suffer a nervous breakdown. Yet the Romantics wrote their greatest poetry out of the revolution’s failure, being driven inward to examine the psychological causes of political failure, discovering at the same time a basis for hope in the recreative powers of the imagination.
The pessimism of our time is nothing new. The dark night of the soul suffered by the Romantics was preceded by Milton’s agonized reappraisal of the Puritan revolution in the name of liberty in Paradise Lost and succeeded by the failure of the uprisings across Europe in 1848 that inspired The Communist Manifesto. Outside the English-speaking world, the brief blossoming of Arab Spring withered swiftly into the present winter of discontent, and the end of the Cold War hardened into the dictatorship of Putin. At its most intense, pessimism may culminate in the nightmare vision of that most demonic of all dystopias, Orwell’s 1984, which opposes John Lennon’s invitation to “imagine” with “Imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.” The ultimate fear is of a dictatorship that can never be overthrown, becoming literally hell on earth, the demonic repetition that I spoke of in the previous newsletter. We are not arrived at the end of that tether yet. Still, by synchronicity, this morning the title character of Bill Griffith’s brilliant comic strip Zippy expressed the current Zeitgeist in his own inimitable way: “Football is a perfect metaphor for life—you take forever to move forward a few yards, only to suffer permanent brain damage.”
This newsletter will appear one week after what in England will be Guy Fawkes Day, November 5. Guy Fawkes Day is a most peculiar holiday. Originally, it celebrated the defeat of at an attempt at insurrection that has a startling resemblance to January 6: the attempt to overthrow the British government by blowing up the houses of Parliament with gunpowder while Parliament was meeting, with the king presiding, a conspiracy known as the Gunpowder Plot. As this was a Catholic attempt to overthrow a Protestant government, Guy Fawkes Day became celebrated less as a defense of liberty than as a festive occasion for persecuting Catholics.
Then, in 1982, Alan Moore in his graphic novel V for Vendetta, completely transvalued it by turning it into a symbol of rebellion against the kind of heartless neoliberal government symbolized in his eyes by Thatcherism. Later still, Occupy Wall Street borrowed the symbol of the enigmatically grinning Guy Fawkes mask, although so, more ominously, did the cyber-hacker group Anonymous. The protagonist of Moore’s graphic novel is a morally ambiguous character to say the least, a precursor of antifa to the extent that antifa is itself more than a kind of fiction. But the story caught the public imagination by its contemplation of what kinds of guerilla warfare might be provoked by an autocratic government keeping itself in power indefinitely with only the pretense of democracy. Moore’s precursor in this line of thought is, unexpectedly enough, the socialist George Bernard Shaw in The Devil’s Disciple, about the American Revolution, and Heartbreak House, with its Guy Fawkes-style imagery of gunpowder and explosions. But violence is all too apt to become a vicious circle of reprisals and counter-reprisals, and it is no accident that Milton in Paradise Lost made Satan the inventor of gunpowder, in an attempt to win the war against heaven. As an instrument of progress, violence should be an absolute last resort.
When the Romantics turned inward after the failure of the French Revolution and the cause of liberty, they diagnosed the root of the problem as a failure of the imagination—in particular, as a failure of empathy. The imagination is the synthetic or connective power of the human mind, and empathy is the form the imagination takes emotionally, a sense of connection, indeed of identification through shared experience, that unites us with other human beings, but also with nature and the cosmos. Those who would dismiss this as feel-good pop-psych are often those who deny and distrust emotion as a most unscientific and probably illusory phenomenon. If that sounds exaggerated, you should read some of the writings of the AI proponents. Lack of empathy results in “othering.” Other people become simply other and not people. There is no sense that other people or animals have emotions or truly feel pain. They are merely objects, to be used as instruments or eliminated if inconvenient or threatening—and the Other is always a potential threat. Hence all the gun-toting lunatics, from the school shooters to Lauren Boebert, and we are back to the diabolic nature of gunpowder.
If most of the evil in life derives from lack of empathy, the real progressive program would be one whose goal was to nurture and educate the capacity for empathy latent in all of us. A necessary first step would be to increase material and psychological security across society, especially for children. A sense of security works to minimize the kind of fear that wants to lash out against perceived enemies on the grounds that you have to eat the other dogs before they eat you. Mind you, this will entail confronting and combatting income inequality, and the elite are so far out of reality that it may take drastic measures to break through their narcissism. A second step would be to change the way men, though also some women, are brought up to repress empathy as a kind of weakness.
The positive side of a progressive vision based on empathy would be a kind of education, rooted in the humanities, that does not preach, let alone “cancel,” but shows a vision of connection and interaction as a real possibility. That is the motive behind The Productions of Time and these newsletters. It is the task described by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound: “To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” It is the task of all of us, in our various ways, the real heroic quest of our time.