October 4, 2024

There are two ways of coping: to develop a way, a set pattern of responding, or to try something new, to improvise.  This is true of our personal lives, but also true on the level of cultural history.  There was once a way: that is, a cultural tradition.  The West had a mythological framework, built up over centuries like a coral reef, within which life had meaning and direction.  I tried to sketch the outlines of traditional Western mythology in The Productions of Time.  Its backbone was the axis mundi, the vertical cosmic axis of levels of being common in many mythologies, crossed by the horizontal line of time.  This cruciform shape is encircled by two cycles, one the cycle of nature and the other a cycle of the spirit moving from creation to decreation to recreation.  Thus, the whole design is a mandala shape, or at least that is a useful and convenient way of mapping it.  Whether such a framework was “real” was not as important as the fact that it provided a blueprint by which the imagination built a rich and complex structue over at least 2500 years. 

A skeptical rejoinder is that it was all a lie, a huge rationalization of an ideological will to power.  To such a view, imagination is the opiate of the masses, a way of making the oppressed feel that their exploitation is a good thing, placating them with the promise that their oppression is their contribution to a great and noble enterprise.  It is true, of course, that all cultures are in part oppressive, that all mythologies therefore are partly “kidnapped,” as Northrop Frye put it, by ideologies.  But such a dismissal is, like all either-or reductionist views, to my mind an oversimplification. 

But in the revolutionary period that coincided with Romanticism, Western culture changed.  However, the change was not from the old way to a new way, from one mythological framework to another.  No, it was more radical: we moved to a new kind of open-ended society based not on a pre-existing map or model but on improvisation.  We could call such a society Heraclitean, after the pre-Socratic thinker who was the first philosopher of process, the one who said that we never step twice in the same river.  Heraclitus was reportedly not happy about this, as he became known as the weeping philosopher.  In our time, he has many counterparts, such as the drunk that Loren Eiseley claims to have witnessed on a train, who croaks to the conductor, “Give me a ticket for wherever it is,” and whom Eiseley uses to dramatize what he calls “the terror of an open-ended universe” (63).  But there are more positive responses, making a virtue of learning to go with the flow.  Abraham Maslow called for a new kind of education that he called Heraclitean, one that would prepare people to cope with a life in constant flux rather than training them into a single set of skills for a job that would probably not exist in 20 years.  Joseph Campbell said flatly that there was not going to be a new, world mythology to replace the old one.  Instead, the mythmaking impulse has been individualized, and each of us has to forge our own myth to live by, in his well-known phrase.  Campbell called this “creative mythology,” and he was derided as a New Age flake for it by those who can only think in terms of stable religious institutions preserving an absolute, revealed truth in a changeless form.  But it is Campbell’s fluid and flexible vision that seems adapted to the modern and post-modern world.  Individualized mythmaking is going to be what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage, a structure built out of whatever comes to hand.  It may make revisionist use of components of traditional mythology for its own purposes, or revive suppressed traditions such as paganism and Gnosticism. 

I was a Unitarian Universalist for some years because I was attracted to the idea of a church that has no prescriptive theology.  It is a do-it-yourself approach to religion, totally flaky to some but congenial to those of us who feel it is the end of the age of absolutes, and we feel fine.  I think Westerners such as fantasist and science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin have been attracted to Taoism (LeGuin even translated the Tao te Ching) because its ideal is literally one of going with the flow:

Water’s good
for everything.
It doesn’t compete.

It goes right
to the low loathsome places
and so finds the way.   
         (section 8)

Democracy does mean liberty and equality, of course.  But a feature of democratic government that goes unnoticed is that it is a kind of experiment in anarchism.  That does not mean there are no laws.  But democracy is inherently improvisational.  Monarchy, aristocracy, tradition—these mean continuous permanent structures of order, usually said to be revealed from on high and therefore unalterable. The king is “God’s anointed”—just ask Shakespeare’s Richard II.  But laws in a democracy are tentative.  We voted them in, and we can vote them out again if we choose.  Nor are they unquestionable wisdom, just our best shot at an answer.  We try various arrangements out to see if they’ll fly.  In this way, democratic laws and institutions resemble the theories and laws of science.  They too are tentative, improvised shots at the most satisfying of, usually, various possible answers, and are always subject to being changed or even totally discarded.  That is very much not how the order of nature was regarded when the Church persecuted Galileo.  The cosmos and its laws were ordained by the God who also ordained the social hierarchy—indeed, the two were aspects of one totality.  When Galileo challenged the geocentric cosmos and showed that the supposedly perfect and unfallen sun had spots, he was challenging not just rival scientific theories but the whole celestial, religious, and political order, which was all of a piece.  Nowadays, the conclusions of science change like fashion.  When I was young, it was still believed that Mars had breathable air and Venus might hide jungles and oceans under its cloud cover, instead of molten lead.  Some of us are still nostalgic for the old planetary myths.  As for cosmology—the theory of dark matter and dark energy is total improvisation, undetectable entities that are postulated in order to make equations come out right, inventions mothered by necessity.  

The current election is the latest backlash against what nearly half the electorate recoils from in fear and hate: a society that is becoming more and more completely improvisational.  Race used to be a biologically fixed demarcation, a black-and-white categorization—now, people like Kamala Harris can be Black and Indian, utterly confusing people like Donald Trump.  Marriage has been re-imagined in a dozen different ways, improvised according to the needs of the people involved.  Not only may people easily divorce and remarry, but there can be blended families (again like Kamala Harris), married couples living apart, couples living together unmarried, polyamorous marriages, and who knows what else.  Gender and sexual identity has exploded in so many directions that people have to use gender flags to keep track of its details.  Gay, lesbian, bi, trans, asexual, aromantic, gender fluid, nonbinary.  People are making up their own identities, creating whole new kinds as a cook may combine ingredients to make new dishes. 

In religion, conservatives who insist that doctrine is not a smorgasbord, that you must obediently subscribe to the whole theology of a church are increasingly ignored.  This was always covertly true—Catholics of my parents’ generation practiced birth control in blithe disregard of the Vatican, and got divorced and remarried by getting an “annulment,” a subterfuge by which the Church decreed that you had never really been married.  When my parents’ marriage was annulled, my brother and I teased my parents that you know what that makes us.  Even history is constantly revised, not without regard for empirical facts but at the same time with no sense that the old stories we used to believe are sacrosanct.

All these identity and lifestyle changes happening at once are admittedly exhausting to keep up with, even for a progressive like me who has always believed in social change.  To these are added the technological changes that have dictated vast changes in the way we live.  This was true as far back as the 1970’s when Alvin Toffler published Future Shock—yet nothing that had happened by that point was as utterly transformative as the Internet and social media, which within 20 years have changed our sense of self, our social life, our way of working, our politics.  They are more powerful than any fairy godmother’s wand.  All of these are improvisations—we try them, or in many cases they are tried on us—without knowing what will happen and what unexpected side effects may appear. 

People are both shaken and stirred, and that is understandable, despite my angry frustration with the reactionaries.  Such people are hysterically anxious: to them, the whole society seems to be suffering a psychotic episode, disintegrating into a flux of bizarre “lifestyle choices,” and they feel we are at a moment of apocalyptic crisis, the whole of America on the verge of dissolving back into the original Chaos.  They pin their hopes on a strong, authoritarian leader who will take over and do what he has to do in order to stop the senseless effervescence. 

Far from being put off by Trump’s violence, it reassures them, because they feel that things have gone so far that a leader will have to be ruthless and sometimes brutal to turn things around.  A society cannot survive when everybody is madly experimenting in all directions, with 11-year-olds declaring they have changed their sexual identity and women aborting fetuses for any old reason.  What explains the sea of Trump signs on the lawns of community after community?  Mass panic in the face of a society that is becoming “pro-choice” not just about abortion but about almost everything.  The commonest lawn poster around here reads “Trump – Save America.”  The leaders of the Trump campaign are unhinged, con artists, or both, but all the Trump signs belong to a larger following who have been stampeded and are plunging over a cliff. 

I confess with chagrin that I do not keep up with contemporary fiction, not for want of interest but from want of time, but the reviews I read give me the impression that much realistic fiction today documents people’s attempt to cope with these changes and improvise a life for themselves.  As for non-realism, a movement, or at least a tendency, in the field of fantasy 10-20 years ago called “slipstream” reflected the feeling, akin to that of “absurdism” in the earlier Modernist movement, that that we are such things as dreams are made on in a deeper sense than that of mere transience.  A dream is an improvisation of the unconscious:  it takes elements of waking life re-arranges them, fuses them, distorts them according to the dreamer’s fears and desires.  Slipstream fiction does with fictional genres and conventions what the dream does with the elements of daily life:  it interbreeds them, producing uncategorizable works that are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.  On my refrigerator door is a magnet on which fantasist Alan Moore says, “Life isn’t divided into genres.  It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science fiction cowboy detective novel.”  I don’t know where, other than my refrigerator, he said this, but it expresses slipstream’s refusal to respect genre conventions, improvising like a dog breeder producing labradoodles (another area where “choice” has boldly gone in recent decades where no one had gone before).  Most avant garde innovations have ancestors to which they are related by affinity if not influence, and the greatest genre-fluid work of early literature is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  At the same time that Virgil was writing the Aeneid to promote a “new world order,” Ovid recombined and re-interpreted 200 works of Greek mythology to create a vision in which nature, humanity, and the gods are caught up in a process of ceaseless metamorphosis.  He tells the story of Io, turned into a cow by Jupiter, for example, in such a way that it becomes akin to works like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug, or Genet’s Rhinoceros, in which everyone turns into a rhinoceros, just because. 

Conservatism regards the improvisational spirit as a symptom of cultural decadence, as a pathology.  When it says certain things like homosexuality or transexuality are “unnatural,” it implies a kind of biological essentialism that sees human identity and behavior as fixed by something comparable to animal instincts.  We are hard-wired for certain things, and the attempt to reject them involves a combination of futility and perversity.  Why not choose to have two noses?  Indeed, in some of the science fiction versions of a free-choice future, two noses would be one of the less drastic choices people could order off a menu.  Once again to grant the opposition its due, some extreme advocates of what is called “social construction” do verge upon a kind of absolutism in the other direction that says that biology does not exist, human nature does not exist, that absolutely everything about us is ideologically “constructed.”  At this point, all we can do is refuse to accept the either-or premises of the argument.  Both biologism and social construction are illusory positions, because real Darwinism is clearly an interplay between inherent mental and behavioral tendencies and freedom to modify or even reject those tendencies.  Anatomy is not destiny to us as it is to the animals:  within limits, we are able to reject our biological nature and innovate.  Human beings have more latitude than other animals, but this is in fact true throughout nature.  If it were not, certain fish would not have made the perverse choice to crawl out of the water and learn to live on land by improvising the weird invention known as lungs.  Darwinist hard-liners sneer at “creative evolution,” but what they are really rejecting is the notion that evolutionary change is a matter of conscious will.  If nature had intended animals to fly, it would have given them wings—but it did.  Something improvised, tried something new to see if it were viable, even if the improviser was neither the creature itself nor a designing God. 

The twin methods of coping are the two faces of evolution.  Yes, some species survive because they have a way, possess traits that adapt them to a certain environment.  They have their niche, and may remain unchanged within it for millions of years.  The cockroaches are far older than civilization.  Perhaps Gregor Samsa’s unconscious was tempted to regress down the chain of being for the same reason that Odysseus’s men wanted to remain pigs after having been enchanted by Circe.  But if a species’ biological niche disappears, it may need to improvise in order to survive.  Evolution is not just blind, instinctive repetition, and that is especially true of human beings.  It is clear that ego consciousness evolved as a means of evaluating possible choices and making a choice between them, giving us an improvisational capacity beyond that of any other species. 

The greatest literary representative of the improvisational spirit is Odysseus, who is described in the opening lines of the Odyssey as polytropos, which means “many turnings.”  Odysseus is a capable enough warrior, but mostly he invents his way out of jams and has a flexible personality capable of relating to many people in many walks of life.  The Odyssey is an epic of peacetime, and at times verges upon being a kind of prototypical comedy of manners.  One aspect of “manners” is knowing what to say and when to say it, and in this regard Odysseus is an artist.  The first four books are the coming-of-age story of Odysseus’ son Telemachus, and as he ventures away from home for the first time, he is very insecure about knowing how to talk to people without embarrassing himself.  Most of social life, when you think about it, consists of conversation, whether face to face or long-distance by means of various media.  And every conversation is an improvisation. 

Which may bring us to ponder the nature of language.  Linguists such as Charles Hockett and Noam Chomsky agree that one characteristic of true human language that distinguishes it from various animal communication systems is that true language is capable of generating genuinely new utterances, maybe even creating sentences that no one has ever spoken before. (I used to show a video in which the comedian George Carlin tried to invent sentences that no one has ever said.  You can imagine).  Animal communications systems, by contrast, are confined to a limited number of signals that always signify the same thing.  What these linguists are saying, then, is that the very nature of language is improvisation, the ability to invent something new.  As a teacher who grades thousands of pages of student writing and also writes himself, I find myself meditating on this from a rather personal perspective.  Composition theory lays a good deal of stress on getting the students to think of writing as a process rather than a product.  I have often thought about what happens when I try to write a sentence, then a paragraph.  I have something I want to convey in the sentence, but I usually have the choice of various ways of combining words to say it.  Or:  there are various verbal combinations that may articulate the same idea.  There: those were two formulations of the same thought.  Which is better?  Which should I choose?  Of course two verbal expressions are never exactly the same.  There is always a semantic difference, even if it is too slight and subtle to explain.  And, more importantly, there is a difference of sound and rhythm, a slightly different music.  That is very important to me in constructing a paragraph, which has to have not just a logical development of ideas but a musicality.  A good paragraph has a satisfying shape, like a piece of music.  The best prose writers, Northrop Frye for example, have a finely-tuned ear, and it is no accident that Frye was a classically trained pianist.  The point is that when I start a sentence, I have to invent my way to the end of it.  Beyond the rules of grammar, there is nothing that predetermines what will come next, word by word.  We improvise our way through even the simplest of utterances.  I think that beginning writers sometimes give themselves writer’s block by being too conscious of this.  Ordinarily, a lot of the verbal choices are made by the unconscious, and the conscious mind criticizes and revises them.  The same is even more true in conversation, where we have to put words together instantaneously, with very little time to think.  We open our mouths and hope that what comes out will be coherent and not too embarrassing.  If you lecture in a classroom, you expect that every so often some sentence of yours will simply tie itself in a knot. 

We have not yet spoken of the most familiar of all types of improvisation, that of music.  Let me stick to the two types of music I actually know something about how to play, folk and blues.  Assuming you already know how to make basic chords, the first thing you do in learning fingerstyle folk music is to is to learn certain picking patterns, formulas that can be repeated indefinitely and modified for each chord.  The formulas are pure convention, and will get boring if not varied eventually in some way.  But they provide the way, the ground on which any melody will be overlaid.  Repetitive as they are, they provide a certain comfort of familiarity and are soothing, a ritual of meditative pleasure.  Some very great folk and country blues fingerstyle players, Mississippi John Hurt, for example, never venture too far from the basic patterns.  But the interest in Hurt’s guitar playing lies in the sometimes quite subtle variations of the pattern itself.  You have to listen closely and develop an ear for minute differences.  Hurt is often paired with Gary Davis as a set of stylistic opposites.  Davis is a restless innovator: he re-invented the whole art of acoustic fingerstyle for himself, inspiring several subsequent generations of players.  He will play the same thing in various positions up the neck.  He will reverse the normal rhythm.  He will syncopate the rhythm.  He will add ornaments and little musical jokes.  It is a high accolade among guitarists that “He never played it the same way twice.”   That is true of both Hurt and Davis, but in opposite ways.  Both improvise, but Hurt improvises within the basic pattern, Davis by changing it, turning it upside down and inside out.  You can learn from Mississippi John how a C major chord in first position can be inexhaustible.  You can learn from Gary Davis how to play a C chord everywhere up the neck in all possible rhythmic patterns. 

The same holds true for soloing in blues and rock, whether acoustic or electric.  Such solos are improvised, but not at random.  Again, there is a way, that is a path or set of paths that provide clear and familiar routes on which to travel, so to speak.  Rock soloing is a development of blues soloing, and blues solos are built on the blues scale—six notes that all the thousands of blues solos are based on, plus possibly some passing notes.  It seems impossible, yet all the work of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven is based on the 12 chromatic notes of the Western scale—the notes between one C note and the one an octave higher on a piano. 

In our iconoclastic time, there are those who reject the idea that improvisation is a marriage of a traditional repeated pattern with innovation.  To be really new, we would have to reject the idea of repeated pattern altogether, and some have done so, accusing it of being worn out, coercive, whatever.  In the last century, therefore, music can be aleatory or random; it can be purely conceptual, as when a performer comes out, sits at the piano for four minutes, and then walks off the stage; it can use intervals other than the fixed 12 notes of the Western tempered scale, and so on.  Such radical innovations push against the boundaries:  rejecting the idea of an interplay between sameness and difference, they try to affirm difference alone.  Their opposite would be the mindless formulas of commercial pop music, banal repetition so lacking in originality that it has to hold the attention of its audience with a pounding beat and a dazzling stage show.  Taylor Swift uses the same formulas to make an increasingly individualized statement, but bad pop music is as numbingly mechanical as a car engine. 

The improvisational spirit acts in everyday life as a kind of Trickster.  I risk speaking too personally here, but when an old life pattern is worn out, and yet we are unaware or in denial about it, something may break into the old routine and wreak havoc for better or worse.  The improvisational Trickster may enter from within or without.  When it enters from within, we find ourselves possessed by sudden moods, sudden insights, sudden impulses to act and change things in a way you had not remotely thought about before.  In a flash, maybe because of something incidentally said in a conversation, you realize that the relationship or the marriage is over, that you or they have outgrown it and must improvise a way of going on.  Or a career change—both my decision to step down as department Chair and my decision to retire were so unexpected that they startled me as much as anyone.  However, it can be an impulse for a new beginning as well as an end.  Paul was a rabid anti-Christian until something knocked him flat on the road to Damascus.  Of course, conversion can move in the other direction as well, and someone may suddenly lose faith or decide to leave the church or cult.  In these moments, it may not seem that we ourselves decide to end something outworn or embark on something new, but rather that we are in the grip of something that is making the decision for us, through us.  We call it a deeper level of the self, but that is not what it feels like.  It feels like something other, although strangely familiar.  Whatever sense that makes.  We do not talk about such moments much, for fear of people looking at us strangely.

The Trickster improvisation may also manifest itself from the outside, as a new factor bursting unexpectedly yet insistently into our lives.  This new factor may appear at the moment of despair when an old life fails.  The most famous example is Dante in the opening of the Divine Comedy, who realizes at the midpoint of his life that he has lost the way and is wandering in a dark wood.  He sinks deeper and deeper, until all of a sudden the figure of Virgil appears to become his guide on a quest that will totally reverse the direction of his life.  Silas Marner, in George Eliot’s novel, lives in isolation and cold despair until a little golden-hair child wanders into his room and his life.   Improvisation is a choice, a manifestation of free will, but there is the question of whose free will is being manifested.  Paradoxically, there are times when the utmost expression of our free will is to choose to say, “Thy will be done.”  That is not at all confined to a religious context.  Any writer or artist or musician knows that moment.  Perhaps too those who realize that they have fallen totally and romantically in love.

To live improvisationally is to live by one’s wits.  Most of us may prefer to sit comfortably within our routine lives and read about the exciting lives of those heroes who live by their wits.  Odysseus, the polytropos, the man of many turnings, is the archetype of such heroes.  He outwits his enemies (who are always stupider than he is), thinks his way out of cliffhangers, and fast talks his way into various people’s graces, which includes an amount of creative lying for which he is commended by no less a figure than Athena herself.    The tricky servants of Roman and Renaissance comedy are Tricksters who provide the wit and invention to outgame the obstacle characters and win a happy resolution for the “normal” characters who would not have the ability to pull it off themselves.  There is an aspect of Homo ludens, man the player, in such figures.  Life becomes a game, to be won by ingenuity coupled with a risk-taking audacity.  Renaissance comedy was strongly influenced by the Italian commedia del arte, whose stock characters were really excuses for comic actors to improvise.  Many of the traditional comic strips, such as Blondie or Beetle Bailey or Peanuts, consist of typical characters in typical situations that recur over and over, the skill of the cartoonist being to make the current variation fresh enough that we smile yet again.  The originality of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat is that it stripped the commedia del arte formula down to its barest essentials.  Three characters—a cat, a mouse, and a dog—played variations for decades on the plot of the mouse throwing a brick to hit the cat, with the policeman-dog then arresting and jailing the mouse.   It ought to be boring, yet there are a good number of people who claim that Krazy Kat is the greatest comic strip of all time.  Those who think so cite the ambiguous complexity latent within the skeletal formula: the twist was that the cat took the brick as an expression of love, and the whole thing was a kind of love-hate triangle, with Krazy’s gender uncertain.

Improvisation is a contest, an agon, a matching of wits against an antagonist, as with Bilbo’s riddle contest against Gollum in The Hobbit.  Even when there is no antagonist or opposing player, improv comedy is a contest, with the comedian challenged to invent spontaneously, judged by the amount and speed of invention.  Truly brilliant improv comics, such as the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, seem to me almost superhuman in their lightning-fast inventiveness, week after week.  When I was young, I envied the quick-witted repartee of the characters in the plays of George Bernard Shaw.  I never remotely achieved that level of wit, but teaching discussion classes has been good training at being fast on my feet.  In a discussion, you never know what students are going to throw out, and you have to quickly figure out a way to make it serve your purposes without being coercive.  It is high-adrenaline work, and my head is sometimes spinning at the end, but at times I feel the excitement that comes with working without a net. 

The current widespread terror at the prospect of an increasingly protean world leads to the question of whether democracy is really possible, or whether only an elite few are capable of it.  Not an elite of social class and privilege, but an elite of mind and temperament.  Democracy demands a kind of polytropos attitude, capable of living with the insecurity inevitable in a system subject to change by its own members.  Those who want security and who find the responsibility of creating and recreating their society through informed voting and other forms of involvement to be too burdensome will always be attracted by authoritarianism.  They long to lay their burden down and be taken care of.  The sheep want a shepherd, especially when prospective shepherds advertise that “Only I can protect you against the wolves.”  This has always been the criticism of democracy, that it could succeed only if people were better than they actually are, more courageous, less lazy and selfish. 

I think social change is going to depend on getting enough people to see that human beings are not innately the kind of lazy and frightened herd animals that are, yes, all too common today, despite propaganda to that effect coming from the apologists for oligarchy and strongman rule.  There has been a concerted effort over decades to create a collectivized mass population easily riled up into a mob through fear and propaganda.  Since the 1980’s, a combination of predatory capitalism and would-be fascism has contrived to deprive the middle class of security through deliberately creating enormous income inequality.  When people are afraid to lose what they have, they will put up with exploitation and become easily manipulated, one form of which is the breeding of resentment at the success of others.  The takeover that began with Reaganism was not accidental but a quite deliberate strategy.  It was and is a divide-and-conquer strategy.  The lower middle class resent immigrants and people of color for “taking their jobs” and getting special economic favors.  They also resent the “elites” above them, the educated professional class that forms the upper echelon of the Democratic party.  All this distracts from the real villains who are doing the puppeteering. 

No, democracy cannot work in a population that has been collectivized and conditioned to a kind of paranoia.  But that condition—the condition that accounts for that sea of Trump signs on so many million lawns—is not “human nature.”  It is what half of the citizenry have been made into, people who in a changed social environment might not only act better but grow into better people.  I find it moving that many of the people of Springfield, Ohio have defended and supported the Haitians as neighbors, members of their community.  Utopias have all too often been depicted as harmonious places in which, because they are run on rational principles, argument and conflict are at a minimum.  But because people are different, and therefore think, feel, and even perceive differently, we have to re-imagine utopia.  First, it has to be a pluralistic utopia, or, as some people have been saying, a heterotopia.  Different personalities with different values wanting different lifestyles should be able to co-exist amicably, and in fact even cultivate an appreciation of their neighbors’ differences.  The utopian pledge of allegiance should be vive la différence.  The science fictional utopias in which people are all dressed and look exactly alike, maybe even have numbers instead of names,  are wrong. Utopians will not wear uniforms.  Second, a society that is minimally exploitative, that does not keep its population in a constant state of insecurity (and we are wealthy—there is absolutely no reason anyone should fear that they might be unable to survive), might cultivate a polytropos, improvisational attitude fit to encounter a universe that is, after all, itself improvisational, is what Loren Eiseley called “the unexpected univere.” 

Third, and most of all, the Harris-Walz campaign is a striking example of a sudden mass improvisation that no one saw coming, exactly the kind of sudden life-changing, game-changing reversal that came, not out of any strategy but spontaneously out of some deeper source.  And the nature of that improvisation is a joyfulness and, of all things, fun.  It is a unanimous rejection by millions of people of the fear, hate, and paranoia with which we have been victimized since at least 2015, an embracing of the exact opposite.  What is the present mood?  It is the spirit of comedy, of improv comedy.  It makes us begin to realize that if we ever do begin to realize utopia, it is not going to be a society of Star Trek Vulcans.  Utopia will be, utopia is, a wildly messy, festive home, a carnival all year round, in which differences can be worked out and lived with, not painlessly, not without tragedy, yet in a spirit of good will towards all, truly all and not just one’s in-group.  Social change must work to bring this about, but it is a perfectly possible goal and not an airy-fairy ideal.  Nevertheless, utopia is not only in the future.  Socrates said that the wise will live in his Republic or ideal society no matter what kind of state they find themselves in externally.  In this way, utopia is like the kingdom preached by Jesus.  In one way, it is a dream of things hopefully to come.  In another, it is here and now.  All we have to do is start living in it. 

References

Eiseley, Loren.  The Night Country.  University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Lao Tzu.  Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way. A New English Version by Ursula K. LeGuin.  Shambala, 1997.