Unjustified optimism, necessary optimism: American attitudes about the future in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology

Millenarian beliefs that the deluge is nigh are not new, but it's not a stretch to say American culture is experiencing a high tide of fin-de-siecle sentiment. We've been drowning in post-apocalyptic stories for years. Perhaps somewhat differently from past concerns about the impending end of the world as we know it, today we can actually point to rational, scientific concerns. Superbugs, climate change, dwindling water to satisfy a growing population, an overdue supervolcano beneath Yellowstone--there are plenty of reasons to feel dread that don't require any religion at all.

Add to that the unusual nature of the current political cycle. While we've had dramatic swings in political philosophies before, we've never quite had this kind of politician whose entire appeal is that he has come to destroy politics. Trump's appeal to the far right--even if he doesn't have enough of a political philosophy to be far right himself-- is now engendering an almost equally radical swing from the left, and we may well end up with a choice between two highly unconventional candidates in 2020. This swing to the extremes seems to also be limiting the space Americans have for common understanding, making us more likely to hate the other side. There is stress on our institutions.

If we look for reflections of this stress in a literary anthology like the 2019 Pushcart--an anthology that, with its focus on smaller presses, can possibly boast to be somewhat more representative of the concerns of ordinary Americans than other anthologies with big names who occasionally make a living out of art--we can certainly see this angst informing narratives. Several stories reflect contemporary nervousness, such as Julie Hecht's "Taco Night," about an aimless woman experiencing a sort of fugue on the night of Trump's election. Or Poe Ballantine's "Secrets Deep in Tiger Forests," in which Vietnam is a stand-in for contemporary concerns about unending wars and the effects of those wars on those who fight them and those who don't. In the entire anthology, no story reflected a basic pessimism about the future as much as Julie Burnstein's "All Politics."

Western optimism in general and American optimism in particular owe their philosophical roots to humanism, an outcropping of the Renaissance that stresses the centrality of humanity and believes in the ability and duty of humanity to use reason to overcome its problems. Humanism gave us modern universities. But in Burnstein's story, the university--in particular, humanities departments, which have the specific task of propagating humanism's core tenets--are rotten to the core and utterly beyond redemption. Because humanities departments themselves are in thrall to their own perverse politics, they are unable to have any impact on politics in the general culture. Without the spirit of humanism to guide them, Western political bodies and the cultures they prop up don't have much hope.

Now this, THIS is a humanities department that can change the world.

But there's a lot of optimism in Pushcart 2019

Along with the pessimistic, though, and actually outweighing it, there are stories that reflect a fundamental optimism about the future, be it the future of humanity, of Western culture, or of basic cultural institutions like family.

I noted a similar swing from a renunciation of the values that have dominated Western culture for centuries to an attempt to restore those values in some way after reading through another anthology, the 2018 Best American Short Stories. This doesn't mean that we are going to see an upswing of writers of serious fiction calling for a genuine return to the values of yesterday, or to make Western culture great again, but it does mean I see modernity struggling to find what it can salvage of humanistic values from the ruins.

This is true from the opening story, Karen Russell's "Tornado Auction," about a man who is obsessed with selling baby tornadoes the way many people now sell prize animals at auctions. It's a world that's mostly like ours, but under a little more environmental stress: some people make a living creating rain or wind. The protagonist is alienated from everyone in his life, especially his children, who do not appreciate his dangerous and unprofitable passion. But we find in the story's most touching moment that his hobby, misanthropic as it seems, is actually what he clings to desperately in order to prevent him from becoming overwhelmed by how powerfully he feels the weight of human bonds, especially the family kind. It is his way of escaping suicidal feelings or the oppressive weight of "something worse than freedom" he feels when he realizes he is a father to children he loves more than he can handle.

Russell's hero, Bobby, faces a very modern conundrum. We fetishize individual freedom, but it is also what is killing us. Jonathan Franzen explored this at length in the novel Freedom, how in the name of freedom, we allow people to waste and consume to the detriment of all. Bobby doesn't give up his freedom. He tries to turn the power of the freedom he loves into an instrument to keep alive the very bonds he seeks to run from. It doesn't work out well for him, and in fact, the story itself is nearly destroyed by the power of the ideas it is working with. But it's clear in the end that the sentiment of the story is in favor of a belief in the family ties that bind.

Nothing is freer of human ideals of right and wrong than an act of God, but also, nothing is more destructive. 

The best two stories of the collection both exude a fundamental optimism, even while presenting a world that is basically doomed, either environmentally, as in David Naiman's "Acceptance Speech," or emotionally, as in Lisa Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend."

In "Acceptance Speech," a gardener expounds upon how the way of things in nature is self-destructive: bacteria in a petri dish will eat their food faster and faster until they choke themselves. She claims that man is headed in this direction, and the sooner we get our own destruction over with, the happier she will be. But the whole time she is weaving the thread of the futility of life in the natural world, she is knitting herself into that tapestry of life. She reveals at the end that she has become purposefully and happily pregnant.

It's not clear exactly how she progresses from misanthropic nihilist to born-again optimist, but it's clear she didn't do it by closing her eyes to all that is wrong in the world. She embraces the future while still realizing it is, almost without any doubt, doomed. Her award for which she is giving her speech was given for ripping out every beautiful plant from her garden and putting ugly things in their place. But when she got to the end of ripping the beautiful things out, she felt that her very honesty about how the ugliness of the world was, in fact, a kind of lie. She felt this when she juxtaposed her own honest pessimism to the self-blinding optimism of her husband: "I knew, from my husband's wounded puss that the garden, however glorious, was no reply to his infant questions unanswered, but a terrible lie."

Her pessimism does not disappear, but rather, she finds a way to merge it with her husband's optimism. Having torn out everything beautiful, she finds there is yet something in the garden left to love. But she is only able to find this out after tearing all the beautiful things out, much as our culture today is only able to find a remnant of humanism worth clinging to because it has so mercilessly attacked the foundations of humanism for so long. Nothing still left standing can possibly be the weak stuff.

In Taddeo's "Suburban Weekend," we have the familiar "love and family are a lie" theme challenged, however, timidly, by a bumbling hero who spends most of the story eclipsed by the person she is trying to save. It is interesting that the suicidal friend in need of saving is named "Fern," making her view of the world the more "natural" one. Liv--whose name is almost comically on-point, because it is her goal to help her friend to do just that--is a comedian who is nearly unable to deal with her own personal issues. This brought to mind Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, in which the theme is advanced that comic mindsets are better suited to survival than tragic ones. "Suburban Weekend" is sort of an exploration of whether that philosophy has an evangelical side to it, whether it can not just save those who follow it, but whether its followers can use it to save others.

In the end, it isn't clear that Liv can save Fern. (That is, in a sense, that she can save the natural world.) But the reader admires the love she shows when she tries to save her friend, and the reader ends up wanting to show that kind of love, too.

Liv can't have less luck at saving a Fern than I have had in my life. 

The not really exceptions

There are some stories that seem to possibly challenge the fundamental optimism of most of Pushcart, but they are actually just validating a humanistic view of progress and the future by way of pointing out exceptions. Gabriel Brownstein's "No Time Like the Present" is about the disasters that can happen when we fail to get a hold of our psychological disorders, the things that rob us of peace. But by critiquing the inability to fix the problem, the story is also asserting a classical humanist concept: that problems can be solved if the right solution is applied through hard work. Similarly, Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" sounds like it ends in a very dark place. When the narrator ends with the promise that "from now on whoever comes to see me is going to hear truth," it's not a comforting truth she's going to tell. It's that whatever comes after death is frightening and best not to think about. But again, this is the failure of reason showing that the solution is to apply reason correctly. It's an injunction against becoming obsessed with what one cannot control and focusing on the here and now. In its renunciation of the after-life and its recommendation to focus on the physical world, it is perhaps the most classically humanist story in all of Puschart 2019.

Even a cynical story like Sarah Resnick's "Kylie Wears Baliman" finds something to admire in the dying world of tabloid journalism it skewers.

The most interesting exception, although I found it to be not a very interesting story in its own right, is Robert Coover's "The Wall." Coover combines the ancient tale of two lovers separated by a wall with the modern political resonance of a wall--although the later is never overtly stated. Coover seems in this parable-like story to examine the idea that troubles tend to be mounted by the societies that face them, but that this just leaves society with another wall to get over. The wall might be psychological, and it might just be the realization that every freedom brings new chains, or that there is never any end to walls. Rather than being overtly pessimistic or optimistic, it is philosophical about the whole notion of pessimism and optimism, and, really, about the future. It's old-guy lit.

Because I make everything about Lord of the Rings

The point has been made many times that American optimism is unjustified and quite possibly dangerous. We don't take seriously the idea that we might destroy the world because we always think Elon Musk or John Wayne will be there to save it for us. I have often thought that America could use a good dose of reality to cure it of its confounded optimism and bring out the dour Calvinists we all might have been.

But then I'm reminded of something Frodo Baggins said about another group of foolishly optimistic and inward-looking fools: "...there have been times when I thought the inhabitants (of the Shire) too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them." He says this just after Gandalf has revealed the truth about the one ring and the threat Frodo brings to everyone in the Shire by keeping the ring there, the moment when Frodo decides he must leave to save it. When the time comes to leave and he thinks about having once felt this way about his fellow hobbits, he concludes, "but I don't feel that way now." 

Frodo has to face terrors and truths and become wiser than any inhabitant of the Shire in order to save it. By doing so, he becomes unable to live in it any longer, but he is content to have saved it for his gardener friend Sam. Which brings me back again to "Acceptance Speech." The wisdom the gardener finds that makes her rejoin the world around her isn't a philosophical argument, it's the sadness in her husband's face. She's not unaware of the cold truths of the world in which cute otters rape baby seals. But when she returns from plumbing the depths of rot in the world, she doesn't leave the garden like Frodo left the Shire; she decides to return to it, a goth Eve with her fool of an Adam. 

The sense from Pushcart and from intelligent, liberal-minded folks in the world who have spent the last few decades tearing down pillars of classical humanism is that we need to find something left with which we can plant a new garden.