How to punch at the meaningless multiverse

In ten days, Best American Short Stories comes out with its 2024 edition. I intend to blog through the stories, as I have almost every year since 2018. The big exception was last year, when I quit after seven of the twenty stories. Although I quit after the seventh, it was the sixth that did me in, which was Da-Lin's "Treasure Island Alley." I didn't outright hate the story, but I didn't think it was strong enough to merit being in a best-of collection. Trying to explain why proved too much for me, and left me feeling like I'm not good enough at this to keep doing it. 

So before I launch in to the 2024 version, I thought I might spend a minute getting the monkey (king) of that story off my back. What bugged me about that story, why was I so unhappy with my inability to explain what didn't work for me, and what do I want this blog to be in the future?

Let's start with this question: If I quit because I didn't think I was good enough, what does "good enough" mean to me? It doesn't mean creating analysis as good as someone whose whole life is literature could write. I've been clear about that since I started doing this. I abandoned literature as a profession after my M.A. for a reason, and part of that reason is that I didn't see the profession focusing much on communicating its knowledge to non-professionals. As someone who dived partway into the deep end of literary studies and then returned to the general population, my hope has been that I can shed some of the light that serious literary studies can bring to reading fiction on readers who are curious and intelligent but who may not have the background I do. I'm learned enough to understand how more advanced readings of fiction go, but not so much that I've forgotten how the kinds of stories that appear in BASS might appear to Jenny from HR who tries to read a few good books a year when she's able. 

Success to me is helping Jenny from HR to read a story in a deeper, more meaningful way by opening it up on a level she wouldn't have thought of on her own, but which she can still understand. It's writing posts that are part college-level paper and part personal reaction, because it's important to bring intellectual seriousness to reading, but also to keep in mind that we are doing this to become better people or to achieve a deeper understanding of life in some way. It's knowing there are smart people out there who very understandably read a BASS story and think, "What about this story is supposed to make it one of the best?" then helping them to see the answer to that question.

I never felt like I needed a ton of theory to do this. I was introduced to theory, both in undergrad and in grad school, in a very haphazard way. I never took an "Intro to Theory" class, for example. I just came across theory and then did the best I could to research until I understood enough to handle the assignment I had. That felt sufficient for what I want to do here, but last year, I decided that if I'm going to keep doing this for a few more decades, I ought to maybe get a little firmer grasp of both theory and the history of criticism. 

Right before starting BASS last year, I'd gotten into just enough theory and criticism that it actually made blogging harder. I was in "a little learning is a dangerous thing" territory, for sure. Rather than mostly using close reading, intuition, general knowledge of life and a little bit of professional knowledge, I now wanted to start putting more of the heavy-hitting esoterica of the profession into my work. But I was still too green at it to pull it off. As a translator who's learned a few languages, I liken it to the advanced intermediate phase of language learning, the one that takes the longest. You start to be able to read and maybe hear more sophisticated material. You get a feel for the terroir of the language, and you want your own use of it to reflect that taste and mouthfeel, but your active language skill isn't on the same level as your passive skill. Instead of getting better at speaking, you're suddenly worse, because rather than saying things in the simple way you've been saying them, now you're trying to remember that cool word or phrase you just heard and stumbling all over yourself. It's easy to feel at this phase like you're never going to get it, but you've got to remember that your passive and active skills will not advance at the same rate, and you have to allow yourself to keep using your safe and simple approach to speaking and not trying for too much until you're ready. There's almost always a simpler way to say something that will do eighty percent of what you want it to do. 

This year, I'm still not any kind of literary expert. I haven't gone back and gotten my Ph.D. I've continued to slowly read theory and criticism on my own. It will appear in my blogging this year a little more than it has before, but I'm still mostly relying on the old mix of close reading and instinct. When I'm feeling like a text is too much, I'm going to keep it simple rather than try to do too much. My work as a blogger here is a lot like my work as a translator. I'm trying to get the ideas across intact from one system to another. There's going to be some loss, but maybe the people receiving the message don't need every nuance that's there in the original. Or maybe they're capable of understanding more than I'd guess. 

In that spirit, I'd like to briefly return to "Treasure Island Alley" and attempt to explain more simply what didn't work for me. Often, when I don't like a story at all, I take a pass on it. A deep reading is hard work, and sometimes, if I just really don't understand a story, it's too much for me to do the work. I feel like this is justified; even literary professionals don't spend most of their time researching work they don't enjoy. Plus, I don't get any catty enjoyment out of shitting on a story written by a living author who takes their work seriously. I usually give only a brief explanation of why something didn't work for me, because I think it's owed, and then move on. Last year, I felt like I wanted to try a more detailed critique. I tried for something that was complicated beyond my ability. Now, I'd like to try a simpler version.

The quick critique after a long preamble

William Wordsworth was a self-serving douche who abandoned his liberal politics later in life when it didn't suit him anymore. He was a bad friend to Samuel T. Coleridge. He also changed poetry and aesthetics for the better forever. Two of his best known precepts about poetry, which I think apply to fiction as well, were that it should be a "spontaneous overflow of emotion" and also "emotion recollected in tranquility." In terms of the actual craft of writing, this tends to mean taking a subject that is deeply personal and working to achieve mastery over it through exacting use of words and imagery. You need both. Mastery of language by itself isn't enough, and raw emotion isn't enough. 

However, when the subject is something really massive, like, say, the absurdity of life in a multiverse  that shows no hint of ultimate meaning and in which all things die and move on to an uncertain fate, I don't believe that the emotion and the tranquility should be equally balanced. This is the big everything you're talking about here, the white whale of the universe. This is the reality of children getting cancer, of how everything survives by eating other living beings, of how everybody lives with uncertainty and fear until they die and go who knows whither. 

True aficionados of boxing enjoy highly technical boxers whose every move in the ring is controlled and calculated. These boxers might win a lot of fights by decision, rather than by knockout, because rather than lunge for big shots, they keep themselves out of range of punches continually and then take small shots when they're available. 

When a writer is taking on the Great Asshole behind life in the meaningless multiverse, though, I don't want a highly technical boxer. I want a street brawl. This should feel like someone trying to kill the murderer of their children, not like fencing at the Olympics where it's for points. There should be shots taken and received. There should be wild swings taken in rage that land nowhere. Craft should sometimes go out the window. 

Does this look like a guy who cares about workshopping his story?

The best example of this kind of writing is, of course, Moby Dick, the original harpoon shot at the white whale. Melville, interjecting his own voice over that of his narrator Ishmael as he does often in the novel, calls the whole novel nothing but a "draft of a draft." And there are, in fact, some glaring plot holes and technical mistakes in the novel. To me, though, those mistakes make the novel better, rather than worse. When you're stabbing at your enemy from hell's own heart, that is not the time to write eleven drafts that are more and more controlled. 

Other examples of wild swings at the meaningless multiverse that are made better by their imperfections are the science fiction story "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente, the sci-fi/kung fu mashup movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and the high-concept sci-fi comedy series Rick and Morty.

I was recently talking about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once with an Asian-American colleague, and I was trying to explain how the movie's imperfections were part of what made it so great. She thought I was criticizing it, and she said I would have appreciated it more if I were an Asian-American woman, but in fact I was trying to say that the very mess of parts of it were why I liked it so much. Remove Hot Dog Fingers Universe from the movie and you have less of a movie, even though it would have been 87% less silly. The movie is dealing with alienation big and small, both with a young Chinese-American woman feeling like her mother is disappointed in her and also feeling like the fact that infinite versions of herself spread out over the multiverse mean nothing matters. It ain't got time for worlds that make perfect sense. 

Here are the first two sentences from "Treasure Island Alley": "The mourning women are howling. Even with fingers in her ears, Xuan-Xuan hears their loud cries from the big white tent that appeared overnight in the alley." 

Here are the opening lines to "The Difference Between Love and Time": "The space-time continuum is the sum total of all that ever was or will be or ever possibly could have been or might conceivably exist and/or occur, the constantly tangling braid of physical and theoretical reality, (steadily degrading) temporal processes, and the interactions among the aforementioned. It is also left-handed." 

Obviously, the second one has not completely given up the "recollection in tranquility" half of Wordsworth's equation, but the rambling tone of the first sentence, the struggling to deal with the way that there is so much to contain in the story that it will never all fit in, fits the theme much better than "Treasure Island Alley's" restrained approach that takes a textbook Iowa Writers' Workshop five-senses approach. 

"Treasure Island Alley" is a mismatch between form and content because its balance of "powerful emotion" and "recollection in tranquility" is out of whack. With the big white whale of everything, the balance between the two shouldn't be equal. "Treasure Island Alley" feels like a story that went through workshops. It feels like a story that was worked on for a long time. It's fine to actually spend years working on a story, but the end result, when you're talking about going up against the absurdity of life in the multiverse, shouldn't feel like you spent years. It should feel like you sat down at a keyboard and bled all over it in one sitting. "Treasure Island Alley" feels like the result of therapy and weekend retreats. There's no mess in it. 

From time to time, people recommend therapy for me. I'm sure I have issues that therapists often claim to be able to deal with, like anxiety and indecisiveness. But I'm never much interested in it. I have some friends who go to therapy, but because those friends are dealing with such insurmountable life issues that are out of their control, there's not much the therapist can really offer. A therapist can be useful for someone who is clearly hurting themselves, like a person with anger issues who keeps getting fired or arrested. What can they do for someone married to a borderline schizophrenic who has taken their kids and moved to Thailand? What can they do for someone who is struggling to take care of multiple sick family members? Someone who is already doing the best they can, who really has no obvious improvements they can make to improve their lives? Nothing, really. Just sit there and reaffirm what they're already doing. 

I don't go to therapists because ultimately, most of my anxiety and indecisiveness comes down to how it seems like we're in a scary, violent, chaotic, lawless universe with no power playing parent to keep all the unruly children from killing one another. Therapy has nothing useful to say to me about that. Fiction might, but not if it gets therapy language all mixed up into it. Therapy is useful for people who've already decided it's worth the effort to try to change. It can't answer the question of why it's worth trying to change in a universe that is, by all appearances, devoid of meaning. I feel like "Treasure Island" has so much recollection in tranquility to it because it didn't do enough feeling the powerful emotion it should have. 

It's quite possible that I'd rather actually be around a writer like Da-Lin in real life than around the people who more successfully recreate the feeling of being disoriented in the multiverse. Apparently, at least one of the creators behind Rick and Morty has a very questionable character. Maybe if he quit thinking so much about the disorienting multiverse and more thinking about self-compassion or saying phrases like "grief is love with nowhere to go" or whatever they say in therapy meetings, he'd be less awful to be around. Would he also then be less adept at tackling the big fish of the universe? One of the most interesting developments of the last few seasons of Rick and Morty has been Rick's embrace of therapy with Dr. Wong. Will Rick eventually be able to incorporate the very terrestrial wisdom of Dr. Wong, knowing all that he knows about the reality of everything? Can the therapy of the calmest and most perceptive therapist in the universe help the smartest man in the universe? 

I don't know, but it's interesting to see if Rick can ever escape his never-ending dark night of the soul precisely because he's so obviously actually been in that dark night. A story that starts to cauterize wounds before they're fully formed isn't quite there. It might be a healthier attitude to life, but it's a weaker story.  

The spring of healing: what a lackluster novel I read as a kid tells us about "America first" philosophies

I read a lot as a kid, although I may not have always read the best the world had to offer. My mom, something of an expert in early literacy, believed it was important for young people to read what they liked to read, rather than for parents to obsess over whether their children picked entirely edifying material. Therefore, I was given a relatively long leash with my reading choices, as long as I was reading something. For a few years, one of the chief sources of reading material for my brothers and me were the slightly dated copies of Sports Illustrated my grandfather brought us. I don't know where he got them, but they were free, and we all liked reading the same articles and then going over favorite lines with each other afterwards. 

When I got older, I started to get into fantasy novels a little bit. Not obsessively--sports-based reading was still my favorite--but enough that I would mix it up here and there. One series I picked up from my dad was Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It was set in a magical world with a geography very similar to Anthony's native Florida. It was also full of puns, something I found funny enough to read maybe the first dozen or so novels in the series, but eventually tiring enough I never read the many he's written since then. 

I might have begun to catch on even as a young reader that Anthony isn't a virtuoso as a writer. If I didn't then, I definitely realized it when I read of few of his novels to my son several years ago. Even my son seemed to realize something was amiss. He kind of liked the first novel, but by the end of the second, he was ready to move on to something new. 

Still, I wouldn't say that Anthony is a bad writer. He's an example of a kind of writing I have a greater tolerance for than many people in literary fiction seem to have, one with some great ideas but who is a little bumpy getting those ideas across. (One of the things that perhaps delayed my ability to get stories published was my level of tolerance in my own work for less than stellar presentation as long as the idea underlying it seemed sound to me.) In particular, I was fond of the thought experiments that appeared in his work.  

Probably the most notable thought experiments in Xanth are the meetings various mortals have with the demon who created the world. This demon is apparently locked in some kind of supernatural game with other demons, and he twice (that I read) asked mortals for help in winning his game. (If I recall correctly, Anthony admitted to borrowing some ideas for these scenes from articles he read about game theory.)

(Aside: I won't delve into the alleged misogyny in his works. I'm sure it's there, but for me to deal with it, I'd have to go back and read him seriously, something I just don't have time to do right now. It's got nothing to do with what made me remember Xanth recently.)

Yeah, like, a whole lot of puns

Reading about "realist" political philosophy brought another Xanth scene to mind

There's another, less pronounced thought experiment from Xanth that came to mind for me the other day. I was thinking about the nature of  "America first" arguments, and, more broadly, about "realist" philosophies of how a government should behave in international geopolitics. It started when I read about John Mearsheimer's belief that Western bad behavior was primarily to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine. It echoed comments I've heard from other quarters, always coming from people who identify themselves as proponents of "realist" political philosophies. 

According to this line of thinking, the West has made a mistake trying to promote the growth of liberal democracies friendly to the West in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Expansion of the EU and NATO were needlessly poking the Russian bear, which nobody thought of as a threat prior to 2014. These analysts claim the US should have allowed Russia to maintain enough hegemony over its near neighbors for its own comfort, even if this meant letting those countries fester in a quasi-vassal state status. Even if it meant their citizens had to live under autocracy. 

Realists would argue that the reason we should have allowed this to happen, rather than attempting to bring these countries more closely into a Western orbit, was for one simple reason: it would have been in our self-interest to do so. In "great powers" politics, the U.S. should no more think of fostering friendly democracies on Moscow's doorstep than Moscow should think of placing a missile base in the Yucatan Peninsula. This just foments conflict, and conflict is bad for U.S. interests, measured--I suppose--in things like stock values and gas prices and GDP and whether people have the emotional energy to spend on some dumb event that happened at the Oscars. 

Trump was apparently influenced by this kind of thinking. His "America first" concept (I won't call it a political philosophy, because I don't think Trump is capable of sustaining any line of thinking deeply enough that it could rightly be called a "philosophy") seemed to involve a fairly straightforward, transactional calculation of debits and credits of any possible move in international politics. If something was "good" for America (according to whatever measuring stick he used for "good"), then we did it. If it was bad for America, we didn't. 

The healing spring and the complexities of self-interest

While thinking about this whole realist idea of how the world works lately, some neuron in my brain harkened back to something from Xanth. I had to get onto Reddit, find an Anthony community, ask a question, and wait a few days to fully remember what it was, but eventually, I found it. 

In the first novel in the Xanth series, A Spell for Chameleon, the main character Bink comes across a wounded soldier. He is directed by a dryad to a nearby magical spring that brings healing to those who touch or drink its waters. While Bink is investigating the spring, a finger he lost as a child is restored. However, the spring stirs to life and warns him that. "Who drinks of me and acts against my interest will lose all that I bring him." 

Seems legit. 

Bink immediately sees complications in this condition placed by the spring, because he wonders how the spring will judge actions for their effect relative to its interests. He assumes that there could be no logging or mining near the spring, because these would harm it in an immediate and tangible way. But what if a king levied a tax on lumber, and because of that tax, lumberjacks cut more wood in order to make up for lost revenue? Would the spring cause all those who had been helped by the spring to fight against the king? In fact, "...any action had widening results, like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pool. In time such ripples could cover the whole ocean. Or the whole of Xanth." Bink wonders if, should the spring's magic become strong enough, the spring might become the real ruler of Xanth. 

Bink realizes, though, that the interests of one spring are not the interests of all springs, nor of Xanth. He rejects the spring's terms and tells the spring to take its healing back. 

Bink was smart enough to realize something advocates of a narrowly defined self-interest fail to point out: that self-interest is complicated. Of course we all want what's good for us. Idealists want that, too. But what's ultimately good for us depends, often, on the unintended consequences of millions of decisions, none of which can be accurately guessed ahead of time, because the entire system is irreducibly complex. 

We have, of course, a great deal of responsibility to try to read the realities of the present, break down that which is complex, and make our best effort to calculate the effects of certain actions versus others. I myself mostly objected to the war in Iraq because of pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons; that is, I thought the stated goals were unachievable, not necessarily immoral if they had been achieved. Right now, I'm more than half convinced the United States should get over the idealistic opposition to proliferation and accept North Korea as a nuclear state, mostly because the practical reality is that we've failed to prevent them from becoming one, so we might as well try to live with that reality. 

We have an obligation to reduce the complexity as much as we can, but at some point, we are making best guesses. A commitment to always keep recalculating for self-interest, based on new information, is a formula for being in a constant cycle of reassessment and reapplication of new strategies. That's great if you work for a think tank and you want to be producing a new calculation every few weeks, but it's bad for formulating a predictable and consistent policy.

Much more to the point than that, though, if we are humble enough to assume that we're going to miscalculate now and again and end up harming our interest in ways we didn't intend, shouldn't we do so for reasons we believe in, reasons we accept as worthy of suffering for? Rather than decide, case-by-case, whether supporting one would-be democracy or another is more trouble than it's worth, isn't it better to say that we believe, in the long run, that democracies (assuming they're organic and not something we're foisting on other countries) are worth supporting, even if there are costs? To say that in the long run, we believe that the costs of not supporting a democracy are worse? 

Mearsheimer stated that there are always practical and moral elements to politics. He said it would be great if the two always aligned, but that sometimes, a country has to accept an immoral policy because the costs of the moral policy are too great. I wonder, though, if in an irreducibly complex game, it isn't ultimately safer sometimes to take the moral route simply because it's the moral route. This is what Bink elected to do when he gave up his own physical wellbeing in order to keep from putting himself in a compromising position. (In the story, there is a twist when he makes this decision, but the point is that he was willing to make this decision.) Sometimes, the very complexity and danger of the game might make a certain moral naivete more, rather than less, safe.  

Realism in political science doesn't mean "realistic," as opposed to someone who believes in fantasy. Realists emphasize the fundamentality of conflict or competition in world events, while idealists emphasize cooperation. It's not supposed to be a question of dreamers versus realists, but I think the cognate nature of the two words has led some to believe that political realists are more grounded in the real world. In fact, though, both realists and idealists care about self-interest and are looking at the real world for clues about how to achieve it. One might say the fundamental difference between them is more one of how both come to grips with irreducible complexity.

The most realistic, pragmatic, eyes-wide-open, non-dreamy belief might be that making hard political choices for moral reasons might sometimes be the most pragmatic solution. As I've suggested before, sometimes, when faced with a decision where it's impossible to predict all the bifurcating future time lines, it might be best to rely not on calculations, but on what I've called ontological ethics. That is, when in doubt, we make decisions guided by a sense of who we are. 

We might still, of course, make wrong calls this way, but there are benefits that can accrue from making decisions out of a sense of who we are. It gives our allies reassurance that we will remain consistent even in the shifting face of events. It gives our adversaries security that they can predict our policies, making them less likely to miscalculate. It gives us an internal sense of purpose and mission. There are real, pragmatic values to these things. One could say that in the long run, moral decisions might be better for our self-interest. 

Or not. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have noted, we're all dead. At some point, this experiment in democracy will fail or fade, or the multitudinous problems of the human race will doom us to extinction. If we have to go down, though, I'd rather go down for something I believe in than a wrong guess about what would have been good for us. I'd rather refuse the immediate good that seems to offer itself rather than be compromised by it. The only way to win a game of irreducible complexity, perhaps, is not to play it.  

Greater empathy or immunity from it?

A friend of mine was telling me the other day that over a weekend, he and his daughter were sitting on the couch when the movie Dead Poets Society came on. His main reaction to re-watching it was that it hasn't aged well, but his daughter was moved by it. When I think back to when I first watched it, I think I was moved by it, too. Nowadays, my thoughts of the movie tend to be closer to those of Kevin Dettmar or Stephen Marche. It's a lot of schmaltz with a few superficial ideas about the humanities or how literature can affect our lives.

When I first started to study literature in a semi-serious way, I checked out a poetry anthology from the library on base where I was stationed. I have forgotten what anthology it was, but I remember reading a justification of why poetry mattered in the introduction. That essay argued that learning to read poetry well could help us to separate the truly moving from the "mawkish," a word I learned for the first time reading that essay. Its meaning is close to James Joyce's definition of sentiment, which was "unearned emotion." And this really is one of the better uses of not just reading poetry, but of close reading of any kind. People who are easily swayed by emotion can be manipulated, whether it's by the people in their lives or the companies that advertise to them or the governments that ask for their compliance. Learning to read in a way that withholds your emotional responses to characters until they have earned it can also teach you to make real people in your life earn your love and loyalty.

But doesn't this sort of clash with another oft-cited benefit of reading literature, especially literary fiction, which is that it increases our empathy? People who defend the value of reading literature will often cite studies that suggest those who read fiction, especially literary fiction, have a higher level of empathy than those who do not. So how does that square with the idea that literature also teaches us to be more discerning about the things we give our emotion away to? Wouldn't being more discerning mean the claims others make to you emotionally have less sway?

After I started reading seriously, I remember one of the things I lost interest in was country music, which I had only just been introduced to by friends in the Marine Corps. Whether because I really started to know what fake sentiment was or because I wanted to appear to, the emotional register of country music didn't interest me anymore. Some people think reading literary fiction--which, let's face it, is just an industry term for "serious" fiction or maybe even "worthy" fiction or "quality" fiction or something like that--makes people discerning. Some think it makes people into snobs, too good to sing along to "Friends in Low Places" or to enjoy the kinds of movies that don't qualify as "films."

You think you're too good to cry at this, Jake? Do you? 

Not too long ago, I dumped all over a story about a young child with a brain tumor, because I thought the story relied on a false appeal to emotion. Was I being too harsh? Have I become so skeptical about the possible existence of bathos I'm now unable to recognize genuine pathos?

There are two dangers for those who read a lot of fiction seriously when it comes to empathy. One is the same one that concerned Saint Augustine: that we will become so enthralled with our vicarious empathy, we fail to care about the real suffering person in the real world. The other is that we can get desensitized to pathos, the way too many action movies can make someone desensitized to violence. Nothing moves us anymore.

For me, I think the latter is a real danger, but it's probably a danger even without being a discerning reader or film viewer or music enthusiast. For everybody, life makes it harder when we're older to become emotional about the same things that make us emotional when we're young. "Win one for the Gipper" might work on college athletes, but it's not likely to work on 35-year-old cornerback just trying to survive one more season. Discerning reader or not, life has a way of taking the sentimentality right out of us.

The ennui we get from excess of empathy from literature is a disease that brings its own cure. By inoculating ourselves early to the false promises of cheap emotion, we help preserve our limited supply of empathy throughout our lifetimes. We also learn to focus our care on proper objects. Literature teaches us to be more disciplined about giving our love away, so it doesn't become too diffuse to have an effect.

We ought to remember that everyone is going to have their own empathy level. Bridge to Terebithia is the saddest thing in the world if you're eleven. It was sad to me when I read it with my son a few years ago, but not as sad as it was to him. We all change as time goes by. It really is okay to be moved by Mr. Keating standing on the desks if you're sixteen. The sort of person who finds that satisfying at sixteen is the same sort of person likely to find it no longer satisfying at forty, because she needs something more enriching and less sweet to keep drawing nourishment from narratives about made-up people.

In other words, yes, literature should make you more discerning the more you read. That might mean you like fewer things. But narrowing your own empathy to a finer point shouldn't mean you lose so much empathy you forget what it's like to experience emotion more broadly. When it starts to do that, I think that's when literature actually becomes destructive, and maybe it's time to take a step back and do something else for a while. There's likely never been a time in history when there is a greater danger of this kind of emotional eating beyond our ability to digest, because we now live in a world where we can stream hours and hours of high-quality fictional stories in our homes. We're building our own empathy-resistant super bugs the way we're creating antibiotic-resistant diseases. Superfluity of emotional response-causing narratives might be making us less empathetic overall.

Did Derrida and Lacan create post-truth politics?

Carlos Lozada's recent editorial in the Washington Post, in which he both outlined the contours of contemporary post-truth politics and reviewed a number of books on the subject, was the latest in what I take to be a refreshing trend: liberals in a moment of introspection about the role we have played in pushing us to the current political moment. He quotes Lee McIntyre:

McIntyre, whose book is perhaps the most thoughtful of the post-truth set, also urges us to root out untruth before it festers. But he calls for introspection, even humility, in this battle. “One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”

It’s annoying advice, for sure. It takes the focus off Trump and his acolytes. It casts the gaze inward, toward discomforting self-reflection, at a moment when engagement and argument seem like all that matter.

But that doesn’t make it untrue.

That's good advice, and I wish more people I generally agree with politically followed it. In fact, I'd be more likely to join a political party based on HOW it determines its agenda rather than the agenda itself.

All the theorists I hated in college coming back to haunt me again? 

There's another point Lozada develops in his essay. It has to do with the extent to which post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and post-modern theories that ruled universities from the 70s to the early aughts led to the current difficulty society is having with determining that truth matters. Lozada cites Mike Cernovich, a "pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist," the one who put forth the Pizzagate rumors.

“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?”

Many of the books Lozada reviews include a discussion of the influence of theorists like Derrida and Foucault, and whether their out-sized clout among intellectuals for decades helped create the current political scene. I don't think that's completely groundless; in fact, that's a big reason why I disliked these thinkers in college/grad school when they were being pushed on me. In a sense, the whole mess of semiotic deconstructionist thinking left a lot of students wondering why, if Hamlet and Bazooka Joe comics were both culturally dependent narratives, we ought to study one rather than the other. Was our gut feeling that Hamlet was somehow a better, worthier narrative false? I'm sure a lot of students ended up walking away from those thinkers wondering what, if anything, really mattered.

Still, I think the influence of continental, post-modern theorists might be overblown. For one thing, nobody outside of the humanities knew much about them. Their writing was so intentionally abstruse, very few people who weren't in the profession of talking about culture would have picked them up. They resisted the merely curious reader. There was, I think, an intentional use of cognitive dissonance resolution on the part of the post-modernists here. They wanted reading their work to be like college hazing: something so arduous that once you had done it, you'd be much more likely to declare reading the work worth the effort, because you wouldn't want to admit to yourself you'd put all that work into reading something that was stupid.

Secondly, I don't think even most people in the humanities actually "read Lacan."  We read key passages from Lacan and we read explanations of key concepts in Lacan's thought, but hardly anyone actually read full works of Lacan. Foucault was a little more likely to be read, but still, I knew very few people who had actually read an entire book of his. If they had, it was likely Discipline and Punish. Derrida nobody read in full. I don't believe Cernovich really "read Lacan." I think he knows some ideas from Lacan, much like I do, and he is cashing in on those ideas to justify doing what he damn well wants to do.

Those French thinkers were notably slippery when anyone tried to pin them down for criticism that their philosophies led to a nihilism that would be unable to withstand tyranny. They often insisted that they were being humorous and intentionally using hyperbole and that readers who were troubled by their writing misunderstood them. In this, they were not unlike Trump in his Twitter tactics, but the followers of Derrida, although strident in the academy, were less so socially and politically. Partly because understanding what the hell Derrida was even saying was so difficult, deconstructionist students never really became much of a political force.

Finally, I don't think most propagandists need to resort to any French philosophers that are hard to understand. Modern propaganda has changed as technologies do, but the basic techniques of spinning everything to suit your preferences hasn't changed in a very long time. I fell under the sway in the 80s of creation scientists who presented what looked to me then like real science, but was actually just propaganda that aped real science enough to trick the gullible. What they did was really not that different from what a biased news site does now. I doubt any of those creation scientists had read any French philosophy other than Descartes.

The answer to nihilist relativism is not absolute dogmatism 

I'm glad some liberals are taking the time to consider our own role in creating a culture that is cynical about what is true. But because culture seems to list back and forth from side to side wildly like a ship foundering in a storm rather than iron out its wobbles and steady itself, I am afraid that as liberals try to undo the damage we imagine was done by relativist and deconstructionist narratives, we will end up becoming dogmatic about the existence of certain truths. I wrote about something in this vein a couple of months ago, when I worried that the #metoo movement might, while rightly trying to change years of bad male behavior, end up propagating a new sexual puritanism. It would be a puritanism that had room in it for LGBT and non-polar sexual behavior, and it would allow for sex outside of marriage, so it would be better than past versions of sexual puritanism, but it would be puritanism nonetheless.

A Christian friend of mine posted this on Facebook a while back. It's from the Babylon Bee, which is an evangelical satire site in the spirit of the Onion (yes, such a thing exists in the world).

(The actual article is here.)

The point behind the satire is this: once you reject timeless and eternal truths as given and fixed, like God's truths, the slide into a world where nothing is true is inevitable. For the Babylon Bee, the only antidote to post-truth is absolute truth.

It's enticing, but it's entirely wrong. First of all, it is confusing facts with truth. I can assert that the speed of light is known with certainty but the meaning of light is not. I can hold that the Earth is objectively getting warmer but be open to various solutions to what could be done about it.

Secondly, and more to the point, "all truth is relative" is just a dumbed-down version of what many non-absolutists think about truth. For people like me, there is no Platonic beauty, no perfect version of what beauty looks like, and so no version of what beauty is will ever fully express what beauty might encompass. For all that, I still think beauty exists. It exists in a problematic way, but it exists. I don't believe truth is relative. It's just a lot more work to get to than an absolutist would think. It's not a point you arrive it; it's a roughly sketched-out  region on a map with borders that are in dispute. But every argument over where the borders truly lie makes the map clearer and more meaningful, not less so. A willingness to accept a game with difficult and vague rules does not mean I want to stop playing the game altogether.

As rational people--a set which surely includes roughly an equal number of conservatives and liberals-- ponder our role in fixing post-truth politics, we need to keep in mind that our goal is not to re-make a world in which we pretend to be sure of more than we really are. It's to draw a nuanced difference between a world in which meaning is constantly being developed and a world that is meaningless.

If Thanos is the force of moral evil in Infinity War, what is the force of moral good?

Critics and fans were both worried that Infinity War might fall into the trap that Avengers: Age of Ultron ran into, one where it had too many characters, and the plot either failed to get them all in and out in ways that developed each of them in meaningfully or it would slog as they all ran into each other. Those who are praising Infinity War-which seems to be the majority of people--find that the movie managed to avoid the pitfalls of having dozens of protagonists by making the central narrative focus instead upon the one villain, Thanos.

Thanos is both complicated and, in many ways, sympathetic. He is willing to use power to remake the world not for himself, but for others, at least as he sees it. He believes the universe has a problem with its intelligent life: it is the nature of sentient life to use up its resources, leading to famine, war, plague, and pestilence. His solution is a cataclysmic culling of the population. He wants to wipe out half the population of intelligent life in the Universe, and he fights to obtain the six infinity stones that will give him the power to do it effortlessly. He is willing to be brutal in order to obtain the stones--the torture of his quasi-daughter Nebula is unsettling--but by obtaining the stones, he is able to complete his objective of taking out half the universe by simply snapping his fingers. There is no suffering for any of those who are randomly chosen to die. They simply disintegrate softly.

Thanos and Malthus

Thanos's philosophy is so reminiscent of 18th-Century thinker Thomas Malthus, I was sure I wasn't the only one who noticed it. Sure enough, Googling "Thanos and Maltus" overwhelmed me with results. A lot of them dealt with the links between Malthus and Thanos better than I could. (see here, here, and here, for example, or even here for a quiz on whether a quote is from Malthus or Thanos.)

Malthus wrote his most influential work right before the industrial revolution. He saw a frightening increase in not just the population, but of the indigent population, and he theorized that people increase faster than resources to feed them. Therefore, if civilizations did not intentionally manage their own populations, they would inevitably find themselves in cyclical, cataclysmic events that culled the population for them: wars, famines, etc. Britain once used this thinking to justify not giving aid to the poor.

The only beauty contest Malthus would ever win

The main rebuttal of Malthus' thinking is that a technological society can break free of the limitations on its resources. Our world has done this on a number of occasions. The Industrial Revolution was one. A second was the revolution in food production of the 60s and 70s, which is one reason why zero population growth hasn't been an important agenda item for any politician in recent memory. In a knowledge economy, people are not just a thing to feed; they are themselves the resources that find ways to feed them. Losing one person might mean losing the one person who can figure out the solutions to our problems.

It's worth noting that at least one review seriously treated the question of whether Thanos has a point. It's possible that we will soon come to an end of our ability to solve our problems with technical solutions, and we may end up with a Malthusian conundrum after all. Thanos is a villain who presages a problem we all sense may face soon. 

What's the good guys' answer? 

The Avengers/Guardians/Dr. Strange don't offer the "knowledge economy" response as their reason for why Thanos is wrong. Most don't offer much reason at all. Their objections are instinctive and not deeply thoughtful: "You're insane," that kind of thing. Those to whom Thanos explains himself somewhat: Dr. Strange, Tony Stark, Gamora, tend to critique his plan rather crudely, by simply asking "so your solution is genocide?" or something like that.

The closest we get to an antithesis to the villain's belief comes, we shouldn't be surprised, from Captain America, the moral center of the Avengers since they first formed. Thanos is a utilitarian thinker. He believes the individual should be sacrificed for the good of society. Captain America, from his first scene, refuses to listen to a plan that involves sacrificing one member of the group for the rest of them. This is consistent with Captain's character; he has, through many movies, refused to surrender individual autonomy for the good of the state. Some even think he took his beliefs too far in Civil War, and should have been more willing to listen to a UN plan to control the Avengers. (He is never more American than in his resistance to the UN.)

So maybe Captain is the voice of moral good in the movie: all human (or whatever Vision is) life has value. We treat every single person as though their  individual lives have as much value as all of us. It is worth risking many to save one. To lose one person is a tragedy as great as losing everyone. By treating life--every life--as though it has this much meaning, we are morally centered in a coherent way where it makes sense to fight Thanos.

Only, as Vision points out, Captain America doesn't really believe his own philosophy. Captain America once sacrificed himself for the greater good (in a scene that really makes no sense and has been mocked over and over). Vision keeps trying throughout the movie to convince Scarlet Witch to use her powers to destroy one of the infinity stones that lies in his head, even if it means killing him in the process. Vision can see that there is a place for sacrifice, for putting the good of everyone ahead of the good of one person.

So there are limits to Steve Rogers's way of thinking. Steve himself is too stubborn to see the contradictions in his own thought, but it works for him. His certainty gives him clarity and the ability to work with resolution. He is like Thanos, in a way, in  his admirable resolution and his ability to carry on in a single direction in spite of obvious flaws in his philosophy.

Rogers/Captain doesn't refute Thanos's utilitarianism on utilitarian grounds the way an economist would. Rather than saying that Thanos's strategy will not achieve its end because humans and others like them can be resources for solving problems as well as consumers that cause problems to solve, Steve objects to Thanos's utilitarianism on idealistic grounds: life is valuable, even life that is inconvenient for the rest of us.

Roger's idealism is neatly counter-balanced in the film by Doctor Strange. Strange is willing, he says, to sacrifice others for the common good. He tells Iron Man he won't hesitate to sacrifice either him or Spider Man to protect the stone in his keeping, because too much is at stake. Strange is a utilitarian, although of a more limited variety than Thanos. His willingness to sacrifice some lives to save others is pitted against Thanos's willingness to do the same, even if Thanos's method is far more shocking and extreme.

But Doctor Strange makes an unexpected pivot. After holding his own against Thanos perhaps better than any of the other good guys (except the mighty Thor at the very end), Strange unexpectedly offers his infinity stone to Thanos if Thanos will spare Iron Man's life. It seems like the most foolish act in the movie (except dumb-ass Star Lord losing his shit when they almost had the gauntlet off Thanos's hand), but we are led to believe that it is actually part of Doctor Strange's plan.

Strange, we know, traveled forward in time to view over 14 million different possible future outcomes. The good guys only win one of those outcomes, and Doctor Strange is making choices to try to bring about that one outcome. Neither the audience nor the other heroes know the plan, but it evidently involves a logic in which a Rogers-like idealism on Doctor Strange's part can somehow stop Thanos.

Sacrifice

We don't know how this is going to work. I don't even really know yet if Infinity War was a great or just a good movie. I kind of need the next installment to tell me. As Doctor Strange is being disintegrated by Thanos at the end after Thanos has all six stones, he tells Iron Man that "this was the only way." We are back to the notion of sacrifice. Strange has sacrificed the many for the one, his belief in utilitarianism for idealism, and himself for Iron Man.

The idea of sacrifice is at the heart of the story now, although in an enigmatic way. Thanos had to sacrifice his daughter to obtain one of the stones, and we find that he--unexpectedly--actually loved her. Vision keeps insisting he be allowed to sacrifice himself. He finally convinces the woman he loves to destroy the stone and himself with it, but the sacrifice ultimately fails.

Since I assume that not all of the heroes (and half the world) who died at the end of the movie are going to stay dead, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in territory where those who sacrifice themselves come back from the dead. I'm wondering if we will get an ancient and mystical answer to a modern philosophical question.

The Marvel movies of the last decade have been an incredible cultural achievement. Just keeping the business side working while still making movies that nearly everyone found fun to watch was an amazing achievement. But the movies have only occasionally challenged our notions of good and evil. Civil War was the best at this, but most of the movies have given us good and bad where it was easy to know where your allegiances should be placed. If the sequel to Infinity War manages to satisfactorily offer an answer to the utilitarian-idealist question it has raised, the series will have become something more than just an impressive business model. It will have been a true work of art for our times.

Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."

Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void. 

Gilead

She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible." 

But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself. 

Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching." 

Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression. 

This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:

 "Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me." 

She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world. 

But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction. 

It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:

If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.

          Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...

Truth and Comfort

"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does. 

I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action. 

There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth. 

In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire." 

Raison d'etre and the writer, explained mainly in Monty Python references

There's an old Monty Python bit about an agnostic who is protesting the racket coming from church bells. The punch line, after the agnostic finally achieves his end, is this: "I've always said there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not."

I may have objected to a joke like this at one point. I'm an agnostic, in the sense that I don't believe any religion on Earth has a convincing enough story I'm willing to overrule my skepticism and accept it. But I wouldn't say that equates to not believing in anything. That's the theist's absolutism that without God nothing means anything, not mine.

But the longer I'm alive, the more I wonder if I'll ever really be able to believe in something again, at least enough to be moved to meaningful action by it. I suppose I am moved enough by the feeling of responsibility to my family that I am willing to work a lot every week. I even put a fair amount of effort into it. So I guess I'm moved to do what nearly every other human on Earth does and work for a living. But beyond that?

If I try to come up with ideas I believe in without reservation, I can only come up with one: I believe strongly that the world is complicated and most simple answers are probably wrong. There may be elegant answers that take something complex and express it simply, but if the underlying idea is actually simple, it's probably wrong. That's it. That's all I've got.

Everything else is just things I'm sure I don't believe, followed by a lot more stuff I'm uncertain about. I know I don't believe that any of the main sects/denominations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism offer deeply true explanations of the world. But that's just an affirmed non-belief, not an affirmative belief in something.

Lately, I've been reading Fashionable Nonsense by the physicists Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont. It's about the way French thinkers of the 60s to the 90s who are roughly called "post-structuralist" or "post-modern," and later their followers, abused science and math concepts in order to add authority to otherwise nonsensical theories.

The "nonsense" they were attacking is no longer fashionable--the book is twenty years old--but it was still quite influential nonsense when I was an undergrad and grad student in literature in the late nineties and early aughts. I could never quite understand what the philosophers were saying. I used to credit that to my being stupid, but I'm now relatively certain that there really wasn't much there to understand, and that's what was so difficult about it. I don't think anyone else--the professors included--really knew what the hell Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and so on were saying. They just learned key phrases and would repeat them at what seemed like the right moments--much like Sokol and Bricmont claim that these same philosophers did with math and science.

The writers of Fashionable Nonsense seem to believe these thinkers were the cause of a great deal of epistemological relativism, the notion that one way of explaining things or understanding things is as good as another. I don't know if this weird blend of linguistic theory, sham psychology, abused science, and erudite white noise was every really influential enough outside of the literary theory crowds I hung with back then to effect any real change in the culture at large, but it was certainly influential to me. Having ditched Christianity in my early twenties, finally gotten out of the Marine Corps--another cult of sorts--a few years after that, I was anxious to see what college had to show me. The best it had was these charlatans, whose message, as best I could make it out, was that everything was meaningless. The best you could say about the attempt to create meaning was that it was entertaining to watch people try to make meaning stick and then fail at it.

This intellectual nihilism flew in the face of everything that the centuries before had been about. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals had believed in their ability to improve their understanding and the world around them through the application of human reason. I understand that--to use the general explanation of how these theories came about-- Europe grew weary of intellectual optimism after a few world wars built upon a positivism about the meanings of things nearly killed everyone. But to date, there really has been nothing that has come after de-constructionism, no reconstructive philosophy. All we've done is keep applying a new post- suffix: Post-post-post modernity.

As a writer, if I don't have some animus driving what I write, it's all just tricks and workshop hocus-pocus putting together things that seem to have what a story should have. It's achieving all the formal, external characteristics of story without any of the heart of it. Stories can certainly be satirical; they can serve to tear down what needs to go. They have also, though, been the mythos that energized civilizations, that caused them to work and explore and create and fight and do all the good and bad things that civilizations do. I don't see much of that in the stories I read today. The world is too much with us, and our ambition is much too small.

I say this as an inveterate deconstructionist. It's not unusual for me to play the role of iconoclast in the social settings I inhabit. And I don't always have to have the answer. I don't need to know how to cook a steak well to know my steak tastes like shit, to use a metaphor a friend of mine often cites. But once in a while, I ought to be ready to offer a vision of what I want more of rather than just what I want less of.

My brother, a lawyer in the Air Force, recently wrote a piece for the War College entitled "Hope Isn't A Strategy, It's the Only Strategy." My brother has apparently been in one too many meetings where someone wrote off an idea that didn't have every base covered ahead of time by saying "hope is not a strategy." My brother points out that while it is of course important to plan, waiting for a perfect plan before acting just prevents action indefinitely. I read a copy of it before he published it, and it influenced my thinking when I wrote about liberal pessimism last week.

As a writer, I don't have to know everything about the universe to have something worth writing about. There can be a certain ad hoc nature to truth. It can be something you find out as you go. That's a lot different than the intellectual certainty that pre-dated the deconstructionists. It's more difficult to obtain. But accepting that truth on my terms in more difficult than I thought it would be once upon a time doesn't mean it's not there. Some things, you figure out beforehand. Others, you jump, and you figure out on the way down how you're going to land.

Parachute or pancake, at least you've done something. And it's a lot more fun believing you might be able to solve the riddle and failing than just giving up trying.