On meaning what we say (Liberal nihilism II)
In which I, a member of Gen X, suggest maybe irony isn't always great for politics
First, a quick announcement: I’m once again teaching a class on writing spiritual nonfiction for Writing Workshops. The class begins on January 29, 2024, and will run for eight weeks. There are no required, synchronous meetings; it’s all done online and asynchronously, but you’ll find that I and your fellow students have pretty lively discussions of the course material and each other’s essay drafts. More info is here. You can also reply to this message with questions.
I’m very good at teaching this class, and past students have gone on to publish the work they did for it, including material for at least two books. I look forward to working with you!
The Hedgehog Review has just brought my essay, “How We Obscure the Common Plight of Workers,” out from behind the paywall. I hope you’ll read it. The meat of it is about how very useful words like burnout, emotional labor, and professional-managerial class, all of them coined in the 1970s/80s to describe the challenge of American working life, became the focus of a much less useful identity-based competition in the 2010s.
At the end of the essay, I suggest a way for members of the professional-managerial class (like me and, in all likelihood, you) to act in solidarity with the working class to improve labor conditions. And it has occurred to me that we just saw a great example of this sort of cooperation in the successful United Auto Workers strike. More than a quarter of UAW members are graduate students, members of the PMC in training. As I understand it, they helped elevate Shawn Fain to the UAW presidency, and he then pushed the union to make bigger demands of the automakers, ultimately benefiting the men and women working on the lines.
Next time you hear someone grousing about the PMC, remind them of that. (And send them my article.)
A little while back, I argued in this newsletter against something I called “liberal nihilism”: a tendency I see too often on the broad political left — particularly in academia — towards viewing societal problems as hopelessly unsolvable or public goods as already irrevocably lost.
A striking example of liberal nihilism came from the Washington Post tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, who wrote on Twitter earlier this year, “not to be a doomer but [you] have to be delusional to look at life in our country [right now] and have any [amount] of hope or optimism.” And why is that so? Because, Lorenz wrote, “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, [zero] social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”
The key move of liberal nihilism is that in the name of concern for the downtrodden, you describe the forces and systems arrayed against them in maximalist terms, to the point where you’ve made those forces appear naturally given and immovable, leaving no room for the downtrodden person or anyone acting on their behalf to improve their situation.
The phenomenon does not just appear on social media. A couple years ago, I wrote about the argument among historians over whether it’s fair to say that racism is in “America’s DNA.” All of the historians claiming racism to be essential to American society would also claim to be on the side of racism’s victims. But they undermine themselves with the way they describe the problem. You can’t change DNA. It replicates itself forever. If the country has always been and could only ever be utterly racist, then why bother trying to improve it? Once you come to the conclusion that nothing can change, it’s worth asking if the concern that motivated your inquiry is at all distinguishable from callous disregard.
I’m not the first to have noticed this defeatist tendency in the academic left. I’m grateful to the reader who sent a link to Charlie Tyson’s very sharp and funny 2019 essay on a similar phenomenon, “fashionable fatalism.” This fatalism, common in academia, is (you guessed it) a form of knowingness:
The fashionable fatalist does not undertake a careful examination of worrying trend lines and decide that giving up is, in some specific case, the most rational course of action. Instead, she derives narcissistic solace — the thrill of martyrdom — from her unshakable certainty that matters can never improve.
In fashionable fatalism, everybody knows all is lost. As a result, the only remaining intellectual task is to compete over who can appear as most hopeless. It’s strange that left-wing academics adopt the fashion, Tyson writes, because “this argumentative style is not just complacent but cynically conservative. By pronouncing the uselessness of action, it bows to the status quo.”
(In his essay, Tyson references A.O. Hirschman—specifically, the “futility thesis” from Rhetoric of Reaction—which is never a bad move. You Hirschheads out there should read to the end of my recent Hedgehog Review article, wherein I recommend a recovery of Hirschman’s exit—voice—loyalty framework.)
Someone else pointed me toward Richard Rorty’s notion of the “spectatorial left.” Every day is a good day to read some Rorty. Here he is in a 1998 interview about his then-new book, Achieving Our Country:
You say at one point that when a Left becomes "spectatorial and retrospective" it ceases to be a Left. What exactly do you mean by spectatorial and retrospective?
Spectatorial in the sense of looking on and saying, "Hey, everything is going to Hell" without having much of an idea of how you can stop it. Retrospective in the sense of looking back at how terrible we've been rather than looking forward to see how much better we could make ourselves.
So that's why you call the Left "the party of hope"?
I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care much about our past sins.
The opposite of hope, of course, is despair. And I’ve been seeing a lot of commentators lately caution liberals and leftists against despair. (Probably because I’ve been looking for them.) Here’s Al Gore, in a recent interview with The New Yorker:
Despair is just another form of climate denial. We don’t have time for it. The stakes are so high…
So we have to act. We have no choice, really. There are obstacles to move out of the way. It’s not fair, perhaps, to ask the fossil-fuel companies to solve this crisis. They’re incentivized to keep on burning more fossil fuels. But it is fair to ask them to stop disrupting and blocking the efforts of everyone else to solve it.
Gore’s firm belief is that we can solve the problem of global warming. “Once we stop net additions to the overburden of greenhouse gases, once we reach so-called net zero, then temperatures on Earth will stop going up almost immediately,” he said. It won’t be easy, and we may never get back to “normal,” at least not in our lifetimes, but there are things we can do to halt the warming and, in the long run, reverse it. Despair is perhaps understandable, but it short-circuits the agency we do have.
Christian Wiman has a new book called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair. I haven’t read it; don’t ask me about it. But it makes me try to picture the person who sees the title and thinks, “He’s arguing against despair? What a chump.”
In October, Michelle Goldberg wrote in a column on some members of the U.S. left’s response to Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, “The most sympathetic reading of the online leftists playacting as the Baader-Meinhof Gang is that their nihilism is a function of despair.” Their rheotrical excess is self-defeating. If leftists excuse violence, Goldberg writes, “I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.”
Goldberg’s comment raises an important possibility: Maybe the climate and justice nihilists don’t quite mean that everything is already, permanently lost. But then, why are they saying it? What good is it doing? More broadly, must we mean what we say?
For most of my life, the answer has been no. We’ve heard about milennial and zoomer irony, but I’m old enough to remember Gen X irony. For my generation, irony meant being passers-by, hanging back from enthusiastic judgments, whether positive or negative. (To a Gen Xer, nothing is “amazing.”) Our irony meant wearing vintage T-shirts of uncool bands.1 At some point, it transformed into the late Matthew Perry’s signature sarcasm, which never got old.
But irony has taken on a different cast in the social media era, where it’s harder to tell who’s being serious about what. Like an ironic T-shirt, an ironic meme plays off of context collapse — a message intended for an in-group nevertheless gets read by members of an out-group who don’t get the joke — only the online message is available to a much vaster audience who is in a position to broadcast and comment on it to recipients far beyond the initial context. These conditions magnify the likelihood and stakes of misunderstanding, but they can also raise the in-group’s sense of its own status: “Look at all these rubes. They don’t get it; we do.”
In addition, social media is essentially a boring video game where the points are measured in instants of others’ attention. There’s little distinction between positive and negative attention. Reward and punishment often go together. The person who attracts a lot of negative attention may well end up with a lucrative podcast deal or a Cabinet position.
I don’t think these are good conditions for political communication. What do you take seriously? What can you dismiss? What’s the difference between a constituency and a group of people who are all just in on the same joke?
In focusing on the left, I do not mean to say that similar problems don’t exist on the right. After all, a guy previously best known for commenting on street fashion did start a “Western chauvinist” organization as a joke, and then people took him so seriously that several members of the group are now in prison for committing seditious conspiracy against the United States.
Such performative irony has also been a feature in many prominent grifters’ moves from left to right, as the journalists Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet document in a recent article in the left-wing magazine In These Times. You start by joking about fascism; next thing you know, you’re advocating it.
So, I reluctantly come to the conclusion that we should mean what we say, at least in political discourse. We should anticipate that people will take what we’re saying seriously, will assume we believe what we’re saying. If we’re not comfortable with that, then maybe we shouldn’t speak out.
I feel like there are still some unanswered questions concerning liberal nihilism and this earnestness in political speech I find myself calling for. For one thing, in what sense is it nihilism? Is it Nietzschean nihilism? Lebowskian? For another, what’s the difference between nihilistic despair and nostalgic lament for things that have been genuinely lost? And should I be taken seriously when I say we should put an end to work? Can you still be a Rortian ironist in an era when ironic statements are so easily misunderstood? (It’s possible that, in fact, you have to be one.) Finally, can Jonathan Lear’s great book, Radical Hope help us here?
For better or worse, this may not be my last word on this topic.
Last minute holiday gift guide: Books by my friends
For history nerds: Whitney Nell Stewart’s This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations. Whitney’s book is a study of how people who were enslaved on plantations imagined and made homes for themselves within a very narrow circle of agency. Non-nihilistic history at its best!
For young readers (3-7): Freddie the Flier, Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail’s new picture book, which she coauthored with its subject, the Indigenous Arctic pilot Fred Carmichael, is a huge hit in Canada. For those of you in the States, this is one you’re going to want to say you knew about before everyone else did.
For someone into everyday spirituality: Elizabeth Barbour’s Sacred Celebrations: Designing Rituals to Navigate Life’s Milestone Transitions. I often say there should be more ritual and festivity in life. Elizabeth actually makes it happen in hers. And here, in her first book, she shows how she does it and how you can, too.
For the conversation appreciator: Erin Greer’s Fiction, Philosophy, and the Ideal of Conversation. Erin, who is one of the best conversationalists I know, sits 19th and 20th century British literature at a table with philosophy from the same era, clarifying conversation’s intellectual, aesthetic, and political possibilties.
For the burned-out Brit: Cultural historian and coach Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhausted: An A to Z for the Weary. Here’s what I said for the back cover: “There are no shortcuts to healing from burnout. But reading Exhausted is like having a brilliant, compassionate, and good-humoured guide showing you there is a way forward.” (This book is not yet available in North America, but keep on the lookout.)
For reasons I won’t get into here, I used to have a John Denver T-shirt. Sometime in the early 2000s, I got the idea that it would be funny to cut the sleeves off and wear it to a noisy rock show in a tiny attic. It was funny, but I looked stupid, because I look stupid if I’m not wearing sleeves. Even so, I probably should have kept it.