Category: utopian visions

Conviviality

Music may be the best thing in American daily life. I guess I could try to expand that to the arts generally. But I am not sure that any of the other arts have as wide an appeal or generate such idyllic communal scenes.

Last week I went on a Tuesday night with some friends to the BlueNote in Durham. It was open mic night, with bands of four to six being formed from the people who sign up to play. Mostly the blues, with the music ranging from passable to surprisingly good. About sixty people in the audience, of all ages and races. Lots of dancing, plenty of beer drunk, and enthusiastic cheering for the musicians. Lots of people out having a good time—with good cheer all around.

Then I spent four days at Merlefest, the huge music festival held each year in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. No alcohol allowed, although the festival is just about totally unpoliced. I saw two security personnel on Sunday, the last day, and realized I had not seen any security or police the first three days. Lots of volunteers, in their bright yellow vests, and some announcement of the rules from the stages, but no one, as far as I could see, was stopped from doing anything. We snuck in some alcohol—and I am sure we were not the only ones. But no visible drunkenness that I could see, while everyone is almost sickeningly polite, and (once again) enthusiastic about the music and about the good time we are all having together. Over 10,000 people there on Saturday and good cheer all around, with the unwritten rules about seats and places at the various stages universally respected. And then there are all those 20 something musicians who are bringing back the traditional music even as they are creating new music. Plus an astoundingly knowledgeable core audience—people who also know and love this music and its history and its old standards.

My rose-colored view does need to be qualified. We ended up at the ER on Saturday around noon (a false alarm, luckily) and the staff there told us how they hated Merlefest because they were fated to see lots of drug overdoses and some alcohol poisonings over the weekend. Back at the festival, I tried to see the signs of these problems–but did not.

Also, the crowd was all white, a mixture of white professionals and Trump voters. (So my wife–who wasn’t there–said, “there’s the harmony. Easy for people to behave well among all their own kind.” Please read that statement with the proper sarcastic tone.) The culture gap was revealed dramatically on two occasions. Friday night the headliner was a country singer named Jimmy Johnson (or some such; I had never heard of him), who has a beard down to his navel, and a beer gut that should not adorn a thirty-something body, singing formulaic Nashville songs that sounded like every country record of the past thirty years. After two numbers, my friends and I were done; but as we walked out, we saw that the reserved seats were about half full while the unreserved seats were completely and totally packed. This guy was a big star, a must see, for a large audience that obviously lives in a different universe than I do.

Then on Sunday morning we were treated to a Christian rock star named Paul Thorn. Had never heard of him either, or really known about the world of Christian rock. And again a huge crowd, much larger than any of the crowds for the banjo meisters Bela Fleck or Allison Brown. Exactly the kind of music I most dislike—chord thumping, drum driven, banging as opposed to note picking—was what really drew in the crowds. And the slick, smarmy Christian preacher, with his little homilies in between his Christian rock numbers, had them in the palm of his hand. Looked him up on google, and he just started out as a rock musician wannabe; the Christian stuff came later, which only heightens my prejudicial conviction that he’s a fraud.

One of my friends was offended by my distaste for Paul Thorn. She thought him a sincere Christian, disliked my immediate suspicion that these Christians are inevitably exploiters of the proles. But it is hard for me to feel charitable toward Christians these days, not when their unflagging support for Donald Trump shows them up in all their mean-spirited bigotry.

But I didn’t sit down at the typewriter to bash Christians. I sat down to reflect (yet again) on the conviviality that characterizes American daily life. My son lives in a DC neighborhood that is 85% African-American and was 100% black five years ago. The street vibe is very friendly—in stark contrast to the street vibe in DC when I first lived there in the 1970s. I don’t fully understand it; if I were black, I would be pissed off all the time. When the police (who are usually black) have any dealings with someone on the street in the neighborhood, there are always five to ten people standing around videoing the encounter on their phones. Gentrification is slowly moving up H Street from Union Station toward my son’s house, two miles further east. It will probably reach his block in 3 to 5 years. Yet everyone on the street—and in the local stores—smiles and says Hello and is invariably polite.

I have the same experience in New York City, where I grew up. When I asked an old friend a few years ago “when did everyone in New York become so nice,” she instantly replied, “isn’t it disgusting?” She knew exactly what I was talking about. A certain kind of macho swagger has lost its cool for large swathes of the population.

And yet . . . We have all the sexual harassment (and worse) even as crime rates are going down. And we have the immigrant hatred and black bashing. Just like in 1968, we want to say that’s just the old folks; that kind of stuff is going to die out. But the kids of 1968 are the old folks now. Our politics is worse than ever; our society’s neglect of large swathes of the citizenry and the rhetorical justifications offered for the state’s and the corporation’s cruelty are more bald-faced than ever. The bile pouring out of the TV and over the internet just doesn’t connect up with the conviviality of face-to-face daily life.

I don’t understand this world I now live in, where life on the streets is so much less mean than I expect, while our public discourse is so hateful that I can’t believe people think that way—or would dare to utter such thoughts in public. I want to run and hide in the music, where a good life beckons.

“Good Enough”

In my last post, I said that liberals are believers in the “good enough,” in accepting the better in place of holding out for the best.

But I can only endorse that position with some serious qualifications. The first is that “good enough” is always contestable. That was the point of saying politics is endless. Political debate, deliberation, and conflict is often about what good the polity should be aiming to achieve. But, in other cases, the debate is about whether the extent to which we have reached a particular good is “good enough.” Could we do better? 80% of the population has health insurance. Should we be content with that level of achievement?

There will always be people who say we are not doing well enough. And such people are to be cherished. The “good enough” position asserts that any arrangement is imperfect. Under that condition there is much to be gained, and little to be lost, by encouraging those who point out how short of perfection we fall. Every halting point, every compromise, is unsatisfactory to some degree—and we hardly want to lose sight of the imperfections that mar every temporary arrangement/agreement.

We stand on muddy, messy ground here—and that is partly the point. Politics is messy because we never know for sure if different tactics will bring us closer to our goal—or if we have maximized what we can achieve. I am loath (allergic to) declaring imperfection inevitable. I hate appeals to “necessity” that seem designed to shut down utopian aspirations or radical critiques. Keeping the realm of possibility as open as possible seems, to me, essential to an imaginative progressive politics. To be called utopian should be an honorific, not a slur.

But—here’s the muddiness—some way of organizing things has to prevail in the imperfect meantime; we cannot leave everything entirely open, fully in flux, waiting upon the perfect. So political fights will also be about whether this current set of arrangements is “good enough” to accept for now, even as we acknowledge its falling short of the ideal. When, in other words, is “good enough” good enough? A very, very, very, difficult question to answer—and one that logic, reason, theory, philosophy cannot do much to help answer. We are here in the thick of the underdetermined world where “truth” has little or no role to play, the world that Arendt identified as quintessentially political.

Temperamentally, I find myself fairly often impatient with the perfectionists who refuse to sign on to an existing arrangement. I say, very likely unfairly, that they prefer their purity, prefer keeping their hands clean, to pitching in to do work required in the here and now. Keeping aloof becomes, all too easily, a permanent stance, a kind of ironic negation of anything that actually exists. It can, no doubt, be difficult to find anything to affirm in this sublunary world—that is, anything to affirm besides the ideals that would allow us to escape our sublunary condition.

But I guess—I never really thought of it this way before—I feel some kind of duty of affirmation. If one is, as I am, an absolute atheist, then there is nothing other than this world. And, yes, we humans have managed to fuck it up mightily. Still, that we have the power to fuck it up means we also should take at least some responsibility for it, for the ways it is arranged and unfolds. Ironic aloofness is one way of denying responsibility. It’s not my fault. I did no harm. But it is also a strategy for not making anything at all happen; I sit aside waiting for the arrival of a perfection that never comes, of a world that will live up to my standards. Good luck with that.

I prefer the route of saying “find something to affirm—and build out from there.” The great good things in my world are my family, my friends, my students, and my colleagues. With all of them I am able to have interactions that are life-affirming, that yield pleasure and insight, and provide opportunities for giving and receiving. From there, it makes sense to affirm (even reserving a right to criticize all their imperfections) the institutions and social arrangement that make those interactions possible. There are worldly settings for our relationships and it seems foolish to ignore or condemn those settings wholesale.

The liberal is often derided as a compromiser, as someone who muddles through, trying to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, lacking a firm sense of contradiction. And the liberal is also seen as a Pollyanna, resolutely closely his eyes to injustices that undergird the social arrangements and institutions he proclaims “good enough.” But the liberal is not a conservative, not someone who is deeply committed to defending the status quo as the best we can do. And the liberal is not a reactionary, insisting that the golden age was somewhere in the past, and we must tear down the present to return to that prior era. The liberal is (in William James’s terms) a meliorist, forward-looking, in favor of improvement, always willing to measure our imperfect present against the ideals we espouse—and that we fall short of achieving. But the liberal refuses to condemn the present tout court and refuses to believe that absolute and violent repudiation of that present is likely to create even a better world than the present, no less a perfect one.

Again, to conclude, no theory or philosophy can guide us here. When is the status quo so unjust, so bad, that drastic action is justified to change it? When are more moderate strategies for improvement the better course? These are matters of judgment, and there is no determinative calculus to tell us which judgments are correct. Politics takes place on the field of judgment—and all we have to guide us are past instances, analogies and examples, and projective (imaginative) suppositions, none of which comes with any guarantees. Judgment, like social arrangements, are good and better, but rarely vault into the land of the “best.” We can only try to make our judgments “good enough.” Which means those judgments lead to tolerable decisions and actions, to doing things that introduce at least some improvement over the currently existing state of affairs. And then we count on “the cries of the wounded” (another phrase from William James) to let us know how the new arrangement still falls short.

Occupy Anarchism

“A kind of anarchism of direct participation has become the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements in America in the last half century. There is a lineage even longer. Decision-making by consensus is of Quaker inspiration, as if to say: Speak and listen, listen and speak, until the spirit of the whole emerges. In its recent incarnation, anarchism is not so much a theory of the absence of government but a mood and a theory and practice of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time—at least until the first frost.” Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (NY: HarperCollins, 2012; pp. 80-81.)

“There was a graver problem with leaderlessness than the fact that it made it awkward for outsiders to know who to speak with. By rejecting leadership continuity, the movement remaining in motion, mobile, able in principle to adapt to new circumstances. But it also rejected the formalities, even the informalities, of accountability. When it made mistakes, it didn’t know what to do about them. It was prone, in difficult hours—and all movements, like organizations and marriages, have difficult hours—to thrash around” (Gitlin, 103-104).

[I]n keeping with the movement’s anarchist, antiauthoritarian thrust, there was a strong sentiment that, as naturalist Garbiel Willow told a New York Times reporter, ‘Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond.’ Demands conferred legitimacy on the authorities. Demandlessness, in other words, was the movement’s culture, its identity” (Gitlin, 110).

“The movement’s great majority rightly understood nonviolence not as negation, the absence of destruction, but as a creative endeavor, a repertory for invention, an opening, an identity. . . .Certainly, the tactics can grow stale with repetition, but committed and creative practitioners can renew it. The Occupy movement has been, so far, a seedbed of creativity. Its future rests in no small part on whether it can continue to learn from experience, deepen its tradition and funnel it into new soil” (Gitlin, 127-29).

“Communities governing themselves in assemblies. . . . The radicalism of the core movement helped explain what baffled so many observers—the absence of formal demands and programs. As a guiding principle, what the radicals wanted was direct democracy. It would have been absurd to demand that the authorities create direct democracy. The authorities have everything at stake in resisting such a demand. If you were going to have direct democracy, you had to launch it yourself, directly. You had to infuse the spirit of do-it-yourself with world-changing zeal, and vice versa. Political-economic decisions were too consequential to be made by anyone but all the persons concerned—the stakeholders, to use the current lingo. The radical core wanted a world run not by exclusive committees but by assemblies of the people” (Gitlin, 133, 138).

“The Occupy movement wanted to win reforms and to stay out of politics. At the same time.

Movements are social organisms, living phenomena that breathe in and adapt to their environments, not objects frozen into their categories while taxonomists poke and prod them. The come, go, mutate, expand, contract, rest, split, stagnate, ally, cast off outworn tissue, decay, regenerate, go round in circles, are always accused of being co-opted and selling out, and are often declared dead. If they are large, they contain multitudes, and contradict themselves. Outsider movements struggle to finesse these tensions, to square circles, striving to hold into their outsider status while also producing results” (Gitlin, 141).

So, if economic life is to be made substantially fairer and more decent, and plutocratic power is to be reversed, an enduring movement is essential. Such a movement may not be sufficient—it isn’t humanly possible to know that—but surely it is necessary. Occupy’s thrust is popular, which is essential, but popularity itself does not change the world.

What does? In the longer run, both institutional change and changes of heart and mind. The movement needs structures that flex and learn, train leaders, generate actions, recruit supporters. It needs to be a full-service movement—one that invites participation at many levels. For overmortgaged and underwater home-owners, it needs campaigns to corral the banks that have them in lock. For the civilly disobedient young, it needs appealing direct actions. . . . Whoever oyu are, it needs to prmotoe activities tailored to you.

In the medium run, say five years, networks of activists—the inner movement—need to devise an infrastructure that sustains them, recruits them, focuses their intellectual and strategic life, generates sustained pressure on power, keeps movement tensions manageable, and not least, make significant progress toward driving money out of the political system” (Gitlin, 165-66).

“Historically, coalitions of outer-movement and inner-movement groups have accomplished what individual groups could not” (Gitlin, 208).

I don’t want to belabor this material. Gitlin wrote his book in the spring of 2012, when Occupy was still alive—if on life support. I will let his comments speak for themselves, with only three observations of my own.

It is striking the extent to which Occupy captured the imagination of the left. Its fragility—and its inability to make a dent on the plutocracy it was trying to disrupt—were obvious from the start. Yet the left is so starved for any kind of “movement” that it took up Occupy as a savior. Gitlin bends over backwards to be sympathetic, even as he repeatedly points out all of Occupy’s flaws. His sympathy is to be applauded, not sneered at. But this ember cannot be stoked into a fire. There just wasn’t enough there—and never was.
The point about inner and outer movements is well taken. Some serious pressure from the left on the Democratic Party is sorely needed. So the dilemma remains: when should the radical left stand firm, when should it fall into line behind the Democrats. Disdain for electoral politics is suicidal, as the triumph of Trump shows. But being continually blackmailed by the threat of “their being worse” is a formula for snail’s pace progress.
So the only answer is to organize, to build larger and stronger coalitions. Anarchism is no help in that case. Assemblies are fleeting if they are not constituted as institutions. The people governing themselves in assemblies is a useless, even frivolous, goal. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s a happening, not a politics—and is of a piece with the gestural politics that is so delicious to the avant-garde.

Corporate Enterprises

A short addendum to my last post. It is striking that war and revolution unite people in destruction, in tearing things down, in fierce opposition to some foe. Is the bliss of cooperation possible in more constructive, creative endeavors? Sports and business don’t fully count here since are so wrapped up in competition, in having an opponent that must be beat. How about art? The making of a film or a play, or of a Gothic cathedral, requires many hands working in concert. Certainly, that’s where Ruskin located his utopia, in the corporate effort to create Notre-Dame.

In his famous and influential “Nature of the Gothic,” Ruskin imagines a perfect Hegelian society, where unified purpose also enables individual distinction. It is precisely not about everyone moving in lock-step, but about each contributing according to his talents—with that contribution being recognized, appreciated, and honored. A sense of individual satisfaction in work well done and, crucially, work self-directed is joined to an over-arching project. I get to work on my small piece in freedom, but am also driven by the knowledge of how it contributes to the whole.

The vast body of scholarship is constructed along similar lines. Yet for those of us immersed in it, it hardly seems ideal. How did the stone-mason in 13^th century Paris feel about his work from day to day? Surely Ruskin idealizes.

Still, one’s scholarship depends on and is in conversation with the work of others. And one’s own work is certainly pointless if not contributing to something that we represent, vaguely enough it is true, as “knowledge.” Without that, where would we be—just seekers of prestige in our designated circle of Bourdieuian hell.

All of which is to say the Hegelian/Ruskinian dream is a beautiful, even a worthy, one. We do well to keep trying to make it real. And while alive to all the imperfections that inflict its semblances in our daily lives, we should also suspect the cynicism that would undermine those efforts entirely. Hence my desire to avoid simply scorning the Hardt/Negri book or the efforts of our “prefiguative” democrats.