The word "generalization" may be defined as "a general proposition about the world, typically obtained from observation of the world, and perhaps even rigorous induction.
A "sweeping generalization" is a generalization which admits of no exceptions.
One may put the difference between them this way--where a generalization may admit of exceptions, perhaps significant exceptions, as by saying some aspect of the world that "It is usually like this," or even just that "It is commonly like this," a sweeping generalization says, if only implicitly, "It is always like this, every single time."
This means that one may much more easily refute a sweeping generalization than a "mere" generalization, because all they have to do is come up with a single counter-example to prove a sweeping generalization wrong. By contrast, to refute a regular generalization allowing of exceptions a single counter-example may be so inadequate as to be meaningless. Rather they would have to be able to produce evidence that no, it is not usually like this, no it is not commonly like this.
In short, the bar for the would-be debunker of the claim is a lot higher.
But idiots do like shooting their mouths off, and telling people they are wrong, and--as they never hesitate to make a "straw man" out of the other side's argument--are prepared to misconstrue a generalization as a sweeping generalization just so that they can trot out their one counter-example, tell the other party they "blew their argument out of the water" or some other similarly obnoxious thing, and feel smug.
If you are one of those who actually care about fact and reason, avoid such persons if at all possible (admittedly, a thing easier said than done as they are so numerous and aggressive).
Monday, November 4, 2024
The Phrase "Blow Out of the Water"
The use of the phrase "blow out of the water" has long annoyed me, because I associate it with fools who credit themselves with having "blown out of the water" someone else's position in an argument.
I suppose this is because it combines an obnoxious rhetorical bombast--something the stupid substitute for soundness of argument--with an equally obnoxious display of self-satisfaction; with a person arguing very badly, and then being very pleased with themselves for having argued badly as they give themselves the laurels of victory.
I suppose this is because it combines an obnoxious rhetorical bombast--something the stupid substitute for soundness of argument--with an equally obnoxious display of self-satisfaction; with a person arguing very badly, and then being very pleased with themselves for having argued badly as they give themselves the laurels of victory.
Have the First Shots Already Been Fired in This Culture War?
I recently wrote about how amid the continued metastasizing of America's culture wars we have seen much that recalled the rancor of Japan years or decades earlier--in particular that over young people and young men in particular "dropping out of life," and what it means for the economic and demographic base. So it seemed to me again as the matter of "virtual girlfriends" has become more topical amid advances in artificial intelligence, the first outbursts of moral panic over the matter already behind us--certainly as of Liberty Vittert's piece about the matter in The Hill last year in which she claimed that "AI Girlfriends Are Ruining an Entire Generation of Men" (this actually the title of the item). The "data scientist" backed up this claim with no evidence whatsoever apart from a few unsourced figures indicative of social disengagement among males 18-30 that include their greater singleness (without explaining how it is that 60 percent of women that age are in a relationship while only 30 percent of men that age are), and reference to the existence of some users for an AI bot by an "influencer" named Caryn. Far from establishing causation, she did not even do much to evidentiate correlation--but it was quite enough for her to plug it into the familiar moral panic-over-cyber-stuff narrative (cross out "video games," write in "AI girlfriends"), as she rushed to connect this with what some regard as a crisis in natality, and that in turn with the collapsing support ratios calling into question the viability of Social Security and Medicare (in a spirit of "just saying," I guess).
Of course, in a reminder (as if any were needed!) that technocrat credentials, personal platform and a willingness to say the "right" things count for infinitely more than saying anything actually worth hearing, here was her piece in this publication, and its receipt of respectful mention in publications running the gamut from CNN to Business Insider to the Guardian.
So far as I know it was only in TechDirt that we got a more critical stance toward Ms. Vittert's argument, Mike Masnick pretty much tearing it apart in every way that it could be, from showing up her questionable use of the data, to her use of familiar narratives bankrupt in the eyes of many, while even throwing in the obvious Futurama reference for good measure.
That was a reminder of how far off the beaten path one has to go to get some real perspective on such matters--with this unlikely to be the last time we need it on a subject about which we seem likely to hear a lot more in the years ahead.
Of course, in a reminder (as if any were needed!) that technocrat credentials, personal platform and a willingness to say the "right" things count for infinitely more than saying anything actually worth hearing, here was her piece in this publication, and its receipt of respectful mention in publications running the gamut from CNN to Business Insider to the Guardian.
So far as I know it was only in TechDirt that we got a more critical stance toward Ms. Vittert's argument, Mike Masnick pretty much tearing it apart in every way that it could be, from showing up her questionable use of the data, to her use of familiar narratives bankrupt in the eyes of many, while even throwing in the obvious Futurama reference for good measure.
That was a reminder of how far off the beaten path one has to go to get some real perspective on such matters--with this unlikely to be the last time we need it on a subject about which we seem likely to hear a lot more in the years ahead.
Virtual Girlfriends for a Generation Raised in a Virtual World
The idea of a "virtual girlfriend" is not new, the first having been introduced to the world at least two decades ago. Still, the concept has got more attention with the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, because of its apparent potential to endow virtual characters with unprecedented verisimilitude.
Of course, this is a subject one cannot discuss without acknowledging the enormous baggage almost everyone brings to the idea, which makes a snicker seem obligatory for many--all as a good many anxieties swirl behind the irony, because even as they shame anyone who would find such an idea attractive, they know not everyone shares the feeling they affect, and dread the implications. "How can the process of starting and building and maintaining a real relationship with a real person, with their own needs and demands, and the resulting doubts and uncertainties and tensions and compromises and frustrations that go with it, compete with that?" they think--and know that all other things being equal, it can't.
But all other things are not equal, of course, with the most obvious answer to those worries the fact that virtual partners are non-corporeal (at least, given the state of the art in 2024). They can never actually be "there," with all that implies for the limits of their interaction. And my first thought was that this would limit their having any very significant appeal to only a very few.
However, considering that I realized that I was thinking in terms of the expectations and standards of a different era. After all, we live in an age in which young adults have never known life without a smart phone in their hand, and consider the demand that they turn their phone off for so much as a few minutes a profoundly unreasonable imposition. Meanwhile at this point even persons who are much older, who did know life in a pre-smart phone, even pre-Internet, world, have nonetheless been shaped by the newer world. They spend life with their noses stuck to their phones, as the bulk of their interaction with others occurs through this medium--even their interaction with people they know in person, with whom they share households. All by itself this suggests physical presence may not be quite so important to them as it would be for someone not so immersed in such experience of the world, even where this particular type of relationship is concerned. (After all, it may be that a non-negligible proportion of the population has already experienced "intimacy" through this medium--maybe much more than non-negligible, to go by how many high-profile figures, old enough to have known life before the web, have got themselves scandalized and divorced this way.)
Of course, the common retort to that is that the people they interact with electronically in these ways are at least "real" in the sense that they have a physical existence, and that even if they have never met them in person, could potentially do that. But when the interaction is exclusively, or even principally, through a screen, it seems plausible that this distinction will matter less to a great many persons, especially if they like what they see on that screen and hear through the device's speaker. Indeed, considering this I am put in mind of Edward Castronova's thoughts about the "virtual reality" of World of Warcraft. The technological media through which the user experienced "VR" was primitive next to the '90s-era hype about what it would be looked, but for all that people were immersed, hooked, so much so that Castronova was to shortly write of an "exodus to the virtual world" from this one.
Again, all this was two decades ago--and so far as I know nothing has come along to refute his expectation. Indeed, in a world where postmodernist epistemological nihilism has been thoroughly mainstream for as long as anyone can remember they can that much more easily answer "What's real anyway?" They can even answer, "Who cares?"--especially as this pertains to the personal, emotional, sphere, where the sorts of hard material facts that don't go away no matter how much you want them to simply do not intrude so much. History has seen many arguing for alluring illusions over reality, those "French poetry majors" that the STEM fetishists so love to bash likely to know something of the writing of Charles Baudelaire, and just which one of the human faculties was queen over the rest.
Quite in line with such expectations, in figures like Toru Honda the age of the virtual girlfriend would already seem to have a start on its philosophers, arguing for the validity of this course on the basis of Platonic idealism. His views will hardly convince the skeptical--but at the very least seem likely to hint at the shape of things to come. However much those who disapprove would like for that to go away.
Of course, this is a subject one cannot discuss without acknowledging the enormous baggage almost everyone brings to the idea, which makes a snicker seem obligatory for many--all as a good many anxieties swirl behind the irony, because even as they shame anyone who would find such an idea attractive, they know not everyone shares the feeling they affect, and dread the implications. "How can the process of starting and building and maintaining a real relationship with a real person, with their own needs and demands, and the resulting doubts and uncertainties and tensions and compromises and frustrations that go with it, compete with that?" they think--and know that all other things being equal, it can't.
But all other things are not equal, of course, with the most obvious answer to those worries the fact that virtual partners are non-corporeal (at least, given the state of the art in 2024). They can never actually be "there," with all that implies for the limits of their interaction. And my first thought was that this would limit their having any very significant appeal to only a very few.
However, considering that I realized that I was thinking in terms of the expectations and standards of a different era. After all, we live in an age in which young adults have never known life without a smart phone in their hand, and consider the demand that they turn their phone off for so much as a few minutes a profoundly unreasonable imposition. Meanwhile at this point even persons who are much older, who did know life in a pre-smart phone, even pre-Internet, world, have nonetheless been shaped by the newer world. They spend life with their noses stuck to their phones, as the bulk of their interaction with others occurs through this medium--even their interaction with people they know in person, with whom they share households. All by itself this suggests physical presence may not be quite so important to them as it would be for someone not so immersed in such experience of the world, even where this particular type of relationship is concerned. (After all, it may be that a non-negligible proportion of the population has already experienced "intimacy" through this medium--maybe much more than non-negligible, to go by how many high-profile figures, old enough to have known life before the web, have got themselves scandalized and divorced this way.)
Of course, the common retort to that is that the people they interact with electronically in these ways are at least "real" in the sense that they have a physical existence, and that even if they have never met them in person, could potentially do that. But when the interaction is exclusively, or even principally, through a screen, it seems plausible that this distinction will matter less to a great many persons, especially if they like what they see on that screen and hear through the device's speaker. Indeed, considering this I am put in mind of Edward Castronova's thoughts about the "virtual reality" of World of Warcraft. The technological media through which the user experienced "VR" was primitive next to the '90s-era hype about what it would be looked, but for all that people were immersed, hooked, so much so that Castronova was to shortly write of an "exodus to the virtual world" from this one.
Again, all this was two decades ago--and so far as I know nothing has come along to refute his expectation. Indeed, in a world where postmodernist epistemological nihilism has been thoroughly mainstream for as long as anyone can remember they can that much more easily answer "What's real anyway?" They can even answer, "Who cares?"--especially as this pertains to the personal, emotional, sphere, where the sorts of hard material facts that don't go away no matter how much you want them to simply do not intrude so much. History has seen many arguing for alluring illusions over reality, those "French poetry majors" that the STEM fetishists so love to bash likely to know something of the writing of Charles Baudelaire, and just which one of the human faculties was queen over the rest.
Quite in line with such expectations, in figures like Toru Honda the age of the virtual girlfriend would already seem to have a start on its philosophers, arguing for the validity of this course on the basis of Platonic idealism. His views will hardly convince the skeptical--but at the very least seem likely to hint at the shape of things to come. However much those who disapprove would like for that to go away.
Japan Yesterday, the World Tomorrow, and the Philosophy of Mr. Toru Honda
I have over the years remarked just how much developments in Japan seem to run a bit ahead of developments elsewhere in the world--Japan's today, or even yesterday, often importantly indicative of the tomorrow of the rest of the advanced industrialized world.
Consider what has happened in Japan since the 1980s. A bout of historic speculative frenzy, substantially connected with real estate, ended with a colossal crash that marked the beginning of a long period of economic stagnation (the "lost decade," which turned into "lost decades") that upended not only economic but also political, cultural, social life--with just one of the consequences a trend of young people who, amid diminished prospects in an ever more materialistic culture with an ever less attainable bar for "success," withdrew from social life (most notoriously, the hikikomori), and a sharp decline of marriage and birth rates, feeding the country's culture war, and helping make old-fashioned concern with natality a hot topic in the process.
So has it gone elsewhere in the advanced world, and beyond, with the crash of 2007 and its aftermath in the "Great Recession" doing for it generally what the crash of 1990 did for Japan, with America no exception, the country since discovering its own "hikikomori", in which a reported decline of marriage, falling birth rates and natalism have become major issues, all of which has fed into its own culture wars. Still, there have been differences between the situation of one country and another, with an interesting case Japanese cultural critic Toru Honda, who quickly emerged as a figure of sufficient note to get interviewed for the Asahi Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the New York Times, or at least what the Times used to be) in the wake of the (within certain circles) controversy over the popularity of the Densha Otoko franchise. His position was that capitalism had done to romance what it had done to everything else, in the process devaluing much of the population such that it had no hope of getting anything by involvement in what may be called the "dating" or "marriage" market (just as many are unemployable in the labor market, and not incidentally thereby rendered hopeless in the dating/marriage market too), and that it was an entirely valid response to reject it--and indeed, to accept as a substitute for an unattainable love with a "3-D" human being one's emotional relation to a "2-D" character.
Just as in Japan the U.S., amid a deterioration of the economic situation, has seen young people become more critical of society's expectations of them, not least in as they interact with gender roles. There has even been some talk of people frustrated with an unpleasant contemporary reality preferring a virtual one to "Real Life" (Edward Castronova and Jane McGonigal, indeed, warning of the possibility of an "exodus" here). However, so far as I know no analysis to compare with Honda's has got a remotely similar level of attention--for reasons that seem quite telling. Much as American commentators smarmily speak of how "liberal" American society is relative to "conservative" East Asian cultures like that of Japan, in America, one may not speak of the prevailing economic system except to glorify it and abase oneself before it. Meanwhile the gender politics prevailing in the American mainstream mean that the expression of male grievance (which is how Mr. Honda's view is taken, even if what he says about the alienations of "love capitalism" and the viability of "2-D love" would go for women as for men) enjoys about as much mainstream tolerance as criticism of capitalism.
The result is that one only sees any criticism of the expectations regarding relationships of this kind from the alt-right, which is of course where criticism of capitalism is least tolerated. Indeed, where one might look at Honda's theorizing and plausibly see some hint of later alt-right thinking, one ought never to forget that in contrast with Honda they criticize feminism, not capitalism (absolutely ignoring or attacking any suggestion that it may have something to do with the situation they find untoward), while the alt-right does not prioritize individual happiness the same way. Rather it sets traditionalism, and natalism, above personal happiness, and tells men to "get out there and talk to a girl" (and brooks no excuse for failure) rather than retreat into a world of "2-D love," so that one would expect them to be dismissive of Honda's ideas. Still, given that neither the country's economic troubles, nor its fraught gender politics, seem likely to change anytime soon, all as "artificial intelligence" may be making "2-D love" more alluring for some. (Indeed, returning to Japan it seems notable that the maker of what may be the country's most popular "dating app," citing disinterest in dating among the young, launched a "virtual girlfriend" app that it thinks will be more appealing to many.) Amid all that it seems plausible, even probable, that we will hear more from those who think along the lines that Honda did two decades ago--and on this side of the Pacific Rim as well.
Consider what has happened in Japan since the 1980s. A bout of historic speculative frenzy, substantially connected with real estate, ended with a colossal crash that marked the beginning of a long period of economic stagnation (the "lost decade," which turned into "lost decades") that upended not only economic but also political, cultural, social life--with just one of the consequences a trend of young people who, amid diminished prospects in an ever more materialistic culture with an ever less attainable bar for "success," withdrew from social life (most notoriously, the hikikomori), and a sharp decline of marriage and birth rates, feeding the country's culture war, and helping make old-fashioned concern with natality a hot topic in the process.
So has it gone elsewhere in the advanced world, and beyond, with the crash of 2007 and its aftermath in the "Great Recession" doing for it generally what the crash of 1990 did for Japan, with America no exception, the country since discovering its own "hikikomori", in which a reported decline of marriage, falling birth rates and natalism have become major issues, all of which has fed into its own culture wars. Still, there have been differences between the situation of one country and another, with an interesting case Japanese cultural critic Toru Honda, who quickly emerged as a figure of sufficient note to get interviewed for the Asahi Shimbun (Japan's equivalent of the New York Times, or at least what the Times used to be) in the wake of the (within certain circles) controversy over the popularity of the Densha Otoko franchise. His position was that capitalism had done to romance what it had done to everything else, in the process devaluing much of the population such that it had no hope of getting anything by involvement in what may be called the "dating" or "marriage" market (just as many are unemployable in the labor market, and not incidentally thereby rendered hopeless in the dating/marriage market too), and that it was an entirely valid response to reject it--and indeed, to accept as a substitute for an unattainable love with a "3-D" human being one's emotional relation to a "2-D" character.
Just as in Japan the U.S., amid a deterioration of the economic situation, has seen young people become more critical of society's expectations of them, not least in as they interact with gender roles. There has even been some talk of people frustrated with an unpleasant contemporary reality preferring a virtual one to "Real Life" (Edward Castronova and Jane McGonigal, indeed, warning of the possibility of an "exodus" here). However, so far as I know no analysis to compare with Honda's has got a remotely similar level of attention--for reasons that seem quite telling. Much as American commentators smarmily speak of how "liberal" American society is relative to "conservative" East Asian cultures like that of Japan, in America, one may not speak of the prevailing economic system except to glorify it and abase oneself before it. Meanwhile the gender politics prevailing in the American mainstream mean that the expression of male grievance (which is how Mr. Honda's view is taken, even if what he says about the alienations of "love capitalism" and the viability of "2-D love" would go for women as for men) enjoys about as much mainstream tolerance as criticism of capitalism.
The result is that one only sees any criticism of the expectations regarding relationships of this kind from the alt-right, which is of course where criticism of capitalism is least tolerated. Indeed, where one might look at Honda's theorizing and plausibly see some hint of later alt-right thinking, one ought never to forget that in contrast with Honda they criticize feminism, not capitalism (absolutely ignoring or attacking any suggestion that it may have something to do with the situation they find untoward), while the alt-right does not prioritize individual happiness the same way. Rather it sets traditionalism, and natalism, above personal happiness, and tells men to "get out there and talk to a girl" (and brooks no excuse for failure) rather than retreat into a world of "2-D love," so that one would expect them to be dismissive of Honda's ideas. Still, given that neither the country's economic troubles, nor its fraught gender politics, seem likely to change anytime soon, all as "artificial intelligence" may be making "2-D love" more alluring for some. (Indeed, returning to Japan it seems notable that the maker of what may be the country's most popular "dating app," citing disinterest in dating among the young, launched a "virtual girlfriend" app that it thinks will be more appealing to many.) Amid all that it seems plausible, even probable, that we will hear more from those who think along the lines that Honda did two decades ago--and on this side of the Pacific Rim as well.
The Sanctimonious Self-Importance of the Press
If still fairly young when he began and not in the business for very long Theodore Dreiser still got a deeper understanding of that business than almost anyone will admit to in our day. As he tells us near the end of his recounting of the experience, A Book About Myself, he tells us that even at that early point in his life in which he was trying to make it as a journalist in New York he "knew about the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed"--and at the same time their "still having the power, by weight of lies and pretense and make-believe, to stir . . . up" that common man "to his own detriment and destruction," a power that they used to the full. Indeed, he confesses to having been "frightened by this very power, which in subsequent years I have come to look upon as the most deadly and forceful of all in nature: the power to masquerade and betray."
It would seem that that "power to masquerade and betray" was in part founded on the press' "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me."
So does all this remain the case today--the news media retaining its powers, and using it in the same irresponsible, corrupt, vicious way, while displaying the same "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority," as we see whenever, in the wake of living down to the lowest expectations of them in the event of the most world-historic of crises, they pat themselves on the back for what a "good job" they did, and smugly brush off any criticism anyone would make of the "mainstream media," sure that the problem must lie with the critics and not such upstanding "adults in the room" as themselves in that self-satisfied centrist way displayed by rags like the New York Times in its degeneration.
One may wonder if these days more people are not sick of the subservience, the cowardice, the betrayal, of which Dresier wrote, and which his contemporaries were already analyzing in detail in ways that ring not just true but depressingly familiar today. After all, even the Establishment-coddling middle-of-the-roaders are looking like they have had enough of these days, to go by what Rebecca Solnit says.
Alas, in the face of the criticisms it seems that they have just gone on getting worse in every way rather than better as they go on congratulating themselves for what a good job they are still doing, and continue to insist that anyone who disagrees with their flattering self-assessment is stupid or deranged or otherwise less than a functional "adult."
It would seem that that "power to masquerade and betray" was in part founded on the press' "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me."
So does all this remain the case today--the news media retaining its powers, and using it in the same irresponsible, corrupt, vicious way, while displaying the same "air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority," as we see whenever, in the wake of living down to the lowest expectations of them in the event of the most world-historic of crises, they pat themselves on the back for what a "good job" they did, and smugly brush off any criticism anyone would make of the "mainstream media," sure that the problem must lie with the critics and not such upstanding "adults in the room" as themselves in that self-satisfied centrist way displayed by rags like the New York Times in its degeneration.
One may wonder if these days more people are not sick of the subservience, the cowardice, the betrayal, of which Dresier wrote, and which his contemporaries were already analyzing in detail in ways that ring not just true but depressingly familiar today. After all, even the Establishment-coddling middle-of-the-roaders are looking like they have had enough of these days, to go by what Rebecca Solnit says.
Alas, in the face of the criticisms it seems that they have just gone on getting worse in every way rather than better as they go on congratulating themselves for what a good job they are still doing, and continue to insist that anyone who disagrees with their flattering self-assessment is stupid or deranged or otherwise less than a functional "adult."
What the "News" Media Gave Us Then, What the News Media Give Us Now
Remarking his time working in Pittsburgh not long after the bloodbath that was the crushing of the Homestead steel strike (1892), where Big Business control of the newspapers seems to have been even more repressive than elsewhere, Theodore Dreiser considered the kind of "service . . . my employers craved," which was harder to discern than what they did not. The elephants in the room were numerous and colossal, and for obvious reason. ("We don't touch on labor conditions except through our labor man . . . and he knows what to say," while there was "nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense," the city editor explained, acknowledging that "[t]he big steel men here just about own the place, so we can't.") Gossip ("a wedding . . . in high society," "the visit of a celebrity"), and violence or tragedy of a purely personal-seeming, irrelevant-to-the-"big picture" nature ("[s]uicides, occasional drownings, a brawl in a saloon"), were "the pabulum on which the local readers were fed." If there was some acknowledgement of weightier matters it had to be consistent with the line of the masters ("labor or the unions" spoken of in terms of makers of "unholy anarchistic demands," for example). But above all they wanted "idle feature stuff which they could use in place of news and still interest their readers."
"Idle feature stuff in place of news."
Not news, but a substitute for news intended to be acceptable to the powerful.
"So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!" Dreiser quipped while describing the constraints under which he and his colleagues had to work.
So much for a free press in America, A.D. 2024, one may say today, as the mainstream of that media barrages us with what is less news than a substitute for news, even where it may seem most like it is presenting us with news--helped by the inability or unwillingness of so many of those who would regard themselves as intelligent and educated to tell the difference between the campaign horse-race crapola" the media love so much, and coverage of what really matters in public life, or recognize the muddling of the insight that the personal is political and vice-versa that enables the media to pass off the shabbiest of personal scandal as material worthy of dominating the headlines. Meanwhile the editorial line would not seem to have changed one iota, the news editors groveling before the robber barons of our times just as they did in Dreiser's day.
"Idle feature stuff in place of news."
Not news, but a substitute for news intended to be acceptable to the powerful.
"So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!" Dreiser quipped while describing the constraints under which he and his colleagues had to work.
So much for a free press in America, A.D. 2024, one may say today, as the mainstream of that media barrages us with what is less news than a substitute for news, even where it may seem most like it is presenting us with news--helped by the inability or unwillingness of so many of those who would regard themselves as intelligent and educated to tell the difference between the campaign horse-race crapola" the media love so much, and coverage of what really matters in public life, or recognize the muddling of the insight that the personal is political and vice-versa that enables the media to pass off the shabbiest of personal scandal as material worthy of dominating the headlines. Meanwhile the editorial line would not seem to have changed one iota, the news editors groveling before the robber barons of our times just as they did in Dreiser's day.
Theodore Dreiser and How People Really Feel About Work
In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser observes at one point that "after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease," and acknowledges that "[t]he one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work." It is a thing too rarely admitted--because since the beginning of civilization, even as those in power have been distinguished by their freedom from the obligation to work and indeed showing off that freedom, the obligation to toil has traditionally been recognized as something inimical to a dignified and full and truly human existence, and humans not born to that privilege that allows for such an existence have always clawed and struggled after the privilege of not working and looked upon those who did not succeed in that as unworthy (those lacking a "competence" literally "incompetent"), acknowledgment of the desire to not work as natural has been anathema to those in power given that their not working has required having the slaves work for them, the more willingly the better. Indeed, that desire of the individual for ease rather than toil is so contrary to how society has been organized for millennia, and especially to the prevailing "schema of values" in the modern, capitalist, world (which ceaselessly tells those who work most for least that a lifetime of alienated labor and little if anything else is what is right and good for them, and they are scum if they question anything at all about the arrangement), that Dreiser can quip that "[o]ne would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power" which "harried" the species "along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal."
The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.
Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.
The rare lack of hypocrisy about such things is one of the book's most attractive traits--and I think critical to his ability to produce a masterpiece like An American Tragedy.
Meanwhile the rarity of that lack of hypocrisy is why, almost a century on, that book remains not some musty classic of sole interest to those whose reading list is driven by what was historically important, but strikes many who pick it up now as all too relevant in a world that, contrary to what Dreiser hoped later in life, has changed very little since his day.
Theodore Dreiser on Natalism
In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser, reflecting upon his romantic outlook during the courtship of a woman who later became his wife, declares that the "world . . . has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma," not least "rules . . . all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of this planet." Is there no more to life than that? Dreiser asks. What about those of us who are simply not interested in participating in that project, especially on the monogamous terms that he criticizes as possibly repressive ("Is it everybody's business to get married?" he wonders), but perhaps on any terms at all, for ? "[c]annot the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves . . . more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more than five hundred million?"
Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.
In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.
Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.
In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.
The Non-Conformist in the Conformist Crowd: Some Thoughts on Theodore Dreiser's Youth
As Theodore Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself draws to its close Dreiser remarks "the professional optimists and yea-sayers, chorus-like in character" who were "constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the possibilities of success, progress, strength . . . for all, in America and elsewhere," all while "humbly and sycophantically genuflecting before the strong, the lucky, the prosperous," and how he felt himself constantly oppressed by a sense of being surrounded by apparent believers in that propaganda in which he could not bring himself to believe. Instead of throwing himself into the "fierce contest" of success-striving with the cheer and gusto society demanded of its young men he saw it as a hateful thing and regarded his participation as an unfortunate necessity for which he had no enthusiasm, and fewer hopes, never feeling very good about his chances. Considering the difference he speculated that "certain fortunate circumstances attending their youth and upbringing" made for optimism about the contest and their likely outcome in it--many of them having had more privileged backgrounds than he ("at least a dozen" of his peers at the newspaper where he was working "swaggering about in the best of clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or Princeton," which made it the easier for "their minds [to be] stuffed with all the noble maxims of the uplifters"). If with less evident confidence, he wondered, too, if part of the difference lay not in a lack in himself but in a lack in those others, particularly a lack of insight into realities of the world of which he already knew something.
It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.
For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.
It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.
For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.
Book Review: A Book About Myself, by Theodore Dreiser
Presented with a book by Theodore Dreiser titled A Book About Myself published in 1922 one may, especially given its running to over five hundred pages in hardback, expect to read of Dreiser's life up to that point. One may regard that book as thus failing to cover much of what many of those likely to be interested in Dreiser's life might want to read about--the publication of his most important novel, An American Tragedy, still three years away, all as such episodes as his trip to the Soviet Union, investigation of the events of the Harlan County war, and much, much else all came after this time. Still, one might expect the first half century of Dreiser's life (1871-1945) that saw him become established as an important literary figure long before 1922.
Instead the book actually deals with just a very few years of Dreiser's youth--those few years in the early 1890s during which he pursued a career as a journalist, and not incidentally ends at a point at which his literary efforts were still very nascent. I was initially disappointed to find this out, and wondered whether Dreiser could really have to say so very much about his relatively brief journalistic career as to justify the book's length. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dreiser did, that the book indeed had a great deal of interest as a "portrait of the artist as a young man" and of his times precisely because he was a junior reporter in the emergent urban, industrialized, America of the Gilded Age, all as the media world was well on its way to taking on something like the shape we know. The young Dreiser may not have broken or covered any stories of world-historical importance, but reading this book after The Brass Check I was fascinated by just how much his personal story bore out what Sinclair had to say about the newspaper business in that day--how people got into the business that seems astonishingly casual today in our era of pompously "professionalized" journalism, the cynical outlook reporters quickly acquired in part because of the ugliness of what they saw on a day to day basis and in part because of the contrast between what they saw and what got put into the paper, the pettiness of the rivalries between competing papers, the general texture of life inside such an operation. Reporters just plain made things up as a matter of course, and for the most trivial reasons, with the fact quite significant in the author's story when Dreiser, who had taken the job of drama critic at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, finding himself in an untenable position after the reviews of three plays he made up got published--after the performances were canceled, giving the game away! And what the reporters did not simply "make up" was often no better, Dreiser learning early on "the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed," as even the public spirited-seeming exposes of genuine corruption proved part of some sleazy agenda. (Thus did it go with Dreiser's experience on Chicago's Globe, owned by a politician and businessman whose business, significantly, was vice--who used a campaign by that paper against the fake "auction houses" in the city to settle a political score.)
Fascinating, too, was what Dreiser's book revealed about Dreiser's outlook on life in his youth, precisely because of how surprising much of it was at first glance--and then not so very surprising after all. The great naturalist who gave the world An American Tragedy was quite the romantic in his earlier days, looking at the scenes that were to inspire Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and in spite of the undeniable depravity and ugliness in them being taken with the color and vibrancy of the panorama of which they were part (writing of the squalor and luxury, misery and pleasure together as "a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies" that left him "like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.") Still, as he tells us, exposed to the poverty and social ills around him, even before becoming a newspaperman, "the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me." If "Darwin, Spencer, Wallace" were only "within the verge of [his] intuition" rather than his "exact knowledge," what little he knew of them may nonetheless have helped him to the view "that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control." Later Dreiser got to know the work of Spencer (among many, many others) rather more deeply, persuading him the more fully of that in ways that seem to have been increasingly critical to his thinking as time went on.
Striking, too, was how much of the stuff of his life seemed to anticipate the path his characters would walk. Here we have an image of a young man who had a stern, narrow, none too comfortable upbringing under a religious yet ineffectual father amid the luxuries and pleasures of a great modern metropolis, fascinated by and drawn to them and frustrated by his inability to do more than look upon them as others enjoyed them--all while learning how compromising of oneself just getting through the day can be. We see that young man, who had already seen a sister run off with a lover, find his family life increasingly burdensome and oppressive and leave it to pursue his own path as he is tormented by a great yet vague ambition for those things not given to him, and find himself all alone in a different city, and lonely. We see him dream of the company of desirable women, and fancy himself meeting "some gorgeous maiden, rich, beautiful, socially elect, who was to solve all his troubles for him," but also become infatuated with a girl of humbler background and rather conventional views who will not let him have her favors outside of marriage, and find himself losing interest in her but not altogether able to escape the entanglement. We even see him depart one of the great cities of Missouri where it seems to him he can no longer stay for a journey by stages north and east toward New York, where a relative has made good and may be able to help him.
Thus was it all to go with Clyde Griffiths in his most famous tale--though besides the details of his life something else seemed very important, namely how much he wrote of his youthful desires and hopes, his frustrations and even his envies-- with great frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy. ("Other men had money; they need not thus go jerking about the world seeking a career . . . fret about the making of a bare living," he writes at one point, and that "[t]he ugly favoritism of life which piles comforts in the laps of some while snatching the smallest crumb of satisfaction from the lips of others" left him "in a black despair.") Indeed, he admits that when he finally got round to reading Balzac for himself that he could identify with a Eugene de Rastignac, think how very like himself a Lucien de Rubempre.
Such frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy are even rarer now than then in a culture in which not only the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality are more legion and intolerant than ever, never failing to accuse the have-nots of every moral failing of which they can think when they express the most mild discontent with their lot in a highly unequal order, but those who pretend to be progressive snarl accusations of "entitlement" and "privilege" at every utterance of frustration (the more in as their thoughts, like Dreiser's, are not always chaste in the ways demanded by what that great admirer of Dreiser, David Walsh, has called the "New Puritanism" of our day).
It seems to me that it was all connected. Having early on had his mind broadened by his experiences and what he was able to gain from the intellectual currents of his time Dreiser had something more, much more, than the conventionalities of his upbringing and his culture by which to make sense of the world around him and his life in it--allowing him to be frank and sympathetic and lacking in hypocrisy as he looked at the less pleasant aspects of his world and his life in it. And that, in turn, was what enabled him to make of the stuff of the world around him and his life in it the masterpieces that, in spite of the sneers of orthodoxy-propounding critics, endure as important works a century later, all as those who responded to his truths with moralizing have been deservedly forgotten--as, one may imagine, their heirs too will be another century from now on.
Instead the book actually deals with just a very few years of Dreiser's youth--those few years in the early 1890s during which he pursued a career as a journalist, and not incidentally ends at a point at which his literary efforts were still very nascent. I was initially disappointed to find this out, and wondered whether Dreiser could really have to say so very much about his relatively brief journalistic career as to justify the book's length. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dreiser did, that the book indeed had a great deal of interest as a "portrait of the artist as a young man" and of his times precisely because he was a junior reporter in the emergent urban, industrialized, America of the Gilded Age, all as the media world was well on its way to taking on something like the shape we know. The young Dreiser may not have broken or covered any stories of world-historical importance, but reading this book after The Brass Check I was fascinated by just how much his personal story bore out what Sinclair had to say about the newspaper business in that day--how people got into the business that seems astonishingly casual today in our era of pompously "professionalized" journalism, the cynical outlook reporters quickly acquired in part because of the ugliness of what they saw on a day to day basis and in part because of the contrast between what they saw and what got put into the paper, the pettiness of the rivalries between competing papers, the general texture of life inside such an operation. Reporters just plain made things up as a matter of course, and for the most trivial reasons, with the fact quite significant in the author's story when Dreiser, who had taken the job of drama critic at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, finding himself in an untenable position after the reviews of three plays he made up got published--after the performances were canceled, giving the game away! And what the reporters did not simply "make up" was often no better, Dreiser learning early on "the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed," as even the public spirited-seeming exposes of genuine corruption proved part of some sleazy agenda. (Thus did it go with Dreiser's experience on Chicago's Globe, owned by a politician and businessman whose business, significantly, was vice--who used a campaign by that paper against the fake "auction houses" in the city to settle a political score.)
Fascinating, too, was what Dreiser's book revealed about Dreiser's outlook on life in his youth, precisely because of how surprising much of it was at first glance--and then not so very surprising after all. The great naturalist who gave the world An American Tragedy was quite the romantic in his earlier days, looking at the scenes that were to inspire Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and in spite of the undeniable depravity and ugliness in them being taken with the color and vibrancy of the panorama of which they were part (writing of the squalor and luxury, misery and pleasure together as "a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies" that left him "like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.") Still, as he tells us, exposed to the poverty and social ills around him, even before becoming a newspaperman, "the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me." If "Darwin, Spencer, Wallace" were only "within the verge of [his] intuition" rather than his "exact knowledge," what little he knew of them may nonetheless have helped him to the view "that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control." Later Dreiser got to know the work of Spencer (among many, many others) rather more deeply, persuading him the more fully of that in ways that seem to have been increasingly critical to his thinking as time went on.
Striking, too, was how much of the stuff of his life seemed to anticipate the path his characters would walk. Here we have an image of a young man who had a stern, narrow, none too comfortable upbringing under a religious yet ineffectual father amid the luxuries and pleasures of a great modern metropolis, fascinated by and drawn to them and frustrated by his inability to do more than look upon them as others enjoyed them--all while learning how compromising of oneself just getting through the day can be. We see that young man, who had already seen a sister run off with a lover, find his family life increasingly burdensome and oppressive and leave it to pursue his own path as he is tormented by a great yet vague ambition for those things not given to him, and find himself all alone in a different city, and lonely. We see him dream of the company of desirable women, and fancy himself meeting "some gorgeous maiden, rich, beautiful, socially elect, who was to solve all his troubles for him," but also become infatuated with a girl of humbler background and rather conventional views who will not let him have her favors outside of marriage, and find himself losing interest in her but not altogether able to escape the entanglement. We even see him depart one of the great cities of Missouri where it seems to him he can no longer stay for a journey by stages north and east toward New York, where a relative has made good and may be able to help him.
Thus was it all to go with Clyde Griffiths in his most famous tale--though besides the details of his life something else seemed very important, namely how much he wrote of his youthful desires and hopes, his frustrations and even his envies-- with great frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy. ("Other men had money; they need not thus go jerking about the world seeking a career . . . fret about the making of a bare living," he writes at one point, and that "[t]he ugly favoritism of life which piles comforts in the laps of some while snatching the smallest crumb of satisfaction from the lips of others" left him "in a black despair.") Indeed, he admits that when he finally got round to reading Balzac for himself that he could identify with a Eugene de Rastignac, think how very like himself a Lucien de Rubempre.
Such frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy are even rarer now than then in a culture in which not only the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality are more legion and intolerant than ever, never failing to accuse the have-nots of every moral failing of which they can think when they express the most mild discontent with their lot in a highly unequal order, but those who pretend to be progressive snarl accusations of "entitlement" and "privilege" at every utterance of frustration (the more in as their thoughts, like Dreiser's, are not always chaste in the ways demanded by what that great admirer of Dreiser, David Walsh, has called the "New Puritanism" of our day).
It seems to me that it was all connected. Having early on had his mind broadened by his experiences and what he was able to gain from the intellectual currents of his time Dreiser had something more, much more, than the conventionalities of his upbringing and his culture by which to make sense of the world around him and his life in it--allowing him to be frank and sympathetic and lacking in hypocrisy as he looked at the less pleasant aspects of his world and his life in it. And that, in turn, was what enabled him to make of the stuff of the world around him and his life in it the masterpieces that, in spite of the sneers of orthodoxy-propounding critics, endure as important works a century later, all as those who responded to his truths with moralizing have been deservedly forgotten--as, one may imagine, their heirs too will be another century from now on.
D.H. Lawrence's Willie Struthers on Aspirationalism
The Modernist D.H. Lawrence, like his colleagues T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was in politics a man of the far right, and indeed, in his propensity for irrationalism and anti-rationalism, hostility to democracy and freedom, worship of subordination and of "powerful" leaders, essentially a fasicst. Still, if he was against the left through and through there was one time when he had a character rather articulately, even memorably, express some of the ideas of the left--not as the right satirizes them, but as they actually are--in one of his less well-known novels, Kangaroo (1923). The occasion is socialist Willie Struthers' monologue in which he characterizes the working class in a capitalist society as having "been brought up in a kind of fetish worship" ordinarily associated with "tribes of savages," with the latterday equivalent of "witch-doctors" the Establishment's propagandists.
Said witch-doctors "thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and tak[ing] us in" with the message of aspirationalism, of individuals lifting themselves up their bootstraps into the ranks of their "betters," which alas "educated men . . . see through," but which "[t]he working man can't see through." As Struthers points out, the reality is that the working class can't all do it because the wealth and privilege of each individual who enjoys wealth and privilege derives them from the exploitation of many others; because, as Struthers puts it, "for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce" what he calls, very significantly, "the graft," because those who preach aspirationalism themselves know it, and use it to the System's ends. As Struthers explains, "[t]empt all men to get on, and it's like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you." Thus does the whole graft go on and on, with perhaps one out of hundreds, or more, "getting on" and becoming the kind of success story of which the "witch-doctors" love to fuss so much, cynically holding them up as an example to the rest--and ignoring all those who did not get to live out the story of "rags to riches," who began in rags and after much struggle and striving remained in rags, those other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine donkeys who did not get the carrot, who strained with all their might and as well as any other donnkey and in the process greatly profited their "betters" without receiving the reward, and left leading lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation by the fact.
One may quibble over some of the details, or at least their reelvance to our time. Struthers has college professors in mind when he speaks of the "witch-doctors." Today, if it seems undeniable that many a professor does just this, along with the quasi-professors of the think tanks and "educational foundations" and the rest, I think we might think of a great number of occupational categories before that--like the "self-help gurus" who befoul the bestseller lists with their drivel, or the pseudo-religious hucksters plying the same trade as they promise the success-chasing that, as Elmer Gantry put it, "God'll help you make good!"--and of course politicians who are not all of the tidily labeled right (and not just in America, with a Tony Blair or Keir Starmer of Britain's "New Labour" very much of this type). Still, Struthers' monologue seems to me to otherwise hold up very well as a succinct expression of the critical view of aspirational propaganda that a left-leaning person who actually thinks about the matter much for long can hardly avoid taking.
Said witch-doctors "thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and tak[ing] us in" with the message of aspirationalism, of individuals lifting themselves up their bootstraps into the ranks of their "betters," which alas "educated men . . . see through," but which "[t]he working man can't see through." As Struthers points out, the reality is that the working class can't all do it because the wealth and privilege of each individual who enjoys wealth and privilege derives them from the exploitation of many others; because, as Struthers puts it, "for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce" what he calls, very significantly, "the graft," because those who preach aspirationalism themselves know it, and use it to the System's ends. As Struthers explains, "[t]empt all men to get on, and it's like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you." Thus does the whole graft go on and on, with perhaps one out of hundreds, or more, "getting on" and becoming the kind of success story of which the "witch-doctors" love to fuss so much, cynically holding them up as an example to the rest--and ignoring all those who did not get to live out the story of "rags to riches," who began in rags and after much struggle and striving remained in rags, those other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine donkeys who did not get the carrot, who strained with all their might and as well as any other donnkey and in the process greatly profited their "betters" without receiving the reward, and left leading lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation by the fact.
One may quibble over some of the details, or at least their reelvance to our time. Struthers has college professors in mind when he speaks of the "witch-doctors." Today, if it seems undeniable that many a professor does just this, along with the quasi-professors of the think tanks and "educational foundations" and the rest, I think we might think of a great number of occupational categories before that--like the "self-help gurus" who befoul the bestseller lists with their drivel, or the pseudo-religious hucksters plying the same trade as they promise the success-chasing that, as Elmer Gantry put it, "God'll help you make good!"--and of course politicians who are not all of the tidily labeled right (and not just in America, with a Tony Blair or Keir Starmer of Britain's "New Labour" very much of this type). Still, Struthers' monologue seems to me to otherwise hold up very well as a succinct expression of the critical view of aspirational propaganda that a left-leaning person who actually thinks about the matter much for long can hardly avoid taking.
The Decline of the Midwest, Again
Some years ago I wrote here about how prominent the Midwest was in American culture in the early twentieth century--as a subject of literature, for example--and how it has been less conspicuous that way since.
Certainly there has been a correlation between the Midwest's representation, and real, material changes. Recently checking the numbers I found that circa 1900 35 percent of the "resident population" of the continental U.S. (the "Lower Forty-Eight") lived in the twelve states the U.S. Census Bureau designates as making up the Midwest. The figure has trended downward since, such that if it was still 30 percent in the 1940s, after 2018 it slipped below the 21 percent mark.
It is a big drop, and one might add, has testified to economic decline. The time series' on Gross Domestic Product by state, alas, do not go back very far, but we do have figures for personal income going back to 1929. From 1929 to 1979 per capita income in the Midwest averaged 101 percent of the U.S. total, with the figure especially high in the 1940s and early 1950s--105 percent in 1947-1953, and still 101 percent in 1977-1979. However, the trend since then has been steadily downward as well, with per capita personal income in the Midwest 94 percent of the U.S. figure in 2016-2023.
In short, the Midwest as a whole went from being relatively rich to being relatively poor, with the shift arguably the greater because it was relatively rich in a time when the country was booming, and relatively poor when the country was stagnating or even declining. One should also note that the average conceals important disparities. The more agricultural states--a Kansas, for example--were historically poorer, and if still poorer than average by this metric, may be said to be less so. However, those states most associated with manufacturing may be said to have suffered especially severe changes of fortune. In 1929-1979 Michigan's per capita personal income was 107 percent that of the national figure, and in 1941-1955 actually 111 percent in 1977-1979 its per capita personal income was still a relatively high 104 percent. However, the state has suffered a long decline since, its figure 88 percent in 2006-2023, and 87 percent in 2021-2023, the state gone from being relatively rich to relatively poor by regional as well as national standards. The situation is comparable in Ohio, which was richer than average until the mid-1960s, with a per capita personal income 106 percent the national figure in 1929-1979, and 107 percent the national figure in 1941-1955, but slipped below the 94 percent mark about the turn of the century, so as to average 90 percent of the national figure in 2006-2023, and 89 percent in 2018-2023.
Indeed, checking the numbers only confirms what many have observed but which many also prefer to deny, namely that the decline of the country's manufacturing base has hit this region, and particularly its more industrialized states, in ways from which they have not recovered, and indeed, which may be getting worse in spite of the "post-industrial" and "New Economy" drivel so beloved of the neoliberal crowd that, in spite of the hopes of some of their critics, still remains in command of the political platforms and still establishes the "conventional wisdom" about economic matters.
Certainly there has been a correlation between the Midwest's representation, and real, material changes. Recently checking the numbers I found that circa 1900 35 percent of the "resident population" of the continental U.S. (the "Lower Forty-Eight") lived in the twelve states the U.S. Census Bureau designates as making up the Midwest. The figure has trended downward since, such that if it was still 30 percent in the 1940s, after 2018 it slipped below the 21 percent mark.
It is a big drop, and one might add, has testified to economic decline. The time series' on Gross Domestic Product by state, alas, do not go back very far, but we do have figures for personal income going back to 1929. From 1929 to 1979 per capita income in the Midwest averaged 101 percent of the U.S. total, with the figure especially high in the 1940s and early 1950s--105 percent in 1947-1953, and still 101 percent in 1977-1979. However, the trend since then has been steadily downward as well, with per capita personal income in the Midwest 94 percent of the U.S. figure in 2016-2023.
In short, the Midwest as a whole went from being relatively rich to being relatively poor, with the shift arguably the greater because it was relatively rich in a time when the country was booming, and relatively poor when the country was stagnating or even declining. One should also note that the average conceals important disparities. The more agricultural states--a Kansas, for example--were historically poorer, and if still poorer than average by this metric, may be said to be less so. However, those states most associated with manufacturing may be said to have suffered especially severe changes of fortune. In 1929-1979 Michigan's per capita personal income was 107 percent that of the national figure, and in 1941-1955 actually 111 percent in 1977-1979 its per capita personal income was still a relatively high 104 percent. However, the state has suffered a long decline since, its figure 88 percent in 2006-2023, and 87 percent in 2021-2023, the state gone from being relatively rich to relatively poor by regional as well as national standards. The situation is comparable in Ohio, which was richer than average until the mid-1960s, with a per capita personal income 106 percent the national figure in 1929-1979, and 107 percent the national figure in 1941-1955, but slipped below the 94 percent mark about the turn of the century, so as to average 90 percent of the national figure in 2006-2023, and 89 percent in 2018-2023.
Indeed, checking the numbers only confirms what many have observed but which many also prefer to deny, namely that the decline of the country's manufacturing base has hit this region, and particularly its more industrialized states, in ways from which they have not recovered, and indeed, which may be getting worse in spite of the "post-industrial" and "New Economy" drivel so beloved of the neoliberal crowd that, in spite of the hopes of some of their critics, still remains in command of the political platforms and still establishes the "conventional wisdom" about economic matters.
What the Propaganda for Silicon Valley is Really All About
Today one would have to be very old to remember a time when Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry for which the term "Silicon Valley" is often used as a shorthand did not receive a share of the attention of the news media and popular culture far out of proportion to its actual share in economic life, as measured by the capitalization and revenues and profits of its major firms, the number of people who work in it, the place of its products in daily life, or anything else.
Those who attend to the image may also note that depiction of Silicon Valley presents it as an entrepreneur-driven scene where the gale of creative destruction is always blowing, laying low the big and clearing the way for the small to emerge and grow (as against a scene in which the visible hand of oligopolistic corporate technostructures have largely sheltered themselves from market forces, leaving small business, consumers, workers, to twist in the wind as they reap the benefits of a privileged position). Where "disruptive" innovation is always "bringing good things to life" (as against it being a scene of minor, trivial, "sustaining" or even nonexistent technological change depending on the case, or worse, the "enshittification" of yesteryear's technological achievements). Where the big fortunes are generally New, and Self-Made, and the product of individual technological genius of world-historical caliber befitting a Great Man theory of economy history (as against Old Money, inherited privilege and billions made from rent-seeking and speculation rather than "real" productive activities, as against individuals reaping the personal benefits of public research and an innovative machine irreducible to single institutions, never mind individuals). And which because of all of the foregoing is, within its line, a center of excellence unparalleled anywhere else in a world which can only envy it (as against an increasingly hollow economy in relative and perhaps absolute decline).
In short, the image of Silicon Valley reflects and reinforces the image of capitalism and especially of the U.S. economy that the orthodox and especially the neoliberal ardently promotes--and the opposite of what those of other economics views, from the conservative economic nationalist to the thoroughgoing leftist, have long analyzed it as being. At best Silicon Valley has resembled their ideal a bit more than the rest of the economy--such that presenting it this way has always entailed a good deal of violence to the facts--and as time has gone on (as the upstart startups turned into Big Tech, for example) it has resembled that ideal less and less. Still, even as the law may be beginning to catch up to what everyone has known for decades (like the fact that Facebook does not sit well with the principles of "antitrust"), the propaganda goes on as movies and TV continue to shower us with flattering images of tech billionaires that remind me of what Upton Sinclair wrote a century ago in Mammonart: that the artist "feels a real awe for authority," "thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body" believes themselves "acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth," with the irony that "the smaller . . . in reality" the sovereign is "the more rigid the art convention that he is big."
As it goes with the lords of old, so it goes with those latterday lords of capital, all part of the "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition . . . bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms" that makes pop culture the idiocy that it is--and the slaves of conventional wisdom snarl at anyone who points to any of the facts calling into question the truthiness of the Establishment-sanctioned view.
Those who attend to the image may also note that depiction of Silicon Valley presents it as an entrepreneur-driven scene where the gale of creative destruction is always blowing, laying low the big and clearing the way for the small to emerge and grow (as against a scene in which the visible hand of oligopolistic corporate technostructures have largely sheltered themselves from market forces, leaving small business, consumers, workers, to twist in the wind as they reap the benefits of a privileged position). Where "disruptive" innovation is always "bringing good things to life" (as against it being a scene of minor, trivial, "sustaining" or even nonexistent technological change depending on the case, or worse, the "enshittification" of yesteryear's technological achievements). Where the big fortunes are generally New, and Self-Made, and the product of individual technological genius of world-historical caliber befitting a Great Man theory of economy history (as against Old Money, inherited privilege and billions made from rent-seeking and speculation rather than "real" productive activities, as against individuals reaping the personal benefits of public research and an innovative machine irreducible to single institutions, never mind individuals). And which because of all of the foregoing is, within its line, a center of excellence unparalleled anywhere else in a world which can only envy it (as against an increasingly hollow economy in relative and perhaps absolute decline).
In short, the image of Silicon Valley reflects and reinforces the image of capitalism and especially of the U.S. economy that the orthodox and especially the neoliberal ardently promotes--and the opposite of what those of other economics views, from the conservative economic nationalist to the thoroughgoing leftist, have long analyzed it as being. At best Silicon Valley has resembled their ideal a bit more than the rest of the economy--such that presenting it this way has always entailed a good deal of violence to the facts--and as time has gone on (as the upstart startups turned into Big Tech, for example) it has resembled that ideal less and less. Still, even as the law may be beginning to catch up to what everyone has known for decades (like the fact that Facebook does not sit well with the principles of "antitrust"), the propaganda goes on as movies and TV continue to shower us with flattering images of tech billionaires that remind me of what Upton Sinclair wrote a century ago in Mammonart: that the artist "feels a real awe for authority," "thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body" believes themselves "acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth," with the irony that "the smaller . . . in reality" the sovereign is "the more rigid the art convention that he is big."
As it goes with the lords of old, so it goes with those latterday lords of capital, all part of the "snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition . . . bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms" that makes pop culture the idiocy that it is--and the slaves of conventional wisdom snarl at anyone who points to any of the facts calling into question the truthiness of the Establishment-sanctioned view.
What Do We Mean by "Nihilism?"
When reading Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons I was struck by the discussion of Eugene Barazov's "nihilism" by himself and his friend Arkady Kirsanov with Kirsanov's father Nikolai and uncle Pavel. Nikolai, never having heard the term before but having enough Classical education to recognize the Latin root "nihil," "presume[s]" that it means "a man who declines to accept anything."* Arkady, however, corrects him by saying that he "treats things . . . from the critical point of view"; that a nihilist "declines to bow to authority, or to accept any principle on trust."
There is a world of difference between the two concepts--the "acceptance" of or believing in nothing, and the refusal to accept simply on the basis of authority rather than form one's own judgments, a position that has been a foundation for a socially critical perspective, which is, after all, what Barazov espouses. (As Barazov himself says, the nihilists condemn the corruption, oppression and superstition they saw as both unjust and holding back societal progress--a socially critical, materialist, position, but not nihilistic in the sense of "believing in nothing.")
Still, few understand the distinction, and of those who do understand it those who set great store by authority while taking a dim view of individual reason and judgment it is common to see the second tendency leading to the first, the rejection of authority in favor of individual discernment ultimately leading to a belief in nothing (whether rightly or wrongly). And unsurprisingly given the predominance of that conservative viewpoint it is that view of nihilism as a denial of all values that has prevailed.
Still, how often does one encounter people who really "believe in nothing," when push comes to shove? It seems to me that those who talk as if they do so are generally doing one of two things, or both of them:
1. Engaging in pseudo-macho, "Look what a tough guy I am!" posturing, like we get from the characters in Shintaro Ishihara's scribblings.
2. Showing themselves to be selfish to the point of idiotic, clueless, unhingedness. They treat everyone and everything as of no meaning--except themselves. When it comes to their personal interests, well-being, standing, comfort, they are never nihilists, instead believing in that totally and deeply.
Both the posturing and the selfishness deserve only contempt.
* I quote the Hogarth translation of the classic.
There is a world of difference between the two concepts--the "acceptance" of or believing in nothing, and the refusal to accept simply on the basis of authority rather than form one's own judgments, a position that has been a foundation for a socially critical perspective, which is, after all, what Barazov espouses. (As Barazov himself says, the nihilists condemn the corruption, oppression and superstition they saw as both unjust and holding back societal progress--a socially critical, materialist, position, but not nihilistic in the sense of "believing in nothing.")
Still, few understand the distinction, and of those who do understand it those who set great store by authority while taking a dim view of individual reason and judgment it is common to see the second tendency leading to the first, the rejection of authority in favor of individual discernment ultimately leading to a belief in nothing (whether rightly or wrongly). And unsurprisingly given the predominance of that conservative viewpoint it is that view of nihilism as a denial of all values that has prevailed.
Still, how often does one encounter people who really "believe in nothing," when push comes to shove? It seems to me that those who talk as if they do so are generally doing one of two things, or both of them:
1. Engaging in pseudo-macho, "Look what a tough guy I am!" posturing, like we get from the characters in Shintaro Ishihara's scribblings.
2. Showing themselves to be selfish to the point of idiotic, clueless, unhingedness. They treat everyone and everything as of no meaning--except themselves. When it comes to their personal interests, well-being, standing, comfort, they are never nihilists, instead believing in that totally and deeply.
Both the posturing and the selfishness deserve only contempt.
* I quote the Hogarth translation of the classic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
