The News: Ashes, Ashes

How Not To Fall Down

It’s ok to be proudly righteous all by yourself or in the company of a few people who share your views.

That’s a fine thing to be as an intellectual, an artist, a hermit. A harsh prophetic voice speaking an uncomfortable truth to anyone who finds their way to your perch atop a forlorn mountainside.

Though it’s unseemly to speak your truths too insistently at people who haven’t asked for your wisdom. Do not go down from the mountaintop and start yelling from street corners. At least scourge yourself if you are going to. It’s one thing to hold yourself accountable, to be reflective, and another thing to believe that you yourself are the standard to which other people must rise. The line between being a critic and being a scold is easily breached.

If that’s your bag, stay lonely, remain alone. If you’re insisting on the one true purity, don’t delude yourself into thinking you are calling people to struggle, that you are leading, that you hold the key and all must follow meekly behind you as you lead. You aren’t doing any of that, and in trying to do it, your righteousness is burned up in your dedication to ineffectiveness.

If you think terrible things have to happen so that some baby utopia can come crawling out of the womb of catastrophe, have the decency to say that as a pained and helpless observer rather than a monster who wants to accelerate the disaster. Just doomscroll in your hermit’s cave and enjoy the teleological ride to whatever future you have deemed inevitable.

If you want to do something about it, whatever that it might be, you have a bigger and harder job than just being right. You have to be part of a we. Being part of a we is not just organizing, it is allowing yourself to be organized by others. It means giving up some of your own vanities, you own insistences, your own certainties and urgencies.

Don’t start from the biggest “we” imaginable, and we don’t start with the “we” that is required to win out in a struggle, as if fighting for a better world is a Request For Proposal with an attached list of minimum specs. We start from where we are as individuals, with the people who are most likely to know us. But that is precisely where the lonely purist fails hardest when they mistake their vain righteousness for a truth everyone has to be bullied and cajoled into accepting. If you can’t convince the people most proximate to you, most likely to listen to you, about what you want to make a shared cause or common concern, then that’s what you have to leave behind. If you can’t leave it behind, then embrace being alone, accept that what matters to you is being right as opposed to being effective. Choose the perfect and scorn the merely good.

I have no problem with someone choosing to be right in that way. I do have a problem when they insist that it is my problem that I am not like them, when they show no curiosity about who I am or what I value, when they demand loyalty and obedience as their due. When they never, ever come towards a “we” that involves a compromise of the “me”.

I have that problem not because of the issue at stake in our divergence. I might also give up my own stubbornly held views on a specific issue if I thought that would make the resulting we more instrumentally effective in achieving some aim that I can at least accept if not instantly embrace.

I have that problem because the better world worth organizing for has to be one that most of us can live in as free and valued equals. If the building of the better world starts with a declaration between people who are so very close to one another in most ways that everyone else has to bend the knee to a small elect’s specific purified yardstick of righteous thought and tactical necessity, then I already know that the better world is not being organized in that particular assembly, because that’s not how the better world is going to work or be if we ever managed to make it happen. I already know that imperious demand is going to kill the resilience of whatever working group is being imagined.

Righteous solitude always has its satisfactions—and the rest of the world sometimes learns a lot from the person who stands alone and apart. I’ll always honor the person wise enough to know that’s where they have to be at any given moment. I hope I am wise enough to know that for myself when that is so. It may even be, in this perilous American moment, a safer place to be than trying to organize towards some larger ‘we’ and shedding whatever ideas don’t work as that larger whole congeals.

All I ask is that people stop trying to split the difference with a bullying insistence that everyone has to line up in every precise way behind them or be viewed as enemies. That we stop demanding harshly from what is closest to us because we lack the imagination to fight terrors that are far away and alien. God knows we have enough enemies at the moment: why make more? We rise together if we rise at all. We are each other’s salvation. We bless one another as we find our shared humanity, witnessed in all our resplendent disorder. That blessing has to also be a shedding off. Love each of us as we are, but if each of us wants to join hands against the darkness, we have to leave some of what we bring behind.

Image credit: Camille Corot, “The Woods of the Hermit”, 1858. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/387977