The News: Working on Our Ism

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Not for the first time, I have been thinking about the problem of defining via negation. In my own field, that’s the problem with a term like “non-Western”, or saying that premodern African polities weren’t states in the Western sense. The idea behind the gesture is sound, but it just reinforces the referent you’re trying to get away from. To describe a political form as not-quite-a-state forces you to reprise what a state is in the act of definition. It installs the state in Western history as the universal benchmark and makes everything else a deviation from it.

Often, it seems to me it’s either best to take the referent, something like state or nation or ethnicity, and either make it more capacious and thus closer to a universal or to work really hard to create a category that is defined from the ground up, from the particulars, until it can stand alongside a concept derived from European history. Both moves are harder than they sound. At some point, you get paralyzed on the threshold of a knowledge that is so compositionally and epistemologically different from what we are working with now that it starts to seem both impossible and irrelevant to produce anything that can circulate or disseminate within the world as it stands.

In a less rarified sense, I think this has been the problem of the global left for a fairly long time. It is defined by negation of the status quo of 21st Century modernity and it tethers itself to a referent—”socialism”—that has emotional resonance but can’t mean the same thing it meant in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Many of us know what we’re against, but not what we’re for.

You can see that more acutely in terms of the electoral politics of the last 15 years in nation-states that still have some kind of liberal democratic concept embedded in their political systems and ideals. Centrist-left parties and alliances can win elections by being the only vehicle for being against rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism. Trump alone has managed to fuel several surges for the Democratic Party in the United States since 2016 despite the party’s relative unpopularity while also providing a boost to parties in Canada and Australia that were likely headed for electoral losses otherwise.

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism ?

I don’t have quick and ready answer to that challenge. A few thoughts, however.

1. It’s no good approaching this challenge as a list of specific issue-level commitments that liberal-progressive majorities support or want. That’s not an ism, it’s not a movement or a worldview, it’s not a vision grounded in the ontology of our everyday lives. Most of the issues that we are polled on are end-state products of a century or more of top-level political compromises refracted through increasingly conflicted and dysfunctional administrative infrastructures. The reason that center-left coalitions don’t make much progress towards enacting some of those issue-level commitments when they happen to have electoral majorities is that the issues don’t rest on a coherent or persistent ethical and emotional foundation. They’re just glue holding together a purely situational coalition whose social vectors are usually pulling in diverging directions.

2. It’s also no good just rolling up sleeves and thinking about policies in a technocratic, expert-driven way, because this approach presumes an answer to the deeper questions that its advocates will never fully lay out. The last time American intellectuals generally took the relationship between expertise and democracy seriously enough to talk it through as a fully contingent and undecided problem was before World War II. This is why Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance and its many spiritual predecessors in the American public sphere have been such non-starters as a basis for defining what a possible majority actually wants. They always sidle past really foundational questions as if they have answers that are so obvious and settled that they don’t even need mentioning.

3. What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.

What would my quick list look like?

• People want to matter. They don’t want to be lost in a crowd, be addressed only as data. They don’t want to be managed, nudged, incentivized, or consulted. Every person wants to feel as if their existence counts for something, that their agency is consequential, that the world is responsive to what they do.

• People want the game of life to be played by the same rules for everybody. They want cheaters stopped and punished. Before equity of outcomes, people want equity in processes and procedures. One line that everybody has to wait in, the same consideration given to everybody when there is scarcity that has to be arbitrated. I don’t think this means people want harsh or punitive systems. They don’t want everybody to go to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. But they do want mercy to be offered where it is needed, where it is justly granted, not where it has been paid for. Perhaps justice is one of those things that we define in negative terms, as a response to its absence or violation, but once we see what was unfair or unjust, I think most people want that injustice to never happen again. Once is an accident, twice is carelessness, three times is corruption and injustice.

• People want a floor and a ceiling. They want everyone to have enough to eat, a safe place to sleep and spend the day, ready access to medical services, and to have all the basic comforts of life in this world. They want people who either get lucky, have special talents, or great focus and will to get some rewards accordingly but not so much so that they deprive others. They don’t want the ceiling to be so high that most of us on the floor can’t even see it, and they don’t want the floor to subject to sudden collapse. A lot of people want to be the person who gets rewards for our difference from others, but not many people really want those rewards to be taken from everyone else or to deform our shared lives.

• Many of us want something to interrupt accumulation from the outcomes of a single generation’s lives. Not in the strictly Marxist sense. People want a cyclical dimension to shared human life, that each generation gets its fair chance to do things its own way, to not live in the lengthening shadows of everything that has come before. Preservation of value, progress from achievement, are important, but most of us recognize that a world where everything old is preserved is a world where new people are forced to live in a museum built by the long dead, where all the resources have already been distributed and the outcomes preordained. There’s obviously the negative version that is equally disliked: most of us hate the idea of inheriting the debts and guilt of previous generations, of being sentenced before we are born. (The Christian doctrine of original sin notwithstanding.)

• People want some form of predictability and stability going forward. They want a sense that change can’t be done to them without their involvement and agreement. That if rewards come to those who take risks, the risks should be theirs alone, that one individual shouldn’t be able to push the lives and welfare of thousands into the board like chips for a big bet. People don’t mind novelty, they don’t mind technologies and reforms that make life better for most people, but they do mind being compelled to live a new life that they didn’t choose or have any say in, and they really mind having their existing lives destroyed or diminished without any compensating replacement.

• People don’t want to be told what to do by people who have no standing in their world. Many people will accept a socially known and knowable person giving them advice, maybe even giving them orders, but they balk at rules, demands, and commands that come from nowhere and no one, that cite evidence and logics that have to be effectively taken as commandments from on high, as articles of faith. People will allow human love and concern to intervene in their own choices, but it rankles when that comes from unknown and unaccountable systems.

• People want something to be done about individuals who are problems for everybody else. (These ideas aren’t consistent with each other: that’s part of the challenge.) They’re open to the means by which that something will be done, they’re sensitive to concerns about proportionality and fairness. I think most people are also quite aware of the danger that making this too easy might end up with people who aren’t a problem being defined as such. But they don’t want ideas about individual freedom to be pursued with such rigor that some individuals have a free hand to create misery and fear for everyone around them.

• People want work that is too big for individuals to undertake to be done efficiently, competently and consistently. E.g., they want public infrastructures maintained without friction, they want obvious problems to be recognized and resolved without undue cost or complication, they want new projects that would benefit the vast majority of people to be continuously envisioned and implemented. They want common sense in the administrative systems that maintain our shared lives, whether in our governments or in our workplaces.

• People prize a set of interpersonal attributes that aren’t always easy to reconcile or combine: honesty, expressive clarity, generosity of spirit, kindness, respect for difference, empathy, decisiveness, righteousness. For a lot of people, a character like Michael Robinavitch on The Pitt is close to an ideal—by turns aggressive, passionate, forthright, introspective, tormented by responsibility, sensitive, and able to acknowledge and correct mistakes. The character is also a millimeter away from being what many of us despise when it curdles even slightly or when we are on the receiving end: condescending, patriarchial, judgmental, histrionic, hierarchical, playing favorites, arbitrary. But we build towards what we want our shared worlds from a Frankstein-like assemblage of emotional and ethical spare parts, the things we’ve witnessed in other individuals, both real and fictional. More than anything else, we apply those assemblies to how we experience and witness power: if someone has power, we want them to use it properly. People believe in something like the no-asshole rule, but their view of what constitutes assholery is situational and mutable. (Especially in regards to themselves.)

• I think most people believe in the Golden Rule in two different senses: as a guide to behavior (“do unto others”) and as a promise of karmic payback (that it will be done to you as you have done)—and at least sometimes, they think it’s the job of society to make sure that the karmic payback part happens.

• People don’t want to deal with other people’s bullshit, but they want their own bullshit to be allowed and respected. I think that’s what “free speech” amounts to for many people—not an abstract commitment offered in advance to all speech acts or representation, but a moveable permissiveness that can be revoked as a matter of tolerance or acceptance, if not as a legal constraint imposed by a government.

• People want some kind of efficiency function in life, e.g., for there to be some rough match between necessity and expenditure, between purpose and effort. But this is a porous preference: extravagance is forgiven as ritual, spectacle and catharsis.

I could keep going, but these are the things I most immediately see. Every one of these preferences or feelings has its variations and opponents, of course, and as I’ve said, applying any of these principles to concrete life immediately reveals how hard they can be to reconcile, even at the simplest and most local scales of everyday life.

But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

I think one historical point of hopeful comparison to ponder might be what happened through the sudden efflorescence of print culture in the 18th Century. We focus too much on a handful of exalted political and social thinkers talking to one another through writing and not on the real “republic of letters”, not on the readerships for new modes of fiction, for fables, for magics and philosophies, for almanacs and cookbooks, for pornography and doggerel, for scriptures and antiquities. That’s a thought that might make us look again at social media: not at an objection of condemnation for its unquestionably negative character on one level, but on its soft underbelly that is less seen or described: the way that threaded conversations are used to set and contest manners and morals, the complicated emotional synchronizations that happen through email and text messages, the stories and memes that strike a chord with us (or fail to do so). Maybe we’ve already been brewing up an ism. Maybe more of the work is underway than we credit.