“I was woken up by my parents on the morning in March when the Russian Revolution occurred, rather early. And we went onto a balcony. And from that balcony I saw movements in the streets below. I saw troops gradually advancing towards ragged groups of human beings. And then what’s called fraternization was going on. And there were banners which said; ‘Land Of Liberty’, ‘Down with the Tsar’ ‘Down With War’, ‘All power to the Duma’, The only people who remained loyal to the Tsar were the police and they tended to snipe at the crowds and the troops too from the rooftops. And I saw a man in the middle of a kind of lynching bee. Very, very white. He was one of these people apparently caught in some rooftop. And he was being dragged off to a not very nice fate. And this was so awful that it made a permanent impression on me. And I’ve never recovered from it quite and its given me a personal distaste for violence which nothing will overcome.” Isaiah Berlin
“It is a sociological truth about our societies that they cannot any longer agree on matters of fact. It’s not something we can ever aspire to. We’ve lost that. It is never going to come back. We need to understand that we live in that environment and that we are never going to fix it. What we should do is make that environment less toxic and do our best at realistically making the situation better rather than pretending that our descent into “alternate fact” world can be fixed. There is a risk that in aspiring to fix that we pretend we live in a world in which we don’t”. Vlad Vexler
“All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.” Samuel Beckett
I don’t take Beckett literally of course, though in his case he was something of a Dante scholar, but see the person of Dante as a metaphor for any cultural creation of we humans that might demand our reflection. (Though you could do far worse, and not much better than Dante). Putting creators of rather lower cultural status in place of Dante might not be some people’s recommendation but my understanding of human creation is perhaps more general and capacious than is typical.
This podcast is essentially a response to a situation, not only personal but also external.
For the purposes of this particular post I am less interested in the situation than in returning to the theme that inaugurated our podcast when, in the first episode, After All One Must Begin (itself a quote from Hegel) I opened with one of Isaiah Berlin’s last statements on what pluralism meant to him, not an insignificant voice when we consider that he was one of the few individuals who developed and “invented” the concept in the 20th century.
Pluralism is the foundation of our podcast and in more than one way. I hold to the proposition that life consists of a differentiation of spheres.
We happen to be in a moment in which not only is there a presumption of no differentiation but one or two of those spheres is thought to be dominant or more important than practically anything else or the spheres are not recognized as being distinct collapsed into a single sphere. (One of the reasons why I always thought the internet - at least in the centrally unified and singular form it was created - was a great mistake: it effectively obliterated the boundaries around spheres, something that I suspect is an eternal frustration for parents of children). These of course are effects of a monistic temperament - as far as I have been able to to tell the dominant one in most eras Ever since the emergence of modern and contemporary democracies we have been actually living pluralistic lives in reality however. In the words of political philosopher John Rawls, pluralism is a fact in something like a descriptive sense:
“A modern democratic society is characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophic, and moral doctrines but by a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. No one of these doctrines is affirmed by citizens generally. Nor should one expect that in the foreseeable future one of them or some other reasonable doctrine will ever be affirmed by all, or nearly all, citizens”.
Now I am a pluralist but a certain kind of pluralist: in a common phrase, I am a pluralist “all the way down”; that is, my pluralism has as one of its consequences a refusal to support having or enforcing one, singular order for how we all are supposed to live in society.
I am aware of course that many of us desperately crave such an order, whether by public or private means and if necessary by some kind of force. For most of human history we were living in profoundly non-democratic societies (I include pre-state and hunter-gatherer societies in this by the way - I would say that they were at one and the same time relatively egalitarian while also uniform, conformist and other attributes of a mixed nature). At times these many non-democratic societies went further and became anti-democratic, usually in response to aspirational challenges from newer democratic societies or in open aggression against democratic societies. One of the things this means is that we have not been doing democracy on any kind of large scale for very long. It is only that we aren’t good at it and that part of us doesn’t really want it, but that we have not yet had enough time to be fully proficient at it.
In much of human history people’s plural temperaments and dispositions could not be fully lived out; they had to mostly stay on the inside.
Now in the 2020s more of us are able to make our pluralism real: this in turn enables us to come face to face with all sorts of differences in human possibility - differences to which we would never have been exposed in prior epochs or eras. It is most unlikely that this project of ours was ever going to be easy and not only for reasons of our society’s essential newness. My pluralism does not only mean that I take such differences as facts of life; it also means that such differences must inevitably be expressed in all of our arts, both popular and unpopular. Indeed it means that we need many kinds of art because the comprehensiveness will be more or better representative of who we are “on the ground”.
I have mentioned before that, owing to some bizarre gaps in my popular cultural literacy that I am currently “studying” the 80s and 90s. If I commenced our podcast with one of the most radical and uncompromising artists, guest Jon Jost, I have made it a priority to try and learn about some of the most mainstream artists.
To put this into some kind of context, one of my last evenings with a woman about whom I was pretty serious happened to coincide with the finale of Seinfeld. (May 14 1998).
Now this was during one of those periods in which I did not have television reception. My engagement with what you could call network television in those years was volatile. During the reign of Twin Peaks in the late 80s through the early 90s I did have television reception making it possible for me to enjoy the cultural phenomenon of that David Lynch helmed televised event. But I was without reception off and on for much of the 90s and 00s.
Needless to say, the woman in question was none too happy about my domestic entertainment situation. We did have a quite long and most enjoyable session of physical intimacy on that May night but it was also one of the last nights we were together. She lived in New York City and I was ensconced, as was the case for many decades, in Boston. My engagement with the artistic phenomenon that was Seinfeld would have to wait until the 00s, me being late to the party as per usual.
Chuck Klosterman describes the cultural system of those years quite well:
“Television in this period was still decided by the constraints of time and the boundaries of available space. Its main utility was just being around. There was an accepted pattern to its consumption.”
As we all know “something happened” in the years after which this assertion could be applied:
Noting that after the finale of The Sopranos aired in 2007 “viewers and critics viewers and critics analyzed the episode’s last ten seconds for the next ten years”, Klosterman speculates further:
“So what happened from 1991 to 1999?
The long answer is complicated. But there’s also a short answer, although that’s even more convoluted that the long one: the validity of emotionally investing in the unreal.” (Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties)
Now all the arts have something to do with emotionally investing in the unreal (indeed this could be one definition of what the arts are). Yet there are many, myself included, who feel this is not always the best way to understand or interact with the arts. Or rather, it might only be applicable to perhaps narrow categories of art objects in the world. And Klosterman’s summary is curious because it could mean so many different things: does it mean that people relate to aesthetic objects as if they were not aesthetic but the real world, making those people more censorious and sentimental?
Does it mean they will become more learned and literate about the arts, which would be essentially the opposite of the former situation? Will mass audiences relate to a streaming television show like Beckett related to Dante? Will that show warrant that kind of relationship, that is, be as good as Dante? (I feel safe in saying that this won’t be the case).
Any great historical change brings with it questions such as these, some of which will be aporetic (referring to aporia in ancient philosophy) and mysterious and some of which will be closer to objective fact and answerable. If one is interested, as I am, in culture as an aesthetic phenomenon, that will make the interest in even relatively less worthy artistic objects more important than would usually be the case.
Complicating matters further, I hold both to the proposition that questions of quality are always operative with the arts and that qualities of excellence or goodness can literally come from any and every possible genre or style. The tensions between these dual truths is only one more example of the power of pluralism in everyday life even if the people who make up that everyday life profess one kind of monism or another.
But Klosterman is noting that there was a changed mass relationship with representation. I don’t believe we can know fully all of the vagaries of this change because we are still undergoing it and I would say that there is probably as much positive as there is negative with it and in something like an equal ratio. And of course all of this calls into question the notion of the loss of a monoculture. We probably have some kind of monoculture now but it is so different in its nature (than an earlier monoculture) that it has the appearance of not being a monoculture.
But it does make the issue of pluralism more important than it has ever been before in any epoch. The question of what to do with our all our disparate and plural opinions and identities is intimately intertwined with the question of disparate artistic styles and genres, especially as any mass cultural phenomenon always has the risk of creating a new consensus around what type of artistic objects are even made and experienced. This consensus is not accomplished by some kind of planned design, but by the unplanned workings of production and distribution.
This is the main reason why I have emphasized a more formalistic approach that sees art as something autonomous and not directly of the real world or real life. November is certainly a time of reflection, a curious irony when one reflects upon that fact that our current November is a time widely considered one of necessary and intense action, possibly possessed of, in the vogue formulation of our era, existential stakes. I am aware that everything written in this post depends on one being open to the possibility or reality that there is a fundamental gap between selfhood and that self’s action. This gap is so fundamental to human experience, never mind culture or art, that it is the basis of, among other things, the conception of freedom of expression and free opinion.
Now when I use the phrase “the known world” this is also the world of the accomplished fact: those things which are intractable and nonnegotiable, like the fact that I now live around a couple thousand people rather than the five million people that I have formerly lived around for three decades, or the fact that now is a time in which politics and voting is on so many minds. The known world, like a gun, does not argue.
One of the things that art is is a kind of argument with a known world - actually any known world - or an attempt to represent the known world so that it is becomes unknown in some way and turns out rather differently than the accomplished facts would have it. Looked at in this way, art is of the party of individual temperament and not collective and mass behavior, the ultimate expression of any kind of temperament and any temperament may very well not only be at odds with any known world but logically incompatible with that known world - just as much as it might be quite at home with a known world.
People will undoubtedly tell me that what I am formulating as the most personal and interior of emotions and decisions - those concerning choices of one’s person including biology and human relations more generally - were always matters of public scrutiny and debate. But society feels different now. The debates and judgments do feel “existential”.
This is the very first time in at least several generations that people have organized a politics around specifically interpersonal and intimate judgement in an organized and mass scale. It can’t only be bad for those like myself who are non-natalist. It will be very bad for any single human being that does not do conventional or expected things. In the 1990s George Carlin had a quite successful comedy monologue decrying what he called “child worship”. Today of course we can’t really know how such a routine would go over, a world in which people in the movement I am trying to evoke here complain that there are too few of us.
A current commentator says that "merely living alongside each other is not enough, that we must learn to truly live with each other." (Charles Matthews)
This is, as they say, sounds good and is itself a sentiment or goal associated with some of my fellow pluralists.
But does “living with” have a way to handle a situation where, say, millions of people want others to live exactly as they do? Many of these millions of people so unhappy with the choices of others will be rather unconscious that they deeply wish that others do as they do and might even profess a disingenuous belief of freedom of choice if asked how they evaluate the lives of others. But their actions have expressed their deepest priorities. Our current period of the liberal democratic order is the first period in which that order is beginning to live up to its initial promise but this real progress is inconvenient for so many.
I also want to state emphatically that this most serious of problems in the public arena is distinct from and not synonymous with the very real psychopathy that is often found alongside it. That is, all it could take to destroy liberal democracy could be a passionate commitment to a particular lifestyle, for example, believing it an edict from one higher power or another. Or it could take simply believing a bunch of bullshit that was overheard or read off a screen here or there.
Do I really think that novels and movies and certain kinds of artworks specifically can help us to abandon such temptations? Well one thing it might do is to enable us to see that we have fundamentally different kinds of lives to live and that it is best to have some kind of society that is constructed to enable such diversity.
Indeed one of the reasons I chose do do our current series on John Updike’s Rabbit books is to enable us to enter the lives of the figures that make up his books, figures who are frankly out of step, non-progressive in so many ways, limited and, as was often said in an earlier epoch, “hopelessly middle class”. They might not be evil but they are greatly flawed. And for all of that they are utterly worthy of our attention and regard as much as for the imaginative invention of their author as for the real life people to which they might correspond.
Works of art enable us to understand better all kinds of people and environments as well as many kinds of emotions themselves. This is far. from the only reason for the existence of art but it is an important reason. This very deep sense of emptiness at the heart of liberalism (and I use this word in its specifically Buddhist sense) is both its innate superiority over other systems (in Winston Churchill’s quip) as well as its unique vulnerability owing to its perpetual knack for disappointing or frustrating so many.
It is no accident that I am able to create shows for this podcast: my education into so many different kinds of dramatic and written arts as well as music and pictorial arts, in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, gave me the widest sense of all the forms of human life and a desire to live in some kind of society that could sustain such creativity and expression.
Only in the fullness of time will we see if enough of us desire for the continued existence of a society where humanity and its ultimate expression in all of the many arts can be said to flourish.
Great writing , thank you 🙏