This was a very brilliant response. And I agree with so much of what you said here.
Where I diverge is this sentence: “History is progress. Things get progressively better from year to year. But if it were true, why is it that, far from leaping on from one philosophical and moral triumph to another, the modern world, and certainly modern literature, seems to have sunk into a pit of nihilism and despair.”
I actually happen to believe we are living in a utopia right now-the best iteration of the world it’s ever been. Far from being an abstract destination we are headed toward, I think it is an ever evolving and perfecting of what we have now.
Will we agree on what is the right destination to head in now? No, and for all the reasons you mentioned. We disagree on morality. And we are intensely selfish, meaning we want what is best for us, not for the whole of society.
And yet, somehow it’s worked. Somehow this is the best time for humans to be alive based on a lot of measures we can agree on: life expectancy, percentage of the world in poverty, equal access to resources, murders and deaths, war.
The fact that we don’t think this is utopia is not because we are living in a dystopia, its because the content we see is painting it that way. And I will point you to an essay I wrote about that! https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/no-news
Thank you for engaging me in discourse. I really love mulling these things over together!!
Oh, without a doubt, in material terms, we are living in the best iteration of the world. The global declines in infant mortality, in famine, in illiteracy, the gains in nutrition, education, etc, are little short of astounding, and they are occurring everywhere around the globe.
And in many ways, material progress is good for moral progress, at least in the sense that when we feel prosperous, we tend to behave better. Whether we count this as moral progress or not comes down to whether we look at outcomes or propensities. The prosperous are less likely to fight because they have more to lose and less to gain. If the global warming alarmists are right (as opposed to the population alarmists of the 70s, who were dead wrong) then those trends are going to start reversing, and we will see if we are really any more moral than we used to be.
So I am with you that there are reasons to be happy, and for literature to be happier than it is. My argument is not for despair but for a middle ground.
The question is, amid all this prosperity, why are people as miserable as they are, or as they claim to be? Is it all a pose? A kind of hedonistic self display? Do they think being dark makes them fashionably sophisticated? Or is there a genuine emptiness, a genuine despair there?
It might be despair that we can't quite reach utopia. Then again, it might simply be a literary and philosophical fashion. I have a suspicion that the reason we have gone abstract in art and atonal in music and grim in literature may simply be because all the other artistic territory has already be explored and claimed and there is nothing else left for art to explore.
Or it might be that, as I noted, freedom and equal rights turns life into a race, and those who fall behind can think of nothing but to try to hobble those who have sprinted off in front. Modern material progress means that almost everyone has more than they had, but less than the other guy. And with no yardstick to measure themselves against but material success, their modest prosperity turns to ashes in their mouth and they despair amidst plenty.
Being human is complicated.
But I am completely on board with a happier literature and a more tolerant discourse.
Yes, whatever the reason is, it's not a good one ☺️ In news media, there was the "Trump Bump," —the more dramatically we skewed into the drama, the more people paid to read it. In literary media, that's the stuff that wins awards. There's no doubt we value it, but why, I will never understand!
Fantastic essay. I also considered posting a response, but now there's no need, as you've more than expressed my core sentiments. Though I am an atheist, I agree with most of what you've written, particularly where you say, "Utopianism is not the antidote to despair, but its progenitor." I believe this ties in well with your premise that 'being is meaning; love is purpose.' The utopian obsession with unattainable perfection eventually obscures our ability to have gratitude for the inherently messy world and our imperfect existence in it; to have compassion for the flaws of others and the suffering life naturally entails. Therein lie the seeds of all our dystopias.
I love it. So good to see a long read that is so engaging and sensible, and not dark. It's an illness of the soul to be so obsessed with the dark and miserable.
What a brilliant essay, Mark! Happy to have stumbled upon your writing. That is the literature I love most: prose that simply gives me a dose of what it feels like to be alive. I'm not Catholic (Unitarian Universalist over here!) but very much enjoyed your more religious insights. Looking forward to the new newsletter.
Great insights as always, Mark. But I would ask what the alternative to a purge is. It seems like that might be a sad but necessary part of forming a new body politic or changing the direction people are headed. Most revolutions have utilized a purge, for example. And we also see them in the more troubling segments of the Old Testament when God leads the Israelites to a new land (passages which are still difficult to explain without resorting to, “Well, Israel was right and the other people were wrong.”) It could even be said loosely that heaven/the afterlife starts with a purge - last judgment. Might it be the case that purges are inevitable, that we will always need to make way for new ideas via some manifestation of force, and the important thing is to only use purges for the sake of the moral good?
Interesting way of looking at it. You are not wrong, of course, that people frequently resort to purges. Nor that if you are dedicated to achieving cultural and moral homogeneity, some form of purge is almost unavoidable.
The problem with the idea that we should only use purges for the moral good, though, is that people invariably think that they are purging for the moral good, so its not really much of a restraint. Also, there is the problem of whether the moral good you are pursuing outweighs the inherent evil of the purge.
But it is the irony of purging in the name of inclusion that strikes me most. The avowed puritan, for instance, can purge the impure with logical consistency. But to avow diversity, equity, and inclusion and then purge people is illogic on a grand scale.
Of course, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Similarly, some people are more diverse than others, and thus have more right to be included. A friend of mine wrote a post recently about her interview with an arts funding agency. Having looked at their funding criteria she observed that basically everyone was eligible for funding except able-bodied heterosexual middle aged white men. How did they make decisions among all the other applicants, she asked them. It was explained to her that it was based on how many different criteria you met. As a woman, she got one diversity point. Those with three or four points would be ahead of her in the line for funding. All people are diverse, but some people are more diverse than others.
You make a good point that the final judgement is also a purge. I'm not sure the Exodus counts as a purge, though, since the Egyptians wanted the Israelites to stay. The Israelites were the ones that wanted to go. It does bring us back to the observation that freedom and equality are the virtues of a particular class. Traditionally, societies have been patchworks of special privileges. Obviously such a system is never entirely just (because humans) but people at the lower ends of the spectrum had their specific privileges as well. Different groups could also be given their own places to live and be allowed to live by their own laws.
We do have a few cases of that still today, set up for specific purposes. One wonders if we might end up with more of it. We do see more and more groups making demands that would amount to special status. Of course, people want their bread buttered on both sides, so they don't want any of the the potential downsides that might come with separate status, like separate responsibilities.
Maybe the alternative to purges is some kind of independent space for different kinds of people to live as they wish to live. But the problem with that is that we have a highly integrated economy dependent on highly mobile specialized skills. Close the doors to that kind of mobility and you condemn yourself to relative poverty. Open them and you condemn yourself to cultural dilution and conflicts over behavior and rights.
Behind all this, though, is a very basic human fear that as long as people exist who do not think as I do, act as I do, worship as I do, teach their children as I teach mine, that one day they will come for me. And that fear is not irrational, because from time to time they really do come for you (and especially for your children), and so the felt need to go after them first is ever with us.
This stuff is hard. And the more we move about and mix with each other, the harder it gets.
That makes total sense. I agree that there’s rather a lot of hypocrisy in achieving diversity by purging all opposing viewpoints. It’s self-defeating and unsustainable. But that’s probably not much of a deterrent, because I would say a number of people pursuing such things are anarchists at heart, who enjoy chaos and would rather nobody have nice things if they themselves can’t have nice things.
Having witnessed the decline of Christianity in the eyes of the general public, I’ve taken the view that it’s alright to stop legislating morality and to separate church and state, but as we change the laws we should build in religious exemptions for almost everything. I want that not just for Christianity but for all religions. In other words, I think the siloed approach you mentioned - where we’re allowed to keep independent spaces - is the only one that will work in a poly-cultural society. It’s the only way democracy doesn’t become mob rule. (And, of course, the question of where to lay down he law becomes very important. We may choose not to adopt any one moral perspective for our law-making, but we’re still drawing moral lines; I suspect most westerners still agree that murder is wrong).
I knew we’d discover some major drawbacks to the internet and globalization, and this is one of them. People now have only vague understandings of the individuals on the other side of the fence, so they detest them. Once you actually meet someone who believes differently than you (or engage in discourse just like this very Substack post, which is a response to another Substack post), you find out how reasonable they are. You may still disagree, but it’s a lot harder to hate humans you see as humans.
Indeed. Thus the the endless debates over who merits the status of "human" or "person." It is truly rare to find a society which counts every biological human entity the status of "human" or "person."
Gratias. For making me look up "Concupiscence" on wikipedia and the German version Konkupiszenz. I have a minor in Theology (cth.) - and never heard that word. ("Original sin/Erbsünde"- I did, lol). Priests and profs are smart to avoid that topic. Feel slightly better educated now. - Very fine text, throughout. - Still, what I take home is the title: "Being is meaning enough. Love is purpose enough." Hit me like a wrecking ball. Touched my like a warm embrace.
This was a very brilliant response. And I agree with so much of what you said here.
Where I diverge is this sentence: “History is progress. Things get progressively better from year to year. But if it were true, why is it that, far from leaping on from one philosophical and moral triumph to another, the modern world, and certainly modern literature, seems to have sunk into a pit of nihilism and despair.”
I actually happen to believe we are living in a utopia right now-the best iteration of the world it’s ever been. Far from being an abstract destination we are headed toward, I think it is an ever evolving and perfecting of what we have now.
Will we agree on what is the right destination to head in now? No, and for all the reasons you mentioned. We disagree on morality. And we are intensely selfish, meaning we want what is best for us, not for the whole of society.
And yet, somehow it’s worked. Somehow this is the best time for humans to be alive based on a lot of measures we can agree on: life expectancy, percentage of the world in poverty, equal access to resources, murders and deaths, war.
The fact that we don’t think this is utopia is not because we are living in a dystopia, its because the content we see is painting it that way. And I will point you to an essay I wrote about that! https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/no-news
Thank you for engaging me in discourse. I really love mulling these things over together!!
Oh, without a doubt, in material terms, we are living in the best iteration of the world. The global declines in infant mortality, in famine, in illiteracy, the gains in nutrition, education, etc, are little short of astounding, and they are occurring everywhere around the globe.
And in many ways, material progress is good for moral progress, at least in the sense that when we feel prosperous, we tend to behave better. Whether we count this as moral progress or not comes down to whether we look at outcomes or propensities. The prosperous are less likely to fight because they have more to lose and less to gain. If the global warming alarmists are right (as opposed to the population alarmists of the 70s, who were dead wrong) then those trends are going to start reversing, and we will see if we are really any more moral than we used to be.
So I am with you that there are reasons to be happy, and for literature to be happier than it is. My argument is not for despair but for a middle ground.
The question is, amid all this prosperity, why are people as miserable as they are, or as they claim to be? Is it all a pose? A kind of hedonistic self display? Do they think being dark makes them fashionably sophisticated? Or is there a genuine emptiness, a genuine despair there?
It might be despair that we can't quite reach utopia. Then again, it might simply be a literary and philosophical fashion. I have a suspicion that the reason we have gone abstract in art and atonal in music and grim in literature may simply be because all the other artistic territory has already be explored and claimed and there is nothing else left for art to explore.
Or it might be that, as I noted, freedom and equal rights turns life into a race, and those who fall behind can think of nothing but to try to hobble those who have sprinted off in front. Modern material progress means that almost everyone has more than they had, but less than the other guy. And with no yardstick to measure themselves against but material success, their modest prosperity turns to ashes in their mouth and they despair amidst plenty.
Being human is complicated.
But I am completely on board with a happier literature and a more tolerant discourse.
Yes, whatever the reason is, it's not a good one ☺️ In news media, there was the "Trump Bump," —the more dramatically we skewed into the drama, the more people paid to read it. In literary media, that's the stuff that wins awards. There's no doubt we value it, but why, I will never understand!
Fantastic essay. I also considered posting a response, but now there's no need, as you've more than expressed my core sentiments. Though I am an atheist, I agree with most of what you've written, particularly where you say, "Utopianism is not the antidote to despair, but its progenitor." I believe this ties in well with your premise that 'being is meaning; love is purpose.' The utopian obsession with unattainable perfection eventually obscures our ability to have gratitude for the inherently messy world and our imperfect existence in it; to have compassion for the flaws of others and the suffering life naturally entails. Therein lie the seeds of all our dystopias.
I love it. So good to see a long read that is so engaging and sensible, and not dark. It's an illness of the soul to be so obsessed with the dark and miserable.
What a brilliant essay, Mark! Happy to have stumbled upon your writing. That is the literature I love most: prose that simply gives me a dose of what it feels like to be alive. I'm not Catholic (Unitarian Universalist over here!) but very much enjoyed your more religious insights. Looking forward to the new newsletter.
Great insights as always, Mark. But I would ask what the alternative to a purge is. It seems like that might be a sad but necessary part of forming a new body politic or changing the direction people are headed. Most revolutions have utilized a purge, for example. And we also see them in the more troubling segments of the Old Testament when God leads the Israelites to a new land (passages which are still difficult to explain without resorting to, “Well, Israel was right and the other people were wrong.”) It could even be said loosely that heaven/the afterlife starts with a purge - last judgment. Might it be the case that purges are inevitable, that we will always need to make way for new ideas via some manifestation of force, and the important thing is to only use purges for the sake of the moral good?
Interesting way of looking at it. You are not wrong, of course, that people frequently resort to purges. Nor that if you are dedicated to achieving cultural and moral homogeneity, some form of purge is almost unavoidable.
The problem with the idea that we should only use purges for the moral good, though, is that people invariably think that they are purging for the moral good, so its not really much of a restraint. Also, there is the problem of whether the moral good you are pursuing outweighs the inherent evil of the purge.
But it is the irony of purging in the name of inclusion that strikes me most. The avowed puritan, for instance, can purge the impure with logical consistency. But to avow diversity, equity, and inclusion and then purge people is illogic on a grand scale.
Of course, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Similarly, some people are more diverse than others, and thus have more right to be included. A friend of mine wrote a post recently about her interview with an arts funding agency. Having looked at their funding criteria she observed that basically everyone was eligible for funding except able-bodied heterosexual middle aged white men. How did they make decisions among all the other applicants, she asked them. It was explained to her that it was based on how many different criteria you met. As a woman, she got one diversity point. Those with three or four points would be ahead of her in the line for funding. All people are diverse, but some people are more diverse than others.
You make a good point that the final judgement is also a purge. I'm not sure the Exodus counts as a purge, though, since the Egyptians wanted the Israelites to stay. The Israelites were the ones that wanted to go. It does bring us back to the observation that freedom and equality are the virtues of a particular class. Traditionally, societies have been patchworks of special privileges. Obviously such a system is never entirely just (because humans) but people at the lower ends of the spectrum had their specific privileges as well. Different groups could also be given their own places to live and be allowed to live by their own laws.
We do have a few cases of that still today, set up for specific purposes. One wonders if we might end up with more of it. We do see more and more groups making demands that would amount to special status. Of course, people want their bread buttered on both sides, so they don't want any of the the potential downsides that might come with separate status, like separate responsibilities.
Maybe the alternative to purges is some kind of independent space for different kinds of people to live as they wish to live. But the problem with that is that we have a highly integrated economy dependent on highly mobile specialized skills. Close the doors to that kind of mobility and you condemn yourself to relative poverty. Open them and you condemn yourself to cultural dilution and conflicts over behavior and rights.
Behind all this, though, is a very basic human fear that as long as people exist who do not think as I do, act as I do, worship as I do, teach their children as I teach mine, that one day they will come for me. And that fear is not irrational, because from time to time they really do come for you (and especially for your children), and so the felt need to go after them first is ever with us.
This stuff is hard. And the more we move about and mix with each other, the harder it gets.
That makes total sense. I agree that there’s rather a lot of hypocrisy in achieving diversity by purging all opposing viewpoints. It’s self-defeating and unsustainable. But that’s probably not much of a deterrent, because I would say a number of people pursuing such things are anarchists at heart, who enjoy chaos and would rather nobody have nice things if they themselves can’t have nice things.
Having witnessed the decline of Christianity in the eyes of the general public, I’ve taken the view that it’s alright to stop legislating morality and to separate church and state, but as we change the laws we should build in religious exemptions for almost everything. I want that not just for Christianity but for all religions. In other words, I think the siloed approach you mentioned - where we’re allowed to keep independent spaces - is the only one that will work in a poly-cultural society. It’s the only way democracy doesn’t become mob rule. (And, of course, the question of where to lay down he law becomes very important. We may choose not to adopt any one moral perspective for our law-making, but we’re still drawing moral lines; I suspect most westerners still agree that murder is wrong).
I knew we’d discover some major drawbacks to the internet and globalization, and this is one of them. People now have only vague understandings of the individuals on the other side of the fence, so they detest them. Once you actually meet someone who believes differently than you (or engage in discourse just like this very Substack post, which is a response to another Substack post), you find out how reasonable they are. You may still disagree, but it’s a lot harder to hate humans you see as humans.
Indeed. Thus the the endless debates over who merits the status of "human" or "person." It is truly rare to find a society which counts every biological human entity the status of "human" or "person."
Gratias. For making me look up "Concupiscence" on wikipedia and the German version Konkupiszenz. I have a minor in Theology (cth.) - and never heard that word. ("Original sin/Erbsünde"- I did, lol). Priests and profs are smart to avoid that topic. Feel slightly better educated now. - Very fine text, throughout. - Still, what I take home is the title: "Being is meaning enough. Love is purpose enough." Hit me like a wrecking ball. Touched my like a warm embrace.