Social Life

When I was an undergraduate, I took a comparative literature seminar where we read, among other introductory works of literary theory, T.S. Eliot’s 1944 address to the Virgil Society titled “What is a Classic?” I was freshly back from Central Europe, where I had followed, sort of haphazardly, the train route from Terezín to Auschwitz that much of my grandfather’s extended family had taken in the 40s. The context of Eliot’s essay, that he had delivered it on November 16th, 1944 in London, seemed to me to reframe if not disqualify his entire point and I said so in class.

The professor was a beautiful gentle long-haired man, with faraway eyes, your wet dream of an English professor. It was the only time I ever saw him get annoyed. “That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” he said sharply. “That is not relevant.”

I had a vague crush on him and a terrible, burning crush on the TA, and I was embarrassed. It was unsophisticated after all to be thinking about the gas chambers and the burning crematoria and the starving Soviet citizens and the American soldiers landing in Normandy when you were supposed to be engaging with something as highbrow as the literary canon. I still thought I was in the right though, and I slowly lost respect for my professor and developed a burning hatred of T.S. Eliot in the weeks that followed. I came to see it as the epitome of everything that was wrong with my rarefied humanities degree, obsessed as it was with close reading, with text over context, with apolitical art for art’s sake. The world was all around me and I wanted to be inside it.

Eliot, it is well-known, was a traditionalist. “The problem with all such political strictures, however," writes Terry Eagleton in The London Review of Books on Eliot’s uneasy dance with European fascism, “is that conservatives do not regard their beliefs as political. Politics is the sphere of utility, and therefore inimical to conservative values.” Like most of Eliot’s other writing, both poetry and prose, “What is a Classic?” reflects this kind of tension. Eliot was decidedly not a classicist and his writing, formally, represents a shattering break with the classics. If the classics are dying, surely Eliot the Modernist is the problem. But the argument he is making is less about literary form and more about sociopolitics. He is arch about this point. Politics, after all, do not belong in art in this formulation. But towards the end of the essay, he offers nonetheless some clarity:

“We need to remind ourselves that, as Europe is a whole (and still, in its progressive mutilation and disfigurement, the organism out of which any greater world harmony must develop), so European literature is a whole, the several members of which cannot flourish, if the same blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole body. […] No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.”

The metaphor, blood circulation and racial purity, feels strikingly connected to its moment. Although Eliot does not deign to acknowledge geopolitical crisis or the war in which England was engaged, it creeps out in his language. He watches Europe, the historical beating heart of civilization, tearing itself apart over such a small thing as politics with dismay. The unstable flux of his language, for which he is so famous, is an attempt to upend the staid constraints of modern life. I willingly admit that his probing and experimentation is at times very beautiful. “The fact,” concludes Eagleton of the Modernists, “that so many of these writers responded to the historical crisis with apocalyptic pleas for absolute authority and the violent exclusion of subversive elements is the price we have to pay for such art, if we should choose to do so.”

All these arguments, as arcane as they are, may seem very contemporary. The anxiety about classicism as a means of shared cultural heritage, the pretended disdain for explicit politics, the swirling melange of right wing intellectual bedfellows (the monarchists, the libertarians, the Christian traditionalists). “He continually provokes the public he addresses,” writes Michael Levinson of Eliot’s criticism in T.S. Eliot in Context, “placing readers in uneasy positions, forced to choose between initiation into a cultural elite or acceptance of benighted ignorance.” This cultural elite was reactionary, priggish, upper middle class, genteelly critical of democracy and secularism and feminism and any tolerance of religious or ethnic diversity, but too averse to the power of wartime censorship and the possibility of backlash to be really explicit about it.

It is this quality that fascinates me about Eliot, this refusal to really say what he means, even when it hovers near the surface of his writing. Of course there were times when he did — in an infamous lecture at the University of Virginia where he held forth on the dangers of “free-thinking Jews” and praised the Jim Crow System for instance, as well as in some of his other earlier prose writing. That he stopped making such explicit pronouncements later on may be taken as a sign of maturing to subtlety or perhaps as a side effect of his growing fame, the rise of fascism in Europe, and public outrage about his comments. “The flurry,” says Levinson, “over his anti-Semitic remark in After Strange Gods taught at least this lesson: that radical opinions, if they were to be placed before the public, required the most studied presentation.”

Eliot could probably have worried less about his legacy. Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline publicly collaborated with Axis governments, openly supported the Holocaust, and published racist and anti-semitic screeds before and during the war, yet both were rehabilitated by their literary peers as early as the late 1940s. By the 1950s, their books were back in print.

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Over the past few years, as the liberal consensus has shifted slowly back rightward, a more explicit far right ideological line has emerged clearly among writers and journalists. Gradually, this messaging has honed into something sharper and cruder: a libidinal charge, a gleeful appreciation of accelerationism, of the thuggish power grab underway, of the rolling back of established human rights that we have come to take for granted, of the wanton destruction of human life.

There are lots of ways you could periodize this. “Something has changed in America; something is still pulsing beneath the carapace of party politics,” wrote Tobi Haslett for n+1 in 2021 of the Black Lives Matter protests. The change is not only a reaction to the riots, in Haslett’s telling, but also part and parcel of the conditions that enabled them in the first place. It is a response to the Covid pandemic, a mass death and disabling event attended by organized state abandonment and by a massive upward transfer of wealth. It is a response to economic desperation, to inflation, to historic rent prices and grocery prices.

For a while, if you picked up any respectable liberal newspaper, its headlines resembled the New York Post: crime runs rampant in America, and so on. This law and order consensus was not only a defensive reaction to the call for abolition (after all, police departments were never defunded anywhere in America with the sort of exception of Minneapolis), but a reaction to the opportunity it presented to shore up exceptional levels of public surveillance and property protection. Recently, a band of New York City police, the most bloated and overstuffed police department in the country, were dispatched into the subway to arrest and harass homeless people sleeping on trains. This announcement was made in the dead of a brutal winter, when the average temperature in New York was around 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime.

And there are lots of ways you could periodize the new brazenness. It did not originate with Trump’s reelection, although that has spurred it. Rather, it came likely from the same place as everything else, an elite capture of the means of media production, the rapid consolidating and shuttering of news outlets, the tight control over ideological lines. These splintered most decisively over Gaza and over the expectation that writers would stay silent on the question of mass murder enthusiastically funded and defended by our government. The new media that emerged out of this vacuum, such as The Free Press, hosted on Substack, traffics in victimhood but is in reality incredibly lucrative — much more lucrative than a staff job writing at a newspaper would be. The brand new Metropolitan Review, founded by Ross Barkan on Substack, (which the writer Teddy Brown called the “Free Press Literary Supplement”) could not be especially lucrative, but allows writers to air their polemical writing with the self-seriousness of the LRB or another real critical outlet. Since it started publishing a few weeks ago, Lillian Fishman (who wrote a #MeToo novel a few years ago) has mounted a defense of traditional marriage, and Jessa Crispin, the Bookslut editor, opined about wokeness. Both pieces have a strong reactionary tone, but both writers are grounded enough in liberal norms to nonetheless couch their language carefully.

Because of this persistent archness displayed by those flirting with the far right, similar to T.S. Eliot’s, it is hard to say how sincere all these new converts are. The thing about writing now is that there are so few pathways to success. Or, there are more than ever, anyone can be a writer, but they lead nowhere. There is no money, no power, no glory. In order for a freelance writer to sell a book, the apex of success for her, she must become an expert in her field, whatever that field may be. She must develop a new catchy turn of phrase (such as enshittification) or a pop frame of analysis. She must become the person magazine editors will call up to write an op-ed when her topic comes up and later on, she will list all of those editors in her book proposal as people who would market her book when the time comes for that.

This is obviously to some extent how knowledge acquisition works. You slowly build a body of work demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of something and are in turn rewarded with respect. But the problem with the decimated writing landscape is that it generally does not offer either the time or the stability or the rigor needed for expertise. Writers write for pennies on the dollar for magazines hungry for virality and wildly understaffed. This encourages a kind of damning myopia. Say you are a writer who has some knowledge of trains and you write an essay about trains that is more successful than usual. Now, you can launch a career around trains. Everything in your writing going forward will come back to trains, they are a metaphor and a microcosm for the world. Even if this is true — trains are significant and integral to society — they are not so much drivers of social dynamics and politics as they are in turn shaped by those things. If you are trying to jam everything in your one grand developing theory of trains, you are liable to miss the forest for the trees. This method encourages a kind of grift which inevitably drifts rightwards, ever grasping towards controversy.

This may sound silly but if you substitute “sex” or “burnout” or “millennial parenthood” or any other Big Idea concepts, you will start to see what I mean. This relationship between parts and a whole always functions rustily. It is the entire tension of nonfiction writing. How far can individual experience be extended? What does one thing (trains) have to do with another (say, communication)? The job of the writer is to link what Frederic Jameson calls in The Political Unconscious “the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life.” What do phones have to do with the state of government? What does porn have to do with sexual violence? What does feminism have to do with the economy? If you are a person who writes about phones and their destructive influence on the human mind and psyche, you might be right in principle, but consider what historical conditions in the world have led to this kind of human dependence on phones, this fragmentation, this distrust. “Such momentary reunification would remain purely symbolic," writes Jameson, “a mere methodological fiction, were it not understood that social life is in its fundamental reality one and indivisible, a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another.”

The blitz of right and right-liberal journalism in recent months suffers from this blight of particularism. It is not a critical error, I think, as it is for many young untrained personal essayists. Instead, it is a manipulation. Instead of presenting the world as a web, made up of unifying particulars, they instead present the world as a universal whole, dissolved into fragments, waiting to be made whole again by homogeny and traditionalism. If you do not understand why two things are linked, for example, loneliness and the housing crisis, a recent Atlantic cover story by Derek Thompson will not illuminate the problem. Instead, it will leave you with the vague sense that people used to be happy and fulfilled and prosperous before our social bonds were severed. They used to live in family units and rarely spent time alone. Instead of looking at screens in their spare hours, they did domestic labor or socialized with their neighbors or raised their children. Thompson is ostensibly a liberal so he dances around the question of gender, but his vision is closer to that of J.D. Vance’s than that of FDR’s. He will not tell you that your rent has gone up because of algorithmic pricing, hedge fund speculation, and monopolies on property ownership and development. He will not tell you that the home is the primary site of physical abuse for many women and children. He will not tell you that American workers work longer hours under worse conditions for less money than ever before or that personal debt has skyrocketed. Instead, he advocates for overcoming personal differences (his example is a disagreement about the importance of affirmative action) to focus on what you have in common (your children), and for adopting the Amish approach to technology.

Although it is different in its form and its content, the method of Thompson’s story is similar to two other much-derided pieces of right-wing longform journalism. Dean Kissick, in a Harper’s cover story, bemoaned the fall of art to the influence of leftwing identitarian politics. He finds this new art both too sanctimonious and too traditional. The kind of art he praises, like Eliot’s poetry, is not formally recognizable as traditionalist, but shares the same assumptions about universality, the same yearning nostalgia, and the same apparent transcendence of politics. Like Thompson, Kissick says very little that is concretely analytic about the financial systems underpinning the art world, about why institutions run by billionaires and weapons dealers and government hawks are willing to launder this kind of (often) faux-radical protest art. You will learn nothing about art reading his essay and leave only with the vague sense that things used to be better before all this nonsense.

This is basically the conclusion also of Brock Colyar’s New York cover story, which has been written about to death, so I will only point out that Colyar finishes on a similar note. They claim conservatism has crept into their social circle, washing away the scourge of political correctness. They get a thrill from saying r——d, from making fat jokes, from offering “tacky” commentary about Gaza to their group chats (not reprinted in the magazine, perhaps because it was too tacky). When a white nationalist tells Colyar at the end that America has become too puritanical and is no fun anymore, they nod in agreement. “It felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you’re in middle school.”

Like all the other writers in this space, Colyar eschews specifics to focus on feeling. The vibes in America feel puritanical. People feel unsafe even if crime rates are down. Men feel emasculated. Writers feel censored. Rich people feel embattled by the encroaching poor. Thomas Chatterton Williams summed it up in an Atlantic article complaining about the Trump administration’s crackdown on freedom of speech, notably in their policing of NEA and NSF grants, by comparing it to left cancel culture. He admits that the “government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so,” but goes on to blame the “left” for setting the terms of illiberal censorship all the same.

If you really think about it, it starts to look weirder. The endless complaints about having to use the right gender pronouns for people and how it is an assault on your freedom and individuality even as trans people’s identification documents have been revoked or suspended or their gender markers changed without their consent. Complaining about how you can’t say slurs in Brooklyn while Medicare is slashed. Claiming that young women are so pressured to participate in hookup culture and aggressive cat lady feminism and lesbianism that they cannot do what they truly want, which is settle down at 22 with a benevolent man and have babies. Promoting the idea that the emancipation of women, who were allowed to open their own fully independent bank accounts in the US in 1972 (during my mother’s lifetime), or the enfranchisement of Black people, who were subject to Jim Crow laws until 1965 across much of the country and who were enslaved under an unbreakable racial caste until a few generations ago, or the abolition of the police, which as I said above simply never happened, has gone too far, and that, even if there were some good ideas in there, that the pendulum has overcorrected.

I always think of that Tobi Haslett quote from an interview he did with The Point that circulates every so often on my social media feed:

“But even today certain kinds of critics—sometimes very established—are invested in displaying their exhaustion with politically inflected art. And I think: What are you exhausted with? Where did this twee McCarthyism come from? You’re an American. You’ve barely ever consumed any left-wing cultural production. You grew up middle-class in the most philistine capitalist state there has ever been, but you’re acting like you were raised on a diet of socialist realism and state radio broadcasts. Your closest experience to agitprop is Sesame Street. Your fatigue is so unearned, I can’t stand it.”

I think sometimes this fatigue is sincere, although not always. Conservatism, as Eagleton points out, does not view itself as political. We live in such a hegemonic sea of conservative values that when left aesthetics encroach upon them, it can be disorienting. It seems to infuse politics into things that are otherwise stable aspects of our society. It lends truth to the cliche that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Things like gender or marriage or eugenics or corporate greed or wealth inequality or the financialization of everything in our system, from housing to healthcare to incarceration to warmongering, are naturalized to the degree of being outside politics. A theory of common sense and normalcy, often touted by the Biden administration, helps to smear a liberal veneer onto this. Anyone who strays from this normalcy, who tries to strip away the glaze, can then be tarnished as political, as “free-thinking,” as a problem.

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I went to see the film Universal Language earlier this week and it made me feel all these feelings. It’s nearly impossible to describe without sounding crazy. Hyperallergic called it “an absurdist comedy about the Great Replacement Theory.” Inspired by Iranian New Wave films, it’s set in a surrealist and frozen Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi. Vendors sell hot tea in the street and Tim Horton’s is transformed into a lowlit tea room with a huge samovar. A turkey steals a child’s glasses, a tour guide takes a group of visitors to random desolate sites in the city, including an empty water fountain and an abandoned briefcase on a city bench that has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site for “inter-human solidarity” because no one ever touched it, a “lacrimotologist” offers Kleenex to mourners at an icy cemetery surrounded by freeway lanes. The characters move in and out of this strange and magical landscape, intersecting in various unexpected ways. Two girls try to get a bill out of the frozen ice, a plotline that recalls The White Balloon by Jafar Pahani but also apparently draws on Rankin’s own grandmother’s Canadian childhood. The currency they are after is called a “Riel” after the indigenous revolutionary leader Louis Riel who led an uprising in Manitoba in the 19th century to defend Métis rights.

Rankin called his movie “a very gentle film that defies the oppositional modes we’ve been led to understand how the world works” in Interview. The film offers no excuse or explanation for its borderless world so unlike the one where we actually dwell. This reliance on poetics may be read as gentle, but to me it is also a rejection of our hegemonic assumptions, of the sharpening of human solidarity, kindness, love, welcome, into polemics or politics. It welcomes us into an unfamiliar universe where everything impossible, the transposition of New Wave Tehran onto Winnipeg, becomes plausible. Moze Halperin perhaps puts it more clearly in 4Columns, writing:

While cultural discourse slowly moves beyond the era of authenticity and identity essentialism—in which art often reified and exalted the individual—the project of right-wing nationalism that leveraged counter-discourse into global power fortifies its own fanatical identitarianism. Are these external realities in part the source of the mournful feeling in Universal Language that seeps into whimsy like cold trying to freeze a dream solid?

Even if racism and xenophobia do not exist in this version of Canada, crisis still rears its head. At the emptied fountain, the tour group is forbidden to “loiter” for more than 30 seconds. The tour guide works three jobs, trying to support his family. In one of the sharpest scenes in the film, a Québecois government administrator, conducting an exit interview (in French – even in fantasy, the Québecois still speak French), insists that his departing employee must speak positively, or at least neutrally, about his experience. “People are losing faith in the government,” he explains.

What astonished me about Universal Language was how fully it committed to its vision of the world. How little art offers this kind of unblunted optimism, this sense that things could be better, that solidarity could exist among all of us. The desolate brutalist cityscape is shot through with moments of hope and warmth and desire. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film to me, which happens almost in passing, a skater dressed in sparkly silver executes a flawless camel spin, while a hammered dulcimer plays in the background. Her face, as she finishes, is radiant, a dream come true.