Circles of concern

There is much to be said for seeing life primarily in local terms, for seeing one’s personal situation as dictating to a large extent one’s actual duties and responsibilities, and for resisting temptations to moralize, pontificate or parade one’s opinions in the public sphere. Sadly, the current digital media environment works against such reticence and self-restraint, exacerbating the drift away from real connections and real communities.

The “uncoupling of shared content from physical proximity and ongoing relations” was recently a topic of discussion at The Electric Agora. One participant lamented the current situation, seeing “the constant deluge of information about far-off goings on” as the root cause of the problem.

Apart from the occasional message from family, it’s not natural for people to be concerned about what’s going on more than a few day’s ride or walk away. It makes diffuse the collective ethics of cooperation, and lends itself to costless performative virtue. Easier for a New Yorker to wave a sign on behalf of a Uyghur than knock on doors for the would-be county mayor, or boycott Israel instead of putting a stone through a scab’s windshield. Solidarity and hope are reduced to self-parody.

I'm not sure I see any form of solidarity or hope worth having in picket lines – but let that pass.

We need to rebuild [heal?] social division geographically. People are best at improving things close by, and knowing what needs improving. Unfettered individualism and social division are symptoms of the sickness. Humanity writ large is not a society, let alone a community. Put your neighborhood, family, and city first, and maybe you’ll feel like part of something bigger. The welfare of your locale is part of the world’s welfare, and the part you can do the most about.

Self improvement comes into it too.

You’re part of the community. Improve yourself, and you improve the community. Prowess, beauty, and fitness are all good. A personable friend to shoot hoops with, a scoutmaster teaching kids to camp, or a schoolgirl putting her all into clarinet chasing that scholarship do far more for a neighborhood than a conscientious news-junkie or devout activist for the identitarian cause of the day.

We need to go back, but most won’t. Streaming videos, internet news, and cell phones are popular for a reason. Distraction has its place, but it’s not a legitimate way of life. The EA crowd has a lot of this going on. Buying 20 Malaria nets for strangers a continent away is less virtuous than playing catch with your kids or baking a pie with grandma, and – no matter how they pretend otherwise – they know it too.

I quote these passages in full because they are vividly expressed and because there is significant overlap with my own views. These sorts of topics are never clearcut, however, and caveats and reservations necessarily apply.

One caveat relates to the fact that there are circumstances in which long-distance concerns demand attention: foreign policy questions, for example.

Quite obviously, the interventionist policies currently being pursued by the U.S. and its closest allies sit uneasily with the principles outlined above, and some kind of regionalism or system of geographically-based spheres of influence would be a better fit.

No set of principles is sacrosanct, however, and it may be – I don’t think they can, but it may be – that current policies can be defended or justified on other grounds. I can see that proximity counts for less and less in purely military terms – in terms of weapons technology, for example – just as it does in terms of general communication. But, of course, any strategic analysis needs to be contextualized and supplemented with a wide range of data and information (including cultural information) if it is to be useful in the real world and effective in the long term.

Some believe that only continued American global dominance can save us and deliver a more just, peaceful and prosperous world but I see dangers in the unipolar model and in the very notion of a global elite, however it is constituted and however sensitive this supposed elite might be to the nuances of cultural variation.

Information, communication and insecurity

There are, these days, countless new and improved ways of losing documents and missing messages. If I and my friends are in any way typical, one routinely loses a large proportion of one’s stored data without even trying; whereas in the past we generally lost only what we deliberately threw away or burnt (school work, old tax documents, those embarrassing attempts at fiction, letters, etc.).

Back then, incoming messages were reliably received. Telephone numbers were generally stable over long periods of time, publicly listed and easily accessible. Household and business telephones rang (quite anonymously) and were answered – or not, as the case may be. Letters and telegrams were an essential part of life and sacrosanct with respect to privacy.

Across the Western world, a mythology had been built up, via news stories and fictional accounts, around the conscientiousness and persistence of the people who delivered the mail. A short story entitled “Le facteur rural” (“The country postman”) appeared in a French anthology from my childhood. It was very dated even then, but it must have struck a chord because I still remember it. And I recently came across a scholarly article on the role that national mail services played in France and other European countries in creating a sense of security, cohesion and national identity during the 19th century.

Mail service myths persisted into the late 20th century and even carried over into commercial settings. In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays a very persistent FedEx executive who, after surviving a plane crash and solitary life on a deserted Pacific island, finally returns to civilization and personally delivers a package from the crashed plane to an isolated Texas farmhouse. But the commercial and (more or less) contemporary context of the film is far from that world in which national or imperial postal and telecommunication services were seamlessly integrated into everyday life.

Some time ago I wrote a short piece centered on the (Texas-born) writer Patricia Highsmith, based on a reading of a few of her novels. The claustrophobic and chilling world she describes is rooted in the mundane realities of the 1950s and 1960s and her fiction reflects important truths about the crucial role communication technologies play in weaving a cultural milieu and defining a locality.

“Some of Highsmith's central characters,” I wrote, “spend a large proportion of their allotted pages planning and writing letters, posting letters, organizing the material for writing more letters, waiting for letters and speculating as to why no letter has come or, more rarely, receiving a letter and analysing the contents. The local newspaper is good for keeping track of whether the body has been found or what stage the police have reached in their investigation. And the telephone looms as large as it did in the movies of the period.”

In their way, each of these media enhances the sense of place and/or the sense of distance from other places. Even the telephone signals the sense of distance by the involvement of a human intermediary, the operator.

The technological changes we have seen in the last half-century have not only provided many new ways to store, send – and lose – information, they have irrevocably changed the culture. The new media can be and have been used to stir up nationalistic sentiments but, by and large, the tendency of the transnational networks (technological and political) upon which we have come to depend is to undermine geographically-based identities.

These changes also have other effects. They strike at the root of our individual and group identities and affiliations and necessarily undermine old ways of thinking and doing things. On a personal level, a whole new mindset is required. One has to let go of old expectations, for practical reasons and simply to avoid stress and anxiety.

The very idea of the self can be seen to be changing in subtle ways as new opportunities for self-presentation and concealment appear. New codes of behavior are developed, or arise spontaneously. There are changes in goals, expectations and perceived responsibilities. Old insecurities are reshaped and/or replaced by new insecurities.

Take personal privacy. It was once sustained by social structures and a pattern of widely understood and accepted rules. But the advent of digital technologies and social media rendered the old rules irrelevant. It is now unclear what the boundaries of personal privacy are or should be.

A new definition or concept of personal privacy is called for and no one can say what form it will take. These things are determined by circumstances and cannot be precisely predicted. But, given the current political tendency to exploit technology to the utmost in order to enhance centralized power and social control, the general direction is fairly clear. Redefinition will almost inevitably involve a weakening and downgrading of the concept.

I’ll finish with a few more remarks on Patricia Highsmith.

Her writing style is plain and spare and utterly non-experimental but she explores the themes of identity and morality in very confronting ways. And, though her literary persona is cosmopolitan, sophisticated and liberal, there are traces of deep conservatism in her work. She was a Texan, after all.

Tom Ripley is her greatest creation, a likable psychopath. He only murders people (very few really) when he has to – and feels no guilt. He can kill someone in the afternoon and have a pleasant dinner, or dispose of the body during the night and really enjoy his morning coffee.

But Highsmith is always aware of the moral landscape that Ripley’s behavior and attitudes challenge and always sensitive to the nuances of human communication which in large measure constitute the texture and map the significance of our lives. In Ripley Under Ground, a suicidal artist character reads from the journal of another suicidal artist:

“Where has kindness, forgiveness gone in the world? I find more in the faces of children who sit for me, gazing at me, watching me with innocent wide eyes that make no judgment. And friends? In the moment of grappling with the enemy Death, the potential suicide calls upon them. One by one, they are not at home, the telephone doesn’t answer, or if it does they are busy tonight – something quite important that they can’t get away from – and one is too proud to break down and say, ‘I’ve got to see you tonight or else!’ This is the last effort to make contact. How pitiable, how human, how noble – for what is more godlike than communication? The suicide knows that it has magical powers.”

Technologies change. Lifestyle, language and sense of self alter accordingly. But, through all this, human psychology and human needs stay fundamentally the same – a fact which I find vaguely reassuring.

[This is an abridged and revised version of a piece which appeared last month at The Electric Agora.]

A few thoughts on name-calling, parody and satire

The bluntness and ruthlessness of childhood interactions is well known and name-calling is a favorite ploy in childish struggles for social dominance. Such behavioral patterns persist – albeit usually in muted or more subtle forms – in adult contexts.

The field of politics can be relied upon not only to exert a disproportionate attraction for narcissists and psychopaths (many of whom would have been playground bullies in their earlier years), but also to bring out the worst in all but those with the very highest levels of integrity and self control. Naked power games are not restricted to politics, however: they are evident in virtually every area of human life.

Literary life has always had its own (often ruthless) politics. But good writing manages to free itself, at least to some extent, from the limitations of the social matrix within which it arises. Satire and parody, for example, take what is twisted, stupid, crude, crass or childish as raw material and transmute it.

Unfortunately, technological and social changes have pretty much destroyed literary traditions. Digitization and social media have finished them off.  Writers have been marginalized and replaced by “influencers”.

The high-point of secular literary culture was arguably the 18th century. Certainly it was a golden age of satire and parody.

Satires and parodies are unusual amongst literary forms in a couple of ways. For one thing, satirical works necessarily take an activist stance whereas other literary forms need not. Satires and parodies necessarily – by their very nature – take a stand. And such works take their targets from the real world of the time. Precisely because of this engagement and topicality, they are not as self-contained as other forms and tend to date more quickly.

Henry Carey is little known today. He was a gifted satirist, librettist and writer of songs. In 1725 Carey wrote a parody of the writing style of one of his contemporaries, Ambrose Philips. The latter had pioneered a simple and direct verse style utilizing a seven-syllable line. Philips was (in the efficiently dismissive words of Ian Lancashire) “a minor poet not highly regarded then or now.”

The issues at stake were primarily aesthetic but there were also political undercurrents. Carey’s parody of Philips’s poetic style was entitled “Namby-Pamby: or, A Panegyric on the New Versification.” ‘Namby-Pamby’ is a play on Philips’s first name. The nickname was picked up by Alexander Pope and others and soon became firmly embedded in the language.

Carey’s parody begins as follows:

All ye poets of the age,
All ye witlings of the stage,
Learn your jingles to reform,
Crop your numbers and conform.
Let your little verses flow
Gently, sweetly, row by row;
Let the verse the subject fit,
Little subject, little wit.
Namby-Pamby is your guide,
Albion’s joy, Hibernia’s pride.
Namby-Pamby Pilly-piss,
Rhimy pimed on Missy-Miss;
Tartaretta Tartaree,
From the navel to the knee;
That her father’s gracy-grace
Might give him a placy-place.
[…]
Now the venal poet sings
Baby clouts and baby things,
Baby dolls and baby houses,
Little misses, little spouses,
Little playthings, little toys,
Little girls and little boys.
As an actor does his part,
So the nurses get by heart
Namby-Pamby’s little rhymes,
Little jingle, little chimes,
To repeat to little miss,
Piddling ponds of pissy-piss…

Some of Carey’s wordplay verges on nonsense, but it is highly charged and nothing like the later tradition of gentle nonsense-for-its-own-sake exemplified by the likes of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Carey’s critical engagement with contemporaries and with specific cultural and political issues marks and motivates his writing. The rivalries and controversies in question have faded into history, but the emotional energy they generated is still evident, even to the casual reader.

I conclude with a few remarks about Alexander Pope who was a master of subtle and civilized satire. When I studied 18th-century English literature as an undergraduate, I still had strong Romantic prejudices and was initially unimpressed. Heroic couplets, I have to say, are an acquired taste. But the personality of some of the writers showed through, especially (for me) Pope and his circle. I came to love Pope as a person and to admire him as a writer, for his warmth and wit and moral clarity.

Unfortunately, given the barriers that the verse form which he employed creates for today’s readers, he is no longer widely appreciated and never will be. Foreign and ancient authors can be translated and live again. But what Pope and other poets of that period said was not only closely tied to the preoccupations and personalities of the time but also inextricably bound up with a particular style of versifying. Form and content formed a fragile and contingent whole.

Those who have the patience to immerse themselves in Pope’s verse will come to realize that the technical constraints which he willingly adopted and embraced suited the tenor of his mind and allowed him to express serious moral and aesthetic judgments without sounding ponderous or pretentious. Poetic conventions also gave him more freedom than prose would have allowed to give voice to the deep affection which he felt for his friends, both men and women. (See, for example, the “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation.”)

The more combative aspects of his writing, the skewering of his attackers and other enemies (as in The Dunciad), may hold some interest for literary and intellectual historians but hardly for the general reader.

[This is an edited and abridged version of an essay of mine which was posted recently at The Electric Agora.]

Looking ahead

A short essay of mine – a minimalistic, descriptive and perhaps deflationist take on obligations and rights – was published a week ago at the new online magazine and discussion forum The Electric Agora. My name has now been added to the list of contributors: this will involve a certain commitment on my part (basically an essay every month or two, commenting and maybe other odds and ends).

The site in the process of establishing itself and I'll try to do my bit to help. It may not work out but, if it does, it gives me access to a sizable and interesting audience that I would not be able to generate on my own account.

The Electric Agora is a spinoff from Scientia Salon, Massimo Pigliucci's 'webzine' which closed down a couple of months ago. The new site was set up by Daniel Kaufman and Dan Tippens with help from Phil Pollack, all of whom were associated with Massimo and Scientia Salon.

We'll see how it goes. My first essay seems to have been a modest success. The comments were certainly interesting and, judging by the likes on the site's Facebook page and Facebook shares from the original site (which are the only stats I have access to), the essay would seem to have been read by a substantial number of people.

Conservative Tendency will continue. It remains my main site and my personal blog. I'm hoping Google will do something soon to open up commenting to people who don't want to use Google+. There are a lot of Google+ comments on my 'English Jewish surnames revisited' post and they continue to appear. I don't want to lose them or the many archived comments from the old commenting system so I am not wanting to take unilateral action to open up commenting on this (or my other blog).

And – who knows? – with more carrot and less stick the tide might turn and Google+ might suddenly take off!

The digital media landscape continues to evolve and it's hard to make long-term plans. The interactive element of blogs has to a large extent been replaced by social media, it seems. I'm wondering now whether the ready availability and increasing use of platforms like Google Docs will further undermine blogs and blogging.

As I say, I'll stay with my blogs for the foreseeable future, but if blogs in general become redundant or merge or morph into social media or other new forms, there is an upside: 'blog' is a very ugly word and I for one would be happy to see it fade into history.