The Loneliness of Nuance

The Loneliness of Nuance

Meghan Daum tells a fascinating story of her political and personal life over the past three years. As her marriage fell apart, Daum fell in love with the Intellectual Dark Web. Over time, however, Daum came to see that the unquestioning fidelity of any love affair was inconsistent with self-thinking. She recognized that her love affair with the Dark Web was driven by loneliness. Her argument mimics that of Hannah Arendt's argument that the loneliness of modern society is the foundation for ideological and totalitarian thinking.

"Enter my new friends. I found them on YouTube. Actually, I found them first through Bloggingheads.tv, a site where scholars and journalists of all ideological stripes carried on webcam conversations about the issues of the day. I was a particular fan of the monthly dialogue between the economist and professor Glenn Loury and the linguist and literature professor John McWhorter. Calling themselves "the Black Guys on Bloggingheads," they talked about racial politics with more candor and (ahem) nuance than I'd probably ever heard in my life. They even dared to do what few in the left-leaning chatterati were willing to do: hold the writer Ta-Nahisi Coates up to scrutiny. Often, it wasn't so much the author himself that they griped about, but the rote, self-congratulatory reverence displayed by Coates' white fans. This reverence was itself racist, McWhorter pointed out. This implication, if I was reading him correctly, was that Coates was good but not a god. And the need for white people to elevate him to the level of a deity constituted "a kind of soft bigotry which is as nauseating as it is unintended."

This delighted me. I learned a lot from reading Coates. But with this reading often came the nagging sense that I wasn't supposed to engage with the ideas as much as absorb them unquestioningly. He wasn't just an author but the unofficial paterfamilias of the wokescenti. (Importantly, it was not Coates making this appeal but the cultural gatekeepers surrounding him.) Privately, McWhorter was making a more eloquent version of a point I'd been trying for months to make anyone who'd listen, which was nobody....

It had been, I realized, more than three years since I'd hunkered down for the snowpocalypse in that Brooklyn apartment, watching Bloggingheads and grieving over my imminent divorce. Amid this thought came a devastating epiphany: Over these years, I'd weaned myself off the long conversation of my marriage by switching over to the conversations of Free Speech YouTube. It wasn't just political loneliness I'd felt-it was the loneliness of a partnership ended, a dialogue converted to an interior monologue. Having lost my human intellectual ally, I'd tried to rig up a new ally - or a whole group of allies - via internet videos.

I also wondered this: Maybe my bloodlust for left-on-left warfare wasn't just a petty indulgence but a substitute for the warfare of my marriage itself. My husband had been at once the best thing about my life and the worst thing. He kept me sane yet drove me crazy. I wasn't so far gone as to draw a literal comparison between my marriage and my relationship with Free Speech YouTube, but there were ways in which they were mirrors of one another. My Free Speech YouTube friends functioned as intellectual allies, yet they disappointed me as often as they bolstered me. As much I was energized by some of the quieter voices in the movement, like McWhorter, Heying, and even science historian Alice Dreger, who left academia over censorship issues and has been embraced by intellectual dark web types even as she's eschewed membership, I was growing weary of the self-conscious clubbiness of the whole thing. It's as if some of them were having the experience of high school geeks who'd suddenly been let into the popular club. They couldn't quite believe their luck, so they got matching T-shirts and wear them every day.

"It seems kind of, um, contradictory to consider us as a group since the point is we are all bad at groupthink," Dreger wrote on her blog by way of explaining why she chose not to participate in the Times article. "If the idea is that I piss people off by being disloyal to my likely tribes, well, I don't think that makes me unusual. I think it just makes me a good intellectual."

A good intellectual, maybe. But being a public intellectual - or what passes for such a thing today - requires viewpoints that can be represented by hashtags and squeezed snugly into 900-word op-eds or hot takes. When I began writing an op-ed column in 2005, a hashtag was little more than the pound sign you press for more options on a phone menu. In all the years of that gig, I was well aware that I could have raised my profile considerably by trending more predictably to the left or right. In recent years, I've more than once imagined what it would be like to share a stage with my Free Speech YouTube friends. I remember how good it felt to wear those matching college sweatshirts at the pro-choice march in Washington. There's a part of me that would love to put on a T-shirt and ride off with my friends into the intellectual dark web sunset. (That sunset looks a lot like an in-home podcast studio or an invitation to an "ideas festival.")

But if there's anything I've learned from divorce - the divorce from my husband as well as the divorce from the illusion of ideological kinship with many of my friends - is that the more honest we are about what we think, the more we're alone with our thoughts. Just as you can't fight Trumpism with tribalism, you can't fight tribalism with a tribe. Nor, I've come to realize, can I count on nuance in the public discourse to save me from the confusion inside my head. Maybe all I can do - maybe all anyone can do - is try to keep nuance as a private practice, a silent meditation, a personal vow to be renewed at least once every 24-hour news cycle. Maybe all I can do is accept that this story is neither a romance nor a breakup story, but a love story in the truest sense. It's the story of that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone."

The Socialist Freedom

Corey Robin argues that the reason for the popularity and (limited) success of candidates who identify as democratic socialists is not a concern with poverty. It is that socialist candidates speak the language of freedom.

"Since the 1970s, American liberals have taken a right turn on the economy. They used to champion workers and unions, high taxes, redistribution, regulation and public services. Now they lionize billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, deregulate wherever possible, steer clear of unions except at election time and at least until recently, fight over how much to cut most people's taxes.

 

Liberals, of course, argue that they are merely using market-friendly tools like tax cuts and deregulation to achieve things like equitable growth, expanded health care and social justice - the same ends they always have pursued. For decades, left-leaning voters have gone along with that answer, even if they didn't like the results, for lack of an alternative.

 

It took Mr. Sanders to convince them that if tax credits and insurance exchanges are the best liberals have to offer to men and women struggling to make stagnating wages pay for bills that skyrocket and debt that never dissipates, maybe socialism is worth a try.

 

Socialism means different things to different people. For some, it conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag; for others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. But neither is the true vision of socialism. What the socialist seeks is freedom.

 

Under capitalism, we're forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as synonymous with freedom. But socialists hear "the market" and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn't cover her child's appendectomy. Under capitalism, we're forced to submit to the boss. Terrified of getting on his bad side, we bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse - just to get that raise or make sure we don't get fired.

 

The socialist argument against capitalism isn't that it makes us poor. It's that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival."

The Limits of Philanthropy

Anand Giridharadas argues that the turn to philanthropy as a way to "change the world" may lead to individual acts of humanity, but it leaves the systems of injustice untouched.

""Change the world" has long been the cry of the oppressed. But in recent years world-changing has been co-opted by the rich and the powerful.

"Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new," McKinsey & Company'srecruiting materials say. "Sit back, relax, and change the world," tweets the World Economic Forum, host of the Davos conference. "Let's raise the capital that builds the things that change the world," a Morgan Stanley ad says. Walmart, recruiting a software engineer, seeks an "eagerness to change the world." Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says, "The best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company."

At first, you think: Rich people making a difference - so generous! Until you consider that America might not be in the fix it's in had we not fallen for the kind of change these winners have been selling: fake change.

Fake change isn't evil; it's milquetoast. It is change the powerful can tolerate. It's the shoes or socks or tote bag you bought which promised to change the world. It's that one awesome charter school - not equally funded public schools for all. It is Lean In Circles to empower women - not universal preschool. It is impact investing - not the closing of the carried-interest loophole....

A successful society is a progress machine, turning innovations and fortuitous developments into shared advancement. America's machine is broken. Innovations fly at us, but progress eludes us. A thousand world-changing initiatives won't change that. Instead, we must reform the basic systems that allow people to live decently - the systems that decide what kind of school children attend, whether politicians listen to donors or citizens, whether or not people can tend to their ailments, whether they are paid enough, and with sufficient reliability, to make plans and raise kids."