I Came To The Cities In A Time Of Disorder
By chance I was spared.
I’ve been told that if you put a link toward the beginning of a piece rather than burying it at the end, people are more likely to click it. Big, if true. So before we proceed here’s a shameless plug for my book about the Pacific Crest Trail, A Good Place for Maniacs.
In keeping with my being terrible at self-promotion, I’m also realizing that I never really ask people to subscribe to this newsletter outside of the last line of these very long dispatches. So hey, here’s an opportunity to do that. This newsletter will always be free because I don’t want this to be a job. (No disrespect to my friends with paid newsletters, which I enjoy immensely.) Feel free to click here if you want this in your inbox instead of having to find it when I post it on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s stifling in Seattle this week and the weather has killed whatever degree of careless ease that I can achieve in my writing. Wires aren’t connecting my brain the right way, is how it feels. The blank draft on the editor page here has become something of a chore to confront instead of a boundless landscape of possibility. (You can tell I’m struggling to accomplish much by how tortured the rest of the sentences in this paragraph are. Sheesh.)
These situations typically either call for airplane mode and a hard brain reset or, more commonly, leaning on other people’s words to get going. This week the piece of writing I can’t stop coming back to is Bertolt Brecht’s “To Posterity,” which despite being written more than 80 years ago seems to have predicted much of how I would feel today. (I’m not sure if that should make me feel better or worse: that things have always seemed bleak and irresolvable to those who were paying attention, or that things have always been bleak and irresolvable.)
The whole poem is a punch in the gut, but this section stands out in particular.
It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.
This is the irreconcilable moral quandary of the individual who wants to do good while living in the imperial core: whether or not it’s permissible to enjoy things when it seems like nothing should be enjoyed, a question asked both before and (uselessly) after the fact of the enjoyment.
Brecht’s lament toward the end of the poem humanizes this kind of despair.
You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think —
When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.
We are so steeped in the supremacy of the individual that almost all of our political choices are both tortured and essentially meaningless. Thomas Frank spoke to this idea in a recent essay:
Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse.
The piece is called “US in the spring of the pandemic,” a brief accounting of the forces that rendered our nation’s healthcare system so unable to meet the threats posed by COVID-19. We can’t confront a crisis like this with individual gumption; everything is too connected, too dependent on everything else. I think Frank threads the needle here quite well—that our attitudes about other people are certainly choices, and ones that do have political consequences in that they constrain our view of the possible; despite this, a commitment to perfecting the self or making perfect political choices will not really move the needle. We’re all too interconnected—and too removed from the levers of power—for that to matter on any kind of scale.
Today only those farmers and industrial workers stand between us and the abyss. Many of them are out there risking their lives in the virus-sphere every day. Others are being ordered back to work at their low-wage jobs regardless of their vulnerability to Covid-related death. They are falling ill in the grocery stores and the meat-packing plants while the white-collar, information-age types who order them to work sit safely at home, working by email and Internet conference, and enjoy a miraculously rising stock market, courtesy of Congress and the Federal Reserve.
Frank continues:
The American system of healthcare-for-profit, constructed over the decades with the enthusiastic input of both political parties, has shown itself incapable of rising to the pandemic challenge. For a simple reason: it wasn’t built for purposes of public health. In my lifetime, the underlying assumption of that system has always been that healthcare is a privilege; you get access to it by being a successful and prosperous person. It is a meritocratic system in the way it rewards high-achieving doctors and innovative pharma scientists, and in the way it parcels out care. Poor people with lousy or no insurance who want their broken bones and organ failure healed are routinely bankrupted by astonishing medical bills. The suggestion that we should stop bankrupting such people and instead give them free tests or treatment for Covid-19 is so contrary to the consensus view of healthcare in this country that it is difficult to see how this necessary step is to be taken. The psychological breach with how we have always thought about healthcare will be wrenching.
One of the manifestations of the individual helplessness echoed by Brecht and Frank is the proliferation of the teachable pastel-colored Instagram story. I am growing to hate these things. In my kinder moments I believe that this kind of re-sharing is ultimately not an act of preachy hectoring, but the result of otherwise good people being asked to reckon with and participate in the imperialist capitalist death machine in whose heart we all live. That’s an impossible task, really; it’s hard to be aware of all of these things and also go about generally feeling good about one’s life. (As Brecht clearly understood.) The political framework presented to the average American is also not a particularly useful one and as such I think people are also feeling a little bit stuck and helpless: “Yeah I know Joe Biden’s a creep, and he wasn’t my first pick, but you’d better get out there and fight for him.”
lol
Here’s the thing about scolding: it doesn’t work, really; even if it did, I don’t think it would be a desirable way of operating in the political world. I talk about solidarity all the time, solidarity being a thing in practice that is diametrically opposed to scolding.
A piece of writing that has informed the way I think about solidarity and activism and my function as a white person in this world is this piece from The Nation, helpfully titled “White Anti-Racism Must Be Based in Solidarity, Not Altruism.”
In it, Jesse Myerson reflects on the standard mode of operating for white people in social justice circles (or, more likely, on social media):
White people are encouraged to defer, shrink, and assist. It is not our fight, the white-altruism mode says, so we must strive to decenter ourselves and support black people’s “advancement” as peripheral allies, doing what kindnesses we can to compensate them for the privileges we enjoy. We must reliably articulate non-racist positions using suitably non-racist terminology, correct white people who fail to do these, and under no circumstances use racist language out in the open.
Not that people shouldn’t interrupt racist personal acts or respect the expertise of people of color regarding how racism plays out in their lives and communities, but that alone does not constitute a strategy. At best, these interruptions and this deference are a woefully inadequate response to systemic racism. At worst, white altruism is a recipe for disaster.
White altruism is never going to be a functional basis for advancing our society along, Myerson argues, not only because you’re never going to convince enough people to act that way, but because doing so represents a fundamental misreading of the forces that act on the lives of most people, including most white people. What we have instead—which, if seized upon, is actually far more impactful if we want to grab those levers of power at any point—is a material basis for realizing that our liberation is bound up in everyone else’s.
In each of these cases, the millions of lower-class white people whose lives are materially damaged have a firm basis for teaming up with the other nonwhite members of their class in opposition to the racist politics that fuel the policies hurting them. Poor and working-class white people are suffering under white supremacy, and have good reason to demand that they too be freed from it.
Myerson continues:
White people in and adjacent to poverty have solid grounds for this type of solidarity; they are directly victimized by a politics that relies on racist rhetorical appeals. The cycle works the same way time and again: Politicians gin up fear of a racist mythological problem, and propose a solution that harms poor and working-class people of all colors—while consolidating wealth and power for the (almost entirely) white rich.
(A helpful expansion on that last sentence can be found in the work on the racial wealth gap from the People’s Policy Project.)
The following segment—a lengthy one, I told you weeks like these require leaning heavily on the writing of other people—has really affected the way I think for the past two years. Emphasis mine:
Solidarity requires that we rethink “privilege.” At present, white anti-racism demands intense examinations of and attempts to correct for privilege. To build solidarity, we must shift away from this practice and toward a demand for universal rights. As long as anti-racist white people remain fixated on privilege at the expense of all else, we remain divided from black people and relegated to the role of, at best, helpful allies. If we can shift to a universal-rights framework, we recast ourselves as all on the same team.
…On the one hand, “privilege” refers to things nobody ought to have, such as the power to dominate discussions, the feeling of entitlement to the body of another person, and the unthinking assumption that comes with social hegemony: that your experiences are the default. We should indeed pay attention to such dynamics, remaining vigilant about white people’s systematic conditioning to behave in ways that exasperate teammates or cause them pain or fear.
On the other hand, it refers to things everybody ought to have. This is where the “privilege” framework can be harmful. For example, I am said to be “privileged,” because my housing has always been dependable, I have never been deprived of nutritious food, I have been able to access treatment and surgery when I have been sick or injured, I have not only received a quality education but had some say in its direction, my periods of unemployment have been brief, and I have enjoyed the free time and freedom of movement and communication necessary to pursue art, inquiry, social life, and other sorts of joy and fulfillment.
Those are human rights, and calling them “privileges” undermines the fight to get them universally respected. Freedom, dignity, and democracy are due to everyone. If the lives of other people are less free and less dignified than mine, if they are denied the say I’m afforded in the systems that affect them, that is not a matter of their lacking my degree of privilege but of their rights being violated.
The baseline matters. Describing human rights as “privileges” uses destitution as the baseline. When people work from that baseline and treat every step above it as another “privilege,” we are affirming the right-wing idea that we naturally have nothing, that we have to ruthlessly compete just to get by. But when we talk of “universal rights,” the baseline shoots way up to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom from want and fear. That is the life we all deserve; that is the life we are owed.
In keeping with our theme for the week I’ll close with some lines from Brecht that are perhaps more hopeful, or at least less desperate. I hope you’ll join me in taking up the message.
Forward, without forgetting
Till the concrete question is hurled
When starving or when eating:
Whose tomorrow is tomorrow?
And whose world is the world?
Talk to you next week.
-Chuck
So much to chew on here, as usual. The big picture is so hard to see, but you do a wonderful job of helping us try to bring it into focus.