Beth Bucciferro, Author at Liberties

The Peripheralist

During Black History Month earlier this year, the New York City streetwear boutique Alife brought to market a limited set of six heather grey hooded sweatshirts made of heavyweight, pre-shrunk fourteen-ounce cotton fleece, with ribbed cuffs and waist. The garments, whose sole decorative flourish were the names of black cultural icons — from Harriet Tubman to Marcus Garvey — screen-printed in sans-serif across the chest, retailed for $138 a pop and sold out promptly. Of the six men and women featured in the campaign, there was only one writer: James Baldwin.

On Instagram, to promote its product, the brand deployed a short clip of Baldwin’s extraordinary debate against William F. Buckley, Jr., on the theme “Is the American Dream at the Price of the Negro?” at the Cambridge Union in 1965 — a grainy YouTube gem beloved by aficionados that was recently brought to mainstream attention in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro. A friend messaged the post to me accompanied by the Thinking Face emoji, finger and thumb against the chin, a look of skepticism. I responded differently. I wasn’t incredulous about this cultural commoditization: Baldwin’s name had long since become a kind of shorthand, an emblem of a position — a way, increasingly fashionable in its own right, to signal which side of any number of contested issues of the day one wishes to come down on.

Jean-Paul Sartre once described the young Albert Camus as “the admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work,” by which he meant, simply, that there was no daylight between his life and his ideas, and it was impossible to think of one without conjuring the other. In an essay for the New York Review of Books in 1963, in which she contrasted morally virtuous if artistically second-tier writers (“husbands”) with perverse and reckless but exciting geniuses (“lovers”), Susan Sontag took Sartre’s observation as a springboard for a merciless review of Camus’ posthumously published Notebooks. “Today only the work remains,” she asserted. “And whatever the conjunction of man, action, and work inspired in the minds and hearts of his thousands of readers and admirers cannot be wholly reconstituted by experience of the work alone.” Elsewhere she expanded the critique:

Whenever Camus is spoken of there is a mingling of personal, moral, and literary judgment. No discussion of Camus fails to include, or at least suggest, a tribute to his goodness and attractiveness as a man. To write about Camus is thus to consider what occurs between the image of a writer and his work, which is tantamount to the relation between morality and literature. For it is not only that Camus himself is always thrusting the moral problem upon his readers. … It is because his work, solely as a literary accomplishment, is not major enough to bear the weight of admiration that readers want to give it. One wants Camus to be a truly great writer, not just a very good one. But he is not. It might be useful here to compare Camus with George Orwell and James Baldwin, two other husbandly writers who essay to combine the role of artist with civic conscience.

What occurs between the image of a writer and her work: the same problem afflicts the reception of Sontag herself. Still, she has a point. She writes elsewhere that Camus, as a novelist, attained a different altitude than either Orwell or Baldwin, but I have never been able to unsee that dressing down of all three “husbandly” men, Baldwin in particular, or to entirely dislodge him from her framework. As the years accumulate and Baldwin’s image and moral authority become ever more flattened, ever more frequently appropriated for the preoccupations of the present moment — with the most casual assumption of self-evidence — something in Sontag’s refusal to play along nags at me. In any event, and even though Baldwin, later in his career, wrote that he had “never esteemed [Camus] as highly as do so many others,” I have always found it useful to think of him as a kind of Harlem companion to the scholarship student from Algeria who became — and then failed to remain — his nation’s moral compass, who was blessed with the same gift of preternatural eloquence, and who struggled mightily and elegantly and perhaps vainly to bridge the disparate worlds that he straddled.

Like Camus, a decade his senior, James Baldwin was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century in squalor, about as far as possible — spiritually if not physically — from the glittering intellectual circles that he would come to dominate. Both young men were total packages, publishing stories, novels, plays, essays, reviews and reportage after having exploded on the scene fully formed in their twenties. Likewise, both men rose to global stardom outside their home countries, specifically in Paris, and peaked at an age when others only start to hit their stride — more or less around forty. Unlike Camus, Baldwin was not exactly fatherless, but it was necessary for him to eliminate one such figure after another to make space in his life for his own prodigious talent. In this sense, he was every bit the “first man” that Camus intended. By the time that Baldwin died of stomach cancer in the sunbaked Mediterranean village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence — not so far from the equally picturesque medieval town of Lourmarin, where Camus invested his Nobel money and is buried—he too was regarded as passé by a generation of readers no longer interested in reconciling differences or avoiding conflict. “Unfortunately, moral beauty in art — like physical beauty in a person — is extremely perishable,” Sontag warned. Baldwin did have the good fortune to have won at least two very influential younger champions in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Toni Morrison. But it was not at all a foregone conclusion that he would become, in the next three decades, nothing less than the pop culture patron saint of an entire generation of black (and increasingly non-black) artists, activists, and writers, in America and beyond. I am referring to the generation that came of intellectual age during the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement, which defined this decade’s response to the spate of highly publicized police and vigilante killings of unarmed African Americans, beginning with Trayvon Martin’s murder in Sanford, Florida in 2012. The enormous renewal of attention paid to Baldwin — which, at least until the coronavirus catapulted The Plague back onto bestseller lists around the world, had eluded Camus — has certainly been merited and illuminating. It has also been reductive and disturbing.

Poor, black, and not straight — intersectional avant la lettre — Baldwin fits seamlessly, as very few icons from the past are able to do, into the readymade template of our era’s obsession with identity. (Even Sontag, a near-exact contemporary who outlived him by almost twenty years, could not entirely bring herself to admit that she was gay.) Books about Baldwin abound, biographical and literary and political studies, and films too: a cottage industry of Baldwiniana has emerged over the past decade. The most sensational entry in the contest for Baldwin’s halo would have to be Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, his letter to his teenaged son that was formally modeled on the first section of Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time, called “My Dungeon Shook: an open letter to my nephew.” The motor of Coates’ essay was the question that Baldwin debated with Buckley — is the American Dream at the price of the Negro? In his own response to that question, Coates divided America into two essentialized camps, the “Dreamers” and a permanent black underclass. Between the World and Me went on to become one of the most widely read and discussed works of nonfiction in the new century.

In the book’s sole blurb, the late Morrison herself enthused: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” More than anything else, that endorsement bound the two men together in the public’s imagination. In his biography of Balwin, which appeared last year, Bill V. Mullen goes so far as to argue that Between the World and Me “was singularly responsible for the rediscovery of Baldwin by the Black Lives Matter movement.” Whether or not that is true, five years out a certain irony is clear: Morrison’s remark and Coates’ success had an even greater impact on the way we perceive Baldwin than the way we do Coates.

Despite the hard-won optimism and ardent emphasis on reconciliation and regeneration through love that distinguishes his work, there is an undeniably pessimistic strain in Baldwin that often rings prophetic today. Drawing on this latter element alone, Coates captured and vocalized the profound disappointment provoked by the many limitations of the first black presidency. Between the World and Me, which so frankly and forcefully embodied the rage and justifiable frustration of an historically oppressed people with a rising set of expectations, rhetorically homed in on a single (mostly but not entirely late-phase) blue note in Baldwin’s catalogue of sonorities. If there is a problem here, it is not that Coates’ version of Baldwin rings altogether false. But it is tendentiously selective. It is a simplifying and coarsening distillation of a versatile and multifaceted writer, a supple and self-contradictory writer, into a single dark and haranguing register. In the process we are made to sacrifice a large amount of the complexity that made the author of Giovanni’s Room and Another Country so special and difficult to pin. Baldwin is revered, but he is lost.

Consider also that Oscar-nominated Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. Though a decade in the making, the project arrived at and helped to define the Baldwin renaissance. The film takes as its impetus Baldwin’s thirty-page unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, which he described in a letter to his agent in 1979 as an exploration of race in America told through the assassinations of three prominent Civil Rights leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Onto this frame Peck grafts footage of Baldwin at roundtables and debates, familiar and jarring archival clips of violent white reaction to Civil Rights progress, such as school and bus integration, as well as contemporary shots of charged police confrontations with activists in Ferguson and elsewhere. There are no interviews with scholars and experts, no talking heads. Peck calculates correctly that Baldwin’s words alone will carry the film (he is the sole writer credited on the project), whether spoken directly or read with understated authority by the actor Samuel L. Jackson. The effect is exhilarating — Baldwin’s language is always captivating and lucid; he needs no translation or amplification. Even the wildly charismatic Jackson refrains from any attempt to compete with the words that he reads, which were written by a former child preacher in Harlem who was one of the few great writers in recent memory to be an equal or better public speaker, a distinction that the film makes thrillingly apparent.

Yet I Am Not Your Negro inadvertently makes manifest some of the incongruities between the smooth new radical mythology of the writer and the man as he actually existed and co-existed with the cultural forces and major personalities of his era. Though it purports to tease out important connections — “I want these three lives to bang against each other,” Baldwin writes of the project — we learn very little about the relationship between him and the trio of martyrs he set out to examine in Remember This House. This is both because those leaders, while they knew and understood each other, did not really constitute a fraternity of any sort, and also — perhaps more importantly — because it can be expedient to avoid the complexity and contradictions of Baldwin’s own insecure position within the actually existing black America, to and from which he remained throughout his adulthood a permanent “transatlantic commuter.”

Of the three, he may have experienced the most straight-forward fellowship with the Mississippi activist Medgar Evers, the youngest of the group and the first to be murdered. Malcolm X was explicit, however, that what he sought was a “real” revolution, not the “pseudo revolt” of someone like James Baldwin. And Martin Luther King, Jr., as Douglas Field shows in All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin, once balked — in a conversation taped by the F.B.I. — at appearing alongside the writer on television, claiming to be “put off by the poetic exaggeration in Baldwin’s approach to race issues.” It is hard to imagine that he could have been unaware that Baldwin was being denigrated as “Martin Luther Queen” in civil-rights circles.

Baldwin himself was understandably eager to emphasize and even embellish his connection to such extraordinary and sacrificial figures, especially King, but their realities were highly incommensurate on a variety of levels. In his memoir No Name in the Street, in 1972, there is a revealing set piece in which Baldwin writes about buying a nice dark-blue suit for a scheduled appearance with King at Carnegie Hall. Two weeks later, after the latter was brutally assassinated, it would be Baldwin’s attire for his funeral. Early in the Peck film we hear Baldwin worry over his role as a “witness” and not an “actor” in the convulsions of his time, only to resolve the apparent discrepancy by declaring that the two roles are separated by a “thin line indeed.” In his attempts to write himself over that line and into proximity with men like Evers, King, and Malcolm and by extension into the center of the civil rights struggle — to collapse that space between man, action, and work — Baldwin at once underestimated a crucial distinction (as well as his own specialness) while also betraying his insurmountable distance from all of them. Darryl Pinckney, in a review of the Library of America’s edition of Baldwin’s writings, kindled to Baldwin’s comment to a newspaper journalist that he would never be able to wear that suit again:

A friend of Baldwin’s, a US postal worker whom he rarely saw, had seen the newspaper story and, because they were the same size, asked for the suit that to Baldwin was “drenched in the blood of all the crimes of my country.” Baldwin went up to Harlem in a hired “Cadillac limousine” in order to avoid the humiliation of watching taxis not stop for him, a black man. His life came into the “unspeakably respectable” apartment of his friend like “the roar of champagne and the odor of brimstone.” He characterizes himself as he assumes he must have appeared to his friend’s family: “an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak.”

His friend had also “made it” — holder of a civil-service job; builder of a house next to his mother’s on Long Island. Baldwin was incredulous that his friend had no interest in the civil rights struggle. They got into an argument about Vietnam. Baldwin says he realized then that the suit belonged to his friend and to his friend’s family. “The blood in which the fabric of that suit was stiffening was theirs,” and the distance between him and them was that they did not know this.

The story is tortured and yet, regardless of Baldwin’s outrage at indifference or his identification with slain civil rights leaders, there is something wrongly insinuating about his depicting his scarcely worn suit as drenched and stiffening with blood, even metaphorical blood. People still remember what Jesse Jackson’s shirt looked like after King was shot.

This slightly frivolous side of Baldwin can just be glimpsed in I Am Not Your Negro (and is almost totally absent from the new hagiography). “I was never in town to stay,” he admits on the film, and after Evers’ death we do hear Jackson read, “Months later, I was in Puerto Rico, working on a play,” as the camera reveals a sparkling beachscape. But he assumes his comparative privilege in No Name in the Street, where he notes that, when King was murdered, he was ensconced in Palm Springs, working on an unrealized screenplay for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. After the emotional and rhetorical shift to Black Power at the end of the ’60s, many of Baldwin’s contemporaries and descendants wrote him off — much the same way that intellectuals and radicals in Algeria and Paris turned their backs on Camus — considering him too enamored of his own voice and far too comfortable in the white world. No Name in the Street, like much of Baldwin’s later output, can be read as a kind of overture to these critics, a capitulation to the new rules of engagement.

“I was in some way in those years, without realizing it, the great white hope of the great white father,” Baldwin concedes. “I was not a racist, or so I thought. Malcolm was a racist, or so they thought. In fact we were simply trapped in the same situation.” In actual fact their situations were very different and those differences are worth thinking through — not wishing away — because they help to explain why their worldviews differed, too. Baldwin was in London when Malcolm was murdered. In the epilogue of No Name in the Street, just a beat after he writes that “the Western party is over, and the white man’s sun has set. Period,” he signs off “New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, London, Istanbul, St. Paul de Vence.” Unlike Malcolm X, there were plenty of lovely and welcoming places where James Baldwin could go, Pinckney mordantly notes, “to remind himself that he felt trapped.”

Yet he did not invent his own marginality. It is no exaggeration to say that he was in some crucial ways homeless. In 1950, with a reasoning that anticipates the desire of today’s #ADOS movement to disentangle the all-American experience of descendants of slaves from any larger pseudo-biological notion of international blackness — to say nothing of that infinitely fuzzier category “people of color” — Baldwin wrote in his essay “Encounter on the Seine” that “they face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years — an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening’s good will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech.” In Paris, he discovered what he could not recognize under the specific conditions of racial bigotry in New York City, and what he could never entirely disavow once he had experienced it: “I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found that my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris.”

That revelation comes in Nobody Knows My Name, his phenomenal second essay collection: “Like me, they had been divorced from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African — they were no more at home in Europe than I was.” This is the Baldwin that the new revival has tended to gloss over or outright ignore. It is what distinguishes Baldwin from so many of his contemporaries and ours. This is the mature Baldwin, the wise Baldwin, the Baldwin who seethes at injustice but is not duped by the excesses of radicalism. It is the writer whose message — while not quite tailor-made to sell sweatshirts — is ultimately persuasive and always necessary. There can be an uncanny Benjamin Button-sense to reading Baldwin in chrono-logical order: it can feel as if the young man and not the elder is the all-accomplished, all-knowing sage. Here is that young-old man in his astonishing debut collection, Notes of a Native Son, recalling his birthday in 1943, which also happened to be the day that his father died and his sister was born. Riots in Harlem had erupted after a white police officer and a black soldier clashed in a hotel lobby in a dispute over a woman:

Negro girls, white policemen, in or out of uniform, and Negro males — in or out of uniform — were part of the furniture of the lobby of the Hotel Braddock and this was certainly not the first time such an incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an unprecedented publicity, for the fight between the policeman and the soldier ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, flowing immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been shot in the back, an instantaneous and revealing invention, and that the soldier had died protecting a Negro woman. The facts were somewhat different — for example, the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because the invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

Later in the essay, in words he would live by to the end, he writes, “In order really to hate white people, one has to blot out so much of the mind — and the heart — that this hatred becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose.” And he continues, magnificently: “That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction.”

I would like to believe that Baldwin never grew out of such views, that he remained an outsider — a peripheralist, as my own father might say — his entire life; and that this is one of the reasons he lived out his final seventeen years in Provence and could never quite bring himself back to America. He paid huge costs to remain semi-aloof, one of which might be the risk of permanent misunderstanding, even in his posthumous homecoming — but I am convinced that this ability to stand apart, this refusal to be completely subsumed and taken over by any group or collectivity, is what ultimately spared him from the all-consuming identity myopia that plagued his era and now plagues ours. He was not a Black Muslim or a Black Panther, he observed, “because I did not believe all white people were devils and I did not want young black people to believe that.” The simple decency of that sentence still holds the power to shock. It is the kind of correct-to-the-point-of-seeming-naïve insight that puts me in mind of Camus, the belief of a naturally humane and moral man, which we are desperately in need of in this age of opportunism and distrust.

None of this is to imply that Baldwin was ever less than lucid about the nature and tenacity of American racism. Baldwin in his nobility was nobody’s fool. One of the most powerful sequences in I Am Not Your Negro is instructive about what makes him, today, such an irresistible figure. Here at last we see him in crackling black-and-white in the company of two of the three martyrs. Here we encounter the “conjunction of man, action, and work” of which Sontag spoke. On a panel moderated by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier — there was so much aggregated brilliance and iconography assembled there! — a weary-look-ing King and an implacable Malcolm appear as dignified props for an immensely thoughtful Baldwin, who speaks stirringly of the “vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority.” Peck cuts to recent black-and-white images of contemporary American police on a war footing, storming through the streets of Fergu-son. “I’m terrified at the moral apathy,” Baldwin says, “these people have deluded themselves for so long that they really do think I’m not human. It means that they have themselves become moral monsters.” Now the screen floods with color as nostalgic mid-century shots of an all-white beauty pageant, and young white women frolicking in spotless ensembles against a radiant blue sky, wash over the viewer. The dissonance of the juxtaposition is excruciating, undeniable.

How are we ever to find our way out of this conundrum? Baldwin hit upon some of the answers. Late in life he seemed to return to a complex understanding of struggle that contrasts with the victim-oppressor binary to which the discourse that overtook him adheres. “It seemed to me that if I took the role of a victim then I was simply reassuring the defenders of the status quo,” he told The Paris Review shortly before he died. “As long as I was a victim they could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home-relief check. Nothing would change in that way. . . . It was beneath me to blame anybody for what happened to me.” And in “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” his essay in The New Yorker in 1962 that became The Fire Next Time, he was even clearer. “For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion,” he wrote. “And the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,” he continued. “I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.”

A dozen years later the Israeli-Palestinian writer Emile Habibi coined the wonderful term “pessoptimist” for the title of a satirical novel. I cannot think of a better way to describe the mottled sensibility and variegated conscience that Baldwin brought to black American life and letters. He was repulsed by the stark, cliché-ridden, and fatalistic “Afro-pessimism” that we have become conditioned to espouse, and to tweet; nor was his understanding of race anything like the Panglossian self-hating optimism for which contemporaneous critics such as Eldridge Cleaver excoriated him. To reduce him to either pole in Habibi’s paradox is as irresponsible as it is boring. A great deal hangs on the proper interpretation of James Baldwin’s work and legacy. Even more than Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., and certainly more than Ralph Ellison, his principal African American rival in talent, James Baldwin has become one of the primary arenas in which the most urgent questions — the meanings of the past, the possibilities of the future — of black American life are being contested today. These are not idle feuds. The stakes of getting his reputation right extend well beyond literary disputations.

Last May, the excruciating videotaped killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man in Minneapolis on whose neck a white police officer kneeled for nearly nine minutes, was yet another brutal and galvanizing cause for pessimism, as Baldwin would rightly have told us. It is at once astonishing and unbearable that our society (and not just white society, as George Zimmerman and other killers “of color” grimly attest) can still produce so many instances of appalling cruelty and injustice, instances which disproportionately target blacks. And yet even as we condemn such evil, our indignation cannot support a total or unending negativity. Baldwin would have admonished us about this, too. It would be just as disastrous a misjudgment of the schizophrenic American reality to argue that nothing (or next to nothing) has changed, that “lynchings” continue to define the black experience some two decades into the twenty-first century, as it would be to dismiss the very specific and incontrovertible familiarity and dread with which so many black Americans viewed that stomach-turning footage from Minneapolis. What is so challenging — but all the more essential for its difficulty — for its absurdity, you could say — is to keep in mind two competing ideas simultaneously. The fight for justice must not end merely in blind revenge or catharsis. The struggle demands not just fury and resentment, but also hope and wisdom.

In maintaining such ambiguity, in defending such complexity, we are left with a single abiding truth: evil is always with us because it is one of the permanent conditions of humankind. Black people — like all other peoples forced to recognize up close the mixed-up character of life, its inextricable tangle of lights and darks — must become connoisseurs of pessimism and optimism to equal degrees. In his moral and intellectual capaciousness, Baldwin models this pessoptimistic mentality on and off the page. In this way his work (as opposed to the compressed and glib image that we are increasingly sold) is mimetic of American reality itself — plenty of which may turn out to be irreconcilable in the end, but none of which is ever enough to justify a single response in every season. Whatever our way out of our racial pain, it will be complicated and fitful and without fully satisfying once-and-for-all resolutions. Much like the context that created him, it is not necessary or even desirable to admire everything that James Baldwin said or did. But he exists to discomfit us, and to call us beyond tidy conclusions and easy emotions. He is forever inconvenient, which is why he is exactly what we need.

The Indian Tragedy

Earlier this year, the Republic of India turned seventy. On January 26, 1950, the country adopted a new Constitution, which severed all ties with the British Empire, mandated multi-party democracy based on universal adult franchise, abolished caste and gender distinctions, awarded equal rights of citizenship to religious minorities, and in myriad other ways broke with the feudal, hierarchical, and sectarian past. The chairman of the Drafting Committee was the great scholar B. R. Ambedkar, himself a “Dalit,” born into the lowest and most oppressed strata of Indian society, and representative in his person and his beliefs of the sweeping social and political transformations that the document promised to bring about.

The drafting of the Constitution took three whole years. Between December 1946 and December 1949, its provisions were discussed threadbare in an Assembly whose members included the country’s most influential politicians (spanning the ideological spectrum, from atheistic Communists to orthodox Hindus and all shades in between) as well as leading economists, lawyers, and women’s rights activists. When these deliberations concluded, and it fell to Ambedkar to introduce the final document — with 395 Articles and 12 Schedules, the longest of its kind in the history of the democratic world — to the Assembly, he issued some warnings, of which at least one was strikingly prophetic. He invoked John Stuart Mill in asking Indians not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions.” There was “nothing wrong,” said Ambedkar, “in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness.” His worry was that “for India, bhakti, or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country. Bhakti, in religion, may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship, is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

When he spoke those words, Ambedkar may have had the possible deification of the recently martyred Mahatma Gandhi in mind. But his remarks seem uncannily prescient about the actual deification of a later and lesser Gandhi. In the early 1970s, politicians of the ruling Congress Party began speaking of how “India is Indira and Indira is India,” a process that culminated, as Ambedkar had foreseen, in political degradation and eventual dictatorship. In June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, jailed all opposition politicians, and imposed a strict regime of press censorship. This was a time of fear and terror, which lasted almost two years, and ended when Mrs. Gandhi — provoked in part by criticism from Western liberals and in part by her own conscience — ended the Emergency and called for fresh elections, which she and her party lost.

If one is reminded of Ambedkar’s warning when reflecting on the career of Indira Gandhi, it brings to mind even more starkly the career of India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. In terms of their upbringing and ideological formation, no two Indian politicians could be more different than Modi and Mrs. Gandhi. One witnessed enormous hardship while growing up; the other was raised in an atmosphere of social and economic privilege. One had his worldview shaped by the many years he spent in the Hindu supremacist organization, the Rashtriya Swamaysevak Sangh (RSS); the other was deeply influenced by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who detested the RSS. One has no family; the other had children and grandchildren. One had to work his way up the ladder of Indian politics, step by step; the other had a lateral entry into a high position purely on account of her birth.

And yet there are significant commonalities. These very different personal biographies notwithstanding, it has long seemed to me that there are striking similarities in their political styles. Back in 2013, I wrote in The Hindu that “neither Mr. Modi’s admirers nor his critics may like this, but the truth is that of all Indian politicians past and present, the person Gujarat Chief Minister most resembles is Indira Gandhi of the period 1971–77. Like Mrs. Gandhi once did, Mr. Modi seeks to make his party, his government, his administration and his country an extension of his personality.” At the time the article was published, the Chief Minister of the western state of Gujarat was making his national ambitions explicit. Fifteen months later, Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning, under his leadership, the first full majority in Parliament of any party since 1984. Modi’s time in office has seemed to confirm the parallels between him and Indira Gandhi. As she had once done, he cut the other leaders in his party down to size; sought to tame the press; used the civil services, the diplomatic corps and the investigative agencies as political instruments; and corralled the resources of the state to build a personality cult around himself.

In January 2020, when the Republic of India turned seventy, Narendra Modi was facing his first serious challenge since he became Prime Minister six years earlier. Modi’s ideological formation in the RSS had convinced him that India’s destiny was to be a “Hindu Rashtra” — a theocratic state run by Hindus and in the interests of Hindus alone. In his first term as Prime Minister, Modi had kept these beliefs largely under wraps. But when he was re-elected with a large majority in May 2019, the majoritarian agenda came strongly to the fore. On August 5, 2019, the government of India abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution, which accorded cultural and political autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This was done unilaterally, without consulting the people of the state (as the law required them to do). It was a wanton intervention in one of the most dangerous areas of contention in the world. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was abruptly converted into a mere “Union Territory.” It was henceforth to be ruled directly by New Delhi, preparatory to what the rulers of India called a “full integration with the Nation,” which the people of the Kashmir Valley feared would result in an invasion of their land by grasping outsiders and a transformation of this Muslim-majority state into a Hindu colony.

Worse was to follow. In early December, the Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This sought to give Indian citizenship to people fleeing religious persecution in three countries: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Act was illogical — it ignored the largest group of stateless refugees in India, the Tamils from Sri Lanka; and it was also spiteful, for it had carefully specified that Muslims from any country, however persecuted they might be, would not get refuge in India. Moreover, the Modi government announced that the CAA was to be accompanied by a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which would demand, from everyone living in India, documentary proof of Indian parentage, length of residence in India, and so on. Those who were unable to “prove” to the government’s satisfaction that they had these papers would be declared illegal immigrants. But if they had the good luck to be Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Parsi, or Christian — that is, anything other than Muslim — they could apply to become Indians under the Citizenship Amendment Act. The CAA was a clear violation of Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution, which promised equality before the law and prohibited discrimination on the grounds of religion. Following on the downgrading of Jammu and Kashmir from full statehood to Union Territory status, the passing of the CAA represented a further — and fuller — ethnonationalist step towards the construction of a Hindu State. Were it to be implemented along with the NRC, as top government ministers had repeatedly threatened, Muslims would become, formally as well as legally, second-class citizens.

The abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood was met with muted protest by intellectuals and human rights activists, and little else. Prime Minister Modi and his hardline Home Minister, Amit Shah, clearly hoped that these new changes in the citizenship laws would likewise go uncontested. They were wrong. There were widespread protests across India, led at first by students, but then with a wide cross-section of the citizenry joining in. Elderly Muslim women staged a peaceful sit-in for weeks in South-East Delhi, this act inspiring many similar sit-ins in other cities and towns. The state sought to suppress the protests through colonial-era laws prohibiting gatherings of more than five people, but the nonviolent and collective civil disobedience continued. Although the Acts targeted Muslims specifically, many non-Muslims participated in the protests, outraged at this whole stigmatization of their fellow citizens merely on account of their faith. The countrywide upsurge within India was accompanied by widespread condemnation of the Modi Government in the international press. This intensified when President Donald Trump visited India in late February, his visit coinciding with religious rioting in Delhi, the country’s capital, in which radical Hindus were the main perpetrators and Muslims the main sufferers.

At this time, it seemed that the degradation of Indian democracy had been arrested. The pushback against the cult of personality and the ideology of Hindu supremacy had begun and seemed as if it might perhaps accelerate. Then came the pandemic, and India, and the world, gasped in wonder and horror. I shall return to the consequences of covid19 for my country at the end of my essay. But first I wish to outline the historic roots of the struggle that has been unfolding within India, between the capacious ideals with which the Indian republic was founded and the majoritarian tendency that seeks to replace it. We must begin with the intellectual and moral origins of the Constitutional idea of India, which Narendra Modi and his party wish to consign to the ash heap of history.

Like the railways, electricity, and the theory of evolution, nationalism was invented in modern Europe. The European model of nationalism sought to unite residents of a particular geographical territory on the basis of a single language, a shared religion, and a common enemy. To be British, you had to speak English, and minority tongues such as Welsh and Gaelic were either suppressed or disregarded. To be properly British you had to be Protestant, which is why the king was also the head of the Church, and Catholics were distinctly second-class citizens. Finally, to be authentically and loyally British, you had to detest France.

Now, if we go across the Channel and look at the history of the consolidation of the French nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we see the same process at work, albeit in reverse. Citizens had to speak the same language, in this case French, so dialects spoken in regions such as Normandy and Brittany were sledgehammered into a single standardized tongue. The test of nationhood was allegiance to one language, French, and also to one religion, Catholicism. So Protestants were persecuted. Likewise, French nationalism was consolidated by identifying a major enemy, although who this enemy was varied from time to time. In some decades the principal adversary was Britain; in other decades, Germany. In either case, the hatred of another nation was vital to affirming faith in one’s own nation.

This model — a single language, a shared religion, a common enemy — is the model by which nations were created throughout Europe. And it so happens that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is in this respect a perfect European nation. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, insisted that Muslims could not live with Hindus, so they needed their own homeland. After his nation was created, Jinnah visited its eastern wing and told its Bengali residents they must learn to speak Urdu, which to him was the language of Pakistan. And, of course, hatred of India has been intrinsic to the idea of Pakistan since its inception.

Indian nationalism, however, radically departed from the European template. The greatness of the leaders of our freedom struggle — and Mahatma Gandhi in particular — was that they refused to identify nationalism with a single religion. They further refused to identify nationalism with a particular language, and — even more remarkably — they refused to hate their rulers, the British. Gandhi lived and died for Hindu-Muslim harmony. He liked to emphasize the fact that his party, the Indian National Congress, had presidents who were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Parsi. Nor was Gandhi’s nationalism defined by language. As early as the 1920s, Gandhi pledged that when India became independent, every major linguistic group would have its own province. But perhaps the most radical aspect of the Indian model of nationalism was that hatred of the British was not intrinsic to it. Indian patriots detested British imperialism, they wanted the Raj out, they wanted to reclaim this country for its residents — but they did so nonviolently, and while befriending individual Britons. (Gandhi’s closest friend was the English priest C.F. Andrews.) Moreover, they wished to get the British to ‘Quit India’ while retaining the best of British institutions. An impartial judiciary, parliamentary democracy, the English language, and not least the game of cricket; these are all aspects of British culture that Indians sought to keep after the British had themselves left.

British, French, and Pakistani nationalism were based on paranoia, on the belief that all citizens must speak the same language, adhere to the same faith, and hate the same enemy. Indian nationalism, by contrast, was based on a common set of values. During the non-cooperation movement of 1920–1921, people all across India came out into the streets, gave up jobs and titles, left their colleges, and courted arrest. For the first time, the people of India had the sense, the expectation, the confidence that they could create their own nation. In 1921, when non-cooperation was at its height, Gandhi defined Swaraj (Freedom) as a bed with four sturdy bedposts. The four posts that held up Swaraj, he said, were nonviolence, Hindu-Muslim harmony, the abolition of untouchability, and economic self-reliance.

When the Republic of India was created in 1950, its citizens sought to be united on a set of ideals: democracy, religious and linguistic pluralism, caste and gender equality, and the removal of poverty and discrimination. The basis of citizenship was adherence to these values, not to a single religion, a shared faith, or a common enemy. I would describe this founding model of Indian nationalism as constitutional patriotism, because it is enshrined in our Constitution. Its fundamental features are outlined below.

The first feature of constitutional patriotism is the acknowledgement and appreciation of our inherited and shared diversity. In any major gathering in a major city — say, in a music concert or in a cricket match — people who compose the crowd carry different names, wear different clothes, eat different kinds of food, worship different gods (or no god at all), speak different languages, and fall in love with different kinds of people. They are a microcosm not just of what India is, but of what its founders wished it to be. For the founders of the Republic had the ability (and the desire) to endorse and emphasize our diversity. Multiethnicity was not the problem, it was the solution. As the poet Rabindranath Tagore once said about my country, “no one knows at whose call so many streams of men flowed in restless tides from places unknown and were lost in one sea: here Aryan and non-Aryan, Dravidian, Chinese, the bands of Saka and the Hunas and Pathan and Mogul, have become combined in one body.” An appreciation of this rich inner diversity means that we understand that no type of Indian is superior or special because they belong to a particular religious tradition or because they speak a certain language. Patriotism was defined by the allegiance to the values of the Constitution, not by birth, blood, language or faith.

The stress on cultural diversity and religious pluralism was all the more remarkable because it came in the wake of the savage rioting of Partition. Gandhi and the Congress had hoped for a united India, but in the event, when the British left in August 1947, they divided the country into two sovereign nations, India and Pakistan. The division was accompanied by ferocious clashes between Hindus and Muslims, in which an estimated one million people died and more than ten million people were made into refugees. But Pakistan was explicitly created as a homeland for Muslims, whereas India resolutely refused to define itself in majoritarian terms. As the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote to the Chief Ministers of States in 1947, “We have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India. . . . Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”

The second feature of constitutional patriotism is that it operates at many levels. Like charity, it begins at home. It is not just worshipping the national flag that makes you a patriot. It is how you deal with your neighbors and your neighborhood, how you relate to your city, how you relate to your state. In America, which is professedly one of the most patriotic countries in the world, every state has its own flag. And some states of India also have their own flag, albeit informally. Every November 1, when the anniversary of the formation of my home state, Karnataka, is celebrated, a red-and-yellow flag is unfurled in many parts of the state. It is not Anglicized upper-class elites such as myself who display the state flag of Karnataka, but shopkeepers, farmers, and autorickshaw drivers.

Patriotism can operate at multiple levels. The Bangalore Literary Festival (which is not sponsored by large corporations but is crowd-funded) is an example of civic patriotism. The red-and-yellow flag of Karnataka is an example of provincial patriotism. Cheering for the Indian cricket team is an example of national patriotism. This patriotism can operate at more than one level — the locality, the city, the province, the nation. A broad-minded (as distinct from paranoid) patriot recognizes that these layered affiliations can be harmonious, complementary, and reinforce one another.

The model of patriotism advocated by Gandhi and Tagore was not centralized but disaggregated. And it helped make India a diverse and united nation. Look at what is happening in Spain today. Why are so many Catalans keen on a nation of their own? Because they believe that they have been denied the space and the freedom to honorably have their own language and culture within a united Spain. The centralized Spanish state came down so hard that the Catalans had a referendum in which many of them insisted upon nothing less than independence. Had the Republic of Spain been founded and run on Indian principles, this may not have happened. Had Pakistan not imposed Urdu on Bengalis, they may not have split into two nations a mere quarter of a century after independence. Had Sri Lanka not imposed Sinhala on the Tamils, that country may not have experienced thirty years of ethnic strife. India has escaped civil war and secession because its founders wisely did not impose a single religion or single language on its citizens.

One can be a patriot of Bangalore, Karnataka, and India — all at the same time. Yet the notion of a world citizen is false. The British-born Indian J.B.S. Haldane put it this way: “One of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this. . . . On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the U.S.A, USSR or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organization. It may, of course, break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India.” A citizen of India can vote in local, provincial, and national elections. In between elections he or she can affirm their citizenship (at all these levels) through speech and (nonviolent) action. But global citizenship is a mirage, or a cop-out. It is only those who cannot or will not identify with locality, province, or nation who accord themselves the fanciful and fraudulent title of “citizen of the world.”

The third feature of constitutional patriotism, and this again comes from people such as Gandhi and Tagore, is the recognition that no state, no nation, no religion, and no culture is perfect or flawless. India is not superior to America necessarily, nor is America superior to India necessarily. Hinduism is not superior to Christianity necessarily, nor is Islam superior to Judaism necessarily. The fourth feature is this: we must have the ability to feel shame at the failures of our state and society, and we must have the desire and the will to correct them. The most egregious aspects of Indian culture and society are discrimination against women and the erstwhile “Untouchable” castes. A true patriot must feel shame about them. That is why our Constitution abolished caste and gender distinctions. Yet these distinctions continue to pervade everyday life. Unless we continue to feel shame, and act accordingly, they will continue to persist.

The fifth feature of constitutional patriotism is the ability to be rooted in one’s culture and one’s country while being willing to learn from other cultures and other countries. This, too, must operate at all levels. Love Bangalore but think what you can learn from Chennai or Hyderabad. Love Karnataka, but think what you can learn from Kerala or Himachal Pradesh. Love India, but think of what you can learn from Sweden or Canada. Here is Tagore, in 1908: “If India had been deprived of touch with the West, she would have lacked an element essential for her attainment of perfection. Europe now has her lamp ablaze. We must light our torches at its wick and make a fresh start on the highway of time. That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe so poor.” And here is Gandhi, thirty years later: “In this age, when distances have been obliterated, no nation can afford to imitate the frog in the well. Sometimes it is refreshing to see ourselves as others see us.”

As a patriotic Indian, I believe that we must find glory in the illumination of any lamp lit anywhere in the world.

The crisis of contemporary India may be described succinctly: the model of constitutional patriotism is now in tatters. It is increasingly being replaced by a new model of nationalism, which prefers and promotes a single religion, Hinduism, and proclaims that a true Indian is a Hindu. This new model also elevates a single language — Hindi. It insists that Hindi is the national language, and whatever the language of your home, your street, your state, you must speak Hindi also. Thirdly, this model luridly presents a common external enemy — Pakistan.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, those promoting this new model of Indian nationalism are borrowing (and more or less wholesale) from nineteenth-century Europe, where nationalism, for all its cultural riches, culminated in disaster. And to the template of a single religion, a single language, and a common enemy they have added an innovation of their own — the branding of all critics of their party and their leader as “anti-national.” This scapegoating comes straight from the holy book of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts, which appeared in 1966. In his book Golwalkar identified three “internal threats” to the nation — Muslims, Christians, and Communists. Now, I am not a Muslim, a Christian, or a Communist, but I have nonetheless become an enemy of the nation. This is so because any critic, any dissenter, anyone who upholds the old ideal of constitutional patriotism, is considered by those in power and their cheerleaders to be an enemy of the nation.

In the wonderful Hindi film Newton, one character says, “Ye desh danda aur jhanda se chalta hai,” the stick and the flag define this country. This line beautifully captures the essence of a paranoid and punitive form of nationalism, based on the blind worship of the sole and solitary flag, and on the use of the stick to harass those who do not follow or obey you. This new nationalism in India is harsh, hostile, and unforgiving. The name by which it should be known is certainly not patriotism, and not even nationalism. It should be called jingoism.

The dictionary defines a patriot as “a person who loves his or her country, especially one who is ready to support its freedoms and rights and to defend it against enemies or detractors.” Note the order: love of country first, support of freedom and rights second, and defense against enemies last. And what is the dictionary definition of jingoist? One “who brags of his country’s preparedness for fight, and generally advocates or favors a bellicose policy in dealing with foreign powers; a blustering or blatant ‘patriot’; a Chauvinist.” The order is reversed: first, boasting of the greatness of one’s country; then advocating attacking other countries. No talk of rights or freedom, or of love either. Patriotism and jingoism are antithetical varieties of nationalism. Patriotism is suffused with love and understanding. Jingoism is motivated by hatred and revenge.

I have already outlined the founding features of constitutional patriotism. What are the founding features of jingoism? First, the belief that one’s religion, culture, and nation (and leader) are perfect and infallible. Second, the demonization of critics as anti-nationals and Fifth Columnists. Rather than engage critics in debate, hyper-nationalists harass and intimidate them, through the force of the state’s investigating agencies and through vigilante armies if required.

In recent years, Indian nationalism has been captured by its perverted jingoist version. But the country remains some sort of democracy, where the jingoist version is popular among a large section of the population and has been brought to power through the ballot box. How did this come to pass? Why is it that the party of the Hindu Right has so many supporters in India today?

I believe there are four major reasons why jingoism is ascendant in India, while constitutional patriotism is in retreat. The first is the hostility of the Indian left to our national traditions. The Communist parties are still an important political force in India. They have been in power in several states. Their supporters have historically dominated some of our best universities, and been prominent in theater, art, literature, and film. But the Indian left, sadly and tragically, is an anti-patriotic left. It has always loved another country more than its own.

That country used to be the Soviet Union, which is why our Communists opposed the Quit India Movement, and launched an armed insurrection on Stalin’s orders in 1948, immediately after Gandhi was murdered. Later the country that the Communists loved more than India was China; and so, in 1962, they refused to take their homeland’s side in the border war of that year. Still later, when the Communists became disillusioned with both Soviet Union and China, they pinned their faith on Vietnam. When Vietnam failed them, it became Cuba; when Cuba failed them, it became Albania. When I was a student in Delhi University, there was a Marxist professor who taught that Enver Hoxha was a greater thinker than Mahatma Gandhi. But then Albania failed, too. So now the foreign country that our comrades love more than India is — what else? — Venezuela. The late (and by me unlamented) Hugo Chavez was venerated on the Indian left. If you think Modi is authoritarian, then Chavez was Modi on steroids — the ur-Modi. The megalomaniac Chavez destroyed the Venezuelan economy and Venezuelan democracy, and yet he continued to be worshipped by Indian leftists young and old.

The degradation of patriotism in India has also been abetted by the corruption of the Congress Party. The great party which led India’s freedom movement has in recent decades been converted into a single family. I have spoken of how the Left chooses its icons, but in some ways the Congress is even worse. When it was in power, it named everything in sight after Jawaharlal Nehru or his daughter or his grandson. Why couldn’t the new Hyderabad international airport have been named after the Telugu composer Thygaraja or the Andhra patriot T. Prakasam? Why Rajiv Gandhi? Likewise, when the new sea link in Mumbai had to be given a name, why couldn’t the Congress consider Gokhale, Tilak, Chavan, or some other great Maharashtrian Congressman? Why Rajiv Gandhi again?

Many, indeed most, of the icons of the national movement belonged to the Congress party. But the Congress has abandoned and thrown them away because it is only Nehru, Indira, Rajiv, Sonia, and now Rahul that matter to them. (The only Congressman outside the family they are willing to acknowledge is Mahatma Gandhi, because even they can’t obliterate him from their party’s history.) If someone like Hugo Chavez is adored so much by Indian leftists, then obviously this will help the jingoists — and likewise, if the Congress government named all major schemes and sites after a single family, ignoring even the great Congress patriots of the past, then that would give a handle to the jingoists, too. The corrupt and sycophantic culture of the Congress Party is a disgrace. When I made a sarcastic remark on Twitter about Rahul Gandhi becoming Congress president, someone put up a chart listing the presidents of the BJP since 1998 — Bangaru Laxman, Jana Krishnamurthi, L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh, and so on, the last name on the list being Amit Shah, followed by “party worker,” whereas the presidents of the Congress in the same period were “Sonia Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi . . . Rahul Gandhi.”

A third reason for India’s jingoist fate is, of course, that jingoism is a global phenomenon, manifest in the rise of Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Erdogan, Putin, Bolsonaro, Orban, and the rest, all of whom pursue a xenophobic, paranoid, often hateful form of nationalism. The rise of such narrow-minded nationalism elsewhere encourages the rise of jingoism in India to match or rival it, and friendships between the authoritarians are naturally formed. And finally we must note the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in our own backyard. Over the decades, the state and society of Pakistan have become dangerously and outrageously Islamist. Once they persecuted Hindus and Christians; now they persecute Ahmadiyyas and Shias, too. And Bangladesh is also witnessing a rising tide of violence against religious minorities. Since religious fundamentalisms are rivalrous and competitive, every act of violence against a Hindu in Bangladesh motivates and emboldens those who want to persecute Muslims in India.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, and its mother organization, the RSS, claim to be authentically Indian, and damn the rest of us as foreigners. Intellectuals such as myself are dismissed as bastard children of Macaulay, Marx, and Mill. As an historian, however, I would say that it is the ideologues of the RSS who are the true foreigners. Their model of nationalism — one religion, one language, one enemy — is foreign to the Indian nationalist tradition, to the Gandhian model of nationalism which was an innovative indigenous response to Indian conditions, designed to take account of cultural diversity and to tackle caste and gender inequality.

If the RSS model of nationalism is inspired by Europe, their model of statecraft is Middle Eastern in origin. From about the eleventh to the sixteenth century, there were states where monarchs were Muslims and the majority of the population was Muslim, but a substantial minority was non-Muslim, composed mainly of Jews and Christians. In these medieval Islamic states, there were three categories of citizens. The first-class citizens were Muslims, who prayed five times a day and went to mosque every Friday, and who believed that the Quran was the word of God. The second-class citizens were Jews and Christians whose prophets were admired by Muslims, as preceding Mohammed, the last and the greatest prophet. Third-class citizens were those who were neither Jews nor Christians nor Muslims. These were the unbelievers, the Kafirs.

In medieval Muslim states, Jews and Christians, the ‘People of the Book’, were defined as ‘Dhimmi’, which in Arabic means ‘protected person’. As a protected person, they had certain rights. They could go to the synagogue or church; they could own a shop; they could raise a family. But other rights were denied them. They could not enroll in the military, serve in the government, be a minister or prime minister. Nor, unlike Muslims, could they convert other citizens to their faith. Such was the second-class status of Jews and Christians in medieval Islam. This model was applied in Medina and Andalusia, and in Ottoman Turkey. While Kafirs (including Hindus) had to be suppressed and subdued, Jews and Christians could practice their profession and raise their family, so long as they did not ask for the same rights as Muslims.

This is precisely how the Hindu Right wants to run politics in the Republic of India today. Muslims in modern India now must be like Jews and Christians of the medieval Middle East. If Muslims accept the theological, political, and social superiority of Hindus they shall not be persecuted or killed. But if they demand equal rights they might be.

The new jingoism in India is a curious mixture of outdated ideas of nationalism mixed with profoundly anti-democratic ideas of citizenship. And yet it finds wide acceptance. But its popularity does not mean that we should surrender to it, or that it is legitimate, or that it is genuinely Indian. For the Republic of India is an idea as well as a physical and demographic entity. Those of us who are constitutional patriots must continue to stand up for the values on which our nation was nurtured, built and sustained. If the BJP and the RSS are to continue unchecked and unchallenged, they will destroy India, culturally as well as economically.

The political and ideological battle in India today is between patriotism and jingoism. The battle is currently asymmetrical, because the jingoists are in power, and because they have a party articulating and imposing their views. The constitutional patriotism of Gandhi, Tagore, and Ambedkar has no such party active today. The Communists followed Lenin and Stalin rather than Gandhi and Tagore, and the Congress has turned its back on its own founders. But while Indian patriots may not currently have a credible party to represent them, they are — as the protests in December 2019 and January 2020 showed — willing to carry on the good fight for constitutional values even in its absence. Those protests admirably demonstrated that citizenship is an everyday affair. It is not just about casting your vote once every five years. It is about affirming the values of pluralism, democracy, decency, and nonviolence every day of our lives.

It was ordinary citizens, not opposition parties, who presented the Modi government with the first major challenge since it came to power in 2014. The challenge was political, it was moral, it was constitutional. But then came the pandemic, and the balance shifted once more, back in favor of the ruler and the regime.

In the beginning of this essay I spoke of how Narendra Modi’s was the second great personality cult in the history of the Indian republic. The first, that of Indira Gandhi, had led to the imposition of a draconian Emergency. When Modi became Prime Minister, I myself had no illusions about his centralizing instincts, yet the historian in me was alert to how the India of 1975 differed from the India of 2014. When the Emergency was imposed by Indira Gandhi, her Congress Party ruled the Central Government in New Delhi, and also enjoyed power — on its own or in coalition — in all major states of the Union except Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, many states of the Union were outside the control of his Bharatiya Janata Party.

My hope therefore was that our federal system would serve as a bulwark against full-blown authoritarianism. In Narendra Modi’s first term as Prime Minister, the BJP won elections in some major states while losing elections in other major states. Even after Modi and the BJP emphatically won re-election at the national level in 2019, they could not so easily win power in the state Assembly elections that followed. The anti-CAA protests further strengthened one’s faith in the democratizing possibilities of Indian federalism. Large sections of the citizenry rose up in opposition to a discriminatory act that seemed grossly violative of the Constitution. The Chief Ministers of several large states were also opposed to the new legislation. This seemed like further confirmation that the present was not the past. Indira Gandhi could do what she did only because her party controlled both the Center as well as all the states in India (Tamil Nadu’s DMK Government having been dismissed a few months after the Emergency was promulgated). But this was not the case with Modi and his BJP.

The covid19 pandemic has changed this calculus. It has given Narendra Modi and his government the opportunity to weaken the federal structure and radically strengthen the powers of the Center vis-à-vis the States. They have used a variety of instruments to further this aim. They have invoked a “National Disaster Management Act” to suspend the rights of States to decide on the movement of peoples and goods, the opening and closing of schools, colleges, factories, public transport, and so on, and to centralize all these powers in the Central Government, effectively in the person of the Prime Minister. They have further postponed the disbursal of funds already due to the States as their share of national tax collections — substantial revenues, amounting to more than Rs 30,000 crores ($40 billion), which, if released, could greatly alleviate popular distress. They have created a new fund at the Centre, the so-called PM-CARES, which discriminates against the States in that it gives special exemptions (to write off donations as “Corporate Social Responsibility”) that are denied to those who wish to donate instead to the Chief Minister’s Fund of their own states. This fund gives the Prime Minister enormous discretionary power in disposing of thousands of crores of rupees as he pleases. The functioning of the fund is shrouded in secrecy, with even the Comptroller and Auditor General are not allowed to audit it.

This heartless exploitation of the covid19 pandemic to weaken federalism has been accompanied by a systematic attempt to further build up the personality cult of the Prime Minister. State-run television, senior Cabinet Ministers, and the ruling party’s IT Cell have all been working overtime to proclaim that only Modi can save India. Even as lives are lost and livelihoods are destroyed by the pestilence, the Prime Minister is going ahead with an expensive plan to redesign India’s capital, New Delhi. This will destroy the historic centre of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and replace it with a series of concrete and glass blocks. The showpiece of this project is a grand new house for the Prime Minister himself. As one writer has remarked, “the biggest irony remains that a prime minister from the humblest of backgrounds should yearn for a house on Rajpath, no less, to endorse his vision of personal greatness and legacy. Would Emmanuel Macron demand and, more importantly, get a house on the Champs Elysées? Can even Trump order himself a second home on the Mall?” The Prime Minister’s own justification of the project is that it was to mark not a personal but a national milestone—the seventy-fifth anniversary of Indian independence. This is disingenuous, because past anniversaries overseen by past Prime Ministers had not called for such a spectacular extravaganza. Apparently, what was good enough for Indira Gandhi and I. K. Gujral won’t quite do for the great Narendra Modi.

The architecture of power reveals a lot about those who wield it, and Modi’s redesign of New Delhi brings to mind not so much living Communist autocrats as it does some dead African despots. It is the sort of vanity project, designed to perpetuate the ruler’s immortality, that Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast and Jean Bédel-Bo-kassa of the Central African Republic once inflicted on their own countries. (I refer readers to V. S. Naipaul’s great essay “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro.”) And as this wasteful and pharaonic self-indulgence proceeds, an economy that was already flailing has been brought to the brink of collapse by the pandemic. The ill-planned lockdown has led to enormous human suffering. Working-class Indians, already living on the edge, are now faced with utter destitution. In his speeches to the nation since the pandemic broke, the Prime Minister has repeatedly asked Indians to sacrifice — sacrifice their time, their jobs, their lifestyles, their human and cultural tendency to be gregarious. Surely it is past time for citizens to ask the Prime Minister to sacrifice something for the nation as well. Anyway, he won’t.

When he was first elected Prime Minister in 2014, Narendra Modi said that he wished to redeem India from the thousand years of slavery it had suffered before his election. My son, the novelist Keshava Guha, commented at the time that Modi saw himself as the first Hindu leader to have the entire country under his command. Nehru and Indira — the two prime ministers of comparable popularity before him — were to him fake Hindus, their faith corrupted by their English education and what he and his party saw as an unconscionable partiality towards Muslims. My son is right. Narendra Modi thinks of himself as doing what medieval chieftains such as Shivaji and Prithviraj Chauhan could not do — make the whole country a proud Hindu nation. His followers call him Hindu Hriday Samrat, the Emperor of Hindu Hearts, but it would be more precise to call him Hinduon ka Samrat, an Emperor for and of Hindus. He is, to himself and millions of others, Emperor Narendra the First. The history of personality cults tells us that they are always disastrous for the countries in which they flourished. Narendra Modi will one day no longer be Prime Minister, but when will India recover from the damage he has done to its economy, its institutions, its social life, and its moral fabric?

The Human Infinity: Literature and Peace

Writers often talk of the torments of writing, of “the fear of the blank page,” of nights waking in a cold sweat because suddenly they see the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, of the story that they have been writing, sometimes for years. This distress is certainly real, but I insist also upon the pleasures of creation, of inventing an entire fictional world out of thousands of facts and details. There is a particular kind of wonder that I feel when a character I have invented begins to overtake me, to run ahead and pull me forward: suddenly this imagined character knows more than I do about its own fate, its own future, and also about other characters in the story, and I must learn to follow, to catch up. In a way that I do not fully understand, my invented person infuses me with the materials of life, with ideas, with plot twists, with understandings I never knew I possessed.

A creative work represents, for me, the possibility of touching infinity. Not mathematical infinity or philosophical infinity, but human infinity. That is, the infinity of the human face. The infinite strings of a single heart, the infinity of an individual’s intellect and understanding, of her opinions, urges, illusions, of his smallness and greatness, her power to create, his power to destroy — the infinity of her configurations. Almost every idea that comes to my mind about the character I am writing opens me up to more and more human possibilities: to a lush garden of forking paths.

“To be whole, it is enough to exist,” wrote the poet Fernando Pessoa. This wonderful observation pours salt on the wounds of every writer who knows how difficult it is to translate a character born in the imagination into a character that contains even a particle of the Pessoan “wholeness,” even a fraction of the fullness of life that exists in one single second of a living person. It is this wholeness — made up also of infinite flaws, with defects and deficiencies of both mind and body — to which a writer aspires. This is the writer’s wish, this is the writer’s compulsion: to reach that alchemical develop-ment at which suddenly, through the use of inanimate matter — symbols arranged on a page in a particular order — we have conjured into being a life. Writers who have written characters and dissolved into them and then come back into themselves; who have come back to find themselves now composed in part of their character; who know that if they had not written these characters they would not truly know themselves — these writers know the pleasures to be found in the sense of life’s fullness that lives inside each of us.

It is almost banal to be moved by this, but I am: we, each and every one of us, are in fact a plenitude of life. We each contain an infinity of possibilities and ways of being inside life. Yet finally such an observation is not banal at all. It is a truth of which we regularly need to remind ourselves. After all, look how cautiously we avoid living all the abundance that we are, how we dodge so many of the possibilities that are broached by our souls, our bodies, our circumstances. Quickly, at an early age, we ossify, and diminish ourselves into a single thing, a “one,” a this or a that, a clearly delineated being. Perhaps it is our desire not to face this confusing and sometimes deceptive welter within us that makes us lose some part of ourselves.

Sometimes the unlived life, the life we could have lived but were unable to live, or did not dare to live, withers inside us and vanishes. At other moments we may feel it stirring within, we may see it before our eyes, and it stings us with regret, with sorrow, with a sensation of squandered chances, with humiliation, even with grief, because something, or someone, was abandoned or destroyed. It might be a passionate love that we renounced in favor of calm. Or a profession wrongly chosen, in which we molder for the rest of our lives. Or an entire life spent in the wrong gender. It could be a thousand and one choices that are not right for us, which we make because of pressures and expectations, because of our fears, our desire to please, our submission to the assumptions and the prejudices of our time.

Writing is a movement of the soul directed against such a submission, against such an evasion of the abundance within us. It is a subversive movement of the writer made primarily against himself. We might imagine it as a tough massage that the writer keeps administering to the stale muscles of his cautious, rigid, inhibited consciousness. In my own case, writing is a free, supple, easy movement along the imaginary axes between the little boy I still am and the old man I already am, between the man in me and the woman in me, between my sanity and my madness, between my inner Jew-in-a-concentration-camp and my inner commander of that camp, between the Israeli I am and the Palestinian I might have been.

I remember, for example, the difficulties I experienced when I wrote Ora, the main character in To the End of the Land. For two years I struggled with her, but I was unable to know her completely. There were so many words surrounding her, but they had no living focal point. I had not yet created in her the living pulse without which I cannot believe in — I cannot be — the character I am writing. Finally I had no choice but to do what any decent citizen in my situation would do: I sat down and wrote her a letter, in the old fashioned way, with pen and paper. Ora, I asked, what’s going on? Why won’t you surrender?

Even before I had finished the letter, I had my answer. I grasped that it was not Ora who had to surrender to me, but I who had to surrender to her. In other words, I had to stop resisting the possibility of Ora inside me. I had to pour myself into the mold of she who was waiting deep inside me, into the possibility of a woman within me — more, the possibility of this particular woman within me. I had to be capable of allowing the particles of my soul — and of my body too — to float free, uninhibited and incautious, without narrow-minded, practical, petty self-interest, toward the powerful magnet of Ora and the rich femininity that she radiates. And from that moment on she practically wrote herself.

There are extra-literary implications to my discovery of another interiority, a human plenitude, within my writing self. A few years ago, I gave a speech on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. It was late afternoon, the sun was preparing to set. The mountains of Moab behind me, at the edge of the horizon, would soon be painted red, and gradually turn paler until their outlines blurred and darkness finally descended. I spoke about my submission to Ora, and then I turned to the reality of our lives here in Israel — to what we Israelis somewhat grimly call hamatzav, or the Situation. It is a word that in Hebrew alludes to a certain stability, even stasis, but is in fact a euphemism for more than a century of bloodshed, war, terror, occupation, and deadly fear. And most importantly, fatalism and despair.

Perhaps there is no more appropriate place to talk about the Situation than on Mount Scopus, because I find it difficult to gaze at that beautiful landscape in a way that is disconnected from reality, from the fact that we are looking a what is called, in conflict-speak, “Ma’aleh Adumim and Zone E-1.” That location is precisely the point at which many Israelis, including government officials, wish to begin the annexation of the West Bank. Others, myself included, believe that such an act would put an end to any chance of resolving the conflict and doom us all to a life of ceaseless war.

On Mount Scopus our reality seems all the more densely present, containing not only the Hebrew University, with all the wisdom, knowledge, humanity, and spirit of freedom that it has amassed for almost a century, but also the three thousand Bedouins in the adjacent desert — men, women and children, members of a tribe that has lived there for generations, who are denied their rights and citizenship, and subjected to constant abuses, the purpose of which is to remove them from this place. They, too, are part of the Situation. They, too, are our situation: our writing on the wall.

Fifty years ago, after the end of the Six-Day War, in the amphitheater on Mount Scopus, Lieutenant-General Yitzhak Rabin, the Chief of Staff who oversaw Israel’s victory, accepted an honorary degree, and his speech on that day reverberated throughout the country. Rabin’s address was an attempt — a successful attempt — to construct the collective conscious-ness and the collective memory of his contemporaries. I was thirteen at the time, and I still remember the chills it sent down my spine. Rabin articulated for us Israelis the sense that we had experienced a miracle, a salvation. He gave the war and its results the status of a morality tale that almost exceeded the limits of reality and reason.

When we said “The finest to the Air Force,” Rabin said in his speech, referring to a famous recruitment slogan, “we did not mean only technical aspects or manual skills. We meant that in order for our pilots to be capable of defeating all the enemies’ forces, from four states, in a matter of hours, they must adhere to the values of moral virtue, of human virtue.” He continued: “the platoons that broke enemy lines and reached their targets . . . were borne by moral values and spiritual reserves — not by weapons and combat techniques.”

It was a breathtaking speech. (It was written by Chief Education Officer Mordechai Bar-On.) It was impassioned but not over the top, although those were euphoric days. God is not mentioned even once. Nor is religious faith. Even the experience of finally touching the stones of the Western Wall is described not in a religious context, but rather in an historical one: “the soldiers touched right at the heart of Jewish history.” Just imagine the florid prominence that would be given to religion, to holiness, to God, in such a speech today.

Rabin also declared that “the joy of victory seized the entire nation. But despite this, we have encountered . . . a peculiar phenomenon among the soldiers. They are unable to rejoice wholeheartedly. Their celebrations are marred by more than a measure of sadness and astonishment. . . . Perhaps the Jewish people has not been brought up to feel, and is not accustomed to feeling, the joy of the occupier and the victor,” But as Rabin uttered those words, the embryonic occupation had already begun to grow. It already contained the primary cells of every occupation — chauvinism and racism, and in our case also a messianic zeal. And there also began to sprout among us, without a doubt, “the joy of the occupier” which Rabin believed we were incapable of feeling, and which ultimately led, through a long and torturous path, to his assassination twenty-eight years later.

It appears that no nation is immune to the intoxication of power. Nations stronger and more steadfast than ours have not been able to withstand its seductions, much less the small state of a nation such as ours, which for most of its history was weak and persecuted, and lacked the weapons, the army, the physical force with which to defend itself. A nation that in those early days of June, 1967 believed it was facing a real threat of annihilation, and six days later had become almost a small empire.

Many years have passed since that victory. Israel has evolved unrecognizably. The country’s accomplishments in almost every field are enormous and should not be taken for granted. And neither should the larger saga: the Jewish people’s return to its homeland from seventy diasporas, and the great things it has created in the land, are among humanity’s most incredible and heroic stories. Without denying the tragedy that this historical process has inflicted upon the Palestinians, the natives of this land, the Jewish people’s transition from a people of refugees and displaced persons, survivors of a vast catastrophe, into a flourishing, vibrant, powerful state — it is almost incomprehensible.

In order to preserve all the precious and good things that we have created here, we must constantly remind ourselves of what threatens our future. I am not referring only to the external dangers that we face. I have in mind, first foremost, the distortion that damages the core of Israel’s being — the undeniable fact that it is a democracy that is no longer a democracy in the fullest sense of the word. It is a democracy with anti-democratic illusions, and very soon it may become an illusion of democracy.

Israel is a democracy because it has freedom of speech, a free press, the right to vote and to be elected to parliament, the rule of law and the Supreme Court. But can a country that has occupied another people for fifty years, denying its freedom, truly claim to be a democracy? Can there be such an oxymoronic thing as an occupier democracy?

A hundred years of conflict. Fifty years of occupation. Beyond the details of the political debate, we must ask: what do those fifty years do to a person’s soul, and to the soul of a nation? To both the victim and the victimizer? I return here to the process of artistic creation that I described earlier — the axiomatic sense of a person’s infinity, whoever that person may be. In the context of our present historical circumstances, I summon back the writer’s understanding that beneath every human story there is another human story. I insist again upon the archeological nature of human life, which is composed of layers upon layers of stories, each of which is true in its own way. The imagination of all these layers and truths, upon which the writer relies for the richness of his creation, has another name: empathy.

But a life lived in constant war, when there is no genuine intent to end the war — a life of fear and suspicion and violence — does not recognize or encourage or tolerate this abundance of human realities. It is by definition a morally unimaginative life, a life of restriction. It narrows the soul and contracts the mind. It is a life of crude stereotypical perceptions, which in denying another people’s humanity promotes a more general denial of all otherness and difference. This is the sort of climate that finally gives rise to fanaticism, to authoritarianism, to fascist tendencies. This is the climate that transforms us from human beings into a mob, into a hermetic people. These are the conditions under which a civil, democratic, and pluralistic society, one that draws its strength from the rule of law and an insistence on equality and human rights, begins to wither and fray.

Can we say with confidence that Israeli society today is sufficiently aware of the magnitude of these dangers? Is it fully capable of confronting them and contending with them? Are we sure that those who lead us even want to contend with them?

I began with the literary and I end with the real — with the reality of our lives. In my view they are inseparable. We do not know, of course, who will stand here fifty years from now. We cannot predict the problems that will consume them and the hopes that will animate them. To what extent, for example, will technology have changed people’s souls, and even their bodies? Which dimensions and dialects will have been added to the Hebrew language that they will speak, and which will have disappeared? Will they utter in their daily speech the world shalom? Will they do so happily, or with the pain of disappointment and squandered opportunities? Will shalom be spoken naturally, with the ease of the commonplace — routinely, as if peace had become a way of life?

I do not know what sort of country the Israel of the future will be. I can only hope with all my heart that the man or woman who will stand in my place will be able to say, with their head held high and with genuine resolve: I am a free person, in my country, in my home, in my soul.

Transgression, An Elegy

Sade does not give us the work of a free man.
He makes us participate in his efforts of liberation.
But it is precisely for this reason that he holds our attention.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, “MUST WE BURN SADE?”

Vito Acconci, later to be known as the art world’s “godfather of transgression,” is crouched under a low wooden ramp constructed over the floor of the otherwise empty Sonnabend Gallery in New York. Apparently heʼs masturbating to sexual fantasies about the visitors walking above him, the soundtrack of which is projected through loudspeakers installed in the corners of the gallery. “You’re on my left . . . you’re moving away but I’m pushing my body against you, into the corner . . . you’re bending your head down, over me . . you’re pushing your cunt down on my mouth… you’re pressing your tits down on my cock… you’re ramming your cock down into my ass…” Now and then gallery goers can hear him come. The piece is titled Seedbed.

It was 1971, Nixon was in the White House, and artists were shooting, abrading, exposing, and abjecting themselves, deploying their bodies to violate whatever proprieties had survived the 1960s, and shatter the boundaries between art and life. This would, in turn, rattle and eventually remake sclerotic social structures and dismantle ruling class hegemony, or so I learned later that decade from my Modern Art History instructor, a charismatic Marxist-Freudian bodybuilder who fulminated about Eros and Thanatos and seems never to have published a word, but greatly influenced my thinking on these matters.

Transgression had been so long implanted into the curriculum that it had become a tradition — a required introductory course at the art school I attended as an undergraduate. Transgression was the source of all cultural vitality, or so it seemed. We learned that aesthetic assault was the founding gesture of the avant-garde, which had been insulting the bourgeoisie for over a century, dating back in the visual arts to 1863 and the Salon des Refusés in Paris. The classic on exhibit was Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, previously rejected by the jury of the annual sponsored Salon de Paris. Manet was his day’s godfather of transgression, though the real scandal of the painting wasn’t that a nude woman was casually picnicking with two clothed men and gazing directly at the viewer. No, according to my instructor, it was that Manet let his brushstrokes show, an aesthetic offense so great that visitors had to be physically restrained from destroying the painting. It seemed like an enviable time to have been an artist.

In this lineage, we took our places. I felt it was my natural home, a mental organizing principle. It augured freedom, self-sovereignty — I was angry at the world’s timid rule-fol-lowers and counted myself among the anti-prissy, though my personal disgust threshold has always been pretty low. Acconci I found both disgusting and intriguing. The heroic transgressor mythology, I eventually came to see, definitely had its little vanities, its preferred occlusions. Even the origin story was dodgy; in fact the Salon des Refusés was itself officially sponsored, something I don’t recall my instructor mentioning. Hearing of complaints by the painters who were rejected by the Salon de Paris, Emperor Napoleon III had given his blessing to a counter-exhibition, cannily containing the backlash by accommodating the transgressors. Possibly there’s always a certain complicity between the transgressive and the covertly permitted — shrewd transgressors, like court jesters, knew which lines not to cross.

A few years before Seedbed, Acconci had performed his equally notorious Following Piece, which involved randomly selecting and then stalking a different unwitting person through the streets of New York City until they entered a locale — an office, a car — where they could not be trailed. He did this every day for a month. The duration of the artwork was effectively controlled by the individual being pursued though their participation was not, which gave the piece its edge of creepiness. The documentation now resides in The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection — count Acconci among the shrewd transgressors.

Of course, terms like “consent” were heard infrequently in arty-leftish circles in those days and the idea that it could be unambiguously established had yet to be invented. Eros itself seemed less containable, which was among the things people mostly liked about it in the years after the sexual revolution and before HIV. Even sexual creepiness seemed less malign: sex was polymorphous and leaky, aggression was inseparable from sex and its attendant idiocies, this was largely understood as the human condition, also a big wellspring of artistic inspiration. Anyway, Seedbed’s audience would have presumably been wise to the content of the piece before entering Sonnabend and being enlisted for roles in Acconci’s onanistic scenarios, though from today’s vantage “implied’ consent is no sort of consent at all. About Seedbed, Acconci was prone to explanations such as “my goal of producing seed led to my interac-tion with visitors and their interaction, like it or not, with me.” The extended middle finger of that “like it or not” (and the unapologetic prickishness of “producing seed”) now seems — to borrow my students’ current terminology — a little “rapey.” But from the new vantage, the entire history of the avant-garde can seem a little rapey.

What was the turning point? When did transgression go south? Even by 2013 damage control was required. When Following Piece was displayed at a MOMA exhibition that year, a nervously disingenuous caption was posted to mitigate potential umbrage: “Though this stalking was aggressive, by allowing a stranger to determine his route the artist gave up a certain degree of agency.” As if getting to determine the route neutralized the piece’s aggression, like carbon offsets for polluters are meant to do for the environment? The artist gave up nothing that I can see, but that was the basic job description for artists from the Romantic era on: give up nothing.

The wrestling match between the caption and the photos now seems emblematic. If “like it or not” was the master trope of the Manet-to-Acconci years, today’s would have to be encroachment. Transgression has been replaced by trauma as the cultural concept of the hour: making rules rather than breaking them has become the signature aesthetic move, that’s just how it is, there’s no going back. New historical actors have taken up places on the social stage and made their bids for cultural hegemony, having sent the old ones to re-education camp. These days it’s the transgressed-upon who are the protagonists of the moment: the offended, people who are very upset by things, their interventions a drumbeat on social media, their tremulous voices ascendant. (Online cultural commissar is now a promising career path.) And the mainstream cultural institutions are, on the whole, deferring, offering solace and apologias, posting warning signs and caveats to what might cause aesthetic injury. Aesthetic injuries flourish nonetheless.

Sure, there have always been offended people, but those people used to be conservatives. Who cared if they were offended, that was the point. What has changed is the social composition of the offended groups. At some point offendability moved its offices to the hip side of town. The offended people say they’re progressives! Which requires some rethinking for those of us shaped by the politics of the previous ethos.

After a century and a half of cultural immunity, transgression has started smelling a little rancid, like a bloated roué in last decade’s tight leather pants. But okay, change happens, the world is in flux, life is a river, nothing stays the same. Let’s try not to get defensive about it. Okay yes, I’m talking to myself, it’s me who feels defensive. But what’s the point of clinging to superseded radicalisms in a different world and time? Please be patient as I attempt to wrestle myself out of a long-term romance with a dethroned idea. I’m doing my best. I’m a bit conflicted.

It was never precisely said that I recall, but it seems evident in retrospect that there was a particular idea of the self that was embedded in the aesthetics of transgression: a self too buffered against the blows of the world, too stolid. It was an artistic duty to shatter this securely integrated self. The role of the authoritarian personality in the rise of European fascism, as analyzed by Wilhelm Reich and his Frankfurt School counterparts, was still in the air at the time of my inculcation into the cult of transgression, its tentacles still wrapped around the counter-culture and the antiwar movement. Character rigidity was the signature feature of the political right, we learned, who were despicable moral cops with sticks up their asses. In the version of twentieth-century art history that I was taught, art audiences and upright citizens generally were all deeply in need of psychical jolts and emetics. These benighted people needed to have their complacencies rattled; as an artist, you were meant to take up that task, defy the censors, search out and assault social norms and conventions, especially the ones embedded deepest within our (or their) sensibilities.

Art had already abandoned objecthood by then; now the mission was plumbing your depths and darkest instincts, then assaulting the audience with the ickiest stuff. Art was supposed to be perilous and messy. Psychoanalysis had long ago told us that the modern personality structure was a hardened carapace formed around traumatic memories or fantasies that had become bottled up and fetid, and had to be manumitted. Sure this was aggressive, but sublimating aggression into art was what made art feel alive, a collective therapeutics, maybe not unlike love: potentially transcendent. It was a world peopled by depressives and jerks who doubled as therapists, putting culture on the couch and then joining it there; we diagnosed its pathologies and our own, we invented curatives. Sometimes those were painful: success was measured in outrage generated.

People understandably howled when their carapaces were under assault, but that wasn’t bad. Violation was an ethical project. Censorship was a tool of the death drive and the authoritarians, but luckily there was no such thing as successful repression anyway — lectured my instructor. The festering stuff was always leaking out, which the Surrealists understood, along with other leaky heroes such as Jackson Pollock, who started flinging paint at a canvas on the floor, liberating it once and for all from the falsehoods of representation and the prison of the picture plane. It was the wild men and (occasional) women who changed the world — by breaking rules, not following them! As with Pollock, who upended painting entirely, but it was his psyche that had to get released first, thanks to Jungian analysis. We pored over Jung looking for backdoors to the collective unconscious, we memorized Reich, another wild man always making another comeback for whom character was itself a kind of defense.

The point is that there was an ethics to transgression. As for us aspiring artists, our own defenses needed to be punctured too, our own inflexibilities shattered. Boundaries made us ill. Humans were armored: not only superegos but also bodies needed to be broken down and realigned. Being permeable was good for you. Another of Acconci’s performances from 1970 was Rubbing Piece. This one involved him rubbing his left forearm with his right hand for an hour until he got a horrible sore, his skin angry and abraded. We all needed to shed our skins, give up our self-protections.

To be sure, these skins were by default white — race wasn’t yet part of the curriculum, though another of my teachers was Robert Colescott, who was at the time painting massive and funnily bitter canvases substituting African-Americans for whites in reprises of iconic history paintings (George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware). In quest of whatever permeability was available I underwent Rolfing, a sadistic form of therapeutic massage designed to dislodge and release the emotional injuries stored in your connective tissues; this entailed paying to have someone grind the heel of his hand and occasionally an elbow into the soft parts of your corpus until you cried. It really hurt. But how was anything going to get transformed socially and politically if our rigidities remained intact, bolstered by aesthetic politesse and safety-mongering?

The possibility of smashing everything, your own boundaries included, made for a wonderful political optimism. Aesthetic vanguards and political vanguards seemed like natural allies — the revolutions to come would be left-wing ones, or so we assumed. What innocent times those now seem, when “right-wing radical” was still an oxymoron. Aesthetic conservatives were political conservatives, that was the assumption. The disrupters were on the left; disruption was a left- wing idiom. It was very heady: signing on to the avant-garde linked you to a revolutionary past and future, from the barricades to Duchamp’s urinals to Mai 68. Everywhere the mandate was to dismantle the art-life distinction, and to embrace whatever followed.

Yes, I do now see there were some convenient fictions embedded in the romance with transgression. For one thing, as much as we hawked dismantling the art-life boundary, we also covertly relied on it: artistic transgressions were allowed to flourish because the aesthetic frame was itself a sort of protective shield. In 1992, in an aptly titled essay “The Aesthetic Alibi,” Martin Jay, while naming no names, gently mocked the whole genre of performance art, invented, he says, to permit behaviors that would put artists in jail or mental wards if art and life were not distinct realms of experience. In other words the transgressions of Acconci and his ilk coasted on the inviolability of art while getting acclaim for appearing to militate against it.

As a nineteen-year-old aspiring artist I worshipped Vito Acconci, I wanted to be Acconci, though in pictures he looked hairy and unkempt. I thought Seedbed was artistically brilliant. I looked up his address in the New York phone book and thought about dropping by (he lived on Christie Street, I even now recall), or maybe stalking him through the streets of New York and then documenting it — transgressing the transgressor! — to what I imagined would be art world acclaim. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try to pull off public masturbation, even concealed under a platform; there were limits to the transgressions I could imagine.

The gender politics of transgression was not initially much on my horizon. Not that there weren’t some stellar female transgressors on the scene: there was Lynda Benglis, for example, who ran a mocking ad in Artforum of herself nude except for white-framed sunglasses, wielding an extra-long dildo like a phallus. (It was a commentary on the art world.) But you didn’t need to appropriate the phallus to be transgressive, you could daintily repudiate it in the manner of the feminist artist Judy Chicago and others, who were reclaiming maligned “feminine” crafts such as china-painting and needle-point to contest the macho grandiosities of minimalism.

In some ways of telling this story, feminism and transgression were always on a collision course. For one thing, and needless to say, women’s bodies were pretty often transgression’s raw material, in art and in life, on canvas and in the bars. I recall reading the painter Audrey Flack on her first meeting with Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Tavern decades before — he pulled her toward him as if to kiss her, then burped in her face. Flack, twenty at the time, wasn’t particularly offended, she just saw him as desperate. De Kooning chopped women up on canvas, charged early feminist art historians. The artist Ana Mendieta either fell off her 33rd floor balcony or was pushed by minimalist superstar Carl Andre, who was tried for it and found not guilty.

By the time #MeToo hit, transgression’s sheen was already feeling pretty tarnished. #MeToo was about a lot of things and among them was a cultural referendum on the myth of male genius, which as thousands of first-person accounts have elaborated over the decades, is pretty frequently accompanied by sexual grabbiness and bad breath. Sexual transgressiveness has always been the perquisite of gross men in power, but there is also an added perk, which is that treating the boundaries of less powerful people as minor annoyances makes insecure men feel like creative geniuses, like artists and rock stars. Post #MeToo, the emblematic transgressor was starting to look less like Vito Acconci at Sonnabend and more like Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Sofitel.

Apropos my young reverence for Acconci and his idioms, I didn’t at the time ponder my own real-life experiences with real-life masturbators and stalkers. A committed truant and somewhat feral adolescent loner, I could often be found weekday afternoons in one or another of Chicago’s seedy downtown movie palaces, where I would park myself in a mostly deserted theater to enjoy a double feature, or the DIY version, sitting though the same movie twice. The raincoat brigade had their plans, meaning solo men not infrequently scurrying into seats within my eyeline once the movie had started and commencing frantic activity in their laps. It took me a while to figure out what was going on — such things weren’t covered in my junior high sex-ed classes. I would gather my belongings and move seats or sometimes flee to the ladies room.

Once, feeling aggrieved at having to move seats yet again, I deliberately dumped a large icy soda into the lap of a man I had taken for one of the miscreants. He yelped in outrage, which was thrilling and terrifying, though I wondered for long after whether I had possibly made a mistake. Maybe those teenage experiences of male performance art were buried somewhere in my psyche when I put together my undergraduate thesis show, a semiotic analysis of an obscene phone call I had received, accompanied by deliberately ugly staged photographs of what the caller said he wanted to do. Structuralism and semiotics were then conquering the art world and I liked the intellectual distance they provided, the tools to be cool about a hot subject. I liked the idea of transgressing the transgressor. On to grad school, triumphantly.

In the following years much of my work, even after decamping the art world, was ambivalently fascinated with transgression, sometimes the aesthetic version, sometimes the true-life exemplars. Critical theories that read real life as a “text” helped to blur the distinction, but so did everything else in the culture. I wrote about Hustler magazine, I wrote books devoted to adulterers, scandalizers, male miscreants, and the professor-student romance crackdown. Though I think of myself as a generally decorous person — only ever arrested once (teenager, charges expunged) — something drew me to indiscretion and imprudence. Envy, sublimated rage, desire, male impersonation? Let me get back to you on it.

The cultural genres that have flourished in the last few decades have likewise been the ones most dedicated to muddying the art-life distinction: the memoir explosion, autofiction, the psychobiographical/pathographical doggedness in criticism, confessional standup and the heirs of Spaulding Gray, along with the relentless first-person imperatives of social media, where everyone’s now a “culture worker,” everyone “curates” every-day life into pleasing tableaux for public display. Which means what for the fate of transgression, whose métier, as Martin Jay intimated, covertly relied on keeping the distinction intact?

The concurrent notable trend has been the outperformance of the offense and umbrage sector, now overtaking pretty much everything in the cultural economy. To be sure, umbrage can be a creative force in its own right, as when in 2014 at Wellesley, a woman’s college, students protested a painted bronze statue of a sleepwalking man in his underpants located outside the art museum, because it was regarded as potentially harmful to viewers. The man was balding, eyes closed, arms outstretched — not an especially imposing or threatening figure, in fact he appears quite vulnerable. A petition to move the statue inside the museum got over a thousand signatures.

Creative umbrage flourished more flamboyantly in 2013, when the Metropolitan Museum staged an exhibit of the painter Balthus’ work and included Thérèse Dreaming, with its notorious flash of the pubescent Thérèse’s white panties smack in the center of the canvas. As to be expected, the Met attempted to accommodate offended sensibilities by posting a safety warning at the entrance to the exhibit advising that “some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors.” Though the image of Thérèse is quite stylized, a petition called for the painting’s removal because of “the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the safety and wellbeing of women of all ages.” You’d have thought there was a living, breathing pubescent girl flay-legged in the museum (over eleven thousand signatures to date have concurred).

Speaking of artistic choices, I noted that the anti- Balthus petition was written in the first person, an aesthetic decision that every creative writer faces — whether or not to deploy that all-powerful “I.” “When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past weekend, I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose,” it read, in bold type and melodramatic prose as aesthetically stylized as Balthus’ rendering of Thérèse, the degree of effrontery so precisely calibrated. If the painting was not going to be removed, the petition-writer offered another option: the museum should provide signage indicating that “some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus’ artistic infatuation with young girls.”

The demand was that the painting be repackaged as a cautionary tale. And since we live in culturally democratizing times, Thérèse Dreaming now comes swathed in lengthy explanations. From the Met’s website: “Many early twenti-eth-century avant-garde artists, from Paul Gauguin to Edvard Munch to Pablo Picasso, also viewed adolescent sexuality as a potent site of psychological vulnerability as well as lack of inhibition, and they projected these subjective interpretations into their work. While it may be unsettling to our eyes today, Thérèse Dreaming draws on this history.” No longer will a viewer’s eye be drawn to that glimpse of white panties and be unsettled, and wonder what to make of it. Goal to the offended, who have seized the license to be outrageous and impose their stories and desires on the polis, much as the transgressor classes once did. But let’s not imagine there is any less cultural aggression or cruelty being unleashed here than before.

Trying to construct a timeline for this art-life blur, I recalled an earlier similar remonstrance, one that startled me at the time, given the source — but it now reads like a bellwether. This was Martin Amis, in his literary critic guise, grappling with what he named a “problem from hell” upon the publication in 2009 of his literary hero Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura. The problem wasn’t precisely that the subject was the desire to sexually despoil very young girls, a preoccupation it shared with the canonical Lolita and four of Nabokov’s other books, six in all. It was that as the aging Nabokov’s talents drastically waned those “unforgivable activities” — the sexual despoiling stuff — were no longer absolved or wrestled with by the usual stylistic firepower, and what remained on the page was dismal squalor. Worse, Laura’s stylistic failures, along with Ada before it — another late-career nymphet-obsessed ponderous mess — taints the other books. Even the great ones start feeling squalid by proximity, don’t they?

Though Amis insists that he is making an aesthetic case and not a moral one — “in fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt” — as you watch him valiantly trying to pry the two apart, the critical performance is palpably anxious. He feints, he deflects, he finally states outright that it comes down to the truism that writers like to write about the things they like to think about, and without sufficient stylistic perfume to offset the foulness of the subject matter, what Nabokov was thinking about just smells bad. But admitting this means, effectively, retracting the license to transgress that Amis (and most of the literary world) once so appreciatively granted Nabokov, leaving the critic (and the rest of us) wallowing in “a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism.”

My own question is, what in the cultural ether pushed this anxiety to the forefront? Had the protective blockades once erected around the aesthetic become that much more porous since Nabokov’s heyday? Literary criticism has always had the sociological move up its sleeve, available to whip out and flay transgressors as necessary — Irving Howe indicting Philip Roth as bad for the Jews, and so on. But when such a prominent writer decides, so late in the day, that Nabokov is bad for pre-teens, it does seem like some major sands have shifted. Reading Amis reread Nabokov’s oeuvre through the lens of Laura, you notice the transgression jumping from the art to the artist, like a case of metaphysical fleas. We have left literature behind and been plummeted into the sphere of moral contagion. The anxiety isn’t just that our glimpses of the violated bodies of pubescent girls have arrived too stylistically unadorned. I wonder if it is also that whatever’s corrupt and ignoble in there will seep out and taint the reader.

If I understand him correctly Amis’ problem from hell is something like this: What if there resides at the center of this deeply transgressive oeuvre not the “miraculously fertile instability” he reveres about Nabokovian language but, rather, the rigidity of a repetition compulsion?
Is this a general condition? I’m not sure, but other such “problems from hell” certainly seem to dot the recent social landscape, especially at the art-life checkpoints. When the comedian-genius Louis C.K. was exposed as a compulsive masturbator and encroacher on women in the wake of #MeToo, it naturally brought back my long-ago teenage movie theater experiences. I was fascinated by his fellow comedian Sarah Silverman’s insouciant response. When asked by Louis if he could do it in front of her, Silverman would sometimes respond — at least so she reported — “Fuck yeah, I want to see that!” As she told it, it was a weird, interesting aesthetic experience, and she was Louis’ equal in weirdness, no one’s victim. Silverman had to quickly apologize to all the women who had not felt similarly — for one thing, it wasn’t clear that everyone upon whom this lovely sight was bestowed had been asked for permission or felt able to refuse. Pathetic C.K. may have been, but he was still a comedy gatekeeper.

Of course he’d also been telling the world for decades exactly who he was, namely a self-loathing guy who was obsessed with masturbation. He did innumerable comedy routines and episodes of various shows devoted to masturbation. Apparently many of his fans — let’s call them the aesthetic-autonomy diehards — thought this was “art,” just a “bit,” and were deeply disappointed in C.K. He was supposed to have been a feminist ally! He was supposed to be fucked up about women, but self-aware! He did comedy routines about how terrible men were at sex, and how grossly they behaved to women — and then he turned around and was gross!

The world is becoming a tough place for anyone who still wants to separate the artist from the art — then again, pretty few people any longer do. Creative writing students across the country now refuse to read Whitman, a man of the nineteenth century who, they believe, said some racist things in addition to the great poetry. I guess reading him now feels disgusting, as though a cockroach had crawled in your ear and deposited a bunch of racism that you are helpless to expunge.

Things were much less confusing when the purists were right-wingers, when the “moral majoritarians” railed against cultural permissiveness while concealing their private transgressions behind facades of public rectitude. I loved the last few decades of the twentieth century, when one after another fundamentalist minister was exposed as a scummy lying adulterer and the world made sense. The right was still at it throughout the 1990s, waging their losing culture wars — it was almost too easy to get them to huff and puff. When none other than the reptilian Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York, threatened to shut down the Brooklyn Museum in retribution for an art exhibit he deemed offensive, the museum produced a yellow stamp announcing that the work in the exhibit “may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, eupho-ria and anxiety.” Note that as of 1999 it was still possible to be ironic about offending people, because offended people were generally regarded as morons.

The rise of identity politics, it is widely agreed, introduced a far more granular vocabulary of umbrage. Now it is the social justice left wielding the aesthetic sledgehammers and “weaponizing” offense. (Note, for the record, that the socialist left, young and old, those for whom class remains the primary category and think identity politics is just corporate liberalism, are not particularly on board with the new umbrage.) There was already a general consensus that pernicious racial and ethnic stereotypes have been among the factors impeding social equality for marginalized groups. The last few decades have introduced a new vocabulary of cultural must-nots: cultural appropriation, microaggression, insensitivity. New prohibitions keep being invented, and political coherence is not required. An obviously antiracist artwork like Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket, which depicted Emmett Till’s mutilated face and body and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017, could be accused by its critics of attempting to transmute “black suffering into profit and fun,” because in the new configuration the feeling of being offended licenses pretty much anything. (Schutz had made it clear that the painting would not be sold.) Protestors blocked the painting from view and petitions demanded that it be destroyed. Offended feelings are like a warrant for the summary arrest of the perps, and prior restraint is expected: the offending thing should never have been said or seen. Culture is no longer where you go to imagine freedom, it’s where you go for scenes of crime and punishment.

Speaking of political incoherence, the irony of the charges against Schutz was the degree to which they echoed the old miscegenation codes, as if Emmett Till’s murder wasn’t itself spurred by fears and prohibitions about racial mixing. It was the “one-drop rule” in reverse, except now a white woman was being accused of crossing the color line, of positioning herself too intimately to a black male body. The extremity of the accusations made the identity politics of the left seem stylisti-cally indistinguishable from the identity politics of the right, both spawned from the same post-truth bubble — as with Swiftboating, Pizzagating, and “Lock Her Up.” Throw some dirt around and see what sticks.

Meanwhile more terrible things have been happening. “Transgression” has become the signature style of the alt-right and “alt-light” (those are the slightly less anti-Semitic and white supremacist ones). Now they are the rebellious, anti-establishment ones, gleefully offending everyone. Some even lay the blame for the stylistics of online troll culture — the alt-truth shitposting adopted so successfully by the current president and his basket of deplorables (to borrow Hillary Clinton’s supremely self-annihilating phrase) — at the doorstep of the avant-garde. In Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle traces their antecedents to Sade, the Romantics, Nietzsche, the Surrealists, the Situationists, the counterculture and punk — culminating with far-right culture hero Milo Yiannopoulos, who also extolled the virtues of disrupting the status quo and upsetting the liberals, whom he saw as hegemonic. All was going well for Milo, the self-proclaimed “dangerous faggot,” until he got a smidgen too dangerous by commending pedophilia, or so said his former patrons who quickly smote him into oblivion. Haha, their transgressive spirit is about an inch deep.

Yet the longstanding association of transgression with the left was always superficial and historically accidental. In Nagle’s version, the alt-right crowd have simply veered toward nihilism in lieu of revolution. She even intimates that it was the virtue-signaling and trigger warnings of the touchy-feely left that gave us Donald Trump and the rest of the destructive right- wing ids; and this has made her persona non grata in certain leftish circles. However you draw your causality arrows, there’s no doubt that the more fun the right started having, the more earnestly humorless the social justice types became, and the more aesthetically conservative. Especially problematic for the younger crowd are jokes: every comedy routine was now examined for transgressions, like a team of school nurses checking kindergarteners for head lice. Comedy is no longer any sort of protected zone, it’s the front lines, with id-pol detectives on house-to-house searches to uncover humor offenses from decades past. Old jokes are not grandfathered in, obviously; old jokes are going to be judged by current standards. Irony has stopped being legible — it puts you on “the wrong side of history,” a phrase you suddenly hear all the time, as though history always goes in the right direction.

In sum, transgressors are the cultural ancien regime who have reaped the spoils for far too long, and now had better watch their steps. Even France, proud home to Sade and Genet, is dethroning its transgressors and putting them on trial. This includes that most literary of pedophiles, the award-festooned novelist Gabriel Matzneff, currently in hiding in Italy, who used to have a lot of friends in high places despite (because of?) habitually foisting his sexual desires on teenage girls and under-age boys, then writing detailed accounts of his predilections. One of his former conquests, fourteen at the time of their affair, recently wrote her own bestselling book, titled Consent. Another, fifteen when they were involved and whose letters Matzneff appropriated and published (even putting her face on the cover of one of his novels — no, he didn’t ask permission or even inform her), has also gone public. She attempted to do so previously, in 2004, but no one then cared or would publish her account.

But it’s a new era: the transgressed-upon of the world are speaking, and the world is listening. This changes many things, profoundly. It’s been a long time coming. As to whether injury will prove a wellspring of cultural vitality or a wellspring of platitudes and kitsch, that is what’s being negotiated at the moment. At the very least, trauma is more of an equal-op-portunity creative force than inspiration or talent, which were handed out far more selectively. Trauma is a bigger tent. The injury and the wound — and importantly, the socially imposed injuries of race, ethnicity, gender, queerness — have long been paths to finding a voice, an intellectual “in.” This is hardly new: wounds have long been sublimated into style or form — so argued Edmund Wilson, and before him Freud. It seems like injuries more frequently enter the cultural sphere minus the aesthetic trappings these days — perhaps there is more patience or attention for unembellished pain. The question we’re left with is how much of the world can be understood from the standpoint of a personal injury: does it constrict or enlarge the cultural possibilities?

Reading about Matzneff, I’d been wondering what the French plan to do about Sade in the post -#MeToo era and was happy to stumble on an essay by Mitchell Abidor pondering the same question. An American who has translated many French avant-gardists and anarchists into English, Abidor rereads Sade through the lens of Jeffrey Epstein, concluding that it is impossible not to see Sade as Epstein’s blueprint. His point is that Sade did not just fantasize on the page, he acted out what he wrote, kidnapping, sexually abusing, and torturing young girls, also numerous prostitutes, and a beggar named Rose Keller — women who supposedly didn’t count, and don’t count to Sade’s legions of readers. Epstein’s victims were, likewise, financially needy teenagers. Two sexually predatory rich guys separated by a few centuries, both monsters of privilege: Sade had his chateau, Epstein his townhouse and his island. Both were arrested and tried; both got out or escaped prison and did more of the same.

What is inexplicable for Abidor is how many of his fellow intellectuals fell under Sade’s spell and became his great defenders, despite what a verbose and repetitive writer he is. They see him as an emissary of freedom — or as in Simone de Beauvoir’s reading, at least it’s on the itinerary. Abidor says that Sade’s freedom is the freedom of a guard in a concentration camp who does what he likes to his victims because they cannot escape. It’s not just the liberties of surrealism that Sade heralds, but also the death trap of fascism.

I arranged a coffee date with Abidor not long ago, wanting to meet this assassin of the avant-garde; he suggested a spot where old Brooklyn socialists congregate. He had become a despised figure on the Francophone left, he told me, glancing around nervously and spotting a few former compatriots. The old guard was furious at him for putting their revered transgressive lineage — Apollinaire, Bataille, Barthes, the heirs of Sade, to which they still cling — in such an ugly light. It is the question of our moment: who gets to play transgressor, and who is cast in the role of the transgressed upon. When transgressions — in art, in life, at the borders — repeat the same predictable power arrangements and themes, what’s so experimental about that?

Yet putting it that way gives me a yucky tingle of sanctimony, a bit of the excess amour-propre that attends taking the “correct” position. What’s left out of the anti-transgression story are the rewards of feeling affronted — how takedowns, shaming, “cancelling,” the toolkit of the new moral majoritarians, invent new forms of cultural sadism rather than rectifying the old ones. All in a good cause, of course: inclusiveness, equality, cultural respect — so many admirable reasons!

The truant in me resents how much cultural real estate the anti-transgressors now command, while positioning themselves as the underdogs. Witness the new gatekeepers and moral entrepreneurs, wielding not insignificant amounts of social power while decrying their own powerlessness. And thus a new variety of hypocrite is born, though certainly no more hypocritical than the old hypocrites.

We used to know what transgression was, but that’s not plausible anymore. Maybe violating boundaries was a more meaningful enterprise when bourgeois norms reigned, when liberal democracy seemed like something that would always endure. The ethos of transgression presumed a stable moral order, the disruption of which would prove beneficial. But why bother trying to disrupt things when disruption is the new norm, and permanence ever more of a receding illusion?

Liberalism in the Anthropocene

In the more innocent time before the pandemic, we already knew that we were living in an era with a new name. We had entered the Anthropocene — a new epoch in which the chief forces shaping nature are the work of our own species. Some date the dawn of the Anthropocene to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, others to 1945 and the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While we may disagree about when this epoch began, we are beginning to understand, and not a moment too soon, its moral imperative. It requires that humans must assume responsibility for natural phenomena — the weather, sea levels, air quality, soil fertility, species survival, and viruses — that we once left in the hands of God or fate. This is a genuinely momentous alteration in our worldview. We have for centuries boasted of our mastery of nature, but the time has come for Prometheus to shoulder the responsibility that comes with mastery, and to make our mastery wiser.

We may be lords and masters of nature, but as philosophers have been telling us, we must learn to master our mastery. It is dawning on us that this so-called mastery could kill us, and not only us. According to what we currently know, a virus leaps from a non-human to a human in a wet market in Wuhan: a tiny entity composed of RNA acid and protein jumps the gap between species, and within eight weeks, thanks to the malign interaction between the global economy and the global biosphere, the entire world was in lock-down, parents and grandparents were dying and the young adults, who came to majority in the new precarious economy, were wondering whether they would ever know economic security again.

Naturally enough, the idea of the Anthropocene no longer awakens only a sense of mastery and control, but also a terrible fear. We fear our own powers and their consequences; we fear our world ending, going dark in environmental collapse and plague, followed by that old evil stand-by, barbarism. Ecological pressure has ended other great civilizations: if Easter Island, why not us? If viruses finished off the Mayans, the Incas, the tribes who so innocently greeted Columbus, why not us?

The Anthropocene — and the fear that now haunts our mastery of nature — is putting enormous pressure on the whole spectrum of modern political beliefs. Some American progressives accept the ecological facts, but they blame everything on capitalism, demonstrating pattern blindness towards the environmental devastation and public health incompetence in the command economies of Russia, China, and Eastern Europe for two generations after 1945. Ideologically hostile to markets, militant progressives are also giving away significant ameliorative tools such as carbon pricing that may be crucial to any solution to the climate crisis.

At the other end of the political spectrum, there are still many conservative parties — Republicans in the United States prominently among them — who are in double denial about the risk to the environment and the risks to human health, vitiating environmental controls on polluting industries and unlocking their local economies before it is safe to do so. Sometimes this know-nothingism derives from a larger hostility to science and objectivity that has emerged from the cultural and political agenda of the American right. It is just possible that the scale of the crisis of the Anthropocene will awaken conservatives from their dogmatic slumbers, because if they do not awaken they will lose the power they live for. (And the eventual catastrophe will hardly be a good business environment.) There are also populists of the right — Salvini, Orban, Wilders — who prefer to change the subject, who tell their voters that the thing to fear is not climate change or pandemics but immigrants and foreigners. But a politics that changes the subject does not have much of a future either.

In a host of countries — the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states — a new politics has been taking shape that identifies climate change as the central political issue of our time and argues, cogently, that species destruction and environmental wastage have rendered us also more vulnerable to pandemics. Before the pandemic broke, however, this politics seemed stuck, unable to achieve electoral breakthrough anywhere except in Germany and Scandinavia. It was asking for more change than most electors were ready to vote for. Now the question is whether the pandemic, combined with the increasing threat of climate change as it is quantitatively measured, will lure voters out of cautious complacency and pull them towards what the times seem to be calling for — a revolutionary politics.

So should we ready ourselves for a revolutionary politics? Does the threat to the natural environment deserve to erase what we know about revolutions and revolutionaries? For the dystopian imagination, the temptation is very great. Panic is not the friend of patience, and there are more and more voices urging us to panic. But if revolution is not the answer, and we should not throw away the wisdom about politics that we have gained from our experience of other historical emergencies, what would a non-revolutionary climate- conscious politics look like? That is the question that liberalism must answer now. By liberalism, I mean any politics that as a matter of principle prefers reform to revolution, puts its trust in political institutions as instruments of change, and develops policies within the checks and balances of a liberal democratic system and with the market signals of a capitalist economy. This kind of liberalism has depended for its success on its association, since the Enlightenment, with precisely the historical story that climate change and pandemics put into question: the story of progress, the tale that says that science and the mastery of nature, married to the capitalist profit motive and free markets, have created an upward spiral in which political freedom advances hand in hand with economic liberty and technological change, all three combining in a successful synthesis that preserves our natural habitat and increases our life-span.

This, understand, is not a “neoliberal” story, one that supposes that markets left to themselves, disencumbered from regulation, will automatically create a society that reconciles freedom, equity and environmental responsibility. That faith is absurd. The only morally supportable capitalism is a regulated capitalism. Nor will all the essential values of an open society ever go together perfectly or without dissonance. A properly liberal story is very different: it contends that politics — collective public action in the name of citizens and the state — is essential if technological progress can ever be made to serve human ends like freedom, justice, and the preservation of our habitat. Activism, representation, debate, compromise, reason, law: those are the elements of the liberal idea of public action against public harm. But will these suffice against the harm we are causing to our climate? Liberalism’s historical story — politics taming the capitalist Leviathan — seems complacent in revolutionary times, or so many people think. Liberalism is not just associated with a story of progress that is now on trial; it is also associated with a style of politics — meliorist, gradual, compromising — that is now held to be unfit for a time that requires radical solutions. Liberal convictions seem out of step with the prevailing end-times mood that warns we are headed for apocalypse. And in the face of a great fear, liberal politics may be swept aside.

Yet the liberal tradition happens to know something about fear. There once was a great liberal who knew about fear all the way down, so let’s begin with him. There is nothing to fear, he famously said, but fear itself; and he said so when the fear of his time was universal and truly terrifying. Roosevelt’s adage is more than just uplift. It recommends an analytical approach to the causes of fear. Following FDR, a liberal believes that the first thing to do about fear is to disaggregate. Break it into little pieces. Attempt to distinguish what you fear most from what you fear less and least. The one big problem is in fact many smaller problems. If there is no quick and effective and salvific way to address the one big problem, there are ways to address the smaller problems, and this is a more likely way of solving them. Once you disaggregate, you can prioritize. Once you prioritize, a politics begins to take shape. In the case of climate change: first recycling, then road pricing; then carbon pricing; then subsidize renewables; when they are competitive, withdraw the subsidy; then, take coal-fired and gas-fired stations off line; then, when renewables start generating sufficient load, start decommissioning nuclear; and so on. This liberal politics — as opposed to the progressive summons to the barricades — we might call the politics of policy.

In pandemics, disaggregation is also the key. Break the problem down into the pieces you can fix: tracing, masks, ventilators, personal protective gear, distancing. As Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand observed, you go early and you go hard. In the absence of a vaccine, you shut your borders, your schools, your whole economy, and you keep it down till the infection dies for lack of carriers. In the process of additively applying these partial solutions to this lethal problem, liberal societies have demonstrated once again the falsity of a very old canard: that capitalist societies value profits more than lives. (I know, some capitalists do.) As President Macron recently said, in shutting down economies in their entirety, capitalist society revealed its deepest anthropological commitments. It imperiled its economy to save its society.

Dissolving a big problem into little steps is the essence of a liberal politics. Radical environmentalists like to scorn gradualism and incrementalism, but working with incentives and markets, liberal gradualism is on the cusp of transforming Western energy systems. Look around at all those windmills and all those solar panels. Look at the way renewables are competing with fossil fuels on price. This is how regulated markets can work. It turns out that the environmental emergency does not refute liberal politics: far from being bankrupted by climate change, liberalism has turned out to be the only politics that has made substantive progress thus far. It has the eloquence of actual changes. Both the environmental crisis — and even more so the pandemic — have vindicated the liberal belief in government. Only a central government can enact the policies and enforce the regulations that will make a decisive difference. Who, worried about the fate of the earth, could oppose the regulatory state? Who, worried about protecting their families from infection, will not want competent government? Against such threats the private sector is a reed in the wind. Competence, simple competence, on the part of public officials, governmental power used responsibly and effectively for the public good, has a way of vindicating liberal gradualism and of taking away the sting of fear.

It is important to understand that fear is a political phenomenon. It is organized by interests whose purpose is to drive public opinion for profit, political gain, or public benefit. Fear is not only a feeling; it is also a strategy. We need to regard the tribunes of fear as political actors, to test their assertions, especially, as in the case of environmentalists, when we support their objectives. We need to be aware of our own susceptibility to fear. There is a voluptuous quality to it: we like to be afraid, even very afraid, as every Hollywood producer knows. Fear is also an industry: intellectuals build careers upon it; newspapers build circulation upon it; demagogues amass power upon it. Nothing sells like fear: it is a brand. Even a sincere fear may be politically constructed and politically manipulated.

Liberalism is the sworn adversary of such a politics. A liberal knows that the only antidote to fear is knowledge. While there may be legitimate controversies about what is true and what is not, the possibility of truth, the reality of verifiable facts, is — at least for liberals — the foundation of political action. But here we get to the heart of the problem. The reliance upon the facts is most often celebrated when truths are deployed against falsehoods, so that prevailing misconceptions are corrected by accurate information. But what if the prevailing conceptions are not misconceptions? What if fear is warranted by the facts? What if the nightmares have a basis in reality?

After all, fear about climate change and pandemics is not a delusion. We all know (unless we choose not to know) the facts already. Millions of human beings are carrying an infection for which there is no cure yet. The polar ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Sea water is acidifying. Coral reefs are dying. Air and water temperatures are rising, accelerating the violence of storms, flooding, and wildfires. It is no wonder that the narrative of doom is penetrating our psyches, leaving us with a grim sense that our virtuous behaviors — and the politics of little steps — are now beside the point.

And yet. Even when hysteria may seem like a plausible feeling about a problem, it is not a plausible feeling for the discovery of its solution. We need to keep faith with little steps — not despite the magnitude of the crisis but because of it. The environmentally progressive actions of individuals are more than just “virtue signaling.” All these small gestures certainly have “big number effects” when millions of strangers, uncoordinated, all join their little efforts to our own. In lockdown, we discovered the immense impact — we called it “flattening the curve” — that individual behaviors such as staying at home could have in reducing risk for us all. Little efforts scaled up are among the central tools of a liberal politics. They are also antidotes to despair.

Despair may be a way of simply registering, at the level of feeling, the gravity of the facts. But it is one thing to face the facts and another to question or even abandon the hope of remedies. Fear in the Anthropocene is also challenging the relevance of the very frame in which liberal politics operates: the nation-state. It is easy to believe that pandemics and environmental crisis overrun the capacities of our sovereign actors. Climate change makes it easy for the powerful to claim that they are powerless, while their private planes idle not far from the conference center, but it also makes it easy for activists to believe that the tactics of liberal gradualism, focused as they are on local, regional, and national governments, are irrelevant. When a problem as big as climate change, as global as a pandemic, enters the political agenda, the advanced chatter begins to claim that only global solutions matter — whereas in reality it is national authorities who actually have the power to close borders, quarantine their citizens, force the transition to sustainable energy. The grueling months of pandemic crisis, far from demonstrating the irrelevance of liberalism’s chosen site for politics — the nation-state — have shown that it is the site that actually matters.

These narratives about the irrelevance of national politics should be seen for what they are: alibis for inaction. Those who do have power still make a huge difference, for good or for ill. Every day that President Trump dismantles the environmental protections built up since Nixon’s time, every time he contradicts common sense in public health matters, he shows us what malevolence and incompetence in public office can do. Xi Jinping makes an equally malign difference, as 56% percent of the increase in CO2 emissions comes from China and a good proportion of the misinformation about covid19 as well. Ditto Narendra Modi in India. Indeed, climate change and the pandemic — contemporary life in the Anthropocene — has also exposed the price we have paid for the shredding of what once passed for a liberal international order. We mock that phrase at our own peril. International climate change conferences — Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid — are easily dismissed, but for all their faults they did edge states towards action, and for all the suspect friendliness of the WHO towards China, does anyone, apart from the president of the United States, seriously believe the world is a safer place without the WHO?

So we desperately need competent national governments to protect us, but also governments smart enough to learn from each other and share knowledge — open governments, empirical governments. The time left for this mixture of national and international action keeps getting shorter. If concerted and scientifically based action fails to address climate challenge, if the oceans keep rising, if the fires keep getting worse, if infections spike again, we may reach a moment when democratic citizens will demand that their leaders acquire autocratic powers to protect us from further harm: governments of national salvation, in the old expression. The pandemic has already demonstrated the use that authoritarians have for such crises. Climate change, if sufficiently terrifying, could cause us to vote ourselves into an authoritarian state.

Thus the climate emergency and the pandemic may test the viability of liberal democracy even more than populism has. Yet before we allow ourselves to be rushed towards the authoritarian exit, let’s ask a simple question: which global leader would you rather have in charge of your climate emergency and your pandemic? Xi Jinping or Angela Merkel? Jair Bolsonaro or Jacinda Ardern? Far from demonstrating that liberal democratic leaders are not up to the crisis, climate change and the pandemic have vindicated democratic leadership and demonstrated what it consists in: trusting your citizens, believing in reason and research, marshaling the forces of government to support them, and having the courage to tell your citizens the truth.

Yet even this is not the core challenge. Liberals face a deeper crisis — in our confidence in our stories about the past. It was technology and political reform that lifted the burden of labor off the backs of men and women; it was science that enabled women to face childbirth without fear and gave us the prospect that everyone could have a full and longer life-span, free of hunger and disease. This is the Enlightenment story, the saga of the empowering relationship between knowledge and freedom. It is the only good story left. It is the narrative that made us feel that all the senseless hustle and brutality of capitalist modernity served a higher purpose, even if we could not see it ourselves. We were bound on the wheel of progress, and it was inexorably moving uphill. Or so we thought.

Now we are told that it is rolling downward towards the abyss. Radical environmentalism, reinforced by covid19, has become the glamorous pessimism of our time. It has become an identity and a style: an opportunity to demonstrate one’s own righteousness, to express disgust at politicians, to give shape, however dark, to time. Better a master narrative that predicts doom than no narrative at all. To dissent from this view is to take upon oneself a whole lot of trouble. My own dissent is in fact pretty limited. I do not dispute the facts, of course — shame on those who do. I dispute the attitude. What I dislike is the pessimism, the misanthropy, the wholesale indictment of progress and humanism, the tendentious re-writing of modern history, the impatience with liberal half-measures, which — I insist — are the only ones that have made any constructive difference.

It is common these days to read that our species is a cancer upon the planet, a virus, an infestation, or to change metaphors, that we are the chief serial killers on earth. Thanks to this dire and defeatist mental agitation, many people worry aloud whether we even deserve to survive. Young people actually ask themselves whether they should bring children into such a benighted world. The fight for life is damaging the appetite for life. Instead of feeling empowered by what we have come to know about the climate and about epidemics, the more we know, the worse we feel.

Are we guilty of crimes against our environment? Of course we are. (We are guilty also of crimes against each other.) Being human demands that we take responsibility for what we have done to the planet. But being human also means keeping faith with our species’ staggering and proven resourcefulness. In a crisis of these dimensions, misanthropy becomes a fatal spiritual temptation. Radical environmentalists understandably wish to shake us awake, but the language they commonly use fosters only despair and disengagement. The pandemic has given life to this new rhetoric of repentance and flagellation. Fire-and brimstone language that calls for apocalyptic change has a long and unappetizing history: in the Protestant Reformation, in the French Revolution, and in the chiliastic fervor of the Russian revolution. In all three it led to a betrayal of the goals that revolutionary change sought to achieve. Our past should have taught us by now to recognize and reject such impulses.

Incredible as it may seem, after hundreds of thousands of people across the world have already died of the pandemic, there are some environmentalists who argue that this is a necessary wake-up call, even a price worth paying if it induces us to turn away, before it is too late, from the path of profligacy, waste, and consumerism. As in heartless religions of old, we are encouraged to make this suffering redemptive. Once again radicals have uses for our terror. Surely there is something indecent about celebrating the desolation of city streets as good for us, and something morally decadent about seeing the quiet of lockdown as a harbinger of a better world when freezer trucks are parked outside our hospitals.

In this new talk about how the pandemic points us towards environmental resurrection, there is a very disreputable idea about human wants and preferences. This is Marx’ idea of false consciousness, according to which this vast world of capitalist consumption is an orchestrated delusion, in which capitalism creates counterfeit needs and desires which then enslave us and lead us to environmental perdition. Liberalism’s belief about human beings could not be more different. We accept that people have the needs and desires they have and we believe that a free society must respect these needs and desires for what they are. People want pleasure, cars, goods, vacations; they derive comfort and consolation from possessions. They are willing to spend money, lots of it, in pointless but amiable sociability in restaurants, bars, cafes, and holidays on far-away beaches. All this is not decadent, it is human. And the vast machine of capitalism exists to serve these wants. The market does not distinguish between those wants that are noble and those that are trivial, those that are conducive to the survival of the species and those that are hostile to it. These are choices that free men and women make for themselves, not least through their political choices. The world that results is only partly free, since the combined effect of these wants can create externalities which then plague us and diminish our enjoyment, but still, fundamentally, the order of our world is created by human desire.

This set of ideas makes a liberal deeply resistant to an environmental moralism that implies that there is a sustainable world to be had if only we could realize that our desires are false. From a conviction that actual human wants are destroying the planet to the premise that human beings should not be allowed to want what they want is but one small step. Most environmentalists are democrats, but if they take that step they will cease to be democrats and cease to be liberals. Pandemics and the climate crisis do not just empower autocrats. They can also corrupt democrats.

For what real alternative is there, except to place our faith and direct our energies where they always should have been: in knowledge, reason, science, persuasion, and policy — in the imperfect and constantly adapting tools that we have used, since the beginning, to gain such mastery as we have of ourselves and of our world? What real alternative is there, what greater engine of mitigation, to democratic politics? Does anyone doubt that the planet will not be saved by dictators? Recall the earlier fascist enemies of democracy, who thought that it was feckless — only to discover how formidable a democratic people can be when their survival depends upon it.

A liberal’s critique of radical environmentalism is that it is essentially a religious movement, in its absolutism, in its exclusive claims to virtue, in its contempt for differences of opinion, in its call for salvation. The pandemic has made these calls for salvation more insistent. Instead of a new secular religion, however, what the environment actually needs is a new politics. For any strategy that will get CO2 and pollution under control is bound to be deeply divisive. To deal with these divisions, green activism must become properly political, seeking the compromises between energy producing regions and energy consuming regions, between workers in smokestack industries and workers in the new economy, between those who benefit from green change and those who may be hurt in the long transition to a sustainable future. The pandemic, likewise, forces choices upon us. Neither the absolutism of public health nor the absolutism of the economy is any kind of guide to our perplexities.

The very idea of compromise sounds scandalous in the face of our emergency, but the core of a liberal politics, surely, is that there are no absolute claims — not even the melting glaciers, not even the spread of a pandemic — that clear the table in democratic debate. We must argue about everything if we wish to stay free. Experts must be heard but they do not rule. Majorities rule, but minorities have to be protected. Legislatures pass laws, but courts have to rule on their lawfulness and constitutionality. All this slows down a liberal polity’s capacity to act, but that is the price of freedom — and also the condition of effective action against complicated problems. Above all, citizens matter, one by one. Energy workers and energy producers, in smokestack industries and regions, are citizens like the rest of us, and their claims deserve something better than moral derision. They need help, they need time, and like all of us they need jobs.

Liberal institutions can handle climate change and pandemics, but only if they are honest and free. Here liberals should confront some hard truths. We need to face up to the reality of how tarnished our chosen instruments have become. The climate crisis is exposing just how many of our institutions have been captured by the interests they purport to regulate. Liberals have to acknowledge in particular the distorting impact of energy oligopolies on market prices for carbon intensive goods, and the equally distorting impact of big energy money in politics. Equally, the pandemic has exposed, at least in the United States, the fearful way in which a private health industry weakened the capacity of states and governments to maintain a public health infrastructure that protects everyone regardless of their ability to pay.

Liberalism is an elite politics in the sense that representative democracy consists in the appointment of a governing class or echelon by popular ballot — and that echelon, that elite, has become much too cozy with big money, whether it be from the pharmaceutical industry or big oil. Here the climate change protesters have been proven right: we will not get climate policies that work if the legislation is written by the energy companies. Likewise, we will not get health care policy that protects all of us, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, if policy is written by health care companies. So the liberal counter-lobby, in favor of sensible and attainable policy, will have to be as well financed and as relentless as the forces it is up against.

It is commonly feared that liberal democracy may not be up to the challenge of cleaning its own house and making the right choices to protect nature and our lives. Yet before we give up on liberal democracy, we should observe a significant fact — noted by the historian Niall Ferguson — that it is only in liberal democracies that CO2 increase has halted. To be sure, these societies are still emitting CO2, too much of it, but they have stopped its increase and with good leadership they can attain carbon neutrality. Where CO2 continues to increase, by contrast, is in authoritarian societies such as China and Russia. So the argument that liberal democracy is too paralyzed by polarization to meet the climate crisis may be wrong. Action on climate change needs more democracy, not less — it needs open societies that empower from the ground up, and favor initiatives at every level, especially the municipal, and enable all of us as citizens to act, to protest, to represent, and to invent solutions.

It is also in open societies that basic knowledge about climate change and pandemics has spread most quickly. Only democratic societies can guarantee the freedom that knowledge requires, though the political and economic pressures on science and free public debate have lately been growing. Despite the counter-attack of the know-nothings, we should remember how far we have come. Mass public awareness of the environmental crisis dates no further back than Earth Day 1970. Mass awareness of the existential lethality of pandemic is no older than HIV, SARS, and ebola. But now we know, and there is no going back. We are closer now, in the early twenty-first century, to a mass politics, based on environmental and epidemiological science, than at any time in history. The new politics has begun, and we must give it time to have its effect, to make its way to government.

Radical environmentalists are already warning us that this is all too little too late. In life, as in politics, it is never too late, and the suggestion itself encourages inaction. Already the next generation grasps that this will be the political challenge of their age, to which they must rise if they are to have a future to hand on to their own children. The politics of environmental correction and global health will not succeed if its core message is to hate ourselves for what we have done.

In finding the balance of activism and understanding, we need to remember how deeply men and women have loved the natural world and have ardently portrayed it in their culture, so that their fellow creatures would love it as they do. We forget how deep the respect for nature’s limits and nature’s laws goes in the anthropological record. We forget how epidemiology has enabled us to see that we are creatures whose survival depends on respect for our habitat and for other species. We walked away from this wisdom, but we are now walking back to what our aboriginal and peasant ancestors knew.

Let us face up to the whole complex story of how we became lords and masters of nature. The celebration of progress since the Enlightenment, the historical script that we inherited from Kant and Hegel, Smith and Marx, made sense of time for us, but it was always in part a myth, concealing the dark side of our conquest of nature. Yet let us also remember that an astounding amount of material, scientific, and moral progress was made, and remember also that the mythical dimension of the story of progress was an ennobling myth, which taught us to believe in our agency for good, in our capacity to become masters of our fate rather than slaves of gods and nature. We must be unafraid to confront the dark side of progress now, but without losing faith in the human campaign to make life better. This is the conviction that we need to save our planet and ourselves.

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