Night Thoughts

    Long ago I was born.
    There is no one alive anymore
    who remembers me as a baby.
    Was I a good baby? A
    bad? Except in my head
    that debate is now
    silenced forever.
    What constitutes
    a bad baby, I wondered. Colic,
    my mother said, which meant
    it cried a lot.
    What harm could there be
    in that? How hard it was
    to be alive, no wonder
    they all died. And how small
    I must have been, suspended
    in my mother, being patted by her
    approvingly.
    What a shame I became
    verbal, with no connection
    to that memory. My mother’s love!
    All too soon I emerged
    my true self,
    robust but sour,
    like an alarm clock.

    Mahler’s Heaven and Mahler’s Earth

    Gustav Mahler: the face of a man wearing glasses. The face attracts the attention of the viewer: there is something very expressive about it. It is a strong and open face, we are willing to trust it right away. Nothing theatrical about it, nothing presumptuous. This man wears no silks. He is not someone who tells us: I am a genius, be careful with me. There is something energetic, vivid, and “modern” about the man. He gives an impression of alacrity: he could enter the room any second. Many portraits from the same period display men, Germanic and not only Germanic men, politicians, professors, and writers, whose faces disappear stodgily into the thicket of a huge voluptuous beard, as if hiding in it, disallowing any close inspection. But the composer’s visage is naked, trans-parent, immediate. It is there to speak to us, to sing, to tell us something.

    I bought my first recording of Gustav Mahler many decades ago. At the time his name was almost unknown to me. I only had a vague idea of what it represented. The recording I settled on was produced by a Soviet company called Melodiya — a large state-owned (of course) company which sometimes produced great recordings. There was no trade in the Soviet Union and yet the trademark Melodya did exist. It was the Fifth Symphony, I think — I’ve lost the vinyl disc in my many voyages and moves — and the conductor was Yevgeny Svetlanov. For some reason the cover was displayed in the store window for a long time; it was a modest store in Gliwice, in Silesia. Why the display of Mahler’s name in this provincial city which generally cared little for music? 

    It took me several days before I decided to buy the record. And then, very soon, when I heard the first movement, the trumpet and the march, which was at the same time immensely tragic and a bit joyful too, or at least potentially joyful, I knew from this unexpected conjunction of emotions that something very important had happened: a new chapter in my musical life had opened, and in my inner life as well. New sounds entered my imagination. At the same time I understood — or only intuited — that I would always have a problem distinguishing between “sad” and “joyful,” both in music and in poetry. Some sadnesses would be so delicious, and would make me so happy, that I would forget for a while the difference between the two realms. Perhaps there is no frontier between them, as in the Schengen sector of contemporary Europe.

    The Fifth Symphony was my gateway to Mahler’s music. Many years after my first acquaintance with it, a British conductor told me that this particular symphony was deemed by those deeply initiated in Mahler’s symphonies and Mahler’s songs as maybe a bit too popular, too accessible, too easy. “That trumpet, you know.” “And, you know, then came Visconti,” who did not exactly economize on the Adagietto from the same symphony in the slow, very slow shots in Death in Venice, where this music, torn away from its sisters and brothers, the other movements, came to serve a mass-mystical, mass-hys-terical cultish enthusiasm, floating on the cushions of movie theaters chairs. Nothing for serious musicians, nothing for scholars and sages…. But I do not agree. For me the Fifth Symphony remains one of the living centers of Gustav Mahler’s music and no movie will demote it, no popularity will diminish it, no easily manipulated melancholy in a distended Adagietto will make me skeptical about its force, its freshness, its depth. 

    As for that trumpet: the trumpet that I heard for the first time so many years ago had nothing to do with the noble and terrifying noises of the Apocalypse. It was nothing more than an echo of a military bugle — which, the biographers tell us, young Gustav must have heard almost every week in his small Moravian town of Jihlava, or Iglau in German, which was the language of the Habsburg empire, where local troops in their slightly comic blue uniforms would march in the not very tidy streets to the sounds of a brass orchestra. Yet there was nothing trivial or farcical about this almost-a-bugle trumpet. It told me right away that in Mahler’s music I would be exposed to a deep ambivalence, a new complication — that the provincial, the din of Hapsburgian mass-culture, will forever pervade his symphonies. This vernacular, this down-to-earth (down to the cobblestones of Jihlava’s streets) brass racket, always shadows Mahler’s most sublime adagios. 

    The biographical explanation is interesting and important, but it is not sufficient. An artist of Mahler’s stature does not automatically or reflexively rely on early experiences for his material. He uses them, and transposes them, only when they fit into a larger scheme having to do with his aesthetic convictions and longings. The strings in the adagios seem to come from a different world: the violins and the cellos in the adagios sound like they are being played by poets. But then in the rough scherzo-like movements we hear the impudent brass. From the clouds to the cobblestones: Mahler may be a mystical composer, but his mysticism is tinged with an acute awareness of the ordinary, often trite environment of all the higher aspirations.

    His aesthetic convictions and longings: what are they? Judging from the music, one thing seems to be certain: this composer is looking for the high, maybe for the highest that can be achieved, for the religious, for the metaphysical — and yet he cannot help hearing also the common laughter of the low streets, the unsophisticated noise of military brass instruments. His search for the sublime never takes place in the abstract void of an inspiration cleansed of the demotic world which is his habitat. Mahler confronts the predicament well known to many artists and writers living within the walls of modernity but not quite happy with it, because they have in their souls a deep yearning for a spiritual event, for revelation. They are like someone walking in the dusk toward a light, like a wanderer who does not know whether the sun is rising or setting. They have to decide how to relate to everything that is not light, to the vast continent of the half trivial, half necessary arrangements of which the quotidian consists. Should they ignore it, or attempt to secede from it? But then what they have to say will be rejected as nothing more than lofty rhetoric, as something artificial, as unworldly in the sense of unreal. They will be labeled “reactionary” or, even worse, boring. Anyway, aren’t they to some degree made from the same dross that they are trying to overcome, to transcend? 

    And yet if they attach too much importance to it, if they become mesmerized by what is given, by the empirical, then the sheer weight of the banality of existing conditions might crush them, flatten them to nothingness. The dross, right. But let us be fair about modernity: it has plenty of good things as well. It has given us, among other things, democracy and electricity (to paraphrase Lenin). Any honest attitude toward modernity must be extremely complex. Modernity, for better and worse, is the air we breathe. What is problematic for some artists and thinkers is modernity’s anti-metaphysical stance, its claim that we live in a post-post-religious world. Yet there are also artists and thinkers who applaud modernity precisely for its secularism and materialism, like the well-known French poet who visited Krakow and during a public discussion of the respective situations of French poetry and Polish poetry said this: “I admire many things in present- day Polish poetry, but there is one thing that makes me uneasy — you Polish poets still struggle with God, whereas we decided a long time ago that all that is totally childish.” 

    To be sure, they — the anti-moderns, as Antoine Compagnon calls them — may also become too bitter and angry, so that their critique of the modern world can go too far and turn into an empty gesture of rejection. In his afterword to a collection of essays by Gerhard Nebel — the German conservative thinker, an outsider, once a social-democrat, always an anti-Nazi, after World War II a marginal figure in the intellectual landscape of the Bundesrepublik, a connoisseur of ancient Greek literature, someone who saw dealing with die Archaik as one of the remedies against the grayness of the modern world — Sebastian Kleinschmidt presents such a case. He admires the many merits of Nebel’s writing, his vivid emotions, his intolerance of any routine, of any Banausentum or life lived far away from the appeal of the Muses, his passionate search for the real as opposed to the merely actual — but he is skeptical of Nebel’s overall dismissal of modern civilization, since it is too sweeping to be persuasive, too lacking in nuances and distinctions. Perhaps we can put the problem this way: there is no negotiation involved, no exchange, no spiritual diplomacy.

    When coping with modernity, with those aspects of it which insist on curbing or denying our metaphysical hunger, we must be not only as brave as Hector but also as cunning as Ulysses. We have to negotiate. We need to borrow from modernity a lot: since we encounter it every day, how could we avoid being fed and even shaped by it? The very verb “to negotiate” is a good example of the complexity of the situation. It comes from from neg — otium, from the negation of otium. Otium is the Latin word for leisure, but for contemplation too. Thus the verb to negotiate denotes a worldly activity that tacitly presupposes the primacy of unworldly activities (because the negation comes second, after the affirmation).

    In French, le négoce means commerce, business. We can add to it all the noise of the market and the parliament. When we negotiate, we have no otium. But it is also possible to negotiate in order to save some of the otium. We can negate otium for a while but only in order to return to it a bit later, once it has been saved from destruction. As I say, we must be cunning. 

    By the way, the notion of otium that gave birth to the verb “to negotiate” is not a marginal category, something that belongs only to the annals of academia, to books covered by dust. For the Ancients it was a central notion and a central activity, the beginning and the end of wisdom. And even now it plays an important role in a debate in which the values of modernity are being pondered: those who have problems with the new shape of our civilization accuse it of having killed otium, of having produced an infinity of new noises and activities which contribute to the end of leisure, to the extermination of contemplation. 

    But can we discuss Mahler’s music along with poetic texts by, say, Yeats and Eliot, along with the other manifestoes of modernism? Talking about music in a way that makes it seem like philosophy or a philosophical novel, a kind of Zauberberg for piano and violin, is certainly flawed. Questions are methodically articulated in philosophy and, though never fully answered, they wander from one generation to another, from the Greeks to our contemporaries. Does art need such questions? Does music need them? The first impulse is to say no, art has nothing to do with this sort of intellectual inquiry. Isn’t pure contemplation, separated from any rational discourse, the unique element of art, both painting and music, and perhaps poetry as well? 

    But maybe pure contemplation does not need to be so pure. We do not know exactly how it works (another question!), but we do know that art always takes on some coloring from its historic time, from the epoch in which it is created. Art obviously has a social history, and earthly circumstances. And yet impure contemplation is still contemplation. Let us listen for a minute to the words of a famous painter, an experienced practitioner — to Balthus in his conversations with Alain Vircondelet, which were conducted in the last years of the painter’s life:

    Modern painting hasn’t really understood that painting’s sublime, ultimate purpose — if it has one — is to be the tool or passageway to answering the world’s most daunting questions that haven’t been fathomed. The Great Book of the Universe remains impenetrable and painting is one of its possible keys. That’s why it is indubitably religious, and therefore spiritual. Through painting, I revisit the course of time and history, at an unknown time, original in the true sense of the word. That is, something newly born. Working allows me to be present on the first day, in an extreme, solitary adventure laden with all of past history.

    How fascinating: a great painter tells us that in his work he used not only his eye and his hand but also his reason, his philosophical mind; that when he painted he felt the presence of great questions. Even more: he tells us that the pressure of these questions was not inconsequential, that it led him to spirituality. We know that Mahler, in a letter to Bruno Walter, also mentioned the presence of great questions and described his state of mind while being in contact with the element of music in this way: “When I hear music, even when I am conducting, I often hear a clear answer to all my questions — I experience clarity and certainty.”

    Certainly, the questions that sit around a painter or a composer like pensive cats are very different from those which besiege a philosopher. Do they require a response? Here is one more authority: in a note serving as a preface to the publication of four of his letters about Nietzsche, Valery remarked that “Nietzsche stirred up the combativeness of my mind and the intoxicating pleasure of quick answers which I have always savored a little too much.” The irony of it: “the intoxicating pleasure of quick answers” in a thinker who, as we know, was so proud of his philosophizing with a hammer. Of course, this one sentence comprises in a nutshell the entire judgment that mature Valéry passed on Nietzsche — the early temptation and the later rejection of such a degree of “the combativeness of the spirit.” And it confirms our intuition: the questions that accompany art, painting, music, and poetry cannot be answered in a way similar to debates in philosophy seminars, and yet they are an invisible and inaudible part of every major artistic exertion.

    In a way, Mahler’s doubleness of approach seems completely obvious; the brass and the strings attend each other, and need each other, in the complex patterns of his symphonies. I have read that in his time he was accused by many critics of triviality in his music. They claimed that his symphonies lacked the dignity of Beethoven’s symphonies, the depth of great German music. What they ferociously attacked as trivial is probably the thing that I admire so much in Mahler’s music — the presence of the other side of our world, the inclusion of its commonness and its coarseness, of the urban peripheries, of village fairs, of the brass — the quotation of provincial life, of public parades and military marches, almost like in Nino Rota’s scores for Fellini. Very few among Mahler’s contemporaries were able to see the virtue of it.

    The charge of triviality also had anti-Semitic undertones and followed in the footsteps of Wagner’s accusation, in his “Judaism in Music,” that Jewish composers were not able to develop a deep connection with the soul of the people, and were limited to the world of the city only, gliding slickly on the surface. Jewish composers apparently could not hear the song of the earth, argued such critics. How wonderful, then, that Mahler triumphed in his own Song of the Earth! Jewish composers were accused — among the many sins of which they were accused — of introducing modern elements into their music. Never mind that one of the principal modernizers of Western music was Wagner himself. 

    I have yet to understand why Mahler has for so long, from the very beginning, been so overwhelmingly important for me, so utterly central to the evolution of my soul. Once, in speaking with some American friends, I asked them who “made” them, in the sense of a master, a teacher, un maître à penser, and the reason was I wanted to tell them that Gustav Mahler made me. It was an exaggeration, I know, and a bit precious. I had other masters as well. And yet my statement was not false. Did it have to do only with the sonorities of his symphonies, with the newness of his music, the unexpected contrasts and astonishing passages swinging between the lyric to the sardonic? Was it the formal side uniquely? For many years I resisted the temptation to translate my deep emotional bond to his music — the deep consonance between Mahler’s work and my own search in the domain of poetry — into intellectual terms, maybe fearing that too much light shed on it would diminish its grip on my imagination. I still hold this superstitious view, but I also suspect that there may be some larger intellectual benefit to be gained from an exploration of my obsession.

    For everyone who has a passionate interest in art and in ideas, sooner or later a problem arises. When we look for truth and try to be honest, when we try as a matter of principle to avoid dogmatism and any sort of petrification, any blind commitment to this or that worldview, we are, it seems, necessarily condemned to deal with shards, with fragments, with pieces that do not constitute any whole — even if, consciously or not, we strive for the impossible “whole.” But then if we also harbor a love for art — and it is not at all unusual to have these two passions combined in a single individual — a strange tension appears: in art we deal with forms which, by definition, cannot be totally fragmentary. To be sure, at least since the Romantic moment we have been exposed to fragments, and accustomed to fracture, in all kinds of artistic enterprises, from music and poetry to painting — but even these fragments tend to acquire a shape. If we juxtapose them with the “truth fragments,” with Wittgensteinian scraps of philosophical results, an integrated pattern is created by virtue of some little embellishment, by a sleight of hand; a magician is at work who tends to forget the search for truth because the possibility of a form, a more or less perfect form, suddenly attracts him more strongly than the shapelessness of a purely intellectual assessment. 

    These two dissimilar but related hunts, one for truth, one for form, are not unlike husky dogs pulling a sled in two slightly different directions: they are sometimes able to achieve an almost-harmony. The sled fitfully moves forward, but at other times the competing pressures threaten to endanger the entire expedition. So, too, are our mental hunts and journeys, forever hesitating between a form that will allow us to forget the rather uncomfortable sharpness of truth and a gesturing for truth that may make us forget the thrill of beauty and the urge to create, at least for the time being.

    This brings us back to Mahler. The doubleness in his music that I have described may be understood as reflecting the ambiguity of the double search for truth and form. Mahler was a God-seeker who recognized the ambivalence of such a quest in art. He was torn between the search for the voluptuousness of beauty and the search for the exactness of truth.

    Hartmut Lange, a German writer living in Berlin, a master of short prose, told me once that Mahler’s Song of the Earth, which he listens to all the time and adores in a radical way, “is God.” I was taken aback. The deification of this almost-symphony, which I also ardently admire, made me feel uneasy. But I find it more than interesting that this great music can be associated with, and even called, God. This suggests a quasi-religious aspect of the music, and even a sober secularist cannot escape at times placing the work within the circle nearing the sacred.

    Among the many approaches to the sacred we may distinguish two: one which consists in searching, in a quest, and is conducted in a climate of uncertainty and even doubt, and another which proclaims a kind of sureness, a positive certainty, a eureka-like feeling that what was sought has been found. In our tormented and skeptical time it is not easy to find examples of such a positive and even arrogant attitude, at least not within serious culture. Among the great modern poets and writers only few were blessed by certainty. Even the great Pascal had his doubts, and so much earlier. Gustav Mahler belongs to the seekers, not the finders. The quest is his element, and doubt is always near.

    It is true for both poetry and music: whenever one approaches an important work, one is much more outspoken when it comes to discussing the elements within it that will yield to the intellectual or even dialectical categories that the reader or listener cherishes. The other ingredients, especially those that represent pure lyricism and thus are at the very heart of the work in question, are hardly graspable, at least in words. What can we say? It is beautiful, it pierces my soul, or some other platitude of the sort. Or we can just sigh to signal our delight. Sighing, though, is not enough; it is too inarticulate, and in print it evaporates altogether. This is the misery of writing about art: the very center of it remains almost totally ineffable, and what can be rationally described is rather a frame than the substance itself. 

    A frame that enters into dialogue with its period, with its cultural and historical environment, can be much better described than the substance of a symphony or a painting. The nucleus of a work, or of an artist’s output, is less historical, less marked by the sediments of time, and therefore mysterious. It is also more personal, more private. This is certainly the case with Mahler’s music, whose very core constitute those lyric movements, those endless ostinati that we find everywhere, first in his songs, in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the other lieder, then in his symphonies, and supremely in their adagios, and then finally in the unsurpassable Lied von der Erde. And the Ninth Symphony! I don’t have in mind only the final Adagio but also the first movement, the Andante comodo, which displays an incredible vivacity and, at the same time, creates an unprecedentedly rich musical idiom — a masterful musical portrayal of what it means to be alive, with all the quick changes and stubborn dramas, the resentments and the raptures, that constitute the exquisite and weary workshop of the mind and the heart.

    But let us not forget, when we celebrate the lyric sections, the sometimes simple melodies, and the long ostinati, let us not forget all the intoxicating marches, the half sardonic, half triumphant marches that originated in a small Moravian town but then crossed the equator and reached the antipodes. These marches give Mahler’s music its rhythm, its vigor, its muscle. There is nothing wan in Mahler’s compositions, nothing pale on the order of, say, Puvis de Chavannes; instead they display, even in their most tender and aching passages, an irreversible vitality. The marches propel the music and give it its movement, its strolls and dances and strides. The “vulgar” marches convey the mood of a constant progression, maybe even of a “pilgrim’s progress.” Nothing ever stagnates in Mahler compositions, they are on the move all the time. 

    It’s unbecoming to disagree with someone who was a great Mahler connoisseur and also contributed enormously to the propagation of his work, but it is hard to accept Leonard Bernstein’s observation that the funeral marches in Mahler‘s symphonies are a musical image of grief for the Jewish God whom the composer abandoned. The problem is not only that there is scant biographical evidence for such an interpretation. More importantly, the marches are more than Bernstein says they are. They represent no single emotion. Instead they oscillate between mourning and bliss and thus stand (or walk or dance) high above any firm monocausal meaning.

     In the Song of the Earth, it is the sixth and last movement, der Abschied, the Farewell, that crowns Mahler’s entire work. Musicologists tell us that its beauty consists mainly in the combination of a lyrical melodic line with the rich chromaticism of the orchestra. But obviously such an observation can barely render justice to the unforgettable charm of this sensual music which unwillingly bids farewell to the earth; we hear in this work the tired yet ecstatic voice of the composer who knew how little life was left to him. Perhaps only in Rilke’s 

    Duino Elegies can we find an example of a similar seriousness in embracing our fate, an instance of a great artist finally abolishing any clear distinction between sadness and joy.  

    There is a fine poem written in the early 1980s by the Swedish poet and novelist Lars Gustafsson. It is called “The Stillness of the World Before Bach” and it caught the attention of many readers. Here is part of it:

    There must have been a world before
    the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita,
    but what kind of a world?
    A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
    everywhere unawakened instruments,
    where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
    never passed across the keys.
    Isolated churches
    where the soprano line of the Passion
    never in helpless love twined round
    the gentler movements of the flute […]

    [translated into English by Philip Martin]

    Of course there were many voices and many composers before Bach, and not at all “a Europe of vast empty spaces.” What would Palestrina, Gabrielli, and Monteverdi say? What would the monks say who created and developed Gregorian chant? Still, in Gustafsson’s poem we immediately recognize some deeper truth. I imagine that in a similar poem in which Gustav Mahler would replace Johann Sebastian Bach, the poet would describe not “a Europe of vast empty spaces” but rather a Europe of cities, great and small ones, of empty Sunday streets, of empty parks, of waiting rooms.

    The Mahler gesture resembles in some respect the Bach achievement, but it is very different too. Bach was a genius of synthesis, who appeared after centuries of the development of Western art and on this fertile soil built a great edifice of music. There is less synthetic energy in Mahler’s creation; the significance of his work seems to reside in its spiritual implication. Mahler, more than any of his contemporaries, tries to graft onto this lay world of ours a religious striving, to convey a higher meaning to a largely meaningless environment without ever forgetting or concealing the obvious features of a secular age.

    The Sludge

    I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest….
    I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried
    to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when
    I tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they
    wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with
    themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it.
    They received a feeling of security.

    RALPH ELLISON, INVISIBLE MAN

    One Friday afternoon, in a carpeted alcove off the main sanctuary of my school, a Jewish school in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my class collected in a circle as we did every week. A young, liberally perfumed Israeli woman in a tight turtleneck sweater read to us from a textbook about the exodus from Egypt. I asked her why our ancestors had been enslaved to begin with, and then wondered aloud whether it was because only former slaves can appreciate freedom. I remember the feeling of the idea forming in my very young mind, and the struggle to articulate it. Clumsily, with a child’s vocabulary, I suggested to my teacher that Jewish political life began with emancipation, and that this origin ensured that gratitude to God would be the foundation of our national identity. Could that have been God’s motivation? I don’t remember her answer, only her mild bemusement, and my impression that she did not have the philosophical tools or the inclination to engage with the question. I was left to wonder on my own about the nature of slavery, the distant memories that undergird identity, and God’s will; without a teacher, without a framework. I was by myself with these questions. 

    Of course, we were not gathered in that schoolchildren’s circle to study philosophy. We were studying the Biblical tale not in order to theorize about the nature of slavery and freedom, or to acquire a larger sense of Jewish history, but because it was expected of us, and every other grade in the school, this and every week since the school’s founding, to study the weekly portion of the Torah, because that is what Jewish students in a Jewish school of that denomination do. I had mistaken a social activity for an intellectual one. The norms of a community demanded this conversation of us, because otherwise the community would be suspect. People would whisper that graduates of our school lacked the capacity for full belonging within their particular Jewish group, because we had failed to receive the proper training in membership. The overarching objective of our education was initiation. The prayers that we were taught to say before and after eating, and upon waking up in the morning, and going to the bathroom, and seeing a rainbow, and on myriad other quotidian occasions, served the same purpose. These were not theological practices; we were not taught to consider the might and creative power of the God whom we were thanking — the meanings of what we recited, the ideas that lay beneath the words. We uttered all those sanctifying words because it was what our school’s permutation of the Jewish tradition taught Jews to do. We were performing, not pondering. 

    Divine commandments were the sources and accoutrements of our liturgies and rituals. But we lingered much longer over the choreography than over the divinity. The substance of our identity was rules, which included the recitation of certain formulas for certain concepts and customs. And our knowledge of the rules, how or whether we obeyed them, would signal what sort of Jews we were. The primary purpose of this system was to provide talismans that we could use to signal membership. In the context of my religious education, the meaning of the symbols was less important than how I presented them. Badges were more central than beliefs. The content of the badges — the symbols and all the concomitant intellectual complications — was left alone. Marinating within that culture inculcated in me an almost mystical reverence for my religion and for its God because it placed them in a realm outside of reason. I could not interrogate them: holiness is incommensurate with reason. Without the indelible experience of that schooling in anti-intellectualism, the beauties and intoxicants of tradition would be inaccessible to me. Even now, when I witness expressions of fine religious faith, I am capable of recognizing and honoring them because of that early training.

    The anti-intellectualism had another unwitting effect: the indifference of my community to the cerebral and non-communal dimensions of the way we lived meant that I could develop my own relationship with them.  Since they were unconcerned with the aspects of religious life to which I most kindled, I was free to discover them independently. They didn’t care what I thought, so I set out to think. In this manner I began to acquaint myself with fundamental human questions, to feel my way around and develop the rudiments of ideas about morality, slavery, love, and forgiveness. My academic syllabi were rife with references to these themes, but they were rarely discussed directly. They were like so many paintings on the wall: we would walk by them a hundred times a day and never stop and look. As children we became comfortable in their presence, but we did not exactly study them together, so I studied them alone, without the commentaries that would harden them into a catechism.  

    In a certain ironic sense, I was lucky. When someone is taught to think about fundamental human questions within a group, her conception of those themes will be shaped by the group. The goal of that sort of group study, perhaps not overtly articulated but always at work, would be to initiate her into a particular system of particular people, to provide her with a ready-made attitude and a handy worldview, to train her to think and speak in the jargon of that worldview, and to signal membership within the company of those who espouse it.

    If language is a condition of our thoughts, it is also a source of their corruption. Thinking outside a language may be impossible, but thought may take place in a variety of vocabularies, and the unexamined vocabularies, the ones that we receive in tidy and dogmatic packages, pose a great danger to clear and critical thinking. My good fortune was that I was not socialized philosophically. My religious tradition was not presented to me as a philosophical tradition. I was not inducted into a full and finished vernacular that would dictate or manipulate how I would think. And I was young enough not to have become so sensitive to political or cultural etiquettes that they would inhibit or mitigate independent reflection and study. The space in my head into which I retreated to think was built and outfitted mainly by me, or so it felt; and there, in that detached and unassisted space, I became accustomed to the looming awareness that these themes were too complicated for me to really understand (an awareness which provoked an ineradicable distrust for communal ideological certainties). Yet this did not diminish my desire to spend time there. My relationship with my burgeoning ideas felt privileged, the way a child feels playing with plundered high heels or lipstick without the context to understand the social significations that those instruments may one day carry. If I misunderstood them, if they baffled me, there was no reason to be embarrassed. My sense of possibility was large and exciting, because it was unburdened by the adult awareness that convictions have social consequences by which they may then be judged. 

    My limited field of human experience — the people I knew, the fictional and historical figures to which I had been introduced — comprised all the materials with which I could conduct my solitary musings. I studied the rhythms and tendencies of human interactions. I watched the way that other people responded to each other, the way they held themselves when they were alone or in society. This stock of knowledge informed how I thought people in general do and ought to behave. (My theory of slavery and emancipation was a product of this discipline: for example, I noted that I got anxious for recess when in school but bored by endless freedom on the weekend or vacation. We appreciate freedom when we are enslaved: is that what Scripture wanted me to understand? Well, that was consistent with my experience.) My inquiries were catalyzed and sustained by pure curiosity about human beings and in retrospect they seem to have been relatively untainted by my community’s biases. Perhaps I am idealizing my beginnings, but I really do have the memory of an open mind and a pretty level playing field. Like the adolescent heroines in Rohmer’s films, I genuinely wanted to know how people are so I could figure out how I should be.

    The effects of this solitary and informal mental life were permanent. Having developed the space in my head independent of a received blueprint, my intellectual methods would always be fundamentally unsocialized. Despite the external pressures, I have never successfully unlearned these attitudes. I don’t doubt that there were many influences from my surroundings, from my community and my culture, that I was absorbing without recognizing them, but still I felt significantly on my own and, as I say, lucky. But I was also quite lonely. The loneliness intensified as I got older and my family became more religious. The high school that I attended was much more traditional than my earlier schools had been. There were more rules, endless esoteric rituals and cultural habits that I had to learn in order to convince myself and others that I was one of them, that I belonged there. I failed often. There was so much that I didn’t know, and, more to the point, there was something about the weather around me that perpetually exposed my difference. No matter how hard I tried to remake myself into a member, to dismantle and rebuild the space in my head, everyone could sense that the indoctrination was not taking. I recited the script with a foreign accent. 

    In a flagrant, chronic, and no doubt annoying manifestation of otherness, I would badger my teachers and peers for reasons and explanations. Why were we — I was a “we” now – obeying all these rules? I was not in open revolt: I sensed that our tradition was rich and I was eager to plumb the treasures that I had been bequeathed. But it seemed a gross dereliction to obey the laws without considering their purpose. My intentions were innocent, perhaps even virtuous, but my questions were discomfiting anyway. Even now I often recall a particularly representative afternoon. A group of girls in my grade were discussing the practice called shmirat negiah, the strict observance of physical distance between the sexes, which prohibits men and women who are not related from touching one another. I wondered: Why had the rule been written to begin with? When did Jews begin to enforce it? What kind of male-female dynamic did it seek to cultivate? Did such emphatic chasteness in preparation for marriage help or harm that union? These were reasonable questions, except that in a context of orthodoxy they could be received as subversive. A girl I admired — a paragon of membership — complained that the practice made her awkward and scared of men, and that she could not understand why her mother enforced it. “Why don’t you just ask your mother why she thinks you ought to do it?” I finally asked. “Because,” she sighed, “she’ll just tell me that I have to because that is what Jews do.” My mind recoiled. Why on earth would a mother shirk the opportunity (and the responsibility) to help her child grapple with such an important question? Why wouldn’t she consider the law itself a catalyst for conversations about such primary themes? Yet even as I asked myself these questions, I knew the answer. Membership mattered more than meaning.

    But surely that attitude did not govern all human communities. This could not be all there was. Somewhere, I assumed, there were institutions in which people directly addressed the ideas I wondered about on my own. Somewhere there were groups in which the exploration of meaning was an essential feature of membership. In the secular world, which I naively called “the real world,” I imagined intellectual camaraderie would be easier to find. Surely secular people, when they talk about justice, sex, mercy, and virtue, must be interested in seriously engaging those themes. In the real world, surely, there would be no orthodoxies, and people would have no reason to incessantly analyze one another’s behaviors in order to grant or deny them legitimacy. They would not spread petty rumors about neighbors failing to uphold the code or refuse to eat at the tables of those who were not exactly like them, as the worst members of my origin bubble did. They would not, forgive me, cancel each other.

    Of course I was wrong. As it turns out, the secular world also has liturgies, dogmas, ostracisms, and bans. It, too, hallows conformity. It has heretics, and it even has gods: they just don’t call them that. In college I discovered the temples of the progressives, the liberals, the conservatives, and more. Each has a vernacular of its own, comprised of dialects and rituals which serve to establish membership, welcome members, and turn away outsiders. In this realm of proud secularity, my religious upbringing proved unexpectedly useful. It had prepared me to identify the mechanisms of group power, and the cruel drama of deviance and its consequences. (What is cancellation, if not excommunication?) It turned out that all too often in the real world, the open world, the democratic world, the enlightened world, when people talk about fundamental human questions they are far more interested in signaling membership and allegiance than in developing honest answers to them. 

    It is true that many of these questions are hard to answer. The intensity with which people hold convictions belies their complexity. Independent and critical reasoning is not for the faint of heart, and the length and difficulty of the search may eventually make skeptics or cynics of them. It is much simpler to memorize a script, and to establish a quasi-mystical allegiance to ones politics. Holiness is incommensurate with reason, remember. Still, the demands of a nuanced politics are not, I think, why people are reluctant to wrestle with ideas on their own. There are advantages to wholesale worldviews and closed systems. They provide something even more alluring than conviction: solidarity. They are a cure not only for perplexity but also for loneliness. A group with which to rehearse shared dogma, and to style oneself in accordance with the aesthetic that those dogma evoke: this is not a small thing. Thus the answer to a philosophical or moral question becomes…community. We choose our philosophy on the basis of our sociology. This is a category mistake — and the rule by which we live.  

    In a different world, most people would readily admit ignorance or doubt about political or cultural subjects the same way that my young peer would have had no reason to refrain from hugging friends of the opposite gender if Jewish custom did not forbid it. If their group ignored the subject, so would they. Most would not be ashamed of their confusion because intellectual confusion is not a common fear. But isolation is. We dread marginality more than we dread error. After all, the social costs of idiosyncrasy or independence are high. We fear finding ourselves at our screens, watching others retweet or like or share one another’s posts without a cohort of our own in which to do the same. Who does not wish to be a part of a whole? (Identity politics is the current name for this cozy mode of discourse.) In my experience, when most people talk about politics, they are largely motivated by this concern, which compromises the integrity of these conversations. They disguise a social discourse as an intellectual discourse.

    I call this phony discourse the sludge. The sludge is intellectual and political kitsch. It is a shared mental condition in which all the work of thinking has already been done for us. It redirects attention away from fundamentals by converting them into accessories, into proofs of identity, into certificates of membership.

    In a sludge-infected world, in our world, if someone were to say, “that fascist presides over a hegemonic patriarchy,” her primary purpose would be to communicate to her interlocutor that she is woke, trustworthy, an insider, an adept, a spokesperson, an agent of a particular ideology, proficient in its jargon. She would also be indicating the denomination of progressivism to which she subscribes, thus erecting the ideological boundaries for the conversation. If someone else were to say, of the same person, that he is a “cosmopolitan” or a “globalist” or a “snowflake” she would be doing the same thing in a different vernacular. (They would both use the terms “liberal” and “neoliberal” as slurs, probably without a firm sense of what either one means.) In the context of these two conversations, whether or not the individual in question is a snowflake or a fascist is as good as irrelevant. The subject of the conversation is just an occasion for manifesting group solidarity. Righteousness is an accoutrement of the code. In fact, asking either person to justify the assumptions inherent in her statement would be as irregular as asking me to justify my faith in God after witnessing me thank Him for the apple I am about to eat. She would answer with her equivalent of “that’s just what Jews do.” In both these cases, belonging is prior to belief. 

    The effect of sludge-infected language is that quite often the focal point of debates about politics or philosophy is not at all the literal subject at hand. Members are conditioned 

    to present as if they care about the substance of a particular ideology. Learning to present as if you care about something is very different from learning to actually care about something. Caring is difficult, it is a complicated and time-consuming capacity which requires discipline, openness, and analysis. This is not a trivial point. Imagine a sludge-infected romantic relationship (or just look around you) — if, instead of taking a close and patient interest in her lover’s needs, a woman simply asked herself, “What are the kinds of things that people who are in love do?,” and having done those things, considered herself well acquitted of these duties and therefore in love. She may tell him that she loves him, and she may be loving or supportive in a generic kind of way, but she will not really know him. Details about his inner life, about his insecurities and his demons, will not interest her. Romantic success, for her, would be to appear from the outside as if they have created a successful partnership. She will have treated love programmatically, in accordance with the expectations of her social context. Who her lover is when he is not playing the role she has assigned to him will remain mysterious. When tragedy strikes, they will be forced to recognize that they do not know or trust each other. 

    Sludge-infected politics are similarly behavioral and unsettling. Practitioners exploit opportunities for genuine expressions of devotion as occasions to signal membership. Consider the effect of the sludge on antiracism. Suppose we were taught to present as antiracists rather than to seriously consider the imperatives of antiracism (or, again, just look around you). Antiracism (like feminism, like Zionism, like socialism, like isms generally) is difficult to cultivate and strengthen. It requires work and must be consciously developed. It is the result of many individual experiences and sacrifices, highs and lows, of sustained and thoughtful interest and introspection. If we consider ourselves acquitted of  our responsibility to antiracism merely by posting #handsup-dontshoot at regular intervals on social media, perhaps garnering a host of likes and followers, the duties of an honest and reflective antiracism will remain unacknowledged (and the sentiment to which that slogan refers will be cheapened). Our antiracism would be not internal but external, not philosophical but stylistic.

    If a person is a dedicated antiracist, over the years she will come to better appreciate the enormity of the battle against racism. She will develop the minute concerns and sensitivities of a veteran. She will realize that the world is not made up only of friends and enemies. She will know that sometimes, in order to do good, one must work alongside unlikely allies, and that purists are incapable of effecting sustainable change. The very language she uses to discuss her mission will be informed by this knowledge. Indeed, it would strike her as shabby and disloyal to regurgitate common slogans when speaking about the specific, discomfiting realities of which she has intimate knowledge and which she is serious about mitigating. She will choose more precise and shaded words, her own words, careful words. The novice will listen to her and think, “I would never have thought about it that way.” If, by contrast, a person is motivated by the pressure to appear as a loyal soldier, she will never gain this wisdom. Her concerns will be only about the rituals, the liturgies, and the catechisms of a particular politics, however just the cause. Outsiders will recognize her language from Twitter or Facebook or other digitized watering holes, and of course they will ratify it, but she will have gained all that she ever really sought: admiration and affirmation.

    In this manner, movements that purport to exist in service to certain values may perpetuate a status quo in which those values, demanding and taxing, are named but never seriously treated. We ignore them, and pretend — together, as a community — that we are not ignoring them. Every time a self-proclaimed “n-ist” presents as an “n-ist,” every time a tweet or a post racks up a hundred likes in service to that presentation, she can tell herself she has fulfilled the responsibilities of her “n-ism” and so she will not feel further pressure to do so. 

    Consider two examples. First, a college student with two thousand followers on Instagram who attends every Black Lives Matter protest armed with placards, and who posts regularly about white privilege and the guilty conscience of white America. Suppose this woman’s antiracism manifests itself primarily as a crippling guilt in the face of systemic inequity from which she benefits: her service to antiracism is not nonexistent, or merely “performative,” since she does force her followers to think about uncomfortable subjects (though it is quite likely that her followers already agree with her, but never mind), and she does contribute to the increasing awareness that these injustices must be named and reckoned with now.

    It is good that our college student marched. But compare her to a white septuagenarian who has moved into an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood, who is well off and even a member of the American elite, who has the cell phone numbers of more than a few important people. She has never once felt guilty for having been born into power and privilege. She is not a marcher. Now imagine that this woman, out of mere decency, involves herself in the everyday lives of her black neighbors (something which most people like her fail to do). She is who they turn to when forced to confront a system which she can manipulate for them, which they cannot navigate without her. She is the one they call when, say, one of their sons is unjustly arrested (again), or when the school board threatens to cut the district’s budget (again), because they trust that she will work tirelessly on their behalf. She learns over time, through direct experience, about the blisters and lacerations of racism, and about how to preempt and treat them. Owing to her skin color and her tax bracket, she, like our college student, profits from systemic inequity, but, unlike our college student, she takes regular and concrete actions to help the disadvantaged. Her actions are moral but not ideological. She is not a tourist in the cause and the cause is not a flex of her identity. Yet she is regularly in the trenches and she is alleviating hardship. 

    Which of these women has more ardently and effectively fought against racism? I have no objection to activism, quite the contrary, but it must be constantly vigilant against declining into the sludge. (Of course neither the good neighbor nor the tweeting marcher are engaged, strictly speaking, in politics; at the very least they both must also vote.) Sludge-like discourse is not a new phenomenon, of course — prior to the mass revulsion at the murder of George Floyd there was the convulsion known as #MeToo, which exposed some terrible abuses and established some necessary adjustments but was mired in the sludge and the culture of holy rage. And there is another historical revolution to consider: in all the centuries of thought distorted by community, there has never been a greater ally and amplifier of this phenomenon than the new technology. It is uncannily ideal for such shallowness and such conformism, and the best place to go to prove your purity. Owing to it, the sludge has become unprecedentedly manic and unprecedentedly ubiquitous. For all its reputation as an engine for loneliness and isolation, the internet is in fact the perfect technology of the herd. Consider Twitter, the infinitely metastazing home of the member-ships and the mobs. For demagogues and bigots and liars and inciters it has solved once and for all the old problem of the transmission and distribution of opinion. The echo-chambers of the righteous progressives and the righteous reactionaries exist side by side in splendid defiance of one another, drunk on themselves, on their likes, retweets, shares, and followers (the latter a disarmingly candid appellation). All these echo chambers — these braying threads — are structurally identical. Authority is granted to those with the highest numbers. The xenophobic “influencer” with the most followers is granted power for precisely the same reason, and according to the same authority, as the justice warrior with the most followers. And followers are won according to the same laws in all realms: those who are proficient in the vernacular, who can convince others that they are full members, that they understand the code and its implications best, they are the ones to whom the like-minded flock. The priests of one temple wrathfully say, “You are sexist” and those of another wrathfully say “You are un-American” in the same way members of my old community would wrathfully say, “You are a sinner.” It all means the same thing: get out. 

    The sludge does not govern all discourse in America, but a horrifying amount of our “national conversation” is canned. And instead of discussing actual injustices we have endless conversations about how to discuss such things. What can be said and what cannot be said? Why talk about slavery when you can talk about the 1619 Project? Why talk about the nuances and ambiguities endemic to any sexual encounter when you can talk about #MeToo? Why complicate the question for yourself when you can join the gang? Every time we choose one of these options over the other, we demonstrate what kind of knowledge matters to us most.

    And one of the most pernicious effects of this degradation of our discourse occurs in our private lives — in personal relationships. Increasingly in conversations with friends I recognize a thickening boundary, a forcefield that repels us from the highly charged subject of our discussion. We bump up against it and decide not to go there, where integrity and trust would take us. At the point of impact, when honesty collides with membership and shrinks away, I sometimes feel as if I am being pushed back not just from the subject matter but also from the friend herself. She begins to speak in a pastiche of platitudes borrowed from the newsletters clogging her (and my) inbox. I don’t seem to be talking to her anymore, I can’t get through to her own thoughts, to her own perspective — which, I stubbornly insist, lies somewhere beneath the slogans and the shorthands. All too often I find myself following suit. Neither one of us is willing to express our respective curiosities and anxieties on matters related to politics. We just bat the keywords around and pretend we are really in dialogue with each other. He declares that the world will end if Biden is elected, she declares that the world will end if Trump is elected, and I am expected not to ask “Why?” Instead I am being invited to join him or to join her, and the more hysterically, the better.

    Once this parameter, this border wall, has been erected, taking it down would require a troublesome break from social convention. One of us would have to be disruptive, even impolite, to pull us out of the sludge-slinging which prohibits intellectual and verbal independence. And so usually we carry on within those boundaries, interacting as representatives of a cohort or a movement, not as intellectually diligent citizens with a sense of our own ignorance and an appetite for what the other thinks. We become paranoid about discursive limits. Ever present in our conversation is the danger that if one of us deviates from the etiquette, the other will accuse her of being offensive, or worse. The wages of candor are now very high. We have made our discourse too brutal because we are too delicate.

    So we obey the rules in which we have trained ourselves, and look for safety in numbers. We invoke the authority of dogma, hearsay, and cliche. We substitute popularity for truth. We quote statistics like gospel, without the faintest sense of their veracity, as if numbers can settle moral questions. We denounce the character of people we have not met simply because others — in a book group, a twitter thread, a newspaper column, or a mob — say they are no good. The actual interpretation of concepts such as climate change or race or interventionism is less significant than the affiliations that they denote. And when the conversation is over, we are where we were when it began, left to shibboleths and confirmed, as Lionel Trilling once complained about an earlier debasement, in our sense of our own righteousness. But this must not be the purpose of conversation, public or private. It is disgraceful to treat intellectual equals as if they cannot be trusted with our doubts. It is wrong to celebrate freedom of thought and freedom of speech and then think and speak unfreely. “Polarization” is just another name for this heated charade. In an open society, in American society, one should not be made to feel like a dissident for speaking one’s own mind.

    Abolition and American Origins

    The turbulent politics of the present moment have reached far back into American history. Although not for the first time, the very character of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have been thrown into question by the hideous reality of slavery, long before and then during the founding era and for eighty years thereafter; and then by slavery’s legacy. In this accounting, slavery appears not as an institution central to American history but as that history’s essence, the system of white supremacy and economic oligarchy upon which everything else in this country has been built, right down to the inequalities and injustices of today.

    More than forty years ago, when a similar bleak pessimism was in the air, the pioneering African American historian Benjamin Quarles remarked on that pessimism’s distortions. The history of American slavery could never be properly grasped, Quarles wrote, “without careful attention to a concomitant development and influence — the crusade against it,” a crusade, he made clear, that commenced before the American Revolution. Quarles understood that examining slavery’s oppression without also examining the antislavery movement’s resistance to it simplifies and coarsens our history, which in turn coarsens our own politics and culture. “The anti-slavery leaders and their organizations tell us much about slavery,” he insisted — and, no less importantly, “they tell us something about our character as  a nation.” 

    If we are to speak about the nation’s origins, we must get the origins right. As we continue to wrestle with the brutal, and soul-destroying power of racism in our society, it is essential that we recognize the mixed and mottled history upon which our sense of our country must rest. In judging a society, how do we responsibly assess its struggle against evil alongside the evil against which it struggles? With what combination of outrage and pride, alienation and honor, should we define our feelings about America?    

    On November 5, 1819, Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, ex-U.S. Congressman, and past director of the U.S. Mint, wrote to former President James Madison, enclosing a copy of the proceedings of a meeting held a week earlier in Trenton, New Jersey, opposing the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. The crisis over Missouri — which would lead to the famous Missouri Compromise the following year — had begun in the House of Representatives in February, but Congress had been out of session for months with virtually no sign of popular concern. In late summer, Boudinot, who was 79 and crippled by gout, mustered the strength to help organize a modest protest gathering in his hometown of Burlington, long a center of anti-slavery. The far larger follow-up meeting in Trenton was truly impressive, a “great Assemblage of persons” that included the governor of New Jersey and most of the state legislature. The main speaker, the Pennsylvania Congressman Joseph Hopkinson, who was also a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had backed the House amendment that touched off the crisis, and his speech in Trenton, according to one report, “rivetted the attention of every auditor.” Boudinot, too ill to travel to the state capital, agreed nevertheless to chair a committee of correspondence that wrote to dozens of prominent men, including ex-President Madison, seeking their support. 

    If Madison ever responded to Boudinot’s entreaty, the letter has not survived, but no matter: Madison’s correspondence with another antislavery advocate made clear that he was not about to support checking the future of slavery in Missouri. Boudinot’s and the committee’s efforts did, however, meet with approval from antislavery notables such as John Jay. It also galvanized a multitude of anti-Missouri meetings all across the northern states, pressuring Congress to hold fast on restricting slavery’s spread. “It seems to have run like a flaming fire through our middle States and causes great anxiety,” Boudinot wrote to his nephew at the end of November. The proslavery St. Louis Enquirer complained two months later that the agitation begun in Burlington had reached “every dog-hole town and blacksmith’s village in the northern states.” The protests, the largest outpouring of mass antislavery opinion to that point in American history, were effective: by December, according to the New Hampshire political leader William Plumer, it had become “political suicide” for any free-state officeholder “to tolerate slavery beyond its present limits.”  

    Apart from indicating the scope and the fervor of popular antislavery opinion well before the rise of William Lloyd Garrison, two elements in this story connect in important ways to the larger history of the antislavery movement in the United States, one element looking forward from 1819, the other looking backward. Of continuing future importance was the breadth of the movement’s abolitionist politics, as announced in the circular of the Trenton mass meeting. Although it aimed, in this battle, simply to halt the extension of slavery, the anti-Missouri movement’s true aim, the circular announced, was nothing less than the complete destruction of slavery in the United States. “The abolition of slavery in this country,” it proclaimed, was one of “the anxious and ardent desires of the just and humane citizens of the United States.” It was not just a matter of requiring that Missouri enter as a free state: by blocking human bondage from “every other new state that may hereafter be admitted into the Union,” it would be only a matter of time before American slavery was eradicated. Just as important, the abolitionists took pains to explain that restricting slavery in this way fell within the ambit of Congress’ powers, “in full accordance with the principles of the Constitution.” Here lay the elements of the antislavery constitutionalism — asserting congressional authority over slavery in places under its jurisdiction — that would evolve, over the ensuing thirty-five years, into the Republican Party’s program to place slavery, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “in the course of ultimate extinction.” 

    The second connection, looking backward, was embodied by Elias Boudinot. Some historians have linked Boudinot’s antislavery enthusiasm in 1819 to his Federalist politics; more persuasive accounts see it as a natural outgrowth of a deeply religious humanitarianism that had led him, after his retirement from politics and government, to help found the American Bible Society and become a champion of American Indians. The most recent comprehensive study of the Missouri crisis depicts him as something of a throwback, “the quintessential antiegalitarian patrician Federalist” with a pious humanitarian streak who had lingered long enough to play a part in the commencement of the nation’s crisis over slavery.

    In fact, Boudinot had already had a long career not only as an antislavery advocate but also as an antislavery politician. He first threw himself seriously into antislavery politics in 1774 when, as a member of the colonial assembly, he worked closely with his Quaker colleague and abolitionist leader Samuel Allinson in ultimately unsuccessful efforts to hasten total abolition in New Jersey. In 1786, Boudinot joined with another antislavery politician, Joseph Bloomfield, in founding the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery; and after several years of indifferent activity, the Society presented a gradual emancipation plan that Bloomfield, elected New Jersey’s governor in 1803, signed into law the following year. Boudinot, meanwhile, was elected to the first U.S. Congress in 1789, where he denounced slavery as an offence against the Declaration of Independence and “the uniform tenor of the Gospel.” In all, if the antislavery arguments of the 1850s dated back to the Missouri crisis, then the antislavery politics that brought about that crisis dated back to the Revolutionary era.

    These two connections — the history of the antislavery constitutionalism that surfaced in the Missouri crisis and the history of antislavery politics dating back to the Revolution — deserve an important place in our account of our origins. I have argued, in a recent book, that by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of property in man in national law, the Federal Convention in 1787 left open ground upon which antislavery politics later developed at the national as well as the state level. Those politics emerged, to be sure, out of the local struggles that dated back before the American Revolution. But the ratification of the Constitution, even with that document’s notorious compromises over slavery, left room for the rise of antislavery politics on the national level. And the origins of those politics, as I wish to make clear here, lay in the efforts by antislavery agitators and their allies in Congress, beginning in the very first Congress, to find in the Constitution the authority whereby the national government could abolish slavery or, at the very least, hasten slavery’s abolition.

    These national antislavery politics, it needs emphasizing, developed by fits and starts, and only began to gather lasting strength in the 1840s. The abolitionists enjoyed just a few significant successes at the national level during the twenty years following the Constitution’s ratification, and they endured some important defeats. These were some of the leanest years in the history of antislavery politics. But that the abolitionists won anything at all, let alone anything significant, contradicts the conventional view that southern slaveholders thoroughly dominated national politics in the early republic. The abolitionists did occasionally prevail; and just as important, in doing so they discovered and began to refine the principles and stratagems of antislavery constitutionalism that would guide antislavery politics through to the Missouri crisis and then, further refined, to the Civil War.

    Reviewing the early history of these abolitionist politics — running from the birth of the federal government in 1789 until the abolition of American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 — is part of a broader re-evaluation currently underway of what Manisha Sinha has called “the first wave” of abolitionist activity that lasted from the Revolutionary era through the 1820s. Scholarship by a rising generation of historians, including Sarah Gronningsater, Paul J. Polgar, and Nicholas P. Wood, as well as Manisha Sinha, have begun to revise completely the history of antislavery in this period. They have more or less demolished, for example, the once dominant view of northern emancipation as a grudging and even conservative undertaking, led by polite gentlemen unwilling to take their antislavery too far. When completed, the work of these scholars and others will, I am confident, become the basis for a new narrative for the history not just of antislavery but of American politics from the Revolution to the Civil War. But there is a lot of work left to do.

    Prior to the 1750s, there was very little in the way of antislavery activity among white Americans, with the exception of the Quakers, and it took even the Quakers several decades of struggle among themselves before they turned misgivings about slavery into formal instructions to abandon the institution. Amid an extraordinary moral rupture at mid-century, wider antislavery activity began in earnest. Initially, these efforts emphasized limited public efforts to change private behavior, relying on moral suasion to hasten manumissions, but soon enough some antislavery reformers turned to politics in more forceful ways. In 1766 and 1767, Boston instructed its representatives in the colonial assembly to push for the total eradication of slavery. In 1773, a Quaker-led campaign against the slave trade, captained by Anthony Benezet, the greatest antislavery agitator of the time, swept through the middle colonies and touched New England; and in that same year several Massachusetts towns petitioned the assembly to abolish the slave trade and initiate gradual emancipation. Black abolitionists, including Felix Holbrook and Prince Hall in Massachusetts, initiated their own petition drives, supplementing the freedom suits that would kill slavery in Massachusetts outright in the mid-1780s. Bills for the gradual abolition of slavery were debated in New Jersey in 1775 and in Connecticut in 1777; Vermonters approved the first written constitution ever to ban adult slavery in 1777; and by 1780 ascendant radical reformers in Pennsylvania led by George Bryan prepared to enact the first gradual emancipation law of its kind in history.  

    By then, political abolitionists had begun organizing their own institutions. On April 14, 1775 — five days before the battles of Lexington and Concord — a group consisting chiefly of Quakers formed the Society for the “Relief for Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage,” the first society with antislavery aims anywhere in the world. Although the Revolution soon disrupted the group, it reorganized in 1784 as the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery; three years later, the society named Benjamin Franklin — conspicuously a non-Quaker — as its president. In 1785, the New-York Manumission Society appeared, dedicated to the same basic goals. By 1790, two more states, Rhode Island and Connecticut, had approved gradual emancipation. Slavery was ended in Massachusetts by judicial decree in 1783, had crumbled in New Hampshire; and at least six more abolitionist societies had formed from Rhode Island as far south as Virginia (where, in 1785, an abolition law was debated to supplement a widened manumission law enacted in 1782). In 1794, the state societies confederated as the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race.

    Abolitionist politics at the national level would await the framing and ratification of the Federal Constitution in 1787-1788. Since the Articles of Confederation had afforded the national government no authority over national commerce, let alone either slavery or the Atlantic slave trade, national abolitionist politics barely existed. The one exceptional effort came in 1783, when a small Quaker delegation from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting delivered to the Confederation Congress, then sitting in temporary exile in Princeton, a petition signed by some five hundred Quakers, asking in vain for a prohibition of the Atlantic trade. With the calling of the Federal Convention in 1787, though, both of the then-existing abolitionist societies, in Philadelphia and New York, mobilized to send petitions. Benjamin Franklin, a delegate to the convention as well as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society decided on tactical grounds against presenting his group’s forceful memorial opposing the Atlantic slave trade, while the New-York Manumission Society failed to complete its broader antislavery draft before learning that slavery as such would not be debated at the convention.

    To comprehend the national abolitionist politics that followed these developments requires a closer look at the Constitution’s paradoxes and contradictions concerning slavery. None of the framers’ compromises over slavery that many historians cite as the heart of the supposedly proslavery Constitution were nearly as powerful in protecting slavery as an assumption that was there from the start: that whatever else it could do, the federal government would be powerless to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed — a doctrine that became known as the federal consensus. This assumption, far more than the three-fifths clause or the Atlantic slave trade clause or the fugitive slave clause or anything else, was the basis of the slaveholders’ confidence that the Constitution had enshrined human bondage. But if the federal government could not abolish slavery outright, then how might it be done, short of hoping that the slaveholders of South Carolina and Georgia would suddenly see the light — a prospect that the South Carolinians and Georgians made clear was not in the offing anytime soon? Once the abolitionists had launched the campaign for emancipation in the North, this would be their great conundrum — but they seized upon it immediately, with actions as bold as their demands. In doing so, they fostered a convergence of radical agitation and congressional politics that would have enduring if as yet unforeseen repercussions.   

    Far from discouraging abolitionist activity, the ratification of the Constitution, even with its notorious compromises over slavery, bolstered it. Above all, the framers’ granting to the new national government, over furious southern objections, the authority to abolish the nation’s Atlantic slave trade, even with a twenty-year delay, struck many and probably most abolitionists and their political allies as a major blow for freedom. This should not be surprising: as historians note too rarely, it was the first serious blow against the international slave trade undertaken anywhere in the Atlantic world in the name of a national government; indeed, the American example, preceded by the truly inspiring antislavery agitation led by Anthony Benezet, encouraged the rise of the British movement to end the Atlantic trade, formally organized in 1787. Some leading American abolitionists described the Constitution as nothing less than, in the words of the framer James Wilson, “the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country.” Ending the trade had long been considered the vital first step toward eradicating slavery itself; and it seemed at the least highly probably that, as soon as 1808 arrived, Congress would do so. More immediately, though, members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society wanted to see if Congress would entertain extending its constitutional authority beyond the slave trade provision.

    The first great confrontation over slavery in national politics was a famous but still largely misunderstood conflict in the House of Representatives during the First Congress’ second session in New York, the nation’s temporary capital, in 1790. Through a friendly congressman, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society presented a petition to the House of Representatives, above the signature of its aging president Franklin, bidding the representatives to “step to the very verge of the powers vested in you” and to abolish slavery itself, not simply the Atlantic slave trade. (At the request of John Pemberton of the PAS, two groups of Quakers had already sent milder petitions referring only to the trade.) Paying no attention to the federal consensus, the PAS petition specifically cited the preamble of the Constitution that empowered the new government to “promote the general Welfare and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” which they contended authorized far-reaching if unspecified congressional action against slavery. Without telling Congress exactly what to do, the petitioners bid the representatives to look beyond the federal consensus to find ways they could attack slavery — to the extent, quite possibly, of disregarding the federal consensus entirely.

    A fierce on-and-off debate over the next three months ended with Congress affirming the federal consensus as well as the ban on congressional abolition of the Atlantic trade until 1808. The outcome is often portrayed fatalistically as a crushing defeat for the abolitionists, sealing the immunity of slavery in the new republic while calling into question the rights of abolitionists even to petition the Congress — an effort undertaken, in one historian’s estimation, by naïve and “psychologically vulnerable” reformers, unprepared “for the secular interest politics of a modern nation.”

    In fact, although the petition (along with the two others from regional Quaker meetings) did not gain the sweeping reforms it sought, it was decidedly not a failure. For one thing, the mobilization behind it, far from weak-kneed, was the first auspicious political protest of any kind to be directed at the new national government. Strikingly modern in its strategy and its tactics, the abolitionists blended insider maneuvering and hard-headed direct appeals to members of Congress with popular propagandizing and political theater of a kind associated with the protest movements of much later decades. The campaign was spearheaded by a delegation of eleven Quaker lobbyists from Philadelphia, including John Pemberton and Warner Mifflin, who were certainly the opposite of naïve and vulnerable. As a consequence, the congressional deliberations over the petitions took a surprisingly radical turn, and in  the end the effort secured important political as well as practical gains.

    Lower South slaveholders reacted with predictable fury as soon as congressmen friendly to the abolitionists introduced the petitions on the floor of the House. The slaveholders’ diatribes asserted that the constitutional ban on congressional abolition of the Atlantic slave trade until 1808 meant that the Constitution barred any federal interference with slavery whatsoever. Given the federal consensus, meanwhile, the slaveholders called the petitions unconstitutional on their face and demanded they be rejected without further debate. But despite the inflation of their numbers in the House by the three-fifths clause, the proslavery forces were badly outnumbered. (“Alass — how weak a resistance against the whole house,” one resigned South Carolina congressman wrote.) By a vote of 43 to 11, the House approved sending the radical petitions to a special committee for consideration.

    Working hand-in-hand with members of the special committee, the abolitionists immediately supplied them with a small library of abolitionist writings, while they arranged, through the Speaker of the House, an ally, to distribute additional abolitionist propaganda to the rest of the chamber. The Quaker lobbyists then advised the committee on its report behind the scenes, sharing drafts and submitting their own suggestions while backing up the PAS petition’s claim that the “General Welfare” section of the Constitution’s preamble gave Congress some unspecified powers over slavery. The committee narrowly turned aside that suggestion — by a single vote, John Pemberton reported — and agreed that the Congress could not ban the Atlantic slave trade before 1808. Yet it also asserted, contrary to lower South protests, that the federal government could regulate the trade as it saw fit at any time. More portentously, the members included wording that the Constitution empowered Congress to abolish slavery outright after 1808 — making the special committee’s report perhaps the most radical official document on slavery approved by any congressional entity before the Civil War.   

    When the report reached the House, the abolitionists swung into action as both agitators and what today we would call lobbyists. Quakers crowded the House gallery to witness the debate, their presence in Quaker gray suits and broad-brimmed black hats inciting and unnerving the southerners. Outside the hall, the abolitionists pursued individual congressmen right down to their lodging houses and taverns and eating places to make their case. Mifflin began a letter-writing campaign, addressed both to individual congressmen and to the House at large. The abolitionists also arranged with allies in the New-York Manumission Society to have a full record of the House debates printed along with antislavery articles in the New York Daily Advertiser, as well as to distribute pamphlets vividly describing the horrors of the slave trade.  

    Finally the House affirmed Congress’ powerlessness over slavery where it existed and over the Atlantic trade before 1808, and a revised report removed the select committee’s language about abolishing slavery itself after 1808. Yet the outcome was hardly a one-sided triumph for the proslavery southerners. The lower South failed utterly in its initial effort to dismiss the petitions without debate. Evidently, contrary to the slaveholders, Congress might well have some authority over slavery worth debating. In the course of arguing that point, moreover, several House members had affirmed that, short of abolishing slavery outright, Congress might restrict slavery in various ways quite apart from the slave trade, including, James Madison remarked, banning slavery from the national territories, where, he declared, “Congress have certainly the power to regulate slavery.” And over howls from lower South slaveholders, the final report affirmed that Congress could legislate over specific matters connected to the Atlantic trade before 1808 — issues that, as we shall see, the abolitionists would agitate successfully. In all, the federal consensus stood, but at the same time the House majority repulsed the proslavery forces and backed the abolitionists on whether slavery was immune from federal authority.

    Over the ensuing decade, the abolitionists, far from discouraged, redoubled their national efforts, despite some serious setbacks. The Southwest Territory — what would become the state of Tennessee — was admitted to the Union with slavery in 1790, with little debate. A coterie of antislavery congressmen could not stave off passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Five years later, a spirited antislavery effort to bar slavery from Mississippi Territory was defeated by a wide margin. 

    And yet the abolitionists had reason to remain optimistic. At the state level, the New York legislature, under intense abolitionist pressure, finally passed a gradual emancipation law in 1799 and New Jersey followed five years later, completing the northern “first emancipation.” In part as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act, the American Convention of Abolition Societies was up and running in 1794. There were various signs, from a proliferation of freedom suits in Virginia to the spread of antislavery opinion in Kentucky and Tennessee, that the upper South was seriously questioning slavery. In national politics, antislavery congressmen, numbering about a dozen and led by a few northerners who worked closely with the abolitionists, made good in 1794 on the victory wrung from the abolitionist petition debates four years earlier, passing a law that outlawed the use of any American port or shipyard for constructing or outfitting any ship to be used for the importing of slaves. 

    Five years later the Reverend Absalom Jones, a prominent abolitionist and mainstay of Philadelphia’s free black community, helped lead an even more propitious effort. Late in 1799, a group of seventy free men of color in Philadelphia, headed by Jones, sent yet another petition to the House of Representatives. The drafters of the petition, as Nicholas Wood has shown, were John Drinker and John Parrish, prominent local Quaker abolitionists who had long worked closely with Jones and other black abolitionists; the signers included members of various black congregations, including Jones’ St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, the majority of them unable to sign their names. 

    The petitioners asked for revisions of the laws governing the Atlantic slave trade as well as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. But they also went further, as far as the PAS petitioners had in 1790, pressing for — as the abolitionist congressman Nicholas Waln observed when he introduced the petition to the House — “the adoption of such measures as shall in due course emancipate the whole of their brethren from their present situation.” Stating that they “cannot but address you as Guardians of our Civil Rights, and Patrons of equal and National Liberty,” the petitioners expressed hope that the House members 

    will view the subject in an impartial, unprejudiced light. — We do not ask for the immediate emancipation of all, knowing that the degraded State of many and their want of education, would greatly disqualify for such a change; yet humbly desire you may exert every means in your power to undo the heavy burdens, and prepare the way for the oppressed to go free, that every yoke may be broken.

    As if brushing aside the House’s decision in 1790, the abolitionists, citing once again the Constitution’s preamble, wanted Congress to probe once more the document’s antislavery potential. The idea that Congress had untapped antislavery powers was emerging as a core abolitionist argument. And, though the sources are silent, this portion of the petition may have also had tactical purposes. In 1790, the defeat of grand claims about emancipation proved the prelude to the House affirming Congress’ authority over more specific issues connected to slavery. Roughly the same thing would happen this time.

    Southern slaveholders and their New England allies reacted with predictable wrath. John Rutledge, Jr. of South Carolina thanked God that Africans were held in slavery, then railed against the “new-fangled French philosophy of liberty and equality” — he was talking about Thomas Jefferson and his supporters — that was abroad in the land. Rutledge’s fellow Federalist, the notorious Atlantic slave trader John Brown of Rhode Island, attacked the petition’s effort to restrain American participation in the trade, while another New England Federalist, Harrison Gray Otis, sneered that most of the petitioners were illiterate and thus unable to understand what they had endorsed, and that receiving their memorial would mischievously “teach them the art of assembling together, debating, and the like.”  

    The next day, the House considered a resolution condemning those portions of the petition “which invite Congress to legislate upon subjects from which the General Government is precluded by the Constitution.” The resolution passed 85 to 1, a crushing repudiation of the idea that Congress possessed implied powers to interfere directly with slavery where it already existed. Even the abolitionist congressman who presented the free blacks’ petition ended up voting with the majority.

    But that was only part of the story. The core of antislavery Northerners fiercely rebutted the proslavery outbursts. George Thacher, a Massachusetts Federalist and longtime antislavery champion in the House, repudiated the racist attacks on the petitioners, upheld the right of constituents to a redress of grievances regardless of their color, and condemned racial slavery as “a cancer of immense magnitude, that would some time destroy the body politic, except a proper legislation should prevent the evil.” Moreover, once the condemnation resolution predictably passed — Thacher’s was the sole vote in opposition — the House was free to act on the petitioners’ more specific demands, which it swiftly did, sending the petition to committee — thereby, among other things, affirming the right of free blacks to petition Congress.

    The committee assigned to consider the petition sympathized with its section on the fugitive slave law — free blacks, its report contended, were “entitled to freedom & Protection” — but the slaveholders and their allies prevailed on that issue on jurisdictional grounds. On the slave trade, however, Congress took action. After a heated debate, the House, with the concurrence of the Senate, approved by a wide margin the Slave Trade Act of 1800, banning even indirect involvement by Americans with the shipping of Africans for sale in any foreign country while also authorizing naval vessels to seize ships that were in violation. While it expanded enforcement of the restrictive law enacted six years earlier, the new law reinforced expectations that the Atlantic slave trade to the United States would be entirely abolished at the earliest possible date in 1808. 

    The scale of this antislavery victory should not be exaggerated — indeed, three years later South Carolina would re-open its own slave trade with a vengeance — but neither should it be scanted. Most immediately, within a year, under the new law’s provisions, the man-of-war U.S.S. Ganges seized two illegal slave schooners off the coast of Cuba and discovered more than one hundred and thirty African captives, men, women, and children, in chains, starving and naked; once freed, the Africans obtained apprenticeships and indentures from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The free black petition debate also marked a highpoint in the efforts by the antislavery congressmen, first to restrict and regulate the Atlantic slave trade prior to its abolition, and then to reform and restrict the Fugitive Slave Law. 

    More broadly, that same small but resolute group took up new antislavery battles and established an antislavery presence that from time to time became an antislavery majority. This was not just the agitation of an elite. It must be emphasized that the congressmen acted in coordination with dense interregional as well as interracial networks of antislavery activists, organized in state abolition societies, churches and church committees, mutual aid societies, fraternal groups, and more. With such popular backing, year after year, antislavery congressmen voiced defiantly antiracist as well as antislavery sentiments on the floor of the House, exploring the Constitution in search of antislavery meanings, trying to find in it whatever powers they could whereby the federal government could limit slavery’s expansion leading to its eventual eradication. Some of their successes were defensive, as when they defeated efforts to augment the Fugitive Slave Act, to otherwise restrict the rights of free blacks, and to repeal the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois and Indiana. But the antislavery forces in Congress could be aggressive as well. 

    In 1804, once again bidden by abolitionist petitions, the Senate approved a provision that would have effectively shut the domestic slave trade out of the entire Louisiana Territory, obtained from France a year before, while the House, stunningly, passed a bill that banned outright further introduction of slavery into the territory. The House provision failed to gain approval from the Senate, and the efforts to keep slavery out of Louisiana proved futile, but the passing success was a signal that the antislavery presence in Congress had grown since 1790. Fittingly, the effort in the House was led by a sharp-witted and acid-tongued member from New Jersey named James Sloan, a Jeffersonian Republican who had cut his political teeth as a member of the New Jersey Abolition Society and as its delegate to the American Convention. A permanent goad to the southern slaveholders, including those in his own party, Sloan would cause an uproar in the House in 1805 by proposing a plan for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia — yet another effort to find places in the Constitution giving the federal government the authority to attack slavery.  

    Finally, in 1807, at the earliest date stipulated by the Constitution, Congress approved the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States. With the bill supported by most of the large Virginia delegation, whose slaveholders stood benefit, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, but the antislavery members had to beat back several efforts to soften the law, including one proposal by the states-rights dogmatist John Randolph which in effect would have recognized slaves as property in national law. “Hail! Hail, glorious day,” the New York black abolitionist minister Peter Williams, Jr., an ally of the New-York Manumission Society, exclaimed at the city’s celebration.

    This high point in the politics of early American abolitionism would also prove a turning point. Although national agitation continued, there was a noticeable decline in enthusiasm in the ranks, at least outside Pennsylvania, once New York and New Jersey had completed their emancipation laws. A powerful racist backlash instigated by the Haitian Revolution and then by reactions to northern emancipation jolted the existing abolitionist societies and paved the way for the emergence of the American Colonization Society. Just as their British counter-parts perfected the massive petition campaigns required to shake Parliament into abolishing Britain’s Atlantic slave trade, also achieved in 1807, the American movement began to falter. Above all, the dramatic shift in the Southern economy that came with the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793 and the consequent renaissance of plantation slavery dramatically changed the terms of antislavery politics, dispelling forever the original abolitionist hope that the closing of the Atlantic trade would doom American slavery.

    Northern antislavery opinion did rebound after 1815 and reached a political flashpoint during the Missouri crisis of 1819-1820. But the abolitionist organizations, including the American Convention, although still alive and active, were becoming less of a factor in guiding events in Congress than they had been at the end of the eighteenth century. By now, with the expansion of mass mainstream party politics, popular mobilizations in the form of an impromptu Free Missouri movement did more to embolden antislavery congressmen than did the abolitionist’s continued memorials, petitions, and lobbying efforts. And then, in the wake of the Missouri crisis, shaken mainstream politicians sealed what amounted to a bipartisan consensus to prevent slavery from ever again entering into national political debates. With national politics seemingly closed to antislavery agitation, the old Quaker abolitionist strategy of working directly with sympathetic officeholders and political leaders began to look feeble. 

    But the fight had been irreversibly joined. The established abolitionist movement’s strategies left an important legacy on which later antislavery political movements would build. Even as the early abolitionist movement sputtered out, it played a part in shaping abolitionism’s future. In forming as sophisticated a political movement as they did, the early abolitionists created a practical model for organized political agitation in the new republic, antedating the political parties that arose thereafter. Although the effectiveness of that model declined after 1800 or so, it never disappeared; and elements of it would remain essential to later abolitionist politics, including the transformation of abolitionist petitioning into monster popular campaigns, along the lines that British abolitionists had pioneered after 1787. 

    The legacy was even more important with respect to antislavery ideology and strategy. If the initial impetus of the early abolitionists, dating back to 1775, had been to politicize antislavery sentiment, in order to make direct claims on government, so the abolitionists of the early republic perpetuated the idea that politics was the only sure means to achieve slavery’s eradication. In national politics, after the ratification of the Constitution, that meant, above all, advancing antislavery interpretations of the framers’ work. Although the most expansive ideas about Congress’ authority over slavery met with ever firmer resistance, the idea that Congress possessed numerous implicit or indirect powers to hasten slavery’s demise remained.

    Consider again the petition from the free men of color of Philadelphia in 1799. In addition to asking Congress to find the authority to abolish slavery, the petition included its own innovative antislavery interpretation of the Constitution to demonstrate that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional: as “no mention is made of Black people or Slaves” in the Constitution, the document observed, it followed that “if the Bill of Rights or the declaration of Congress are of any validity,” then all men “may partake of the Liberties and unalienable Rights therein held forth.” The assertion got nowhere, but it had been made, and as long as abolitionists kindled a basic optimism about the Constitution’s antislavery potential, they would sustain their belief that political efforts, and not moral suasion alone, would bring the complete abolition of American slavery. 

    This optimism peaked again during the Missouri crisis, when abolitionists seized upon federal control of the territories and the admission of new states as an instrument to commence slavery’s abolition. The optimism persisted through the 1820s, even as the colonization movement flourished and even as mainstream political leaders built a new system of national politics based on two opposed intersectional national parties — a party system deliberately designed to keep antislavery agitation at the margins. In 1821, a sometime colonizationist, the pioneering abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy, offered a comprehensive seven-point plan to abolish slavery under the Constitution that began with banning slavery in the national territories and abolishing the domestic slavery trade. Four years later, Lundy joined with the abolitionist and political economist Daniel Raymond in trying to establish an antislavery political party in Maryland. After that failed, Lundy persuaded the American Convention to pick up the dropped thread of James Sloan’s earlier agitation in the House and pressure Congress to use its authority to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. He then had the idea of mounting a mass petition campaign to support the demand; and in 1828, working in coordination with a Pennsylvania Abolition Society member, congressman Charles Miner, who had announced his intention to work for abolition in the district, he forced the issue to the floor of the House. Younger PAS members warmed to the campaign and kept it going; so would, somewhat ironically in retrospect, the young editor whom Lundy later picked up as his assistant and brought into the abolitionist cause, none other than William Lloyd Garrison. 

    The optimism would be badly battered in the 1830s and 1840s. Some members of a new generation of radical abolitionists, led by Garrison, would conclude that there was no hope of achieving abolition and equality in a political system attached to a proslavery U.S. Constitution — a “covenant with death” and “agreement with hell,” in Garrison’s famous condemnation. Only moral suasion backed with militant protest, Garrison declared, would advance the cause; moral purification would have to precede political action. Taking the long view, this represented as much a regression as an advance, back to the anti-political stance of the more pious of the Quaker abolitionists in the 1750s and 1760s. Garrison’s absolutist high-mindedness forthrightly but perversely lifted the cause above the grimy necessities of actual politics. 

    Yet for all of Garrison’s fiery and intrepid polemics, he and his followers were a minority inside the abolitionist movement, increasingly so after 1840. The abolitionist majority never relinquished the idea, passed on from the first-wave abolitionists, that Congress, by acting wherever it could against slavery, would hasten slavery’s destruction. Inside Congress, meanwhile, a luminary with antislavery convictions but no previous antislavery record, John Quincy Adams, led a small group of colleagues in a guerilla war against the gag rule and finally prevailed in 1844. Adams, the ex-president turned congressman, was a singular figure in American politics, unlike any before or since; and the 1840s were not the 1820s or the 1790s. But Adams, who came to work closely with abolitionists, in his way reprised the roles of George Thacher, James Sloan, and Charles Miner, becoming the face of antislavery inside the Capitol — “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of slavery that ever existed,” in the view of his fiercely proslavery Virginia rival Henry A. Wise.

    By the time he collapsed and died on the floor of the House in 1848, opposing the American war with Mexico, Adams had also helped turn antislavery politics back toward issues concerning federal power over slavery in the territories — the very issues that, within a decade, led to the formation of the Republican Party. The abolitionists search for the constitutional means to attack slavery, begun in 1790, culminated in the agitation over Kansas, the convulsions that followed the Dred Scott decision in 1857, and everything else that led to the Civil War. All of which is a vast and complicated story, making the final connection between the antislavery politics of Anthony Benezet and Benjamin Franklin with those of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The important point, in the consideration of American origins, is that the early American abolitionists, audacious in their own time, formulated the essentials of a political abolitionism that, however beleaguered and often outdone, announced its presence, won some victories, and made its mark in the national as well as state politics of the early republic. It was not least owing to this constitutive achievement of American democracy that in the relatively brief span of fifty years, some of them very violent, slavery would be brought to its knees.

    Which brings us back to Benjamin Quarles’ observations, about the concomitant development of American slavery and American antislavery. The struggle for justice is always contemporaneous with injustice, quite obviously, and the power of injustice to provoke a hostile response is one of the edifying lessons of human life. Once joined, that struggle forever shapes both sides: there is no understanding the growth of proslavery politics, leading to the treason of secession, without reference to the growth of antislavery politics, just as antislavery politics makes no sense absent proslavery politics. But the history of anti-slavery in America, even during its most difficult periods, is not merely a matter of edification. It is also a practical necessity, a foundation for political action. It presents contemporary antiracism with a tradition from which it can draw its ideas and its tools. It is a barrier against despair, and a refreshment of our sense of American possibility. The struggle against slavery was hard and long, and it was won. The struggle against racism is harder and longer, and it has not yet been won. But as our history shows, it has certainly not been lost.

    Loosed Quotes

    THE SECOND COMING 

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    |The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

           W.B. YEATS

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    ….

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    In every crisis they appear, those famous and familiar lines from “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 by W. B. Yeats. Journalists and critics alike seem to take them as final assertions of Yeats’ own beliefs. Such innocent judgments do not ask why those lines open the poem, or for how long their assertions remain asserted. The poem itself has become lost behind the quotability of its opening lines. And Yeats, it seems, wants to be a pundit.

    In our ready “yes, yes” to those lines, we think we are accepting the judgment of a sage, but by the time we reach the close of the poem — which is a question, not an assertion — we are driven to imagine the changing states of the writer composing this peculiar poem, and we raise questions. What feelings required Yeats to change his bold initial stance, and in what order did those feelings arise? In order to understand this poem, to free it from its ubiquitous misuses, and to restore it to both its opening grandeur and its subsequent humiliation, those are the questions that we must answer. 

    Yeats was an inveterate reviser of his own ever-laborious writing: recalling his difficulty in composing “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” he confesses, “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/ I sought it daily for six weeks or so.” (Mention of that poem in his letters of the time prove this no exaggeration: I counted the weeks.) What was the obstacle suspending his progress? (He spends the poem finding out.) In “Adam’s Curse” he remarks in frustration, “A line will take us hours maybe.” Hours to do what? “To articulate sweet sounds together.” Yeats puts the sequence of sounds first; he composed by ear. Are the resulting sounds always “sweet” in the ordinary sense of the word? Not at all; but they are “sweet” in the internal order of rhythms and styles as the poem evolves. When the poet has articulated its theme, its sounds, and its lines to the best of his powers, the ear registers its satisfaction.  

    “The Second Coming” is a lurid refutation of the lurid Christian expectations of the Second Coming of Christ, which Jesus himself foretells in Matthew 29-3:

    Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will refuse her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will rock; and then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in heaven; then it is that all the tribes of the land will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of heaven, with great power and glory.

    Yeats proposes a surreal alternative to Jesus’ prophecy, proposing that on the Last Day we will see not Christ in majesty but a menacing, pitiless, and coarse beast who “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” “After us, the savage god,” Yeats had said as early as 1896. He watched through the decades, appalled by the sequential horror of world events: The World War from 1914-1918; the failed Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916; the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. And his first assertions in “The Second Coming” are indeed thoughts prompted by such political upheavals (and by earlier ones — Marie Antoinette appears in the drafts).   

    But what sort of assertions does he choose to express his thoughts? After the octave of assertions, there is a break not entirely accounted for, since the whole poem is not written in regular stanzas, and there are no further breaks. The compressed sentiments preceding the break are undermined by the unexplained and increasing mystery of the poet’s phrases, bringing the reader into the perplexity of the poet. The whole octave is full of riddles: What is a gyre? Whose is the falcon? What is the centre the center of? Why all the passive verbs? Who loosed the anarchy? Whose blood, loosed by whom, has dimmed what tide? What is meant by the ceremony of innocence? Who are the best and who are the worst? Such abstract language, such invisible agents, and such unascribed actions persist in Yeats’ opening declarations, down to the period that closes the octave.

    The quotability of Yeats’ opening passage derives, of course, from the total and unmodified confidence of its initial reportage, impersonal and unrelenting, offering a naked list of present-tense events happening “everywhere.” Stripped to their kernels, these are Yeats’s truculently unmitigated hammer-blows of grammar:

    The falcon cannot hear
    Things fall apart
    The centre cannot hold
    Mere anarchy is loosed
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
    Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned
    The best lack all conviction
    The worst are full of passionate intensity

    The break, after Yeats’ introductory eight-line block, leads an educated reader to expect that a six-line block will follow, completing a sonnet. Yet the poet finds himself unable to maintain his original jeremiad, which has been aggressive, omniscient, panoramic, and prophetic. Yeats “begins over again,” and utters in the fourteen lines following the break a complete second “sonnet,” a rifacimento of the one originally intended, in which he rejects his earlier rhetoric of impersonal omniscience as inauthentic from his human lips. Who is he to speak as though he could see the world with the panoramic scan proper only to God? That so many successive writers have been eager to reissue his lines reveals how greatly the human mind is seduced by the vanity of the unequivocal. Can we requote without unease what the poet himself immediately rejected?

    Although “The Second Coming” begins with an attempt at couplet-rhyme, soon — as Peter Sacks has pointed out to me — the couplets begin to disintegrate, as though they themselves were intent on demonstrating how “things fall apart.” After the break, Yeats reveals in its wake a second attempt at a fourteen-line sonnet, one exhibiting a traditional “spillover” octave of nine lines (implying overmastering emotion in the writer) before a truthful closing “sestet” of five lines, making up the desired fourteen. The second, revisionary octave replaces the certainty of the poet’s original octave with the self-defensive uncertainty of “Surely.” Longing for a revelation more humanly reliable than an unsupported façade of godlike prophecy, Yeats insistently utters his second “Surely,” one no less dubious than the first. The second “Surely” attempts to locate a cultural myth to which he can attach the vision vouchsafed to him in a revelation arising within his human consciousness. “Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!”

    For the first time in the poem, we hear Yeats speaking in the first person, declaring that “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight.” The poet is the sole spectator of this vast image, and he claims that it stems not from his own bodily sense of sight but from the World Spirit, a universal Spiritus Mundi always potentially able to rise into human awareness. (Poets so often describe the initial inspiration for a poem as something coming unbidden that the reader is not troubled by Yeats’ myth of a World-Spirit supplying the image for his revelation.) The poet has decided that it is more honest, more tenable, to write in the first person, to present himself as one whose imagination has reliably generated a telling and trustworthy “vast image” of his historical moment. He has forsaken his impressive but fraudulent rhetoric of omniscience for an account of his private inspiration.  

    Once Yeats has repudiated his initial “divine” posture as a guaranteed seer-of-everything-everywhere, he can take on, in the first person, his limited historical image-making self and create with it a “human” sestet for his newly “remade” sonnet. Admitting the fallibility of any transient metaphorical image, he acknowledges that his image vanishes, “the darkness drops again,” and he is left alone. Yet he grandly maintains, in spite of his abandoning a prophetic stance, that he now definitely “knows” something.

    The “something” turns out to be a single historical fact: the exhaustion of Christian cultural authority after its “twenty centuries” of rule. His “vast image” — its nature as yet unspec-ified — has shown him that Christianity will be replaced by a counter-force, a pagan one. Drawing on his reading of Vico and Herbert Spencer, Yeats believed that history exhibited repetitive cycles of opposing forces. Just as Christianity overcame the preceding centuries of Egypt and Greece, now it is time for some power to defeat Christianity.

    In his private “revelation” the poet has seen the Egyptian stone sphinx asleep “somewhere” in sands of a desert. (The uncertain “somewhere” admits the loss of the initial “everywhere” of Yeats’ prophetic opening.) The “stony sleep” of the Sphinx has lasted through the twenty centuries of Christianity, but now Fate has set an anticipatory cradle rocking in Bethlehem, birthplace of the previous god, and a sphinx-like creature rouses itself to claim supremacy:

    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle…

    Although the poet “knows” that Christianity is undergoing the nightmare of its death-throes, he cannot declare with any confidence what will replace it. He can no longer boast “I know that…”: he can merely ask a speculative question which embodies his own mixed reaction of fear and desire to the vanishing of a now outworn Christianity, the only ideological system he has ever known. What will replace the Jesus of Bethlehem, he asks, and invents a brutal and unaesthetic divinity, a sphinx seen in glimpses — “with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” The desert birds (formerly, it is implied, perched at rest on the immobile stone of the Egyptian statue) are now disturbed by the unexpected arousal of the “slow thighs” beneath them. The indignant birds, their movement in the sky inferred from their agitated cast shadows, “reel about,” disoriented, projecting, as surrogates, the poet’s own indignation as he guesses at the future parallel upheaval of his own world. Unable to be prophetic, unable now even to say “Surely,” the poet ends his humanly authentic but still unsatisfied sestet with a speculative question, one that fuses by alliteration “beast” and “Bethlehem” and “born”:

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    A conventional reading of the poem might take us this far. But no one, so far as I know, has commented that the culminating and ringing phrase, “Its hour come round at last,” is an allusion to Jesus’ famous statement to his mother at the wedding feast at Cana. When she points out to her son that their host has run out of wine, he rebukes her as he had once done in his youth when she had lost him in Jerusalem and found him preach-ing to the rabbis in the temple: “Wist yet not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2: 48-49) At Cana, Jesus is even harsher as he tells his mother that he is not yet willing to manifest his divinity: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” Not answering her son’s austere question, she simply says to the servants, “Whatsoever he saieth unto you, do it.” He tells them to fill their jugs with water, yet when they pour it is wine that issues, as, in silent obedience to his mother, Jesus performs his first miracle, even though to do so means changing his own design of when he will reveal his divinity. The evangelist comments: “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory” (John 2: 4-5,11). Unlike Jesus, who wished to delay his hour of divine manifestation, Yeats’ rough beast has been impatiently awaiting his own appointed hour, and it has come. His allusion to Jesus’ “Mine hour is not yet come” establishes a devastating parallel between the rough beast’s presumed divinity and that of Jesus, as the poet quails before the savage god of the future. 

    One senses there must be a literary bridge between the glorious “hour” of Jesus and the hideous hour of the rough beast. As so often, one finds the link in Shakespeare. In Henry V, Shakespeare alludes to Jesus’ remark, but adds the malice and impatience that will be incorporated by Yeats in his image of the rough beast. A French noble at Agincourt describes, in prospect, the vulturous hovering of crows waiting to attack the corpses of the English who will have died in battle. Eager for their expected feast on English carrion, “their executors, the knavish crows, / Fly o’er them, all impatient for their hour.” We know that the rough beast has been, like the crows, “all impatient for [his] hour,” because, once loosed on the world, he knows that his appointed hour, long craved by him, has come “at last.” Yeats had been alluding to Jesus’ words about the appointed hour ever since 1896: in his youthful poem “The Secret Rose,” a benign apocalypse is ushered in by the idealized romance symbol of the rose. He even remembered — writing in 1919 — his original inscription of the longing word “Surely” in the envisaged victory of the Secret Rose:

    Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
    Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

    “Surely thine hour has come;” “Surely a revelation is at hand”: apocalyptic symbols thread their way through Yeats’ life-work. In the same volume as “The Secret Rose,” we find a contrastively violent version of the End Times, drawing on the sinister Irish legend of a battle in “The Valley of the Black Pig” ushering in what Yeats called “an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral Darkness again.” Just as the brave warrior Cuchulain — in Yeats’ deathbed poem, “Cuchulain Comforted” — must be reincarnated as a coward to complete his knowledge of life, so the serene beauty of the Secret Rose must, to be complete, coexist with a twin, a wildness of apprehension. Maud Gonne, whom Yeats loved in frustration all his life, incarnated for him the conjunction of wildness and beauty:

    But even at the starting post, all sleek and new,
    I saw the wildness in her and I thought
     A vision of terror that it must live through
    Had shattered her soul.

    Maud had already appeared in 1904 as the paradoxical “wild Quiet,” “eating her wild heart” (an image of wild love borrowed from the opening sonnet of Dante’s La Vita Nuova). She is the female companion to another apocalyptic creature, the Sagittarius of the zodiac; he is a Great Archer poised, his bow drawn, in the woods of Lady Gregory’s estate. He, like Shakespeare’s predatory birds, “but awaits his hour” to loose arrows upon a degenerate Ireland, where English archaeologists are sacrilegiously excavating sacred Tara and the ignorant Dublin masses are actually celebrating the coronation in England of Edward VII:

    I am contented for I know that Quiet
    Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
    Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
    Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
    A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.

    By 1919, in “The Second Coming,” the Yeatsian apocalyptic symbol has shed its early romance component of the idealized Rose, has lost the starry constellation of the vengeful zodiacal Archer, and, in the hour of its Second Coming, has become “a vision of terror” like the one Yeats saw in the young Maud’s soul. Yeats had thought of calling his poem “The Second Birth,” but by renaming it “The Second Coming,” he ensured that in spite of the rocking cradle, all his recurrences of “Mine hour is not yet come” recall the self-manifestation of Jesus not as a child, but as the adult of Cana, the miracle-worker who will return to the world at the end of time.  

    “The Second Coming” is in fact a thicket of allusions. A hybrid one pointing to Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost adds an opaque quality to the mythical dimension of the rough beast: he cannot be accurately described. Yeats presents him vaguely as “a shape,” borrowing from Spenser the concept of Death’s resistance to visual representation and from Milton the shapeless word “shape.” In Spenser’s first Mutability Canto, after a procession of months representing the passage of time, Death, symbol of the end of time, appears both seen and unseeable, “Unbodièd, unsouled, unheard, unseen”:

    And after all came Life, and lastly Death;
    Death with most grim and griesly visage seene,
    Yet is he nought but parting of the breath;
    Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
    Vnbodièd, vnsoul’d, vnheard, vnseene.

    Imitating his master, the “sage and serious poet, Spenser,” Milton has his Satan meet Death, equally indescribable except by the word “shape” and its successive ever-less-visible negations (Milton substitutes “shadow” for Spenser’s Hades- issued “shade.”) Death confounds even Satan:

    The other shape,  If shap
    e it might be call’d that shape had none
    Distinguishable in member, joynt, or limb,
    Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
    For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,
    Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
    And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head
    The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on.

    Retaining the word “shape” but changing the concept of the shapeless shadowy “shape” inherited from his predecessors, Yeats attempts to describe in disarticulated images the nameless figure of his own chimerical “vast image” with a “lion body and head of a man,”: he adds a description of its gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun,” sexualizing it by the “slow thighs” unattached to any completed bodily description, and debasing it by its “slouching” motion, its lurching advance as it gradually reactivates its stony limbs. So grotesque is the figure, so unnameable by any visual word, that Yeats rejects even his own impotent efforts at specialized description, tethering his final question to the vague words “rough beast,” offering nothing but its genus. It is a generalized “beast” rather than a recognized species, let alone an individual creature.

    There are, then, four evolving motions successively represent-ing Yeats’ mind and emotions in “The Second Coming.” We see first an impersonal set of prophetic declamations; these are replaced by a first-person narration of the appearance of the troubling “vast image” coming to replace the Chris-tian past; this, disappearing, is replaced by a “factual” account of the obsolescence of Christianity (“Now I know”); but after this flat declaration of secure knowledge, Yeats can muster no further direct object of what he “knows.” Instead, he launches a final speculative query (“And what rough beast”). These four feeling-states — impersonal omniscience; a first-person boast of a private “revelation”; a “true” historical judgment as to the nightmarish dissolution of the Christian era; and a blurred query uttered in fear — mimic the poet’s changes of response as he attempts to write down an accurate poem of this life-moment. A desire for authentically human speech has made him turn away from his initial confident (and baseless) soothsaying to a personal, transitory, (and therefore uncertain) private “revelation.” He tries finally to attain to truth in judging the end of the Christian era.  

    But what truth can he declare of what is to come? He acknowledges — in a move wholly unforeseen in the strong and quotable opening octave — how limited his “knowledge” actually is. The “darkness” of fear cannot be resoundingly swept away by a transitory image from an unknowable source: opacity drops again. By the end, Yeats must forsake his proposed prophetic and visionary and historical styles and resort to a frustrated human voice that confesses the helplessness of the human intellect and the humiliation of admitting incomplete knowledge. At the inexorable approach of an unknowable, shapeless, coarse, and destructive era, “the darkness drops again.” 

    It is not mistaken, however, to think of the resounding opening summary list as “Yeats’ views” as he begins the poem. He even quotes himself in a letter of 1936 to his friend Ethel Mannin, anticipating the next war: “Every nerve trembles with horror at what is happening in Europe, ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’” The sentiments are genuine, but in a poem something more has to happen than the static observation of a moment in time. A credible artifact has to be constructed, the “sweet sounds” have to be articulated, and a persuasive structure has to be conceived. Since Yeats had lost faith in both Blakean denunciation and Shelleyan optimism by the time he wrote “The Second Coming,” he had gained the humility to confess, at the end of the poem, the limits of human knowledge and human vision. Though his diction is still grand in his closing, he is no longer boasting his seer-like knowledge, no longer claiming a unique private vision, no longer able to assuage the nightmare of the End Times of Christianity. To admit Yeats’ final acknowledgment of human incapacity is essential to perceiving his overreaching in his earlier claims to prophetic power and visionary insight. 

    Painful as it is to see the truncated opening lines — however memorable — become all that is left of the poem, and of Yeats’ character, in popular understanding, it is more painful to see the disappearance of the human drama of the poem in itself as it evolves, in its desire for authentically human speech and an authentic estimation of human powers — better and truer things than arrogant and stentorian utterances of omniscience. In repudiating his first octave of omniscience, making a break, and then having to write a different “sonnet” to attain a more accurate account of himself and his time, Yeats repeats, by remaking his form, his disavowal of the vain human temptation to prophecy. “Attempting to become more than Man, we become less,” said Blake, in what could serve as an epigraph to Yeats’ intricate and terrifying and regularly misread poem.

    On Indifference

    What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
    Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
    My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
    I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

    WALT WHITMAN

    The Olympian gods are not our friends. Zeus would have destroyed us long ago had Prometheus not brought fire and other useful things down to us. Prometheus was not being benevolent, though. He was angry at Zeus for having locked away the Titans and then for turning on him after Prometheus helped secure his rule. We humans were just pawns in their game. The myths teach that we are here on sufferance, and that the best fate is to be ignored by these poor excuses for divinities. On their indifference depends our happiness. Fortunately we have only minimal duties towards them, so once the ashes from the sacrifices are swept away, the libations mopped up, the festival garlands recycled, we are free to set sail.

    The Biblical God requires more attention. Though he is sometimes petulant, his providential hand is always at work for those who choose to be chosen. Providence comes at a price, though. We are obliged to fear the Lord, to obey his commandments, and to internalize the moral code he has blessed us with. For purists, this can mean that virtually every hour of every day is regulated. But that is not how the Bible’s protagonists seem to live. They love, they fight, they rule kingdoms, they play the lyre, and only when they lust after a subject’s wife and arrange for his death in battle does God stop the music and call them to account. And repentance done, the band strikes up again. The covenant limits human freedom, but it also self-limits God’s. Our to-do list is not infinite. Once we have fulfilled our duties, we are left to explore the world. We good here? Yeah, we’re good.

    Tut, tut child! Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.

    THE DUCHESS, ALICE IN WONDERLAND

    But as a Christian my work is never done. I must have the vague imitatio Christi ideal before my eyes at all times and must try to answer the riddle, what would Jesus do?, in every situation — and bear the guilt of possibly getting the answer wrong. Kierkegaard was not exaggerating when he said that the task of becoming a Christian is endless. It can be brutal, too. Jesus told his disciples they must be ready at any moment to drop every-thing if the call comes, adding, if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

    Saint Paul’s God has boundary issues. More busybody than Pied Piper, he is always looking into our hearts, parsing our intentions, and demanding we love him more than we love ourselves. That master of metaphor Augustine found a powerful one to describe the new regime: Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. He hastened to add that the earthly city plays a necessary role in mortal life, offering peace and comfort in the best of times. But over the millennia — such is the power of metaphor over reason — zealots hedging their bets have concluded that if we are to err, it is better to fall into self-loathing than discover any trace of pride within. A moral scan will always turn up something. And so they lock themselves into panopticons where they serve as their own wardens and where nothing is a matter of spiritual indifference.

    Subsequent Christian theologians raised doubts about this rigorist picture of the Christian moral life. In the Middle Ages they debated whether there might be such things as “indifferent acts,” that is, acts that have no moral or spiritual significance. Scratching one’s beard was a common example used by the laxists. Aquinas conceded the point concerning beards, but otherwise declared that if an action at all involves rational deliberation it cannot be indifferent, since reason is always directed towards ends, which can only be good or evil. Q.E.D. And so the class of genuinely indifferent acts was left quite small in official Catholic teaching. That sat just fine with a monastic and conventual elite already devoting their lives to self-abnegating spiritual exercises, accompanied by tormenting doubts about whether such exercises were prideful. But they were a class apart. Ordinary clerical functionaries led more lenient lives, which is how we got cardinals with concubines and with Titian portraits of themselves hanging over the fireplace. Vigilance was not their vocation.

    In the Protestant view, that was precisely the problem. Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, brought back moral rigorism and then democratized it. Now every burgher was expected to frisk himself while meditating on the terrifying mystery of predestination. The anxiety only increased when Protestants faced the choice among different and hostile denominations. Was there only one true church? Or were certain dogmatic disputes among denominations matters of indifference to God? Combatants in the Wars of Religion said no: true Christians must not only walk the right walk, they must talk the right talk. But, over time, as the denominations proliferated like tadpoles in a pond, and the doctrinal differences among them became more abstruse, the rigorist line became more difficult to maintain. Perhaps the Lord’s house has many mansions after all.

    That thought is exactly what Catholic critics of the Reformation, worried about. If we concede that there are many Christian paths to salvation, people will ask whether there are also non-Christian religious paths. If we concede that there are, they will then ask whether there are decent and admirable non-religious paths to moral perfection. And if we concede that there are — here is the crucial leap — they will be tempted to ask whether there might also be decent and admirable ways of life that do not revolve around moral perfection. The danger would not be that people would abandon morality altogether; no self-declared anti-moralist, not even Nietzsche, has ever renounced the words must and ought. It would be that they would start considering morality to be just one dimension of life among others, each deserving its due. It would mean the end of morality’s claim to be the final arbiter of what constitutes a life well lived.

    The gradient on this slope of questioning is steep. Montaigne slid to the bottom of it while the Wars of Religion were still raging and has been dragging unsuspecting readers along with him ever since. He did not openly state the case against the imperialism of conscience; a bon vivant, he was in no rush to become a bon mourant. Instead he wrote seemingly lighthearted essays full of anecdotes that subtly held up the rigorist life to ridicule or revulsion, implying that there must be a better way to live, without specifying exactly what that might be. He only pointed to himself as a genial, indeed irresistible, exemplar of tolerant, urbane contentment.

    Pascal, Montaigne’s greatest reader, immediately discerned the threat that the Essays posed to the Christian moral edifice: Montaigne inspires indifference about salvation, without fear and without repentance. Atheism is refutable, but indifference is not. The scholastic debate over indifferent acts had presumed a desire to get our moral houses in order. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation debates over justification presumed a desire to get our theological houses in order. Montaigne’s indifferentism, as it came to be called, made all well-ordered houses look menacing or faintly ridiculous. That is why indifferentism was denounced along with liberalism as modern “pests” by Pope Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864. He understood that there is nothing more devastating to dogma than a shrug of the shoulders.

    It is nonsense and an antiquated notion that the many can do
    wrong. What the many do is God’s will. Before this wisdom all
    people have had to this day bowed down — kings, emperors,
    and excellencies. Up to now all our cattle have received
    encouragement through this wisdom. So God is damned well
    going to have to learn how to bow down too.

    KIERKEGAARD

    Americans’ relation to democracy has never been an indifferent one — or a reasoned one. For us it is a matter of dogmatic faith, and therefore a matter of the passions. We hold these truths to be self-evident: has ever a more debatable and consequential assertion been made since the Sermon on the Mount? But for Americans it is not a thesis one might subject to examination and emendation; even American atheists skip over the endowed by their Creator bit in reverent silence. We are in the thrall of a foundation myth as solid and imposing as an ancient temple, which we take turns purifying like so many vestals. We freely discuss how the mysterium tremendum should be interpreted and which rituals it imposes on us. But the oracle has spoken and is taking no further questions.

    Which is largely a good thing. Not long ago there was breezy talk of a world-historical transition to democracy, as if that were the easiest and most natural thing in the world to achieve. Establish a democratic pays légal, the thinking went, and a democratic pays réel will spontaneously sprout up within its boundaries. Today, when temples to cruel local deities are being built all over the globe, we are being reminded just how rare a democratic society is. So let us appreciate Americans’ unreasoned, dogmatic attachment to their own. Not everything unreasoned is unwise.

    But neither are all good things entirely good. This is what the dogmatic mind has trouble grasping. If some end — the rule of the saints, say, or the dictatorship of the proletariat — is deemed to be worth pursuing, the dogmatist needs to believe it is the only and perfect good, carrying no inherent disadvantages. Blemishes must be ignored so as not to distract the team. But once problems become impossible to ignore, as inevitably they will be, they must be explained. And so they will be attributed either to alien, retrograde forces that have infiltrated paradise, or to insufficient zeal among believers in pursuing the good. The dogmatic mind is haunted by two specters: the different and the indifferent.

    Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it, but it weakens their understanding of it. The hardest thing for us is to establish enough intellectual distance from modern democracy to see it in historical perspective. (While virtually every American university has courses on “democratic values,” I am unaware of any that offers one on “undemocratic values,” despite the fact that almost all societies from the dawn of time to the present have been governed by them.) The Framers had experience with monarchy and had studied the failed republics of the European past. They looked upon democracy as one political form among others, a means to particular ends, with strengths and weakness like any other political arrangement. But once Americans in later generations came to know nothing but democratic life, democracy became the end itself, the summum bonum from which all discussion and debate about means must flow. When Americans ask how can we make our democracy better? what they are really asking is how can we make our democracy more democratic? — a subtle but profound difference.

    Our dogmatism shows up in other ways, too. Spend some time abroad and you start to notice that Americans rarely express mixed feelings about their country as other peoples do about theirs. We oscillate humorlessly between defensive boosterism and self-flagellation, especially the latter over the past half century. Today there is nothing more American than condemning American democracy or declaring ourselves alienated from it. Yet the only charge we can think of leveling against it is that of failing to be democratic enough. No one appreciates the irony except the alert foreign observer with a sense of humor, like the divine Mrs. Trollope. Foreign anti-Americanism is always, at some level, anti-democratic, which is what can make it enlightening, and useful to us. American anti-Americanism is hyper-American and earnest as dust. We find it virtually impossible to get outside ourselves. We breed no Tocquevilles, we must import them.

    Other countries claim to revere democracy, and many do. But few think of democracy as a never-ending moral project, a world-historical epic. And none have considered it their divine duty to bring democracy to the unbaptized. The Protestant stamp on the American mind is so deep that collectively we take on the mantle of the Pilgrim Church marching towards a redemption in which all things will be made new. For much of our history the sacred individual task of becoming a more Christian Christian ran parallel to the sacred collective task of becoming a more democratic democracy. Note that I do not say liberal democracy. For there is nothing liberal about Americans when they are on the march. Which is why when conscription begins, the indifferent, who for whatever reason do not feel like marching just now or have other destinations in mind, beat a retreat. Some have sought refuge in rural solitude, some in the American metropolis, some in foreign capitals. Anywhere where they might be free of the unremitting imperative to become a better person or a better American. Anywhere where they could simply become themselves.

    The thesis that huge quantities of soap testify to our greater
    cleanliness need not apply to the moral life, where the more
    recent principle seems more accurate, that a strong compulsion
    to wash suggests a dubious state of moral hygiene.

    ROBERT MUSIL

    A hand goes up in the audience: But we are no longer a Protestant country! We are a secular one that has gotten over religious conformism. What on earth are you talking about?

    Thank you for that question. In one decisive respect we have indeed moved beyond Protestantism: we no longer believe we are fallen, sinful creatures. The Protestant divine was severe with his flock and occasionally with his country, but he was also severe with himself. He was a busybody because his God was a busybody who put everyone, including the clergy, under divine scrutiny. There is none righteous, no, not one, says Saint Paul. What a terrible way to start the day.

    But in other respects we have retained vestiges of our Protestant heritage and even exaggerated them. Hegel foresaw this. Considering the moral and religious psychodynamics of his time, he observed that the Dialectic has a sense of humor: toss Calvin out the front door and Kant sneaks in through the back. No sooner had the empiricism and skepticism of the Enlightenment disenchanted nature, draining it of moral purpose, than German idealism surreptitiously reestablished the principles of Christian morality on abstract philosophical grounds. And no sooner had Kant midwifed that rebirth than the moral impulse floated free of his universalist strictures and became more subjective, less subtle, more excitable, less grounded in ordinary existence. In a word, it became Romantic. The saints are dead; long live the “beautiful souls.”

    What is a beautiful soul? For Schiller, who coined the term, it was a person in whom the age-old tension between moral law and human instinct had been overcome. In a beautiful soul, he wrote, individual deeds are not what is moral. Rather, the entire character is…The beautiful soul has no other merit, than that it is. Schiller imagined individuals who so fully incarnate the moral law that they have no need of moral reasoning and who experience no struggle to surmount the passions. This beautiful soul does not really act morally, it simply behaves instinctively — and such behaving is good. (Ring a bell? And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.) A disciple of Kant, Schiller took the moral law to be by definition universal. What he did not anticipate was that the notion of a beautiful soul could inspire a radical impudence in anyone convinced of his or her own inner beauty. Who would not want to be crowned a moral Roi Soleil, absolved in advance of guilt, self-doubt, repentance, and expressions of humility? Who would not want to learn that the definition of righteous-ness is self-righteousness?

    So, in answer to the question, yes, in one sense America is a post-Protestant nation. The uptight Bible-thumping humbug of yore has been shamed off the public square — but only to make room for networks of self-righteous beautiful souls pronouncing sentence from the cathedras of their inner Vaticans. What no one seems to recognize is that they are an atavism, a blast from the past, not a breeze from a progressive future. Like their ancestors, they are prone to schisms and enter civil wars with the giddiness of Knights Templar descending on Palestine. Yet they are bound together by an unshakeable old belief that when it comes to making the world a better place there are no indifferent acts, no indifferent words, no indifferent thoughts, and no rest for the virtuous. Our beautiful souls are Marrano Christians as radical as old Saint Paul. They just don’t know it. Yes, the Dialectic really does have a sense of humor.

    “Ah,” Miss Gostrey sighed, “the name of the good American
    is as easily given as taken away! What is it, to begin with, to be
    one? And what’s the extraordinary hurry?”

    HENRY JAMES

    America is working on itself. It is almost always working on itself because Americans believe that life is a project, for individuals and nations. No other people believes this quite the way we do. There is no Belgian project, no Kenyan project, no Ecuadoran project, no Filipino project, no Canadian project. But there is an American project — or rather a black box for projects that change over time. We are always tearing out the walls of our collective house, adding additions, building decks, jackhammering the driveway and pouring new asphalt. We are seldom still and never quiet. And when we set to work we expect everyone to pitch in. And that means you.

    Which can put you in an awkward position. Let’s say you are unhappy with the project of the moment. Or you approve of it but think it should be handled differently. Or you appreciate the way it is handled but don’t feel particularly inclined to participate right now. Or you even want to participate but resent being dragooned into it or learning that others are being punished for not joining in. Or say that you simply want to be left alone. In any other country these would be considered entirely reasonable sentiments. But not in America when it is at work on itself.

    The projects of our moment may sound radical, but they are just extensions of the old principles of liberty, equality, and justice. That certainly speaks in their favor. What is new, thanks to our beautiful souls, is that the task of making this a better America has now been conflated with that of making you a better person. In the Protestant age, the promotion of Christian virtue ran parallel to the promotion of democracy but usually could be distinguished from it. Bringing you to accept Jesus as your personal savior had nothing necessarily to do with bringing you to accept William Howard Taft as your national savior. The first concerned your person, the second concerned your country.

    In the age of the beautiful soul our evangelical passions have survived and been transferred to the national project, personalizing it. Beautiful souls believe that one’s politics emanate from an inner moral state, not from a process of reasoning and dialogue with others. Given that assumption, they reasonably conclude that establishing a better politics depends on working an inner transformation on others, or on ostracizing them. And thanks to the wonders of technology, the scanning of other people’s souls has never seemed easier.

    These wonders have also landed us in a virtual, and global, panopticon. It has no physical presence, it exists solely in our minds. But that is sufficient to maintain a subtle pressure to demonstrate that we are all fully with the newest American projects. In periods of Christian enthusiasm in the past, elites would make ostentatious gestures of faith in order to ward off scrutiny. They would fund a Crusade, commission an altarpiece, make a pilgrimage, join a confraternity, or sponsor a work of theological apologetics. Virtue-signaling is an old human practice. Today the required gestures are of a political rather than spiritual nature. We have all, individuals and institutions, learned how to make them by adapting how we speak, how we write, how we present ourselves to the world, and — most insidiously — how we present the world to ourselves. By now we hardly notice that we are making such gestures. Yet we certainly notice when the codes are violated, even inadvertently; the reaction is swift and merciless. Such inadvertence, even due to temperament or sensibility, is read as indifference to building a more democratic America, which ranks very high on the new Syllabus of Errors.

    It is of vital importance to art that those who are made its
    messengers should not only keep their message uncorrupted, but
    should present themselves before their fellow men in the most
    unquestionable garb.

    THE CRAYON (1855)

    Aristocracies are aloof and serene. American democracy is needy and anxious. It wants to be loved. It is like a young puppy that can never get enough petting and treats. Who’s a good boy? Who’s a very good boy? And if you repeat this often enough, eventually the dog will lick your face, as if to say, and you’re a good boy too! The rewards for satisfying this neediness, and the penalties for failing to satisfy it, are powerful incentives to conform in just about every sphere of American life, no more consequentially than in intellectual and artistic matters. Every society, every religion, every form of government offers such incentives. Since ancient times worldly intellectuals and artists have understood that they are never entirely free from the obligation to genuflect occasionally, and the clever ones learn how to wink subtly at their audiences to signal when they are doing just that. L’art vaut une messe. Romanticism in the nineteenth century was the first movement to fuel the fantasy of complete autonomy from society, only to itself become a dogma that all thinkers and artists were expected to profess.

    It is one thing, though, to self-consciously genuflect when necessary — and then, just as self-consciously, to stand up when mass is over and return to your workplace. It is quite another to convince yourself that kneeling is standing. Or that you must turn your workplace into a chapel. What Tocque-ville meant by the “tyranny of the majority” was exactly this infiltration of public judgment into individual conscious-ness, changing our perceptions of and assumptions about the world. It is not really “false consciousness,” which is the holding of false beliefs that enhance the power of those who dominate others. Rather it is a kind of group conscious-ness that morphs and re-morphs arbitrarily like cumulus clouds. False consciousness obscures precise class interests. The tyranny of the majority obscures the interests, feelings, thoughts, and imagination of the self.

    What is so striking about the present cultural moment is how many Americans who occupy themselves with ideas and the imagination — writers, editors, scholars, journal-ists, filmmakers, artists, curators — seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Rerouted from their personal destinations toward a more moral and democratic America, they are losing the instinct to set their own course. They no doubt believe in what they are doing; the question is whether they are in touch enough with themselves to feel any healthy tension between their presumed political obligations and whatever other drives and inclinations they might have.

    Talk to creative young people today and prepare yourself for the patter celebrating the new collective journey, which they have no trouble linking to their personal journeys, however short those still are. The rhetoric of identity is very useful here because it has both individual-psychological and political meaning, blurring the distinction between self-expression and collective moral progress. That is also why identity-talk has become the lingua franca of all grant-making and prize-giving bodies in the United States. The committees are much more comfortable exercising judgment based on someone’s physical characteristics and personal story than exercising aesthetic and intellectual judgment based on the work. Little do the well-meaning young people drawn into this game suspect that they are not advancing into a more progressive twenty-first century. They have simply been rerouted back to the nineteenth century, where they must now satisfy a newer, hipper class of Babbits. Or, worse, become their own Babbits, convincing themselves that their creative journeys really are and ought to be part of a collective moral journey.

    This is not to say that art has nothing to do with morality. Morality in the broadest sense, the fate of having to choose among conflicting ends and questionable means, is one of art’s great subjects, particularly the literary arts. But the art of the novelist is not to render categorical moral judgments on human action — that’s the prophet’s job. It is to cast them into shadow, to explore all the ruses of moral reasoning. Literature and art are not sustenance for the long march toward national redemption. They have nothing whatsoever to do with “giving voice” or “telling our stories” or “celebrating” anyone’s or any group’s achievements. That is to confuse art with advertising copy. The contribution of literature and art to morality is indirect. They have the power to remind us of the truth that we are mysteries to ourselves, as Augustine put it. Literature is not for simpletons. Billy Budd was not written for Billy Budds. It was written for grown-ups, or those who would become one. Which is why the status of literature and the other arts has never been terribly secure in the land of puer aeternus.

    In the American grain it is gregariousness, suspicion of privacy,
    a therapeutic distaste in the face of personal apartness and
    self-exile, which are dominant. In the new Eden, God’s creatures
    move in herds.

    GEORGE STEINER

    For some, art and reflection have always served as a refuge from the world. In America, the world more often serves as a refuge from art and reflection. We are only too happy when the conversation turns from such matters to those thought to be more practical, more pedagogical, more ethically uplift-ing, or more therapeutic. The history of anti-intellectualism in America is less one of efforts to extinguish the life of the mind than to divert it toward extraneous ends. (See On the Usefulness of the Humanities for Electrical Engineering, 3 vols.) Such efforts reflect a perverse sublimation of the eros behind all creative activity, redirecting it from the inner life of the creative person toward some activity that can be judged in public by commit-tees. The result, in intellectual and artistic terms, is either propaganda or kitsch. And we are drowning in both.

    Censorship in America comes and goes. Self-censorship does too, depending on the public mood at any particular time. The most persistent threat to arts and letters in America is amnesia, the forgetting of just what it is to cultivate an individual vision or point of view in a place where thinking, writing, and making are judged to be necessarily directed toward some external end. The barriers to becoming an individual in individualistic America should never be underestimated. Tocqueville’s deepest insight was into the anxieties of democratic life brought on by the promise and reality of autonomy. Freedom is an abyss; the urge to turn from it is strong. The tyranny of the majority is less a violent imposition than a psychologically comprehensible form of voluntary servitude.

    In such an environment, maintaining a state of inner indifference is an achievement. Indifference is not apathy. Not at all. It is the fruit of an instinct to moisten the roots of all that has grown, as Whitman put it, and experience one’s self and the world intensely without filters, without having to consider what ends are being served beyond that experience. It is an instinct to hit the mute button, to block out whatever claims are being made on one’s attention and concern, confident that heaven can wait. It is an instinct for privacy, far from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of beautiful gods and beautiful souls. It is a liberal instinct, not a democratic one.

    Liberalism, Judith Shklar once wrote, is monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy — but it is a marriage of convenience. That is exactly right. The liberal indifference of Montaigne was a declaration of independence from the religious zealots of his time. But zealotry is zealotry, and democracy has its own zealots. We may look more kindly on their aims but they are no less a potential threat to inner freedom than our homegrown messiahs are. The indifferent appreciate democracy to the extent that it guarantees that freedom; they distrust and resist it the moment they are invited down to the panopticon for a little chat. They are not anti-democratic or anti-justice or reactionary. They understand that a liberal democracy requires solidarity and sacrifice. and reforms, sometimes radical ones. They wish to be good citizens but feel no obligation to cast down their nets and join the redemptive pilgrimage. Their kingdom is not of this continent.

    It is a paradox of our time that the more Americans learn to tolerate difference, the less they are able to tolerate indifference. But it is precisely the right to indifference that we must assert now. The right to choose one’s own battles, to find one’s own balance between the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The right to resist any creeping Gleichschaltungthat would bring a thinker’s thoughts or a writer’s words or an artist’s or filmmaker’s work into alignment with a catechism. Dr. Bowdler be damned.

    America is working on itself. Let it work, and may some good come of it. But the indifferent will politely decline the invitation to shake pom-poms on the sidelines or join a Battle for The American Soul just now. Why now? Because the illiberal passions of the moment threaten their autonomy and their self-cultivation, and have formed a generation that fails to see the value of those possessions. That is the saddest part. Perhaps a later one will again find it inspiring to learn what the early modernist writers and artists who fled the country believed: that America’s claim on us is never greater than our claim on ourselves. That democracy is not everything. That morality is not everything. That nothing is everything.

    “From 2020”

    1.
    The first half having been
    given up to space, I decided
    to devote my remaining
    life to time, this thing we live
    in fishily or on like moss
    or the spores of a stubborn
    candida strain only to be
    gored or gaffed, roots
    fossicked out by rake or have
    our membranes made so permeable
    by -azole drugs the contents
    of the cell flood everywhere.

    The bubble gun I’d bought
    on Amazon had come, so
    flushed, time’s new novitiate,
    I stood outside the door
    in velour slippers with a plastic
    wedge, from M&S, the toes
    gone through, and practised
    pulsing softly on the trigger,
    pushing dribbly hopeless sac
    shapes out, dead embryos
    that, managed all the same
    to right themselves to spheres,
    and bob as bubbles do, the colour
    of a rainbow minced or diced
    into the ornamental tree, or else
    just brim the fatal fence, most
    out of reach of the toddler
    capering side to side to keep
    his balance on the grass, one
    snotty finger prodding like a
    rapper turned jihadist’s threat
    of threat and all, ten seconds in,
    unskinned of radiance,
    re-rendered air.

    This would have been in that
    sad hobbled stretch of week
    between a Sunday Christmas
    and new year, my friends all
    40+, harassed by infants, joylessly
    still slugging Côte de Beaune
    and fennel-roasted nuts, the liver
    detox books not downloaded
    to app but only browsed by phone
    in the dark mornings, slitless.
    (I lay there worrying at my own
    which had the meaty bigness
    underrib of foie gras entier.
    The pillow case smelled horsey,
    sheets unchanged, the laundry
    everywhere, mountainously.)

    It wasn’t till my birthday,
    Jan 3, when schools went back,
    search engines saw a volume
    spike for ‘custody’ and gifs of
    sullen cats with emery boards
    explained the dead-eyed un-
    sheathed fear produced by credit
    card repayment plans and pissing
    on ketosis sticks that the month
    could manifest the rawness
    of new year: poverty then,
    and mock exams; now, enzyme
    supplements, and softening
    the 11s, scooped one layer
    deeper by all that red wine,
    by summer’s oxidative damage.

    2.
    The dry trees lolled in drunken
    groups outside front gates,
    waiting for the council van
    to come. Today, which was
    my birthday, macerated shit
    in nappies from the 24th,
    threaded by the bin in links,
    by twisting, like short sausages
    or poodles fashioned from
    balloons, was binned along
    with bean tails, tonic bottles,
    nails, a mini Lamborghini’s
    snapped-off wheels, a magnum
    bitter round the rim with old
    champagne (that halitosis smell),
    and twenty near-identical
    reception Christmas cards:
    a stippled snow-hung tree
    a bloated, ravaged robin.

    My son propped on one hip,
    front door ajar, both shivering
    in the not yet dawn, the heating
    just about to crackle on —
    raised up his palm in silent
    pleasure at the work being done.
    One man, his shoulders dewy
    with reflective strips, waved
    back and called him by his name
    — the weekly ceremony —
    until he bristled in my arms
    legs stiffening with joy.

    3.
    Downstairs I mixed some Movicol
    into warm juice and saw a
    squirrel run across the grass,
    freeze skinny as a meerkat
    on the mostly mud I’d tried
    to reseed twice last summer.
    (After moss killer, waiting,
    something ferrous, the shady
    lawn seed recommended by
    a friend eventually produced,
    as if by staple gun, a few sparse
    fiercely emerald reeds which died.)

    Both boys had scrambled over
    look! and when they turned away
    behind the mouth and nose
    breath diamonds, fading,
    the squirrel was spray-digging,
    pelleting again, even though
    he must have polished off his nuts
    by Halloween. We’d seen him,
    bushier then, a baby really,
    slyly going back and back,
    as we did on school coach trips
    to the battlefields of Ypres
    ripping through the Monster Munch
    long before the sickening ferry
    with its waffle smell and slot
    machines, the textbook poppy
    fields we’d seen on Blackadder,
    now stretching flatly, forever.

    I suppose the squirrel didn’t know
    the days would stick like curtains
    catching on the outer edge
    of the metal track, the yellow
    fleur de lys a half inch less
    wide open every morning.
    I knew that I could probe it,
    hey Siri, do most squirrels
    make it through to spring in their
    first year of life in urban
    environments, but the fact
    that I was always ladling
    porridge as he dug, donating
    raisins, doing calligraphy
    with smooth or crunchy
    peanut butter — there was
    that whole jack-o-lantern
    month, involving apricots,
    when it rained — only added
    to my sense of having been
    complicit in his losses:
    the bad grass, the Amazon
    deliveries that kept coming
    in white Toyota vans, the
    part-thawed corn cobettes
    siloed in their own brown bag,
    spongy with a mortuary
    softness that repelled me.
    He’d seen all that.

    The boys must be upstairs
    — a long withdrawing roar of
    Avalanche! the scuff of
    falling cushions — so I grabbed
    a handful of cashews and stood,
    unseen outside the window,
    scattering them contritely on
    the mud, around the reeds
    now colourless, and the small
    quill of his wavering tail.

    4.
    It being my birthday I was
    standing there, lost in the screen,
    the screen the same for reading
    on and writing this,
    for writing to, for finding out
    how many steps I’d taken
    yesterday/ in March last year,
    when I had spotted, bled,
    the algorithm always and
    upbraidingly concerned
    with sensed decline: a higher
    average headphone volume,
    deafness beckoning,
    and fewer steps, an upward
    trend in weight from these slack days
    around the year’s end picking
    at the Roses box, and making
    desperate cupcakes from a
    bbe last August box mix
    (the dribbly icing misty
    on the spoon, the wafer dog
    — a fireman — loosely hanging on)
    morbid obesity, then death.

    Its view of future time was,
    In a sense, so frictionless
    I envied it — that whole fin-
    de-siècle confidence:
    if history wasn’t progress
    it was Untergang, Déclin,
    the line traced out as if a ball
    dropping from the balltoss
    met the racket’s sweetspot
    swoof and whipped across the net
    and up, and up, so rather
    than returning it evaded
    satellites, fine meteorites,
    the rain, all things held still
    or left to fall, by gravity,
    and just went up and up,
    and quietly on. In China
    health authorities alarm
    as virus tally reaches 44
    in capital of Hubei province
    Wuhan, I could have read,
    if I’d read every piece of news
    that day. I didn’t, of course.

    5.
    Later, as we watched the moth’s
    drab plates of wing contracting
    on the windowpane or rented
    house’s limewashed skirting board,
    my son would talk of new year
    as the time when we had supper
    in the living room and ‘I
    was very ‘cited’. After baths,
    bedtime, the news, the news,
    Zoom wine with friends whose distant
    houses were still lapped, dustily,
    by sun, I lay unblinking
    on the bed, bean-fed again
    (shakshuka, quesadillas,
    cannellini mulched to paste:
    the NYT was camping poverty)
    and worked the chalky residue
    two paracetamols (expired)
    had striped across my tongue
    with squash, a pint. I searched
    for pleurisy, rib pain, cut glass
    opacities, read Twitter feeds
    of people in Berlin disputing
    quarantine R0 pathogen
    that ship the Princess Diamond
    why cocoons are never safe,
    then watched a video of snow
    massing right to left across
    the scientist’s window in Pankow
    until it was the only medium
    the only crazily still
    mobile thing behind the window
    flecked with paint chips, greasy
    fingerprint galaxies. Beyond,
    beyond: the snow did as it pleased
    effaced revealed the avenue
    he lived on with its scrub of
    park, its single taxi, and the lines
    of parked-up old estates which
    like the broken-backed receding
    linden trees reached to the
    grey horizon’s grainy limit.

    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.