Just Say the Word

    I signed the papers, and the world created 

    out of all I have destroyed honestly doesn’t look 

    much different. A grainy whitish wind blows in

     

    from Little Poland, and a human form in heavy gear

    screams unanswerable questions into traffic. Questions, 

    while inadequate to truth, are faithful to sorrow, so fair enough.

     

    Inside the padlocked gates of Leal Rental 

    a grey pitbull shining like a nail could be the silver dog Argyreos

    and the sun on whose mat of light he sleeps 

     

    the gold dog Khryseos  

    forged by the god of metalworkers, masons, to guard the threshold 

    of King Alcinous’ legendary hospitality 

     

    and its founding principles of order.

    I have only ever wanted to see things as they are. Until I did, and experience 

    narrowed to a fact impossible to turn around in. 

     

    Now everything I need to fix it myself resides with Leal Rental, 

    in whose yard a conclave of articulated boom lifts 

    achieves the conspiratorial symmetry of 

     

    The Calling of St. Matthew or The Supper at Emmaus,

    raised basket platforms attentive, inclined in the manner that indicates 

    listening, in their posture a hint of nature 

     

    aspiring to weightlessness

    and the eye follows the Baroque Diagonal into a sky of vivid, structural 

    blue, premodern and cloudless. 

     

    The craftsman never blames his tools 

    yet is only as good as they are, which leads 

    to some uncertainty as to where the fault lies. Argyreos of Leal, 

     

    allow me to linger, as I too am between jobs. 

    A condo development, blocks-long, modular, pre-démodé

    has sailed in from an increasingly unaffordable future 

     

    flying the skull and crossbones of Tridel Communities

    but it is pleasant to lose oneself on Dupont Street 

    in the comforting presence of factory colours,

     

    thoughts on their feet high in the thought-baskets

    awaiting direction, though from up here 

    it looks like the whole thing is going to have to come down.

    Bad Landscape

    I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow, 

    not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward 

    the poor outcome of a structure neither representational

    nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond 

    ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense 

    of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, 

    to animate what’s lacking with the spark of its 

    remainder. Better than this were the products of by-numbers kits 

    hanging on the walls of my grandparents’ home —

    bird dogs, game birds —

    that knew what they were, spoke at least of a steady hand

    and subsequent pride in the completion of a task 

    for its own sake. Above the roar of the new gas furnace 

    installed in the living room, as there was no basement, 

    the volume of the brand new colour television 

    we were warned as children we sat too close to. Blue light 

    of the programs on our faces, some of the outside 

    was already on the inside, the radiation we were told 

    was everywhere — power lines, radios, fluorescent light, telephones — 

    in all of what emitted that low hum of menace 

    we had no other word for. 

    The Bluebird

    Each old thing in its new place must prove its worth yet again. 

    Dust is disturbed, having made itself at home 

     

    among what former tenants have found wanting. 

    A friend brings a gift to brighten my room then leaves 

     

    a cruel word to move in with me.

    Good and bad don’t always line up opposite.

     

    Nearing the end of an earlier journey, I’d stopped at 

    a roadside motel whose name ameliorated 

     

    the experience of staying there 

    not at all. Around it rose the dark forest of the Shield country, 

     

    endless differentiation appearing undifferentiated

    though one had the sense of something slowly,

     

    unrelentingly, being taken apart within.

    Ahead lay great happiness, great sorrow, and it seems to me now

     

    a decision was to be made between them then,

    though the conditions for such a choice did not exist. 

     

    The past is so poorly constructed, so unsuited to the living 

    that must be done, we might wish for the forest to grow up around it —

     

    but knowledge can’t replace the facts 

    of its acquisition. They continue to perform 

     

    in the events they set in motion 

    whether we remember them or not.

     

    I was hungry, it was very late. Across the four lanes 

    northbound, southbound, divided in my memory 

     

    by a waist-high steel girder, a gas station convenience store’s 

    neon still awake. Seldom a break in the traffic, 

     

    footbridge miles away. To get to the other side quickly 

    meant taking your life in your hands.

    On Moral Concern

    You shall surely reprove your fellow.

    Leviticus 19:17

    A long time ago, I spent a couple of years reading Calvinist theology and Puritan treatises and sermons (for a doctoral dissertation and a first book).I don’t remember many lines, but one has stuck in my mind. The Reverend Richard Baxter, author of The Holy Commonwealth, described in 1659 how he maintained moral discipline in his Kidderminster parish “with the help of the godly people of the place who thirsted after the salvation of their neighbors and were in private my assistants.” I have thought a lot about those godly people and their peculiar “thirst.” There aren’t all that many men and women so strongly engaged with their neighbors’ moral well-being, but such people do appear frequently in history. We find them again and again “thirsting” after the salvation, or the rectitude, or the piety, or the political commitment, or the ideological correctness, of their neighbors. These people possess what I want to call “moral concern.” (There may be a better term.) They are driven not only to worry about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people, but also to express their worry — sometimes only in private, but sometimes also in public.

    Moral concern is my subject here. You might call it nosiness, but that word carries negative connotations that are too quick for my purpose. Anyway, moral concern goes far beyond nosiness: it is not just an interest in other people’s beliefs and behaviors or a readiness to talk about them; it is also an eagerness to improve both. Moral concern is different from compassion, which describes a sympathetic engagement with other people’s physical or material well-being — with those who are sick or poor, or victims of flood or fire, or orphans, battered wives, disabled men and women. And moral concern is also different from solidarity, which requires a commitment to help people who are oppressed or, better, who are resisting oppression, fighting for national liberation or racial or gender equality. Solidarity leads political activists to join the fight, to support the goals of the fighters. By contrast, the agents of moral concern are not committed to the goals of other people; they have their own goals. They have a very firm idea about what my moral condition should be, which probably isn’t my own idea. They thirst after my religious or political salvation. And their thirst may well challenge or even override my self-concern and my liberty. 

    I haven’t looked for help in the analysis of moral concern from the philosophical psychologists, who may well have a lot to say about these thirsty people. I am a political theorist, and I will consider the role that morally concerned men and women have played in political history. In line with contemporary practice, I should say up front that I believe that moral concern often leads to moral over-reach, and that it has had perverse effects, especially in left politics, but not only there. At the same time, isn’t there something admirable about people who think not only about themselves but also about others, who worry about you and me?

             This concern for the morality of others begins, I think, with parental solicitude — and also parental anxiety. Both of these are no doubt salutary: we want parents to worry about the morality of their children and to work hard to teach them right and wrong — not only how to behave but how to think about how to behave. But doing and not doing comes first, as in this injunction to parents from a seventeenth-century Puritan text on “family government.” 

    The young child which lieth in the cradle [is] both wayward and full of affections: and though his body be but small, yet he hath a great heart, and is altogether inclined to evil…. If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth, but by education…. Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect, that they never smile or laugh at any words or deeds of their children done lewdly…naughtily, wantonly…they must correct and sharply reprove their children for saying or doing ill….

    A high level of moral concern would be required to follow this disciplinary program. It is, perhaps, an extreme example — or, better, given the politics of seventeenth-century Puritanism, a revolutionary example. It calls on parents to enforce a radical discipline. And it tells us two important things about how concern for the morality of others works when it becomes a project. The project begins with the conviction that the men and women about whom we are concerned are in a bad state — perhaps not utterly depraved as in Puritan theology, but seriously wrongheaded — religiously, politically, ideologically incorrect. We are “wary” about the others, sure that they need help. And then our concern is expressed in clear-cut ways: we help the others by sharp reproval and firm correction.

    But if we move from children to neighbors, the concern will have to be expressed a little less sharply. Parents have full control over their children; when children “run wild,” family government has failed. Our neighbors, by contrast, are free men and women, so when we exercise our moral concern we are likely to engage in some version of what the Puritans called “brotherly admonition.” Still, admonition is shadowed by the hope for something stronger, something more like firm correction. Early seventeenth-century Puritans might urge their neighbors not to attend frivolous and wanton performances of Shakespeare’s plays, but their ultimate goal was to close the theaters. So moral concern reaches toward politics — from family government to the government of the state, from admonition to coercion. 

    The most obvious example of official moral concern is state censorship: subversive or licentious books and magazines are banned in order to make sure that no one in the country gets subversive, dissident, or wanton ideas. Subversive ideas are not only politically dangerous, they are also commonly taken by the censors to be morally wrong. They undermine or deny divinely established authority or legitimate government or the will of the People (expressed by their Maximal Leader) or the course of History (represented by the ideological vanguard). Or they encourage sexually illicit conduct and undermine family values.

    People in power are naturally concerned with the beliefs and the commitments of their subjects; they seek obedience to moral codes and political regulations, but what is more important, they seek willing obedience. They want to shape the moral habits of the men and women they rule. Censorship is always politically instrumental, but it is often driven also by a genuine abhorrence of the ideas that are censored. The powerful few want the others to recognize the rightness of sexual propriety, political authority, and their own subjection. 

    The missionaries who followed colonial armies, thirsting after the salvation of the natives, provide an example of semi-official moral concern. They could not do their godly work without the background support of the army, and they also serve to advance the colonialist cause — or its pretended moral purpose: to civilize the benighted peoples of Africa, say, or wherever the armies conquered. 

    Yet moral concern can also be expressed in more egalitarian ways and, again, the Puritans had the right words: “holy watching,” a phrase that describes a strong form of mutual surveillance, the work of men and women who feel themselves to be each other’s equals and are wary about each other’s moral condition. They watch one another, looking for signs of false beliefs, licentious affections, or deviant commitments — eager to offer correction. We see this most clearly in revolutionary situations, when moral concern comes into its own, when it is released from the everyday inhibitions of courtesy and respect for privacy. The Puritan revolution of the 1640s and 1650s is certainly not the first example of this release (think of Savonarola’s Florence), but it is first in the modern history of revolution and perhaps the best known—since the Puritans were, after all, puritanical. They aimed to create the holy commonwealth described by Richard Baxter, and “brotherly admonition” and “holy watching” were instrumental to that creation. As were their “experience meetings”: these were special sessions of Puritan congregations held “to resolve doubts,” to listen to accusations and confessions from the members, and to reprimand and punish sinners.

    Experience meetings were convened not only in England but also by Calvinists in Geneva and by the French Huguenots; they are the direct ancestor of the Jacobin épuration or purification. “This tribunal of conscience,” one of the revolutionaries wrote, “is terrible indeed, but it is also just. The most practiced audacity, the most refined hypocrisy, disappeared before the watchful and penetrating eyes of the sound members of the society…” The “sound members” are the French version of Baxter’s “godly people,” and like godliness, soundness indicated a highly developed moral concern. The “sound members” thirsted after the secular salvation of their fellows, looking to turn unsound citizens into “patriots” (rather than Protestant saints). I am not sure whether revolutions produce people like that or people like that produce revolutions. Perhaps the people are always there, waiting for political opportunity.

    Moral concern at such moments reaches very far into the life of the sinful or unpatriotic others. The chief aim of the Jacobin militants was, of course, to uncover and correct royalist sentiments, to overcome habits of submission and deference. But the work of correction extended much further — to something very much like Puritan morality. Here is Crane Brinton’s summary description of what went on in provincial Jacobin clubs, from his classic book The Anatomy of Revolution. The members, the sound members, resolved that 

    Citizen W should keep his dog tied up; citizen X should be made to marry the girl; citizen Y should be admonished against outbursts of temper; rich citizen Z should be made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club.

    You might say that the revolutionaries had taken over the role assigned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to gossiping women. “How many public scandals,” he wrote, “are prevented for fear of these severe observers?” But Rousseau was describing an ordinary form of social pressure: the gossiping women, and men, too, enforced the local mores, whatever they were. The Jacobins were a moral vanguard, and their “watchful and penetrating eyes” looked toward a new morality directed against the libertinism of the aristocracy — very much like what came to be called “bourgeois,” but with a sharper edge.

    The American Revolution, less radical, perhaps, than the others, produced a similar mix of political principle and everyday puritanism. Here is one of the revolutionaries worrying about the appropriate language of patriots, warning his readers against the use of titles other than “mister” (the American equivalent of the French “citizen”): we must “adopt the simple language of free government… Let us leave the titles of excellency and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King.” And here is the Baltimore Committee in 1775 recommending that the people of the county “not attend the approaching fair because of its tendency to encourage horse-racing, gaming, drunkenness, and other dissipation.” You need stalwart men and women to fight a revolution, and stalwart men and women want everyone to be like them.

    The great defender of revolutionary stalwartness is Vladimir Lenin; he far outdoes the Baltimore Committee, and he will serve as my last historical example of moral concern. Consider his complaint against his fellow revolutionaries: he criticized their “slovenliness…carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality, nervous haste, the inclination to substitute discussion for action, talk for work, the inclination to undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.” I think of this as a Bolshevik version of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic, focused not on economic but political activity. Lenin wants comrades who will work hard, stay the course, and win in the end. And since the end, a communist society, is critically important for all humanity, this is a moral demand. It is accompanied by a recognizably puritanical morality — a morality not often associated with the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the first years of the Russian revolution were a time of sexual liberation. Unintended liberation, however: here is Lenin preaching against free love: 

    Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois; [it] is a phenomenon of decay. The proletariat is a rising class; it needs clarity, clarity, and again clarity. And so I repeat, no weakening, no waste, no destruction of forces.

    The Bolsheviks took a more obvious interest in the opinions of their fellow revolutionaries; they guarded against ideological deviation. As with the Jacobin purification, that was the first purpose of the Soviet purge. But the comrades — like all the saints, citizens, misters, and patriots — were also concerned with moral well-being in the largest sense. The first soviets, Brinton reports, took steps to ban prostitution and gambling and to shut down night life. Members of the vanguard were supposed to be something like secular ascetics, all their energy focused on revolutionary action. Or, maybe, not all, since much of their energy had to be focused on ensuring the commitment and zeal, the asceticism, of the others. You might call that the “holy watching” of “severe observers.” Again, it challenges the everyday freedom of ordinary men and women. 

             I collected these quotations years go for a particular academic purpose: to demonstrate the similarity of revolutionary endeavor across decades and centuries, from Puritans to Bolsheviks (and Maoists). My reason for invoking them here is different. They came to mind when I was reading the articles and listening to the lectures of contemporary American “abolitionists,” good leftists who want to abolish the police. There are many more people who want to defund the police, which is the reformist version of the argument; but the abolitionists are more like revolutionaries. Indeed, one of their excited supporters wrote of the burning of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct building in late 2020 that “fire became the technology of abolition.” Most of the time, though, the idea is more theoretical. Abolitionists are inspired (those of them who read political theory) by the writings of men such as Rousseau and Lenin. In The Social Contract, Rousseau argued for the replacement of professional politicians, professional soldiers, and professional teachers by activist citizens. The citizens of the republic, he wrote, “do everything for themselves.” Today’s abolitionists simply extend the argument to police work; they want the citizens to exercise their moral concern and police themselves — and each other. Perhaps they are following Lenin’s lead, who claimed — in State and Revolution, written in the tense months of August and September, 1917 — that in a communist society there would be “no police force distinct from the people.”

    That last sentence requires interpretation. I don’t think it means that there will be fewer police, but rather that there will be many more: all the people policing all the people. “Control,” Lenin goes on to say, “will really become universal, general, national, and there will be no way of getting away from it.” This is a call for the mass mobilization of moral concern. Now consider these milder sentences written in 2019 in a (very optimistic) book describing America’s democratic socialist future:

    A society governed by socialist values would likely make the conditions for transformative justice [that is, abolition] more possible. If people were regularly engaged in democratic processes at their jobs and in their neighborhoods, and had their basic needs provided for, they would be more able and willing to sustain relationships of mutual accountability.

    Would they? How much moral energy would be necessary to “sustain” the accountability of everyone to everyone else? How much time would it take — time left over from our engagement in “democratic processes” at work and in our neighborhoods? And what about political participation in state politics? We would all be endlessly active. Remember the remark attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Socialism would take too many evenings.” And mornings and afternoons, too. Of course, one of the objects of the moral concern of active citizens would be the reluctance of the others: the laziness, the dissipation, the frivolity of too many men and women. Here is a hard question: do people have what Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, famously called “the right to be lazy”?

    Many of the abolitionists don’t imagine that everyone’s moral concern will be at work all the time. They favor committee work, groups of neighbors taking turns at “watching” and “admonishing” the others. I don’t know whether committee members would be elected or chosen by lot; the lottery is more likely given the democratic presumption that everyone is morally concerned. But everyone isn’t equally concerned: the distinction that the Jacobins made between “sound” and “unsound” citizens will still need to be made. Some committees will work at reproof and correction much harder and more efficiently than others, and conscientious citizens will run to the less active committees with urgent information about wayward neighbors and strong suggestions for correction.

    I am not sure how the neighborhood committees would deal with violent crime. Abolitionists suggest that there would be lessons in de-escalation and “harm reduction” for committee members, but the hope must lie with prevention — that the secular versions of “holy watching” will detect violent tendencies early on. And then neighbors will admonish and counsel potential criminals. White collar crime also isn’t much discussed in the literature of abolition. Over time, perhaps, committee members will acquire the computational skills necessary to detect financial finagling and bank fraud — or the abolitionists may believe that over time the work of morally capable men and women will produce a virtuous society where illegal profit will not be much of a temptation. 

    You can see that I am a skeptic here, though I understand what drives the abolitionists. I recognize the reality of police violence — in the United States, of police racism. It is certainly possible that civilian review boards, a kind of neighborhood committee, might improve police accountability and reform police behavior. And for that we would need morally concerned citizens, though not as many as abolition would require. For now, anyway, I prefer to be watched by men and women in uniform rather than by anonymous neighbors, so that I can watch the people watching me. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I do not value the moral concern of (some of) my neighbors.

    “The ardent revolutionaries,” Brinton writes, “overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their neighbors.” Right, and this point can be made more theoretically: the radical exercise of moral concern comes into conflict with individual liberty (as we have seen again and again), and ordinary men and women rise up to defend their rights. These presumably include the right to ignore the moral condition of their neighbors and the right to refuse the work of “holy watching” — the right to be lazy. The “struggle sessions” of the Chinese cultural revolution — the most recent, and I hope the last, of the “experience meetings” — suggest how important those rights are. A terrified man or woman, a “bourgeois element,” is seated on a stool in the middle of a circle of neighbors and (former) friends who take turns denouncing and “reeducating” him or her. The denunciations are fierce because every person in the circle knows that they could be the next target. Their moral concern is not voluntary, and that is probably true of many participants in “holy watching” and “purification.” Eventually the overreach produces “thermidor” — the month on the French revolutionary calendar when the Jacobin terror ended. It is now the name for all such endings. 

    What one of the American abolitionists calls “community accountability practices” would not, if they ever became common, constitute terrorism. but I believe that they, too, would produce their own “thermidor.” Morally concerned men and women, even in this gentler version, irritate their fellows, who are not, however, unconcerned. We are all capable of moral concern; it is — the egalitarians are right — a universal endowment. But most of us confine the exercise of our concern to a few relatives and friends — and the form that it takes is argument. We try to convince the people we live with and talk with to adopt what we take to be the right moral and political opinions. Sometimes we extend the argument into the wider world; we join demonstrations, carry signs, circulate petitions, write articles; we want to convince our fellow citizens of some new doctrine — but without coercing or terrorizing them. Think of the campaign in the United States for gay marriage: the aim was not only to change the law, though that was obviously important, but also to change the way Americans imagine gay life. Moral concern, in this democratically constrained version, is a critical agency of social change.

    This is my own version of moral concern — and the version of my political friends. We are concerned about the moral commitments of other people, and we try to set them right if we think them wrong. Do we “thirst” after their rightness? Well, we hope for it. But we don’t watch them closely; surveillance isn’t our style. We don’t denounce them at neighborhood meetings; we don’t report their incorrect opinions to a local committee; we respect their independence. So, are we missing something important, a necessary fierceness in the exercise of our concern?

    Today in the United States, we are in the midst of a very fierce outburst of moral concern. You see it everywhere, and it is expressed in political acts that lie somewhere between argument and terror. Large numbers of Americans are committed, rightly, to a historical reckoning with slavery and racism. The immediate subjects of this reckoning are long dead (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson), which is helpful in avoiding terrorism. So we, or, better, some of us, tear down the statues and the reputations of men (it’s mostly men) who were once greatly admired. And we call for a rewriting of our national history — a rewriting especially of the textbooks with which that history is taught in our schools. Much of this is to the good; we argue about these issues because we are concerned about the moral views of our fellow citizens — and of our children. But this concern has now reached to practices that look too much like “holy watching” and firm correction.

    The official version of moral concern, as I suggested early on, is state censorship, and we now have in America an avalanche of laws, proposed laws, and local regulations aimed at controlling the textbooks that can be used and the things that teachers can say in classrooms around the country — and the books allowed in school and public libraries. Rightwing politicians play to parental worries about what children are being taught. The parents have a right to worry; the political play is crudely manipulative. Some of the politicians probably do believe that teaching about racism in American history will exacerbate the tensions of identity politics. They aim to minimize the tensions — and also to maintain the racial status quo and uphold the reputation (and secure the votes) of the white majority. Moral concern mixes with political ambition, as I suppose it also does in revolutionary situations. And, as the freedom of ordinary men and women is endangered in those situations, so the freedom of teachers and students is in danger today.

     

    The unofficial version of moral concern today is closer to my own intellectual home; it is most visible in the American academy. What is called “cancel culture” is the work of students and professors determined to make sure that no opinions that differ from theirs are defended in the classroom or by visiting lecturers. The offending opinions mostly have to do with race and gender, and they are often expressed inadvertently by good liberals or stalwart conservatives who aren’t sufficiently sensitive to, or sufficiently sympathetic to, what is now politically correct. So visiting lectures are called off because the speaker’s opinions might corrupt the listening students; or individual students are harassed by their fellows who judge them already corrupted; and teachers are disciplined by administrators because they have said something that their “sound” students believe is morally or politically dangerous. I don’t think that the aim of the cancelations, the harassment, and the discipline is to reform the immediate subject, the harassed individual, but rather to save the others. The concern is with the moral well-being or, better, the ideological correctness, of the greater number, but perhaps there is also the hope of “re-educating” wrong-headed individuals. On some campuses, the politics has gotten nasty; I hope for thermidor.

    We are also seeing a peculiarly American version of all this. Cancel culture has been sentimentalized. The result is visible now in our high schools as well as in our universities: we must beware of hurting the feelings of our students. The official censors in some American states have decided, for example, that focusing too much on the oppression of black people might hurt the feelings of white kids, identified as the heirs of the oppressors. That is an actual argument, perhaps politically effective, but not, in my opinion, morally serious. The unofficial censors, by contrast, worry that any teacher of American history who doesn’t manage to express the full awfulness of slavery will hurt the feelings of black kids. The kids are, in effect, urged to consider themselves victims or possible victims, sensitive to real and imagined slights — rather than intellectually alert and angry students. At such moments, one longs for an activist moral concern. The black kids need to stand up and argue. Everyone else, too, as in my last example.

    Some years ago, a group of Jewish students from a nearby university came to see me. They were very upset: the Black Students Association had invited Louis Farrakhan to campus, the leader of the Nation of Islam, a vicious anti-Semite. (He never came: he insisted on armed bodyguards, and the university authorities thankfully said no.) The Jewish kids were offended by the invitation; their feelings were hurt. What should they do? I didn’t have the phrase, but what I told them amounted to a plea for the exercise of moral concern. This was a moment for argument: the students had to explain and expose Farrakhan’s lies; they had to engage with their fellow students, challenge their prejudices, try to change their minds. What was needed was brotherly admonition. There was no danger of over-reach here; the campus Jews had no coercive power. But they should have been concerned not with their own feelings but with the moral condition, the political beliefs, of the others. And in these immediate circumstances, they had no right to be lazy.

     

    The Triumph of Anti-Politics

    Nearly all observers today agree that politics in the United States is in a dire, poisoned state. For this they generally blame “polarization” — and the other political camp. In fact, the reasons are both more complicated and more distressing, and cannot be blamed on any single political grouping.

    In his pre-pandemic best-seller Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker hailed the worldwide spread of democracy, but not in the glowing terms one might have expected from such a zealous celebrant of modernity. Democracy, he allowed, was preferable to tyranny, and offered people “the freedom to complain.” But Pinker cautioned against what he called “a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.” And he continued: “By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future.”

             The statement was obviously true on one level, as even a glance at the “deliberation” in our media will show; but it is appallingly superficial on others. Of course, ideal democracy has never existed on the planet, and probably never will. If a key element of democracy is a universal adult right to vote, then the United States has approached democratic status only since the 1960’s. But recognizing the fact that reality always falls grievously short of the ideal hardly invalidates the ideal. Pinker, having dismissed the ideal as impossible to realize, and having taken a condescending swipe at “the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs,” argued instead for a “minimalist conception of democracy” that leaves public policy, as much as possible, in the hands of trained experts. “To make public discourse more rational,” he insisted, “issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible…” In other words, circumscribe democracy through technocracy.

             The problem with this vision is that the most important problems in public life cannot be depoliticized, because most of them do not have a single correct solution that “rational” analysis alone can determine. Men and women see different solutions, depending on their political principles and moral values, which they hold in good faith. The fact that many of them do not approach the subject in the way an Ivy League professor such as Pinker (or I) would do hardly invalidates those principles and values. Would the creation of a national healthcare system in the United States represent a step towards improving the public good or an intrusion upon individual freedoms? Should we tolerate enormous inequalities of wealth so long as the poorest among us see their incomes rise? How do we balance the right to defend our homes against the dangers posed by the easy availability of deadly weapons? I have strong opinions on all these issues, and will vote for politicians who share my opinions and promise to act on them. But I recognize that others have different opinions, not because they are mistaken or ignorant or evil, but because they bring different principles and values to bear on the problems. I recognize that however strongly I feel about these issues, they do not belong beyond the bounds of political debate, with only one point of view about them permissible. 

             Throughout modern history, the greatest threat to democracy has come precisely from the rejection of these assumptions — indeed, of politics itself — and the consequent denial of political legitimacy to those who fail to share one’s own views on key issues. Historians have devoted intensive study to the long and painful process by which the notion of a “legitimate opposition” gained acceptance in the United States and other democratic societies and the way in which it has frequently threatened to erode. Democratic politics, tending as it so often does towards hyperbole and demagoguery, all too easily generates claims about the wanton stupidity, immorality, or just plain evil of one’s political opponents.

             But it is not casual hyperbole, insincerely employed and quickly forgotten, that most seriously threatens democratic societies. It is when the denial of legitimate difference congeals into a system of thought, into an ideology which admits only one permissible point of view on key issues, and judges all who fail to share this point of view as ipso facto beyond the pale. Such systems of thought, reinforced through constant repetition in media and by political party organizations, have led again and again not only to the erosion of democratic societies, but to their destruction.

             If politics has reached such a dire state in America today, the reason is not simply “polarization,” but the toxic growth of several distinct and distinctly contemporary patterns of thought that all tend to undermine the idea that citizens with different political principles and moral values can collectively deliberate on the public good. They span the political spectrum, and can be labeled, in turn, technocracy, market fundamentalism, Trumpian populism, and wokeness. Each seeks to place key issues in American life beyond the bounds of political debate, subject to only one permissible point of view, and they can, for this reason, be called antipolitical. They represent not so much a contribution to politics as a contribution to its destruction. They all have historical roots but have all evolved into new and powerful forms in recent years. Partly this is because the contemporary media environment groups like-minded people into hermetic “silos” with such dreadful efficiency, making it far more difficult to submit extreme and insistently repeated claims to even the most elementary forms of objective verification. Partly it is because these different patterns of thought have shown a surprising capacity to influence and interact with each other. 

             Over the past few years, this shriveling of politics has principally spurred attention among left intellectuals broadly associated with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. It has been a leitmotif in the work of the influential legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn, who has done much to popularize the concept of “antipolitics,” which he drew from a constellation of thinkers including the French intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon. Early in his career, Moyn used the term to characterize the human rights crusades that took shape in the 1970’s, charging them with circumscribing the field of action of progressive social movements and siphoning off their energy. More recently he has emerged as a strong critic of the authority now held by the American Supreme Court. This year, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy picked up on the idea of “antipolitics” in a forceful book-length essay entitled Two Cheers for Politics. Purdy claims that “our institutional and intellectual life, our culture and common sense, are made up substantially of warnings against politics and appeals to alternative sources of order: enduring constitutions, sober norms, the wisdom of markets.”

             Valuable as they are, these works suffer from two problems. First, they tend to conflate the antipolitical and the antidemocratic. Purdy, for instance, holds up James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville as “antipolitical” figures because of their strong and well-known beliefs about the dangers of untrammeled democracy. But if we think of politics as a society’s collective deliberation about the common good, Madison and Tocqueville were in no sense antipolitical. They both believed passionately in what they called political liberty, and ferociously opposed systems in which a central authority decides all public matters. They both advocated what they considered a healthy, lively political life — but with safeguards against the sort of democratic excesses that they believed led to despotism, political collapse, and civil war. This makes them conservative and anti-egalitarian in certain senses, and perhaps “antidemocratic” as well — but hardly antipolitical.

             Secondly, the “antipolitical” intellectuals tend to see the threat coming almost entirely from phenomena that they associate with the political right and center. They are not wrong in what they see happening there, but they err in characterizing the rise of antipolitics as a simple question of right versus left, with the left as the heroic opposition. The left, too, is culpable for a form of antipolitics — associated with the overly broad but unavoidable term wokeness — which has become increasingly influential in American society, and whose anti-liberal excesses figures such as Moyn and Purdy have been reluctant to criticize. The existence of this left antipolitics undercuts the comforting idea that what we are living through in the United States today is essentially another chapter in the long conflict between “the people” and “the elites,” and that a more successful version of Occupy or the Sanders campaign might bring about the people’s triumph.

             In fact, the existence of the left version of antipolitics suggests strongly that something different, and more dire is at work in America today. It suggests that the antipolitical impulses at work in America do not principally derive from a fear of politics, from a terror among elites of a powerful and unruly demos. To the contrary, they derive from a more generalized fear of the weakness and failure of politics, in what very quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

             The different versions of antipolitics circulating in the United States today have this in common: they all share the conviction that the political system has failed in its most important task. For technocrats, this task is to manage the fearsomely complex challenges of postindustrial society. For the market fundamentalists, it is to safeguard the sacrosanct market system from interference by disruptive interest groups. For the Trumpian populists, it is to protect real Americans, genuine Americans, from being ruined by elites and overrun by strangers who share neither their heritage nor their values. And for the “woke,” it is to protect historically oppressed groups from further oppression and to repair the damage done to them.

             All these groups, of course, have their agendas and their material interests. But all have managed to craft enormously resonant messages, which our deranged media and social media systems, as they distill outrage into profit with such dreadful efficiency, amplify all too powerfully. Worse, the endless, strident competition between these groups, their demonization of each other, and the resulting political paralysis only reinforces the fundamental perception, common to all of them and grounded all too firmly in reality, that our political system is indeed failing, in what amounts to a truly mephitic positive feedback loop. In the resulting political universe, even crises on the scale of the financial collapse of 2008 and the pandemic have failed to bring about genuine change, or the popular movement that figures such as Purdy hoped might crystallize. 

             This is, then, the paradox of our politics today: while nearly everyone believes that our political system has failed, there also seems to be a broad consensus that the only possible response is to restrict the space of the political yet further, to place ever-larger swathes of American life beyond the reach of collective deliberation and decision-making, to further reduce the space of toleration and patience without which no responsible politics can flourish. What one group sees as the protection of sacrosanct rights, others perceive as a tyrannical imposition. In the process, all sense of a common political community and a “legitimate opposition” evaporates, and, as Foucault once put it, riffing on Clausewitz, politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.

             The first pattern of antipolitical thought at work in the United States today is the one that Steven Pinker exemplifies, namely technocracy. Today technocracy is often seen, mistakenly, as a cause whose time is past. When the sociologist Daniel Bell (my father) analyzed it in 1973 in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, the term summoned up images of white-coated experts working for government bureaucracies, think tanks, and large corporations such as IBM. These experts would provide direction to elected officials as they proceeded with large-scale social and economic planning. The Communist bloc, with its massive, petrified bureaucracies and its “new class” of officials and experts, seemed to offer a hypertrophied version of this sort of technocracy, while Western European institutions such as France’s ultra-powerful École Nationale d’Administration and Commissariat Général du Plan offered a more compelling example. Today, the appeal of central planning has ebbed almost entirely away across most of the planet. In the sector of the economy which Bell and others saw as the principal arena for the triumph of the technocrats — information technology — the future did not belong to armies of white-coated company men from IBM and MIT. Instead, it was seized by swaggering upstart capitalists possessed, in many cases, of a distinctly counter-cultural vibe. 

             But as the success of Pinker’s work suggests, technocracy still has powerful resonance for many Americans. One relatively benign version has found a home in the more cautious and wonky precincts of the Democratic party, among officeholders who aim to achieve their goals as much as possible through technical and regulatory changes, thereby avoiding risky political conflict. Barack Obama, for all the soaring rhetoric of his campaigns, gravitated towards these in-the-weeds policies, for instance by preferring the technical fixes of the Dodd-Frank Act to any serious attempt to restructure the financial sector in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and by failing to include a public option in Obamacare. His influential advisor Cass Sunstein, an authority on the theory and practice of regulation, has advocated the pursuit of reform through the careful and expertly designed “nudging” of public behavior in a wide variety of arenas. He has called this “libertarian paternalism.” As Moyn has put it, “When it comes to government helping people achieve fulfillment, Sunstein insists that technocrats must rule. With a palpable sense of relief, he has confessed that he finds politics mostly a distraction and not so much about contending collective visions of the good life or about calling out the oppression that claims to expertise can mask.” To be sure, technocrats are not valueless or amoral people, and Sunstein’s regulatory work has been motivated by a concern for the good life, and the safe life, and the fair life. 

             A far more threatening form of technocracy has found advocates among American oligarchs, notably the former business partners Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Few things do more to breed arrogant over-confidence than the acquisition of a multi-billion-dollar fortune, and these men believe they know far better than any career politician — not to mention the American public — how to solve the country’s problems. To be sure, while they share the older technocrats’ conviction that governance can be approached like an engineering problem, they utterly reject the idea that doing so requires a large bureaucracy. They generally have a strong libertarian streak (Thiel backed Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and has a weakness for Ayn Rand) and they take the tech startup as their organizational model: lean, fast-moving, and totally in thrall to a dominant, charismatic leader. As Sam Adler-Bell wrote in a recent profile of Thiel’s protégé, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters: “the Thielites want to see the government hollowed out… They wish to unseat the liberal technocratic elite only so they can install their own: a more competent, compliant and unfettered one.”

             It is hard to know what actual political program these technocratic oligarchs envision, beyond wrecking the federal government and freeing companies like theirs from regulation and taxes. In their hunger for domination and their scorn for competition, in their sense of themselves as a priesthood that exclusively understands the esoteric needs of the hour, in their economic power and their political unaccountability, they are dangerous. Whatever is wrong with OSHA, it is not an apparatus of conquest and control. Unlike the technocrats of the 1960’s, and the Democratic wonks of our day, the new technocratic vision of the future comes in considerable part from science fiction, meaning that it depends on technologies that do not yet exist and may never do so, such as Elon Musk’s comic-book “hyperloop” that would solve traffic congestion problems by whisking passengers in capsules through depressurized underground tubes at seven hundred miles per hour. Most significantly, these would-be technologist-kings have a visceral contempt for democracy. Curtis Yarvin, an addled blogger admired by both Thiel and Masters, has openly suggested that a Big Tech CEO should become an American Caesar, ruling dictatorially. 

             Free market fundamentalism also has a very long pedigree. Nineteenth-century classical liberals promoted the notion that unfettered markets provided the most efficient way to distribute goods and services for maximum overall social benefit. Markets, they argued, were naturally self-organizing and self-regulating, and could therefore safely be left to operate in their own natural state of equilibrium, without interference from the state. This vision, just as much as the technocratic one, was of a society free from politics — a society where ordinary people had little or no recourse to political action. Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that when taken to an extreme, it can leave ordinary people almost as vulnerable to forces beyond their control as totalitarianism does. The historian Jacob Soll has demonstrated in his important book Free Market: The History of an Idea that the vision also broke with the long tradition of market thought that prevailed from antiquity through the eighteenth century, up to and including the work of Adam Smith. For all his paeans to the operations of the free market, Smith firmly believed that it could only operate within structures and limits devised and maintained by powerful states.

             In more recent decades, free market fundamentalism has radicalized. Acolytes of Milton Friedman press for keeping government entirely out of economic life, and indeed for limiting government as much as possible to military and police functions. They insist that the need for maximum possible economic growth justifies high levels of economic inequality, coupled with powerful restraints upon taxation, regulation, economic planning, nationalization, and labor organization. So-called neoliberals put particular emphasis on freeing the financial sector of the economy from regulation, on allowing “creative destruction” and “disruption,” and on insisting that free trade needs to operate on a global level, with goods and services freely circulating at maximum possible speed and volume across the world.

             Unlike technocracy, free market fundamentalism no longer has high-profile gurus like Thiel, Musk, or Pinker. The days of Friedman and Hayek — or, on a comically lower intellectual level, Ayn Rand and Arthur Laffer — are past. As Soll notes, Friedman himself had maximum visibility and overt political influence in the 1980’s, the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Yet the doctrine retains enormous strength through such institutions as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the corporations and hedge funds who ensure through their donations that the congressional Republican party — and much of the Democratic delegation as well — remain committed to the gospel of tax cuts. Just this past August, congressional Republicans without a single exception voted against President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with its 15% minimum tax for large corporations, while once-Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema engineered the preservation of the low tax provision most cherished by hedge fund managers (the “carried interest” provision). As noted, advocates of the new, stripped down, oligarchic version of technocracy, who often have libertarian backgrounds, can sound surprisingly like free market fundamentalists. Steven Pinker cheers on globalization and rails against what he calls “collectivization, centralized control, government monopolies and suffocating permit bureaucracies.” He does so despite the fact that allowing markets to operate without political oversight blatantly contradicts the idea of allocating goods and services according to technocratic expertise.

             With Trumpian populists, the shriveling of politics takes a very different form. In their rhetoric, at least, Donald Trump and his many acolytes have no sympathy either for technocrats or free market fundamentalists. They excoriate and ridicule both as foolish, greedy, unpatriotic, and out-of-touch elites. They rage against “globalists” and globalization, lax immigration policies, and free market agreements such as NAFTA that allowed American corporations to move jobs beyond our borders. They scorn government experts as corrupt members of the “administrative state” or the “deep state” or the “swamp.” They call for returning political power to “the people” in terms sometimes quite close to those of the Sanders left and the Occupy movement.

             The catch, of course, is in how they define “the people.” Few of them go as far as the tiresome reactionary Ann Coulter, who in 2016 proposed limiting the vote to people with four U.S.-born grandparents (a measure that would exclude Donald Trump, among others). But Trump himself often speaks of “real” Americans (or, in a recent fundraising letter, “REAL Americans.”) He takes care not to define them in ethnic terms, but his rhetoric leaves little doubt as to whom he takes them to be. Real Americans are proudly patriotic, overtly religious, and live outside large cities (“Democrat cities,” otherwise known as hellholes). They believe in the Second Amendment but not in climate change, they eat meat but not tofu, they own pickup trucks rather than Priuses. They are white. They are convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, and that Joe Biden and the Democrats are consciously plotting to “destroy” the country. Some even believe that Biden and Nancy Pelosi are kidnapping children to drink their blood. Only these Americans, in the Trumpian populist view, really deserve to have a voice in deliberations about the common good.

             This idea would be noxious enough if it remained mainly a rhetorical cudgel. But in recent years, figures across the American right have drawn on it to forge what amounts to a coherent and powerful anti-democratic ideology. They increasingly insist, buoyed by the work of intellectuals from quasi-authoritarian places such as the Claremont Institute, and drawing on James Madison’s famous distinction, that America is a republic and not a democracy. They therefore justify (as somehow “republican”) the gerrymandering of congressional seats, the hugely disproportionate power granted small rural states in the Senate, and the way the Electoral College gives presidential candidates the ability to win elections while losing the popular vote. They also tout the “great replacement theory” according to which elites are consciously trying to replace “real Americans” with immigrants who do not share their values, thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of naturalized citizenship for millions. They shower praise on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and the thuggish tactics he has used to muzzle a free judiciary and a free press. Most dangerously, they press the notion that Republican-controlled state legislatures have the right to override the popular vote. In short, the Trumpian populists believe in politics, but only for themselves, only when it produces the outcome they prefer.

             In practice, over the past several decades, adherents of these three currents of antipolitical American thought have been able to make common cause, united by a shared hatred of liberal elites and government regulation. The Republican party, Newt Gingrich in 1994 through the Tea Party in 2009 to Donald Trump in 2016, proved brilliantly adept at muffling blatant contradictions and gathering oligarchic technocrats, libertarian financiers, and ethnonationalist populists into a coalition that might not command a majority of the citizenry but could nonetheless win national elections. And so, despite the contradictions, it is easy to imagine these three currents as a single malign antipolitical force — “the right” — that a properly energized and powerful left, committed to real democracy, should have the ability to overcome. It is easy to imagine antipolitics as a left-right issue.

             But unfortunately the left has its own version of antipolitics, commonly known as wokeness. It is a system of thought that stems from the best of intentions, namely to protect historically oppressed groups from further oppression and to redress the wrongs done to them. But it, too, ends up placing numerous issues outside the realm of the political, in this case by defining them as moral absolutes and matters of inalienable right.

    To be sure, many left-wing intellectuals whom I would call antipolitical insist loudly on the inescapably “political” nature of their work. But their definition of the political is very different from the one I have offered here. Heavily influenced by Foucault, they see modern societies as fundamentally shaped by hegemonic belief systems grounded in exclusion (of women, people of color, sexual minorities). “Political” work consists of exposing and challenging these belief systems and the exclusionary practices that stem from them. From this point of view, collective deliberation about the public good is only authentic and productive when it takes place among those who have done the work of exposing and challenging. The only legitimate political discourse is dissent. In practice, it is a stance that makes the vast arena of legitimate political activity — both in terms of who can participate, and which issues they can debate — vanishingly small.

             It goes without saying that many key issues facing the United States today do indeed involve moral absolutes and inalienable rights. Critics of wokeness often forget that things which they themselves may now place in the “inalienable right” category — the right of gays to marry, for instance — not so long ago struck most Americans as wild progressive overreach. There are many issues which clearly should not be left up to a popular vote. Imagine, for instance, the results of a referendum on interracial marriage held in the United States in 1920. But as figures such as Madison and Tocqueville so keenly argued, political deliberation need not always be, indeed should not always be, democratic, in the sense of reflecting the conscious and immediate desires of the majority. Particularly on issues of great moral import, such deliberation may more properly involve relatively undemocratic institutions such as the courts. But it should still, in some sense, derive from national institutions and express the will, as mediated notably through the constitution, of the nation as a whole.

    Wokeness, on the other hand, puts the definition of what qualifies as a moral absolute and a matter of inalienable right solely in the hands of the oppressed group itself, and its members’ claims as to what constitutes harm. They are, in this view, epistemologically privileged: their experiences allow them to see further and understand more. If members of the group declare that even the discussion of an issue causes them pain, or places them in danger, others must defer to them, and set that issue beyond the bounds of deliberation entirely. This notion of deference does not just disquiet thinkers on the right. The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, an eloquent advocate of reparations to African Americans, wisely writes in his book Elite Capture: “For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present.”

             For the moment, wokeness of this sort has the greatest influence in universities and in the elite media. Even publishing, as opposed to writing, an article deemed harmful or dangerous — for instance, Senator Tom Cotton’s New York Times op-ed “Send in the Troops” in response to the protests following the killing of George Floyd — can cost editors their jobs. Despite the hysterical charges emanating from the right, wokeness has not taken control of public primary and secondary education (except perhaps in a handful of schools and districts), or large corporations, or the military. But it has had an undeniable effect in the Democratic party. In heavily blue districts and states — and in presidential primaries — candidates run serious risks if they express heterodox opinions on a variety of issues, including issues that large majorities of Americans consider vexed and difficult, such as abortion, or affirmative action, or hormone therapy for prepubescent children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Invoking the notions of a moral absolute and inalienable rights, as defined by those who have suffered or may suffer harm, activists rule out political deliberation on these issues by the community — a group of people with many life experiences — as a whole. And so politics shrivels.

             All of these corrosive systems of thought have long pedigrees. Antipolitics is nothing new. But in recent years it has become far more powerful, and far more of a threat to American democracy, for several reasons. First and foremost is the current media environment, in which populism and wokeness in particular thrive. Today a handful of huge corporations derive enormous profits from keeping their users in a state of permanent outrage, driving them to click on link after link, to take in hour after hour of cable news and radio talk, and to see and hear endless advertisements carefully tailored to their demographic profile and their previous spending. Read about the Democratic “regime” and its latest dictatorial power grab! (and click here to learn about a miraculous new performance enhancer). Hear about the latest racist outrage from a right-wing professor! (and let us tell you about our new line of electric cars). And so on and so forth. Algorithms are carefully defined and refined to keep audiences exposed to the same sites and programs, depriving them of other sources of information and constantly reinforcing the same one-sided narratives. Twitter especially was designed for outbursts and invective and slogans and conformity; in a political order that depends on thoughtfulness, Twitter is most often the technology of thoughtlessness. Moreover, Trumpian populism and wokeness have long served as each other’s favorite targets. Trumpistas like nothing more than to warn against woke bogeymen such as “Critical Race Theory” and transgender bathrooms. The woke, with more reason, see Trumpian populism as a thin veil draped over the cause of white supremacy.

             Free market fundamentalists and technocrats do not participate in the new media environment in the same way, and as already noted, in both cases the heyday of their overt political influence is long past. But globalization, and the dynamics of what much of the left continues to call, with a rather touchingly naïve hope, “late-stage capitalism,” ensures that market forces themselves remain as powerful as ever, generating money that floods the political system to protect against profit-reducing regulation. And Wall Street plutocrats have found few better investments than political campaigns. A few million directed to the right senators can save billions in tax breaks. Meanwhile, the new breed of technocrats has proven all too skillful in forging alliances with the Trumpian populists and harnessing the populist resentments that breed so furiously online.

             In fact, the different streams of thought feed off each other in often unexpected ways. As already noted, free market fundamentalists, Trumpian populists, and the new technocrats share a hostility towards most of the federal government as it currently exists, and eagerly collaborate in attacking it. The woke and the Trumpian populists, meanwhile, both direct much of their ire towards an allegedly oppressive elite establishment, even if the first sees it as embodying white supremacy, and the second, a cosmopolitan liberal contempt for ordinary people. And while the Trumpian populists fixate on border security and traditional sexual values, libertarian market fundamentalists and the woke are both more likely to celebrate sexual difference and to support increased migration. More generally, as Jedediah Purdy comments, many progressives agree with market fundamentalists that personal freedom and autonomy, albeit defined by the two groups in hugely different ways, are “too essential to be left to democracy.”

             Above all, though, all these streams of thought thrive on the conviction that politics itself has failed in the United States, leading to the conclusion that key elements of the public good can only be preserved and advanced by extra-political means. And, of course, the ever more bitter political strife that they generate in pursuing these extra-political means turns the conviction into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as endless outrage and controversy chokes the political system and drives it ever further into paralysis. By teaching the failure of politics they bring about the failure of politics. The Biden administration has managed, against great odds, to pass significant legislation despite this nefarious dynamic, and for the moment has partially overcome the paralysis. But if 2025 brings us a Republican president and Congress, they will undoubtedly take as their first order of business the reversal of these achievements.

             At the end of this dark road, if we continue down it, stand the new technocrats. It is they who most clearly and explicitly reject politics itself as corrupt and inefficient, and it is they who, in the long run, will benefit if the American public becomes entirely despairing about political life. It is all too easy for me, as a historian, to see how the public could, in its despair and disgust, ultimately embrace a charismatic technocratic figure promising to stand above the corrupt political fray, to manage social problems in a unifying and rational, if dictatorial, manner. The promise worked for Napoleon Bonaparte, whose version of enlightened despotism was the technocracy of his day. It worked for many others who followed in his wake. This outcome may still seem unlikely, but if the political conflict in this country turns violent (or rather more violent: it is already violent) then people will not simply despair about politics; they will start to fear it. At that point, the appeal of a Caesar could become overwhelming.

             Can we save politics, real politics, a common deliberation about the common good, from this fate? Is it possible to imagine a new sort of movement arising that could bring together enough citizens to produce real achievements, and restore a faith in political life? I see no possibility of such a movement arising today out of the American right. The rot there, the rejection of politics in the name of “real Americans” and even of dictatorship, is far too strong, reinforced as it is by a conservative media machine of unprecedented power. Nor is there any evidence of a significant internecine clash within the Republican Party about its future. There is more of a possibility of a pro-politics politics arising on the left, and it is worth remembering the genuine appeal that the Sanders campaign had for at least some Trump voters. But for the American left to generate such a movement successfully it has to reject its own version of antipolitics and the Puritanical moral absolutism that accompanies it. Only by turning away from this moral absolutism and focusing on causes that genuine majorities of the country can unite behind, does such a movement stand even a slim chance of success. Otherwise, genuine political life in America will continue to shrivel, until nothing at all is left of it. A society without a belief in politics is a kind of hell.

     

    The Happiness-Industrial Complex

    Alongside the industrial and the digital revolutions, the modern era has witnessed a happiness revolution. The scientific study, laboratory refinement, and industrial production of happiness are all big business. If we count among its products the dopamine rush with which we are awarded for our small efforts online, the happiness industry is now the largest in the world. But just as mass-produced plastic items lack any lingering aura of the artisanship packed into the traditional crafts these items supplant, so too the isolated, distilled, and monetized product that has been studied and developed and sold back to us as happiness shows little continuity with traditional articulations of what happiness is.

    I should perhaps confess at this early moment that I am not, myself, happy. With the right dosage and combination of SSRIs and anxiolytics, and a whole battery of specialists to keep me propped up, I find I can get by in this world well enough for now, and am even able to come across to those who know me as a high-functioning go-getter and an all-around genial fellow. But the cost of this is enormous, and the resulting condition remains both artificial and tenuous — like a golf course in a desert.

    I bring up my own happiness deficit at the outset only because I hope it can help to reveal something almost paradoxical about the topic at hand. Ordinarily we imagine that not knowing something directly is a good reason not to write about it, especially in this age of “standpoint epistemology” and general disapproval of any effort to move out of one’s “lane.” You probably do not want to hear from me about what it is like to be a woman, or a victim of the historical legacy of settler colonialism (though if you do I’ll probably be willing incautiously to hold forth). And yet my own constitutional unhappiness seems to me no reason at all to decline to write about happiness.

    On the contrary, I suspect that someone who claims to be happy is the last person we would wish to hear about happiness from. Achieving the condition in question, or claiming to achieve it, appears ipso facto to be a mark of inexpertise. This may be in large part because those who claim to speak about happiness from direct experience often appear, especially to those of us who are constitutionally unhappy, to be lying. If they weren’t lying, we often think, but were simply living their happy lives, it is unlikely that the topic of happiness would interest them enough to set themselves up in the world as its experts and representatives. A truly happy person, we the unhappy suspect, would not be able to think of happiness as a commodity, with a price-tag and a limited supply. A truly happy person would emanate happiness somewhat in the way that the God of Neo-Platonism emanates being, as a natural magnanimous flow, so that anyone entering into that person’s presence would automatically come to have some share in it, at no cost, while the emanator would not thereby be deprived of any of his own supply.

    Whatever is being sold by the happiness experts, we imagine, cannot really be happiness, but can only bear a relationship to it even more distantly removed than the one a synthetic mass-produced blanket at Target has to an early American album quilt. Or the relationship here is perhaps like a nutritional supplement you might take that dubiously claims to encapsulate in a single small pill the numerous beneficial molecules known to constitute the principal dishes of a Mediterranean diet. It might be true that you can put garlic-like and fish-like compounds in a pill, but if you swallow it on top of an American diet otherwise based on corn syrup and refined flour, it is unlikely that you are going to enjoy the same health history as a nonagenarian Greek islander.

      As the happiness industry, relying on cherry-picked scientific studies, has grown more effective at isolating marketable “happiness molecules” and synthesizing them for mass production, it has largely lost any historical memory of the long and difficult efforts that philosophers have made to determine, coherently, what happiness is. Significantly, while philosophers continue to write about happiness, by far the greater part of the recent academic work on this topic is coming from the fields of business and behavioral psychology.

    Likely no recent work distills a purer essence of this approach to happiness than the social scientist Arthur C. Brooks’s book, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America — and How We Can Get More of It. Brooks writes in a folksy American style reminiscent of Will Rogers and motivational sales speakers such as Zig Ziglar — he is a master of happy talk. His book is as much an extended speech-act as it is an analysis, helping to maintain in being the enduring myth of his country’s Sonderweg. There is something so deeply American in all this lucrative uplift. Brooks sees America’s uniqueness as flowing in part from the explicit value placed on “the pursuit of happiness” in one of its founding documents.

    Yet the Declaration of Independence is only making room for the individual happiness of its citizens, not bringing into being a country that is itself happy. To say that America is itself happy, or to argue as Brooks does that America might hope to be even happier, is really just to point to the statistical data concerning what several individual Americans report about their own happiness. Brooks provides a twenty-page appendix of admittedly interesting tables showing such information as “Trends in Happiness, Average Income, and Income Inequality, 1972-2004,” and “Happiness and Perceived Personal Freedom, 2000.” But such schematic summaries, the stock-in-trade of Brooks’ academic discipline and its relentless popularization in “how” and “why” books, bury over all the ambiguity and uncertainty that the individuals queried might have felt in answering questions about their own happiness. And if they did not feel uncertain, this can only be a result of overconfidence — the presumption that they had grasped a concept that in fact eluded them.

    For millennia, philosophers have been aware that happiness is a concept difficult to define, as much as it is a condition difficult to achieve. Brooks offers some initial acknowledgment of the difficulty of defining the term, and in keeping with the conventions of recent research he makes a tripartite distinction between “fleeting feelings of happiness,” “happiness on balance,” and happiness as “moral quality of life.” He notes that in antiquity it was the latter of these, which may be assimilated to Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia, that was generally preferred.

    But there are other ideas about happiness in the history of philosophy that Brooks does not even consider. Many, though not all, ancient philosophers warned against conflating happiness with a current sensation of contentment or pleasure, preferring to understand it as a long-term condition of the soul, or as a dimension of moral character. But many also argued that happiness is an objective state that attaches to a given individual whether that individual has any first-person experience of it or not. For Brooks, by contrast, “the bottom line is that we may not know much, but we do know when we’re happy.” Brooks must remain committed to the transparency of our own happiness, in order for the data on which he relies to retain their value. But what if things are not so simple?

    In the history of philosophy and religion, strong arguments have been put forth in favor of the view that happiness is something over and above what is contained in the notion of pleasure. Happiness is, rather, conceptually distinct from pleasure, and perhaps even incompatible with it. The reason for this is not just that pleasure is sinful, though that has certainly played a role in historical efforts to separate it conceptually from happiness. It is also that philosophical inquiry into happiness, as a concept, lies at some remove from the traditional study of “the passions,” which partially but not entirely map onto what we today call “emotions.” Happiness was not a passion, like anger or melancholy or lust, for it was not the result of some balance of humors in the body, but rather the result of a given external state of affairs.

    This becomes clear from a simple consideration of the origins of the English word in question, which places it in the same semantic cloud as words like “happenstance” and “haphazard,” both going back to the archaic “hap,” a synonym of “luck” or “fortune.” For Shakespeare, a sentence that begins with the adverb “happily” does not go on to describe a pleasurable situation, but rather tells you what happened, by chance, to transpire. In German the most common word for “happiness,” Glück, is also the most common word for “luck.” In French the word for someone who is “blessed” is bienheureux, which obviously connects with both the advective heureux, “happy,” as well as the noun bonheur, “happiness.” Someone who is happy, on the archaic reading that these words recall to mind, is simply someone who got lucky, on whom God has smiled, and the happy person might well be so without even having realized it.

    “Call no man happy till he dies” is a saying that captures well this old meaning: it is not that being dead is a pleasurable condition, but only that the determination of whether one’s life has been a fortunate one cannot be made until there is no more life to be lived. The only person who can be called happy, on this understanding, is one who has no subjective experience of any emotion at all, at least not in the earth-bound, embodied form in which we the living catch some small glimpses of it. By contrast, it would make no sense at all to say, “Call no man angry till he dies,” or “Call no man lustful till he dies.” Anger and lust are a matter of how you feel, happiness is a matter of how you are, or how your legacy is.

    Brooks assimilates Aristotelian eudaimonia to the view that happiness is connected to moral character, but this means very little until we are in a position to appreciate how he understands moral character. Aristotle’s ethics is naturalistic through and through. For him our happiness is dependent on our virtue — it is “an activity of the soul expressing virtue” — while our virtue, or aretḗ, is simply the particular excellence appropriate to a human being, just as the excellence of a knife is wrapped up in its cutting and the excellence of fire in its burning. This means that, in an important respect for Aristotle, an acorn that manages to become an oak, thereby realizing the particular excellence that was contained within it in potentia, is also happy, or at least is in a state that is not totally distinct from what we recognize as happiness in human beings.

    If happiness is understood in this way, as a set of circumstances quite independent of any subjective experience of them, the project of isolating its “molecules” and selling it to the public appears downright absurd. You can sell a person a lottery ticket, but you cannot sell them the luck that would make it the winning one. That involves a whole cosmic arrangement that precedes us and frames our existence; it is not something you can accumulate through the accumulation of tokens of the things — lottery tickets, love interests, stock-market investments — in relation to which a person may be said to be lucky or unlucky.

    You can sell a person a book about happiness, you can sell them a course of instruction, but if being happy or not makes no actual difference for your inner state, if happiness is something that can most appropriately be predicated of you only when you are dead and no longer have any inner states at all, then, obviously, the happiness merchant is most akin not to the physician, but to the carnival barker who has a vial of tonic to sell you, to cure what ails you through the activation of occult forces of which you, buyer, can only feign understanding.

    Perhaps the most compelling alternative to the Aristotelian identification of human happiness with a state of affairs suitable for realizing excellence is the one propounded by the Stoics, which in stark contrast maintains that human happiness, in order to count as such, must depend on no external circumstances at all, but in fact only on an inward indifference, or equanimity (ataraxia) in relation to all externals. Epictetus wrote that, while a person can delight in wealth and status and human relations, he should always be prepared to drop these at once, as when the captain calls a sailor back to the ship and he throws down the beautiful seashells he had just been admiring on shore. Properly understood, no turn of events is truly bad, not even the deaths of our children or some imminent mortal threat to our own lives. As long as we have access to the veins of our wrists, we are still free to commit suicide, and so even here there is, as is said all too often today, “no problem.”

    We might well suppose that anyone who could simply shrug their shoulders when they lose their entire family has hardened their heart so severely as surely to be suppressing a good deal of trauma, and that this is bound to catch up with them sooner or later. The Stoic requirement for self-control is one that is so difficult to attain, so manifestly superhuman, that it seems to have been handed down by a philosopher with no real sensitivity, and perhaps with some amount of contempt, for human psychology as it is actually lived. Still, there is surely some wisdom in the admonition to recall that no one ever promised you things would turn out alright, and so when they do not turn out alright, this is not so much cosmic injustice as simply the nature of reality.

    Nor is it any viable alternative to go the way of the monastics and to avoid developing the earthly attachments that expose us to risk of tragic loss. For the ecstatic union with God that might be achieved at the end of a life of strict askesis is far from what we ordinarily think of as happiness, even if the solitary, rudimentary life that is spent in preparation for this does seem to contain much of what we are able to recognize as common unhappiness. Thus, in Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the protagonist wanders around in the desert a crazed dotard, like Lear but king of nothing. Even when he succeeds in rejecting the temptations of the seductresses and the swindlers, he seems just as lost, just as empty, as he would have been had he given in to them.

    You can remove yourself from earthly affairs in order not to be heartbroken by them, but that is its own sort of suffering, and once you allow yourself to get mixed up in earthly affairs you are ever at risk of losing the people, things, or circumstances that give your life purpose or satisfaction. You are caught, in sum, between being ever at risk of losing everything and having nothing to lose.

      We have made it this far without talking about money, other than to note that it is what the self-styled happiness experts are after. Yet the academic field of what might be called “happiness studies” overlaps considerably not only with behavioral psychology but also with economics, for both of these domains model the human good in the same etiolated terms of abstract reward. Though he denies that happiness is to be equated with pleasure, Brooks often resorts to examples drawn from studies or thought experiments concerning the sharing or hoarding of things like ice-cream cones, essentially no different from the set-up of research on cooperation in macaques. And though he denies that happiness flows from financial wealth, he nonetheless conceives it as somewhat akin to gold, in the sense that each country manages its own reserve.

    In the happiness experts’ efforts to isolate the fundamental molecules of happiness and to measure happiness by quantitative means, they have wittingly or not rendered happiness into something money-like, where having more units of it makes you better off and having fewer does the opposite. For them, happiness is an asset class. It is difficult to say how far back this economization of happiness reaches, and a full genealogy is beyond our present scope. But it seems at least fair to say that its roots are not American, but rather lie in the liberal philosophy of early nineteenth-century England, and in particular in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, his “felicific calculus,” which sought in effect to quantify the human good in a system of discreet measurement.

    Bentham was both rigorous and original, but in its more demotic forms, particularly as they are translated across the Atlantic, the units of the new science of happiness will come to be presented as the units of the true economy, while monetary wealth in the narrow sense will often be presented as the foundation of a false happiness. Thus while happiness studies as a field is deeply invested in surmounting and contrasting itself with the science of economics, nonetheless it is often to economics that this field looks as its imperfect ancestor. Happiness studies seeks to position itself as economics with a human face. (More precisely, with a smiley face.) One cannot but be impressed by the elaborate cultural expressions that we have evolved to conceal what it is we are really after, even if this concealment is only bullshit, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense, and everyone knows that everyone knows that it is wealth and power, and not love and human fellow-feeling, that sends businesspeople out on their corporate retreats and into their infantile “trust-building” exercises. Why else would business schools hire happiness experts? Happiness studies sometimes read like what used to be called “industrial relations,” like more psychology that is of use to managers for whom productivity requires happy workers, as if being happy at work has anything to do with what we mean by happiness. In some sense all of this is as at least as old as urban settlement and grain storage. Thus in the Rig Veda we find the following eminently “relatable” reflection dating from around 1500 BCE (in Wendy Doniger’s translation):

    I am a poet; my dad’s a physician

    and mom a miller with grinding stones.

    With diverse thoughts we all strive for wealth,

    going after it like cattle.

    One detects however, that in its premodern forms this law of human endeavor that the poet has identified has yet to be turned successfully, towards bad-faith ends; for nowhere in this striving does the poet identify any plausible expectation of happiness as its likely outcome.

    The corrective that the happiness experts wish to provide, regarding the relationship between wealth and well-being, is welcome enough, when they really mean it, but they have been making it for some time now, and the fact that the basic lesson never fully sinks in suggests that it is not simply a lack of information that causes us, year after year, to continue in our mad pursuit of Moloch. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness, offers a clear example of this effort to correct. He notes that must people believe “they would be better off if they ended up with more money rather than less.” In fact this belief “has far fewer scientific facts to support it than you might expect.” Gilbert cites studies showing that Americans who earn $50,000 per year are indeed happier than those who earn $10,000, while multimillionaires, by contrast, are not measurably happier than those who make around $100,000 per annum (in 2006 dollars, that is).

    So why don’t we face up to the declining marginal utility of our efforts once we hit the upper middle class, and just relax? Gilbert supposes that it is our own individual irrationality that prevents us from shaping our priorities in accordance with what is best for our future selves, and instead compels us to chase after lucre long after the benefit of having it has diminished. That there is such tapering-off at the higher end of the economic ladder cannot be disputed. One unnamed Silicon Valley CEO told the New Yorker recently that high-end boats are a desirable purchase not primarily because they facilitate sea voyages, but because they “absorb the most excess capital.” How sad to see such a wonderful thing as a boat through the reductive prism of investment!

    I probably would not protest if society were so arranged as to prevent any individual from possessing more than, say, ten million dollars (at their value in 2022), but honestly my feeling towards the tech billionaire is not one of Jacobin resentment, but only of pity, mixed with a strange sort of self-recognition. I am as an ant to him, and yet my psyche is shaped, or misshapen, in the same way as his. I might be peculiar in some respects, but I live under the same economic system as the rest of you and I am fairly confident it does more or less the same work on all of us.

    Some of my most painful memories from childhood are of the evenings we spent driving around Sacramento — my mother, my sister, and I — looking for the rare Kentucky Fried Chicken that would accept checks, which we knew were going to bounce, but which at least would keep us fed that night, unlike the cash that we did not have. My mother had been a psychology graduate from UC Berkeley who saw the events of 1968 up close, and shared in their idealism while also inheriting her country’s materialism. After my sister and I were born, she finished law school and quickly opened a family-law practice specializing in the legal defense of poor, rural women survivors of domestic violence. On several occasions she ended up accepting chickens, goats, and other forms of barter in lieu of pay, and after her own divorce from my father we often had more farm animals than money (and no surviving knowledge of how to butcher them).

    Notwithstanding this apparent world-renunciation, my mother also liked money and status, and was on more than one occasion able to convince the local Maserati dealership that she was a serious prospective buyer. This was enough for them to lend us a vehicle for a week-long test-drive, which afforded us kids many occasions to be picked up from swim-practice in the Italian luxury car to the imagined envy of our teammates — our little stub of a family, broke and bespoke at once. My father, meanwhile, after the divorce, had a brief flare-up as a Republican lobbyist with a retired model as his second wife, but then divorced again and slowly, atavistically returned to a state of perpetual penniless travel that was almost indistinguishable from the borderline-hoboism of some of our Dustbowl progenitors. He spent his last years in a bottom-end motel near Guadalajara.

    My own relationship to money and class, and indeed to happiness, was conditioned by their histories. Until the age of forty I strove in vain to maintain a casual and bohemian relation towards money, while also seeking to keep up ordinary bourgeois connections to the world — getting married, buying furniture, and so on. The result is that I was perpetually in debt, perpetually hounded by collection agencies, and so desperately unhappy that I cannot describe the condition I was in as anything other than a disease. Having lived through this continues to deform my existence; it stays with me like the limp of a childhood polio victim. It is only in the past decade that I have become obsessive, retentive, fastidious about money. I am not at all happy about this, but on balance things are better. I probably would have been dead by now if I had not at long last surrendered to money’s unbending reign.

    One of the enduring symptoms of this disease is that I conduct myself somewhat like the Silicon Valley C.E.O., if at a vastly smaller scale. I seek money even though I know it does not equal happiness, because I also know that debt equals death. It is only when we climb out of debt that we become aware of the need to constantly, jealously, phobically maintain and expand the buffer that keeps us from sliding back into it. And so I work like a fiend, not because I falsely believe this will enable me to enjoy showing off my success through costly status signifiers, but because I am afraid that my spouse and I could end up elderly and broke and too enfeebled to replenish our savings, and also because I would like, for once in my life, to be able to be generous towards my loved ones. But I am my father’s son, and I confess at any given moment I am about forty-nine percent of the way towards dropping it all and becoming a mendicant ascetic, free of all “externals.” But this would inevitably mean losing my human ties as well, to my spouse, to my nieces and nephews.

    When I think about all the blame and criticism that my family has to offer up in memory of my father’s moral character, I am struck by the fact that it all comes down to money: he could not afford, in his late-period vagabondage, to pay for the things that are considered, whether we say so out loud or not, prerequisites of moral goodness in adult men. The thought of being condemned to the same fate terrifies me, and so, although I am his son, I hold back from that radical move of world-renunciation, and I continue, day in and day out, to seek to acquire money. That is really all there is to it.

    Psychologists such as Gilbert present our desire to accumulate money as a mark of our own irrationality. We do it because we have false beliefs about what makes us happy. There is little acknowledgment among those who work in Gilbert’s vein that we are externally constrained to do this whether or not we know that it is not making us any happier. Here again I am coming very close to sounding like a revolutionary who would like to see this system smashed, and indeed I suppose I would, if I had any confidence at all in the ability of its would-be smashers to replace it with something more conducive to true human thriving. In the absence of such faith, my indictment of the system amounts only to a quasi-existentialist charting of my own “thrownness”: this is the world I was thrown into. As Tony Soprano liked to say, what are you gonna do?

    Of course, a true existentialist would also insist that what you do is up to you. You are responsible for your own happiness. And here as well, I would say, yes, I agree. Although I am on SSRIs, I hate reductionist, medicalizing talk of “brain chemistry,” as if depression were in all ways comparable, say, to diabetes. My unhappiness might be part of my thrownness, but my happiness is up to me.

      We may be arriving here at another paradox, in light of the suggestion that happiness is a choice, and yet, evidently, one that I have refused to make. Some of us would appear, namely, to be happy to be unhappy, and this is something that simply does not, cannot compute, within the available language of the happiness experts, even though, once again, not surprisingly, it is well-trodden ground in the history of philosophy.

    Let us now appeal to authority. Spinoza says that, for the wise man, “death is the least of things.” Long before him, Epictetus fleshed this idea out by invoking a logical argument that may either be utterly compelling or utterly spurious, depending on your mood: death cannot be a misfortune, he says, because death is by definition something a person never lives through; to be dead is not to be. But even if no one can be dead, mortality is what frames our lives and makes us what we are; mortals do not, cannot, worry about the same things as immortals. In light of this “horizon of mortality,” Socrates said that philosophy itself is best conceived as nothing other than the project of “preparing to die.”

    I have hinted that I would likely have been dead by now if I had not made certain fundamental changes — not just learning how to manage money, but also quitting drinking and getting on antidepressants. That I made the effort to do this suggests that I would like to avoid death, and one might easily imagine that there could be no good reason to go to such trouble if I were not still holding out hope for happiness. But there is another way to look at it. If Socrates is right, then we might say that it is good that I did not die back then, when life was a fog and I was a desperate animal, simply because I was not yet prepared to die, which is really just another way of saying I was not yet wise.

    Few indeed, and fortunate, are those who have adequate time for preparation. Is this fortune what we may call “happiness”? Perhaps — note that busy morpheme “hap” popping up again! — but it is certainly not the kind that might be derived from kissing, or boating, or the kind we may fail to derive from plunging “excess capital” into boats. It is the kind other people might enjoy without me, like the party in The Mikado that Pooh-Bah and Pish-Tush promise to Ko-Ko after his own beheading.

    In the meantime, I should add that things really aren’t so bad. I am not happy, but I am in the very good and enjoyable company of distinguished others who have likewise lived their lives under the dominion of black bile. This humor furnishes us a lens on the world through which a certain stratum of truth about it is revealed. This is not the whole truth, and there are other registers of experience that may not be dismissed as false. But one of the advantages of the melancholic life is our total immunity to the efforts of the happiness experts to sell us a share of their stuff. We know that happiness is not the sort of thing that can be bought or sold, and we know, I now feel emboldened to say, that we, the unhappy, are its true experts.

     

    The Missing Delight

    Delight is an orphan. Many other moods and emotions have had champions in literature and philosophy, patrons invested in their cultural standing. Melancholy can claim The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s strange masterpiece from 1621. It generated a fashion for melancholy that has not entirely faded, which the Romantics powerfully refreshed, lionizing melancholy for its immediate purchase on beauty. Baudelaire liked to remark that sadness is an essential element of beauty. In Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain and other albums, Miles Davis projected modern melancholy onto a liquid music that proves Baudelaire’s point. Joy is, in this respect, like melancholy: it has great advocates in art and perhaps the greatest musical advocate of all in Beethoven, who composed the “Ode to Joy” — via Schiller’s poem, which Beethoven embedded in his ninth symphony — regal and radiant. Despair and anguish have secure homes in the arts and in letters. They haunt the literature of loss, the literature of mortality, the literature of romance, the literature of regret, the literature of war. Happiness? It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, or at least the pursuit of it is. Stendhal believed the exact opposite of Baudelaire — that happiness is what beauty promises. And happiness can be formidable in absentia. It, too, cuts a culturally imposing figure.

    Horror is widely esteemed. What else could answer the human talent for cruelty? Horror intertwines with history — with Josephus chronicling the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem or Thucydides relating his stories of plague and brutality or Gibbon summing up history itself as a record of the “crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” In the twentieth century, the Holocaust and other shatteringly large mass murders have deepened history’s association with atrocity and crime, leaving its shadow on the face of literature. The literature of witness has many twentieth-century tributaries. It is paradigmatically modern, an entire genre governed by horror. Or horror can flourish outside the historical realm, in the psyche. It can be the ahistorical preoccupation of Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Edvard Munch, Val Lewton, and Alfred Hitchcock. No video streaming service would be complete without an expanding collection of horror movies. Hollywood discovered a long time ago that even horror can give pleasure.

             The more irate moods balance political with cultural stature. Raging against the dying of the light can resemble rage at the world’s injustices — the purity of political anger and the indignation that bends toward revolution. Karl Marx did not just study global commerce and speculate about alternative forms of political economy; a virtuoso of invective, he grounded his prophetic visions in fury. The dominant political mode in the United States at the moment is either anger or disgust, a point of convergence for the wrathful Right and the wrathful Left. Disgust is a mark of engagement and sensibility. Not to be disgusted is to be oblivious or simply to be stupid. For decades, disgust has colored contemporary art, which often confronts us with the extent of our rapacity, with the depth of our prejudice, and with our underlying commitment to the production not of value or of dignity but of garbage, of the waste we so callously leave behind. Disgust is definitely in vogue.

    But delight is not in vogue. It almost never is. It is, as I say, an intellectual orphan. More fickle than happiness and almost physiological, a reflex as much as an emotion, delight evades easy definition. It is intensely subjective, more so perhaps than sadness or anger. It is lighter, and with fewer evident implications, and even more impermanent, than pleasure. Delight cannot be summoned. It comes when it comes and goes when it goes — usually quickly. It awaits occasions, and in their absence it cannot be spontaneously generated. Often delight owes something to surprise. Yet delight is not a less meaningful state of mind, a less fundamental human mode, than sadness or anger, rage or disgust, joy or melancholy. But where are its advocates? Its placelessness puts it in a precarious cultural position. It runs the risk of being overlooked and, by getting overlooked, of being dismissed or forgotten as trivial. It runs the risk of neglect at precisely the moment when delight might be most culturally beneficial, which is to say the moment we are living in right now. Slaves of anxiety and fear, surrounded by unimpeachable reasons for pessimism, we are still in need of it. 

    I would like to say a few words in defense of delight.

    Delight is a Latinate word. The “de” is an intensifier placed against lactare, to lure or to entice. Old French modified delactare into delitier, meaning to please or to charm, and around the year 1200 Middle English winnowed delit from delitier, keeping its meaning. In the sixteenth century, delit acquired an “h” and with this addition its modern form, which by an accident of English spelling harbors a word that does not really belong to it — light. A room is lit, a lamp can be lighted, and a person can be delighted. Words properly related to delight are: delicious, delicate, lace, elicit, and dilettante. (A dilettante, unlike an expert, is someone who is often delighted.) The root of delight in lactare reinforces one of delight’s important aspects. It is an active emotion, kinetic in a way that anger and sadness are not. Compared to delight, anger and sadness can seem static.

    The 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary provides three definitions of delight, wavering between sense and intellect. First, it is “a high degree of gratification of mind; a high-wrought state of pleasurable feeling; lively pleasure; extreme satisfaction; joy.” “Gratification of mind” is itself an interesting variation on “extreme satisfaction.” “Lively pleasures” emphasize delight as a word of motion, more active than passive. Somewhat circular is Webster’s second definition: “that which gives great pleasure or delight.” And third, lest “gratification of mind” grant too much to mind and to highly wrought inner states, there is delight as “licentious pleasure; lust.” Without explanation, Webster’s parenthetically puts the name “Chaucer” next to this third definition. The Canterbury Tales could reasonably be called a compendium of delights. Chaucer merged verse, humor, and bawdiness in his characters (male and female), cheerfully acknowledging the pleasure they take in sex. Chaucerian writing captures a distinctive version of delight.

    Left out from the definitions in Webster’s are delight’s religious and spiritual overtones. Perhaps they are subsumed within the “gratification of mind.” Consider the thirty-seventh Psalm in the King James translation. Iterations of delight appear in it three times. The Psalm begins by eschewing antagonism. Its first line is an injunction: “fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious of the workers of iniquity.” Antagonism is a distraction from God and from godliness. Trust, rather, in the Lord, the Psalm contends, and “delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” “Delight thyself in” might be a synonym here for worship, but more precisely it is an antonym to the Psalm’s opening word, an antonym to “fret.” To fret is to inhibit delight. To fret because of evildoers or to envy the workers of iniquity is to focus one’s mind on the evildoers and the iniquity, a technique for losing sight of God. Delight — by contrast — is the path to receiving one’s heart’s desires through God. It is the gate, the path, and the goal. This Psalm is a document not of a tormented religious sensibility, which is amply represented in all the religions, but of a joyous one. 

    The thirty-seventh Psalm guarantees the transience of wickedness. It promises the eventual demise of evildoers, after which “the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Together, righteousness and delight in the Lord are preludes to some period of God-given recompense, to a time when the meek can delight themselves in abundant peace. Both means and end, delight constitutes a virtuous circle in this Psalm. Its third and final mention of delight synthesizes the word’s first two appearances: “the steps of the good man are ordered by the LORD; and he delighteth in his way.” Abraham is ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac; Jacob must wrestle with an angel to become Israel; Job, a good man, is subjected to fantastic suffering. Such are the imponderables of God’s will and of faith in God. The thirty-seventh Psalm illuminates a separate pathway, of God ordering the steps of the good man and of the good man delighting in his way. Is delight the proof of his goodness? Is it the cause of his goodness? Is delight cause and proof simultaneously?

    A more secular sensibility would link delight not to God or to goodness but to art and aesthetic experience. Delight is thinner than tragedy’s catharsis, the constructive churn of emotion that arises from the spectacle of disaster. Nor is delight at all related to the awe that one feels in response to the sublime, a category of art or nature that has long fascinated philosophers. The sublime is a vertiginous awakening of the senses to the magnitude of things, one part wonder and one part horror. The sublime shades into terribilita, the trait claimed by Renaissance painters such as Michelangelo. Grandeur and seriousness are the markers of an artist aspiring to terribilita. To achieve their desired effect they must produce an art that is large-scale and riven with tension, with light and dark, good and evil, piety and sin.

    Delight is smaller and there is nothing cataclysmic about it. It is, in fact, anti-cataclysmic. It is a respite from intensity. Art in search of delight, art open to delight, tends toward moderation. It runs the risk of sweetness and harmony. Dangers abound for any art oriented toward delight. Aiming to please, to allure and to entice, it might please too much, starting in the gratification of the senses and ending in banality — the beautifully arranged image of a beautiful person in beautiful clothes contemplating a beautiful tree. Any excess will make a delightful work of art cloying. Another trap in which such easily grasped art might get caught is kitsch, and commodification. Once upon a time the Impressionists were shocking, with their revolutionary fidelity to sense impressions and their exhilarating liberties with color, but their paintings have since ended up on shower curtains and coffee mugs and picture puzzles. Delight sells, not least because it seems to demand no effort, merely a momentary capture of attention. The will to delight is a mainstay in the aesthetics of advertising.

    Delight’s natural affinity may be less with “high art,” which by definition makes demands on the viewer, than with interior and industrial design. Delight is not just the currency of advertisers and not just the advertisement. It is the iPhone itself, which gives great pleasure or delight. Delight can be an appreciation of craftsmanship. It is the effect of examining a well-made watch — the fineness of the pieces, the interlocking parts, the exquisite smallness of everything. Or delight is there to be absorbed from distinctive furniture, the Eames chair that hits every mark of style, the color of the wood, the excellence of the fabric, and the austere geometry of the chair itself. Delight in this regard cannot escape certain class connotations. It intersects with luxury, with the licentiousness of objects. Prized objects can give delight, reflecting the money and the taste that made them possible. Delight walks arm in arm with connoisseurship, with the educated ability to recognize things, preferably rare and expensive things, that rise to the level of delight.

    Two other domains of human experience, food and sex, do a lot to make delight their own. Food’s claim is self-evident — the unity of smell, taste, and sight heightened and then relished by appetite. The variety of a great meal, the conviviality: the hunger to be delighted by food is instinctual, something with which we are born. Even poor people can partake of it. The social character of eating has often been praised as an enhancement of delight: when Hume sought release from philosophical perplexity, his first instinct was to dine with friends. Similarly, erotica does not have much purpose beyond delight, giving fresh meaning to “a high degree of gratification of the mind.” Pornographic erotica often traffics in violence and exploitation, feeding into a high degree of rapacity of the mind, selling this rapacity to the highest bidder. It is often revolting. In milder erotica, however the mind similarly gratifies itself through fantasy, through idealizations or through idealized degradations, depending on tastes and preferences. As with food, the enjoyment of erotica is instinctive, crossing many cultures and many epochs. In ancient Pompeii, people had erotica painted into their houses without embarrassment. They displayed it with pride, as yet another way — in addition to images of field and flower — of ennobling a home with the delights of domesticity. In these examples, delight approximates the lively pleasures that are one of its defining features. 

    An enduring objection to delight as aesthetic experience is political. Is there such a thing as political delight? Political art might embrace sentimentality or the sublime, it may inspire or cast one down, but it has little patience with delight. Political art frets about evildoers and the workers of iniquity. It can be subtle and it can be marvelous as art, but at the very least political art must advocate. It must carry a message that can be broadcasted and received and sustained. That is its truest function. Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece of social protest, The Jungle, from 1906, channels the superior novels of Charles Dickens (who was an avowedly political writer) and the superior novels of Emile Zola (who was nothing if not a political writer). Sinclair was right about the intolerable labor conditions in Chicago. To remain right about this Chicago, he had to write a novel in which the modern American city is oppressive. Its stockyards are awash in blood. The city around them is dense with unhappiness. The sheer length of The Jungle makes it oppressive to read. Because the novel breathes the air of unhappiness, so, too, must the reader. Anything else would be a betrayal of its political purpose. In this context the genius of Dickens becomes even more pronounced. He produced novels that analyze and indict social conditions but somehow manage to layer passages of sheer delight into them, most palpably the delight Dickens always found in the written word. 

    If delight is not entirely an orphan, it is because it has a parent or a guardian angel in comedy. Conventional comedy has its genre requirements: the smooth passage past discordance and dissonance to resolution — the progression in romantic comedy, for example, from a relationship that makes no sense to the perfect marriage. All’s well that ends well and so on. Comedy traffics in laughter, which is an outward expression of delight (among other things). The parallel between laughter and delight lies in their physicality, in the force of laughter, which mirrors the motion of delight. Laughter is sudden, it comes as a relief, it cuts through, it pulls up, it breaks through boredom, anger, anguish, complacency, worry, grief. Beckett was the great master of such laughter. Of course not all comedy plays by the conventional rules. It can mix and combine with other emotions and genres, particularly with tragedy, its frequent fellow-traveler. Whether full-fledged or only a piece of the puzzle, well-fashioned comedy is pedagogic. By provoking laughter it teaches laughter. In this it once again resembles delight, which by provoking joy teaches joy.

    Satire, an uncompromising version of comedy, is tied organically to delight. Satire takes as its point of departure evil, disaster, sanctimony, hypocrisy, vanity, and pomposity — and transforms them into laughter. Satire does not promise the eradication of misfortune. If anything, satire promises the intractability of evil. Satire and political art branch out in two separate directions: one toward reform and the other toward survival skills, the ones that can help us to co-exist with the never-ending foolishness and injustice. True satirists are not reformers. They are noticers, not just of evildoing but of the indifference that is so often the response to evil. The satirist depicts malice meticulously — most famously Swift observing how little people care about poverty in Ireland and then proving the point in his “Modest Proposal,” in which he made the policy recommendation that Irish children be eaten. The laugher that Swift incites is complicated. The dark delight lies not in the mention of poverty but in Swift’s complete psychological command of our unconcern. To laugh at ourselves is in this instance to see ourselves in a very unflattering mirror.

    A less exacting species of delight resides in parody. By shifting registers, by altering the tone, parody exposes formula for what it is. In the film Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks accomplishes a ferocious parody of the Western. Brooks gets us to laugh at ourselves in Blazing Saddles — at our enthusiasm for Hollywood formula — by rearranging the cowboy movie’s cliches. In Blazing Saddles, a man punches a horse, a visual gag and a joke about the movies. It would be nothing for a man to kill another man in a Western: the genre thrives on violence and on outlaws who upend social and ethical codes. Yet in Blazing Saddles the violence goes too far, exposing violence as not only wrong but absurd. A man punches a horse, and Brooks prods us to laugh at our shock and outrage. If we do, we are in the zone of delight. In 2022, one could easily imagine the film getting banned for its depiction of cruelty to animals, confirming the brilliance of Brooks’ joke. In 2022, indeed, Brooks’ whole film, with its parodies of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and religious piety, could never get made, which is a shame.

    In 1964, Susan Sontag brought together satire, parody, and delight in “Notes on Camp.” Sontag captured a well-established cultural style — she traces it back to the eighteenth century — that thrives on responding with comic appreciation to art that is overdone, that is too much, that dramatizes itself far past the limits of good taste. The epitome of such comic appreciation, Camp is “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of life as theater,” Sontag writes. In this theatrical sensibility, “things are campy not when they become old — but when we have less invested in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” The enjoyment of failure, Camp is “a seriousness that fails” and that by failing succeeds as Camp. Less investment, greater enjoyment. Without apology, seriousness is exchanged for lightness. 

    Sontag was writing against the literary-critical grain of her time. She was throwing down a gauntlet to the recondite academics and to the dour servants of the avant-garde. One sees this dual program in her defense of Camp, which “refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risk of fully identifying with extreme states of being.” More than a take-down of the overly earnest and the overly intense, “Notes on Camp” is a celebration of “the consistently aesthetic experience of the world.” Camp is a method of appreciating some popular culture — or mass culture, as the editors of Partisan Review, the magazine in which “Notes on Camp” first appeared, would have put it. Camp is a method for having cultural fun, one that “makes the man of good taste cheerful.” Not quite the thirty-seventh Psalm, this, too, is nevertheless a way of reaching the desires of one’s heart. “The connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted,” Sontag continues. Sontag’s argument for Camp is precisely that it delights. 

    Granting laughter and enjoyment their due as tools of delight, one must immediately add that there is a variety of delight that is not entangled in Camp’s ironies or in satire’s aggressions. Irony and satire are stances or attitudes. Delight is an experience. The purest delight arises from the aesthetic experience of it, as it might from experiences untethered to art: the easy delight that nature gives off, or the delight encoded in the giddier moments of friendship and love. Sensual or sensuous pleasure might issue in physical or psychosomatic symptoms — the fabled “Stendhal syndrome” induced by art or antiquity, or in Stendhal’s case, “a fierce palpitation of the heart” and “an attack of nerves” that followed a rapturous encounter with Volterrano’s frescoes in a chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce church. Delight is a different and less dramatic response. And yet, like the aesthete’s ecstasy, delight is more mystical than rational; and it transforms, not forever because it passes, but still it transforms. In its own way, the art of delight elevates. It juxtaposes two contrasting truths: that we do not live elevated lives most of the time, since we always carry many burdens; and that we are capable of elevation, even of levitation, though down we will go soon enough. The first truth might well be unbearable without the second. Delight defies the difficulties of life. 

    Case studies can lend these claims specificity, and I will provide three of them, traveling backwards in historical time. The first is the Chrysler Building, which was completed in 1930. This extraordinary skyscraper is profligate in the delight that it bestows on onlookers and passers-by. The second is Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” a studio performance that is evidence of Armstrong’s early mastery. The third is Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, an opera buffa, which first appeared on stage in Vienna in 1786 and brings us (inevitably) back to comedy as well as pedagogy. Mozart’s Figaro shines with delight. No less does it teach its listeners or viewers to know delight, even though the story it tells is often harrowing. Like the classical style more generally, Figaro punctuates delight with poignancy. And the opera is an experiment in delight as philosophy, as a way of being, through which Mozart does the impossible: he sustains delight for hours, reversing the standard ratio and thereby arguing provocatively, in agreement with the thirty-seventh Psalm, that suffering is temporary but delight as eternal.

    The Chrysler Building is a great work of art. It came about, though, for reasons that were to the side of artistic intention. Its architect was William Van Alen, who was born in New York City in 1883. From modest beginnings, he made his was to Paris in 1908, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a traditionalist haven, and then gradually acquired a taste for modernism. Van Alen’s great patron turned out to be Walter Chrysler, also of modest background. He was a man without much education and with an extreme talent for business. By 1928, Chrysler was promoting his Silver Dome car, running a booming company and seeking a prestige building in New York. He wanted it to bear the insignia of his name and his company. He wanted the advertising, and — as many did at the time — he wanted to be in on in the construction of the world’s tallest building. Van Alen delivered the goods, after which their relationship soured into acrimony with a court case about payment. Van Alen won the case, but by having brought it to court he lost his professional reputation. The Chrysler Building was his only major commission. He is an artist who made only one work and it is a masterpiece. 

    Up into the sky it rose, between 1929 and 1930. The distinctive steel used for the Chrysler Building, Enduro KA-2, was created not much earlier, in 1926. It must have mingled in Walter Chrysler’s mind with the Silver Dome, and cars were suggested and represented across the building. Its gargoyles, inspired perhaps by Van Alen’s time in Paris, look like gigantic hood ornaments. The building’s most notable feature, after its silvery steel, is its decorative spire, an unforgettable pattern of curving lines that suggest a sunburst, a pagan accent, and — more prosaically — the hubcaps of a Chrysler automobile. Pagan hubcaps! The Chrysler Building never shies away from business; it is all business. It bypasses the alleged tension between branding and art and between art and commerce, which curiously is a part of its glamour. Claudia Roth Pierpont once described the Chrysler Building as “the quintessential jazz baby of buildings” and as a specimen of “the honky-tonk sublime.” 

    Ever since it went up, the Chrysler Building has sparkled in films and photographs. The photos highlight the charm and exuberance of its many ornaments, while the aerial photographs divinize the building. Located on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, it is far enough from the downtown and midtown forests of skyscrapers to stand out, and to contrast its slender beauty to the many less sublime structures of the Manhattan skyline. It is less squat than the Empire State Building, less severe than the Twin Towers, of blessed memory, with less matter and more art than any of the countless other attempts to brand the New York City sky. The photographs are persuasive in admiring the Chrysler Building as New York City’s loveliest skyscraper. Postcards and refrigerator magnets tell us that what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and the Coliseum is to Rome and the leaning tower is to Pisa, the Chrysler Building is to New York. Walter Chrysler could not have been more pleased with what his building has achieved. More than the car company, the building will immortalize his name.

    The Chrysler Building’s involvement with delight runs along other grooves. It comes from seeing the building from the street. It comes by surprise, which is a feature of delight, when art or aesthetic experience is not what one was expecting. It comes either by day or by night. The day should be sunny. Street-level New York is loud. It overfills the eye: the signage, the foot traffic, the flood of cars. Above it are the usually multi-storied buildings, many of the them handsome, but they cannot compete with the spectacle of the near-at-hand. But cross a street, or walk into Bryant Park, and the sky reappears, and there, demarcating this blue sky perfectly, stands the Chrysler Building, its gleaming silver cleansing the eye and drawing it up to the crowning sunburst that, because it is so high, belongs more to the sky than to the city or the street. Seen purely, as an optical experience, the Chrysler Building signifies nothing but its own exquisite form. It promotes nothing. It is a building rather than an icon, but a building that transforms stone and steel and masonry into the visual stuff of levitation. In this way it surprises and delights its accidental viewers. When you look up you are lifted up. 

    In the evening, the Chrysler Building’s steel is invisible. It is one of a thousand skyscrapers. Its sole uniqueness is its domed top, the curves of which are lit up — something that Van Alen had contemplated but was not realized until the 1980s. The curves of light belong to the building, which at night is a metropolitan lighthouse, lending the city coherence and staving off disorientation. New York is too bright, even at the darkest pitch of night, to see the stars. The Chrysler Building takes their place, the city’s North Star, merging the delight of its design with the comfort of its identifiable presence. Amid the visual chaos of Manhattan the nighttime Chrysler Building is a constant, like its cousin the Empire State building, there to guide the late-night walker in the city. In the nocturnal city, which can inspire anxiety, the spire of the Chrysler Building comes as a great relief from darkness, as an answer to darkness, an image of form that playfully, cheerfully, solicitously oversees the endless city. 

    The Chrysler Building is a work of art ironically. Much as New York City does, Walter Chrysler wanted to impress. His adolescent eagerness to own the world’s tallest building, which for a while he did, was outpaced by this same adolescent eagerness in others. By 1932, the Chrysler Building was demoted to being the world’s second tallest building; and it continues to be so demoted; and it hardly matters. The Chrysler Building makes no secret of its impurity. It is neither a museum nor a monument, and it is no cathedral, except maybe to capitalism. It is an office building. Yet the sincere impurity of a building put up to celebrate gas-guzzling Chryslers does nothing to tarnish its gift of delight. Its form is unimpaired by what goes on inside it. To the contrary: by asking so little of its viewers, by not being Saint Peter’s Basilica or Notre Dame de Paris, it forces them to receive its gift with no expectations, without having to be aware of anything (other than the building’s name), without having to give it their religious or political allegiance. It lets them be merely delighted, and the surrounding city obliges as a foil, with its fumes, its din, its grays, its gaudy colors, and its unforgiving proportions. New York’s overwhelming density paves the way to the delight of a building that leaves it all behind and melts into a colorless, self-illuminated verticality. If fretful New York is the call, the Chrysler Building is the response.

      Louis Armstrong came to New York in 1924. Born in New Orleans in 1901, he had moved to Chicago in 1922, a prominent member of the Great Migration from South to North. At age seventeen, Armstrong had begun playing on riverboats near New Orleans, and it was in 1923 that he made his first studio recording (in Indiana). New York, the big leagues, had the Fletcher Henderson band; but Armstrong went back to Chicago, where he made some of his most extraordinary music. Between 1925 and 1928, he recorded sixty songs — for which he received modest payment and no royalties — with different groups. Jazz was a new and fluid musical form, a work in progress, and Armstrong’s recordings in these years were some its greatest revelations — jazz’s scripture. There was the quality of the ensemble playing, which no other musicians could match. There were Armstrong’s improvisations, which no one could match. He did not improvise decorative ornaments. He improvised everything, the whole melodic line, playing with the total assurance that was his signature. Rather than find his way to a new style he brought to his recordings a new style fully formed.

             A gem among these bejeweled recordings is “West End Blues.” The song had been composed by Armstrong’s mentor, Joe “King” Oliver, a cornet player. Its name evoked New Orleans and in particular a neighborhood, the West End, known as a summer resort. It was a popular venue for music — and the last stop on a New Orleans trolly line. On June 28, 1928, Armstrong came to the studio with the pianist Earl Hines, the clarinetist Jimmy Strong, the trombonist Fred Robinson, the banjo player Mancy Carr and the drummer Zutty Singleton. By the racial and popular-culture strictures of the day, Armstrong was an entertainer. He resented his wife (the pianist Lil Hardin) for promoting him as “the greatest trumpet player in the world.” He could not have been unaware of his genius, so fluently did it display itself in his recordings and in his concerts, but his own genius was not the point of these recordings. That much can be surmised from Earl Hines’s recollection of their reaction to “West End Blues”: “When it first came out, Louis and I stayed by that recording practically an hour and a half or two hours and we just knocked each other out because we had no idea it was gonna turn out as good as it did.” They had no idea!

    A bit over three minutes long, “West End Blues” has several discreet parts. Armstrong starts alone with a baroque chain of arpeggios and clustered notes, all bravura and virtuosity. The next part is the song’s melody, a straight-up blues played by Armstrong to the underlying soft thump of his rhythm section. Armstrong makes way for a lazy trombone solo and then a clarinet solo, to which he added his voice, scat singing in dialogue with the clarinet. (Throughout his life what made Armstrong’s raspy voice into a lovely voice was the sound of delight within it.) What follows is an intricate, elegant piano solo from Earl Hines, going up the piano, staying momentarily high, shifting to the piano’s middle registers and then bringing out its bass notes — urbane blues par excellence. Armstrong hits a high note in the song’s climax, lingers over it and then plays a few blues figurations, after which he and Hines trade punctuation marks, giving the song a soft landing, a minimalist conclusion to its baroque beginning. However rehearsed it was, “West End Blues” is free and seamless and floating and seemingly effortless, a languorous summer afternoon in the West End of New Orleans.

    The ensemble contributes a lot to the song’s delight. For its three minutes, the song moves through many textures: the cerebral clarity of the piano, the weary thickness of the trombone, the earthiness of the clarinet, and the conversational whimsicality of Armstrong’s vocals. As for the solos, Armstrong generously passes the baton, which continues to get passed, a touch of competitiveness flashing when Hines dares to play with no less imagination than Armstrong, and no less flair. None of the musicians reduces the number to a personal flight of fancy. “West End Blues” is a self-creating poem in which each verse is written with a new instrument or combination of instruments, a classical drama with a beginning, a middle and an end. Nothing intrudes. Nothing obtrudes. Nothing distracts. Nothing detracts. Nothing conflicts.

             The ensemble is Armstrong’s of course, as is its approach to the song. His voice is lighthearted, imitating first the clarinet and then with a “wah wah wah” the trombone, not making fun of them but not taking them very seriously either. Armstrong’s trumpet is the song’s incomparable instrument of delight. The sound is bright and high, neither celestial (as a violin might be) nor melancholic (as a cello might be). “West End Blues” radiates delight much as the Chrysler Building does. As with the Chrysler Building, it uses altitude for effect. Armstrong’s introduction plunges down, a waterfall of notes that zig-zag lower and lower. Later, in his short solo, Armstrong flies up, staying as he liked to do for several seconds on a single note, the ensemble going on almost without him, as if he had forgotten about them and about the rules of gravity. Just as the eye sweeps up the Chrysler Building, the ear — and the soul — sweeps up with Armstrong’s high note and briefly remains ascended, standing with the trumpeter at the top of the mountain and relishing the height and the view and the cool air.

             Armstrong’s rhythms complete the picture. Speeding up, slowing down, staying silent, he divides and subdivides time. The song starts with the jagged complexity of his introduction, brilliantly breaking down time and folding it in upon itself, after which Armstrong’s rendition of the melody is low key. A bit faster and it would be dance music, something at which Armstrong excelled: it was Armstrong’s marching-band and blues rhythms that formed the foundation for swing in the 1930s. Throughout “West End Blues” and without playing many notes, Armstrong uses syncopation to give the music its energy, its tension, its forward momentum. The biggest delight of all is that we can hear him improvise in “real time.” Though the number has structure, there is something blithe and serendipitous about it — its sophistication gives way to joy. If Armstrong and Hines had no idea what they had accomplished with “West End Blues,” it was not necessarily because they were modest or because they had been labeled entertainers rather than artists. They may have entered too blissfully into the moment and been too fully enchanted by the rhythms of their ensemble and solo playing to assess their handiwork. If so, they would have something in common with those who can listen to them play — on a record, on a CD, on a phone — and be startled and delighted (delight is always startling) by the music together with the musicians who were making it on June 28, 1928.

    The Marriage of Figaro is perhaps the last word on delight. Listing the greatest hits of Camp, Sontag included “much of Mozart.” This is not quite right. Mozart could not fail musically, though he was certainly theatrical, and his operas were the apogee of his theatricality. Figaro and many of Mozart’s other operas do not skimp on ridiculous plot twists and on the silliness endemic to opera, especially to opera that does not declare itself to be comic — but Figaro has nothing in common with the bad Broadway musical that can be twisted, by a sophisticated viewer, into a fabulously bad Broadway musical. Figaro is an aesthetic experience for what it is, beginning with its marvelous plot and continuing in the music, which is psychologically astute and a kind of storytelling art unto itself. Averse to glum seriousness, though the pains of love and the injustice of class relations are among its subjects, and thrillingly comic, Figaro is as ambitious a work of literary art as there could be. It surpasses even Don Giovanni, the opera that Mozart would write a year after finishing Figaro. By placing the laurel wreaths of artistic perfection on a comedy, Figaro is an invitation, in its details and in aggregate, to ponder the exquisiteness of delight. 

             Figaro’s libretto came from the pen of Lorenzo da Ponte. Jewish by birth, Da Ponte grew up near Venice and became a less than proper Catholic priest. Having made his way to Vienna, he was a sought-after librettist who collaborated with Mozart on Figaro, on Don Giovanni, and on Così fan tutte. As if this were not enough for an interesting life, Da Ponte eventually settled in the United States. In New York City he ran a bookstore and served as a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. He made many contributions to the musical arts in the early republic, helping to build up an opera house that was a predecessor to the Metropolitan Opera. With Figaro, Da Ponte was repurposing a controversial play, La folle journee, ou le Marriage du Figaro, written by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, an avid supporter of the American Revolution, who portrayed a world of culpable aristocrats and admirable servants. Many readers of the play, including Danton and Napoleon, regarded it as an act of political subversion. Converting the play into an opera, Da Ponte took much of its political edge off. His Figaro is neither radical nor sanguine about what a college student might today call privilege. It is very canny about privilege.

    The story is about an errant employer. He is the Count Almaviva, who eliminated the droit du seigneur from his Seville household but then tries to bring it back. Count Almaviva, an obstreperous baritone in the opera, has lost interest in his wife, even in her unhappiness. The libretto implies that he has seduced the gardener’s daughter, Barbarina. The action of Figaro revolves around Susanna, whom the servant Figaro wishes to marry and whom the Count wishes to seduce. The opera begins with Susanna’s fear, which the music makes clear: a servant’s bell doubling, while she sings, as an alarm bell. She is right to fear the Count’s lust and his will to power. Though Figaro has the happy ending that comedy seems to promise, and the resolution that is a formal requirement of the classical style, its exploration of barely restrained coercion, of jealousy, of emotional abandonment, of transgression hoped for if not always consummated, is rich and moving. In Figaro, these attitudes and conditions are not smothered in the myth and in the histrionics that make many operas famous for their music and infamous for their plots. 

     

    Delight has two guises in The Marriage of Figaro, the music  of course and the narrative. They are not separable. A simple delight of Figaro’s story, augmented by its Spanish setting, is a house full of young and amorous people. It is la folle journee, the topsy-turvy day, on which two people are about to wed. Figaro and Susanna lend their anticipation to Figaro. Its first scene is Figaro measuring out the space for their marriage bed. Excitement is also instilled by Cherubino, a boyish man whose role Mozart wrote for a soprano. A character plucked from Da Ponte’s libertine past, Cherubino is the eroticized cherub. He cannot hide his attraction to the Countess, to Barbarina, to love itself. Cherubino is perpetually enamored — voi che sapete, tell me what love is, he sings in one of the work’s finest arias. No longer young, the Countess gets the opera’s most heart-breaking aria, its show-stopper. “Where have the sweet moments gone?” she asks with almost unbearable regret about her wayward husband in Act Three. Lamenting the loss of love, she is pure tenderness in this aria, foreshadowing the reconciliation with the Count destined to come in Act Four.

             A less simple delight in Figaro crystallizes around perseverance and forgiveness. Resourceful Susanna, not simple-minded Figaro, is the opera’s protagonist, its heroine. Echoing the Beaumarchais play, Figaro celebrates Susanna as someone who can outsmart the Count. She has to outsmart her fiancée Figaro in the process. His insufficient and then overabundant jealousy threatens their relationship with ruin. Susanna’s soulful perseverance, embedded in everything she sings, rises far above the aloof Countess and above the narcissistic Cherubino, not to mention the bombastic Count. But it is this same fallible Count who breaks through to introspection and regret, getting down on his knees to beg forgiveness of the Countess, when the four-act merry-go-round of intrigue and impersonation comes to a halt and the Count finds himself eagerly trying to seduce his own wife. His missteps are certainly familiar from comedy, whether from the romantic comedies of Shakespeare or the romantic comedies of Hollywood. Yet when confronted with his wife, when recognizing her, he steps away from comedy. His request for forgiveness — the music leaves no doubt about this at all — is from the heart.

    The Countess’s forgiveness of the Count captivated Lionel Trilling, who slipped a mention of it into his novel, The Middle of the Journey. Its main character, John Laskell, is listening to Figaro on the radio: “it was in full flight and nearing its end in the magical last scene where farce moves to regions higher than tragedy can reach.” What are these higher regions? Why can farce reach them when tragedy cannot? Ever the teacher, Trilling liked to give his readers questions without being so forward as to answer them himself. Tragedy scrutinizes error, loss, and death through nobility: the tragedy of King Lear, the tragedy of Prince Hamlet. Tragedy is surely the gateway to higher regions. Farce, if it goes higher, corresponds to daily life. It has the space in which to go up, to ascend, to gain altitude and to demonstrate — by means of delight, which is second nature to farce — that error is not necessarily followed by loss and death. Errors can pile up in such a way that from them love and forgiveness might materialize. Farce is not tangential to Figaro. Farce, the comedy of perpetual human error, and therefore a genre of eventual or sudden self-overcoming forgiveness, is what makes it move and what makes it moving. 

    Mozart’s music does the rest. It is the story and the commentary on the story. Mozart is the composer for whom the prime mover is usually delight. Simplicity is one factor, because it brings out the uncluttered melodic line, which is a vocal line in all of Mozart’s music, rising and falling in synch with the human voice. Mozart’s melodic line is lyrical, tinged with the pastels of his harmonies, not without darkness but suffused with light. Figaro’s music capitalizes on the conventions of opera buffa, mocking the Count’s vanity, cherishing the mistaken identities, and honoring Mozart’s own character, his irrepressible, almost angelic mirth. Mozart was born for farce. Yet his music wraps opera buffa in beauty, not in slapstick. The music is designed to provoke not wild laughter but a wise and grateful smile. Jealousy and self-understanding, love and deception, seesaw throughout Figaro in actions so petty, so humdrum, so familiar that they remind the viewers not of a fantasy-land eighteenth-century Seville but of their own twenty-first century dailiness, their own quotidian dramas. If it is “we” who are on stage in Figaro, failing to persevere or to forgive, misunderstanding and then misunderstanding again; it is also we who inhabit and are irradiated by the music’s beauty, and it is we who can wind our way through the convolutions of farce into the higher regions of delight. In this empyrean, delight feels almost like a worldview. 

             Art and the artist are said to have responsibilities, especially these days. One of those  responsibilities is to respond to the surrounding circumstances and to take them into account. The word “novel” derives from the French word nouvelle, which is less about novelty than the news. Novels bring us the news. So too do all the arts, and these days the news is bad. Climate change has begun, standing like a roadblock before the future. Russia’s war in Ukraine, which already is a long war, is not a local war. It is an attack on international comity, an attack on American aspirations to global leadership, and an attack on peace in Europe. The record of atrocities is large and getting larger — committed sometimes on the same terrain whose previous experience with mass murder yielded the phrase “never again.” Climate change and war are occurring in the midst of pandemic, food shortages, and the gradual replacement of globalization (mixed blessing that it always was) with war economies guided by sanctions, military spending, and the rationing of goods that the war will soon demand. And China is on the march.

    In the 1930s, the United States was an antidote to the bacillus of worldwide chaos and aggression. Italy had Mussolini, Germany had Hitler, Spain had Franco, Portugal had Salazar, and the Soviet Union had Stalin. The United States had Franklin Roosevelt. For Joe Biden’s America, the bacillus is foreign and domestic: the zombie-like nature of Donald Trump, who refuses to stay buried in the political grave of his electoral defeat; an intractable economic inequality; a Congress trapped in performative outrage and real gridlock; a polarized society intoxicated by its respective particularisms that is less and less curious about its own members, less and less capable of the empathy, compromise, patience, and calm that enable democratic practice and social peace; a civil society armed to the teeth in which massacres are a regular feature of civic life; a culture that vacillates between sanctimony and indifference, egotism and self-abasement, ivory-tower jargon and social-media vulgarity. The common impulse is not so much to analyze as to diagnose the United States, though nobody seems to know what the disease is. No matter: we are all advocating cures — more democracy, less democracy, more secularism, more Christianity, more civility, more fight, more rule of law, more attempts to storm the cockpit and prevent United 93 from crashing. 

    Artists have taken heed. Climate change and its causes are a more than valid subject for art. And not a new subject: you can spot an objection to industrialization in many landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, such as the train in the distance in Thomas Cole’s verdant mountains. The campaign to reverse climate change speaks to greed and moral escapism. Don’t Look Up, the recent movie on climate change, was Swiftean in its set-up, though neither clever nor cutting enough to be Swiftean in its execution. Responding to war is similarly one of the constants of art, which will be crucial to any reckoning with the war in Ukraine. Art eclipses the writing of historians in the public memory of war; it — Goya is the most powerful example — is the best aid to moral reflection, especially for events that disturb us into confusion and numbness. Art also crosses the borders that wars impose, taking people out of uniform, out of victimhood, and back to their humanity. But generally political art does not accomplish the restoration of humaneness. Art will not be capable of untangling the crossed lines of American politics, in the short term at least. Too often twenty-first century American artists surrender loudly to their politics and themselves become instances of the overarching political polarization that ails us. Needless to say, art does not come up with political solutions. To ask solutions of art is to ask a misguided question, to ask of art, even political art, more than it is able to give. Artists may think they have solutions to political problems, but the solutions will not be their art. 

    The mistake is to assume that art must take its inspiration from climate change, from war, from political dysfunction or from similar crises and public disfigurations. The irony is that these grand disturbances are far too small a palette for any artist. Art answers to a fuller spectrum of emotions and imperatives. Among them is the emotion and the imperative of delight. Even in dark times, or perhaps especially then, art cannot forgo the resources of delight, or ignore its utility, the temporary salvation from bleakness that delight provides. These three practitioners of delight, Van Alen, Armstrong, and Mozart, were not coincidentally innovators. Van Alen invented a skyscraper unlike any other, employing new materials, configuring the architecture to go as high and reflect as much light as possible. In 1928, Armstrong was pioneering the sounds and structures of jazz, and imparting its astonishing originality in the relatively novel setting of the recording studio. Mozart remade opera buffa into a high art form and did so with an edgy and transgressive story. (The original Beaumarchais play was banned from the Habsburg empire, a portend in 1786 of the revolution three years later.) Van Alen, Armstrong, and Mozart had problems aplenty. They did not bleach them out of their art. Neither did they fall so in love with their problems that they lost sight of their joy in creation, and in their individual genius for giving others delight.

    Delight is, or had better be, an essential part of culture. It softens the rough edges. It opens the window. It balances out the indignities. It dissipates anger. It separates beauty from sadness. It converts the grapes of wrath into the wine of extreme satisfaction, of lively pleasures, of gratification of mind, when the weight of events does the exact opposite. Much as Van Alen’s Chrysler Building mutely witnessed the Great Depression, before which it was designed and during which it was built, art aligned with delight will not cast off or lessen the weight of events. Delight is impermanent. “West End Blues” lasts only three minutes. When it reaches its fourth act, The Marriage of Figaro is almost over, its plot about to resolve. Delight is so necessary because it will never be the rule; it is relief from the rule. Once one sees the Chrysler Building from the street, New York will heartlessly reimpose itself. It will not let you rest in that spire’s glistening ambience. The Chrysler Building was not placed gracefully in a planned city. It offers momentary respite from the frenzy of promotion, the money making, the reputation making, and the thrill seeking to which New York City is unashamedly devoted. Delight’s victories never last.

    Yet its victories are precious nonetheless. They are restorative. While the sensation of delight passes in a rush, delight’s invigorations remain. Delight is the secret spring. It reveals an entire vein of possibility. It furnishes energy for the walk through the shadows that inevitably follows an interlude of delight. The memory of delight is one of our most valuable inner resources, internalized for the undelightful longue duree. Delight and dread are formidable antagonists, and delight teaches us to live with those elements that engender worry, sadness, oppression, and horror. Delight was Proust’s response to the scent of the madeleine: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin,” he wrote. “And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Proust started In Search of Lost Time before World War I, and he set down much of it during and after the war. As he rigorously documented malice and prejudice and desperation and cruelty in the people he knew and invented, he remained devoted to delight, as a principle and as an experience, without which he could not have begun his novel or continued it or come close to completing it. It was indispensable for his spiritual survival and his exploration of the vicissitudes of life, reason enough to be forceful but never to be uninterruptedly fretful.

    Figs

    Figs are sweet, but don’t last long.

    They spoil fast in transit,

    says the shopkeeper.

    Like kisses, adds his wife,

    a hunched old woman with bright eyes.

     

    Translated by Clare Cavanagh

    The Allegory of Good and Bad Government

    Good government, Buon Governo,

    and the good judge — we see

    how Siena thrives

    under the just ruler.

     

    Peace reigns over all, revealed.

    The peasants work serenely,

    grapes swell with pride,

    a wedding party dances in the street.

     

    But bad government sets out

    to torment justice,

    who bears the lovely name Iustitia,

    it lies, it sows Discord,

     

    it delights in Wickedness

    and Deceit; it ends by hiring assassins.

    The town empties, fields cease

    to bear fruit, houses burn.

     

    Still, after seven centuries, just look,

    (compare the two frescoes)

    Evil is pale, barely legible

    while Good compels our gaze

    with its rich colors.

     

    Only seven hundred years

    of waiting.

    The Twentieth Century in Retirement

    Let’s try to imagine it:

    a little like old Tolstoy

    he strolls the fields of Picardy,

     

    where funny tanks once

    clumsily defeated

    the terrain’s slight elevation.

     

    He visits the town

    where Bruno Schulz died

    or sits on a riverbank 

     

    above the Vistula’s dim water,

    a meadow scented with warm

    dandelions, burdocks, and memory.

     

    He doesn’t speak, rarely smiles.

    Doctors warn him 

    to avoid emotion.

     

    He says: I’ve learned one thing

    There is only mercy —

    for people, animals, trees, and paintings.

     

    Only mercy —

    always too late.

    In the Garage

    And then when you entered

    the empty garage

    a trumpet called 

    as in the Fifth Symphony

    And it suddenly grew clear

    that there is joy and death

    and mad flies

    that circle the table

    where all of you sat

    just moments ago

    calmly chatting

    The Old Painter

    The old painter stands by the studio window,

    where his brushes

    and colors lie.

     

    Poets wait for inspiration, but objects

    and faces assault the painter,

    they arrive shrieking.

     

    Their contours, though, have

    blurred and faded.

    Objects turn blind, mute.

     

    The old painter feels only

    a dim wave of light,

    a longing for form.

     

    And he knows even now

    that he may see again

    the bitter joy of indistinction.