As many have noted and some have lamented, politics are multiplying: these days everything seems to have one. The search term “the politics of” yields over a million results in my university’s library database. There is “the politics of dirt,” “the politics of sleep,” and even the politics of abstracta, such as “presence” and “absence.” Obviously political entities, such as “authoritarian rule,” have politics, as do things that might seem to the uninitiated to be staunchly apolitical, such as “dogs” and “snow.” In a quaint display of reactionary nostalgia, my thesaurus suggests that “governmental” is a synonym for “political,” but the political has evidently bubbled beyond the bounds of the state apparatus by now. It would make little sense to speak of the “the government of dirt” or “the government of absence,” but both of these things apparently have “a politics.” Many of these freshly politicized phenomena do not just have politics so much as they are political, no matter what else they might appear to be. Like Plato’s forms, a thing’s politics have come to constitute its true if invisible essence, or so the popular story goes. The ethical, for instance, has become political: there are more than nine thousand hits for “the politics of ethics,” whatever that means, in the library database. The aesthetic, too, is on the verge of annexation. As Lauren Oyler observed in Bookforum, “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism.” By “good person,” contemporary novelists and critics do not mean someone rational, as Plato did; or someone merciful, as Augustine did; or someone who regards others as ends rather than means, as Kant did; or someone who celebrates the singularity of others, as Buber did. Instead, a person qualifies as “good” only if she conforms to a specific set of political standards, her personal virtues be damned. The standards in question, of course, are the ones endorsed by the crudest, most online leftists. “A good person,” Oyler explains in her criticism of her moralistic peers, “possesses a deep understanding of power structures and her relative place in them.” This is not understood by Oyler’s adversaries as merely one of the many aspects of goodness: rather, it is all that they suppose virtue to consist in. That is to say, a good person is concerned about global warming; she #believeswomen; she voted for Bernie and posted about it on Instagram. Admittedly, she bullies Warren supporters from an anonymous Twitter account with a snake avatar, but this amounts to “punching up” and is therefore morally commendable. A good person acknowledges her privilege frequently, and when she apologizes for it, as she often does, she pledges to “Do the Work” (but uncharacteristically declines to demand adequate compensation). A good person understands that “owning the libs” is of paramount importance, though she doesn’t know any libs personally, probably because she understands that good people do not ever associate with bad people. (In any case, she is ultimately opposed to ownership.) In a word, a good person has no unpredictable opinions, no friends with whom she disagrees about anything of any importance, no views that could not be distilled into slogans and printed on canvas tote bags, and no unruly appetites. (Naturally she is a vegan.) This person shows up in contemporary fiction as character, author, and regulative ideal alike. She is Bobby in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, Adam Gordon in Ben Lerner’s Topeka School, and Mia Warren in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. She is also the conscience of all three novels, and under her watchful and unforgiving eye a body of writing has emerged that we might call “sanctimony literature.” Its flourishing, commercially and critically, is one of the most salient features about this moment in the politicization of culture. Sanctimony literature is, in effect, an extension of social media: it is full of self-promotion and the airing of performatively righteous opinions. It exists largely to make poster-cum-authors look good and scrollers-cum-readers feel good for appreciating the poster-cum-authors’ goodness. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin wrote of sententious reformist fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that “we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.” Sanctimony literature has similarly affirming and consoling effects: it serves to make us feel proud that we share its ethical assumptions. Though it purports to treat themes of great gravity and complexity, such as sexism and economic inequality, sanctimony literature is suspiciously easy to read. Perusing a sanctimony novel feels like binge-watching a series on Netflix or scrolling through Instagram, pausing every now and then to read an inspirational caption. (Unsurprisingly, Rooney’s Normal People and Ng’s Little Fires have both been adapted into popular TV shows.) The vocabulary of both texts is often unambitious, and the syntax undemanding, for despite the sanctimony novel’s pretensions to subversion and system-smashing, it is usually formally unadventurous. (Ben Lerner, an inspired stylist, is a notable exception to this rule.) The little exploration that the genre permits is so easily digestible that it hardly constitutes experimentation at all: in place of Proustian effusions we get fragments, strewn strategically amid complete sentences, to signal that the text at hand is capital-L-Literary. Emma Cline’s The Girls, a gem of a sanctimony novel, is full of such shards: “Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriend’s hands.” These slippery non-sentences may seem daringly ungrammatical, but they are so easy to gulp down. A good person knows that ethical consumption and creation are impossible under capitalism, so she sets out to write a blockbuster, reminding herself that naked clauses are Tweet-adjacent and therefore apt to sell better. Like the protest novels that Baldwin so deliciously excoriated, sanctimony novels contain morals that are, as he puts it, “neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving motoes sometimes found on the walls of furnished rooms.” Above all, sanctimony literature is defined by its efforts to
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence