Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a different kind of “critic,” tasked with helping God to improve upon His “first draft” of the universe. There are birds who “consider the world as if from a distance” and are interested in beauty above all. There are fish who “critique from the middle” and are consumed by the “condition of the many.” And there are bears who “do not have a pragmatic way of thinking” and are “deeply consumed with their own.” The three main characters in the novel track with the three types: Mira, the art critic and main character, is a bird; Mira’s father, whose death takes up the middle part of the novel, is a bear; and Mira’s romantic interest and colleague at a school for art critics, Annie, is a fish. The bird, the bear, and the fish are the basis for an inquiry into different value systems and the ways of perceiving the world that follow from them. The schema itself evokes a competition-to-the-death: birds and bears both eat fish. But the competition Heti is interested in occurs in the social world, not the natural one. There, conflict need not be fatal, but it remains a significant and even a necessary aspect of social life in modern secular societies. For what defines the three types is more than a matter of personality, or sensibility. It concerns what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluations”: that is, the kind of choices and commitments that individuals living in those societies make to express “the kind of beings we are or want to be.” Heti has spoken of writing Pure Colour during the Trump years, and of it being her way of responding to the ambient conviction that it was “frivolous” to be an artist during such a politically charged time. It is appropriate, then, that the central conflict in the book is between Mira, the artistic sensibility, and Annie, the political one. To be sure, the virtues of the fish are not dismissed, and toward the end of the novel Annie offers Mira an impersonal kind of comfort (perhaps the only kind she is capable of offering). Through Mira’s eyes, Heti acknowledges that fish can be driven by a true and beautiful compassion for others, and that sometimes they are the ones who “see the whole picture most clearly.” The novel nevertheless traces a deep and often hostile incompatibility between the worldviews of the bird and the fish. Mira, who sees beauty in the world just as it is, calls Annie a “fixer” because she is always telling people her “own ideas about things; about relationships and the psyche and the world of people, and what it meant to be in a family… meddling in the structure that had been given to humans, as old as a tree.” Toward the end of the book, she envisions finding Annie in the small town where she has gone to help people “repair their collective delusions” and telling her that fixers are “the wrong thing to be.” Annie listens “politely, with a face of cold marble.” Then she tells Mira that she is just repeating patriarchal talking points she learned from her father. “I still think it’s wrong to be a fixer,” says Mira. “That’s rich for you to say!,” responds Annie “you, who have never tried to fix anything!” (Italics Mira’s.) The majority of Heti’s fiction, and all three of her novels, beginning with How Should a Person Be? in 2012, have been published during a decade in which strong evaluations have trended in one direction: toward that of the fixers. Far from standing for all ways of caring about the “condition of the many” — that is, of engaging in politics — the fixer names an ethos that has become conspicuous on the progressive left in recent years: it appears in Annie’s character as a kind of therapeutic moralism, which takes little notice of the compromise and contestation traditionally thought of as intrinsic to political life. Like many who call for the breaking down of every border and convention, Annie conceives of the lines delineating communities — whether biological, like the family, or political, like the state — as arbitrary and meretricious; all that stands in the way of her utopia is the ignorance and laziness of those who have not read the right books or learned the most up-to-date vocabulary. In her claim that Mira’s criticism is merely the result of her having internalized the patriarchal claims of her father, it is easy to hear the moralists’ characteristic skepticism that any defensible value system besides their own is even possible, much less something to be consciously cultivated. Much has been made in recent years about the problem of political polarization, but just as distinctive of the period — perhaps more distinctive, since polarization in American politics is perennial, and inevitable — has been the accompanying encroachment of the ethos of the fixers across the categories of left-liberal society and culture. This includes the categories of art and literature, much as it might seem that aesthetic values would preclude the utilitarian bias at the heart of therapeutic moralism. Dispiritingly, the most common response of contemporary novelists to the encroachment of this ethos has been to submit their manuscripts dutifully to the panels of fixers for judgment, approval and, occasionally, a surely justified censure. “Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive,” observed the writer Greg Jackson about the literature of the Trump years, “It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial.” Heti, while feeling the same pressures as other artists, has chosen a different tack, of which Pure Colour is only the most explicit example. In each of her novels, she constructs a coliseum wherein the bearers of different