flattering troubles
A few years ago a couple of undergraduates at the University of Chicago started a little ‘review’ of (what else?) culture and politics, with a sort of pro-Great Books, un-woke, Strausso-Catholic conservativish tone. I had coffee a few times with one of the editors, in I suppose an avuncular-advisory role. It’s not the sort of thing I was up to at their age (that was my Maoist era) or that I’d want to sign off on now, but it’s generally good, isn’t it?, to be vaguely in favor (albeit more-or-less uninformed) about whatever is keeping young people enthusiastic about writing. The one time I wrote something for the review, though, was to express a hopefully benevolent skepticism about the intellectual orientation of most of its contributors and more generally about young conservatives’ eagerness to be old.
What I wrote—which I’m pasting below, some paragraphs down—was one of several ‘responses’ to a ‘proposition.’ Maybe it’s the format, or the sense of being asked to comment, that gets my hackles up. In a similar instance, asked by Harper’s to comment on an essay by Sam Kriss on Girard (is this how all the letters to Harper’s are actually written, solicited by an editor looking to start drama?), I was probably more of a dick than I might have been otherwise (or rather, otherwise I wouldn’t have read or thought about any such essay—the words ‘Harper’s’, ‘Girard,’ and ‘Kriss’ all being verbal equivalents of ‘nature’s warning signs’). Something about being asked for an opinion makes one feel frustratedly like Sontag in that famously bitchy interview where her anger is directed less to the interviewer’s dumb questions themselves (‘what’s the future of the American left?’ ‘what living authors do you admire?’) than to the obvious, enraging fact that she has made herself into someone who can be reliably hit up for opinions, something she rightly recognizes as a degradation (being a dispenser of thoughts rather than thinking).
Still, although I was, in essence, being a dick to some nice kids in my ‘letter,’ I also, I think, elaborated something, usefully at least to myself, that I also touched on in an essay from 2021 on Covid and AIDS that at the time sparked a certain amount of stupid controversy. The essay was, in its most topical sense, me musing about the strangeness of how conservatives were now into transgression, in this case the violation of public health norms, in a manner once associated with the gay men they’d dreamed of rounding up for the sake of public health. A game of musical chairs between William F. Buckley and Tim Dean. That many took this to be an endorsement on my part of conservative opposition to vaccines and such—rather than an expression of my exhaustion with the whole paradigm of transgression, which proves itself retarded precisely insofar as it can be taken up by the right—I suppose shouldn’t have been surprising.
A version of this point (isn’t transgression actually idiotic, and doesn’t it move oddly between ‘gay sex’ and ‘reactionary politics’, which turn out, of course, to mean almost the same thing, if we have been so dumb as to accept a series of analogies linking gayness to ‘queerness’ and queerness to anti-normative anything and Reaction to the overturning of norms we libtards happen to like) was made at about the same time, in dumb tenderqueer fashion, by Jeremy Atherton Lin crying about how Morrissey is racist and punk is over (Geoffrey Mak retreads this yet again in his opening essay in his essay collection Mean Boys, which is just awful—another crime against letters committed by Anglophone Berlin, along with those of Ryan Ruby, Lauren Oyler, and Ben Miller. A sort of bomb ought to be invented, and then dropped, instantly vaporizing all, but only, the inhabitants of the city at work on a personal or critical essay in English).
I think what remains more interesting in that essay, though, is that I also find connecting right and left positions on Covid (this was a moment when my family was refusing vaccines and freaking out that contact with vaccinated people might spread dangerous something or other) a liberal notion of the autonomous subject who can/should educate and thus protect herself—a notion that I would go on to critique more thoroughly in a latter essay on Roberto Esposito, but started to find inadequate here:
In every case some potential guest’s body not only might pose—to COVID-anxious or vaccine-wary relatives—the danger of contamination, but also an opportunity to whisper and judge how such-and-such a person has made an ethical mess of themselves, opening their body to foreign substances and their mind to the lies of Big Pharma or conservative media. Susceptibility to infection or influence appears as a moral failing, an inability to have sustained oneself as the right kind of subject.
In the imagination both of those skeptical of vaccines and of those who hold the former in obloquy, this subject seems, through a careful management of their social ties and media consumption, to keep body and mind impervious to undesirable external forces. Falling ill, or into false belief, is a breach in the circuit of self-regulation, of critical thinking, or of deference to the correct authorities.
For all their disagreement, interlocutors seem certain that something essential about a person’s goodness or badness is revealed in the disclosure of such information as their vaccination status, most recent test, and eagerness to receive a booster shot. The moral person, who resists sickness and credulity, is also a member of one’s own side, ranged with oneself against those others whose poor choices and foolish ideas endanger our collective well-being. Questions of health, belief, morality, and identity appear inextricably bound together, as if it were impossible to imagine a person physically healthy but not morally good, or a person who believes “the right” things without being genuinely virtuous, or a person who is virtuous but not on “our side.” The good things in life go harmoniously together, we agree—or at least they would, were it not for the interference of grotesquely imbecilic enemies. This inescapable everyday moralism confuses our thinking, but helps us maintain our standing in our communities as solid, respectable individuals with a core of ethical agency through which we resist bodily weakness, misinformation, and the nefarious out-group.
Faith in a subject who thinks for herself, in other words, ends up being only another expression of a moralizing, polemical collectivism, something to be, like oneself, distrusted. A critique of the right and the left is not to be undertaken from the perspective of liberal humanist center that moderates their excesses, but rather with the aim of showing how left and right emerge from that center’s own constitutive, pernicious fantasy of self-making, of reason made autonomous, of being too smart to be fooled.
This or something like it is also what I was getting in at my in letter to the undergraduates:
A response to The Harper Review’s spring 2024 proposition, “We should tell children the truth.”
Dear editors,
To ask whether we should tell children the truth is to posit distinctions separating “children” from some other group (presumably adults), “truth” from some other way of relating to interlocutors about the world (falsehood, obviously, but also delusion, ignorance, nonsense, etc.), and what we “should” do from what we might, but should not, do.
Each of these distinctions raises doubts, as well as practical difficulties. One might ask, for example, whether undergraduates are children, adults, or something else. One might wonder whether one can tell the one singular truth, and one might suggest that any thinking about ethical imperatives around truth-telling should begin by investigating the conditions for discussion of our shared world that prevail in any given circumstance.
The question, “should we tell children the truth?” assumes, moreover, that the one to and about whom it is posed is a non-child, in possession of some (if not the) truth, and capable of telling it but wondering whether he ought to share it with a human type (the child) of which he is himself not a member. The question solicits him to consider himself as a potential enlightener and evangelist, or as an esoteric concealer, or again as a benevolent teller of parables by which immature minds can be guided and eventually be so formed as to fully know the truth for which he untruthfully prepares them.
The role of the one who knows, but might or might not reveal, the truth and its accompanying ethical dilemmas (what should he do?) echoes the profession of the educator. This role is seductive to students, who desire a bridge from their current position as passive recipients and victims of “learning” (compounded of truth and untruth, in uncertain proportions) to an imagined future position in which they would be truth’s distributors or withholders. This longing seems to be, indeed, a key mechanism for many young people’s conversions to such faiths as Catholicism and Straussianism, by which they envision themselves passing from one side of the question of truth (that of the children) to the other (that of the “we” who know).
One is thrilled by such flattering troubles—what do I do with the truth I possess? Should I tell it to lesser, younger, perhaps unready minds? Contemplating them, one is led away from considering the local, contingent, unsteady character of, if not “the truth” in its majestic singularity, then the possibility of communicating truths convincingly. One is prevented, too, from asking if one is not oneself a child in need of truth (and perhaps unable to receive it), or whether it is not children who are closer to truth than the “we” to whom the question is posed.
“Truth,” perhaps, names less something that can be told (or not) than what in our living and thinking together resists the certainty of being adult.
Parrhesiastically,
Blake Smith