Get your smart on.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; -- Yeats, The Second Coming
Tell me if you can relate to this, but these past weeks I have been thinking about the role of artists and thinkers in difficult times. We have a nearly forgotten existential climate crisis (I like to begin there because, what the fuck); the rise of fascism and return of gestapo-like slave-catchers in the United States; the dismantling of the world order as established post World War II; and last but not least, a cover-up of the inner workings of a pedophile and human trafficking operation by and for the very rich and powerful men (and some women). In times like these, what is thinking for? Surely action is what this moment calls for.
We have been here before, and more than once.
As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, one effect of rising authoritarianism is the reduction of all civic life to politics. Everything becomes political, and politics becomes inescapable. (I wrote about this in “6 Characteristics of Totalitarianism, and Mounting Resistance,” if you want to take a look.) I was reminded of this last night, while scrolling social media at the end of my day (which I definitely need to stop doing, but I can’t seem to help myself), and seeing posts about how this week in particular people started to notice that their feeds were completely filled with political posts.
Like many others, I am having a hard time regulating what I take in, and how much of it. We may go on social as a means of escape only stumble upon an image of such violence, without warning. I understand that the TikTok algorithms is trained to show you something to soften you up, like a cute puppy, and then follow that up with violence, for max impact. The emotional manipulation on TikTok in particular is obvious now, even though that doesn’t seem to stop me from going on there. I feel like I need to stay connected, witness, and document, but it is traumatizing.
I have been feeling frozen, and I am a person who is usually triggered into fight. A few years ago, I was assaulted by petty thieves on the street. They asked for the bag I was carrying, and even though it had absolutely nothing of value in it, I fought like hell purely on principle. I always thought that I would just hand over whatever, not being a materialistic person, but as it turns out, it pissed me right off, and I fought them. The four men ended up jumping right back into their car, leaving me on the ground where I had fallen on top of my bag, shielding it with my body (not planned, but still a brilliant move) and balancing the pizza I had just picked up in the other hand. The pizza was cold by the time I ate it, damn it.
So I’m normally a fighter, and feeling frozen is a new on on me. It took me a little bit to recognize it for what it is — an inability to move forward in any aspect of my life. My energy is not so much contained or dispersed as dampened. I have been sleeping a lot, which has always been my favorite way of coping with stress. A good nap has never failed to revive my sprits and help me reset, until now. I just wake up feeling ever more tired. My sleep patterns are completely messed up, and have been for months now.
We have been here before. We could point to the end of World War I, when Yeats penned:
The Second Coming, first stanza *Turning and turning in the widening gyre * The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; *The best lack all conviction, while the worst * Are full of passionate intensity.
We have been here before. Look to the end of World War II, when artists and intellectuals asked themselves, What is the point, the point of our humanity, if the best part of us, our rationality, can be turned to the task of more efficient killing? Absurdism caught fire (Becket wrote “Nothing to be done”), existentialism and its existential angst became all the rage, and nihilism bloomed. Poetry and theater both lent themselves to the cause of making sense of the mess.
But I am distrustful of what was said then, largely representing the viewpoint of men who, if they did not individually enjoy and suffer, in equal parts, the world they themselves built for themselves, they are constitutionally unable to process the root causes of fascism and it’s enmeshment with dominant forms of masculinity as control. Their reaction was indigestion and nihilism, and who can blame them. So I want to look to whose who have been fighting all this time, who perhaps do not have the privilege of giving up with what amounts to throwing up their hands in a shrug. Heidegger’s being-towards-death is a way to simulate being under erasure, and for many of us that is not all that abstract. And anyways, there are things worse than death.
Our terror and pain feeds a certain kind of person, I fear a person whose morality has been abandoned to their gods.
Has it been worth it? So that some relatively small number of us could live under concretized illusions, and enjoy a prosperous American lifestyle. If your answer to that is yes, then you are also okay with the extraction of resources now, for the benefit of the wealthiest few. The logic is the same, the interests of a few over the many. But I would not blame you, necessarily. I miss the convenience and tchotchkes that I thought made my life pleasurable, and my individualism has been a shield against my status as a girl, then a woman. For me it has been worth it, and that is a reality I struggle with now. We are none of us innocent, the quicker we get to this the better off we will be.
The image of the gyre in the Yeats poem suggests outward extension and dispersal into nothingness. “Mere” anarchy loosened on the world, as things loose their connection and meaningfulness. Totalitarianism always presents anarchy as the only alternative, while at the same time using lawlessness as a means to power. Authoritarianism looks like law and order while it dismantles systems of justice.
We are not in an ever widening gyre, I don’t think, but in an ever-narrowing circle. At least, my life is narrowing. Not in the midst of an explosion, but a slow-mo implosion. An ever-narrowing circle, into what feels like the neck of a tightening vise.
There are two competing models in Western metaphysics. In ancient times, it was called the problem of the One and the Many. If you believe that everything that is is One, like so many world religions posit, that underneath all the difference and change there is an underlying unity or harmony, you believe in the totalitarian one. Keeping that One together is crucial, and a threat to unity is an existential threat. You likely believe in a humanitarianism that says that underneath all of our differences we are all still One, humanity.
From this perspective, what requires explanation is diversity, space/separation, and change over time, all threats to said unity. Difference needs be justified and/or reduced. Animated by a desire for an eternal return to an imaginary original unity of the totality of all that is, or the One.
The other doctrine of the Many says that change and diversity are the starting point for that that is, and in this case it is unity, regularity, homogeneity that requires an account (an explanation and justification). In Plato’s Timaeus, we get the image of a winnowing basket — a flat basket used to separate husks from grain — establishing the original cosmological order of the elements, organized from the heaviest to the lightest: earth, water, air, and fire. These “elemental passions” are irreducible, the one to the other. In other words, the starting point is difference, and not a difference of a divided whole.
From the perspective of the Many, unity is an achievement, not a given. In Empedocles’ Poem, the powers of Love/affinity and Strife/hate create a mixture from elements that, over time and many iterations, begin to resemble lifeforms that we might recognize as a world. (The modern theory of evolution comes from this seed.) In what is a counterintuitive movement, love attracts unlike kinds and brings them into relation, forming a mixed whole, while strife/hate breaks up this diversity of kind by returning like to like. Most interpretations of Empedocles get this exactly backwards, and completely miss the point: homogenizing forces is not creative but a destructive.
We in the United States are a multicultural democracy, that is our collective, material reality. Now Hate is here to break up our diversity and attempt a return “us” to an imaginary homogeneity. Love for our neighbors and our shared history as a nation is already doing its work. (We’re proud of you Minnesota, Tucson, Portland, LA!) In our cohesiveness, there is no center, only many layered networks in need of revitalization. The center cannot hold us all.
For Further Reading Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951.
Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas." Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 79-153.
*Empedocles. *The Poem of Empedocles: A Text and Translation with an Introduction. Translated by Brad Inwood, University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press,
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniversary ed., Continuum, 2000.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lugones, María. "Purity, Impurity, and Separation." Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pp. 121-48.
Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl, Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.*
Yeats, W. B. “The Second Coming.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Scribner, 1996, p. 187.