08 Apr 2019 - Graham
previously: against the wirecutter, part one
The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best, / It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer, -- Walt Whitman
the ceaseless grooming and optimizing of ordinary life stands in the way of finding out how else we could spend our attention and our energy. -- Mark Greif
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
As always, the archive of old issues is available here: tinyletter.com/gpd/archive
Last issue focused on my own illusions about stuff and the way the wirecutter reinforces a fantasy of perfection. I noticed that stuff has inertia and that my attempt to own only the best was vain (in both senses of the word).
Yet I still find deep satisfaction from owning nice things. Dan S. wrote, after last week’s issue, to remind me that my top-notch blender and wirecutter-recommended kettle do make life more pleasant. They continue to pass the KonMari touch&love test with flying colors.
The problem is that these nice things make me cowardly.
Any good Marxist can tell you how consumerism makes us docile. The socially constructed desire to acquire ever more fancy junk keeps us chained to the wheel of work and distracted from our deeply unequal world. And yes that’s very true and horrifying, but I’m actually thinking more personally here.
What do I mean by cowardice? I mean that stuff inhibits us.
Most obviously, stuff is physically burdensome. Especially as it accumulates. We’ve all had a too heavy suitcase keep us from exploring the city. Yet this physical burden is only a small piece of the puzzle. My very heavy piano weighs even more heavily on my imagination; now that I have it, it’s harder to imagine moving.
Acquiring things limits imagination because of our cognitive bias against loss. We tend to hate losing $10 more than we like getting $10. This loss aversion is a baseline shifting effect - we don’t choose in a rational void, instead our choices are deeply shaped by what we have now. Having more makes it difficult to imagine having less.
This makes comfort relatively invisible; every increase is subsumed to our baseline sense of normal. Wealth is a habit difficult to break.
I think this is what William James was getting at when he wrote:
lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritual excitement throw away possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard.
But from a different angle, buying piano-type-things is more heroic than cowardly. The piano was a commitment to growth - to becoming a person who can read and play music. Similarly, after last issue, Cam C. emailed me about the smart watch he bought to help himself work out more and Kate D. told me about the new clothes she bought to help her feel confident.
These positive goals help explain why, especially when buying the best, we call a purchase an investment. This phrasing is otherwise odd because consumer goods always decrease in value. I might tell myself an object is an investment because it will save me money in the long run, but I rarely account honestly. My lovely vitamix, for example, saves me money compared to buying a juice daily. But would I drink juice daily if I didn’t have it? Almost certainly not. What I really mean is that this blender is an investment in a nicer, juicier way of living.
If investments in stuff can help us improve our lives, then maybe stuff isn’t inherently cowardly? Perhaps we could evaluate purchases based on whether they help us grow or not?
This growth-or-not metric provides a useful way of understanding why the wirecutter’s checklist for the ideal road trip is so awful. It’s full of cowardly stuff like a sleeping bag liner (but no sleeping bag) and a power inverter (to ensure we’re never without our electronic safety blankets). These recommendations are anti-growth, and thus cowardly, because they attempt to tame travel by reproducing the known comforts of home.
In the section on rooftop cargo boxes, they seem to get a little guilty and throw in this ineffective caveat:
And don’t overpack. As with a bag, a well-packed car is one that has less than you think you want to bring, but everything that you truly need to bring.
This distinction between needs and wants actually intensifies our acquisitive impulse. It encourages us to pretend that we aren’t making a choice about a majority of the things they recommend (or we otherwise bring along) because we will need them. But in fact we are still choosing; we’ve just made that choice based on habit (or fear or ignorance).
The problems with the wirecutter’s recommendations and caveat gets us closer to the essence of cowardice; cowardice makes our current way of living seem inevitable by rendering our choices less visible.
Stuff, because it seems inert, is especially good at hiding our decisions. When we invest in something, we intend it to direct our future self. Then, once we own it, we pretend that object is a mere neutral enabler of desire. Ironically, with this pretending we resign ourselves to relative passivity and grant even more agency to our stuff.
Unfortunately, this means stuff tends to produce cowardice even when we buy with heroic intentions. In fact, the more time or energy or money we spend on the best thing for the best life the more tightly that thing will bind us to that particular version of the best life.
If this halfway heroism of buying stuff to grow leads back to accumulation and cowardice, then perhaps a fuller heroism is needed to set our imagination free. And what’s more heroic than travel?
Well, travel isn’t always heroic. In fact, like stuff, travel might tend towards cowardice.
Today, travel is gospel. DC’s swiping apps suggest that a failure to travel is as unacceptable as Republicanism. This is probably because we are sure that travel makes us more tolerant. But even if this is true, is tolerance such a high achievement? Isn’t the easiest way to achieve tolerance to care less (“live and let live”) or ignore difference (“we’re all just human” or “I don’t see race”)? Tolerance does not necessarily demand introspection or change. We don’t have to reevaluate our way of life, we just have to let other people live theirs. Aiming for tolerance could actually dull us to the world.
Travel can also anesthetize us by universalizing our normal way of being. The more I travel with my phone the more I reinforce the idea that I need my phone - I discover that I need it wherever I go. Similarly, if I am unhappy at home and also unhappy when I travel, I must just be an fixedly unhappy person.
Cowardly travel perniciously reproduces our daily ritual in evernew places. This universalization makes our status quo less visible and more inevitable.
Even travel that takes us outside our comfort zone can be cowardly. The boldest vacations are cowardly when they justify a bad life. The prospect of a luxurious vacation makes bearable what should be an unbearable day-to-day. The ability to afford travel gives us a plausible reason to stay in a socially evil job. Work trips glamorize our seemingly do-good, but actually neo-colonialist careers with nonprofits or development agencies.
So to resist the pull of cowardice, we must not only travel but travel with truly heroic intentions. We will seek out challenge and resistance and difficulty. Rather than following the wirecutter’s false distinction between needs and wants, we will take less than we think we need.
Is this scary? Yes, and that’s how we know it’s the right path. Here’s some words of encouragement from Seneca:
I constantly meet people who think that what they themselves can’t do can’t be done…. How much more highly I rate these people’s abilities than they do themselves!… In any event what person actually trying them has found them prove beyond him? Who hasn’t noticed how much easier they are in the actual doing?
With heroic travel we walk the path of the great romantic philosophers: Rousseau, Nietzsche, Thoreau. All three were big walkers, as I learned from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Frederic Gros’ Philosophy of Walking. Walking freed these three to see the unnecessity of all their peers took for granted. Wandering from town to town let Rousseau imagine radical democracy rising from the ruins of monarchy. Grand hikes allowed Nietzsche to see that morality is not given but made. And going to the woods inspired Thoreau to invent non-violent civil disobedience.
Solnit and Gros both add Jack Kerouac to this list of wandering philosophers. Kerouac’s writing resonated deeply, and embarrassingly, with my teenage self. I loved On the Road because he drove wherever he wanted; associated with weirdos and punks and black people; smoked pot casually; and got laid. He abandoned the soft comforts of home for danger and freedom. He was both appealing and awful because he described the burdensome limits of privilege and suggested that us fellow white suburban boys could discard it, too. He lived a real life full of real challenges and I was missing out.
Gros reminded me of Kerouac’s resonance and radicalism by quoting at length from Kerouac’s dharma bums:
i’ve been reading whitman, you know what he says, cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the bard, the zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway,
I’ve been reading Whitman, too! I was wandering old desert paths with my rucksack last week! Perhaps I was wrong to dismiss Kerouac as cliche?
It is suspicious that Kerouac is so radical and also so widely read, but maybe we readers simply lack his nerve? We play at rucksack adventure for a few days or even years, before we return to conventionality. No, it can’t be all our fault, there must be a defect in his radicalism that has made him easily co-opt-able. Yes, in fact, Kerouac was playing, too. He claimed to get to the root of life, but he spends most of his time in his own head or, worse, taking advantage of the people whose lives he briefly vacations in.
Kerouac is not alone in this selfish self-absorption. Rebecca Solnit notices that, from the very start, 600 BCE, the hero’s journey has been a macho trip divorced from reality:
Homer’s Odysseus travels the world and sleeps around. Odysseus’s wife Penelope stays dutifully at home, rebuffing the suitors she lacks the authority to reject outright. Travel, whether local or global, has remained a largely masculine prerogative ever since, with women often the destination, the prize, or keepers of the hearth.
The hero’s adventure is sustained by a navel-gazing that obscures the world around him. The cowardly tourist is easily ridiculed - they hide in luxury resorts, exploit local resources to exhaustion, and become imperious with the local servants. But the hero is an awful tourist, too. The heroic tourist creates the setting for their own internal journey by painting a thick coat of exoticism over the particularities of place - first as fantasy and then, as he unconsciously flexes his economic muscle, in reality.
As heroes we extract adventure and care and return little but our supposedly magnetic presence. As heroes we put ourselves at the center of the story and marginalize or abuse the rest of the world.
In contrast to Gros and Solnit, who have critical but sympathetic views of romanticism, Bertrand Russell has no patience for the romantic hero:
The mystic becomes one with God, and in the contemplation of the Infinite feels himself absolved from duty to his neighbor. The anarchic rebel does even better: he feels himself not one with God, but God…. If we could all live solitary and without labour, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators…. In order to continue to feel solitary, he must be able to prevent those who serve him from impinging upon his ego…. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.
Unfortunately, then, the coward and the hero are not so different. The coward might do everything they can to avoid challenge, but the hero is equally insulated by a relentless focus on themselves. In fact, the coward might be superior because, despite all the hero’s talk of self-sufficiency, at least the coward takes care of themselves.
At this point, the easy way out would be to say we just have to find a moderate third way, that we need to balance heroism and cowardice. But I don’t believe in moderate third ways; like the wirecutter’s attempt to balance needs and wants, they tend to justify whatever the current balance is. And it’s not that cowardice and heroism are bad extremes, but rather that they are fundamentally the same - both tend to inhibit growth, reinforce the status quo, and even limit our capacity to imagine a different way of being.
Erich Fromm (thanks, Brian C!) lived through the rise of fascism, like Bertie Russell, and witnessed its heroic self-justifications. But Fromm draws a distinction between the destructive heroism of Mussolini, which has faith only in the current sources of power and treats human life with disdain, and a different sort of courage which demands faith in life:
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner… [T]he belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth.
Perhaps we need to practice heroism to compromise our comfort in pursuit of collective goals. And perhaps we need a heroic attitude to believe our fellow citizens can practice this collective sacrifice with us. But I’ve fallen back into theory again. Let’s return to the personal. What does it mean practically to have faith in my own and our collective growth?
Despite setting out, in this newsletter, to generate something a little more affirmative than I ended with last time, I’m not sure I can positively answer that question. Still, perhaps, with all this reflection on cowardice and heroism, I can at least describe two patterns of thought I want to give up:
One thing I do know, I gotta work up my courage to dance and the more I dance the less courage it demands. These two albums are great for dancing at home, alone, in silly ways. (And this Toro y Moi even makes a sneaky little reference to LCD Soundsystem.)
LCD Soundsystem - The Long Goodbye spotify Toro y Moi - Outer Peace bandcamp
next post: a guide to lazy days in dc