Three Cheers for Democracy

E.M Forster (portrait by Dora Carrington)

E.M. Forster was famous for his novel A Passage to India which dealt with the clash of cultures as a metaphor for the internal machinery—human language—that inevitably separates all individuals from each other. Noam Comsky might talk about a universal grammar, but both syntax and semantics conspire to create the modern form of a Tower of Babel, a tower of “paradigm shifts,” to quote Thomas Kuhn’s famous locution. A Passage to India should be required reading in a world where even a liberal minded organization like PEN can find itself divided by the conflict between free expression and a sensitivity to cultural differences, as manifested in the recent conflict over the Charlie Hebdo award (“Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate,” NYT, 5/4/15). Forster also wrote a book called Two Cheers for Democracy, a series of essays in which he defended liberalism. Here again Forster’s mild mannered, ambivalent and often tortured thinking deserves to come to the fore. The classic liberal finds his or her views more threatened then ever in our current climate. He or she buckles at a multi-culturalism that threatens free speech while at the same time feeling protective of constitutional rights of those extremists who would stifle all expression. Will liberal ideals which champion privacy, constitutional rights and due process be able to survive in a world where government agencies increasingly need to take action? Will liberal ideals survive in a world where search warrants and Miranda rights go down the drain, as our fear of terrorism mounts? And can you make exceptions and suspend certain rights, under particular conditions? Oliver Wendell Holmes seemed to think so in the famous Schenck decision in which anti-draft sentiments at war time were equated with “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." However, in a subsequent dissent, Abrams v. United States, he seemed to reaffirm the rights of expression in the same theater of war. The classic liberal is a latter day Hamlet, inhibited from action by too many thoughts and preconditions. And yet we sometimes forget that without all the questioning, without all the concern for due process and human rights—that constitute the liberal mandate—we would have nothing left to defend against the onslaught both of terrorism and its equally totalitarian backlash. You don’t want to hear about wishy washy liberal ideals when your blood is boiling and you’re ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater, opting for revenge at all costs. But isn’t this exactly what the terrorists want? After they’re finished pillaging the historical memory of antiquity, they’ll get us to commit hara-kiri by doing away with everything we stand for.

Datafication Redux II: Evgeny Morosov

Evgeny Morosov is a Luddite with a Luddite’s true nostalgia for a way of life that has passed. The way of life is what is known as the mitteleuropaishe esthetic of Kafka and Max Weber, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. In the past, this Belarusian writer, has railed against the depredations of the information age and in a recent New Yorker essay “Only Disconnect: Two Cheers for Boredom,” (The New Yorker,  10/28/13) which tips it’s hat to E.M. Forster’s famous line “only connect,” he goes on the attack against the attack on boredom by social media. However though Morosov is arguing for boredom, he is never boring. In trying to describe the plight of socially mediated man buffeted by an “information overload” that is boring in the wrong way since it “doesn’t provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it,” he cites the German cultural critic, Siegfied Kracauer, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the German sociologist George Simmel whose l903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” describes the Faustian bargain cosmopolitan man makes in his rejection of simpler ways of life. He also makes reference to a character named Mercer in David Eggers recent released novel The Circle, about a Google like campus, who “compares social media, with their constant prompts for more interaction and feedback, to snack foods that are packed with precisely determined amounts of salt and fat in order to keep us wanting (and eating) more and more.” However, the kind of old-fashioned unadorned boredom Morosov is arguing for is a little like cursive handwriting, a talent that is slowly diminishing due to atrophy. It, in fact, may be something that has totally vanished from the palette of human emotion by a certain time in the future. Congenitally blind people whose retinal damage has been repaired aren't always able to see since their neurogenic pathways are not acclimated to sight. Similarly, the problem with the kind of cleansing and potentially creative boredom that Morosov is arguing for is that there are those of us who might not even be able to recognize it, in the unlikely event we far enough away from our smart phones and Google glasses to experience it. In fact, if the flood of stimulation and datafication continues, the old-fashioned boredom that Dr. Seuss talks about in The Cat in the Hat, when he says “The sun didn’t shine and it was too wet to play so we stayed in the house all that cold, cold wet day," may someday be banished from the nightmarish universe some now call “the internet of everything."

Aristocracy of the Heart

photo of Benjamin Nugent

There is nothing like the self-satisfaction of moral superiority. It’s a thrill in and of itself that may even create a buzz is the message communicated by the novelist Benjamin Nugent in a recent Times Sunday Review piece, “The Adulterous Sins of Our Father Figures.” (NYT, 4/27/13).  Nugent recounts the contempt in which he held his “mother’s partner” after receiving an “e mail confessing to an emotional affair.”  Nugent’s view that “men raised before second wave feminism—that is, men born before l960—were deformed by a culture that regarded romantic indiscretions as natural expressions of manliness, an alternative to hunting” was only challenged when he himself cheated on his girlfriend. Only then did he deal with problem of what “you do when you discover you belong to a class of men you hate?” Nugent’s point is that there’s a price to be paid for purity. Avoid the seven deadly sins at your own peril since you may eventually find yourself guilty of “self-loathing.” For Nugent the hatred of instinct had acted as a mechanism of self-control. And then it had backfired when it transformed into a perverse form of vanity. “Hating yourself is a kind of stimulant, anxiety-producing, but also energizing. It can be nearly pleasurable. I found I had to kick that stimulant in order to act morally.” But is he talking about morality or emotion? Desire, in any form, is a hard thing to legislate, however hard the Catholic Church or the superego try to do it. Isn't Nugent really alluding to a form of knowledge, which E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy described as being possessed by “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky?”--in effect an aristocracy of the heart.

The Lonely Crowd II

Erica Jong coined the term “zipless fuck,” but the desire for instant intimacy obviously has a storied history, from Catullus to The Canterbury Tales, from Rabelais to Sexus, Nexus, and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, to Nicholson Baker’ s brilliantly erotic Fermata.  However, the sexual passages from these works can be so stimulating that we forget the more profound desire to connect that lies at the heart of even the most perverse scenarios. It might be worth our while to interject E.M. Forster’s famous words from Howards End—“only connect”—into the discussion, though that work is hardly noted for its sexual content. Inevitably, even the most promiscuous fantasy about a hot sexual encounter with an anonymous partner has everything to do with connection. If the orgasm is, as the French have termed it, a little death, then the birth of consciousness, the child’s entry into the world and separation from the womb (and what Freud termed its “oceanic effect”) represents a displacement, an individuation that is purchased at the price of isolation. If ego can be defined as the literal and symbolic boundary of the material self, then that demarcation constitutes a prison. Furtive browsers of Internet porn sites might convince themselves that they are engaging in little acts of rebellion in which they only want to see gonads or sexual practices that would normally be hidden from sight, but ultimately the obsession with intimate acts emanates from a more profound search for intimacy. The wandering ego is an exile from the paradise of oneness with nature. Humans, and indeed all organic matter, even molecules, demonstrate a tendency to differentiation, together with a countervailing tendency to dissolution and finally unification with the whole. Isn’t that what the peasants are after in the famed orgy sequence in Bunuel’s Viridiana? The Lonely Crowd is the name of a classic work of sociology, but the title may have even more universal implications than its authors, concerned with the world of post-war strivers, ever intended.