Apple Pie and the Flinty Eye

09 Jun, 2024

I’ve been trying to deal with a ridiculous situation: namely, the fact that I feel like a schlocky Pollyanna whenever I try to think about or argue for ways that we could engage in more truly democratic practices. As a grad school colleague would put it whenever I’d offer an earnest proposal or observation, “That’s sweet.” What’s the point, after all, when Congress can’t reach the developmental level of teenagers, or when representatives won’t even acknowledge the letter you wrote—or at best, send some form response that has at least something to do with what you were asking? Why waste your energy when we can’t even have a sustained, much less reasonable, debate about anything at all? Trying to drum up some enthusiasm for what we could be just seems painfully naive in the face of what we are.

But I’m guessing that some of that feeling like a rube—being convinced that listeners have kicked me out of the sophisticated crowd for still thinking meaningful democracy is a possibility worth mentioning—is also a product of the particular good ol’ boy culture in which I was raised, where it always felt (and continues to feel) as if expressing sincere enthusiasm for anything marked you as unserious. Do your work and keep an eye out for people trying to sell you something or pull one over on you or get you to do something unnecessary, thereby marking you as a weak and gullible fool; sew up your own wounds (without anesthesia!) instead of seeing a doctor, always buy the cheapest option, be satisfied with what you have, expect to be disappointed. In that environment, the only legitimate way to express affection for someone is through teasing; the only way to express care about larger issues is via indignation, disgust, or professed shock that someone’s not doing something the way we do it. If you do admit to having developed an interest in something, play it down in both word and tone: it’s not that important; it’s dumb for having mentioned it at all, but there it is, ready to be retracted.

I suspect that sort of provincial snark is itself at least partially the result of its Lutheran-heavy legacy, and the conviction of humans’ innate depravity and worthlessness that comes with it. Luther said we shouldn’t despair about the fact that we’re nothing on our own but miserable worms who ought in all right to be stepped on, because God’s mind-blowing grace means we’re forgiven for being such intrinsic nullities, and are thereby elevated to beings with value. But for the average churchgoer, and one fully situated in the anti-intellectual US of A, puzzling out the (il)logic of it all is a lot of effort no one has time for, and you’re left with the easy-to-believe conviction that we’re all a bunch of hopeless idiots.

Lewis Hyde talks about Luther’s and other reformers’ “division of moral and economic life” and their leaning on “the new merchant princes” for support, since they no longer had the grand institution of the Catholic Church to back them up. In doing so, “They said in effect that while it might be hoped that a prince would rule in the spirit of the Gospels, the world was such an evil place that a strong temporal order based on the sword, not on compassion, was necessary.”¹ Hyde’s talking here specifically about the development of the idea of usury, and how Christian churches moved from their communal property-sharing origins to the individual faithful getting their own just like everyone else. But Hyde sees Luther wrangling with a larger problem: it’d be nice if everyone acted like a good Christian and repaid their loans, but let’s face it: that’s rare, so we need the sword to make everyone behave. And within that wrangling is also what seems to be a lack of faith in the very overpowering divine power Luther celebrates, surrendering to practicality instead of belief that things could be different. Or as Hyde says, declaring not the overabundance of grace in which we’re to find reassurance, but rather “a scarcity of grace and gift”—a declaration that starts to look like “bad faith,” which assumes “that things won’t work out.”²

It’s not that there isn’t some good sense in this deflation of Luther’s ideal, especially given the uncertain, to put it mildly, time and place in which he was living. And Hyde would have us think, too, about the fact that Luther didn’t come up with this all by himself, acting in some ways, he says, “as a diligent and responsive reporter of the spiritual state of Europe in the sixteenth century.... Luther tried to speak to this—to the looseness of that bond and the scarcity of grace that he felt all around him. He reported the situation, and, moreover, he tried to imagine the shape that faith must now take to survive.”³ Much like their religious forebear who did a lot more than just roll his eyes at more earnest idealists who were being slaughtered for their attempts at change,⁴ why wouldn’t my non-wealthy farmer culture be primed to expect the worst of people, or know that high-flown ideals are one thing; market fluctuations and inscrutable nature and its rains and draughts and pests quite another? Among other things, it’s hard to believe a visiting politician has your best interests at heart when the stiff new Stetson he’s put on for the occasion says he doesn’t even understand what those interests are. Show him around your field, be polite, get on with your business once he’s gone, and don’t expect anything to come out of it.

So there’s that. But Susan Neiman gave me something new to throw into the mix with her recent book, Left Is Not Woke. The volume really comes down, I think, to her argument that we can’t 1) retreat to our separate tribalisms and dismiss the justice and solidarities that rights-centered universalism aims for; or 2) throw out the Enlightenment as some Eurocentric colonial enterprise, but must remember instead that Enlightenment thinkers were pushing via the use of reason (which itself Neiman says is much maligned these days) against the very sorts of attitudes and practices they often get accused of upholding. As part of her argument, Neiman brings in a number of thinkers and movements that have turned us into skeptics or cynics about the possibility or desirability of bringing a better world into being. One of those thinkers is Michel Foucault, whose admittedly brilliant work uncovered how power flows in often unnoticed ways, and is all the more sinister for that fact.⁵

The problem, Neiman says, is that Foucault was never willing to differentiate between particular manifestations of power’s operation, or to admit to instances in which progress for the better, even if minute, had been made. Instead, he seemed to look on the working of power as evidence of the always-nefarious intention of power holders bent on holding on to what they have—a lack of faith in humanity that might fit right in with Luther’s, only without any possibility of either prince or divinity making any real difference. Neiman uses Foucault’s example in Discipline and Punish of a criminal being publicly drawn and quartered, from which the author moves on to assert that the prison system that then developed was no less malevolent.⁶ This, Neiman says, is a problem: the fact that here and throughout his other work, Foucault was unwilling to acknowledge that, yes, all these situations are awful, but that some might be less harrowing than others, and that those preferable situations might have emerged as the result of efforts made by people who were sincerely committed, not to keeping others trapped within their power, but to trying to bring the awfulness to an end. In her interpretation of Foucault’s outlook, working for anything better would be “intellectually crude,” because all we have in this world “are simply brutal forms of subjugation which are replaced by more refined ones.”⁷

The discussion reminds me of philosopher Simon Critchley’s accusations against his colleague Slavoj Žižek: that the latter dismisses any form of political or social improvement or progress that is not total revolution as dewy-eyed tripe.⁸ Incremental progress is worthless, because it will never result in everything we strive for, and will only allow disingenuousness to flourish in new and creative ways—so we should dismiss the attempt whole hog, and simply sit in condemnation and paint the many ways in which our functioning is dishonest. These sorts of assertions from really smart, really charismatic—and let’s face it: great stylistic—thinkers leave you feeling like a complete tool for believing, with your unsophisticated nobody brain, that there’s any point in trying at all. Or as Neiman says, “I suspect that our fear of emphasizing the good news stems from a primitive fear: of being mocked as naive.”⁹ Check.

That’s why I’m trying to keep reading people who do care, who are enthusiastic and committed (even if and especially because they’re not remotely sentimental or nostalgic), and who are unapologetic about being so. Both Neiman and Critchley are tremendous thinkers who could in no way be accused of being naive. They may not have ready solutions to all our problems on hand, much less ways of implementing them—but they’re also trying through their writing to pull us into continual engagement and wrangling with the ways our is doesn’t live up to our ought. And not only are we sure not living up to our democratic ought right now; if we don’t get more committed to changing that fact, I’m not sure we’ll be able to apply that adjective at all to a lot of political or social functioning to come. I’m trying, then, to push straight into that fear of being mocked, and convince myself the effort will be worth it.

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<sup>1. Quotations in this and the previous sentence are from Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2007), 156.↩
2. Hyde, 165, 167.↩
3. Hyde, 169.↩
4. Hyde notes in particular Thomas Müntzer: “The authorities caught up with this man, tortured him, and cut off his head.” 160.↩
5. Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke, expanded and updated edition (Hoboken: Polity, 2024). Among others, she also brings in for questioning leftists’ attempt to use Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt in a way that would undermine Schmitt’s awful commitments, as well as what she considers the unfounded assertions about human nature espoused by evolutionary psychologists. The Foucault discussion is largely in the book’s third chapter, “Progress and Doom,” 106–41.↩
6. I’m not going to argue here about Neiman’s interpretation of Discipline and Punish; rather, I want to think about the contribution to a feeling—which may or may not be justified, but which is there either way—that such thought might give rise to.↩
7. Neiman, 110.↩
8. See in particular Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (New York: Verso, 2012), 232–36.↩
9. Neiman, 140. In Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History to Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), Neiman points to a fear similar to this one and to the sheepishness I feel at wanting us to be better at governing ourselves: “I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them.” 13. ↩</sup>