Shutting Up and Embracing the Bland

30 Jun, 2024

I dove this week into In Praise of Blandness, François Jullien’s thoughts on how the concept is conceived, as part of the book’s subtitle has it, in “Chinese thought and aesthetics.”¹ Though I’m not finished, I’m well enough on my way to offer a general summary of Jullien’s understanding of the idea: although having gone through different variations, blandness is that rare, fleeting quality that reveals the reality of all things holding together. Add some spice or style or any flavor at all to it, and you’ve essentially blocked its flow with a sexy distraction. It’s putting it too simply, but the better you’re able to cultivate nonattachment to any given characteristic, or maybe what many a yoga instructor has called equanimity, the more available you’ll be to sense “the manifest nature of things.”²

It’s not that this quality is boring; instead, when you really experience blandness, you’re being granted an experience of “that phase when different flavors no longer stand in opposition to each other but, rather, abide within plenitude…. At this stage, the real is no longer blocked in partial and too obvious manifestations; the concrete becomes discrete, open to transformation.”³ It’s sort of reassuring, and a silly appropriation of the idea, to read about the real value of blandness during a week when, having to get new glasses after a prescription change, I wound up, after wasting too much time wishing I could pull off snazzy cat eye or artsy geometric frames, with what I generally always go for: the spare, black rectangular pair of specs that in this instance was called “The Professor.” Hah! There you are: far from hip, yet without blinders of chunky bejewelled plastic to distract me, I’m all the more available to receive the true nature of reality (and with new and improved vision to see it clearly!) whenever it feels like crossing my path.

At the same time I was developing my appreciation of blandness, I was catching up on The New York Review of Books, where I found Mark Lilla trying to understand what right-wing critics of liberalism, and in particular right-wing Catholics, might be searching for.⁴ Among the jumbles of people on all sides dissatisfied with “the hollowness of contemporary culture,” the Catholic postliberals Lilla focuses on share with much of the radical right “the conviction that a decisive historical break is to blame for the loathsome present”; they often turn to (their view of) modernity itself, and its emphasis in particular on individual autonomy, as the point where it all started to turn sour. From then on, “liberalism” (essentially, that particularly modern valuation of the individual) has pulled us down and away from more communal commitments, resulting in the empty consumerist nightmare we get to enjoy today.

Lilla reviews Catholic postliberal work all along the thoughtful-to-ranting spectrum, with some authors, such as Patrick Deneen, finding a place on multiple spots on that continuum. And he notes that there’s a great deal that US cultural critics left and right could agree upon and confront together at this point, particular and complex issues unique to our modernity-shaped world that require careful, patient thought and effort, such as “the worrisome state of our children, who are ever more depressed and suicidal. And we do lack adequate political concepts and vocabulary for articulating and defending the common good and placing necessary limits on individual autonomy, from gun control to keeping Internet pornography from the young.”⁵ The problem, though, is just like many a would-be revolutionary, these in-your-face Christians already have the only solutions we need, which must be imposed from above and without input from or concern for anyone else; “they almost never speak about the power of the Gospel to transform a society and culture from below by first transforming the inner lives of its members,” which “requires patience and charity and humility” and “has nothing to do with jockeying for political power in a fallen world.” Instead, they often spiral into insular nuttiness, and while hungering for a full-scale invasion of government institutions, “get so tangled up in their own hyperbolic rhetoric and fanciful historical dramaturgy that they eventually become irrelevant.”⁶

Their (and evangelicals’) alignment with, or at least use of, Trump, a hyper-individualstic, hyper-autonomous liberal if ever there was one, seems on the face of it strange. But these right-wingers’ use of the effective tool that Trump is in serving their agenda is part of it; the other, and I would say significant, part of that phenomenon is precisely a shared addiction to hyperbolic rhetoric and fanciful historical dramaturgy. No blandness here; no self-imposed silence or cultivation of openness to try and get a glimpse of reality’s complex interconnections and constant change. The belligerent dog-and-pony shows that constitute Trumpism do everything they can to stomp out (even the possibility of) inner detachment, clear vision, appreciating what is for all that it is. It’s no surprise to see in Trump or the crusading postliberals Lilla discusses foils for the figure of the Sage described by Jullien:

the benefit of his actions never attracts attention, never offers a sign or mark of its existence… he brings about, almost imperceptibly, the evolution of an antagonistic situation, so that the gradually attained victory never calls for admiration and is never referred to as a great accomplishment. True efficacy is always discreet; conversely, the ostentatious is illusory. Sage and strategist alike reject spectacular and superficial acts in favor of an influence that operates profoundly over time.⁷

I’m far from calling Joe Biden a sage; among other things, his taste for being in office seems to have affected his ability to see how what he cares about could be furthered if he’d leave it to (the face of) new people to take it on. But I’m guessing I could call him generally bland, and no one would really argue the point, at least not in the way that we commonly tend to understand that characteristic. But flashy Biden’s not, and whether it’s him or his party or a combination of both and more that fail to communicate his “accomplishments,” whatever influence he/they are hoping will “operate profoundly over time” is geared to the wrong audience and undermined by any sage-like tendencies he might possess. In other words, far too many Americans these days are caught up not with the truly beneficial mode and results of a practitioner of the bland, but with the flash of what Confucian tradition long, long ago called “the small man”: “Relations with the Gentleman are like water, those of the small man like new wine. The Gentleman is bland, but that is why he is able to bring things about; the small man is pleasant [to the taste], but that is why he ends up only destroying things.”⁸

I’m not saying anything remotely new or surprising by asserting that a good half of our short-tempered country would rather feel the immediate rush of joining in a small man’s loud rant and blame in favor of ignoring the slow, frustrating efforts to understand what the actual problems are and the work needed to resolve them—and as a result, only destroying things. As Lilla says, it’s understandable that people are dissatisfied with the world we have to live in these days. “But finding the true source of our disquiet is never a simple matter,” and it’s much easier to hitch your wagon to a movement that has all the answers “than it is to reconcile oneself to never being fully reconciled with life or the historical moment, and to turn within.”⁹ It’s pretty hard, that is, to shut out all the whistles and bells and gadgets and trends and social media timelines to try and hear what the unamplified tones of bland reality are trying to tell us. I sure hope to god we can learn.

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