Who I Try to Be
Authenticity and Activism in the Age of the Spectacle
“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
“You can’t have a political movement made up entirely of podcasters and YouTubers; everyone can’t be the class clown. Some people have to simply be earnest foot soldiers who make the case without quotation marks.”
Freddie DeBoer
“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
“…we live in a state of 'Chronic Virtuousness,' where Social Media has encouraged us to project the universality of Evil upon our enemies, and at the same time to simply wish away or ignore the irrational or sometimes darker aspects of ourselves.”
― Sisyphus 55
Have you made your bed today?
In this essay I explore the priorities and tone of political dialogue today, add some historical and philosophical context to develop a critical analysis, and conclude by stating how I approach political activism and the quest to lead a good and useful life.
The new online form of ‘political’ organization is broad-based and targeted at the young and fairly affluent. It seeks to energize on the bases of emotion and moral narratives. It is almost completely unconcerned with policy and is highly concerned with purity of thought, conformity, and subjective feelings (especially those of certain groups). The idea seems to be that we live in an oppressive society where everything (language, standards, expectations, objectivity) is implicated in the oppression and the way to address this is to get a bunch of people upset about something and set them loose on Twitter or city streets or the lobby of a legislative building. But once everyone is there… what happens next? I’ve been saying it a long time and I suspect that I’ll continue to have cause to say it: change happens in the corridors of power through policy-making and organization-building. So it has always been and so it will always be. Not only is it not enough to identify a problem and ‘raise awareness’ or ‘foster dialogue’ (very little dialogue actually happens around these issues anyway). It sucks the oxygen away from effective and targeted movements; gives people-especially young people-the illusion that political change is morally straightforward without trade-offs, requiring no compromise; and gives a million people the illusion of having DONE something on behalf of some group or toward some goal because they posted something on a social media platform.
BLM is the epitomic online political movement. It misdiagnosed the problem, opting to focus on an overblown and distorted narrative of racist and violent police (rather than undertraining, hiring and recruitment practices, underemphasis of de-escalation strategies, officer mental health support, etc. etc.). By framing the issue so narrowly (in, literally, black and white terms) they made opposition to their claims seem tantamount to racism but the fact that most black Americans want more police, the fact that every brilliant back social scientist I can name is intensely critical of BLM, and the fact that much of the energy in the movement actually came from corporate donations and young white people should give one pause before adopting their stances. Those donor corporations are presumably links in the vast societal chain of systemic racism, after all. What changes have they made to redress power imbalances, beyond the cosmetic and publicity-focused? Those young people are totally oblivious, never having meaningfully interacted with police OR criminals and taking comical and extreme stances that would crumble if they had to live in REAL neighborhoods with real social problems, while working real jobs.
BLM as a movement did spawn some peripheral policy goals but these were never the point of the mobilization and were mostly unrealistic (ending qualified immunity) or counter-productive (banning chokeholds or defunding police departments). They might constrain police action but they do nothing to reduce the level of active racism in police departments. Racism in an institution is a very serious problem indeed but before organizing one should be able to roughly measure the problem: what are the indicators and how sure are we that the indicators and disparities are not caused by other factors? We should be able to point to its origins or sources of power and growth and outline some serious ideas for addressing it. Without these basic steps you’re just complaining. This is the futility endemic to every university DEI office, which are more lavishly funded and well-staffed with every passing year. If your university is racist, HOW? Who are these racists or which policies exactly demonstrate racist intent or create racist effects? Let’s get to work! Fixing racism would of course mean the end of their jobs, though. Racism has gone from a specific variety of malign ignorance characteristic of some darker aspects of human psychology with real victims and visible patterns of expression to a kind of vague shadow that’s always around but never really does much (unless some black employee is fired or a student underperforms, and those will only be accounted as instances of racism depending on the favor of the people and their circumstances). The same criticism could be made of the climate activist community (misunderstanding the scope and nature of the problem, neglecting workable solutions, mobilizing on the basis of anger and fear to no clear end)…. Or racial achievement gaps in public schools. I’ve heard dozens of intellectuals and education professors claim that systemic racism is the reason for the large (and widening) test score gap between the mean black and white student in the US. Where is this racism? How is it affecting students? How does it replicate and reinforce itself? What steps can we take toward addressing it? Not only are these questions not asked, they are strongly discouraged. If enough people are emotionally invested in the progressive narrative change will happen of its own accord, the thinking seems to be, and discussing statistics or results or teaching strategies confuse people and distract from that urgent mission: get people to buy in and get them upset.
The political Left in the US has changed so dramatically in my lifetime that it would now be unrecognizable to a 1990’s American social democrat. There have been equally dramatic changes on the right (disgust with elites, anti-institutional feeling) in different directions and these two shifts combined have left the traditional political spectrum in tatters. Maybe it’s my burgeoning middle age but the newer ideas ascendant in the culture seem to me uniformly terrible. One of these is the idea that personal action is insignificant. Personal improvement for a black student, for instance, is almost treated as if it’s impossible or an absurd goal or perhaps adding to the immense burden of the downtrodden. First of all, if you’re just measuring time and energy and share of income spent black students in the US are not disadvantaged. On average they have the easiest and most comfortable K-12 academic careers of any group. The consequences of that often relaxed stance is a different matter. It’s not exactly high-level social science to say that groups of students who work hard will generally perform better and benefit more from their education than groups of students who don’t. Black students don’t work very hard on average in the United States. This is a massive generalization, of course, but if you’re talking about improving black educational performance suggesting more time spent on homework is the lowest of low-hanging fruit, policy change-wise. Personal changes will almost always be more direct and more immediate in effect and MUCH easier than ‘systemic changes.’ There’s no reason we can’t talk about both at once. We can discuss the underrepresentation of black teachers in the classroom (a problem that might be addressed, I imagine, by more black people training to become teachers and then being hired) AND the laughably scant time spent on homework by many students (black and white!). Indeed, if you want to improve the students’ performance, work habits will probably comprise the bulk of the conversation, and no matter how many conditional objections you raise (poverty! Insecurity! Food insecurity! Single motherhood!) the fact is that homework is not a difficult or resource-intensive thing to work on. There’s another dimension of this complete unwillingness to acknowledge that people can do a great deal on their own behalf: an unwillingness to explore moral growth, even as a concept.
Helenic civilization had a precoccupation with gaining knowledge about the world and about ourselves. They pursued this end for a longer and more dedicated period than any other civilization I can think of. Interrogating values and norms and the specific features of a well-lived life was at least as important as any other area of inquiry. Eudemonia was their word for the concept of a worthy and fulfilling life. We have no equivalent. Not only are the distant and scattered corollaries spread across multiple fields and buried by loads of unreplicable social ‘science’ and feel-good nonsense and tautology: we seem committed to forgetting that this question (arguably the most important one for any person and for a society as a whole) exists and matters. What are our operating terms or phrases which indicate Eudemonia? What professionals deal with its applications? Try to recall some tweets or statements or arguments on the subject, or some cultural projects that deal with it in a deep and general way (rather than the moral challenges of behavior or duty in particular situations). Our culture is starving for connection and purpose, but it seems to categorically bury the project of determining how one might make their life matter. This is a problem.
I’ve written elsewhere about the failures and blind spots of our mental healthcare complex: the prioritization of subjectivity (but only in arbitrary cases), the aim upon increasing happiness (rather than effectiveness or goodness), the privileging and near-celebration of certain pathologies or disorders (trauma, anxiety, gender confusion, ASD), the inconsistent and ideological treatment of moral responsibility, the over-reliance on symptoms and diagnoses and medications as metrics for health or unhealth, the neglect of human psychology and cultural wisdom (like the ‘hero’s journey), etc. I could go on and on, and I have. The responsibility for our ignorance of eudemonia rests with psychology more than any other field and it tracks with certain criticism I’ve long held. One of the best intuitive measures of applied mental health is the ability and tendency to do good in the world, intentionally.
Why this deafening silence on the topic of Eudaimonia or its synonyms in our cultural conversation? Partly I think this lies in the Left’s bizarre and contradictory notion of moral relativism. As a group they are uncomfortable with speaking about right and wrong, noble and petty, gracious and grasping with anything like definitiveness. This impulse to avoid any hint of judgement or certainty leads them to avoid statements altogether and the questions which provoke them. Except that even this is not at all true. Ask any critical theorist and you will hear how cultural values and bodies of knowledge are mediated by power relations. What exactly this means in practice is not clear, even to them of course. But if you’ve found one in a declamatory mood you will hear how indigenous and BIPOC and queer (blah blah blah) storymaking and meaning formation has a value and moral purity that far exceeds the systems tainted with imperialism and capitalism and patriarchy (blah blah blah). Let’s disregard the fact that many indigenous societies were aggressive and sometimes imperialistic (and usually patriarchal and chauvinistic). You might have seen the paradox already, which makes it odd that it remains completely unreconciled. If you’re a cultural relativist you CAN’T compare an indigenous culture to the modern capitalist United States on any firm moral basis. All you could say is that they’re different, and how. To imply that queerness is morally superior to heteronormativity – which is a message contained on almost every written page of queer theory – already breaks your worldview. It requires an objective moral standard against which you’re making the comparison. Similarly, a cultural relativist doesn’t believe in inherently good or bad actions or beliefs. They might use the labels conditionally within a certain understood cultural frame but they treat them as varying cultural illusions that can’t make any further claim to moral worth. They’re socially useful, the framing goes, but ultimately incoherent. Critical theory can’t even appeal to the truth or realism or effectiveness of these things, because they throw all human knowledge onto the heap of things that are culturally-dependent and relative. So, ask a believer: do you think it’s wrong to persecute trans people? Is enslaving “black and brown bodies” and working them to death morally repugnant? They will say yes, and (more importantly) they BELIEVE these things. Critical theory is actually moral absolutism that masquerades as relativism to give them the flexibility to avoid confronting the horrors of any particular (marginalized) culture. Its morality is a study in slave morality: whoever is marginalized is redeemed and whoever is historically oppressive is sanctified (and wise as well). The last SHALL be first in their utopian vision, indeed, but not in an idealized post-apocalyptic sense. This is their guiding impulse for navigation problems big and small in our time. This also raises the issue of what is to happen when those marginalized groups successfully capture power. When queerness has more cultural and financial support than heteronormativity will the critical theorists suddenly label queerness as repressive? I suspect they will not but if they were striving for intellectually consistency they should.
Morality has no individual meaning in critical theory. It’s purely a collective phenomenon and can only be spoken of in relation to groups. The common (and absurd) idea that “black Americans CAN’T be racist” is an example of this kind of thinking. Even if social disempowerment preclude one from being racist (which it doesn’t – racism is just an expression of in-group biases universal in humanity and it can be and is demonstrated by people of all backgrounds and all times) that wouldn’t let racist black people off of the hook. There are plenty of individually wealthy and powerful black Americans. What about them? Even them, in their conception, for they deal with black people as an amorphous mass and they deal with whiteness as a cancer. When they say that black Americans can’t be racist, what they mean is that racism is only possible for the group of white people to evidence because they are the privileged and must be brought low. This is a statement of political utility rather than psychology or moral philosophy. The millions of individual hurts and resentments and assumptions that will necessarily accompany such political changes don’t concern them in the slightest.
Our culture is also so fixated on happiness and pleasure that right and duty took a back seat a long time ago and probably disembarked from the bus entirely. Look at the messages (from teenagers and influencers and intellectuals and celebrities alike): be true to yourself, follow your heart, practice self-care, don’t settle, surround yourself with good vibes. These all presume that the individual being considered is deeply and intuitively right and worthy and spectacular and any dimming of that incandescence is likely to be an effect of ‘haters’ in the vicinity. Of course, those haters must also regard themselves as the main character and equally right and worthy too, in this conception. It’s not a message that can be universally applied, for if everyone’s instincts are right and good we’re right back where we started. It would be hard to create a shallower and more one-dimensional picture of human interactions and moral guidance, and it’s ultimately not even fulfilling. Happiness and healing generally only come from doing difficult things to benefit others. Focusing mostly on yourself will guarantee moral stagnation. Focusing mostly on your own happiness and pleasure will guarantee unhappiness (verified by a mountain of data). We’re social animals and all admirable and enjoyable endeavors begin with a recognition of our responsibilities and the needs of others.
I believe that moral growth MUST precede and accompany any sustained useful political activism. The giants of political change in the 20th century were men (mostly) who exemplified the virtues of strength and discipline but also mercy and patience and forgiveness (all concepts that are equally neglected in our public discourse). Were many of them false, or harboring secret weaknesses? Assuredly, but that doesn’t dim the radiance of the ideal. It’s actually better to have a group of wise and fair-minded people working towards a TERRIBLE goal than a group of spiteful midwits who happen to be right about everything. The landscape of policy challenges is constantly shifting and fair-mindedness means you have decent shot of developing alongside it in a productive direction. Ethical commitments mean that you will avoid immoral or hypocritical policies as a rule and kindness mean that you will attract others, through the tone of your dialogue and your example. In short, the wise and fair-minded will tend to adjust their goals in better directions over time; the spiteful will incline toward worse.
There’s a fundamental truth of political change that seems to have been discarded in large parts of political America. You only grow your movement and approach progress toward your goals when you convince OTHER PEOPLE, people who presumably disagreed or were uninformed. Leftist Twitter seems to be people by people who have a rather different approach: [1] establish the correct position on every important issue. A note: tax policy, alliances, military decisions, science research, infrastructure development, etc. etc. are NOT important issues. What word we should use to refer to Latinos, the details of a routine police killing in which white police killed an armed person who was on the verge of fatally attacking a different civilian, exploring how action movies bolster rape culture, and debating the strategic merits of throwing soup on revered paintings on display in museums – THESE are important issues. [2] Advertise your ideological conformity at every opportunity. Piling on someone else who mis-stepped or used an unfashionable phrase or idea is the best way to do this but if those opportunities aren’t forthcoming you can just tweet or post things on social media, as if you were answering someone’s question. [3] Stay up with the latest developments. Woke language is a dynamic, forward-hurtling mutant. No term can ever stay in good graces for more than 5 or so years it seems (barring some old favorites, like queer or people of color, the latter of which sounds so stupid that I shudder a bit every time I read or write it, even today). You can’t pile on the wayward and hapless unless you are current on all the correct ideas and terms. This requires a lot of time on Twitter but if this is earnestly your project you’re no doubt there already! A further note: remembering that these words and meanings constantly change along with society and opinions is pointless and actually counter-productive. If you can find a tweet from someone expressing doubt as to the policy merits of same-sex marriage in 2012 you’ve got them. Homophobia doesn’t just FADE. Acknowledging that, in that year, Hillary and Barack were both also publicly opposed to legalizing same-sex marriages changes nothing. Do you really believe context can absolve you of your sins? These values and ideas are morally absolute and therefore both urgent and eternal and thoughtcrime must be expunged. [4] Devote more energy to corralling ‘your group’ than worrying about those hopeless bigots. NEVER acknowledge, even to yourself, that the working-class people in this country – even female and Hispanic and black, etc. – usually believe in a world picture that’s in many ways closer to the bigoted and reactionary than it is to your abstract matrix of rights and wrongs, nested in an endless maze of oppression. You’re fighting (in a sense I suppose) FOR black people and the fact that most of them find your goals bizarre and ridiculous should not create any issues for you. You went to Smith College after all, and studied media affairs (with a special focus on the portrayal of gender in media and how capitalist media reinforces patriarchy) so you’re basically an expert on all this stuff. YOU know what’s good for them even when they do not. Sometimes when people are misguided, they need a little help and you can be their lifeline, their savior, as it were. Historical political movements might have tried to spread their message and expand their coalitions but your goal is not organization or effectiveness: it’s purity. All of your goals are right in a morally absolute sense and will eventually be manifested by the natural flow of progress. Meanwhile you need to help keep the movement pure. If someone agrees with you on literally every issue but expresses some doubt about the wisdom of housing dangerous and sexually predatory men who have adopted female names and wear makeup in the same setting as nonviolent and vulnerable women, you MUST attack. NO deviation is acceptable on the important issues. Opinion and perspective is irrelevant when you’re dealing with issues of cosmic moral certainty!
This is all far from optimal. I know my tone here is sarcastic, but I don’t think I’m being unfair or exaggerating here. It’s exemplary but too close to the dynamics that I’ve regularly observed to properly be called parody. Self-improvement is already a difficult task, for everyone (almost by definition). Convincing large swathes of the most privileged and educated that self-improvement is not only futile but is based on a misguided notion is a huge mistake. Convincing them that worth and status should rightly come from a person’s online opinions (which is effectively what they argue) will ensure a high degree of intellectual conformity but nearly all of those people will NOT sacrifice for your goals. They won’t sacrifice for any goals. They won’t even try to be better or kinder or more useful and these are the best things that an elite class can be. In our current cultural landscape virtues of fair-mindedness and grace and honesty – which are beneficial for ANY pro-social political program – fall by the wayside, almost completely disregarded.
Guy Debord is one of many brilliant French philosophers who lived in a world of theory, surrounded by intellectuals living in their own imaginary worlds. He created a framework of ideas that he then over-applied (like virtually all such people) and created a vision of society which probably reflected the emptiness and futility of his own life. Nietzsche wrote that “…every great philosophy up until now has consisted of… the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography” and like so many things Nitezsche wrote there is great wisdom here. Debord lived until 1994 until – depressed by the perceived worthlessness of his ideology in promoting change and afflicted by nerve damage from chronic and serious alcoholism – he took his own life. Like almost all critical theorists, Debord believed that it was his place to simply manufacture and spread ideas. The manner in which he lived his life weas irrelevant and it wasn’t HIS task to implement or organize any institutional counterweights. I can imagine how much hopelessness such an attitude must engender.
Nevertheless, his ideas did have merit and they seem downright prescient now. He explored the way that developed capitalist societies create collective visions and meaning (the spectacle) to entrance and organize and anesthetize the population. The critical theorists apprehended the fantastic material wealth of modern capitalist societies and felt little but scorn. The comfortable houses and lavish opportunities and advancing technology were little to them other than obstacles to the accomplishment of their Marxist paradise. Only one born in the lap of luxury could ever approach the comfort and safety of modernity with such an attitude. The spectacle isn’t a capitalist phenomenon, of course. It’s a symptom of an advanced and technologically connected civilization of any economic form.
Debord was right to criticize the society of the spectacle, though. The spectacle can retard growth and progress, by distracting the masses away from the urgent issues which deserve their attention. It can create a vast ocean of loneliness and anomie by orienting people toward digital mirages and creating vast webs of parasocial relationships (which are usually commercial, in capitalism, but could be political, as in the would-be true totalitarianism of modern China). Most urgently, they aren’t replacements for a life of meaning and actual physical loves and friendships. They can’t be. Even if the spectacle replicated real experience flawlessly, the actual elements (the social worth of people living with purpose and relating to each other meaningfully in the world) wouldn’t exist and so we would see an ocean of isolated, eternally-distracted individuals clustering around a gaping abyss where romantic love and community used to be, all staring down at their screens rather than at each other. Does this sound familiar?
Debord’s revolution would have required ideological manipulation and a great deal of force to become a reality. In their more honest moments the critical theorists admit this but take it as worthwhile in service of the utopian society. I consider utopianism to be a dangerous illusion which caused the deaths of well over 100 million people in the 20th century. Its promises are so profound and its vision so pure that any act in its service becomes acceptable, and the movement started by ideologues comes to be dominated by psychopaths and bizarre sadists after no more than a few iterations of political re-organization.
The ‘revolution’ I seek requires no force. Society can retain its current shape. No Luddite campaign of phone-smashing is required. Instead, all that must be done to return to the path of pro-sociality and general happiness is for each person to cultivate their own sense of meaning and self-discipline. One can educate onseself on society and its ills but one should do this with an attitude of kindness and forbearance. One should also recognize that the first and most basic arena available for people to effect social change is their groups of friends and family and their workplace. It’s the streets they drive and the stores they patronize. To treat daily life as an irrelevant distraction from the REAL issues is a tragic error. I think you’ll find that if you pair your activism with an earnest desire to improve your life and your thoughts and your relationships you’ll find that the activism blooms and becomes doubly fulfilling. Who do I try to be? I try to be right and I try to be informed and I try to be eloquent but far ahead of those aims I try to be a good and honest son and brother and employee and tenant and customer. I’m not especially good at some of these efforts but I know exactly where improvement must be made and I have some idea of how to proceed in those directions. Unlike the issues of the world, seen through the harsh and distorted lens of Twitter, these are areas which I can change and the perception of change made is a great feeling. I have some tiny effect on the operation of the spectacle but I have a massive effect on the course and quality of my own life and recognizing this is the beginning of happiness, for me and for everyone around me. No matter where you focus or how you progress, the world must change one individual act at a time.