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I wrote before about how models of what society looks like can differ radically between societies, so much so that there are some societies for whom society can really be said not to exist. Thinking about that further, I’m reminded that models of society can differ even within a society, sometimes with deleterious results. The classic case comes from Levi-Strauss: low-status people in a certain tribe see society as divided into two equal halves, us the commoners versus them the elite, while high-status people in the same trible see society as a series of concentric circles – elites, naturally, occupying the inmost ring.

There’s probably so much diversity in contemporary American social diagrams that it’s not even worth the trouble of trying to categorize them. The contrast that emerged among Levi-Strauss’s informants probably also holds at some level between the rich and the poor in America. How many of the 99%, though, really see the rich as the opposite moiety? It’s minorities or illegal immigrants or sex perverts or lizard men or even, in a weird involution, trump voters. To a great extent – and this is really a development of the last five years – the rich have managed to disappear from the social map. This works to their advantage, since their invisibility transforms them from the objects of politics into its backroom managers. They fine-tune things to their ever-more incremental advantage while the rest of us tilt at windmills.

None of these diagrams are (or were ever) “right;” they’re metaphors, maps corresponding only roughly to a territory. To an astonishing extent, though, the metaphors are becoming more fantastic, mapping a territory that looks nothing like the fundamental conflicts blocking social progress in this country. That’s partly the fault of cable news and youtube for offering as many social diagrams as can be monetized. Supply creates demand. But not just as it likes. Why are we reaping this harvest now, as opposed to a decade ago when all the media players were already in place?

One possibility is that the kinds of actual difference that grounded the social diagram of a decade ago have disappeared in the meantime, transferring the burden of ethnogenesis onto the social diagrams themselves. We think we’re more divided than ever, but an alien observer would see us as united by a monoculture of looking at screens. The behavioral landscape is monotonous and offers no grounds for differentiation. Instead, we have to differentiate ourselves by reference to what we believe about the social landscape. What does it look like to us when we see a crowd of people staring at their phones?

The narcicism of small differences can have big effects. A hundred years ago, Europeans got so much alike that they had to start World War 1. But that’s nothing compared to the uniformity that’s coming to be. At the moment, a cause for optimism is that the diversity of social representations from which people can choose has yet to coalesce into one big consensus, which means we can still plump for Marxism over fascism as the final destination of that consensus. Key to that will be making the wealthy visible again, as cause and beneficiary of our current crisis.

Following close on yesterday’s post, I ran across something in the Rig Veda which reminds me of something I wrote before about Augustine and the problem of credulity. This is the last stanza of the Hymn of Creation, RV x.129:

Iyam vistrshtir yata ababhuva/ yadi va dadhe yadi va na/ yo asya adhyaksha parame vyoman/ so anga veda yadi va na veda.

“Whence came about this creation, whether he made it or not, he who is its surveyor in the utmost heaven, he alone knows – or else he doesn’t.”

What Augustine reminds us is true for each of us as individuals, that we don’t know where we came from, the RV claims is true for us collectively as well. We weren’t there when the universe came into being. It’s here now, though, so we have to believe it got here somehow. Does that mean need to take it on faith? Or have any belief about it at all?

The scriptural religions all seem to think so. Most of them, at one point or another, make a big deal about how they’re filling in the gaps in what we know about the beginning of time. I think that’s a way of fetishizing the evidentiary quality of written texts, which offer what must have been (at the time of their introduction) an exciting and unprecedented tool for looking into the past. If a written text can tell you your great grandfather’s name, why can’t it tell you where the world came from? And why not with the same degree of reliability?

This telescopic quality of the written document was enough of a commonplace by the time of Muhammad that the Qur’an struggles to disclaim dependence on documentary evidence. Its early audience assumes just such a dependence, describing Muhammad’s warnings as “asatir al-awalin” – usually translated “tales of the ancients,” though “inscriptions of the ancients” would be more accurate. Later critics accused him of borrowing from other scriptures, particularly the bible and the torah – a trend in Qur’anic criticism that continues today, sometimes in more a polemic than a scholarly vein. Writing, once the technology of revelation, has become a disenchanting alternative to it.

Secular modernity, fully acclimated to this disenchanted view of the written tradition, purports not to need answers to the sort of question which the RV characterizes as unanswerable. That’s a bit of a shell game. A Hans Blumenberg points out in The Genesis of the Copernican World, we grow more confident in the face of such questions by undoing their unanswerability. After Copernicus, the next great cosmological dislocation decenters us in time as well as space: we now see that the universe, far from orbiting around us, isn’t even contemporary with us. When we look over distance, we also look back in time. We do the impossible, seeing back before our own (individual, species) existence. We compensate ourselves for our exile from the center of the universe by reimagining ourselves as the RV’s surveyor in the utmost heaven.

A basic question: are people stupid for believing things? Are they gulls? Are they dupes? Or is there no way of knowing that gets past belief?

It’s a political question, or at least a question that conditions your response to politics. If you follow Plato in distinguishing between doxa (tired) and episteme (wired), then you’re going to have a hard time watching people make political decisions. That’s because political debate always involves various prosthetic attachments to logic, “as-ifs” like enthymemes or the utilitarian calculus that let us debate incredibly complex issues as though we were talking about the same thing, even as we disagree about the fundamentals. If, as in the USA right now, people decide to keep the fakery but lose the consensus, it can get downright infuriating. The truth is out there, so why is everyone happy watching trump tweets projected on a cave wall?

You can lose your mind trying to figure that one out. Plenty of people have, which is why MSNBC is now pulling in ratings about on par with Fox’s among politically-attentive oldsters. MSNBC joins CNN, the Washington Post, and plenty of second- or third-rate political writers in appealing to that truth-obsessed demographic, not by solving the conundrum that’s melting their brains – that’s bad business, since you can only do it once – but by selling a kind of martyrdom. It’s true what you think, that half the country is living a lie. You’re one of the smart ones, the good guys, that sticks to the truth. So truth and knowledge of the truth, which begin as the most profoundly hubristic claims that humans have ever made upon the world, end as a marketing plan. Nietzsche wouldn’t mind!

The alternative, paying more attention to how truth works, is something I’ve advocated on this zero-reader blog since day one. It wouldn’t hurt if we could learn to see what’s happening now as just one more turn of the screw, rather than as a world-ending catastrophe. Part of that means recognizing what a world is, and the extent to which every world – whether it belongs to us or them – is built around forms of ungrounded belief.

I’ve seen these ideas cropping up elsewhere lately, too, in a kind of delayed response to the trump campaign that’s finally something other than an immune reaction. One sign of the times in Emily Ogden’s Credulity, just released, which looks marvelous and which I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. Another is D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, an illuminating study of the modern UFO cult that unfortunately also suggests we’re not out of the woods yet. I’m glad to see Pasulka reveal technology for the cult that it is by laying out the homologies between our attitude towards it and UFOlogy. I’m now convinced that UFOlogy too, cult or not, deserves a fairer hearing than it’s gotten: it’s probably the only religion with a chance of being right about its god. I was nauseated, though, by the book’s final episode, in which the sophomorically-pseudonymed Tyler Durden, a wealthy UFO expert whose story makes up the backbone of the book, converts to Catholicism. Wittingly or not, Pasulka paints a portrait (which may also be a self-portrait) of someone who gets off on his own credulity. “I want to believe,” not as a coy expression of skepticism but as a straightforward statement of desire.

The tiresome thing is that Pasulka’s subjects generally take their beliefs as seriously as the truth. That’s a danger that faces anyone who thinks that truth and belief as clearly separable, because the easiest way to make that separation is to say that what I have is truth, while what you have is belief. We thus make ourselves at once sanctimonious and psychotic, two nasty flavors of human that taste worse in combination.

Robert Pfaller had a good idea about the Greeks, which is that they didn’t take their beliefs too seriously. I think that’s basically right and can be extended to most non-Western societies; Christians were the ones who fetishized truth and then tried to make everyone else do the same. Now every truth looks like a hill to die on. Is it too late for us to become like the Greeks in at least this respect?

If some scholars (e.g. Daniel Edelstein) still want to declare the Enlightenment innocent of causing the French Revolution, then they need to work harder to explain this piece of historical synchronicity: that the Enlightenment celebrated, and the French Revolution resulted from, what’s probably the moment of peak adulthood in European history. That’s supposing we define adulthood as legal and personal independence, of which the bourgeosie of Europe at that time had more than anyone else in the Western world before or since.

David Graeber talks about this at some length in the superb final chapter of Bullshit Jobs, a book that aims at least in part to deflate our sense of our own importance. He points out that adulthood, in the eighteenth century, meant owning the means of your own support – a privilege now enjoyed by a vanishingly small number of people on this planet. Over the nineteenth century, as capital gobbles up more and more of the means of production, notional grown-ups find themselves increasingly dependent on masters and bosses for their livelihood. People get mad enough about this that they emigrate in vast numbers to America and Australia, where the old kind of independence can still be supported (at least for a while) on land expropriated from the natives. We forget how much of late 19th- and early 20th-century American politics revolved around defending that personal independence against the encroachments of capital.

Politicians on all sides still gesture towards it, with less and less plausibility – cowboys on the right, entrepreneurs on the left. But neither of those categories is now or will be demographically meaningful for most Americans. The continued efficacy of such appeals depends on the sense we all have that we’re being jerked around, that we don’t really have control over our own lives despite living in a country that fetishizes freedom. Would it help for people to recognize what’s happening to them as resulting from a long slow process of infantilization? Maybe; at least this would do something to end the culture wars surrounding notions of “adulthood” that I discussed in a previous post.

This concern with the material conditions of independence is one that’s basically disappeared from political discourse in the US (outside of socialism and communism, the last enlightenment political movements standing). Freedom in the abstract is supposed to be a political worth whatever material goods we might have to give up to sustain it. But that’s a confidence game: as Hobbes pointed out, we’ve already got all the abstract freedom we can possibly have. We’re always free to do whatever we want; the state can only punish us after the fact (which the USA certainly still does, more than most other countries in the world.) Effectively, neoliberals from Reagan to Clinton sold us what we already had in exchange for a base of material prosperity that could have allowed us to be free in a concrete sense as well as an abstract one.

The Romans aren’t the only people to have recognized the distinction at play here, but they made the most fuss about it. The most alien thing about Roman culture – even weirder than slavery, which Romans partly subsume under it – is the notion of patria potestas, the power of fathers over their descendents through the male line, a power effectively mediated by paternal control over family property. For most of Roman history, sons with living fathers simply can’t own anything in their own name; even if they receive a gift or an inheritance, or work for a salary, all that money goes to dad. Not until his father died was a Roman man free in this concrete sense, “in his own power” – though he might have been free abstractly, i.e. liber, from birth.

The full achievement of adulthood thus meant attaining an independence that came from controlling your own means of living. That kind of adulthood is effectively never achieved by most people in the world. The fact that it could be achieved by expropriating wealth from the millionaires and billionaires who claim to have a paternal concern for us is one of the best-kept secrets of American politics. As long as the culture directs our attention to ideals of adulthood that are outdated – the cowpokes – or part of a zero-sum game – the startup founders – we’ll still be haunted by a sense of our own minority.

Capping off his discussion of what Aufklarung really means, Kant says that it’s man’s escape from his self-imposed unmundigkeit. That’s a paradoxical claim, because unmundigkeit in the juridical sense (as, it seems, Kant means it) is a state of legal minority or tutela – something that by definition you can’t impose on yourself. One common feature shared across the family of legal concepts to which unmundigkeit, tutela and minority belong is that those who come under them get stripped of their capacities as legal agents – so, if you impose a tutela on yourself, it’s immediately invalidated.

Of course Kant knows all that. The paradox is intentional, a kind of allegory. When we realize that our tutelage is self-imposed, then we see it’s paradoxical and unreal. We discover that we’ve been acting according to a law that is no law. Now we’re “free” in the sense that we were free all along, but didn’t realize it. That’s one particularly optimistic way of thinking about enlightenment.

Well, so much for all that. Kant’s figure still has something to tell us, though, about the dark age to come. It’s a way of addressing the question – “what do they want?” – that comes naturally to me, and to a lot of other people, when right-wing voters and politicians invoke “getting back to the good old days” as a political platform. We rightly think that they don’t mean this literally, in the factual sense of returning to an era before iphones or airplanes or electric lighting. It’s a figural statement. For what? Racism? Reinstating “traditional gender roles?” Fascist authoritarianism? Yes, all those things – but then, why not be specific? Why bundle it all together under the heading of a sepia-toned nostalgia for “the good old days?” The easy answer is that they’re trying to fool you, that “the good old days” are some kind of a dog whistle. It should be obvious by now, though, that they don’t care about fooling you. They only care about fooling themselves.

How does nostalgia work for that? In two ways. First, obviously, it helps Trump supporters not think of themselves as Nazis, which would be uncomfortable even for (most of) them. But it also helps them disguise what they want in another way. Their appeal to a particular historical period as ideal keeps them (and us) from recognizing what might be the most important fact about this historical period: it’s when most of Trump’s supporters were children. What they really want is to get back under tutela. They’d impose it on themselves if they could, but that’s impossible, so they elect politicians to do it for them. Getting someone else to impose tutela on you is, at the personal scale, just a kink; at the national level, it’s fascism.

The views I’ve just expressed fit oddly with the way adulthood works in actual right-wing rhetoric. There, the grown-up in the room is usually some dweeb like Ben Shapiro telling infantilized “millenials” (the unholy persistence of that generational name being another can of worms entirely) to stop throwing tantrums about whatever today’s grievance is. That brings up a real schism at the center of right-wing thought. Trump voters want to be coddled like children – remember, most of them love social programs, and Trump stood out from the Republican field in 2016 by promising to keep his hands off of Social Security – but they also want to be respected like adults, to monopolize adulthood for themselves.

Can they have it both ways? That’s the promise of a uniquely American form of fascism, one that owes as much to Jim Crow and the Antebellum South as it does to 1930’s Europe. For the most part, Trump voters don’t dream of an all-white America – and this is why they can tell themselves they’re not racist. They just want an America where being white entitles you to respect from everybody else, where minorities know their place in line (to borrow Arlie Hochschild’s forceful metaphor) is at the back. Grown-ups first, which is actually how dinner used to be served in most American households (and probably still is in the atavistic swamps of Alabama, or whatever.)

A fantasy of childhood surrounded by a fantasy of adulthood – but they’re both fantasies, and that’s why the Trump movement is ultimately a rejection of the kind of adulthood that Kant talks about. Trump voters want to be deceived about their own value, like children are. Children, of course, don’t generally know that they’re being deceived, at least until they get an obvious signal of that, like a participation trophy, which is why those have gotten to be such a bug up Fox News’ ass – not because they spoil children, but because they destroy an illusion which viewers of Fox News would also like to enjoy. As adults, they know that children get lied-to all the time about how great they are; forgetting that fact would be an essential step toward becoming children again themselves, toward feeling like they were worth something again.

Why take that backward flight? There’s a dark side to Kantian enlightenment from the perspective of our self-worth: our self-imposed tutelage was all about us, but the real world’s nothing like that. One after another, a series of Copernican Revolutions decenters us until we realize we’re not even the protagonists of our own life stories: we’ve been working for some other asshole the whole time. Does it actually have to be this way? Not if emancipation follows upon enlightenment, not if we get the freedom to use the powers of which enlightenment has already made us aware. Capitalism is the blockage that keeps us from full freedom. It forces us into subservience, actually, in a way that strips us of even the real independence that the enlightenment-era bourgeoisie enjoyed (on which, more later.) The result is a form of adulthood that, for most people, seems grim and grey by comparison with the technicolor Disneyland we’ve built for children. No wonder some people want to go back.

My favorite part of Works and Days is the bit where Hesiod patiently explains how, even though fish and beasties and birds eat one another, we don’t do that – because Zeus gave us justice, which is way better than cannibalism (δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη γίγνεται.) Sure – but what are the hors d’oeuvres like?

I take this kind of closely with my favorite part of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is where Aristotle starts talking about things that we’d probably characterize as tabloid headlines or urban legends. The one that sticks out in particular for me is the story about the slave who ate his fellow-slave’s liver, just because of the effort you would have had to go to. That’s one of a few in this section of the EN that feature cannibalism, a practice that was supposed to be limited to other, non-human animals. And what’s the heading that brings all these stories together? The vice that Aristotle’s trying to illustrate is theriodes, or beastliness.

It’s true that, maybe, sometimes, humans can be a little animalistic too. That reminds me of a story about Mt. Lykaion, first told by Plato in the Republic and recently sort of confirmed by archaeological evidence. Every year, people go up to the top of the mountain and eat some stew, but it’s a bit of a lottery, because some of the meat is from human sacrifice. Whoever eats it gets turned into a wolf; the only way for them to turn human again is to abstain, as a wolf, from human flesh for a period of about ten years. If eating people makes you an animal, not eating them, in turn, makes you a human being.

There’s a kind of a puzzle here, though we (modern, Western observers) may have to look pretty hard to see it. Herodotus can help: he tells a story aobut Darius getting some Greeks together with some Kallatians (a tribe from India) and asking the former how much money they’d take to eat their dead parents. Of course, they just won’t do it. The punchline comes when Darius asks the Kallati, who eat their parents as a matter of custom (οἳ τοὺς γονέας κατεσθίουσι), how much he’d have to pay them to cremate their parents like the Greeks. They’re just as freaked out about that possibility as the Greeks were about endocannibalism. From some points of view, not eating people looks weird. Why do the Greeks make such a big deal out of it?

One possibility is the kind of social nightmare (I think) envisioned by Hesiod and Aristotle, where we’d just be eating each other all the time if we let ourselves do it one. Giacomo Leopardi works out this fantasy in a short work called “The Wager of Prometheus,” where the latter finds out that humans in general weren’t really worth sacrificing his liver for. At one stage, he travels to the New World and finds it almost entirely depopulated by cannibalism: human flesh is too good to resist once you’ve tried it, so gluttony takes over and everyone gets eaten.

The worry is that cannibalism might turn out to be a natural desire (like any other kind of eating, some Greeks think) rather than a social practice. In other words, you might not be able to make distinctions about who to eat. Cannibalism might be like man being a wolf to man, which is no basis for a social collective. There are, of course, some pretty important counterexamples in the Odyssey, like the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones, both groups of giants who eat outsiders while sparing their own, but these are basically represented as monsters.*

We know from those stories, as from others (the cosmogonic fable in Plato’s Protagoras, any number of maiden/sea-monster myths) that the Greeks thought of themselves as maybe especially delicious. In any case, they thought that animals and monsters were always out to eat them. Was a sense of their own nice flavor actually part of Greek identity? And did these beliefs about human deliciousness make cannibalism seem more taboo than other taboo activities? You get plenty of incest on the tragic stage, e.g., but not much cannibalism.

However that may be, we now know quite a lot about the effectiveness of cannibalism for mediating social organization. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in particular has written extensively about how exocannibalism, the hostile kind of cannibalism which the Greeks most feared, contributes to forming affinal or potential-marriage bonds in Amazonian societies. Socialized cannibalism is all about making choices: whom you can eat, whom you can’t. As such, it’s also a way to recruit new socii.

With the Greeks, it’s basically the opposite: cannibalism is how you recruit enemies. Or rather, since all forms of socially-acceptible eating are by definition not cannibalism, that is not the eating of a being like you, eating something is a way of making it an enemy, an outside to your society. In most cases, that’s a state of affairs rather than an etiology; where it does become etiological, as with Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave, the enemy eats you first. How to justify our eating of sheep and goats and things, which can’t possibly have tried to eat us first? They ate our crops, so we escalated proportionally. The Cyclops, however, might want to take advantage of that logic by asserting that Odysseus ate his cheese before he ate Odysseus’ men, also a proportionate escalation.

In the end, there’s no consistent logic behind these social structures. The point is just that the structures themselves can be used as a logic, recruited for talking about other things – justice, for instance, or vice or gift-exchange. To the extent that you can support them with the threat of cannibalism, you’ve managed to sell them to the Greeks and, pari passu, to us. But you have to wonder what a cannibal would make of Hesiod’s plea on behalf of dike. Would he be forced to assume that fish, beasts and birds were somehow human, and that the non-cannibal anthropoi in this passage represent quite another species?

*interestingly, Aristotle in the Politics seems to read the cyclopes as particularly isolated human beings rather than as monsters. But then, pace Homer, he denies them any social cohesion.

In most of the world, pretty much no one displays the flag. The only people who do are psychotic nationalist/fascists, e.g. Spaniards who want Franco back. By this standard, obviously, the USA stands out as strange. Not only do plenty of us fly the flag on our houses; up until a few years ago, politicians couldn’t even go on television without displaying the flag somewhere on their persons. So, what’s wrong with us?

One right-ish but over-simplistic conclusion to draw would be that we actually are, for the most part, psychotic nationalist/fascists. That’s true, but the value of the flag as signalling that in particular gets a bit worn down when everybody wears it. The US equivalent of that kind of flag-waving, the kind that outs you to your neighbors as someone to keep the kids away from, would be flying the Nazi flag (or the thin blue line flag, which is basically the same thing). That’ll make you stand out; just flying the regular old American flag is too commonplace to mark you as a real weirdo.

Some people might say, too, that people picked up on the flag as a sign of resistance to whatever it was that 9/11 symbolized. That gets the timing about right, at least for politicians wearing flag pins. But then, since that “trauma” has “faded,”* how come the flag epidemic just keeps getting worse? And how come people are, more and more, just openly and aggressively patriotic, like being from America should get you some kind of fucking prize?

Like most things in American life, I think this trend is generally connected to the economy and more specifically connected to the recession that started in 2008. Patriotism in the US has always been kind of a rube’s game, the thing they use to get you to die overseas so that GE can keep selling fridges on the Korean peninsula. After Vietnam, this got pretty hard to deny: from the way that patriotism got used to exploit people, people drew the correct conclusion that only an idiot would be patriotic. So why return to it? Patriotism’s a last resort when you don’t have anything else; maybe you finally would like that long shot at getting a prize just for being born in the US of A.

As long as people couldn’t see through it, patriotism was the last resort of scoundrels; now that the jig is up, it’s the last resort of losers. The new patriotism isn’t so much about getting other people to do stuff as it is about getting yourself to do stuff, like get out of bed in the morning. It’s cheaper than antidepressants. That’s the booby prize for living in a rigged economy that’s iced you out of a real wage increase for going on 50 years and is really just about to get around to replacing you with a robot.

I talk about all this like it’s a bad thing – which for me, as an internationalist and someone who clings to an ethical standard beyond “my country, right or wrong or building concentration camps,” it obviously is. But it’s not like I can’t see the appeal. If I got a little thrill of validation every time the state applied violent solutions to imaginary threats, I’d be feeling great right now. If you have no inner resources, patriotism is a great solution to the problem of being unemployed or underemployed at the end of time. And the dominant form of psychic warfare in America right now, as I’ve argued before, hinges on whether we can just ignore our neighbors’ patriotism or whether we have at least to pay attention to it, if not take it seriously. In that fight, the flag isn’t just a symbol but also a weapon.

*i.e. we’ve lost the initial buzz of national solidarity, but kept all the bad parts like airport security lines

There’s nothing more boring than people talking about their dreams. I’ve got to talk about this one, though, because it’s apparently not just mine. Last night, I dreamed that the Earth was about to get hit by a meteor big enough to cause human extinction. I had a line on a seat on a spaceship offworld, but I’d missed the bus to get to the launch and I wasn’t sure I could make it in time by cab.

I woke up before the meteor hit, so I never got to find out whether I made it or not. That’s not always the way these dreams go: so far, I’m about 50/50 on catching the spaceship. The other half of the time, I just get blown up along with everyone else.

Is this a collective dream? At least it’s a political one. I always have it when I’ve been paying too much attention to elections. One time, my ride on the spaceship was supposed to be courtesy of a community organizer I knew. Instead, he showed up with a rowboat. That was one of the dreams where I got blown up.

Is it a collective dream? Yes, to judge from the bumper stickers that were everywhere during the last presidential election: “Giant Meteor 2016.” Extinction is better than politics. That’s not exactly a tongue-in-cheek sentiment, especially if you think that politics is maybe now just a longer, more terrifying route to extinction anyway.

I don’t think we’re going to see those stickers get updated for 2020, even if Biden wins the Democratic nomination. Politics is serious now; we grew up somehow in the last four years, and we don’t treat Trump like a joke anymore. The most important thing is beating him.

This is actually a dangerous attitude, though – not taking politics seriously, which is extremely appropriate, but extending that seriousness uncritically to the presidential contenders. The fact that we’re ready to do that makes us smell desperate, which is what got desperate grifters like Seth Moulton to jump in the water. Campaigns that we’d otherwise instantly dismiss as shameful vanity projects now advance, under the cover of seriousnesss, onto the national stage. Pete Buttigieg ought to be starring in a Little Rascals reboot; instead, he’s polling a bit shy of ten percent.

Buttigieg won’t win, but likely as not the end of the primary process will spit out a candidate as vain and empty as he is – someone like Biden, who won’t do a damn thing to roll back Trump’s most vile policies but who’ll make us feel better about them by not talking like a brain-damaged Nazi. You can bet Biden isn’t going to abolish ICE; he’ll just make us forget that we’re running concentration camps for children.

Is that “seriousness?” No, it’s seriousness as performance, both on Biden’s part and ours. In a Trump/Biden race, we’ll be asked to make a choice between putting a smily face on fascism or leaving the mask off. If we pretend that’s a real choice, then that’s the choice we’ll keep getting sold for the foreseeable future.

I’d want Giant Meteor to be running in that race. Hell, I want Giant Meteor to be running in the Democratic primary. New debate rule: any candidate who can’t beat mass extinction in all the national and state polls doesn’t make it onto the stage. If Giant Meteor wins, NASA has to go find an appropriately-sized rock and smash it into the Earth. If it loses, put it back in the next presidential election cycle. We should always get the chance to choose the fast route to oblivion, just so we don’t take the slow one by accident.

Some truly horrifying shit this week from Phillip Jeffery, writing in National Affairs and calling for a new national cultural agenda. Like a lot of us, Jeffery thinks that the free-market modernism pushed covertly by the CIA and then openly by the NEA was a bad thing, both for the world and for the arts. Where we part ways, though, is why. I think that government sponsorship of the arts tends to make sure that the arts aren’t ever going to be revolutionary, either aesthetically or politically. Jeffery’s problem with the NEA is, instead, that it’s ended up enforcing a kind of “cosmopolitan” (with all the nasty connotations that word now carries on the far right) high culture on a small-town America that, basically, knows better.

The absolutely deranged solution that Jeffery proposes (with an obligatory lib-bating nod to the WPA) is that the NEA start directing its grants explicitly toward small-town artists, artists whom Jeffery expects to produce an anti-cosmopolitcan art that’s in line with Donald Trump’s agenda of American renewal. You (and he) are already imagining the national nightmare that would ensue: bookstore shelves stocked with Mitch Albom fanfiction, art museum walls decked out in nothing but patchwork quilts.

Can we have a reality check or two? First, America already produces a whole bunch of not-exactly-nativist but surely not cosmopolitan artwork. Americans make weird music and write weird books, both pitched to a domestic audience but enjoyed abroad because the USA (and not France, pace one of Jeffery’s weirdest claims) still leads the dance of global culture like it has since the fifties. The vast majority of this art comes from cities, because that’s where the vast majority of Americans live.

Second, there’s not actually any small-town culture to support. I say this as someone who was born in one small town and has lived in a bunch of others. Locally, there’s absolutely nothing but dinner theater and cover bands; the vast majority of the culture that small-town America consumes gets beamed in from above; the monoculture is a tall tree that’s already killed all the rural saplings struggling in its shadow. Jeffery notes that the WPA focused on rural culture because that culture already seemed to be disappearing in the 1930’s, but doesn’t draw the obvious consequence that rural culture is, by now, long-disappeared. What’s replaced it is mostly Fox and Sinclair Media and Clearchannel; if you asked small-town America to make art now, that’s about what you’d get.

I suspect that’s also what Jeffery wants, and that this plea for the revivification of small-town culture actually disguises a right-wing project for propaganda from below. Even thus conceived, though, it won’t work: the impulses that Jeffery wants to capture are already getting expressed on Facebook, and posting is a lot easier than making art.

Still, it’s worth asking what a left culture policy to counterbalance this one would look like. A good start would be to adopt an idea mooted by the late Paul S. Martin, a distinguished Cenozoic paleontologist. In his final book, he suggested that the midwest and great plains regions of the USA should be re-wilded, first with buffalo and then, when technology catches up to our ambition, with cloned wooly mammoths. I propose extending this policy nationwide and just bulldozing every town with a population of less than 30,000 that isn’t also a near exurb of a major city. With that range of habitats, we could probably bring back the full range of quaternary North American megafauna. Giant armadillos, giant sloths, cute little horses. Doesn’t that beat going on a family vacation to York, Nebraska?

The cultural angle here is twofold. First, of course, paintings of mammoths, but then also the idea that getting rid of small towns would at this point be doing artists a big favor. Small towns are a repository for the most atavistic, backwards ideas in the national discourse; because one of those ideas is that small towns represent “real America,” they also get assigned an importance in the national conversation (why does Iowa get to have the first presidential primary?) that’s totally out of proportion to their share of the national population, which is around 10%. The always apparently looming threat of small-townism has the effect of making really radical socio-economic transformations of the sort that most Americans actually support seem impossible, so we end up stuck with a neo-liberal compromise formation that, even if it doesn’t help most urban residents, at least holds back the fascist tide.

But what if we could see that the fascist tide was really more of a trickle? What if small-town ideas had a place in the cultural conversation that actually matched their place in American demography? People would feel freer to experiment, I bet, in art as well as in politics. We might get more novelists like Thomas Pynchon, writing imaginative grand Americana, and fewer mediocrities like Jonathan Franzen stooping to the prejudices of an imaginary small-town audience.

That’s maybe not too practical a recommendation in the current political climate. On the other hand, the actual climate is changing in ways that make what I’m suggesting (minus the megafauna) basically inevitable. The small towns of the southeast, midwest and great plains are going to be uninhabitable by the end of the century, and small towns in the deep south are going to be a lot more unpleasant to live in (where they’re not underwater). At least the end of the world comes with a small silver lining.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that society didn’t exist. What she meant by that isn’t what she literally said – Thatcher was in for reactionary defense of “social values” as much as any right-wing cracker from that era – but rather that society didn’t have any interests worth defending. That’s true in a sense, but only after you’ve bought into a lot of other mythology about interests. In particular, the unspoken thought behind Thatcher’s quip is that individuals do have interests worth defending: in the Thatcherite idiom, that they “exist.”

That basic assumption is one that it’s hard for Westerners – and not just econ majors – to think past. The problem is that we have an idea in our head that society is a kind of force constraining individuals not to act on their “interests,” which are given. That image of society can probably be traced back to the enlightenment, which generalized a view of society as contract which had been advocated by Hobbes and raised, but dismissed, by Hobbes’ main bugbear, Aristotle. On that view, society exists as a compact of mutual self-defense by which its members agree to a curtailment of what can legitimately count as their interests so as not to fall victim to the interests of their neighbors. Adam Smith took over this view in the main, only adding that, actually, the social contract doesn’t need to curtail our interests at all, since the universal pursuit of self-interest creates a self-sustaining system. Mainstream arguments between individualists and collectivists have been carried on in those terms ever since: the interests of society (synthetic) on the one hand, those of individuals (natural, given) on the other.

I’m thinking about this now because that’s basically also the social image that E.R. Dodds imposes on the Greeks in The Greeks and the Irrational. By sheer coincidence, it happens to be close enough to the Greeks’ own social image not to be all that deeply distorting, but it’s worth asking where the differences lie. Greek thought pictures society as a koinonia, a res communis, a community in the somewhat archaic sense of “that which one shares in common.” That means, not that society is what we all have in common, but that the things that we have in common – materially, spatially, linguistically or, at the utmost level of abstraction, teleologically- are what produces us as a collective. Is there such a thing as society? Yes, on this depiction, of course there is. Are you going to tell me there’s no such thing as paving stones? As public slaves? As the Greek language?

At about the same time as Thatcher was doing a set of activities that she characterized as privileging individual interests over the (non-existent?) interests of society, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern was making a similar kind of claim from a very different perspective. Looking at Melanesian subjects, it seemed to her that perhaps there really was no such thing as society – not for them, at any rate. While we confront society as something external and given, most Melanesian peoples regard it as the object of their production – as actually needing to be produced constantly through practices of exchange, among which the kula made famous by Bronislaw Malinowski would have to be numbered. That gift-exchange system did not, contrary to what Malinowski tried to show from a functionalist standpoint, allow a given society to survive; instead, it produced that society in a way that ensured the survival of its individual members.

That point is in a way more obviously true when it comes to Greek practices of xenia, especially in the archaic period and to the extent that Homer counts as evidence for these. Odysseus justifies his request for gifts from the Phaeacians not by making reference to a pre-existing society that unites them, but by appealing to the Phaeacians’ own interest in receiving good treatment if they, in a similar case, should ever wash up on the shores of Ithaca. Xenia doesn’t preserve a society, it produces one. If xenia could seem a bit atavistic from the point of view of Aristotle, that was only because the classical social image represented society as an accumulation of stationary objects rather than moving ones. It was still the things that produced the relations.

If we could learn to think about our own society in a slightly more material way, this would probably be salutary. We would not, for instance, ever be in danger of falling under the Thatcherite delusion that you can help people out by taking their side against “society.” After all, society is just made of the things that we hold in common. From an anthropologically-informed standpoint, that’s like saying you’re going to help someone out by setting their house on fire (or, in Thatcher’s case, by giving their house to someone else.)

Unfortunately, time’s running out for this. The reason is that tech people have started to literalize the most awful and backwards things about the enlightenment image of society. Twenty years ago, if you’d said “society is oppressing me,” you would have been using a metaphor. Now, you’re just talking about facebook: there really are all-encompassing, contractual (though the contracts are a bit more coercive than Rousseau might have hoped) fields that organize us as a collective, and these really do have coercive authority to curtail us from pursuing our interests too aggressively. Moreover, “society” in this sense really does turn out to have interests of its own, which include selling our eyeballs for ad views. Rousseau definitely wouldn’t have seen that coming.

In any case, the fact that we’re a long way from the General Will shouldn’t stop us from seeing the genealogical connection. The modern internet in many ways completes enlightenment project, stripped of every noble aspiration and repeated as farce. In this topsy-turvy world, Margaret Thatcher’s reactionary claim that society doesn’t exist turns into a salutary reminder, soon perhaps just the expression of a nostalgic wish.