Coming Unstuck

Some thoughts

I.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a sense that things are coming apart, unglued, breaking, unstuck. The post-war consensus is dead, and something new slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. The pandemic forced us to forget parts of society. And they haven’t come back. There’s a sense that the compact with society is breaking as the government seems to orient itself ever more toward transfers from the young and productive to the old and unproductive. That’s not how it’s supposed to work - or, more accurately, that’s not what the implicit promise was.

There are a lot of emotions swirling. It is common to see the rejoinder “don’t you have empathy?” on the left and “don’t you care about Americans?” on the right. But this is all a tale told by an idiot. The meta-irony which pervades everything from memes to the very conversations we have with each other makes it impossible to actually believe anything sincerely, or as part of anything other than a winkingly ironic posture.

We shout at each other because there is no actual content to our politics. Yuval Levin wrote that our politics is sick because of nostalgia. What he meant was that every debate we have is just a refraction of eternal debates American society has been having since 1968. In endless curlicues and epicycles, we refight the same battles of the boomer generation. Is America a force for good in the world? Is the American experiment intrinsically evil? Should we apologise for the sins of the past? What kind of deal should we give to the less fortunate among us? Are our universities working? On, and on, and on. Forget actually debating the issues which face us in Britain, either. America has eaten the world and all our specific debates too.

Recently, these epicycles have become tighter and tighter. One remarkable feature of the present moment is that we are re-enacting debates that are not just within living memory but even feature precisely the same actors. It seems as if the institutional left is coalescing around the idea that the reason that they lost is their insufficient ability to enter the information space. This has come to be referenced with the slogan “liberals need their own Joe Rogan.”

But all of this is just the same debate which occurred in the middle and late November of 2016. Reeling from an incomprehensible loss, the institutional left concluded that they lost because of misinformation and disinformation, fake news. This became a matter of happy consensus.

It is the same debate, in the same words, about the same exact people. The same pitfalls, the same mistakes, the same brain death. We are stuck.

II.

When I was entirely too young to understand it, I read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that book, there’s a meditation on what it means to be stuck. Robert Pirsig, the author, described stuckness as the zero moment of consciousness. The total mental blank is what makes stuckness so frustrating. You’re out of ideas. Lethargic. Demotivated.

For nigh-on 60 years, we in the West have been stuck. We feel stuck in our politics because we’ve regressed to voting for people we hate marginally less rather than anybody we actually feel enthusiastic about. We feel stuck creatively, reflected most obviously in the fact that the vast majority of the movies in our cinemas are remakes, reboots, and adaptations. But also reflected in the fact that even the most apparently transgressive of art has just become a boring vehicle for politically correct (in the Leninist sense) bromides. And, most crucially, we feel stuck in our present state of technology and social progression. We unleashed forces we are powerless to control and then ran out of ideas on what to do next.

All of these things have been reflected in our politics. There has been basically nothing legitimately novel in decades. There is a reason that the entire institutional right is hypnotised by Reagan, because that is the last time it felt like the institutional right had any sort of intellectual vitality.

The consequence of all of this stuckness is that intelligent and creative individuals have gravitated toward increasingly extreme views, just to be able to transgress. The dissident right have had a near monopoly on actually new ideas for about two decades. This has been disastrous, because it means that the most vital and energetic politics today is entirely practiced by schizophrenic anonymous racists.

This phrasing matters because some like to frame the present moment as a decline or a collapse. If you listen to the Chinese, the West is just in terminal decline, the experiment is out of juice. If you listen to the groyper right, the West is in terminal decline because [INSERT RACIST COMMENT], and so on. But both of these are wrong, because they are both still stuck. The Chinese are stuck huffing the fumes of the decaying corpse of Marxism. The far right are just resurrecting white nationalism, which is also a total intellectual dead end and we’ve known that for at least 80 years.

Sure, in relative terms, a stuck society is declining. Most obviously this happens physically, with an aging society which takes every problem with the social compact and stresses it a thousand times more. But it is all a symptom of the same disease, which is that modern life is totally denuded of energy, of power, of vitality, of forward momentum.

III.

It takes some time for an era to end. One of the ironies of history is that it’s only possible to see a consensus after that consensus is broken, or already faltering. The Washington Consensus is an obvious example; it lasted a mere 15 years until it was already time to write heavily cited articles about how the Washington Consensus was dead. But the frog is often boiled very slowly. If one is very attentive, one might see the water pulling back from the shore as the tsunami approaches, but it only becomes undeniable once the seaside village is shattered.

In our times, the breaking wave usually comes in the form of an event. The resurrection of Donald Trump from the dead is just this event. I want to be clear - I do not necessarily believe that the man himself is the cause. But his re-election is what marks the end of the post-war order. Not because he will tear it up - actually he is unlikely to fundamentally reshape politics in the US because there is so much inertia in the system. But in the mere fact that he could win, and win so big, despite being so unacceptable - that shows that the old world is dead.

The European system as old Europe had known it died in World War One, but it took the rise of Hitler to sound its death knell. Napoleon killed the old order of Europe with the levee en masse, but it took the formation of Germany and the rise of Bismarck to sound its death knell. The old order between Sparta and Athens was already dead but it took the death of Pericles to sound the death knell. The Qing dynasty might have fallen but it took the accession of the would-be despot Yuan Shikai to sound the death knell.

IV.

There is no paradigm shift and there will be no paradigm shift. That is simply not how the world works. But things are coming to a head.

We discussed at the beginning the idea of a world aflame, of coming apart, coming unglued. This is a curse because it is a world that is less peaceful, and lurking in the background there is always the possibility of Armageddon. But it is a blessing for this reason; finally, what comes next is not clear. We are unstuck, but also un-stuck.

In Britain, part of the reason why the Conservative government were turned out was because they were intellectually exhausted. The sum total of what happened in the last few months of the government was nothing. One reason people voted for Labour was because of the feeling that they might actually do something about the problems which face the country.

This impulse, for somebody, anybody, to just do something, is often termed fascist. But this is wrong. It is the crying out of the human spirit to be unstuck. It’s an articulation of the inarticulate frustration in the moment of stuckness.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the return of the political.

V.

We do not have to cede the field to the schizophrenic racist anons of the far right, or the brainwashed zombies of the far left. We’d only do so if it was because it is only those extremists who believe in anything, or at least profess to do so. The centre will hold, if only we can summon the effort to will it so.

Liberal democracy has succeeded because it submerges conflict under a veneer of getting rich. But when citizens no longer believe that the system can be trusted to make them rich, the political floats back to the top.

We are stuck because we are in endless epicycles designed to escape this brute fact, with talk of Marxist class consciousness or of populism or other such fictions. Wise politicians seek to balance the system in order to resolve conflict. But we have had foolish politicians who seek to dampen the system in order to prevent conflict. This is exactly the wrong approach, and it is one reason why we have been stuck for so long.

People used to be terrified of the train rushing toward them on the movie screen and flee the theatre, and now it is light entertainment. So too with politics. People were rightly terrified of the consequences of politics because elections actually had consequences. But in the ironic age, it is all a LARP driven by politics as entertainment for bored people living lives which the Sun King would have described as excessive.

It is time for a return of seriousness and an end of irony. Now is the time when we have to truly believe in something, anything.

Coda

Herodotus puts into the mouth of Cyrus this saying, upon being asked if the Persians should conquer other lands:

“Go ahead and do this, but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil.”

In degenerated form, this has become the meme:

Strong men, good times

Good times, weak men

Weak men, hard times

Hard times, strong men

This is, of course, completely wrong. History is not a cycle or an epicycle, and we’re not fated to improve or degenerate. People who reach for memes like that are seeking comfort in the fantasy of declinism or the blind belief of cyclical history. Things will eventually improve, we are told, because they must. Or they will get worse, because they must, and all there is left is to enjoy the ride.

No, things stay stuck unless there is an herculean collective act of will to unstick them. We are unstuck, unglued, and the system which comforted us for decades is coming apart at the seams, every element of it failing all at once in an unimaginable polycrisis. The world is terrifying because it is unpredictable. But it is also invigorating because it is unpredictable.

There is something of Kierkegaard, so wise, in all of this. His leap into faith was belief in God, but it was also a belief in committing to anything. The leap to God is a leap to the only thing which someone might be able to believe in seriously. The world is coming unstuck, which is a blessing. If we would like to keep it from coming apart then it is time to believe in something again.