The search for meaning, political and otherwise.
Via “Children of Our Age,” by Wislawa Szymborska, and the (oft-quoted) “The Culture of Narcissism” (again!) by Christopher Lasch.
Apologies! This essay is a day late! Blame it on a glitch in the matrix, a lack of autosave, which caused me to lose half this essay to an abyss. I was forced to rewrite it to the best of my abilities in less than a day. It’s obviously a timely one, but it mostly provided me the opportunity to share with you one of my favorite poems, from one of my favorite poets, Wislawa.
“Children of Our Age,” by Wislawa Szymborska
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
and though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
Does the political provide us with meaning? Or are we are the ones tasked with bestowing politics, and thus, politicians (or any idea or person, for that matter) its value?
Watch any party convention—Republican and Democrat alike—and it might prove the former true, with its pure spectacle and bedazzled pageantry, its nauseating optics, its cultish sense of belonging. Politics give us meaning, a value system, an identity.
Less than a week ago, a bullet perforated Donald Trump’s right ear. If said bullet had traveled only an inch or so left, it could have pierced through the side of his skull and tore into his brain matter with devastating consequence. A terrifying and historic moment, indeed. According to video from the scene, the first bullet clipped the outer contours of his ear and his hand reflexively went up to investigate, found blood. As he registered more bullets were flying—a surreal experience that could only rely on instinct, as the brain would need time to catch up with reality—he collapsed to the ground for safety, as Secret Service bodies swiftly formed a circle around him. The entire event lasted mere minutes before the shooter was taken out and the bullets ceased.
But what came next is most intriguing. As officers continued to form a human barrier around him, an attempt to shield him from any residual danger, they began to lift him to his feet, to whisk him off stage, when Trump defiantly looked out into the crowd and raised his fist. It was an unbelievable act of consciousness as fresh blood still trickled from his ear to his face. The cameras flashed, the crowd cheered.
What we didn’t know at the time was that a civilian behind him proved not so auspicious, was likely already dead from another bullet that had come closer to its target—his death was supposedly instant, hopefully painless.
***
It’s hard to believe that any politician under such existential duress would be so trained in abject self-consciousness, so one with the abstraction of his own image, that his second or third impulse after being shot, after his initial, more uninhibited reaction to the tangible reality of being shot, would be to consider the image of being shot. I suspect he’s not the only one of us who would hold such a proclivity. Perhaps the shiny global panopticon we built to keep ourselves in check has officially overridden any necessary or evolutionary biological system of self-preservation. Stay alive is swiftly followed by don’t look stupid while doing so. Failing at the latter might prove more damaging to the self. Because there are cameras, of course!
In Christopher Lasch’s (oft quoted on this Substack and elsewhere—and here once again, sorry!) The Culture of Narcissism, he describes an increasingly theatrical and illusory political sphere devoid of meaning, a “politics as spectacle.” The root, he argued, could be traced back to advertising, which in the early 20th century became the most useful iteration of propaganda. In a larger “society as spectacle,” the worker would become more economically useful as the most prime and valued consumer. Lasch wrote:
In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.
Worse, this spectacle of loneliness, of isolation, this construction of need meant to drive consumption not only worked to strip society of deeper meaning, but also stole away any individual autonomy to reject such a society. In a self-closing loop, it “…upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion.” Even uprising is rendered moot. “When the images of power overshadow the reality,” Lasch argues. “those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.” In a system where one is incapable of producing real change, is left with no clear channel for autonomy, no opportunity for the betterment of one’s societal conditions, even protest risks becoming theatrical, a display without meaningful end.
This has become most clear on social media, where internet activism tends toward a theatrics without solution. If nothing else, this spectacle of activism has rendered even our most sincere attempts to raise consciousness—mine included— to be viewed as disingenuous, ineffective. Any sincere concern will be bookended by targeted ads.
The replacement of deeper meaning with its representational image has seeped into every aspect of society but is most notable in politics. Lasch perceived politicians as early as Kennedy and solidifying with Nixon as relying on the ensuing distraction and confusion that spectacle brings by using language as a medium not to convey truth or authority, but more importantly to sound true and authoritative. The superficial image of leadership usurped any actual success or failure of leadership. Lasch explained,
Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality.
The year was 1979, and Lasch was obviously a prescient social critic capable of foretelling our contemporary reality, predicting the flattening of all experience and feeling into commodity, only quickened by the proliferation of social media and its hollow promise to liberate, to give voice. The internet as a whole only turned out instead to be another market for corporation and consumption, constructed as the crudest offshoot of raw Capitalism. With our behavior now aggregated into data points, we have become more readily manipulated, especially by politicians.
***
Last Saturday evening, while enjoying an early dinner with friends, the phones kept pinging. (Well, not mine, which is perpetually on silent—sorry, that’s why I don’t answer!) Someone had to check. “Sorry… I have to interrupt, because apparently…someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump?”
More shocking than the statement itself was how little we seemed moved, not because we didn’t have empathy or wished death or harm upon him, but because we had become so deeply accustomed to news of violence and spectacle. He had survived. Our dinner resumed, mostly unfazed.
***
When I ask colleagues or friends who they are voting for in the upcoming election, and most importantly, why, their logic and motivation remain notably unintelligible. They rarely provide actual policy they find moving or important, and when they do, it’s usually an abstracted version, a vague idea.
People usually prefer to define themselves politically by opposition, in relation to the other side. Those on the left persistently warn of a “fascism” of the right, of their inherent threat to democracy. Meanwhile, Liberals most recently actively suppressed student protesters and sought to even limit their speech, online and otherwise. The right persistently warns of a “socialist” and “communist” left that wants nothing more than to take inherent freedoms away (“freedom,” of course remaining vague and undefined), conflating two different ideologies as one and falsely labeling social democratic principles as, you guessed it, fascist. It would seem, then, that political language has been increasingly voided of fact and divested of meaning. If the other side is always fascist, communist, and/or socialist, without any real account of what those words and ideologies actually mean (and whether or not any leader is actually acting under these ideologies), then how are we ever to truly hold anyone accountable for policy? How might any of us determine what we desire, what we believe?
***
I immediately assumed that the assassination attempt was void of political meaning. Still, in the aftermath of the event, mass condemnations against political violence rang from every corner of Congress. Present Biden was adamant that “political violence” in America was, verbatim, “unheard of.” A few days earlier his administration had resumed shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel, who has continuously enacted mass carnage upon Palestinian civilians, the death toll purported to be somewhere close to 186,000. A most staggering act of political violence.
The shooter, unsurprisingly, was reported a loner, intelligent but odd, an outcast relentlessly bullied. Whichever candidate and their subsequent politics he would aim for didn’t seem to matter. Trump’s rally and its relative proximity seemed only a matter of convenience. It wasn’t political violence he was seeking, but spectacle, through which he hoped to secure meaning. Any personal significance would be short lived—as was his life—but would continue on in the collective conscience, in the archives of history. The shooter knew he would likely die in the act, but his would be a death of infamy. He would matter.
It didn’t quite go to plan. His attempts at wider recognition came out only half-baked. The assassination attempt has already proven a major factor in the election, having a sobering (likely, temporary) effect on political language, becoming a tool of propaganda used by both sides for different means. Attendees at the Republican National Convention were already seen wearing faux bandages over their ears in solidarity; one can already buy a t-shirt emblazoned with Trump’s bloody face, his defiant fist raised.
The shooter died, of course, but only as a historical footnote. I had to look up his name to remember. It was Thomas.
***
I’ve long pondered whether the internet has truly changed human behavior as much as we think it has, or whether it has just extracted our most terrible traits—the very worst of our inclinations—and built them up like muscle, positioned them at the forefront, made them more ruinous. Reading The Culture of Narcissism might support such an argument, as it was written long before the proliferation of the internet and can easily be applied to the contemporary.
What I think social media has done to our brains is further blunted deep thinking, severed our innate capacity for connection, urged us to continuously reflect the world right back onto ourselves. Brainwashing, isolation, and narcissism are nothing new, as Lasch described them well in 1979. The common thread is meaning, and it seems we had already begun to lose it pre-internet.
Still, I’d argue we had more shreds of it remaining before 4chan and Facebook came around. The children are lonelier, and it’s probably the internet. Our culture is more violent, and it’s also probably the internet. We are buying ourselves into oblivion, and it’s definitely the internet.
***
The question remains: has there ever been a politics worth dying for? Historically, people have died for all sorts of noble political causes, particularly for the rights of others. But what if our politics have relinquished their deeper meaning, and now serve only to represent us in image? What if they are most likely to be used only to present an idea of ourselves to a wider world?
The shooter that attempted assassination held no apparent deep-seated belief. He sought no greater meaning or purpose except personal renown. Still, the world has already begun to place more meaning upon his act than it deserves. An innocent man named Corey Comperatore died that day, and I find it most meaningful that he died during his last, most selfless act: apparently shielding his family from harm. In the upcoming months and years his family will be left with their unbearable grief. As the world moves on, the loss of their father will only burn holes in the contours of their memories.
I have watched Palestinian children die in vain for months without a political end in sight. Does their death have meaning? There are too many who have perished to name, though in the future I imagine their names will be inscribed onto some kind of memorial, erected in an attempt to atone, for what has actually happened, for what we watched occur by image alone.
It could be said that violence in and of itself has no inherent value, no real meaning, its ultimate consequence being death—a meaningless end until we decide to bestow it with something. Death is finite, corporeal, real. It goes without saying that who and what we are willing to die for should be deeply considered.
Szymborksa reminds us,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.