Stoicism Won’t Save Us
I’ve been having some trouble for a few days now parsing the latest from Jonathan Malesic, intended as some sort of warning against something I missed him writing about before, which he terms “liberal nihilism” and defines as “self-imposed helplessness in the face of the supposedly immovable oppressive structures of the world”.
My idea what that a lot of well-intentioned people over-describe the forces of oppression in the world out of concern for the downtrodden. But when you say, over and over, that racism or patrarchy or capitalist exploitation are always and everywhere crushing the people beneath them, you leave yourself little room to mitigate these forces. If the world is as these well-intentioned folk describe it, then why bother trying to improve things? It won’t do any good.
The solution Malesic offers is a bit of Stoicism (despite admitting that “there is much to criticize about the stoic point of view”), specifically the idea that we should be able to distinguish between what is and is not “up to us” and focus our energies and attentions on the former, letting the latter, I guess, take care of itself.
So: Don’t get too worked up about the motion of the planets. They are not up to you. Don’t bet on sports — or, if you do, don’t pat yourself on the back when you win money, and don’t get upset when you lose. Neither outcome was up to you. Don’t worry about your reputation; that’s other people’s problem, not yours.
Citing an essay by Rachel M. Cohen for Vox, Malesic decries the idea that people working for systematic change might be belittling smaller actions, even if (as in an example Cohen mentions) it really is true that the idea of the carbon footprint was devised by the petroleum industry as part of its sleight-of-hand to get everyone worried about their own, individual contributions to climate change while said industry merrily continued along in its rapacious and extractive rampage across the planet.
Anyway, here’s the actual, specific thing that got me all squirrelly and distracted for the past couple of days:
I think it’s fair to say that Cohen is responding to a broad-based failure to accurately differentiate between what is up to us and what is not up to us. “Ending patriarchy” is not up to you, but, if you happen to work in corporate HR, writing a paid family leave policy that you think your company’s board will accept might be.
Hang on.
Hold up.
Who, exactly, is it up to, this matter of ending patriarchy? Aliens? God? The coming artificial superintelligence just before everything collapses into the post-human Singularity? None of these things are coming to save us. There is only you, and me, and the us that we make together, across all of those additive yous and mes from sea to shining sea.
Back in June, Charlie Jane Anders wrote about optimism, except that what she really wanted to talk about was hope:
In other words, optimism is a mindless faith in our own ingenuity and the infallibility of the systems we design. Meanwhile, hope is an active determination to do everything we can to make things better, even in the face of insurmountable challenges.
Anders spends a bit of time talking about climate change in this context, itself within the larger context of human nature, but the initial reason I wanted to bring Anders into this at all to begin with (it’s not to critique her the way I am Malesic, if that’s unclear) was because Malesic was talking about patriarchy—something Anders correctly diagnosis as basically inextricable from the climate crisis.
Again, I don’t think weakening the patriarchy, on its own, will fix the damage we’re doing to our own habitat. I think it’s going to take a lot of change in a lot of areas, over a period of time. But I think it’s one of the things that needs to happen, both for the dignity of all human life and for the embrace of a different kind of leadership. So I draw some hope from the fact that the patriarchy seems really scared right now. Men are irradiating their own testicles, they’re so freaked out. It’s undeniably terrifying to be on the receiving end of that backlash — and I’m scared a lot of people are going to get hurt — but it is a backlash. Really, when I hang out with Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, and see so much casual queerness and so much acceptance of gender non-conformity, it makes me feel like maybe the army of screaming men are right to clutch their pearls.
(Sorry, I’ll be right back after I follow a link in the original to find out why the men are irradiating their own testicles. Oh, right, of course: Tucker Carlson.)
That dangerous and dehumanizing backlash is the sound of patriarchy flailing as our society takes steps beyond it, as hesitant and as “not soon enough” as those steps might be. But, if “ending patriarchy” is “not up to us”, then how is this happening? Why, exactly, is patriarchy manically and obsessively lashing out, desperately trying to maintain its grip? That’s not just happening, somehow, on its own.
Anders:
Which brings us back to faith in human nature. A simple model of human behavior would assume that once people are confronted with inescapable evidence of a sweeping problem, they would drop everything and come together to fix the problem ASAP. That scenario massively underestimates the human capacity for denial. Not to mention the fact that people have a hard time imagining futures that are radically different than the past, and tend to discount negative information about the future.
Malesic:
It’s probably sometimes true that small actions can distract from the big picture, as activists claimed a decade ago. But I think that, more often, the big-picture things beyond your control distract from the smaller-scale things within your control. The first step, in any case, is to be clear about which is which.
What I think actually has been happening is that liberals and the left simply have not done a good enough job in organizing the opposition to the “racism or patriarchy or capitalist exploitation [that] are always and everywhere crushing the people beneath them”, and has too much bought into the self-same individualist mythology that those forces of rot themselves foster and depend upon for their very survival, as well as to an extent professionalized activism to the point where rather than energizing and organizing people, it just wants us to donate and then go back to our recycling.
I’ve still got a lot of posts to import here, but if you’ve been reading me for while, you know that over the past year I’ve talked a lot about the idea that only building both solidarity and capacity can get us out of this mess. There are stories that need telling that draw the connection between the ways in which we know we should be treating each other face-to-face and the ways we should be making new structures for how we treat each other writ large (while reforming or destroying the old ones), that as they stand today only ever want us thinking about ourselves.
Atomization into personal choices can’t get us there alone, at least in part because it’s atomization into personal choices that got us where we are. Liberals and the left need to stop being scared of real organization, of real mobilization. The reality is that the cracks in, say, patriarchy happened because people are getting better at seeing a better future, and also because there really are activists out there—and, yes, even politicians—who have been pursuing that better future.
The twisted paradox in Anders’ piece is that the patriarchal backlash right now becomes a kind of hope in that its very existence means they are suddenly afraid of losing, of actually losing, but it’s also the case that the change itself is happening because just enough people had just enough hope in that better world to cause the reactive paroxysm in the first place, and that violent reaction only led more people to think they could help to defeat at least some part of patriarchy’s stranglehold.
Change is happening because of hope, not optimism, and people are really, really good, actually, at seizing upon activated hope if given the opportunity to do so—because that’s the operative word here. It’s probably true that people don’t “drop everything and come together to fix the problem” simply because they’ve been “confronted with inescapable evidence” for it.
What they need is the opportunity to act.
It’s why people do respond to personal, individual appeals to things like recycling, or “adopt don’t shop”: we want to fix things. They—we, I guess—don’t act more largely and expansively because both the system we are in and too many of the structures fighting it don’t give us enough opportunity to act. Not just the chance to like, donate, and subscribe, but actually to act. We know people are hurting for it: just witness the massive Black Lives Matter uprising—in the middle of the enforced asociality of a global pandemic.
That plaintive cry for racial and other kinds of justice didn’t fail because everyone suddenly decided that institutional “racism” isn’t “up to us”. It was smothered by a return to the business as usual of the personal and individual, rather than channeled into lasting action for lasting change.
The small things and the big things matter alike, in their own spheres and in their own ways, but if you’re suggesting that the big things somehow are someone else’s problem, or worse yet just sort of ungraspable and best left, I guess, to the forces of history?
You’re the nihilist.