THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2017

The Possible Hypocrisy of Our Professed Love for Nature

I launched us off by talking about the constant tension I feel between my desire, on the one hand, to have the living world matter, really matter, for me — as a sensual experience and as a source of emotional and moral guidance — and then, on the other hand, my guilty sense that I will never stop exploiting its resources.

Don and Yann sat near me on the sofa, which is covered with the skins of multiple cows. A fire burned behind me, which happened to be fed by gas… but I confessed that I have no doubt that if it demanded logs I would happily throw another onto it when the flames grew small.

Sometimes my rapture about nature, and our insistence on our deep embeddedness in it, strikes me as… obviously hypocritical.

“Aren’t we like SS officers,” I asked, “sitting around our bunker in the death camp, talking sentimentally about how much we love the sacred singing of those inmates in House #13?” We love nature in a sentimental way, while all the time we ruthlessly exploit it.

Yann spoke up to say that this ignored the many gray areas. Yes, we exploit nature, and we always will. But as our awareness grows of our interconnectedness we can do just a little bit better to treat the living world with respect and care. The abuse of the orcas in Sea World is coming to an end in the U.S. because public awareness was raised. Many of us purchase cage-free chicken eggs, even at an increased price. We do not clear-cut forests in as many places now, but rather, like the author of The Hidden Life of Trees does in Germany, we devote ourselves to considering how best to maintain eco-systems (well, until Trump reverses all that).

“So I get it, you’re saying we are not so much SS officers,” I answered. “We’re more like… the low-level Polish guards standing in the snow. They do what they can to sneak a crust of bread into the hands of an emaciated inmate, making it just a little bit better, while still earning their pay.”

The hypocrisy still troubles me (all unfortunate Holocaust analogies aside). Which is it? Do we want to open ourselves to nature as equals, or do we want to persevere in our primate-based habit of dominance?

After all, I pointed out, we like dominance; we can’t deny it. We like scoring a winning goal in soccer. We like it sexually, sometimes (to varying degrees). We like the thrill of power when we accomplish something significant in a public arena. Would we really ever be willing to abdicate that aspect of ourselves in order to maintain a more harmonious and equitable relationship with the living world?

Death and Vegetables

Don talked of how he struggles with this question of power on a very personal level. Already a vegetarian for some 30 years, he even wonders about the ethics of eating vegetables! This started when he became aware that the needs and vitality of plants are not as different from our own as we like to think.

In response, I shared with him an excerpt from a book by Dorian Sagan, Death & Sex, (brought to my attention by Setenay) in which Sagan describes how our very mortality is bound up in our shared evolutionary history with plants. Sagan eloquently points to how we are all bound up in a cycle of birth and death, so even as Don eats a plant he can recognize that he too will be “eaten,” disposed of, turned back into humus someday. It goes back to the process of sexual reproduction, which require that the “older generation” becomes unnecessary once sperm meets egg (or archegonium, as the case may be) to create new life.

Sagan points to the earliest fossil record of sex:

“The oldest ejaculation in the fossil record occurs in the Devonian, 408 to 363 million years ago. The paleological preservation of the salacious scene is reminiscent of the erotic frescoes of erotic paintings preserved at the village of Mount Pompeii by the volcano Vesuvius. Long before humanity, the earliest preserved ejaculation took place among a member of the Rhyniophyta, a phylum that contains the first land plants, which began to diversify some four hundred million years ago. The act was caught in flagrante delicto by chert, fine crystalline quartz with an uncanny ability to preserve fossils. Algaophyton major is one of the most common plants in the volcanically preserved Rhynie Chert, named for the nearby village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Early in the colonization of land by plants, and before the evolution of true leaves, the fast-setting minerals preserved a host of petrified plant, fungal, lichen, and animal specimens. (Animals evolved earlier but came to land after plants.)

“Since sex usually occurs in water, it doesn’t tend to preserve well. But in one four-hundred-million-year-old silica-rich deposit local changes in pH remobilized some of the silica, leaving behind thin films of the original organic material. In the specimen the chert beautifully preserved the plant’s delicate archegonium (from goni, Hindi for ‘sack,’ akin to yoni, Sanskrit for ‘vagina’) — the female sex organ. Another sample of rock, sliced thin and observed with a microscope, shows Aglaphyton’s antheridium, its male sex organ — filled with sperm cells ready to explode. Here, preserved by chance, with neither compromised actors nor moral qualm, is a geographic equivalent of the ‘money shot’ of pornographic films — an ejaculation event 140,000 times older than Homer’s Odyssey, 400 times older than the human species, and almost as old as the appearance of animals in the fossil record.”

Sagan continues:

“The sexual reproductive cycles that got swinging not even a billion years ago, brought with them a frightening complementary motion, the switching from side to side of the Grim Reaper’s scythe. With meiosis came mortality because going back to sperm and eggs eventually meant discarding those trillions of somatic cells that, although having brilliantly served their purpose, were not directly represented in evolution. And with reproductive sex came programmed cell and differentiated body death, because evolutionarily our bodies are husks, biodegradable reserves of valuable bioelements that belong to the ecosystem and must be returned, like overdue books, after performing their natural duty of keeping going the larger energetic process. Personally, as intelligent animals, we identify as individual bodies. Although easier said than done, the mystics advocate a larger view in which we identify with the cycles of natural energy-transforming forms, as well as release from such cycles, which they call nirvana. Creeping behind the bright prospect of Mesozoic ginkgo-sniffing reptiles, primeval ejaculators, and the first fragrant flowers was that dark figure, the inevitability of their demise. A melancholy note was struck in the cosmic love machine [underlining added].”

Setenay read aloud Sagan’s conclusion that our involvement in this cycle of sex and death has a consoling spiritual aspect:

A Tibetan mystic saying goes: We are here to realize the illusion of our separateness. The spiritual sentiment has a biological cognate. Our xenotropic drive — to merge with what is not us, temporarily in sex, or permanently in symbiosis or cross-species hybrids — is more than a metaphor. But it also offers spiritual solace. When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent. In the fullness of time, we may all be linked. In the meantime, eros brings us together, making us more than we are alone. Cupid’s arrow, quivering into the heart of loneliness, kills us even as it sets us free.

Or as David Abrams puts it, in his Becoming Animal:

“As an omnivore, an eater of the flesh of plants and sundry animals, willing to taste almost anything… I find myself entwined in a great gift of economy, wherein each life partakes of other lives and gives of itself in return… If we ingest the land’s nourishment not only through our eyes and ears but also through our hungry mouths — chomping leaves, seeds, and muscles with our teeth, moistening them with our saliva, and swallowing them down into our depths, incorporating the world’s flesh into our own — it can only be so because we too are edible. Because we, too, are food.”

Does that make you feel any better, Don? The knowledge, as you chomp down on a piece of broccoli, that you will die too?

What It Takes Truly to Appreciate Nature

In talking about his own relationship with the living world, Ken mentioned Martin Buber’s writing on the value of moving from an “I-It” relationship with nature to an “I-Thou” relationship.

He had previously sent to me by email this excerpt from Buber, which I will include in full now:

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2017

We had a lively meeting. Considering the personal nature of our topic this time, I won’t give my usual dramatic rendering of our back-and-forth discussions.

Instead, here are a few of the areas we covered…

1. Depression as Both a Challenge and an Opportunity

Some members of the group spoke of their own or their family’s experiences with depression, and how it presents at once a challenge and an opportunity.

When you finally recognize depression for what it is, they agreed, there is a kind of relief to be had.

You have to accept that it is not likely to go away, this shadowy character (one member even gives her depression a name: “Demetrio,” a dangerous, handsome, dark-haired figure, always trailing her and looking for vulnerable moments to step into her life. She likes him but knows to keep him at bay).

Instead of trying to abolish depression from your life, these members explained, you learn to cordon it off, control it, anticipate its attempts to insert itself. Perhaps, too, you learn to avoid its familiar means of access, like alcohol or lack of sleep or poor nutrition.

One member spoke of making it conscious (so far as possible) and willfully turning his back to it, all the while knowing that at times he might have to face it again to subdue it.

Some spoke of learning to recognize its lies, particularly its false certainties about the utter emptiness of life or… their own shame and failure. “Ah,” you might say to yourself when your thoughts begin to gravitate towards a particularly brutal assessment of life or yourself, “I have heard that before!” You learn to discount the language depression uses to draw you in.

One member spoke of how she has actually learned to love her capacity for depression. Acceptance, in her case, does not require passive resignation. Instead, she has learned to celebrate the wide-ranging emotions given to her by depression. She plays “big,” as she put it. So she has learned to think of her depression as more than a threat, but as something that is the shadow side… of a part of herself which she cherishes. She wouldn’t want it any other way. It just requires more vigilance than for some who live with more of an even keel.

2. Depression As Seen From the Vantage Point of… Infinity?

Should depression be understood as a heroic struggle for Meaning in the face of the infinite abyss?

Or should be understood, to the contrary, as merely a frustrating set-back and time-suck in a person’s admittedly finite life, something to be given no particular value (or no more than, say, shingles)?

I suggested that the ways we talk about depression seem to fall into one of these two camps.

In the first camp you have Tolstoy’s Confessions (which Setenay summarized for us), or the “dread” of the existentialists, or traditional religious narratives of sin and redemption through faith. At least since the early 1800s we have the popular conception of the moody, shaggy-headed genius, heroically resisting the conventions of society or the world, at a cost.

Lord Byron, depressed genius.

In the second camp you have William Styron’s and Sylvia Plath’s memoirs, both of which are descriptive of a grim ride down to the rock bottom… pretty much without redemption. I mentioned in this context that perhaps I like Kafka so much because he doesn’t give his protagonists a heroic stature when he depicts their despair and disorientation. Yet somehow he makes their narrative arcs compelling to his reader anyway. Deeply depressed himself, he manages to straddle this gap between the heroic and the mundane.

3. Social and Cultural Aspects of Depression

We talked at one point about how different cultures, and different generations within cultures, have developed different norms around depression.

Jaimey mentioned how first-generation Holocaust survivors generally resisted speaking about their experiences. Yet as we see in the documentary Shoah, when pushed by the filmmaker’s insistent questions, they finally can be made to break down emotionally. Is anything gained by making them talk in the face of such pain — other than satisfying our prurient interest?

The filmmaker in that case faced criticism for pushing them too far. Yet…their sons and daughters and grandsons and grand daughers often seek talk therapy to enable them to emotionally process their family histories. Is one approach right, and the other wrong?

Setenay talked about how some Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide, particularly those still living in Europe, preferred not to speak of it, while their American children (in a group she attended) actively sought to put the pain and suffering of that experience into words. What is perceived as good for one generation may not be perceived that way by the next.

This brought us to a discussion about how depression has been feminized in American culture, so that men are often depicted as stoic and silent… but rarely labeled as depressed (Florence brought up Nicholas Cage’s character in Leaving Las Vegas as an exception to this). We talked about how it is surprising that there are so few words for such a nuanced state: “melancholia” being one, “anomie” another, “ennui,” “malaise.”

It seems to be difficult to speak about — words fail. We are just scratching at the surface of our understanding of this aspect of experience.

4. The Relevance of Childhood Trauma or Loss to Adult Depression

Some members of the group spoke of painful events in their childhoods, and how these events continue to drive their darkest times.

Yet some of these same people noted that, at a certain age, they were able to distance themselves from it. “That was not me, and it had very little to do with me!” they tell themselves, and a great weight lifts.

Whether through geographic distance — moving to another coast — or simply through the passage of time, some people are able to adjust their focus to keep those old neural networks from lighting up too brightly.

I mentioned how in The Crack-Up F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of refusing to hold a “sad attitude towards sadness” or a “tragic attitude towards tragedy” — instead drawing a bright-line distinction between the hardships of his life and his own self. After coming across it a few weeks ago, I have found this observation useful for my own life. Since then I have reminded myself on a few occasions not to over-identify myself with my circumstances and the daily, hourly emotional responses I have to them. This is of course part of the practice of Buddhism, as well as aspects of all religious traditions (“turning it over to God,” etc.).

Some in the group who had enjoyed happy childhoods spoke of the opposite challenge: not so much trying to establish a useful distance from childhood trauma but, rather, trying to find ways to cope with the relentless, almost banal accumulation of suffering as we grow older.

In this respect, I admitted that Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, and his struggle to bear up under the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” didn’t speak to me at all as a younger man. “What is this guy’s problem?” I thought to myself. “Why would anyone want to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’?”

Yet as life has gone on, I can relate more. At least I understand now what Hamlet is asking. How are we to deal with our suffering? When does the burden become greater than the reward? These are unquestionably valid questions at 48; they seemed silly to me at 18.

5. Achieving a Clarity of Understanding 

Some members pointed out that understanding itself may have quite important role to play in the avoidance of depression

Not only can people start to recognize depression’s language and familiar means of access, and hence tamp it down when it tries to poke its ugly head into their lives. More than that, some suggested that clarity of understanding can sometimes turn depression into something more akin to grief. It makes our response to suffering a manageable feeling as opposed to an intractable condition.

For some, the capacity to clearly understand and articulate the sources of suffering, when they were children, helped them to order it and contain it and overcome it in later years. For one member, it wasn’t even her own understanding. It was her friend’s extraordinary clarity at the time of her death that brought a sense of gratitude and peace, which would have been otherwise difficult to find.

We talked about how in an evolutionary sense perhaps depression has a distinct purpose. Maybe it functions to… slow… us… busybody… bipedal primates… down. To shift our attention away from our usual daily tasks towards more large-scale problems of existence in a longer time-frame. Maybe this is useful on some occasions.

In a fascinating way, when it comes to depression it seems that what goes on in our heads directly impacts our neurochemical state — and the reverse as well. Our heads and our bodies are working in such complicated ways together that it is not possible, sometimes, to distinguish where one begins and the other leaves off (ok, don’t say, “The neck?” — you know what I mean).

6. Taking Leave

As it got to be 11, we had to leave the discussion there.

Thank you to all who came and shared your reflections. What a rare and valuable opportunity to discuss some of the more unpleasant aspects of life with an open-hearted and open-minded group of friends.

See you next meeting!

THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2017

The future is scary these days! That may explain the smaller than usual turn-out at this meeting devoted to contemplating it.

There were only seven of us sitting around the room. It was cozy, though, and we had a good talk.

1. Jaimey’s Critique of Yuval Noah Harari’s Shallow Thinking

Jaimey got us going by launching right away into a withering critique of Harari’s Homo Deus.

He maintained that, throughout the book, Harari relies on a kind of verbal slight-of-hand to put across a rather limited and superficial thesis.

Above all, Harari wants to assert that our familiar ways of thinking about ourselves are obsolete and failing us. To aid this thesis, Harari must insist that the mainstays of our usual understandings of our relationship to the world, little things like “consciousness,” “free will,” and even the unified “self,” have been revealed to be fictions — lies!

It follows from this that humanism (and its expression in the political sphere, liberalism) are no longer helpful organizing systems for our time. According to Harari then, we are on the verge of a brave new world which will require new fictions, new mythologies (he suggests “techno-humanism,” “dataism,” and the like).

To Jaimey, however, Harari’s bold contention is mostly bluster. The unified “self,” Jaimey assured us, has not been eradicated… because it was never assumed to be unified in the first place!

Harari insists that from the time of the Enlightenment on, many philosophers in the West have fixated only on the self as a utility-maximizing, rational agent, and have therefore ignored the emotional and expressive and changeable nature of our experiences. But that is laughably ignorant as a potted intellectual history of the West, according to Jaimey. “If Harari had even a passing acquaintance with German intellectual history,” Jaimey explained (and here, imagine his voice lowering into a soothing, Chomskyesque tone of disdain and dismissal), “then he would recognize that the dialectic between the Enlightenment and its critics has always been far more complicated than that.

“Even Kant would never have insisted that the self was merely a rational agent!” Jaimey stated, his eyebrows rising cheerfully.

It is this straw man (of the blinkered Enlightenment thinker), Jaimey continued, that leads Harari to make so many egregious errors throughout his narrative. For example, he groups 20th century fascism under the label of “evolutionary humanism.” Jaimey considered this an obvious error.  For Nazism and fascism unmistakably represented post-humanism, in that they ignored the irreducible self of the person in favor of the single characteristic of “race.” They are, we might say, textbook examples of post-humanism. After all, Jaimey observed, even a “genius Jew,” to a Nazi was still sub-human and considered unfit for civilized society.

But Harari’s telos requires him to see humanism as engaged in its “religious wars” in the 20th century; in other words, as just another “fiction” that emerged as a means of social control. So it would be deeply inconvenient for Harari to acknowledge that, in fact, a fierce commitment of many millions of people across the Allied world to process and fairness and individual rights stood firmly against this threat at mid-century. Certainly it would complicate Harari’s catchy narrative about the fragility of this “fiction” of humanism.

Jaimey also pointed out that for all of the trending news items and memorable sociological studies he plucks out of the internet, Harari ends up contradicting himself at times. At one point, for example, Harari concedes that nobody really understands “consciousness” yet. So how can he then proceed to draw conclusions about how our belief in it has been, or has not been, shattered?

In summary, Jaimey felt that most of Homo Deus is not much more than a kind of extended, improvised vamp, leading up to the admittedly difficult questions he poses in the last chapters. Those questions, Jaimey noted, are indeed disturbing and real:

What should the role of technology be in the future, considering that it is rapidly displacing human beings from their sense of being useful?

How far can we go with neuro-chemical enhancement and digital interfaces before we find ourselves unrecognizable?

2. A Skeptical Lens on the Enlightenment

Responding to Jaimey’s critique, I brought up another book that I read in anticipation of this meeting, The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra. There are certain parallels in this book to the story Harari tells in Homo Deus about the development of humanism and the legacy of the Enlightenment.

Both see the Enlightenment’s emphasis on individuality and reason and the rule of law as having fostered an unprecedented material boon for humanity. Both also see this new, ostensibly egalitarian/materialistic/hedonistic life as having creating enormous dislocation and anomie.

Yet whereas Harari sees the “fiction” of humanism as only recently becoming outdated by advances in neuroscience and data science, Mishra sees it as having been oppressive and unstable all along.

The Age of Anger focuses on the way that the Enlightenment creates resentments among the majority who adopt its aspirations… but have no means of satisfying them. This deep tension in liberal democracy, Mishra argues, arose from the very beginning of the 1700s.

Mishra traces a counter-Enlightenment story (from Rousseau to Herder to Fichte to Dostoevsky to Nietzsche to Marx to Weber to Freud to the Futurist poets to Nazism to ISIS… and even to Trump voters). And he argues that this counter-Enlightenment wave is actually cresting in the present.

As the disorientation and furious change caused by liberal, democratic, individualist, consumerist society sweeps the entire globe, people everywhere, on every continent, are beginning to be consumed with the same violence and chaos that overcame Europe in the 20th century. People are angry because they feel shut out from the traditions and values of the past… while also feeling shut out from the future! There is only the volatile present.

The elite, Mishra points out, from Voltaire and Catherine the Great to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, still triumph, even in a supposedly egalitarian, liberal model of society. Their vaunted philosophy may sound good rhetorically, but most people get left out all the same. So the disenfranchised turn to group identities, authenticity, order — all the ingredients of fascism and authoritarianism. Mishra notes in this context that Rousseau’s ideal society was the city-state of Sparta.

I explained to the group that this thesis, too, struck me as relying on a slight-of-hand, a reductionist approach not unlike Harari’s. For just because a moneyed and privileged elite emerges out of liberalism and capitalism, doesn’t mean that the whole Enlightenment project was and is a charade, does it? The principles of individual rights, equality under the law, free inquiry, and so on, enshrined in slogans like “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” are (pace Marx) not mere bourgeois propaganda.  Neither were they meant to occupy the entire ground of meaning in people’s lives.

They are procedural guides.

They were — and are —  as far as I understand them, simply intended to point the way towards a process by which people can create meaning for themselves in the most unobstructed way possible, without interfering with other people’s efforts to do the same. Liberal democracy can definitely be charged with hypocrisy and multiple and ongoing failures to create well-being, but that is not the same as suggesting that it is a scam. It may be deeply flawed and the best thing we have going.

Jaimey agreed that Mishra is following a telos in his book as well, and this requires him to see the Western Enlightenment project in a very skeptical light (after all, Jaimey pointed out, Mishra is writing form a post-colonial vantage point — and it is no doubt a necessary corrective to the blithering paeans to democracy and liberalism offered up by neoconservatives and the American media).

In order to point to the future, both books take a narrow and teleological view of the past. Perhaps this is unavoidable when trying to see ahead? You have to use one kind of lens or another?

3. More on the Question of Elitism

Our discussion of The Age of Anger led us into an extended discussion of elitism.

I argued that there are multiple definitions of “elite,” and the use of the same term for all of them leads, unhappily, to confusion. There is of course the moneyed, privileged elite — think Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the guest list at Mar-a-Lago, etc. But then there is what I think of as the “intellectual elite” — academics, policy experts, writers and scientists and artists.

To my mind, people on the Left often conflate the two, and as a result they sometimes… pour out the baby with the bath water, as the saying goes.

Hillary Clinton, for example, certainly has ties to both kinds of elites. But I would argue that her policy prescriptions, and likely her deepest commitments, are closer to the intellectual elite, whom most of us admire because they espouse roughly the values of liberal democracy. Despite her failings, Hillary probably does mean what she says when she talks about wanting equality and rights for all. She actually does want individuals of all stations and creeds and cultural traditions to be granted dignity, and given equal access to economic opportunity. Perhaps she doesn’t go far enough (free college tuition for all?), but when she doesn’t, to my mind, these are largely matters of degree and policy debate. Thus her ties to the economic elite (her own wealth, her speeches at Goldman Sachs, her resistance to seeking criminal prosecution of Wall Street after the crash of 2008), though real, do not represent, as far as I can tell, a nefarious attempt to bilk everyday men and women. In other words, it isn’t a scam.

Yet people let their frustrations about the rise of an “elite” make them cynical and even hostile towards liberal democracy as a whole, and often repulsed by the very people like Clinton who are its champions. My take is that, yes, there is a huge illiberal surge, just as Mishra suggests, and it is accurately represented by Trump supporters. But there is also a huge surge of people holding firm to liberal democratic values — expressed, for example, in the rapturous reception given by urban, privileged people (broadly speaking, what we might call the intellectual elite), to the musical “Hamliton.” Think of it as “Hamilton America.” It is strong too, perhaps even stronger than the atavistic forces of the Bannonites. Both of these forces are surging and powerful, at our present moment. That’s why I think that, despite its many failures and frustrations, we need to stand squarely with this liberal democratic culture, even at the risk of being associated with an “elite.”

Setenay suggested that before we try to impose our “Hamliton America” ( multi-cultural, pluralistic, liberal, democratic) values on the other half, we need to deliver for them in practical and economic ways. They need money, and access to jobs, and dignity. To this I answered: We can do both, can’t we?

But Setenay wasn’t that sure that these universal values can even be addressed before more fundamental concerns. What strikes her as more important than talk of values is to assess honestly where the power lies (I think of Lenin’s succinct question: “Who, whom?”). Yann took this argument up, saying that the reason that Trump voters have the views they do is actually because of inequality. Systemic inequality has led to poor education, discouragement, a cultural coming apart for many. No assertive, well-nourished, self-satisfied elite, talking about liberal democratic values of inclusion and tolerance will make a dent on the Trump base, without first creating more equality on the ground. The problem is circular, and it feeds on itself.

All of us agreed that the solutions are not obvious. Some of the forces are so big — automation, globalization, the dispersion of “fake news,” drug epidemics — that it is difficult to know how to counter them. Even where we can, it is increasingly difficult to get the elite to care (here is where there is certainly some overlap between the moneyed elite and the intellectual elite).

Yann is optimistic that even the most craven Mar-a-Lago denizens still want to live in a healthy and sustainable economy, and hence worry about the “unwashed masses,” to some limited extent. But he frets, too, that it used to be that the upper echelons of society actually needed the buy-in of majority of the people, for the simple reason that they required a large military and a productive workforce. In our digital, high-tech world of drones and robots, with the army and the workforce receding as felt needs, what will be the pressure, other than vague anxiety for the future of the country, to force the elite to care?

4. Claudia’s Timely Arrival

We were graced with the arrival of Claudia, who spoke directly to her experience working with people who face the raw end of the economy. She mentioned how many of the people she works with in the Alameda unified school district definitely feel a hard ceiling on their ambitions to rise in life. As a result, they are, as we would expect, resentful and angry.

She knows one Latina woman, for example, who voted for Trump for the simple reason that he promised to “make America great again” (this woman, Claudia reported, already regrets her vote). This one individual case seemed to me to support both sides of the equation! The problem of elitism is real. But the problem of misguided and even ignorant values in the ranks of the non-elite is real too. These two problems are intertwined, if not intractable.

5. Predicting the Future is a Fool’s Game

We ended the evening speaking briefly about our own visions for the future. I tried to stay away from describing a personal utopia (we had already done that at our Utopia meeting). Instead, I tried to describe what I think will actually occur…

Surely this kind of prognostication is impossible to do with any confidence, but what trends do we see magnified in the future?

I told the others that I tend to throw my hopes in with the eventual triumph of liberal democracy and socialist-leaning capitalism, once again (as it did in Europe and Japan after the disruption of the two world wars). With this hope in mind, I spun out an admittedly rosy scenario, in which the current upsurge of ressentiment described by Mishra resolves by, say, 2037?

Those many millions of people whose traditional cultures have been jettisoned and even assaulted by liberal, democratic, individualistic, consumerist values, will, I think, discover, over time, that new values do take root. Just as in present-day Sweden, or Australia, or Argentina, so in 20 years or so, will the people of Indonesia, and Nigeria, and Bangladesh learn to absorb a new, pluralistic, dizzying, sometimes confusing, but ultimately open-textured and liberating outlook on their lives. They will form reading groups to forge new meanings in this unsettled and unsettling world. Likewise, those in the already developed world in the West, who have watched resentfully over the past 20 years as their unfair and disproportionate share of the resources has slipped away, will learn to dial down their consumerist expectations. They will learn to accommodate themselves to what Thomas Friedman famously called the Flat World.

Oh, and the whole science of climate change turns out to be wrong! So there’s no ecological catastrophe. Wouldn’t that be nice. (Okay, my prediction ended up being a utopian vision, despite my best efforts to keep it neutral.)

Claudia spoke movingly of a future where a new set of values emerge, values which celebrate the “emotional life” of each person, as opposed to a combative, “compare and despair,” zero-sum game we presently find ourselves playing.

Setenay rejected my regulated capitalist/liberal/accommodationist utopia. She predicted that with the introduction of a basic universal income, and the expansion of health care as a right for all, the world will shift to a more communal model. Some private property rights may remain (you own your own house, for example), but after the “Rise Up” Revolution of 2026-32 there will be far more active redistribution of wealth, leading to increased opportunities.

In the end, we decided that we really don’t know what the future will bring. As Setenay pointed out, there will likely be “non-linear” events, such as an astroid creating an electro-magnetic pulse knocking out all communication satellites, which will set the world in a direction nobody could anticipate!

6. The Future of the Old New Way

As for the future of this group, The Old New Way, my inclination is to wind it down for the present.

We have had three years and a total of sixteen meetings. Sweet sixteen. Each one to me has proved invaluable. I find that I am clearer, three years later, in my thinking on so many questions that I had at the outset of this group.

I can also say, with pleasure, that the group has introduced to me at least as many questions that had never occurred to me before.

Thank you all, my friends, for participating, for pondering, for laughing, for debating, for dreaming.

With love and hope for a beautiful future, for as many people as possible,

Tom