BY MATTHEW HERBERT

It has become a habit of mine to look back at the end of each year and recall some of the best books I’ve read or simply reminisce about big events.

Thanks to advances in cognitive psychology, we now know that any kind of retrospective like this is a rigged game. Most humans, when we look back and evaluate certain kinds of experience over time, run an algorithm that Daniel Kahnemann calls the peak-end effect.

Here’s the peak-end effect. When we want to rate an experience qualitatively over time, we give undue weight to two data points–the peak, or most intense, experience of the series, and the last one. We don’t do what would seem to be intuitive–add the data points up and average them or simply compare them. Our judgment is locked as if by gravity onto the high point and the end point.

The experiment that brought this effect to light showed that subjects who were given the choice to repeat either (a) painful experience or (b) a slightly more painful experience that eased up at the end chose the latter. They chose more pain and–it is worth emphasizing the obvious–they thought they were making a good choice. It’s a classic case of humans being less than rational, proof that our thinking machines are made of meat, not silicon.

In his wonderful book Homo Deus, Noah Yuvel Harari makes a very big deal of the peak-end effect. For Harari, it proves that the human self is not a reliable narrator and, therefore, does not exist in the usual sense. Contrary to Freud (and common sense), there is no me at the center of me. It’s all just a tangle of algorithms made scattershot by the thousand and one evolutionary pressures that shaped our brains over the eons.

Maybe Harari is right. I’m not sure I’m ready to follow him all the way to his conclusion. It’s disorienting enough to admit that we lack the logical machinery to make good sense of our own inner life. I’m not sure I will join him in declaring the end of the self in toto. But if  you are intrigued by the idea that we need super-human discipline to retrieve anything like an accurate memory of our lives up to this point, you might find pleasure in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is a catalogue of the defects that riddle human memory and a consideration of what they mean for our identity.

By the way, if you are a grad student in cognitive psychology and you’ve happened upon my blog, here is a free tip, for which you may thank me later. Just start reading In Search of Lost Time (especially Book One, Swann’s Way) and see if you don’t come up with three ideas for papers or experiments.

Proust was a highly disciplined phenomenologist, an expert observer of mental states. He didn’t just reflect flaccidly on what his thoughts, perceptions and memories felt like; he extrapolated from their detailed form how they had come to be produced and have their particular character. How, for example, could one memory automatically awaken a certain set of others while letting others lie dormant? (We now know some of the answers, which have to do with “lexical proximity,” but that’s a whole nother topic.) Proust’s keen inner eye anticipated many of the problems that Kahnemann and others would stake out in 20th-century cognitive psychology.

To a great extent, we can’t eradicate our biases. They’re too deeply entrenched by our evolutionary history. The cool, logical habits of mind that would make you a clever statistical reasoner today–say, an accurate appreciation of base rates, for example–would have made you dead 500,000 years ago. False positives kept us alive. Indeed our ancestors survived thanks to a glut of fearful, self-centered, short-term “reasoning” patterns that we still have with us today.

Like the peak-end effect. Women would have just stopped having babies had they been able to look back as statisticians and sum up the pain of pregnancy and childbirth. Luckily for Homo sapiens, though, the end effect of holding a baby in their arms skewed their memories and kept them in the reproduction game. (Among other things, of course.)

So we are stuck with our biased algorithms. We can strategize to correct for them, but usually only in very crude ways.

Today I will correct for my own peak-end effect in the crudest way possible, by indulging it openly and admitting error up front. Instead of trying to go around the peak-end effect, I will go into its breach.

I will always wonder whether 2018 was a good year. The peak data point was actually a nadir. We had to leave our home of 12 years, a place that had become exceptionally comfortable for everyone in my family. I’ve already recorded much of the grief at this loss, and there is no need to re-hash it or expand on it today. Let it rest.

But it’s true what sappy bourgeoisie time-servers like myself say: home is wherever your loved ones are. Even as I said an elegiac goodbye to our old home, I made a note of where the real meaning in my life comes from–from the people I live with, and for. We are all together and healthy in our new home, and that is, of course, everything that matters.

And what of my project to read America? I have already reported, it went off the rails. Instead of reading the many topics I laid out for myself at the start of the year, I read only a few, mostly in the form of novels. Typical. The best novels I read were The Grapes of Wrath, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral trilogy, and almost everything by Sinclair Lewis. John Updike’s Rabbit series was a prurient pleasure. I despise Updike’s message but can’t stop reading his clamorous stories of American delusionaries and halfwits.

I ended the year with an orgy of Kurt Vonnegut, re-reading Sirens of Titan, Player Piano, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Deadeye Dick, and, just this morning, Mother Night. This last one features American Neonazis who believe they are really good American patriots. Hi ho, as Vonnegut might have said, if he were alive today.

I’m tempted to say that Vonnegut is the greatest American novelist there is, but I know he’s not. That’s just the “end” part of my peak-end effect speaking. Vonnegut’s range is too limited, and his message too political. He believes, as I do, that cruelty is the worst thing people can do. But America is a big country, and there are decent people whom Vonnegut will never reach with that message–people who believe that injustice or dishonor or getting bored are the worst things we can do. They also deserve artists who will speak to them.

As for me and my house, we will follow Kurt Vonnegut. He invites us to say, “Goddammit, children, you’ve got to be kind.” And I had the privilege this year to read that message in the hundred wry, inimitable, ingenious ways that Vonnegut gives it voice. So, in the end, it was a very good year.

BY MATTHEW HERBERT

Since our dear old country is already descended into rank tribalism, I suppose it makes a certain kind of sense to go ahead and take sides. I’ve been tacitly taking sides for years now, so I might as well put certain cards on the table.

As usual, I begin with a true confession. I have stacked the deck in my favor by claiming the high ground from the outset. By training and inclination, I am a philosopher, and if you break that word up into its ancient Greek parts, it means “lover of wisdom.” So I’ve got that going for me.

Now some people emphasize the poetic, emotive aspect of this term, inherent in the word love. It suggests a romantic picture of us philosophers as always in a swoon.

The man I first learned philosophy from, though, parsed the meaning of philosopher differently. He emphasized that love was essentially a desirous reaching out toward an object and only incidentally a way of feeling. He said what was crucial to being a philosopher was motivation–the unyielding search for wisdom, regardless of whatever emotional response the quest elicited. Whether you worked yourself into a high, operatic dudgeon over the meaning of life or kept your mind laser-focused on the dispassionate logical analysis of the meanings of words, what distinguished the philosopher was her commitment to keep doggedly seeking truth. Wisdom might never be achieved, but a true philosopher kept chasing after it. It was a duty.

The philosopher’s foil was the sophist, the person who thought she already possessed wisdom. There was no need to go on a lifelong quest for it, according to the sophist; wisdom was readily available to the clever. The sophist’s measure of wisdom was the ability to argue both sides of a thesis with equal conviction. The business applications of this skill were pretty sweet in ancient Athens. A good sophist could win a lawsuit or keep a rich young man out of military service, for example, which could earn high wages. Today the best sophists make excellent trial lawyers, wealth managers, politicians, ad men and so forth.

It has always been easy to disparage us philosophers. The thing that seems to get under most other folk’s skin about us is our bland acceptance of human incompleteness. We acknowledge that humans will never know everything there is to know, and that we will never perfect even our most cherished institutions–family, state, law, what have you–because they all depend on knowledge. Philosophers also fail, for what it is worth, to believe that humans will graduate to a magical kingdom after death in which all this missing information will be provided (or made otiose by an eternal spectacle of bugling and praise-singing and bedding of virgins and sadistic voyeurism).

But on we trudge: we stick to our quest nonetheless, and this makes us look quixotic, a literary term for pathetic. The novelist Milan Kundera called the trudging frame of mind the Long March. From Europe’s angry young men of 1848 to the American civil rights movement to Occupy Wall Street, reformers have a thing about manning the barricades and getting out to march for some higher ideal. It’s an attitude that can too easily become a pose, and that’s what Kundera scorned about it. He makes great fun of latte liberalism in the last part of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To be sure, Kundera felt the allure of the Long March himself at various times in his life. He had grown up behind the Iron Curtain and thought humans were capable of pursuing better lives than the ones designed for them by the Soviets.

The American writer James Baldwin referred to the trudging frame of mind as the quest to “achieve our country.” He believed that if humans could appreciate their mutual vulnerabilities as living things and their common destiny as dead things, they could  form a union aimed at reducing cruelty and humiliation for the short while we are here. The irony was, Baldwin was born into a country that thought it already was this place but really was far from it.

Baldwin thought we Americans weren’t even headed in the right direction to achieve our country, despite the pious claptrap preached to us in history and civics class about being a city on a hill. He thought we were still holding on to the old country, which was based on willful ignorance of our immense, proven capacity for cruelty. Our democratic city on the hill had been founded by violent, intrepid marauders, armed to the teeth, tended by slaves, and willing to break any promises whatsoever to gain more land, power or wealth. These vices were typical for European “discoverers,” but Baldwin thought it was a little rich to base the conception of our country on believing the opposite. Our “memories” of how uniformly great and noble our forbears were were pure hogwash.

Kurt Vonnegut retells our founding story as a kind of corrective that Baldwin would have cheered, I believe. It is brief:

The teachers told the children that [1492] was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. . . .

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.

Color was everything.

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

(from Breakfast of Champions)

Well, whether or not you take as bleak a view as Baldwin about how far we’ve come since the days of the sea pirates, if you are a philosopher, you believe, as he did, that we are still chasing wisdom, still trudging after the object of our hunt. We are making only the tiniest of incremental gains in knowledge; we are not on the cusp of achieving our country, not even close. But it’s still worth pressing forward. This is the core truth that keeps the Long March alive.

(By the way, another old professor of mine thinks philosophy has come about as far as it can in the quest for the kind of socially useful knowledge that actuates the Long March. Science, not philosophy, has produced so many of our species’ recent incremental gains in knowledge, it is now time to recognize that scientists have displaced philosophers as the leaders of the Long March. My professor talks about this idea in his latest book, as philosophers do.)

So today we have two tribes. One tribe thinks we Americans have already achieved our country, and what the country most needs is protecting from bloodsuckers, degenerates, terrorists, and other kinds of bad hombres trying to get across our borders. We are just fine as we are, and we don’t want the diseases such people would bring into our country. Or their ideas or work habits.

I leave it to nobler, more magnanimous allies to come up with a polite name for this tribe. For me, it is the Reactionary Mob.

The Reactionary Mob finds people like me demoralizing because we appear unable to shut up about what a rotten place America is. Love it or leave it, they tend to say. Indeed the president they love tried to make the oozing of patriotic affection a literal requirement for immigrating here when he said anyone coming to America needed to profess a deep love for our country. As recently as the 2000-aughts, conservatives and other fans of small-government would have heckled this move as nakedly totalitarian. Who but Orwell’s Big Brother would try to manage the private content of the people’s hearts and minds? Times change though. Many conservatives also seem to like Trump’s big-government idea of having a storm trooper strike force, another acquisition from the Big Brother rummage sale.

But from my tribe’s point of view, America is not really a rotten place at all. In fact it is a wonderful place. We believe it can rise to the beautiful ideals that its highest heroes have preached–the words of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King Jr., and, yes, James Baldwin. America just has not achieved itself yet. It is still on a quest for better ideas, better institutions, and an ever more perfect union. It won’t get there by willful blindness, but only if it keeps its eyes wide open, even to the painful truth of its past.

Which brings me back to those cards I said I would lay on the table. As the tribal dividing lines deepen, it occurs to me there is a crucial test for determining which tribe you belong to. It’s a kind of Jeff Foxworthy device: “You might be a progressive [or insert whatever else here] if you believe in the existence of . . . .”

No one actually needs this test, of course; everyone already knows which tribe they belong to. But a suggestive distinction has been knocking around in my mind for several months now, and it might be useful to get it out.

The idea crystallized for me last night as I read that some folks these days enjoy offending my tribe by modifying the machinery of their cars to produce more, or at least more visible, exhaust. Expel a poof of black smoke, goes the thinking, and “own the libtards.”

So this is the idea that had been buzzing in my bonnet even before I read this: America’s tribes can be distinguished by the kinds of invisible entities in which they believe and invest power. The Reactionary Mob tends to believe that carbon atoms and its derivative molecules, for one thing, either don’t exist or are so irrelevant as to be ignored. The deliberate pluming of car exhaust is meant to ridicule people who believe otherwise.

Well, since it is the mob that has suggested this kind of identity marker, let us compare.

My tribe tends to believe in several kinds of invisible entities. Some are so small they can’t be seen, like the individual potassium nitrate molecules that Kurt Vonnegut’s sea pirates mixed into gun powder.

Or, to take up the exhaust-pluming example, we believe quite strongly in the existence and power of carbon particulates. Our species expels them from our machines, and they choke up the atmosphere, locking in gases–other invisible things–that warm up the planet.

The methane molecule is another invisibly small thing in which we believe. Scientists discovered last year that polar-region permafrost is melting at an unprecedented rate, releasing lots more methane into the atmosphere than current global-warming models include. Which means faster global warming.

The mob, which disbelieves in global warming (and sometimes the invisible mechanisms that account for it), tends to believe in a divine cosmic plan that will protect human life, come what may. There is no need to go looking for atoms, molecules or other voodoo, they say, because almighty God has created the universe in such a way that it cannot be harmed by puny, fallen man.

And if that doesn’t work for you, you may help yourself to a fatalistic myth about the foreordained end of the world. If we are ruining our planet, it is not due to reversible human foolishness but rather the irreversible will of God. He is using ecological disaster to end the world in the way he has always foreseen.

There is also a cheery religious diversion from the apocalypse–the grinning idiocy of preachers like Joel Osteen who say there is a benevolent, God-given reason for everything that happens in one’s life. If you embrace this deeply narcissistic idea, you will achieve happiness and prosperity, despite whatever horrors might bring the world to an end. It has certainly worked for Osteen, who is fabulously wealthy. The approaching Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear not to disturb him at all on his yacht.

Instead of an ethereal, eternal soul, progressives tend to believe in humanized algorithms. Anything with a large enough brain has some combination of thoughts, feelings and perceptions, which influence our actions. Humans have some of the biggest brains around, which grew and developed by an evolutionary process that played out over millions of years. Increasingly, we are discovering that our mental algorithms are largely a product of adaptive pressures. Much of what we think, perceive and feel is attuned to help us survive in the animal kingdom–or, better, was attuned to help our forebears survive for millions of years. The deeply encrusted patterns we’ve inherited are not always optimal for peace or other kinds of conviviality, which presents challenges in a world that has only enjoyed civilization for the last few evolutionary seconds.

We humans are also filled with microbes, invisible things that–surprise!–help form systems that are very much us. Our guts are filled with friendly bacteria which, among other things, carry out the optimal functioning of our gastroenterological systems. Get rid of them, and you are not you anymore, or at least you are not the you you think of as yourself. Imagine that. In the days of Descartes, many learned people thought we had a soul inside us that actually had physical weight. Nope. Turns out what we really have is about two or three pounds of useful microbes.

We also depend famously on genes–and their four constituent amino acids, which we all learned in the seventh grade–for making us who we are. This week I heard a story on the radio about a group of doctors who try to diagnose rare, uncategorized diseases. Two of their patients were young brothers in California who were normal except for lacking the capacity for muscular development. All they could do was lie in bed.

They passed the time playing video games and of course talking to each other and their parents, who loved them very much, but they knew they would die young. Human brains and other key organs develop in concert with musculature, and the boys’ systems would collapse after a few years because they could not move their muscles enough to produce key developmental inputs. How did they receive this slow-moving death sentence, an unbearable agony which their parents must share with them every moment of every day? One of the amino acids in their genes was out of sequence.

Now I won’t be so philistine as to suggest that religious people cannot believe in genes and other scientific facts. Francis Collins, one of the world’s leading geneticists, is a Christian. But Collins also believes we are beasts, fantastic products of evolution. It must be very complicated for him.

But if you ask the Mob, the grinning idiots of the Olsteen camp, they’ll say the two boys’ condition was brought about by a personal choice made by a loving God. God gave them a gift whose benevolence is so mysterious that most of us just can’t discern it and actually see it as something horrible. I think it is profane and evil to encourage people to believe this kind of thing. Let them believe in reality instead. Both fantasy and reality will eventually deliver us unwelcome messages, but at least the latter will not turn us into ghouls.

Like my old professor who wrote about science recently, I am all talked out about philosophy. I wanted to add the Invisible Hand and the Laffer Curve as two more magical items on the Mob’s list of invisible wonders, but I think you get the point by now.

BY MATTHEW HERBERT

First, an admission. I’m addicted to Bob Woodward’s big, thick books about current affairs. You can buy most of them for a penny online. Sure, you have to pay three or four bucks for shipping, but I enjoy the small delusion of thinking I’m only paying one U.S. cent. So much history, almost for free.

I’m aware of Woodward’s limitations. As Christopher Hitchens once said, Woodward often functions as a mere stenographer to the rich and powerful. They speak, he writes, the dutiful court historian.

Joan Didion went even farther, castigating Woodward for being morally autistic. He simply couldn’t apprehend the monstrousness of pernicious acts so long as they were being related to him by a powerful man sitting agreeably for an interview. Woodward just wrote them all down, fact after deplorable fact. You must read Didion’s (in)famous 1996 review of Woodward here, in the New York Review of Books. I took my own measure of Woodward’s deferential side in my review of Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987. (It may very well be the only Kurt Vonnegut-inspired review of a Bob Woodward book on the internet. Go ahead–treat yourself!)

But I still like Woodward immensely, if “like” is the right word. There is manifest value in having a technically competent journalist abroad in the land with a wide interest in our society, in-depth knowledge of Beltway politics, and excellent access to powerful figures. What Woodward ends up writing in his big, thick books is the fabled first draft of history that we entrust to journalists. An English-reading Martian newly arrived, wishing to get a grip on who we are, could profitably begin with a dozen or so of Woodward’s books.

But still, I was disappointed with Woodward’s 2010 book Obama’s Wars. This is partly because I was prepared to be disappointed. I actually read the book in order to be disappointed. This will take a moment to explain. Barrack Obama is a political hero of mine, and I wanted to understand how I could continue to admire him despite two despicable decisions he made as president.

First, he saved the rich and powerful of Wall Street with the bank bailout of 2009. With no trace of shame, Obama arranged for the poor and middle class to pay off the wealthy so they could continue doing their jobs of, well, being wealthy. This move was, and remains, morally profane. Don’t get me started.

Obama also gave in to the allure of killing that tests all war-time presidents. Here was a man who campaigned on a promise to reverse war-time powers engineered by George W. Bush that he believed violated due process–primarily GTMO and the Patriot Act. We cannot fight a just war, Obama the candidate argued, if we claim tyrannical powers like the authority to spy on Americans without a court order or imprison whomever we please on a no-man’s land bereft of law.

But presented with the opportunity to step up drone strikes on suspected terrorists around the globe, Obama conveniently forgot the legal distinctions that had so fired his conscience as a candidate. His drone force targeted several Americans for assassination, and he even boasted he had gotten “pretty good at killing people.” The same man who earlier could not countenance the wiretapping of U.S. citizens without a court order somehow found it acceptable to kill them with rockets. In this way Obama well and truly earned Cornel West’s condemnation as a loyal servant of the neoliberal power order he pretended to defy.

Clearly politics is a bizarre game. Obama did these horrible things, but I still regarded him on the whole as a decent man who tried to govern through reason. I still do.

All presidents fail, and a surprising number of them fail at exactly the thing they say they will do for the country. Reagan ran on the promise to shrink government, reduce the budget, and eliminate the deficit. Ask any Reaganite, and they will say these were pillars of his presidency. Yet he immediately and dramatically did the opposite of all three of them. His admirers, though, recall him fondly for the principles he espoused and probably still advocate them.

So I cracked open Obama’s Wars already aware of the large-scale hypocrisy that I guess we all show when it comes to our political heroes. We like who we like. I suppose I will always love Obama for his ability to preach noble principles of law and governance to us, the heirs of a slave country founded in blood and human bondage. Even his worst decisions as president can’t dim the brilliance and magnanimity he embodied for me. At his best, Obama offered–yes–hope that we will someday, in James Baldwin’s words, achieve our country.

But back to Woodward. His book about Obama is limited in all the usual ways, and it showcases one glaring flaw to boot.

Obama’s foreign policy was all about context. He thought Bush Junior had skewed our entire international agenda to Iraq, the alleged epicenter of the Islamic terrorism we were fighting around the world. Obama thought this view was wrong in two ways, one obvious, one subtle.

First, Iraq was not the epicenter of Islamic terrorism that our global war was supposedly designed to combat. If that war had an epicenter, it was still in Afghanistan. We had misspent trillions of dollars, thrown away thousands of American lives, amped up new terrorist groups, empowered Iran, alienated old allies, and drastically worsened the security of the entire Middle East, all for the wrong war. Our war-fighting focus needed to be on Afghanistan.

Second, as becomes clear in Obama’s Wars, Obama believed, unlike Bush, that America was not existentially threatened by Islamic terrorism. The sooner we reset our global strategy to reflect this assumption, he thought, the sooner we would restore our power and credibility. This is the deepest insight Woodward pries out of Obama. Some of the thinking behind it appears on page 363. Woodward reports:

During my Oval Office interview with the president, Obama volunteered some extended thoughts about terrorism: “I said very early on, as a senator, and continued to believe as a presidential candidate and now as president, that we can absorb a terrorist attack.”

I was surprised.

“We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, that ever took place on our soil, we absorbed it and we are stronger. This is a strong, powerful country that we live in, and our people are incredibly resilient.”

This is possibly the most important thing Obama believes about America, because it means we should still try to be a country of peace. Woodward, though, does exactly nothing with this revelation.

The entirety of Obama’s Wars is about the narrow process carried out by the national security apparatus of shifting military effort back to Afghanistan. It’s riveting Belway drama, but it barely touches on Obama’s dramatic expansion of drone warfare, our seminal involvement in Yemen’s civil war, or the quiet but drastic increase of direct action by Special Operations forces around the world. It gives no account of Obama’s (mostly failed) effort to close GTMO–a cornerstone campaign promise–or his high-level public diplomacy in the Muslim world to salvage America’s image as a freedom-loving democracy that defends human rights.

All of Obama’s war-fighting decisions were shaped by these issues, but Woodward ignores them. He also fails entirely to consider Obama’s “Asian pivot.” The pivot was a broad package of foreign policy initiatives aimed at improving trade with Asia and taking some of the oxygen out of the global war on terrorism. It was conceived as much to show what America was not doing as what it was doing on the global stage. A huge part of what Obama wanted to accomplish with the pivot was to demonstrate that America had moved on from 9/11 and that we cared more for cultivating trans-pacific ties in trade, culture, and technology than in stoking the old tribalisms of the Middle East.

Woodward’s big, thick book, in other words, should have been 300 pages longer than it was. Had he taken the time to put Obama’s thinking into strategic context–and to consider all of the president’s wars, not just the ones in Afghanistan and the Beltway–the job might have stretched out another year. Then Woodward could have written a proper ending to his book, namely in May 2011, when U.S. Special Forces killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. But instead of coming to an end, Woodward just stops writing, something teachers have been telling me since the seventh grade not to do.

Luckily, though, all we have to do is wait for his next big, thick book.

 

BY MATTHEW HERBERT

A Review of Come With Me, by Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman’s new novel, Come With Me, is set in contemporary Silicon Valley. It engagingly portrays the ways high tech wizardry increasingly shapes our lives.

Reflect for a moment on our habits and routines. We are always switched on, working or at least available for work. Our attention is chronically divided by personal devices. Our choices of products or dating partners are framed for us by artificial intelligence. Our language is determined by the tropes of text messaging and Twitter. Our personal histories are uploaded into the cloud, along with everything else, available for streaming in broadband. In fact, we are not full members of a community these days unless our life is thoroughly mediated by technology.

And yet we go on being human underneath it all. Although we are possibly crippled by our brave new way of living, we may be unable to choose any other way at this point. The digitization of human life may turn out to be a bell that cannot be unrung.

Indeed this balance between the contingency and irrevocability of human life is the main theme of Come With Me. It is a story of how we drift or wander into lightly-made choices and then live out dramas whose storylines are determined by the cumulative, swirling consequences of those choices. Life starts out as an unreflective lark and then, to steal a line from Orhan Pamuk, we awake to find we have been living other people’s dreams. How did we get here?

Come With Me tells a story of how one family got there. The heroine, Amy, is a 40-ish public relations specialist recently employed by Donny, the boy-genius son of a friend. Like everyone else in Silicon Valley, Donny is working on a way to enhance then monetize some aspect of the human experience. His idea is a kind of virtual time machine that will let people go back and explore virtual versions of their lives, constructed out of the digital traces they constantly leave in the cloud.

Amy’s husband, Dan, is a former print journalist, now an out-of-work schlub on the verge of a midlife crisis. Their 16-year old son Jack is a California dude, easy going but Stanford-bound and therefore probably on the cusp of achieving some kind of tech genius himself. It’s the way of things in the Valley.

Jack’s eight-year-old brothers, Thing One and Thing Two, are not-so-identical twins. Yin and yang, they are object lessons in the heartbreaking, multitudinous ways childhoods can go wrong when smart, ambitious parents let digital technology do the babysitting so they can stay immersed in the adult world, writing code, having affairs, and that sort of thing.

In fact everyone in Come With Me is a Type, a persona that might well have been synthesized from trenchant magazine articles about the digital world’s transformation of real life. One of the characters, Jack’s best friend Kevin, literally is such a concoction, a profile cribbed from a 2015 Atlantic Monthly cover article about teen suicides in Silicon Valley.

Schulman’s weakness in selling her characters, though, is balanced by the excellence of her storytelling and the timeliness of her themes.

The plot of Come With Me hinges on three pivotal days in the life of Amy’s family. On the first day, Amy is introduced to Donny’s business idea, a digital interface with the cloud that lets the user explore alternate multiverses–ways her life might have turned out differently than it did with even the slightest adjustments to her choices and circumstances.

Amy is shaken to discover that she has deep misgivings about the way life really has turned out, misgivings she didn’t know were there. In a lightning flash of existential uncertainty, she comes to hate Donny for dangling before her all the what-ifs of past boyfriends and an abortion that need not have happened; visions of core happiness guarded by random strangers, ruined by intimates and the drubbing of endless domestic responsibilities. Life, she realizes, would be better left as an undisturbed, irrevocable fact. Or maybe not. She can’t tell.

The reason she can’t tell is because she doesn’t know exactly what is happening with her husband, Dan. But what is happening comes into full view on day two of the story. Dan, who has, for two decades, been a kind of colorless but faithful backstop against passion and drama–the ideal father, in some ways–reveals himself to be a defeated man in need of new sources of meaning. As usual for men of a certain age, “new sources of meaning” actually mean a new piece of ass.

The owner of the ass in question is Maryam, who used to be a man. Interesting twist, that: anything is possible in our virtual-real world. A journalist, Maryam believes in causes. She persuades Dan to come with her to Japan to cover the neglected aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Dan spends money he and Amy don’t have to travel there, sleeps with Maryam, and botches his cover story so badly that Amy can see from 2,000 miles away what Dan is doing, the scale of the disaster he has wrought. This happens on the same day Thing One is expelled from school for (successfully) gambling on Magic the Gathering and Jack’s best friend Kevin kills himself. Amy deals, but then reaches the end of her tether.

“She screamed [into Dan’s voice mail]: ‘I know you’re there! You’re texting me, you stupid asshole! Coward!!! Pick up the fucking phone!'”

Day three is the day of Kevin’s funeral. Dan returns from Japan. All the virtual strands of the plot come home to Silicon Valley to root themselves in the real lives of the characters. The reader is made to behold some durable truths about humans, which survive even the most thorough digitization of our lives. I won’t spoil these, except to say that Schulman seems to believe the way we live now complicates Tolstoy’s observation that happy families are all happy in the same way, unhappy families unhappy in myriad different ways. Many families may actually split the difference these days, given our new tools for achieving self awareness.

Come With Me is a novel about our Zeitgeist, similar in scope and ambition to Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 The Corrections, and it is almost as good. It is very much a novel of right now. It tries to make us see how our lives are caught inside the tumbler of contemporary history, and there is simply no way of predicting the shape they will have when they come out.

And we impose this uncertainty on ourselves. We choose it, up to a point, just by allowing our lives to be mediated 24/7 by digital technology. In placing a bet that technology will continue to improve human life–something it has done for the last 5,000-odd years–the only return we can be assured of is the increasingly radical uncertainty of the next moment in history. We have no idea whether Moore’s Law will accelerate the profits of improved knowledge or the disorientation of enhanced fantasy and plain old error.

Early in Come With Me Schulman observes that Philip Roth, like the generation of he-man novelists he belonged to, tried to write in a way that would cheat death. She got Roth completely wrong. “The meaning of life is that it ends,” he wrote, and believed.

But the story and the themes of Come With Me get Roth exactly right where it counts–on the elusiveness of knowing what humans are up to. Try as you might to understand those who shape your life; try as you might to understand even yourself, and you will hit a bottom layer of guesses–incomplete, misdirected attempts at answers. This is how Roth put it in The Human Stain:

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

The part of Come With Me that should give us pause is this: Donny created the what-if machine because he wanted to help people comprehend their lives as they actually happened. He thought if he could let them view all their past roads untraveled he might heighten their interest in, maybe even deepen their understanding of, their present predicament. But all those roads untaken also opened up onto unknowable terrain and unpredictable consequences. There was nothing firm about them. All Donny really did was to multiply the ways in which “there is no bottom to what is not known,” as Roth put it.

The way we live now means we will not just carry on making ordinary mistakes about ourselves, but we will actually use technology to create new ways of being wrong. So that should be fun.

 

BY MATTHEW HERBERT

Last week the Trump administration warned federal employees they weren’t allowed to bad mouth the president while on duty because it would violate the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a 1939 law that bars government workers from campaigning for a candidate while on the job.

It’s a sensible law. Of course civil servants should not draw wages to do anything other than the job they were hired to do.

This week’s memo, though, is an obvious attempt by the president to abuse executive power. People do talk, including civil servants. Trump’s desire to police their conversations is based on the childishly stupid premise that he is already running for office and therefore off limits as a topic of discussion.

Every first-term president since the Hatch Act was passed could have made this argument but didn’t. Why not? One can only speculate. One glaring reason might be that it would take a catastrophically insecure and narcissistic personality to imagine one might benefit from this kind of curb on free speech. And although we have had many deeply flawed presidents since 1939, we have had none who could match Trump for insecurity and narcissism.

Well, in any case, I’m off the clock at the moment, and so I thought I would share a few choice words about Trump’s garish stupidity and thuggishness. They aren’t my words. I could certainly come up with some, but I thought I would let a few of my favorite authors do the talking instead.

So, without further ado, enjoy these observations on Trump.

Trump is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac. . . . [He] is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.

Philip Roth, novelist

 

He still has not visited U.S. troops deployed to a war zone — although he has spent 72 days at Mar-a-Lago and 58 days at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club. . . . So much for Trump’s conceit that he is pro-military. . . . He has no understanding of what soldiers do or the honor code by which they live. His idea of military service is marching in a parade — and he is peeved he couldn’t have one in Washington this Veterans Day. Through his words and deeds, the commander in chief shows his contempt for the men and women in uniform.

Max Boot, military historian, Republican strategist

 

And the basis of democracy is that everyone can be criticized — particularly our leaders. We don’t have a monarch, a supreme leader, a dictator for life. We’ve got a person who is temporarily in charge of the government, and when he makes an error it is mandatory for a free press to call it out. To try to delegitimize the press whenever it criticizes the president, it’s really the reflex of an autocrat, of a tin-pot dictator in some banana republic, and not worthy of a democracy like the United States, where the president serves at our pleasure and can be criticized just like anyone else.

Steven Pinker, linguist, psychologist

 

Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic.

George Will, conservative commentator

 

He’s a jackass.

Bill Kristol, conservative commentator, editor, The Weekly Standard

 

I join my family for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether or not you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.

David Sedaris, writer

 

Trump bluster[s] incoherently like the ignorant, fact-disdaining, vainglorious bully he is.

Richard Dawkins, biologist

 

Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.

Trumpian bullshit serves not only as a test of elite loyalty, but as a signifier of belonging to a mass audience. The big, beautiful wall that Mexico will allegedly pay for, the war on the “fake news” media, Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate, and now the secret tape recording that will destroy James Comey are not genuine articles of faith meant to be believed in. Their invocation is a formalism or a symbol; a sign of compliance and belonging. The content is bullshit.

Matthew Yglesias, journalist

 

Comparisons between Trump and Hitler are wrong, Amis argues, because the US president actually resembles a different fascist: Hitler’s ally Mussolini.  . . .[Amis] recalled seeing the slogan “Mussolini Is Always Right” on Italian bridges in the 1970s. 

“Trump is that crazy, and that boastful, and that deluded,” Amis said. “Even Mussolini had a few good years before he lost it. But people like Hitler and Stalin wanted to change human nature. That’s what totalitarianism is. Trump doesn’t want to make a total claim on you as an individual. He wants to stay in power, and that’s about it.”

From an interview with Martin Amis, English novelist

 

Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, journalist

 

Trumpism is not just the usual mendacious special pleading for the super-rich. In fact, Trump cares little about policy or policy ideas or, for that matter, any ideas at all, even bogus or illusory ones. He only cares about self-gratification and self-glorification. His towering ego is his only ideal. But his megalomania is about more than his narcissism – for his fortune and his family riches, and his criteria for powerful leadership, have long-standing links to organized crime. Donald Trump is a racketeer, loyal neither to principles nor persons.

Sean Wilentz, presidential historian

Well, off to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, off to work.

 

 

BY MATTHEW HERBERT

We are a nation of rugged individualists, we tell ourselves. We struggle alone and unaided on the great playing field of life. If we work hard, we succeed. Life is a meritocracy.

My favorite version of this myth, one which I believe in on sunny days, is Walt Whitman’s. America is a vast country of open skies, Whitman believed, offering endless opportunities for work to whoever wants to earn a living. In turn, what we do with our labor helps make us who we are.

All work is dignified work, continues this myth. The way we earn our living is a means of leaving our unique mark on the world. Work expresses a will to power, because it gives us the best tools we will ever have for fashioning a part of the world to accord with our wishes. Here is Whitman, singing of this strong spirit and its uniquely American character:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs

All very good. Whitman is lyrically feeling his way around a philosophical distinction Hannah Arendt will make between labor and work in The Human Condition. Labor, which Arendt says is something we have to do to, repeatedly and (seemingly pointlessly) to sustain ourselves, work is an intrinsically interesting activity that engages our mind and leaves behind a durable object in which we can take pride. It is what Whitman is referring to as the special thing that belongs to each worker “and to none else.” Meaningful work makes us who we are.

Capitalism in America came to conflate Arendt’s ideas of labor and work. The effusive joy of “I Hear America Singing,” reflects how lucky Whitman thought we were in this convergence. In a booming, bumptious America, no matter how you labored, it also counted as work. When Whitman wrote “I hear America Singing,” if you could walk out into an American morning and do your job, you were, without even thinking about it, helping build a great and noble nation. You were part of a living poem.

But with professionally specialized work, came wealth as well. Building the streets, railroads, cars and ships that made us who we are also made profit, some of which was passed along to the worker in the form of good wages. For quite a long while, trades-based work made Americans prosperous even as it guided them toward becoming their essential, poetic selves.

Now fast forward a century. It is the 1970s. Two decades have passed since the post-World War Two boom started to fuel new, increasingly profligate patterns of consumption. Americans have come to measure the value of their work, not in the mark it made on the world, but in the marginal amount of wages it brought in. The sacred thing that could belong to each of us was no longer a trades-based identity, but raw purchasing power. Buying stuff was the whole ballgame now. The advent of all-out consumerism de-sacralized work. It meant that all that mattered was whether our job brought us more stuff than the next guy.

Now anyone with even a single Marxian bone in her body has already recognized this unfolding story as the grim tale of alienated labor. American capitalism had come to reverse Whitman’s happy dilemma. With the rise of consumerism, no matter what kind of work you did, it also counted as mere labor–the rote execution of tasks to gain spendable wages.

Here is Gore Vidal, who had more than one Marxian bone in his patrician frame, from a 1972 essay. Vidal is discussing what it meant to work and earn one’s living in our great land, where purchasing power was now paramount:

Although the equality of each citizen before the law is the rock upon which the American Constitution rests, economic equality has never been an American ideal. . . . A dislike of economic equality is something deep-grained in the American Protestant character. After all, given a rich empty continent for vigorous Europeans to exploit (the Indians were simply a disagreeable part of the emptiness, like chiggers), any man of gumption could make himself a good living. With extra hard work, any man could make himself a fortune, proving that he was a better man than the rest. Long before Darwin the American ethos was Darwinian.

Now jump ahead to 2009. It has been 60-odd years since consumerism took over our culture, and nearly 40 since Vidal penned his jaded observations on this development.

An overtly Darwinian political class has arisen in America. It views the unbridled competition for wealth with full-bodied approval. With Ronald Reagan setting its mood and Milton Friedman drawing its economic curves, the new Republican Right promoted for three decades the idea that the true purpose of work was to pursue pure, unmitigated self interest in the form of higher wages. Scrap for all you can, says this dogma, and society will take care of itself. Taxation, a threat to one’s pile of wages, is legalized theft, says the new Right; resist it with all your cunning. Look out always and everywhere for Number One. Greed is good.

Margaret Thatcher put the words in Reagan’s mouth that he was not quite smart enough to come up with to summarize this view: “[T]here’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.”

As I say, it is 2009. Tony Judt, an American historian, lies dying in his bed, and he is thinking about how far America and Britain have run with Thatcher’s idea. A friend, a Holocaust historian, is helping him write his last book. Judt has this to say about living and working in America, where most industrial jobs have fled overseas, wealth inequality now equals China’s, and median life expectancy hovers just below Bosnia’s:

Many Americans are well aware that something is seriously amiss. They do not live as well as they once did. Everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth: better education and better job prospects. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime. However, when advised that such benefits are available in Western Europe, many Americans respond, “But they have socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.” . . .

The presumption in the American Bill of Rights–that whatever is not explicitly accorded to the national government is by default the prerogative of the separate states–has been internalized over the course of centuries by generations of settlers and immigrants as a license to keep Washington “out of our lives.”

The suspicion of the public authorities, periodically elevated to a cult by Know Nothings, States Rightists, anti-tax campaigners and–most recently–the radio talk show demagogues of the Republican Right, is uniquely American. It translates an already instinctive suspicion of taxation into patriotic dogma. Here in the US, taxes are typically regarded as uncompensated income loss. The idea that they might (also) be a contribution to the provision of collective goods that individuals could never afford in isolation . . . is rarely considered.

How did we get here from Whitman’s broad, sunny morning that saw happy workers doing interesting jobs and building a great country? Whitman felt great patriotism for the quality of life we were building in our land. It was possible, he thought, to be a fulfilled individual and contribute to a great society. Whitman saw these projects as complementary, completely harmonious with each other.

But our political culture today posits that true patriotism lies in the naked pursuit of economic self-interest. Seek the most wealth you possibly can. Whatever normative questions arise in the hubub will be addressed by the functioning of free-market forces. Will people get sick? Of course, and doctors will charge whatever they can to cure them. Intrepid, rational actors will, if they deem a sufficient financial need, pool some of their wealth to pay for a market-based hedge against medical costs. They don’t need the government to fund or organize this service for them. The rational individual pursuit of wealth will always find efficiencies that elude bureaucratic do-gooders.

The foundation of this rugged individualist political culture is the belief that people must seize basic services directly from nature; they must not allow governments to intervene in providing them. Government always screws up the provision of services and, with no competitors to curb them, overcharge to boot. It’s a mess.

But rugged individualism is based on a blind disregard of what government is. In the state of nature–best and most clearly imagined by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan–there are no governments, or even society–Maggie Thatcher would have loved it. Each individual has the natural right to use lethal force to protect her life and property. There are no rules outside the biological imperatives, primarily to eat and defend what is yours. You need little imagination to picture such a life in Hobbes’ famous terms. The universal, natural right to use lethal force would make life “nasty, brutish and short.”

To escape this hell, we form the Social Contract. Each individual surrenders the right to lethal force, entrusting it to a mutually recognized governing authority. This voluntary transfer of the right to use force is why, in almost all developed societies, the police and soldiers have all the guns. It is not an ideal setup, because a wicked government could use the guns against us, but we have consensual politics to try to ensure the legitimacy of our all-powerful government. It is much, much better than the state of nature.

I’ll come to the point. Americans have never committed fully to this contract. Because we have an undying suspicion of the government’s motives, which we refuse to treat therapeutically through politics, we retain the right to use lethal force. We retain it just barely–through the highly disputed Second Amendment to our constitution–but we retain it nonetheless. And this scotches the whole deal of the Social Contract. This tiny sliver of daylight between us and the Social Contract keeps us in the realm of savages, which is, for some reason, where we think we ought to be.

Why did I open this discussion by talking about work, labor, wages, consumerism and medical insurance? Because those things reveal in uncontroversial terms something that is deeply shameful–and therefore, I would hope, controversial–about our national character. We value and enjoy living in a violent, Darwinian society. We believe life should be a real contest, with real winners and losers.

To take just one indication of this attitude, which I’ve already touched on, medical care: we have much more than enough money in our country to provide medical care to everyone. The way we keep it out of the reach of millions of citizens is a deliberate choice. It reflects a national consensus that life should be like a reality TV show but really real. We want to enjoy watching the spectacle of people trying their hearts out and coming up short in the game of life. We are not a sufficiently decent people to choose to care for people instead. As long as we have a safe perch from which to watch the show, we want life to be nasty, brutish and short for those not clever enough to recognize the game or not strong enough to escape to the next level.

Often, when there is a mass shooting in America I rerun a blog post of mine in which I try to remind Americans that we like it here in the big leagues of violent chaos. We like gun violence. We like mass incarceration. We like the reality-TV contour of our national spectacle. We accept death and fear and hopelessness as acceptable costs for holding on to the romantic, outdated dream that life is a struggle that cannot be insulated from the law of the jungle. Take a look at the things we value and the things we don’t: we want the law of the jungle, or at least an enticingly real simulacrum of it.

Our spectator love affair with gun violence is just the tip of the iceberg. Our national journey has taken us taken is to a place where we work primarily to consume, where we regard the taxes we pay as a pointless ripoff, and where we fervently want life to be a Darwinian struggle, something that can only be kept up by artificial means.