The Dialectic of Doubt

I recently had an essay published in Literary Traveler about existential doubt assuaged by a belief in literature as a life-affirming mythology.

The response has been positive, and I think I know why: The mental-emotional process I described is familiar to many readers. 

The cycle I outlined in the piece looks something like this: 

-An aching or vacuous sense that life is meaningless…

-Followed by a thrilling realization — “Wait, I find this thing (in my case it was literature) meaningful, so life must not be meaningless after all!”

After the piece was up on the site, like any vain writer, I re-read it in its polished, published form. I wasn’t surprised to find myself doubting my own conclusion. Literature might be a worthy activity, but there’s nothing ultimately meaningful about it. It doesn’t explain everything like many religions claim to do. It doesn’t satisfy that questioning: why, why, why? 

So, I thought, “If literature hasn’t actually supplied my life with meaning, then life IS meaningless…Except that it’s not — because I have my wife! And love! How can life be meaningless with love?!

“But then love is nothing but a biological function, something that keeps us living in units capable of survival. So, life is meaningless. But still, love is pretty sweet.”

Looking at these mental convulsions from afar, it’s impossible not to notice a cycle — or a dialectic of doubt. 

-Thesis: Despair.

-Antithesis: Hope that meaning resides here or there. 

Synthesis: An acceptance that life is ultimately meaningless, but that it’s full of all sorts of small delights in which we can construct provisional meaning. 

And, in a post-religious mind, this might be about as good as it gets — and that’s alright. Any thinking person is bound to doubt. Sisyphus can’t be smiling all the time, but maybe he can manage a laugh now and then. As long as he’s able to push beyond despair, as long as he can reach that next moment of provisional meaning, he’ll find joy — and hopefully that joy comes often enough to save him.  

Looking for more insights from an intrepid writer and committed travler? Follow Benjamin Clabault on Twitter and check out his website for all the latest news on publications, appearances, and more.

Another Reason to Travel: Combating Geographic Exceptionalism

There’s no lack of adages about why travel is good for you. “It helps broaden your horizons.” “You learn about other cultures.” “You grow as a person.”

Well, I’d like to add another:

Traveling eradicates notions of your own town’s/region’s/country’s exceptionalism. 

And I mean “exceptionalism” in a neutral sense. We’re liable to think our place in the world is especially good, and we’re also liable to consider it especially bad. When we travel, we learn that it’s neither. 

There are assholes everywhere. It’s not just a Massachusetts thing.

Pluckiness and determination are as common outside the U.S. as they are within it.

This isn’t to say places have no unique characteristics. Of course they do. And of course places have certain strengths and weaknesses. Some tendencies are more prominent in one country and less prominent in another. Just check out this fascinating work to learn more. 

But what travel shows us is that very few traits are truly unique to a single place. When you get out there and see the world, you learn that humanity’s foibles and nobility are remarkably universal.

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Looking for more insights from an intrepid writer and committed travler? Follow Benjamin Clabault on Twitter and check out his website for all the latest news on publications, appearances, and more.

The Sacrilege

In How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti’s narrator attempts to fuck her way to a better place. She’s feeling lost after being abandoned by a rightly offended best friend, and she responds by letting herself become the sexual plaything of a cold, heartless man. 

At one point, she says she’s indifferent to the possibility of having the man’s child...she’d as soon kiss the head of his baby as the head of his penis. It’s all the same to her.

There’s a stunning vulgarity to this sentiment, a sentiment that carries with it the essence of the mess we’ve created in the secular Western world. 

Is it too conservative, too reductive, too cliche, to suggest a lack of respect for the sacredness of certain parts of life — in this case, the creation of children — contributes to our general sense of societal malaise? This passage found a place in Heti’s book for a reason. She clearly felt it meant something.

Our old cultural and spiritual edifices have come crashing down — the religions and social orders that taught so many generations of our ancestors what to think — but maybe, just maybe, those legends and structures, proscriptions and rules were based on a real, biological, evolutionary-derived sense of what matters in our lives. Maybe we’re destined to find certain things sacred.

There’s a reason Heti’s narrator’s account inspires derision in a reader.  Violent sex as equal to parenthood? We don’t need any tradition to tell us the very idea is profane.

Is Twitter Part of the Real World? Are Twitter Handles People?

 

Some recent happenings:

Dutch soccer player Georginio Wijnaldum, who recently signed with PSG, said of his time at ex-club Liverpool, “There was a moment when I didn't feel loved and appreciated...The fans in the stadium always supported me...On social media, if we lost, I was the one who got the blame.”

Simone Biles, the U.S. gymnast who pulled out of the team competition, said of her pre-Olympic stress, “There were a couple of days when everybody tweets you and you feel the weight of the world.”

Singer Billie Eilish lamented the difficulty of doing good in the world when people online “are just going to keep saying that you're doing wrong.”

All these folks are high-profile individuals whose mental see-saws have been tipped off their fulcrums by the bullies (or adoring masses) of social media. And while I can empathize with their pain, I can’t help but wonder if we should make a key distinction once and for all, the distinction between the Twittersphere and the real world of flesh and blood.

The Wijnaldum case is especially intriguing. He noted himself the difference between fans he interacted with in person and those hurling insults through the void, saying "My feeling was that the fans in the stadium and the fans on social media were two different kinds.” Where he seems to have gone wrong is in giving each of these subsets equal weight. Who counts as a “Liverpool fan?” The dad and his son, wearing jerseys and waiting for an autograph from the little boy’s favorite player outside the stadium? Certainly. How about an anonymous Twitter user posting nasty things after the game, who could be someone genuinely displeased with Wijnaldum’s performance... or a casual observer who enjoys causing trouble… or some random person a half a world away who gets a kick out of winding up whoever they can, wherever they can, taking advantage of the anonymity and normalized vulgarity that Twitter provides? Does this last entity deserve its place in Wijnadlum’s mental category titled “Liverpool fans?” Does this entity even belong in the category of “people?”

A person interacts with the world, interchanging words and gestures with others, dealing constantly and inevitably with the consequences of their communications. A Twitter handle isn’t so much an extension of a person as a non-personal entity a person takes up when they’re looking to take a break from personhood. Why should these entities be given any weight by real people operating in society?

Of course, dragging social media entities below the threshold of personhood isn’t always so easy. This is most keenly felt in the case of physical threats and racial abuse. When athletes are subjected to such nastiness, as they increasingly are, it must be immensely painful, producing a fear and disgust I can scarcely comprehend. And no matter how much the athlete intellectualizes the concern away, there is still that unavoidable fact: Real human fingers typed those worlds.

But even these extreme cases are best dealt with by insisting on the non-personhood of the Twitter entity and the non-reality of the Twitter world. It’s by no means a perfect formulation. Twitter does, of course, exist. But it exists not so much within our social world as alongside it.

El Baile de la Conquista: The Tale the Conquered Are Allowed to Tell

This past weekend, Santiago Atitlán held its annual fair to commemorate Saint James (Santiago in Spanish), the community’s patron saint. It was a slightly under-illuminated affair, the pandemic exiling the carnival rides to an empty field well outside the city and cancelling the annual marimba concert altogether. Still, much went on as usual. The image of Saint James traveled the streets atop the shoulders of persevering bearers. The patron’s special brotherhood inaugurated his feast day with several rounds of sleep-depriving 4 AM rocket blasts. Feathered and masked young men danced for hours in a historical reenactment called “el Baile de la Conquista.” 

It was this last event that most captured my attention

The dance itself is less a simple set of movements than a full-scale theatrical production. The plot concerns the original Spanish conquest of the Mayan population. In the dance’s penultimate scene, the Spanish commander defeats the heroic Tecún Umán (a figure whose historical existence is dubious, but whose role as a mythological focal point is undeniable). The defeated Mayans, watching their leader’s downfall from the shadows, are left to bend the knee and take on the religion of their conquerors: Catholicism.

The dance is no modern invention. Combining age-old Mayan movements with Spanish narrative tropes (most notably those of el Baile de los Moros), el Baile de la Conquista originated in the conquered indigenous communities of colonial Guatemala. The Spanish friars encouraged its proliferation, confident its pro-Catholic conclusion could only benefit their cause. They had no reason to disapprove of a story glorifying their own triumph. 

When it comes to historical narratives, we’re used to hearing that the winners always get to tell the story. Here, however, we see something a bit more complex: the winners letting the losers tell the story, but in a way that the winners find satisfactory. Perhaps in the years after the conquest some Mayan dances told a different tale, one depicting the true price of Spanish brutality and the spiritual pain of forced conversion. If those dances did exist, they weren’t allowed to survive. It’s little wonder why.

Bright, Not Brilliant: Overcoming Trounced Notions of Orginality

 

It’s awfully fun to be young and creative. You wrap your limbs around a handful of new ideas, each of which seem to define the world in its entirety, and then you set about sprouting new ideas of your own. Each of these, you’re sure, could change the world of art, science, or social relations just as much as it changed your own perceptions. The people are silly, backward, or blind, but now a young genius has come along who will truly make them see.

One day, among the readings for a college class or in an old documentary, you happen upon an idea you thought was your own. The first time, it’s exhilarating. “Oh my God,” you think, giving yourself not so much a high five as an exuberant celebratory shaking. “I produced the same thought as X, so I must be just as brilliant!”

Then it happens again and again, and the initial euphoria at seeing yourself as a fellow traveler of the greats gives way to a growing sense of panic as all your grand theories, all the private breakthroughs that marked your superiority to your peers, fall claim to the thinkers of the past. Sure, you were clever enough to come up with some novel ideas, but they were only novel to you. What had seemed a blast of innovation was just a parochial lack of awareness.

This is an unsettling, demoralizing, and profoundly humbling realization. You’re not brilliant, but merely bright. You’ve created or changed nothing of note. As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, you might as well have never been born.

So what is one to do? Put down the pen, shred the library card, and commit oneself to the guiltless enjoyment of pop music? 

Or keep at it?

It’s the latter path I’ve decided to make my own. I find solace in the fact that countless greats, almost all thinkers, innovators, and enactors of true genius, must have passed through their own share of ultimately unoriginal innovations. They, too, saw their ideas suddenly appear among the flotsam of the past. And what did they do? They kept thinking, kept innovating, kept pushing the boundaries of what they were sure they already knew. And eventually, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, they came up with a philosophical formulation, artistic method, or scientific hypothesis that really was new. 

Looking at some of my past literary efforts can be cringe inducing (and I’m sure I’m not alone in that). What’s even worse is remembering how proud I was of each “innovation” at the time. 

Despite my shame at my hubristic past, the only solution is to keep pushing the limits, keep stretching beyond my own understanding in the hopes I’m stretching beyond the readership’s understanding as well. All it takes is a little bit of courage — the courage to look back, cringe, and still try again, knowing full well that my current endeavors might some day produce that same gnawing embarrassment.

Antiracism = Anticapitalism? An Argument for Multiple Analytical Perspectives

Whenever we analyze the world, we’re bound to privilege some channels of analysis over others. We can be purposeful in choosing to view the world through a particular lens, thereby discovering valuable insights into how society might be understood. Recently, theorists have done this to great effect by putting racism at the heart of the American story. The 1619 Project and the positioning of racism as central to the country’s past and present has illuminated the full extent of the horrors perpetrated against people of color, showing racism to be far more than an “unfortunate aside” to some noble American tale.

Problems arise when people assume the lens they’ve applied to the world for the sake of seeking new insights actually represents the world in its objective state, and think all matters in society can be adjudicated in accordance with the insights this lens has provided. 

Take, for example, Ibram X. Kendi’s case for “anticapitalism” in How to Be an Antiracist. He argues that racism and capitalism are inextricably linked, and so we ought to oppose capitalism in order to dismantle racism. You can see how one would come to that conclusion if they were to apply one lens — that which focuses on racism’s presence at the heart of the American story — to understand the world. The problem is that, in order to reach more supple conclusions, we must force ourselves to simultaneously consider how the world appears through other lenses. When considering the issue of capitalism, we should consider how the world looks when viewed through the lens of global poverty. When we do so, we see that the spread of markets has coincided with a remarkable decline in the rate of global poverty. With this insight in mind, dismantling capitalism seems like a very bad idea. 

(* It’s worth noting that Kendi employs a rather unique definition of “capitalism.” He rejects the notion of capitalism as “markets and market rules and competition,” instead defining the term as “the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin.” This is quite the bit of intellectual chicanery, forming an argument against something by redefining it as self-evidently abominable. Even if he means his “anticapitalism” to focus on exploitation, his use of the term suggests an opposition to capitalism as traditionally construed — that is, an economic system relying on markets to determine prices and wages.)

So, what’s our way forward? It seems an “objective” understanding of human society is impossible to come by. No matter how much distance we take from our object, when the object is something as complicated as the entire world, we simply have to privilege some sets of factors over others. It makes sense, then, to purposefully apply a lens to our observations without drawing all our conclusions from that single perspective. We can use various lenses, various perspectives, to gather a sizable collection of insights. These insights, sometimes obnoxiously contradictory or incoherent, will then comprise the closest thing to “objective reality” we’ve got. It’s from this amorphous blob of convoluted insights that we‘re forced to decide what ought to be done.

We live in a world where racism is linked with capitalism, and capitalism is linked with higher standards of living. The response to such a conundrum requires less wholesale eradication and more surgical extricating. It’s a messy business that requires the insights provided by new perspectives, with the latest takes on racism central among them.