Inspiration (guys, it’s time to think big)
Pay attention to your heart rate before and after. :) (Thanks, Michael Moore!)
From the Roots
It has become increasingly clear to me that to live up to the requirements of this chaotic time, it is necessary to challenge our own ideas and assumptions. I have found that doing so is both disorienting and strangely heartening: when we widen the lens on what we will allow ourselves to consider, think, and wonder, we’re no longer listening to someone bang away on a tinny two-key piano (this is good, that’s bad); we feel less like sorting machines and more like humans.
You may recall (unlike my husband, LOL) that in my last post, I decided to use this platform to explore some of the great works that, as I put it, have “grappled with humanity’s biggest questions long before I awakened to the situation,” starting with Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots. In his preface to that book, T.S. Eliot wrote, “…our first experience of Simone Weil should not be expressible in terms of approval or dissent. I cannot conceive of anybody’s agreeing with all of her views, or not disagreeing violently with some of them. But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul.”
[By the way: I haven’t even read this whole book yet, just a few chapters. I’m leaning into the risk; rather than trying to wrap my head around “everything” before saying “anything” — out of fear, of course, of being wrong, criticized, or misunderstood, my worst-nightmare triumvirate — I’m going to go for it. Our society has enough pre-packaged ideas backed by big pressure and big money and presented as independent thinking. I think we need to break out of that bind, so I’m attempting to put my money where my mouth is!]
It’s my hope that exploring these chapters provides a good deal of friction to help each of us explore what we really think and feel.
Part I: The Needs of the Soul (Introduction)
“A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.”
The opening of the book explores the relationship between rights and obligations, giving clear supremacy to the latter. “An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.” She goes on to say that a person in isolation would still have duties to themselves (presumably to feed and care for that self, etc); rights seem to come into play only when we find ourselves in relationship to one another, and in certain conditions and contexts.
Weil then lays out the fundamental terms from which the rest of her arguments will be drawn out: that the obligations between all human beings are inherent, inescapable, and entirely non-contingent upon any political or social arrangement, and that it is only “interests or passion” that could (and would) attack this otherwise universal, natural state.
I don’t think I’ve ever thought of rights and obligations in terms of primacy and against the backdrop of an “alone in the universe” thought-experiment. I’ve always just sort of thought of them as intertwined preconditions for “existing in society,” and mainly as a springboard from which to complain about people who want to enjoy their rights without any consideration for their corresponding obligations.
It seems to me — to continue with that complaint for a moment — that a significant portion of our current predicament stems from the fact that, a number of decades ago, the idea was introduced into society that our “selves” were wholly separable from life in general, and that their satisfaction should be the primary preoccupation of our lives. At one level, I think that many of us just became “spoiled,” so drunk with rights and freedoms that we forgot our obligations entirely.
Looking more closely, though, I’m not so sure we weren’t actually, in a way, also victims: it’s as though corporate forces — which have long been intertwined with the machinations of government, as this utterly fascinating story of the Boston Tea Party describes — often backed by huge and emerging insights within the field of psychology, slipped something into our collective drinks, in search of new frontiers for profit, to make us lose touch with the deeper satisfactions that accompanied our natural obligations to one another. Everywhere I go these days, both online and “IRL (in real life),” I hear echoes of the longing for community that was once just “how it was.” It’s almost cliche to talk about how desperate we are for such community, to return to the time before it was discovered that there was a sneaky way to take something from us that we’d never knowingly have given away.
On our little menu chalkboard in the kitchen, I’ve put the pithy and well-circulated message, “If something is free, you are product.” It’s a chilling reminder of an inversion that seems to have taken place without our full awareness. Products, by design, always exist in a state of relative value. Even when they feel they are existing as free agents (think Toy Story), they are never wholly independent from their status as merchandise; it is no coincidence, I think most of us can at least somewhat acknowledge, that the fragility of our democracy has emerged in tandem with a decade spent in a media ecosystem that turned us — unwittingly — into both producers and products for someone else’s gain. It also makes sense that producers and products would become confused about their own rights and obligations, and even their selfhood. It makes sense, too, that we might turn to others who “agree with us” for a clear reflection, or at least an affirmation, of that selfhood.
Throughout Weil’s writing, there’s an acknowledgment of the “eternal, universal” realm beyond the terrestrial stage upon which human affairs play out. The existence of this realm gives context to everything with which we wrestle in our imperfect and chaotic world. We could debate the existence of this universal realm until kingdom come (in fact, we have done so and probably will continue to do so as long as humans walk the earth), but I think it’s actually quite a useful framework within which to observe and understand ourselves, regardless of our true beliefs. We step outside of the theater. Or the water, as David Foster Wallace put it:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
I sense that it’s been a while since we’ve fully stepped aside and taken a look at the water we’re swimming in, at our tacit agreement to continue perpetuating certain assumptions without looking at how each of us is, in our own way, endorsing that particular version of reality.
We can learn a lot from the way we use language to both describe and shape our world. It’s long been fascinating to me, for example, that we use the word “environment” as a sort of stand-in for nature, from which we are technically and biologically inseparable. The word “environment” is derived from the “action of surrounding something,” which seems to imply that there is the “thing” (me, you, the person, the people) and there is the “stuff surrounding it” (the environment). Doesn’t that suggest that the things are inherently separate from one another? Picking it apart, the whole idea feels absurd; our ecological crisis, I think, reflects that core misunderstanding.
As we think about how to approach the “wicked problems” facing us as we head into the new year and all it heralds, it might be very fruitful to go back, as we’re doing here, to basics and — as Mr. Miller used to say in my 7th grade algebra class — “define our terms.” I’ll plan to keep doing that here, along with Simone Weil, as long as it feels useful (both to me and to all of you!).
JFK said, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”
May each of us enter 2024 with both a strong voice and open mind. ❤️
I’m curious (and please share in the comments if you’re willing): what comes to mind when you think about “rights” and “obligations”?
Watch | Listen | Try
There isn’t enough time in the day for all of the amazing things out there, but I thought I’d share a few standouts in this newsletter. This one, which could have been useful to a few Ivy presidents last week who seemed to have a hard time standing within a basic and intuitive reality, is a cool new tool from Developmental Politics, an organization I’ve followed for many years, as quoted in their launch email:
“We've create[d] DepolarizingGPT, a political AI chatbot that gives three answers to every prompt: one from a left-wing perspective, one from a right-wing perspective, and a third answer from a depolarizing or “integrating” perspective. Try our free political chatbot at this link: https://DepolarizingGPT.org
They go on to suggest a few ideas to get you going:
Get its opinion on any political issue.
Ask it to respond to a tweet or a post (approximately 500 words) by copying the text into the prompt box.
Practice debating an issue with a political opponent.
Make it do something goofy, like write a song about the border wall.
Mark and I have already thought of a few interesting applications for this GPT!
Lastly!
OMG! I am so grateful for the first unsolicited but deeply, profoundly appreciated pledge to support my work. I don’t intend to put up any sort of paywall, but if you have valued my work over the years and would love to help me continue to produce these things in the midst of the general chaos of life and work, I would be EVER so grateful. :)
Also: I get a lot of amazing emails in responses to these posts, and I love every one of them. If you’d ever be willing to share on the post directly (via the “comment” button), that would be wonderful, as it builds momentum and community! If not, don’t worry— I hope it goes without saying (and that you know and experience the fact) that I still absolutely love hearing from you!
Pressing the “❤️” button below would also be most appreciated. The number of views versus the number of hearts is a bit imbalanced, and if/when I publish a book (!) it will be super helpful to have a wide and supportive audience.
Sending love today and always!
Thanks for sharing DepolarizingGPT - understanding any issue from different perspectives is a valuable process that is currently avoided by too many.