Dickinson, Faith, Doubt

In Our Time this time was on Emily Dickinson. It was a good, solid reminder of just how deeply religious the poems are. For me it was a corrective because on the whole I tend to focus on the doubts that hedge the faith rather than the faith itself. But yes indeed, the poems are both religious and full of doubt. One of my favorites, which underscores that duality, is this one:

 

I know that He exists.

Somewhere – in silence –

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

 

’Tis an instant’s play –

’Tis a fond Ambush –

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

 

But – should the play

Prove piercing earnest –

Should the glee – glaze –

In Death’s – stiff – stare –

 

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest –

Have crawled too far!

 

The faith, indeed the certainty of a divine presence, is obvious in the first line (I’m reminded of a student who once upon a time said she thought the poem was about a potential lover . . . sure, why not). But so is the doubt—the “silence,” the “hid” if the first stanza point in that direction, but then so does the “should” and the “would” of the third and fourth stanzas.

 

And even more importantly, the poem emphasizes a profoundly critical stance on the nature of the divinity that, without doubt for the speaker, shapes our ends. From the divine perspective, it’s all “play,” a “fond Ambush,” a “surprise”—a bit of fun. From the human perspective, on the contrary, there’s “piercing earnest,” “glaz[ing],” a “stiff stare,” so that the “fun” becomes something else entirely.

 

That “He,” then—not just a good guy, not just a benevolent, jolly hidden giant. It’s more like one of the several conjectures in King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.”

Cancel Culture

The easy irony today is that those folks who bitched and moaned about “leftist” cancel culture are the ones who, without thought of a blush, cancel anyone who does not take their point of view as gospel truth. The obvious case is Liz Cheyney, but there are so many many others that the MAGAverse has taken to heart the old 1990s invention—RINO, Republican In Name Only—and used it to smear anyone from their own party who deviates from the Trump line. Ask Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Dubya . . . “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”

 

Let me take a step backwards, though. What exactly is cancel culture? How does cancel culture function? Who enforces cancel culture?

 

In a low-stakes kind of way, we all know that cancel culture is the silencing of voices and perspectives that disagree in some way from an accepted, received, standard idea of what is true or what should and should not be done. There’s a group of some sort, identifiable because its members see themselves as different from others and so unique. But while the group sees itself as different, it rejects being identified as different with terminology imposes an outsider’s denigratory perspective on the difference. Members of the group then express their outrage at the terms and the perspectives that they find offensive, and seek to silence those outsiders regardless of their wishes. What makes the phenomenon expressly cancel culture rather than merely good manners is the involuntary silencing.

 

I’d give examples from the culturally “leftist” perspective—“leftist” in this context means something like “sympathetic to the voices of those who see themselves as marginalized”—but to do so is to invite opprobrium because I’d be obliged to use the offensive terms in order to make the example concrete. So let me invent an example. There is a group of people who are ambidextrous. They call themselves the “even-handed.” But outsiders mock them as the “namby-pambies,” implying by that term that the ambidextrous are so indecisive that they can’t even tie their own shoelaces. Not surprisingly, the ambidextrous among us take umbrage at the term and inveigh against it at every opportunity.

 

Once upon a time, in the long-ago days when there was no social media, such inveighing would almost necessarily be self-limiting. There might be a local campaign against the users of “namby-pamby,” which might become public enough to reach the letters to the editor of the local newspaper. But it would be unlikely that the effort to cancel “namby-pamby” would grow much beyond the borders of the group of ambidextrous folks who resent the term.

 

To be sure, if there were enough force behind the campaign, the local might grow to be national and develop a life of its own—think of how the terms by which minorities were designated changed in the US from the 1950s to the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. I have in mind here what Michel Foucault says about the development of culturally significant discourses. The more a given discourse intersects with other, culturally significant discourses, then the more powerful will the given discourse become. I have no doubt that such development could happen to the terms “even-handed” vs. “namby-pamby,” but again, for that to happen the phenomenon of ambidexterity would have to intersect a great many other weighty, culturally central concerns. In short, the effort would require a great deal of social capital, social force, and social power.

 

Social media bypasses the need for such force and power. Even the least significant of concerns could grow to be tremendously powerful simply because the members of such a socially marginal group can multiply its voice almost infinitely via social media. Without social media, I think, there could be no such thing as cancel culture. To rewrite the first sentence of this paragraph, then: social media is now the mechanism by which social force and power is elaborated.

 

Social media do not just elaborate a particular cancelation. They also enforce the dictates of cancel culture. Multiply the voice of even the smallest of groups sufficiently—multiple accounts sourced to a small cadre of posters, for instance—and the persons who use the offensive term might easily find themselves subject to constant attack, which if it becomes vitriolic enough can lead to the persons being fired from their jobs, harassed in their neighborhoods, ultimately forced to withdraw from the world as much as possible.

 

I know that right-wing attackers of cancel culture assert that such a result is incompatible with the principle of free speech guaranteed to us Americans in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But I think that such a take on things is just wrong. In the first place, the First Amendment forbids Congress, which is to say the Federal Government, from infringing on the right of free speech. Individuals and groups are free to tell others to shut up, or to use whatever language they wish, short of libeling or calling for violence, of course. The general flow of cancel culture to which the right wingers object does not impose governmental sanctions on speech.

 

In the second place, free speech works both ways. If I use “namby-pamby” to mock the ambidextrous, then I must be willing to face a vociferous response to my usage from those who would rather speak of the “even-handed.” Again, short of calling for violence against me, the “even-handed” have as much right to inveigh against me as I have to use the objectionable term. If I don’t like the response and feel myself oppressed by it, then I have three options: fight back against the response; stop using “namby-pamby”; withdraw from the verbal field of battle. That’s the way that free speech works.

 

Up until Mr. Trump was elected president for the second time, cancel culture was a matter of person vs. person, of social group vs. social group, the free-for-all that free speech engenders and expects. Free speech produces “the wars of Truth,” as John Milton calls it in his essay of 1644, “Areopagitica.” Mr. Trump has introduced an unfortunate imbalance in those wars. Specifically, he has thrown the weight, power, majesty, threat of state authority behind the side of the wars that he favors. Quite literally, it turns out, not to agree with Mr. Trump can get you not just fired, not just mocked and vilified, but killed. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, the wars of Truth have become the war of state power over the individual.

 

With every post, every statement, every threat that Mr. Trump makes, he violates the First Amendment.

State of Nature

Folks on MSNOW are talking about the comment from Peewee German, aka Stephen Miller, that power is all that matters, and drawing analogies to Hobbes’s Leviathan. What’s lacking from the discussions is the central issue of Hobbes’s book, namely that it’s the agreement of the people, or for my purposes of nations, that they will cede their power to do whatever they want, and hand that power over to the “leviathan,” “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”

 

The agreement is a contract among the people/nations to cede their own authority and power to the leviathan. But the contract is not between the people/nations and the leviathan. That means that the leviathan is not bound by the terms of the contract, by the law, and so can exercise its power without any limitation at all. From the perspective of the people/nations, the contract binds them absolutely not to exercise any power that they have ceded to the leviathan. If any person/nation does so, the consequence is to suffer the exercise of leviathan’s power.

 

In theory, at any rate, the US is a Hobbesian nation in the sense that there is a contract, the Constitution, that assigns power to the federal government in more or less clearly stated terms. To challenge those terms is to provoke the power of the federal government and suffer the consequences. Obviously Hobbes’s notion that the leviathan is not part of the contract and therefore not subject to the terms of the contract doesn’t apply to the US—at least so far.

 

In effect, thanks to Marbury v. Madison, the SCOTUS functions as a sort of Hobbesian leviathan in the sense that it’s the SCOTUS that determines to what extent the federal government, in its legislative and executive guises, is bound by the law. The SCOTUS itself, it seems, is unbound by any law. Whatever the court decides is absolutely within its power to determine, but there is no obverse to that—in other words, short of impeachment of individual members of the court, no one can tell the SCOTUS how to behave or what to decide.

 

The problem that the world faces is that there is no global counterpart to the SCOTUS. There is no leviathan whose power can be exercised without restraint in order to maintain the contract among the people/nations. Presumably there is a sort of contract—say the charter of the UN, or of the International Court of Justice. But there is no agency that can impose consequences for violating the terms of that contract. In the absence of such a leviathan, then, Hobbes tells us that we actually live in what he calls a state of nature, in which there is a constant and perpetual war of each against all. Peewee German—I mean Stephen Miller is therefore right when he says that the only thing that matters is power.

 

Unfortunately Peewee does not contemplate what Hobbes says are the consequences of living in a state of nature. Such a life, says Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short.” That is the world we live in. From the perspective of the rest of the world, that miserable existence has been obvious all along. Thanks to the cockwomble now in the White House, we in the US are now seeing that we are not exempt.