The flight didn’t begin on an auspicious note. I had a window seat, and as the plane taxied left onto the runway, I could see a FedEx plane a few miles out on final approach, making a lazy turn to line up with our runway. Our runway. The one we were on, and were about to use for takeoff. The pilot fired up our engines just a little and scooted back off the runway to the left, making a quick semi-circle, and a few seconds later the giant DC-9 dropped onto the runway with screeching tires. I could only see its reflection in the mirrored windows of San Antonio’s A terminal. The DC-9 is one of my favorite planes; it’s got the tail tri-jet configuration that never competed effectively with what Boeing and Airbus came out with and eventually led to Lockheed’s exit from commercial aviation. But while it was a thrill to see it land so close, I was wondering who the knucklehead was who let us get onto the runway while it was about to land.
Different sides of the coin
Leaving Canada is always a bit of a downer, but Sunday was worse than usual. I spent the weekend on the shores of Lake Ontario, having the privilege of seeing my friend and co-contributor Viktoria and my other dear friend Walter get married. It was a lovely ceremony, wholly self-produced by the two of them (well, mostly by Viktoria, I think I can safely say). Saturday was spectacular, with the kind of sky that only Canada can create – giant slabs of thick white cloud against a brilliant deep blue September background, trees shimmering yellow and light green as autumn began to take hold, the lake rippling with whitecaps from a western breeze.
Indeed, that breeze was the kicker – the ceremony was outdoors, complete with dogs frolicking around the happy couple, poetry and video links with grandparents falling silent against the wind. While it wasn’t long, the ceremony was long enough for the cold off the lake to bite into everyone’s core – well, everyone except the happy couple, both riding a high of love and relief and satisfaction that the whole thing was finally coming together after months of preparation and hope. We in the crowd huddled closer, shivering, wondering when the bar would open in the sheltered tent and when maybe, just maybe, we’d be able to feel our fingers again. I had arrived earlier in the day with a late summer tan, but had quickly turned an early winter blue. The dog stayed by me, I think sensing my old dog’s absence – they were good friends – but also being a pal and sharing his body heat with me. I’m glad I’m good with dogs.
The ceremony and the speeches afterward keyed off a similar, resonant theme: we have one life, only one magnificent life, and if we are lucky, then we will see our own individual wonder and make the most of it – which, when you think of it, is an interesting message for a wedding ceremony, which is usually keyed off of some message of union or the match of the couple or the like. Those other messages came up fairly often, of course – but at its core, the bride and the groom and their family all marvelled at how Walter and Viktoria both are simply beautiful, amazing individuals, who are making the most of their own beauty.
Viktoria and Walter are not a typical couple. I needn’t get into details – that’s for them to do if they choose – but they are unconventional in about every way except for the fact that, in this world of shifting genders and sexualities, Viktoria is a woman and Walter is a man. But what makes them particularly unusual in my experience is that both of them have embraced their own lives as individuals and accepted both the costs and the benefits of doing so. And yet, they’ve still turned outwards from their individual existences – despite plenty of setbacks which might have taught them otherwise, which might have led them to retreat away from the world – and they have embraced the exponential expansion that can occur when we release ourselves to the love of others. They are both whole individuals, that is to say, and not simple individuals at all, who merely line up to regular, “normal,” broadly accepted societal forms. They are unique and different and sometimes not “normal” at all, thankfully.
While organizing her wedding, running a small business, hiking the Appalachian Trail and a provincial park on Lake Huron, embarking on an ambitious program of reading and study in philosophy, finishing the bathroom in their home, and dealing with the drama of an extended Quebecois family, Viktoria also somehow has found time to write a new essay for the website – this time on the very timely issue of the conflict between traditional society and the emergence of what she calls hyper-individualism, what she and I elsewhere have referred to as radical individualism. This is the philosophy that she and Walter (and, I hope, that I too) embrace in defining ourselves and in the way in which we try to enter into dialogue with others and with the broader world. I won’t repeat her argument but I’d ask you to read the essay.
I’m going to diverge from her argument, though, because from the way she painted the alignment of forces, one might think that hyper-individualism and traditional society are starkly at odds, and I don’t actually think that is the case. It’s true that we live in a secular age, and as I’ve written elsewhere, Charles Taylor and others have compellingly described a key foundation of secularism as the emergence of an individualized sense of self, which informs even the expression of traditional values and institutions. But that indeed is why I don’t think individualism and traditional society are truly at odds. Rather, I think Viktoria alludes to a far more powerful opposition which is at work today, namely, the fear that animates much of the conservative or reactionary retreat into older or established traditions and institutions, and the openness which characterizes what one might call a progressive stance.
What I’d note, though – and what I think Viktoria establishes in her essay – is that those who are “progressive” in demanding the acceptance of individual expression are not necessarily open at all; they can be just as deterministic, just as blind to the possibility of change and exchange and dialogue, as those who are more blatantly resistant to change or inclusion. Saying that “we are riding a river inevitably winding towards a sea of diversity, inclusion, and the dignity of all individuals no matter what their expression” is just as closed-ended, just as freedom-robbing at the individual level, as saying that “unless we return to a recognition of God, country, and family, our society will dissolve into chaos and violence and disrespect for one another.” The former expression might seem a little happier (or wide-eyed, or utopian, or foolish, depending on your preference), while the latter might seem more dystopian and grim; but both essentially rob the individual from having anything other than a choice between being a part of a noble future or being an instrument of perdition.
The freedom to choose between a right and a wrong outlook or philosophy, is not a choice and is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to live one’s life while recognizing the reality of others doing the same so as not to be worried about the likelihood that you won’t perfectly align with them. Individual freedom involves the confidence to know yourself, but also to be strong enough to allow for others – and, in the ideal case, even help others – to find their own expression, even if it diverges from your own values. As such, freedom requires putting aside deterministic views of evolution or of a particular future state that you expect to come about. Instead, you accept your role in a universal experiment, and with confidence and without any sense of disempowerment, accept the fact that the experiment itself is beyond your understanding. I think Viktoria would agree with me here and, also, she would say that this is at the heart of hyper-individualism. My point, though, is that one can be conservative with respect to institutions and how one sees society as a construct and still be hyper-individual and have that released perspective on fate – just as one can be enormously progressive with respect to individual freedoms and the need to respect our individual preferences while still being deterministic in understanding the evolution of our experience in time.
This all probably feels somewhat irrelevant and removed from seeing Walter and Viktoria get hitched on a (frankly, predictably) cold late September weekend in eastern Ontario. But I bring it all up because what Walter and Viktoria did in getting married was, in its way, just as radical as their own ability and willingness to express their own, unique, totally beyond the understanding of most of society individualities as solo man and unmarried woman. They entered into one of the most conservative of institutional forms – marriage – not because parents demanded it (although the parents involved were not unsupportive), or because they wanted to “normalize” something, or even for cynical tax or legal reasons. They did it simply because they believed in the institution and in its relationship to what they both hold most dear, which is love.
The two of them have not had much luck with society’s normal institutions, frankly. We should not have been surprised had they rejected marriage entirely. This is Walter’s second marriage, the first being very good in many traditional ways but also a binding, constraining trap that took away his own need to be himself. It’s not like he’s some kind of raconteur; that’s not it at all. But he is a man of service, of kindness, of support. He found himself in a marriage where those parts of him – that essence of him – was covered over and consumed by very traditional white male North American mid-20th century expectations of needing to lead, to conquer, to possess and to dominate. That’s not Walter; he’s a much better person than any of that. But in the “tradition” of marriage, he couldn’t escape, except when he did. In Viktoria he has found someone whom he can support – sometimes by learning how to work a backhoe, sometimes by simply being the caring soul that we all wish we had in the background of our own lives – and he doesn’t need to lead, chest out foot forward, the way his late 20th century Canadian male background otherwise demanded.
Viktoria has the power and the expressive potential and the sheer energy to create new worlds on her own – and she does. She makes Elon Musk look like a misbehaving lazy sot (though he does seem to be a misbehaving sot, one must admit). Indeed, the wedding was somewhat comical because of how deeply it was her wedding – she clearly had done so much of the work, not just physical work but the imaginative process of a unique ceremony and event. But as she said in her wedding speech, she has so much potential and power that she runs the risk of drifting, of losing her way. She is looking for ground just as Walter wishes to be the ground for someone flying towards the moon. She and Walter were fired by their wedding planner because what she wanted – and what Walter supported her in wanting – was just too far away from the normal blueprint to be understandable to such a planner. She wants to re-imagine the world and she has the energy to put it into being. Why, in heaven’s name, would “marriage” be appealing to such an innovator?
Well, simple – because while the traditions and norms of marriage are irrelevant to them, the foundation they see at its heart – the expression of love, the public and explosive expression of that love, and the human ritual of affirmation and of bringing together their diverse community of friends and family in such a ritual – was exactly in alignment with what they wanted to express of their own joy in each other. Marriage in its traditional expectations is irrelevant to them; but marriage – in its traditions of love and the expression of that love – was an ideal fit. As individuals, they fit like a glove – a man drawn to service and to support, a woman who has struggled to find her center because of the rotational power of her own ambitions and abilities. And despite what we may outwardly have expected, the two of them also fit with marriage as a form – not the norms that Walter found oppressive, or the expectations that Viktoria would reject out of hand anyway, but the core of it, the vision of love that they both see, a public expression and celebration and collective embrace of their love. In return, they did not accept the community’s expectations imposed on them via the institution; far from it. Instead they asked for and received the reverse, the community’s embrace of their vision.
Instead of buying into a societally imposed vision of a relationship, they were quiet revolutionaries, co-opting the institution of marriage without throwing away the outward forms, in a way which I think is actual far more radical than just being a “hyper-individual” who rejects traditional institutions in whatever form they come. While still embracing the ritual and (some of) the outward trappings, they stripped away all of what to them was the nonsense of the institution, and replaced them with new forms which are powerful and resonant for them. And they instead of saying to us that “we buy into your norms,” they made a powerful ask of us as co-celebrants: help us, keep us on our true path (not the path of your expectations of marriage, but definitely on the path of our own desires even as they may change), and be a part of this marriage by virtue of being here at the start. They saw the good at the core, and embraced it; they saw the irrelevancies around the edges, and they ignored them; and they wrote in new elements which were essential to them, and they asked us to join them in building their own, novel, personalized, unique institution – even while using the names and some of the vocabulary of the older box.
Thankfully, they also fed us well. A note to future revolutionaries: please make sure to get top notch catering help, or at least, make sure your revolutionary ranks are swelled with grocers and good chefs. It helps. Really.
A friend of mine asked me a couple of months ago, on a drive towards a hike, if I wanted to get married again. I didn’t know what to say and stumbled through what was probably a lame answer. Because the real answer is that I don’t know. What I do know is that I want nothing to do with my own mistake in getting married before, when I was married institutionally. I want to find someone who matches me, with my strengths and weaknesses and faults and talents, not perfectly because that’s not possible but at least roughly, and who brings their own strengths and weaknesses and faults and talents, and together, we both want to learn and grow and become something far greater than we could be as individuals alone. (Also, I come pre-loaded with a child and just people in general, so be prepared for that.) Marriage as an institution is irrelevant to any of that, and I actually don’t even think you need to have any of the traditional trappings of most relationships – that person could be anyone if you’re open enough, if you’re both open enough to the possibility of happiness (and if you fancy the other one’s sweet body, too – that’s important). But if the other person was of a public bent – much like Viktoria, in her way – then yes, I’d support the idea of marriage, in our own key and with our own definition, because that would be a key part of our love. And the template’s there, so why reinvent the wheel? But if the other person was of a private bent, then no, I wouldn’t want to get married. I’d love just as deeply, just as permanently, in both settings – hopefully as deeply as Walter loves Viktoria and as deeply as she loves him, and just as hopefully, I’d be loved as deeply too.
Viktoria’s essay presented a kind of battle royale scenario between tradition and individualism, a false dichotomy, but her own wedding was a beautiful amalgam, of the type she was really writing about. The future will not be some undefined “everyone loves one another regardless of their thoughts” utopia, nor will it be a Handmaid’s Tale horror of post-Trump authoritarianism, as the left solely defines its two live-free-or-die outcomes. Nor will it be an idyllic return to Eisenhower administration Anglo-European capitalist affluence and power, or a dissolution into a depraved, violent, multicultural and multilingual hellscape, as the equivalent take-it-or-leave-it outcomes are promulgated by the far right. No. It will be a construct, a compromise of institutional forms and individual creations, sometimes good and always in need of improvement, and it will react to cosmic change (solar storms? magnetic field changes? climate change?) and more mundane crises (people growing apart? jobs lost? waning desire for Chinese takeaway?) in ways we can’t predict. It will be a field in which our freedom of expression will meet with external challenges and the accrual of historical detritus that requires addressing, and we’ll all figure out what comes next.
What Viktoria and Walter showed us this past weekend, in other words, was that freedom and union are not opposed. Uniting with another isn’t giving up anything – it allows into both partners’ lives the possibility of a grander field of play, without losing any of the potential we bring to the union as individuals. If we’re afraid, or if we’re unimaginative and stuck in traditional ruts, then yes, we’ll ignore the possibilities and eventually feel trapped and stuck and lost and suffocated and alone. But if we’re confident and brave, and if we put aside what the world of the past has shown us and look at what is possible in all worlds, we’ll find a new way. And it will be good.
In other words, we can create a perfect wedding and perfect marriage – both of which are perfect due to their failings. Perfection on this earth only occurs because the failings are there too. On Saturday night, the piano guy’s stirring rendition of “Benny and the Jets” stuck in my head like a gunshot wound, I left the perfect wedding behind me – which was too cold, which didn’t have enough dancing, which had too many old people who just wanted to get home to bed. It was perfect.
But on a Sunday, driving alone, no dog, no partner, no friend to join me, just CBC Sunday radio programs and the OnRoute rest stops every 100 kms or so, I felt a grim melancholy. The night before, I had given my speech at the wedding – a short one – and sat down, mismatched in two sweaters, two jackets, and a touque, shivering and sipping my scotch in a corner. Then in the morning I listened to the conversation at breakfast, looked at the wedding pictures and oohed and aahed as was expected (and was deserved). Their dog sat by me and squeezed his head against my lap and asked for as many belly rubs as possible. Then I packed my car, Walter and I had a final goodbye, and I drove off down the dirt road from their house by the lake. Speeding on the 401, I felt keenly the absence of the partners I had left behind on the lakeshore; I missed the conversation, even if I was mostly just a listener, being the strange “philosopher” friend amongst the rural Ontario and urban Quebecois audience of the wedding.
I filled the tank a few miles from the airport, and the wind was picking up again and my fingers lost feeling as they gripped the pump. The airport air conditioning was on too high, probably still not having been adjusted to autumn temperatures, and I kept my jacket from the Alberta bank on while I drank a couple Caesers in the bar. I saw Viktoria’s post pop up and I smiled. I’d have something to do on the flights south, back to a foreign land where I’m definitely on the wrong side of the divide between individuals and tradition, between love and fear. I’ll survive. I have something to write about.
The Revolutionary River
This week-end, I read this op-ed in the New York Times: ‘We are not the Resistance’, by Michelle Alexander. I suggest that you read it; it is relatively short. But for my purpose, the key point was this: she argues that resistance toward Trump is only one episode in the long social struggle for human freedom and dignity. She argues that this evolution toward human freedom and dignity is, by the words of Vincent Harding, “like a river”. While the speed at which we descend the river may vary across time, the destination is set. (Utopia?!? She doesn’t care to paint us a picture of it).
I truly disagree with this brand of social determinism. Yes, I can see – like her – that the trend in history has been toward more human freedom; for slaves, for common (ie: unlanded) man, for woman, now for LGBTs. However, I can also see the forces of traditional power continue to resist these changes, often undermining them in more subtle but no less pervasive ways. We might no longer own any other human beings, but the working poors are still living with great uncertainty and without assurance that they will have the basic necessities of life. We might all have a vote, but the power of campaign contributions continue to outweigh ‘popular feeling’ in influencing the nitty-gritty of law-making. The economic power of the rich is unchecked; as shown by the runaway inequality of our time. As for woman, yes, we are rising to equality; yet, the #metoo movement has shown that men’s attitudes have not changed as fast as the politically-correct slogans would suggest.
Yes, the trend is toward more human freedom and dignity for all – but the counter forces to that trend are such that the direction of social evolution cannot be pre-determined. And more importantly, it is not preordained that this trend will continue.
To support her thesis, she reframes Trump as himself the ‘Resistance’ against this “…new nation struggling to be born, a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice matters.” She seems to forget that Trump was democratically elected by the majority of the electorate college. He might act like a tyrant today, but he was elected by a population, in an institutional form that might be two hundred years old but that still exists with well-known rules and norms, that desires order when all they feel is anarchy rising.
And that, my dear reader, is also a ‘natural’ reaction. Obviously, Trump didn’t sell the same type of hope as Obama. But what Trump promised – order and superiority of the strongest – appeases our fear of a future that we know to be uncertain.
With the pace of technological evolution, constantly causing social dislocations, and a labour force still recovering from the aftermath of the financial crisis, everyone – not just the elites, financial or intellectuals – now intuitively knows that their lives circumstances, including their economic livelihood, are bound to change several times within their lifetime. This pace of change is unprecedented. Ms Alexander extrapolates her trend toward human freedom from a past in which progressive changes took generations. Furthermore, she glances over the fact that some of these changes, like the ending of slavery, took a civil war to settle.
The pace of change today, especially since it is compounded by the spreading effect of information technologies, is creating a very unique time in history. We are at a threshold. Toward what, I do not know: I do not have Ms Alexander’s convictions in our destiny in human freedom and dignity. I am just too aware of the power of the reactionaries. People profit from the world as it is today, and those people do not join the ‘band-barge’ flowing down the river. They conspire, undermine, contrive. They usually have the capacity to capture the existing power structures, and use it to their advantage: Trump is clearly an example of that. Because he had financial power and celebrity status, and promised to fight the apparent lack of order of our era with good-old paternalistic sternness, he was able to become president. One who cares about progressive changes cannot dismiss his presidency as a stroke of luck.
I was deeply touched by the essay because, of course, I applaud the sentiment. Radical freedom and human dignity are great aspirations – I share the desire that they will be key pillars in our future. But her op-ed shows wishful thinking. One cannot win this ideological war without knowing one’s enemy, and giving them credit where it is due.
Because it is an ideological war. It is not only progressivism against traditionalism – though one’s attitude toward or against change is an important sorting characteristic. No, the novelty of our time is hyper-individualism. This degree of personal freedom, especially in choosing one’s values, clearly threatens social order. Radical individualism is perceived as a threat to social order not only because it challenges the established social structures, like the Churches and ‘traditional’ family values, but it raises doubt on the very idea that there can be social norms applied to all members of society. While some people embrace the freedom to define their values (usually the previously marginalized by social orthodoxies), others (arguably the majority) still prefer to defer to cultural authorities (Church, State, Patriarch).
Hyper-individualism is pitting both camps head-on. The proponents of hyper-individualism maintain that social cohesion necessarily constrains personal freedom within a certain range of actions (the social norms), and thus requires the exclusion of certain sub-groups (those who don’t abide by the norms), creating a us-vs-them mentality that is antithesis to personal freedom and the dignity of all. The opponents of hyper-individualism perceived in it a ‘free for all’: which it is since individualism implies ‘free for me’ and the reciprocity allows others ‘free for them’ too. In absence of moral precepts around which radical individuals can coalesce, there is great difficulty in maintaining group cohesion and collaboration, which are essential if society is to remain an organizing force and not descend into anarchy (where the wealthiest, the most bullish, the strongest prevails).
Ms Alexander recognizes this fact, noting that the current ‘resistance’ is organized only insofar as it is against Trump – the man. If Trump’s resistors were to pursue a positive goal, they would dissolve into thin air before they could formulate what that goal is: just like the Occupiers, who were another expression of this underlying cultural revolution.
Our historical path shows a progressive enlargement of ‘who matters in group decision-making’. It started with the village chief and his entourage, who later became king and aristocracy. The first democracies only included property owners, where even other forms of wealth acquisition (like the merchants) were excluded. Fast forward millenia, now everyone has a vote. But the institutions put in place to mediate political decision-making predate the enlargement of the constituency. The broader citizenry, both in terms of number of people and in the diversity of their values, is therefore constrained by an institutional structure that was not meant to include such a range of concerns. We – humanity – are in unchartered territory here. We have never tested how a society composed of hyper-free individuals can collaborate to create new institutions to represent their diversity.
This matters, a lot! With his quote of Javier Cercas (on Arts and Craft), Mark Hannam points out that: “by using old forms the novel is condemned to say old things, and only by using new forms can it say new things.” This applies to political structures too!!!
In the mean time, before new political structures can emerge, we are in for quite a bumpy ride! Humans are very uncomfortable with anarchy and uncertainty, even if only metaphorically in the moral, social and political spheres. Right now, Trump is as much a source of uncertainty as the hyper-individualists; this is in part why he is resisted (including by his close aides, as shown by the anonymous op-ed).
Notwithstanding her wishful thinking, Ms Alexander’s purpose and conclusion are valid. Her primary purpose is to reframe the current grass-root resistance against Trump in terms of a revolution in favor of human freedom and dignity – one with a long lineage of successful battles. I agree: there is a greater chance that we will get the future we desire if our goals are aspirational and our efforts are pro-active.
As a corollary, her conclusion is that resistance alone will not suffice. We, the hyper-individuals, have not yet found a way to come together into a common pro-active movement. We are not – yet – a revolution because we do not have a united voice. We are a cacophony – and in recent years, there is more yelling than conversations going on.
For my part, I will add that, most importantly, we have lost sight of the fact that our radical individuality – the personal freedom of choices that we hold so dear – has led us into fragmentation, which itself serves to maintain the status quo very well.
I will not claim to have any solutions here. But if, as Ms Alexander suggests, the various fragmented resistances understand implicitly that incremental changes alone will not bring forth the changes we desire, then we have to start imagining – collectively – what it is we desire.
Here, thinking that our destination is preordained does not suffice! It is even counter-productive, since it absolves us from the responsibility to collectively define the future we want. We want a sustainable planet; we want economic justice; we want human freedom and dignity. But how will we embody those values into our institutions, into our culture, into our social norms? By following the revolutionary river? Sorry, this is not sufficient.
We need to map our way forward.