Engagement

I couldn’t do it, Viktoria said, writing to me about how I feel compelled to engage with the world as it is, the world of work and corporate life.  There is, I think, more to it than that.  I live in places which are “normal,” like San Antonio and Seattle.  I don’t live in paradise outposts in Maine or rural Ontario, or live in less prosaic but nevertheless lovely and spectacular places like London or other major cities where everything is there for you, where you can detach from normal existence while still enjoying the benefits of cosmopolitan wonder.  I don’t even live in Philadelphia or Manchester or Tampa, where the world blends into a kind of stable mix of paradise and normalcy, where the food is good or the sun shines but the housing is subpar and the urban planning is rubbish and most people still dream of the places where it all seems sterling, where people dream of London and Maine in their different ways as benchmarks, as marks of what should be.

But it’s not like I enjoy this.  I loved working in Seattle when the best bank on earth was headquartered there, but I didn’t love Seattle the way I craved London.  I loved working in San Francisco but the banality of self-satisfied West Coast life slowly drove me mad, great food and even better golf courses aside.  I love Maine but I found myself disconnected there; I loved London but I found it all too self-satisfied and filled with the fear that it would change.  Being aware makes you realize the world everywhere is fragile and imaginary, differentiated only by climate and the accumulation of physical plant that came before us.

I had a brief moment of inspiration today.  I think I live as I do because I want to make the world better, and how I define that requires engagement in the worlds that people live in because they simply want to live their own lives well.  It’s a moral stance, to be sure – and I reference Mark’s recent comments on Viktoria’s introduction to her work in making a statement of moral value here.  It is both a rational stance but fundamentally a first principles stance which has to be asserted.  I want to change the world through action, not through creation or through control, but through action which at once demonstrates a particular way of acting and through action as a means of exploring different ways of acting.  I don’t know what is right, but I want to explore what “right” means, and I want to demonstrate to others that I can explore without the need for control, or self-aggrandisement, and still live a good life.  I also want to understand what others do to explore the same, and doing so requires direct engagement, and means I can’t walk away from daily life as lived by “most people.”

I don’t presume to think that this is the “right way to live.”  Everyone has to make their own choice, and indeed I think living independently, without regard to others’ beliefs about what the good life is, is a braver, more pure stance.  But I can’t do that – well, I could, but it wouldn’t feel correct to me.  I envy those – like Viktoria, like the ex-girlfriend – who can reject the common notions of what “correct” is and embrace a completely individual stance.  But it’s not me.  I look at the people I grew up with – the people who raised me – and see the goodness in them even as I reject most of what they accept without question as to what “good” is.  To put that all behind me seems, well, selfish.  I know for others it’s not selfish, it’s a pure act of self-preservation, a simple act of saying “no, I need to embrace what I feel is essential” – but to me, always self-doubting, always conscious of the limited nature of my own perception, I can’t reject anything that another person accepts completely as their own truth.

So I end up in places like San Antonio, which are not beautiful by any means but still attract millions of residents who actually like it here, despite the heat, despite the vistas where one commenter said “poverty extends and there’s really no civilization in sight.”  Those areas attracted people from areas with probably worse poverty, where civilization was not only not in sight but where civilization was beyond imagining, where a Circle K and a nearby Wal-Mart represent the hope of physical plenty even if contrasted by the threat of deportation or the inability to afford to shop there.  I end up in places like Seattle, where physical beauty is combined with a sense of end-of-earth finality which leads to opioid addiction and the ghettoization of the uneducated.  I end up working for companies which serve the mass middle market even as the mass middle market slides slowly and inexorably towards servitude.  Why do companies accelerate the trend towards servitude, when other models exist to enable participation?  I end up at companies like the provincially owned bank in Alberta, or the strange mutual hybrid company serving military families here in Texas, both of whom apply their capacity for profit to the public weal, and why do I alternatively work for the global megabanks which accelerate the trend in the opposite direction?

I think I do it because if we’re going to change this world, we have to understand the entire nature of the system.  We can’t just escape and create beauty – although that is a valid response, and thankfully enough of us do escape and do create beauty that beauty does exist, as a talisman to draw our attention to the possible.  But not all of us can do that.  Not all of us have the capacity for the creation of beauty – I know I don’t have that capacity – and most of us will struggle with the challenge of discerning on our own what the good can be, or put differently, we’ll struggle with the magnitude of the challenge of creating the good in a world of billions of other conceptions of the same, a world of limited resources, a world of too many people who do not care about the conception of the good and only care about possessing or controlling more than the rest of us have.

Changing my world – the world which I think is real, even if others think it imaginary – requires understanding that world.  It requires engagement.  Engagement isn’t often fun.  In fact sometimes it’s the polar opposite of fun.  It involves walking through urban landscapes filled with reflected, concentrated heat, bouncing off concrete parking lots and freeways until it destroys the life of trees and grass and burns out nature in its relentless pursuit of profit.  It involves walking through once vibrant neighborhoods being slowly destroyed by developers who will erect elegant glass and steel buildings filled with fine furniture and no people.  It involves walking from overbuilt parking structures to mile-long office buildings containing too many people earning their living from millions of soldiers and their families who get real benefit from all of those underemployed people and don’t understand the process of generating profit enough to rally against the waste and the underemployment of their staff.  It involves drifting from meeting to meeting on the thirty-first floor of a London office building listening to scared, terrified people who earn fifty or two hundred times the average wage desperately try to justify their existence in the face of change.

Without understanding those people who don’t understand, who fear, who try their best but with unthought intentions, who try their least with very cynical intentions on behalf of families and friends who deserve very good things anyway, who try to create value but get caught up in the endless potential for human beings to explain their actions in self-referential terms, who mean well but don’t think beyond the first or second consequence of their actions, who want to sleep well at night after a good meal and don’t see how sleeping as well as they do and eating as well as they do prevents others from sleeping at all or eating enough to live, without understanding all of them, I won’t understand how the system can be improved.  I won’t understand even if the system can be improved.  This may be the best of all possible worlds – how can I be sure if I don’t live it, and test it, and own it for my own?

Because I can’t create my own world.  I mean, I could – in fiction – but I have no talent in that way.  I could, in art, but I have no talent in that direction either.  I can only live in this world, and ask questions.

The biggest challenge I face is in raising a child in this world that I encounter.  I don’t have a conception of my son being able to create whatever world he wants – he has the capacity to create, sure, but in a world of other people who also can create, and through their fear also have the capacity to destruct other potential worlds.  Being an active though ineffectual participant in his development as a human being is both the bravest, dumbest, and most spectacular thing I could ever be a part of – even surpassing the brave, dumb, spectacular potential I have to love other people, and join them on their brave, dumb, spectacular journeys of discovery.

I cannot create a world, although I can write, and I can influence, and I can gently guide others in different ways and see whether that has any impact.  I don’t wish to create a world.  I wish to participate, to engage, and see what happens.

By the way, I could have titled this essay “On Engagement.”  But I think the whole “on” titling conceit we’ve been doing lately is a bit too cute.  So Mark, Viktoria – the gauntlet has been thrown.  Feel free to prove me wrong.  That’s part of the striving, too.