Pitfalls and Box Canyons

Mapping the way through and out.

Composite. Credit: Kester.

I published an article last week in

The Metropolitan Review

about art, politics, and the right. It opens with the true story of a barbarian king being cut in half by his rival in a very literal fell swoop because what better way to grab your attention? (You should read it.)

Will Conservatives Make Great Art Again?

The responses to it were overwhelmingly positive. In fact, it put me on a little cloud over the weekend. However, there were a few downers. Certain authors, who I will not name here, criticized the magazine for publishing me. Thankfully, the nice people at the review didn’t seem to care at all.

There is a peculiar type of person who is consumed by interminable vindictiveness and for whom concepts like grace are as dim as dying stars. They are present on either side of the aisle, spending their days roaming the corridors of discussion like hall monitors in search of a trespasser to bludgeon and drag back to “where they belong.” I sincerely hope that these people will someday realize that this is an awful way to live and find it in their hearts to change.

With that said, one of my favorite replies came from

Charlie Becker

, a second-generation secondhand bookseller, professor at the University of Houston, and publisher of

Castles in the Sky

.

Though the whole comment is wonderful, it feels wrong somehow to bring the entire thing out from behind the wall. So here is an excerpt of what he wrote:

Great art is about transcendence: extending beyond ourselves to see and be something more. But transcendence demands grief. You have to admit you’re lacking in some way. Something in you—or in your worldview—has to be surrendered for something better to emerge. And while some corners of the Right are beginning to wrestle with that, I don’t see enough of it yet to support the kind of emotional depth great art requires.

The Left, of course, has struggled with both of these in its own way. It made a lot of people upset with the former—what felt like constant critique, deconstruction, and moral judgment. And yet it produced excellent grievance art. But the latter was arguably where it faltered most: it attempted transcendence without grief—trying to leap ahead into a new world without acknowledging what, or who, might be left behind. This is where it seemed to really piss people off.

There is a tendency now to look upon any emotionality other than anger as weakness, the idea being that this reflects strength and purpose. In reality, it just translates into cruelty that corrodes and stultifies, no matter how satisfying it seems in the moment to partake in the rage—in the grievance.

Xenophon claimed that the ancient Persians considered ingratitude among the worst crimes and punished it harshly because it is from ingratitude that so many other social sins flow. A people who cannot give thanks are lost to time, severed from continuity and, ultimately, from each other. This, I think, has been at the root of the worst forms of left-wing politics, not indifference toward our collective inheritance but an outright hostility against the past, which expresses itself in animosity toward those who, in its eyes, represent all that must be left behind, the children of a bygone world that will be bulldozed and paved over by the steamroller of history with a capital H. How can you grieve the loss of that which you never felt gratitude toward? You can’t.

On the right, I blame the pretend machismo promoted by talking heads with all the moral backbone of jellyfish, who preach strength but are utterly slavish to politicians and parties and petty signaling. The not-so-dissident right, “Frog Twitter,” and so on; all these strains are guilty of leading people down dead ends of stupidity and hubris that will be repaid with a hard fall.

In a recent profile, Curtis Yarvin quoted Louis de Saint-Just, a French philosopher who supported the Reign of Terror, as saying: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.” Yarvin wanted to make a point about the Trump administration, that unless a full-blown autocratic takeover of the U.S. government occurs—after which there would be no more voting, no more elections, no more freedom in a meaningful sense—then the new right is at risk of suffering backlash, having pushed the envelope of what is permissible so far while thumbing its nose not only at liberals and Democrats but also many conservatives and Republicans.

I think Yarvin is right, and I hope that if and when the backlash comes, it comes for those who are responsible for leading so many astray, who encouraged neighbors and friends to turn on each other, who held aloft vice over virtue, who turned their own venom and self-interest into the most cynical political project of our time.

For now, though, we can settle for building real communities around things that really matter.

In response to my piece,

Leighton Woodhouse

also reflected on his journey from an activist who turned toward journalism after becoming disillusioned with politics:

Journalism isn’t art, but it’s part of the same larger industrial apparatus of cultural production. It recruits from the same middle-class, urban, college-educated pool of talent. The “creators” who populate both fields share many of the same prejudices and predilections. There is the same sense of moral obligation to a certain kind of politics, the same self-confidence in one’s enlightened worldview, the same disdain for the same disfavored people.

And so politics corrupts art in the same way it corrupts journalism. Whether you’re a journalist or an artist, if you bow to its demands, your vocation becomes your moral purpose and your craft becomes propaganda. If you’re a novelist or a filmmaker, your plots become moral fables and your characters become two-dimensional stand-ins for various political constituencies. If you’re a painter or a sculptor your work becomes a mere vehicle for the lessons you wish to impart to an amorphous, less enlightened public. It becomes cynical and boring, which may not be the enemy of journalism, but it certainly is of art.

What’s remarkable is that Charlie and Leighton approached this from completely different angles, with different life experiences behind them, and yet they ended up in the same place, mapping the same pitfalls and box canyons. I suspect that many people feel this way, not just exhaustion or revulsion with politics but also a desire for something more, something that will not turn based on elections.

There is a way out, and we’re going to map it together.

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