7. The Opportunism of Extremism
Conveniently held beliefs are a wonderful enabler of success. Living as I have for much of my life in such close proximity to the nation's capital, I don’t doubt that if I could have held my nose and embraced the more noxious elements of left-wing belief, I could have had as active a social and sex life over the years as so many of my more personably or physically attractive intellectual compares who are a few degrees to my left, rather than being a tolerated dissenting voice. More importantly, I don’t doubt that had I been able to hold my nose and embrace the more disgusting elements of American right-wingdom (which comprises most of it...), I’d have had as wonderful and influential a career as seems to burgeon for so many right-wing intellectuals I know.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no reward for contrarianism except for a few minutes in the spotlight and the belief that you’re correct. Whether or not people admit or realize it, they will do anything within their power to avoid disagreement, and they will do everything they can to avoid contact with people who challenge their belief. All socializing is a club, in which friends do everything they can to validate one another - because if we didn’t have validation, our sense of self would collapse. We’d all either become depressed or insane...
In leftist circles, the only reward in America is a social life. Even the rewards of the one reliably prosperous leftist vocation, academia, are steadily decreasing as they have for the half-century since leftist thought conquered academia. Most American leftists of an intellectual bent are stuck with the inadequate rewards of fighting losing battles at teaching on lower levels, or realizing artistic vision, or working at non-profit organizations for their pet causes. It’s a cliche to say that there is no organized Left in America, which is of course bollocks. There are plenty of leftist organizations in America whose voices are heard with little trouble, they’re just not well-organized. And consequently have very little influence on American life as a whole, and as such the careers of most left-wingers languish in unfulfillment.
Right-wingers, on the other hand, have all the rewards one can possibly ask for. They can have as great a social life as their leftist equivalents, but only if they’re not too busy reaping the obscenely delightful rewards of their beliefs in remuneration and influence. There are no end of career opportunities for American right-wingers of intellectual ability, for whom the world is nothing more an orange to squeeze so that they may enjoy the juice. And all the while, they will think that they rose because of their innate gifts, and that others who did not rise with their alacrity were prevented from doing so because of their innate laziness, moral corruption, and an intellectual limitedness that prevents them from realizing the true way of the world.
In this way, today’s intellectual right-wingers are no different than the Politburo bureaucrats of half-a-century ago, who no doubt found it equally easy to convince themselves that they rose up because of the depth of their commitment to ‘the people’, and that those who didn’t rise with the same speed were simply lacking in compassion for the plight of the worker.
In a dysfunctional society, what is most needed to rise very quickly is to parrot the beliefs which are squawked at you. The bosses at the most influential jobs are looking not for talent, but for inferior minds which can be molded like playdough. The minds of such people aren’t necessarily intellectually inferior (though I guess there’s an argument to be made...), they are inferior in terms of fortitude. They possess so little sense of self that whatever sense of self they have is connected to their movement, which is their best source of money, influence, privilege, and friends. They think not with their brains (because their lives would be much worse if they did), but with their hearts. And as such their beliefs are skin-deep. The best way to argue with them is not to refute their points intellectually, but to provide a right-winger with a left-winger to fall in love with, or to offer a left-winger a well-paid, secure job at a bank. The brain-washing would reverse itself in the drop of a hat, and their previously ‘cherished’ beliefs would melt into their precise opposites. Over and over again, I’ve seen it happen for so many people. Because these people never held their beliefs because of what their brains told them, but only because of what more primal organs did.
And oh... if only I could be one of either.... I’d be a much happier person.
8. The Baltimore/Washington Tragedy:
“City and Province — the two basic ideas of every civilization — bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living through today with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end —what does it signify? France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities — of old Crete and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North — to become "provinces." Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman (noble, priest) and the "worldly " patrician genius of the famous old small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the conflicts over the Dionysus religion — as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon — and those of the Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-outlook that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city overcame them. It is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day — as in the Hellenistic age which at its outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria — Culture-cities like Florence, Nurnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The worldcity means cosmopolitanism in place of "home” cold matter-of-fact in place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, society in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. It was in the conception of money as an inorganic and abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth and the primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks. Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income; and, unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the xoth, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds — all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence — anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.”
- Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”
I now know that I was a different person than I was four years ago when I drove through Washington DC and saw Sherman Avenue around Columbia Heights. Just four years ago, it was still a slum - dimly lit with boarded up townhouses. You did not walk there at night, and if you could help it, you wouldn’t drive there either. It’s now a pristine avenue of upper-middle class living, with streetlights so bright that it’s a twenty-four hour daytime. As I drove by, I blurted out ‘Are you shitting me?!?’
Every time I drive through Washington, there is another part of town that’s completely cleaned up. It’s barely even remarkable anymore. Neighborhoods I daren’t drive through when I was in college I now walk through without a second thought. At its current rate, the entire city will be upper-middle-class habitable by the time I’m forty, perhaps it all is already.
Rome was not built in a day, but Washington looks to be built in a matter of hours. The rest of the country grows ever more decrepit, more divided, more slummified. What we called The Great Recession may be the new Great Reality for the next hundred years in which jobs grow ever more scarce, student loans harder to pay off, the middle class gradually shrinks to nothing, and the gap between rich and poor becomes unbridgeable. But Washington is the one city in America which is recession proof. The bigger the government grows, the more lobbies and non-profits grow around it, the more educated people feel the need to move in, and the more vibrant DC’s economy grows. Washington is the city whose streets are paved with other people’s Gold.
What we seem to see in Washington DC is nothing less than the unstoppable construction of an imperium. It’s little different than the 19th century reconstruction of Berlin. No matter how important politically, and occasionally intellectually, Berlin was a sleepy, provincial town of little consequence to the development of mankind. When encountering the splendors of old Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, even Stockholm and Amsterdam, Berliners might as well have been country bumpkins. It was only when Berlin had other people’s money to grow itself that the city became the Bismark-era capital of the world, Earth’s most important city. When Prussia united Germany under the Second Reich, the other great German cities - each previously the capital of its own principality - grew ever more trival and poor. But Berlin became the shining economic, intellectual, and cultural light of the German-speaking world. So important was Berlin to Germany’s growth that by the 1920’s when the Weimar Republic gave Germany hyper-inflation such as the world had never seen, Berlin had finally reached the peak of its influence upon the world. Not even Vienna, Paris, or even New York could compare to Berlin’s cultural reach. And Berlin is the model for the new Washington, which is just beginning to stretch its wings into the most important American city and the nation’s true capital. In a half-century, its power over our nation could dwarf even New York’s. We can oppose it if we like, but what good is that against the tide of history?
In 1800, Baltimore was the second-largest city in America - a mercantile metropolis which housed perhaps the most important granaries in the New World, and a shipping center which imported and exported more food and sugar than any place in early America. Short of Philadelphia or Boston, and maybe Charleston, there is not a single city in America whose history goes further back into the roots of this nation. Early Washington DC was destroyed in the War of 1812, but it was in Baltimore that America repelled England’s efforts to subdue the new American nation and perhaps bring it back into the fold of the British Empire. And at that moment came the climax of Baltimore’s long history, initiating a decline in the city’s fortunes which is soon to enter its third century.
I used to hate Baltimore with a throbbing passion and swore I would never return. To me, Baltimore was all those things which are backward about America. Like an old-school Brooklynite to Manhattan, or an Oaklander to San Francisco, I looked at Washington DC as a shining beacon of progress against the stagnant regression I saw all around me. Washington DC may have been no better than Baltimore in terms of crime, drugs, and disease, but time was on Washington’s side. By the time I was in college, it was obviously the model of a vibrant, growing metropolis which Baltimore so clearly wasn’t. There were no end of outdoor restaurants, the city didn’t feel completely deserted after the end of the workday, there was an extraordinary profusion of gorgeous architecture, important thinkers of all fields were constantly lecturing around town, there was more theater, more art galleries, more concerts of nearly all genres, it was greener and more bike-friendly, and there was easier access to art-films. Most significantly, Washington DC had an industry! Until the sixties, Baltimore was a steel-manufacturing town, but it even lost its blue-collar reason for being. Baltimore was an ugly city with only the power of Johns Hopkins to sustain it, but Hopkins alone does not a vibrant city make. DC was a government town, and therefore has a constant influx of educated people. Even if the city was too transient and anonymous, it was always exciting. You felt that you were at one of the epicenters of the American Carnival, in one of the cities that makes America the most exciting place on Earth.
People who moved to Baltimore and see only a contemporary bastion of quirkiness for privileged white people can never understand what Baltimore was like when my generation was growing up. The Wire isn’t just a show, and the Baltimore of that era might as well be synonymous with downward mobility, hidebound conventionality, segregation at its most poisonous, gated community privilege, and utter distrust of progress. It had all of DC’s problems and none of its advantages. Even if things have improved, it’s still a lot like that today. And if there is a superficial gloss of ‘weirdness’ in which people feel so free to be ‘themselves’, it’s because the city around it hasn’t noticed: at its heart, Baltimore is as backwardly conventional a place as exists in America. As an adolescent, I viewed this city as a prison, and in some ways, I still do. Yes, Baltimore has all the identity which DC lacks, but that identity is a chain.
I may never return to live Washington DC, but I left an important part of myself in that city, perhaps the best part. But if the identity of Baltimore is a chain, then perhaps the identity of DC is an apparition. Only gadflies like me can make themselves at home in a city like DC, no one else can, because it’s an identity based upon skepticism. The things I love about DC, the dissatisfaction with a slow-moving life of simple pleasures, the constant spectacle of encounters with ‘celebrities’ (at least of a certain sort), the horror felt at the idea of living an inconsequential life, the cynical spurning of so long established institutions like families and rootedness and traditional morality (even as it's often so celebrated), the feeling that you are where important things happen, are precisely the reasons why DC cows any person with a healthy sense of self. Anyone who feels at home in DC is either a person of immensely little identity or immensely low expectations. I left DC because my low expectations were confirmed, and it was impossible to build a meaningful life in a place that valued my abilities so little.
If life were lived the way it should, it would be possible for these two opposite cities to coalesce into something truly livable. A place where belief and skepticism go hand in hand, a place of both dynamism and rootedness, a place with all the benefits of both provincial and cosmopolitan life. But unfortunately, my life, for a time, will remain an hour-long drive to capture those two sides of life, and of myself. But such a place does not exist in America. Does it exist anywhere else?
