Mephistophelean Meditations

Or, How to live the wrong life

In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles introduces himself as “the spirit of perpetual negation; / And rightly so, for all things that exist / Deserve to perish, and would not be missed” (Part I, ll. 1338-40, David Luke trans.). Adorno notes this passage as expressing the true spirit of Hegel—or at least the part of Hegel he finds valuable and convincing—in both Hegel: Three Studies and Negative Dialectics. As I start a new blogging venture—using, according to many left-wing online denizens, the “wrong” blogging service, and having accidentally sent a generic email to subscribers to my old blog—I found no better place to begin that with my fervent agreement with this sentiment. All of this [gestures broadly at everything] is wrong. We are living the wrong life, of which Trump is only the latest and most distressing symptom.

Indeed, I seem to have been cursed to be born into an era where every major world-historical decision on the part of the global ruling class has been comprehensively wrong. I was born just as neoliberalism was taking root—a one-sidedly pro-market ideology that degraded state capacity and eroded trust in our collective ability to shape our world. It thus arose at exactly the wrong time, just as the threat of climate change became clear. That ideology kept failing upward, convinced of its inevitability by the untimely demise of the Soviet Union, which removed any effective counterweight to American imperialism. While the 1990s “peace dividend” did admittedly create the space for some good rock banks in Seattle, the heady mixture of American triumphalism and neoliberal globalization laid the groundwork for the War on Terror and the Global Financial Crisis. And since then, “we”—or rather our leaders—have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The opening produced by each crisis for fresh thinking and new approaches has been immediately, forcibly shut down. The perpetrators have not only walked free but gone from strength to strength.

Meanwhile, the public’s ability to understand and intervene in the world has been systematically degraded by the advent of blackbox algorithmic social media, an intentionally addictive product of which right-wing radicalization is a naturally emergent property. We have been collectively induced to trade any reliable access to truth for regular hits of dopamine and we seem to actively crave the anger and frustration our online “interactions” always unfailingly produce. Not content with destroying our own minds, we have thrown our children into the maw of this infernal contraption, crushing their emotional resilience, sapping their powers of concentration, cutting off their contact with their peers, and in many cases literally driving them to suicide. And now an even more supple and flexible bullshit machine promises to feed us ever more customized content, including step-by-step instructions on succeeding at suicide by one’s chosen methods.

But it’s just as well that we get the kids used to subsisting on AI slop, because the one-two punch of smartphones and so-called “AI” are destroying young people’s ability to read and write even before they develop. We’ll need the AI to write for us because we won’t know how, and we’ll need it to understand on our behalf because we neglected to learn how to learn anything ourselves. We (or our rulers) somehow feel comfortable outsourcing everything to this wonderful technology—which is already being integrated into classrooms and forcibly inserted into corporate “workflows”—despite the fact that it is a toy that is not reliable for any important purpose and never will be. This technology is inevitable, “here to stay,” despite the fact that its development has demanded untold hundreds of billions of dollars and unfathomable ecological damage and despite the fact that no viable use case or profit model has yet been found.

We will hardly miss our self-cannibalized capacity for collective deliberation, though, because the Trump administration is hard at work making sure that we will have no collective ability to do or know anything. Even basic functions of the state like providing economic statistics (by the way, did you know that the very word “statistics” derives etymologically from the word “state”?) or fending off epidemic disease (while we’re indulging in trivia, did you know that plague doctors were depicted alongside soldiers on the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, so crucial were they considered to the idea of the modern state?) are being actively destroyed, for no stated reason other than a sheer hatred of truth. Worst of all, I still haven’t received my tax refund, despite filing in February!

Meanwhile, ecological collapse is happening, right now. It’s not looming. It’s not on the horizon. It’s here, right now. In Chicago, the strange orange haze of wildfire season—because so many trees burned down simultaneously thousands of miles away that their ashes remain densely visible for weeks on end—has gone from unthinkably weird to routine. The familiar sequence of the seasons from my childhood is gone. My students have never experienced what I consider to be a “normal” year of weather. It’s absolutely indisputable, but climate denial is weirdly redundant in a world where everyone appears to have simply given up. If we can’t reduce emissions without guaranteeing expected returns to incumbent asset-holders—including, for instance, the reactionary scum who run the Gulf States—then that’s tantamount to saying it’s physically impossible.

Many people imagined that the unavoidable reality of climate crisis would finally force people to do the right thing. What we’re learning, though, in the face of the single greatest collective problem ever faced by humanity, is that we really do have the ability to irrevocably fuck up. And we are. We are.

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Once I was talking to My Esteemed Partner about the fact that every important political theologian (a category I define exceptionally broadly) has some crank belief. When I mused about what mine might be, she interjected without hesitation: “The belief that things could have gone differently.” She’s right, of course. I do believe, with all my heart, to the point of driving myself mad, that the past was as open as the present is and that important events really could have gone differently.

It sounds so simple, but people find it so scandalous—as I find every time I suggest on social media that, for instance, Obama did not deliver the most he possibly could from his historic mandate or the Biden administration should have found some way not to allow the dude who tried to overthrow the government to walk free. But the idea is controversial even to world-historical geniuses, like Hegel and Marx.

For Hegel, the advent of secular modernity, with all that entailed, had opened up the possibility of humanity becoming more transparent to itself and therefore governing itself in accordance with reason. I think that was broadly true. For Marx, the one flaw in Hegel’s diagnosis was his failure to reckon with the unique economic structures that had arisen—structures that presented a unique opportunity for humanity to take conscious rational control of its material needs. Again, I think that was broadly true. Where both of them went wrong—and here you can tell I’ve spent the past six months reading Adorno constantly—is that they thought the desirable result would happen automatically. The self-actualization of absolute Spirit would culminate in the fully transparent rational society, just as the inevitable revolt of the proletariat would culminate in collective abundance that would render political conflict irrelevant.

Hegel and Marx were right in identifying the possibilities, but they both missed the crucial element of human agency. They were pointing toward the opportunity for humanity to finally grow up, to finally take responsibility for itself—but you cannot take responsibility for yourself under external compulsion. You can only take responsibility by taking responsibility. What modernity shows us is that humanity shapes its own destiny whether it wants to or not, and it also shows us what happens when we refuse that responsibility and hide behind impersonal forces—like the inevitable triumph of Communism, or the vindication of the master race, or the ineluctable action of the invisible hand, or (what somehow seems to encompass them all) the inexorable progress of technology. When we hand our agency over to those lies, we build the wrong life for ourselves.

It makes no sense to say this is the wrong life unless there was some other possibility. That means that my revulsion at the world is a weird kind of evidence that it could have been otherwise. If this is right, if this is progress, if this is natural and inevitable, how can a person as weird and ill-fitting as me exist? Why can I not simply adjust myself? Why not buy a house on one of the innumerable culs-de-sac I can see from the window of my commuter train, get an SUV and a Keurig coffee maker, and finally settle down to the important work of comforming being happy? But I cannot, reader. I cannot.

And so, I will be writing periodically on this newsletter, which will be my own little corner where I can reject this world, and all its lies, and all its empty promises. I will not be charging anyone any money for these missives, nor will I take it personally if former subscribers to An und für sich prefer to unsubscribe from this new venture. I naturally do not seek glory and renown for the type of thing I plan to write here. Instead, I seek to continue the semi-private, semi-public conversation I have had with an open-ended self-selecting group of similarly alienated souls for all these many years.