Needier People in Colder Spaces (and a few notes about random stuff in academia and politics)
I’m 32,000 feet over Ohio, flying in such a tiny economy-class seat that I have to type with tyrannosaurus arms. Near the end of a very brief trip to an old friend’s memorial service in a Manhattan pub, I’m struck by the coldness of travel in the post-pandemic social landscape. I’ve been meaning to stay in the TWA Hotel at JFK since it opened, and now I have. It’s beautiful and cool, and you can look at pictures here if you haven’t seen it. Also, the one person at the front desk when I arrived late at night shook his head at me when I got within twenty feet of him, and pointed at this:
So I checked myself in, then went up to a 200 square-foot room with a bed and shower, like a very elegant monk’s cell, sparse and cold. Bar of soap, water glass, three coat hooks. That night in a little room cost more than my round-trip flight. You can spend a night in a hotel without speaking to another person, now, going kiosk to kiosk. Then I walked over to the terminal and ordered breakfast.
Those of you who suggested that I read Paul Kingsnorth’s book about the anticulture of the Machine pretty much nailed it. Halfway through.
In the middle of all this coldness and disconnection, I keep hearing people around me talking about their anxiety and their special needs. Across the aisle, a pair of passengers had to explain that they weren’t able to wait for the beverage service to begin, because they needed drinks right away. And the person across the aisle from me on the mostly empty flight from Los Angeles to New York was an extremely fidgety young man who spent the entire trip kicking and writhing in his seat and throwing all his trash on the floor.
The flight attendants talked about him, whisper whisper whisper, but not to him. I didn’t really blame them. The moment we reached the gate, he sprinted all the way to the still-closed door, shoving people out of the way.
All of the coldness in systems plus all of the personal dysfunction and unmanaged anxiety exist side-by-side in a world of warmth-signaling slogans that tell you how much you’re being cared for.
“Your tummy.” Thank you, mommy. It’s like home!
In other news, a remarkable interview this week with the Harvard history professor Jill Lepore could be used in a psychology class to illustrate intellectual compartmentalization and Cluster B splitting. If you’re in academia, or if you care about academia at all, I suggest that you click on that link and read the whole thing before you read what I say about it. I’ll wait right here, up over…Illinois, now, and we just blasted right past Indiana while I was looking down at the screen.
Okay, you read it? Lepore talks about the collapse of academic culture, and how much she’s hated it for the last ten years or so, and how much she almost quit. She even hesitated to publish a heterodox essay after friends warned her that she would be destroyed for crimethink. She repeatedly depicts academia as a cruel, "prosecutorial,” angry, narrow, dangerous cultural world, where people are hurt and punished for thinking the wrong things. She uses the word “miserable” to describe the experience of teaching at Harvard and writing as a professor.
She also pivots back and forth to the theme of Mean Republicans and Orange Man Bad, and warns that the American political right is interfering with academic freedom. But she can’t connect the two thematic streams: academia is miserable and unfree, and for some bizarre reason politicians are trying to intervene in it, which is an assault on our right as intellectuals to think what we want and say what we want. She acknowledges that inside [X], you can’t think and speak freely, but then she says that people outside [X] are interfering with the freedom of people inside [X] to think and speak freely, which is very mean, because it’s important to be able to think and speak freely. Everyone on this island is starving, and some mean outsiders are trying to deliver food, which is an attack on our island.
She can see that academia is sick, but she can’t allow herself to see for a single moment why anyone looking in at the sickness might try to force a course correction on the sick thing. Watch how hard it is for her to land these two themes on the same runway:
Higher education is crucial and essential and full of people working incredibly hard for oftentimes very little. They are now being demonized by political actors who would like to withdraw funding because they’re dismantling the federal government. They would like to have intellectual control over universities and professors because they want to dominate our lives and intrude on the world of ideas and the life of the mind in the way of all tyrants. I don’t want anything that I say about where higher education has gone wrong and why it’s important to be honest and open about those things to give an inch, not a millimeter, to the conservative claim that the Trump administration has any right to say who universities can and cannot hire and admit to their programs. I want to be entirely clear about that.
So:
My car is broken, I can’t drive it
Hi, I’m a mechanic, I’ll try to fix your car
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WHY ARE YOU SAYING MY CAR IS BROKEN THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH IT OH GOD STOP YOU’RE ATTACKING ME HELP HELP NAZIS
The university is a miserable place, unless Trump says so, in which case the university is absolutely wonderful go away. People outside academia are trying to fix academia because academia can’t fix academia, and everyone with a pulse knows this, including Jill Lepore. (Earth to Jill Lepore, come in Jill Lepore.) It’s fine to argue that the imposed solutions from politicians are bad interventions, and to pursue the details of helpful versus unhelpful approaches to academic reform, but she’s doing something else: in the odd paragraphs, she’s gaslighting about the dysfunction that she rants about in the even paragraphs, and she kind of seems to be gaslighting herself. It’s like she’s switching between parallel brains that don’t communicate: This is broken oh no why are they trying to fix this it’s fine.
Anyway, hello to Iowa. Everyone look up and wave.
Also, as a reminder of how much we're not hearing one another, here's Lepore's depiction of the culture war:
"We’re in this appalling situation where civics education has a political balance that leans right, while the discussion of the diversity of the American past has a political balance that leans left. The problem with a civics education that leans right is that its version of the American past is inevitably going to be the story of the march of progress and prosperity and freedom. And the story that leans left is the story of atrocities and ongoing systematic inequalities. Both of those accounts of America are true, but neither of them is the entire truth. No child is equipped for life in a democracy if they are asked to receive either story as canonical."
At a moment when the politics of the thing coded as "right" is about making America great "again," she thinks the right is insisting on a story in which America has steadily marched toward better and better things, more prosperity and freedom. She appears to have no idea at all that the discussion on the populist right is now entirely about the loss of those things. She's arguing with people she's never met or heard from.
Ah: I said "a few" notes in the headline because I was going to mention David French's new garbage about the pope's intervention in American politics, but then I decided not to bother.