On the Nose, Commissar
“Modern culture is a garden culture,” Zygmunt Bauman wrote:
It defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact, it defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through an endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order. Apart from the overall plan, the artificial order of the garden needs tools and raw materials. It also needs defence — against the unrelenting danger of what is, obviously, a disorder. The order, first conceived of as a design, determines what is a tool, what is a raw material, what is useless, what is irrelevant, what is harmful, what is a weed or a pest. It classifies all elements of the universe by their relation to itself. This relation is the only meaning it grants them and tolerates — and the only justification of the gardener's actions, as differentiated as the relations themselves. From the point of view of the design all actions are instrumental, while all the objects of action are either facilities or hindrances.
Writing about the Holocaust, Bauman argued that genocide is always latent in the modern state; bureaucracy, he wrote, “made the Holocaust. And it made it in its own image.” The bureaucracy has a task to perform; people help or get in the way; and so a bureaucracy regards people as objects that advance the project or impede the project, and then acts on people in the context of advancing the project. If you live in Shanghai, we need you to stay indoors until there are no more viruses, and will you just shut up about needing food?
The modern state pulls weeds. It puts the garden into order. (See also.)
So. Here’s a story1 from last year, from Nina Jankowicz, now the new executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security:
The gift, in this story, is that a member of the slogan-chanting class is so completely lacking in self-awareness that she just goes ahead and says directly that we can’t merely chop down the people we want to remove from our political discourse — we need to really get in there and rip them all out by the roots. We need to make sure the social networks stay clean and well-ordered by taking decisive, long-lasting solutions that produce total eradication.
Be grateful for this — for “this rise in politics as drama student drama queens” — because the high school drama club performance of the Creel Committee makes the joke obvious enough to reduce threat to farce. We’re not facing the postmodern Gestapo; we’re facing an amateur production of The Producers with some Gestapo dance numbers.
“It classifies all elements of the universe by their relation to itself. This relation is the only meaning it grants them and tolerates.”
Trump is connected to a bunch of weeds that keep coming back, and Nina Jankowicz really wants to make sure they can’t anymore. She yearns for a purge. And she has some songs about it!
The implication of society (or social network) as garden, is that the moment the gardeners cease their work nature returns with a vengeance. As our dancing, singing, drama nerd commissar has noted, maintaining their garden requires a constant investment in time and energy. How long can they keep that up? Maybe quite a while. But nature's patience is infinite.
“Being the good citizen that I am, I reported the unsightly weeds to the county.”
Please, shouldn’t we start calling her “the quintessential Mrs. Kravitz”. Older people will get it.