The Role of a Social Critic

 

 

Latest Peer-Reviewed Journal Article:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Draft script:

Stephen Jenkinson worked for a long time in palliative and hospice care. He calls it the death trade. Jenkinson has said and written the following few lines many times: “Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.”

I’ll go a step further than Jenkinson: Hope is useless, as I pointed out in an invited, peer-reviewed paper in the May 2019 issue of Clinical Psychology Forum. According to my Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to hope is, “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true.” I want a lot of things to happen or be true. Wishing doesn’t make them so.

I would also argue that, not only is grief required to proceed, but that grief recoveryis required to heal. Just as one can recover from physical wounds, so, too, can one recover from emotional wounds. As the Grief Recovery Method points out, acknowledging grief is the first step toward recovering from grief. As the founders of the Grief Recovery Methodindicate in their workshops and books, grief is wishing for a different past. Of course, we know we cannot achieve a different past: There is no changing what has already occurred. However, acknowledgingour desire for a different past allows us to recognize the emotional pain we are experiencing. A familiar analog is hoping for a desirable future and then having the future turn out badly.

Once we recognize the source of the pain, physical or emotional, we can respond positively. We can begin the process of recovering from the pain only after we identify the cause of the pain. Healing from emotional pain requires identifying the source of pain, just as healing from a physical wound requires identifying the source of the pain. A metal nail in our bicep demands surgical removal and probably some source of follow-up care. Once we identify the source of emotional pain, we can conduct the necessary surgery required to remove the irritant—the nail, if you will—from the heart. Contrary to the often-repeated notion that we must constantly experience various stages of grief, thereby keeping therapists and counselors employed indefinitely, we can actually recover from grief. It need not be a constant source of emotional pain.

If you noticed the title of this video, then, you might be thinking, “What does this have to do with social criticism?”

The obvious response addresses the point of social criticism. After all, what do social critics do? They speak truth to power, especially when the truth is inconvenient. Social critics and cultural critics point out what has gone wrong. While everyone else is simply carrying on, enjoying their lives (or not), the social critic is pointing out that there are adverse consequences associated with the way society is structured. For example, procreating and acquiring wealth are considered reasonable, and even desirable, pursuits. And yet, too many people pursuing too much wealth has brought us to the brink of extinction. Of course, we all want to have it all, and society normalizes the attendant behaviors. Meanwhile, every reasonable, informed social critic recognizes that the monetary system is a disaster driving us to extinction. In other words, the collective desires of far too many humans are driving us to extinction. Knowing this is true encourages very few people to seek simpler lives.

As an example of a long-time social critic, I turn to American writer Edward Abbey. Cactus Ed frequently provided social commentary simply by spelling words in a certain way. For example, he virtually always spelled culturewith a kand without an e. The culture we love comes at a cost … to all of us, all the time.

About 15-20 years ago, I read or re-read books by three renowned social critics: (1) Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 Revolt of the Masses. In this video, I quote from Anthony Kerrigan’s 1985 translation. (2) Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1967 collection of essays, And Even If You Do, which is the sequel to his 1964 collection of essays, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So. (3) Wendell Berry’s 2000 novel Jayber Crow.

 

Although each book is a product of its time, each of them also is timeless (pardon the cliché). Consider the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega, who lived from 1883 to 1955, bearing in mind they were written about a century ago: “In the United States it is considered indecent to be different. The mass crushes everything different, everything outstanding, excellent, individual, select, and choice. Everybody who is not like everybody else, who does not think like everybody else, runs the risk of being eliminated.”

 

Another snippet from Ortego’s 1929 book: “As one’s existence evolves, one comes to realize more and more that the majority of men—and of women—are incapable of any effort beyond the one strictly imposed on them by a reaction to external necessity. For that very reason the few persons we come to know in our experience who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out as isolated, monumental. Those few are the select men, the nobles, the ones who are active and not reactive, for whom life is perpetual tension, an incessant training. Training = askesis. And they are the ascetics.” And, perhaps most relevant to our current predicament: “In short, the man who does not get lost in the confusion of living is the one who is ultimately proven clear-headed. Consider those around you and see how they wander through life like sleepwalkers amid their good or evil fortune, without any suspicion of what is happening to them …. they are not even trying to adjust to reality. Quite the contrary: the person’s ‘ideas’ are merely the individual’s blinders before reality, a way of avoiding the sight of his own life. For the truth is that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much, but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe everything is clear.” I reiterate: The Revolt of the Masses was published in 1929, long before most of us were born.

 

Krutch’s essays, published in a variety of outlets, are similarly prescient. With a single exception, which was published in 1931, the essays were published between 1953 and 1967. Krutch lived from 1893 until 1970 and spent most of his life in Tucson, Arizona. He had several distinguished careers, including drama critic, teacher, naturalists, and philosopher. His ecological world view is particularly compelling: “Cities got along without electricity for thousands of years. In many remote parts of the world, large areas are still so little dependent upon it that to cut it off would not create a major catastrophe or even a serious inconvenience. But suppose that bombs or sabotage were to deprive a major part of the United States of its technological lifeblood by making electricity unavailable, not only for a few hours, but for months. Goods could not be moved in; garbage could not be moved out. Before long we would be in a situation almost as impossible as that of the ivory-billed woodpecker deprived of his decaying trees.” Krutch comments on suburbia in an essay titled, “The Sloburbs,”: “I wondered if ever before in history a prosperous people had consented to living in communities so devoid of every grace and dignity, so slum-like in everything except the money they represent. They are something new and almost uniquely unattractive–neither country nor village nor town nor city–just an agglomeration without plan, without any sense of unity or direction, as though even offices and shops were thought of as disposable, like nearly everything else in our civilization, and therefore not worth considering from any standpoint except the make-do of the moment.” Krutch has much to say about education and educators, but for brevity I include a single pithy line: “I have met ‘educators’ who were not, and made no effort to be educated themselves.” A page later, in the same essay, Krutch reveals he was often asked the question many people ask me: “If these are your convictions why don’t you go hang yourself?” [These days, most people use shoot instead of hang] “The answer was, and has continued to be through all such changes of opinion as I have undergone, that there is a private world of thought and endeavor which society has never been able to take away from me.” Finally, I include only one more line from Krutch’s wonderfully provocative collection of essays in And Even if You Do: “That man cannot conceive of anything that would make him perfectly happy and perfectly content is proved by the fact that his imagination has invented a variety of hells, all of them full of horror, but never a paradise in which he would want to dwell for eternity, or even for very long.”

 

Jayber Crow is the only fictional account on this list. Written by Wendell Berry, it reflects, through the life of an individual born in 1914 in middle America, Berry’s 1977 non-fiction classic, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Berry was born in 1934 and he is a farmer and writer. I loved his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America for its sweeping assessment and critique of culture in the United States, through the lens of agriculture. On the other hand, I absolutely hated his 2001 Life is a Miracle, an ill-informed, ludicrous, anti-science screed that critiqued, through the lens of spirituality, E.O. Wilson’s amazingly good 1998 book, Consilience. Thus, I was prejudiced against Jayber Crow before I picked it up.

 

So much for my prejudice. Jayber Crow is superbly written, thoughtful, serious, and humorous. There are many gems but, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the book cannot be reduced to short passages without significant loss. So, I quote a long passage, which echoes The Unsettling of America: “Buying a tractor at that time was not unusual. A lot of people were doing it. The young men who had been in the war were used to motor-driven machinery. The government was teaching a new way of farming in night courses for the veterans. Tractors and other farm machines were all of a sudden available as never before, and farmhands were scarcer than before. And so we began a process of cause-and-effect that is hard to understand clearly, even looking back. Did the machines displace the people from the farms, or were the machines drawn onto the farms because the people were already leaving to take up wage work in factories and the building trades and such? Both, I think.”

 

And more: “You couldn’t see, back then, that this process would build up and go ever faster, until finally it would ravel out the entire old fabric of family work and exchanges of work among neighbors. The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things—which made it finally a dependence on credit. The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn’t dream, then, that before long a lot of little bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for the available land. The time was going to come–it is clear enough now–when there would not be enough farmers left and the farms of Port William would be as dependent as the farms of California on the seasonal labor of migrant workers.”

 

“It is hard, too, to say that anybody was exactly blamable for this–or anybody in particular.”

We need many, many more social critics. Considering the widespread use of social media, we can all do our part. We can all point out the tragedies around us. Most of us can do so with a sense of humor. Just another thought as our time winds down.