“. . . protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and … indignation is a predominant modern emotion.”
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981.
I re-read the same books over and over again. Partly, that’s because — like watching the same movie a year after the first viewing — everything didn’t stick, so I can experience the same surprises all over again, only a bit more thickly. But I said “books,” plural, meaning in addition to recapturing the points, or discovering what I missed, in one book, I also compare, contrast, and integrate concepts and ideas between the same books I read over and over again. Like a spider building a conceptual web. I’m sure all you bibliophile readers identify.
I’ve also taken to watching free lectures and debates on YouTube (real debates, not those obnoxious shouting matches on network television). That started in earnest during the first surge of the pandemic. One thing I missed out on in life — this isn’t a regret, just an observation — was pursuing academic interests. You can’t do everything. I did a few semesters after my first stint in the Army, then put together some classes here and there; but actually buckling up to pursue degrees was not a section on my own broken road. I’m generally pretty critical of social media and tech, upon which I’ll elaborate later, but I’ll admit that these free lectures and debates have filled that little fantasy-academic space in a very satisfying way. These, too, have been woven into my web.
Something else I started doing quite consciously — to the chagrin of some of my old comrades — is listening closely to people with whom I have strong disagreements. Even suspending my judgements of them — no easy task — and even, in some cases, trying to adopt their points of view in the same way I learned when, for a short time, I studied literature written in the long past. One can’t appreciate, not honestly, those other beliefs without some apprehension of their conceptual, psychological, cultural standpoints through a process of intentional abandonment of one’s own reality and meditation into the reality, as close as we can imagine it, of others — even the long dead.
In some cases — perhaps the most fertile cases — I’ve encountered thinkers among my list of re-read books and re-tread lectures who don’t slot easily into our most popular categories of antagonism. Right-left. Liberal-conservative. Blah blah blah yadda yadda blah.
Ever since around 2006, I’ve been drawn away from these polarities myself, having grasped them — under the tutelage of my books and their authors — as being symptomatic of a much larger problem, the shorthand for which is modernity. I need to explain that so I don’t come off like a Jordan Peterson, bless his heart, who makes a papier-mâché goat out of one ill-defined term — in his case, “pOsTmodErnisM” — which he then repeatedly sends offstage and into a rhetorical wilderness to carry away all our sins. I’ll attempt my explanation of “modernity” as we continue to sneak up on the shy, wild point of all this verbiage.
What provoked me to sit down and write this was the latest cultural dust-up around a museum flute. Apparently Lizzo — I admit I’d never heard of this musician — played James Madison’s crystal flute while she twerked or something. This apparently ignited a great deal of indignation among some conservatives, who in turn (perhaps they were baited) were ruthlessly mocked by what some call (I do not) “the left.” I became aware of this “controversy” at the same time I felt my own alarm rising over Russian threats to escalate to the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in the invasion of Ukraine. This is still a terrifying development to my mind, even though the mainstream media seem eerily unperturbed by it (They even throw gas on that fire). I’ve looked into the background of this, and we’re closer to a nuclear conflagration than perhaps at any time in history, but we’re talking about Lizzo and the James Madison’s fucking flute.
Sorry.
What popped into my head about the flute thing was Philip Rieff’s theses on “deathworks.” Rieff is one of those guys I’ve read — in particular his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud— who’s been cited by such a variety of people that he doesn’t fall easily into one of those aforementioned slots. Nonetheless, Rieff is claimed by conservative intellectuals (his work is a bit dense for your opinionated uncle or Lindsay Graham), and this notion of deathworks fits the conservative outrage at Lizzo’s flautal twerking.
Before I go there, I have to tell a story about having dinner in Miami with a lesbian couple I was friends with years ago, Kim Diehl and Alyce Gowdy-Wright. (Alyce has regrettably since passed away.) It was at the Tap Tap Haitian Restaurant on South Beach, where I used to sleep upstairs while waiting for flights to Port-Au-Prince. Kim and Alyce had been to some kind of outdoor art show, where they’d been taken aback by an art “performance” in which a woman danced around to some drums while she slowly pulled an American flag out of her ass. I was understandably impressed by the weirdness of their story, when a guy walked into the restaurant with an American flag head bandana on, whereupon I remarked, “I wonder if he knows where that’s been?” We had a good laugh, followed by a good meal with bad service (a combination the Tap Tap was known for, and in which it took a perverse pride).
Back to Philip Rieff (once married to the young Susan Sontag, btw). Rieff coined the term deathworks to mean “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” He included everything from James Joyce novels to Mapplethorpe’s pornographic “art.” He’d have included flute-twerking and dancing the Ass-Flag.
To understand “deathworks,” one needs the larger Rieffean historico-sociological cosmology within which it fits. Rieff has broken (Western) history into three “worlds.” The first world is pagan and polytheistic, and regulated by taboos. The second world is monothesitic and ordered by commandments (sacred laws). The third world (ours) is post-sacral, a world in which the sacred — whether pagan-sacred or monothestically-sacred — is systematically destroyed. A world of advancing transgression and deconstruction.
Rieff published Life Among the Deathworks when he was 84, just before he died in 2006. He wrote his most influential work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in 1966. Between the two, he published one book, The Feeling Intellect, in 1990. By all accounts, we was not particularly likeable — coming off as an arrogant patrician. His erudition was intimidating, even to his editors, who occasionally let him get away with errors. His analysis of racial strife (and black culture) in the US was stunning in its superficial idiocy. His dismissals of sexual minorities, even after his seven year marriage to the sexually flexible Sontag, were a classic case of having nothing but a hammer and calling everything a nail. There is a lot to disagree with in Rieff, and yet he made some remarkable and important observations, often stated in such pithy and memorable terms that — for his conservative fans especially — they stuck like glue. I myself was delighted at the many confirmatory turns of phrase I encountered reading Triumph.
The next culture, with its component symbols, and with institutions embodying these symbols arranged in a normative working order, probably will require, in order to establish itself (1) a new institutionalized inequality of demand and remission, (2) an ideal character type designated in these studies as the “therapeutic.” Under the foreseeable ideological and technological conditions, this emerging moral idea is unlikely to be a workingman; on the contrary, the therapeutic will be a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his sense of well-being in highly refined alloplastic ways. (Triumph of the Therapeutic, 236)
Conservatives haven’t focused much on Rieff’s technological references, but on sex. As evidenced by the latest turn in Atlantic nation culture wars — which have developed now into right-wing political cudgel — conservatives, with few exceptions, are well-preoccupied with sex. That’s not saying we aren’t all preoccupied about sex — that’s sort of a human thing. But in terms of cultural panics, conservatives have taken the lead in associating the impending death of civilization with the breakdown of the Western sexual norms of around the mid-twentieth century, norms which they mistakenly take to have been in place for preceding millennia. (I’ve discovered some Medieval sexual practices that I’m sure would take the skin off them.) In particular, those social trends which have aimed at women’s sexual “liberation” and at greater acceptance of non-heterosexual relations, to wit, same-sex marriage and more recently, trans-ideology.
This has been — at the street level — a kind of gut reaction which, once it entered the political arena with a vengeance, went in search of its own intellectual buttresses. Where they found that support was within various critiques of modernity, which — and Rieff is among them — name the pathological sequelae (and there have been numerous) of the sexual revolution (which has most triggered the right) not as the central pathology, but as symptomatic of the ways in which modernity — with its privatization, atomization, and alienation — has misshapen human beings, in some respects, through the denial that any such thing as human nature exists at all. It’s not just same-sex couples or trans-folk who have been misshapen into this “modern self,” what Rieff called the therapeutic self . . . but all of us. And here is where sex-panicked conservatives have themselves run into a stumbling block. The “us” includes them.
The modern self has been in the making for centuries, not just since the The Pill and Stonewall. Conservatives have exposed themselves in some cases, not all, as mere patriarchal restorationists — which is a kind of bootless yearning to turn back the clock to some imaginary past. It’s not to them that I’d address this, except to suggest some reevaluations. And it’s not this rather shallow version of conservatism that I’m engaging. Rieff’s grand historical narrative attempts to come to terms with something much larger than gynophobic fifties nostalgia.
(I do not include in “sex panics” the concerns that parents, for example, have about the promotion among the young of promiscuity, porn culture, trans ideology [not trans people], sexual objectification and self-objectification, and so on . . . these are legitimate concerns in my view, and I wrote about these things here, here, and here.)
Rieff was trying to come to grips with the dialectic of culture and personhood, specifically the therapeutic turn that is historically associated with Freud. That is, when and how did we “go internal”? When and how did the person, who once took his or her markers of self-identification from a(n external) meshwork of social relations and roles (I am an apprentice blacksmith, a Catholic, the son of Richard and Gwen, brother . . . uncle . . . husband . . . resident of the village of X, who speaks this dialect, etc.), re-focus on the phantoms of a self-consciousness in turmoil, come to regard those externally-determined relations and roles as possible impediments to self-realization, and set off on a mapless quest for “authenticity” . . . or at least some form of functional homeostasis?
Rieff saw “therapeutic man” as both aimless and driven.
Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going. (Triumph of the Therapeutic, 41)
This reminds me, obliquely, of the military’s response to the diagnosis of PTSD, the D standing for “disorder.” The fact that there is nothing disordered at all about having strong reactions to traumatic events — it’s perfectly normal — isn’t conducive to “keep going.” The disorder requires therapeutic intervention so the soldier can get back out there and soldier; the thought of abandoning the practice which produces the trauma is unthinkable. The same applies to the rat race in which most civilians are caught. If the individual unit starts to malfunction, it needs a therapeutic tune-up — maybe augmented with some good therapeutic drugs.
Rieff sees this as a generalized reaction to what Nietzsche called the death of God — where God has abandoned the field as a kind of commander, leaving the troops aimless and disoriented.
Under a credal order, there can be no struggle between self and authority. Where there is not this supreme confidence in authority — or, what amounts to the same thing, where there is no confidence in a supreme authority — the individual will lack confidence in himself. Without such supreme confidence, the individual might drop out and not take the risk of death in battle […] Self-confidence is inseparable from submission to the credal order, and through that order, to the supreme authority expressed in that order […] The conformity of action in mass organization is anti-credal. Deep individuality cannot exist except in relation to the highest authority. No inner discipline can operate without a charismatic institution, nor can such an institution survive without that supreme authority from a relation to which self-confidence derives. Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality. Self-confidence thus expresses submission to supreme authority […] Released from the constraints of charismatic authority, Western culture can engage freely in its own destruction. (Rieff, The Gift of Grace)
Rieff longed for Christendom, even though Rieff himself was a secular Jew. Not for Christianity, per se, but for some established sacred creed backed by power. In this, he is perhaps similar to today’s Catholic integralists; which goes a good way in explaining why Rieff has attracted such positive attention from a bevy of conservative intellectuals.
I’ve been too deeply marked by Stanley Hauerwas’s theology not to immediately find the fault in this functionalist account of faith; but I think I understand the functionalist account well enough to not misrepresent it. Rieff’s sociological functionalism is predicated upon an account of human nature in which humans require some structure of authority at the top of which is some final, independent, and unquestionable Grand Authority, where all appeals end.
“Without God, all things are permitted,” said Dostoevsky.
“Where there is nothing sacred,” Rieff once said, “there is nothing.”
It’s a short step from here, especially if one is motivated by a kind of generalized anxiety about societal collapse, to the reactionary “conservatism” we see rising around us today. We have to reestablish the authority of the father (in the family), and the strong father (as the national leader), backed by the Holy Father . . . because civilization itself — as evidenced by “deathworks” (the escalation of profanity aimed at what was formerly sacred) — is coming apart without this Great Chain of Being (or cultural Authority).
There is a devolution — even a moral devolution — at work in late capitalism. Rieff’s observation that we live in a period of transgressive one-upmanship is quite accurate. The lack of a divine brake is part of our acceleratingly transgressive ecology, so to speak. But the West isn’t “under attack;” it’s been setting up its own destruction for five hundred years.
“Culture and sacred order are inseparable,” said Rieff. “No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order.” In this, he’s echoed by Jacques Ellul (and several other of my re-read authors — Illich, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh, McCarraher, e.g.) who didn’t see the loss of the sacred, but the migration of holiness from God, saints, mysteries, and sacraments to various modern idols. Efficiency, Progress, Money, Fame, Technology . . . the Nation.
Hear those brakes squeal for conservatives! The nation is sacred! It’s the holy container of our cultural particularity holding out against the homogenizing forces of globalization and the advancing postmodern “universalism” of anything-goes, carnivalesque transgressivism.
I won’t spend a great deal of time on this, but this fetish for national particularity — speaking as an Illich-inflected proponent of the vernacular — only reaches back a few years (back into that fifties-nostalgia thing). The nation-state, speaking historically, has been the principle vehicle for the forcible destruction of particular cultures. Conservative preoccupation with the preservation of “culture,” defined in nationalistic terms, is suspiciously correspondent with immigration panics and their inevitably attendant racial anxieties. No, I don’t believe in silly policy fantasies about “open borders,” but conservative intellectual opposition to immigration — generally provoked by dire circumstances abroad — for reasons of cultural particularity are disingenuous. The culture they are “protecting” is no more particular than a fast food franchise. Our particularities were broken down long ago by Disney, Walmart, and McDonald’s. The game was over with the introduction of television and the construction of Levittown. It’s been downhill from there.
No, they’re not all racists, but race remains the unspoken and denied issue for the shock troops of the immigration panic.
Let me just say, as an old man who’s lived the best part of his life in the US South, the first sexual panics of “conservatives” weren’t directed at same-sex unions or gender-identitarianism (a late-comer, at any rate), but at interracial unions. White men had a special fear about “their women” having relations with black men. Psychoanalysis — about which we’ll discuss more momentarily — may have some of the answers as to how this particular white male anxiety has translated, in the porn-age, into a popular porn convention — the cuckold fetish. But I digress; the point is, as much as I want to give white conservatives the benefit of the doubt on the subject of racism, my long experience in their company has left me with a “trust, but verify” orientation to their talk of “culture” and “particularity” with regard to immigration. I’ve seen those movies titled, “What about our property values?” and “Would you want your daughter to marry one?”
“They’re coming after your women.”
“They’re coming after your jobs.”
Maybe a new porn fetish where a Guatemalan or Somali or Pakistani does your job . . . while you watch. IDK (Sorry)
It’s important, in the interest of not generalizing, to point out that there are a fair number of black and brown conservatives who’ve been effectively assimilated into the oh-so “particular” culture of Disney, McDonalds, and Walmart . . . into American “particularism.” It’s complicated (but “feminism” anxieties and “wokeism” anxieties factor strongly into this).
Returning now to this “psychological individual,” Rieff has a point and misses several. His three-worlds account is descriptive, but far from totalizingly so, and so it leaves much to the imagination that’s otherwise covered by other people whose books I’ve also read and re-read.
We have to start somewhere, so I’ll start with Alasdair MacIntyre, who’s quoted at the beginning of this article. MacIntyre, another critic of “modernity,” also laid some emphasis on therapy, therapeutic approaches, and therapists. In his first well-known work, After Virtue (1981), he described modernity not through Rieff’s tri-epochal sociological lens, but through the evolution of post-enlightenment analytical and moral philosophy. MacIntyre, moreover, was a former Marxist — deeply familiar with and sympathetic to Marx’s readings on political economy and its dialectical relationship to consciousness. For Marx, perhaps less-so but still so with MacIntyre, social structures were shaped by underlying “material conditions,” those being the ways in which we make and exchange things, with particular emphasis on questions of power in relation to productive processes. MacIntyre was attentive to these processes and relations in all his work. He is no longer a Marxist, but a neo-Aristotelian, which gives MacIntyre a much thicker account than Marx of something we might call human nature. (For the record, Marx was a bit of an Aristotelian, too.)
Without digressing further into Aristotle, one of MacIntyre’s assertions about Aristotle’s method — if you like — is that it gives us access to some normative and circumstantial account of The Good (this confuses people who accuse him of moral relativism). In doing so, neo-Aristotelianism also provides some of the tools we might need for — ahem — self-discovery (sorry, Philip Rieff). That is to say, for MacIntyre (and a good many others), the less we understand about how we’ve been formed in the past, the greater the likelihood we will self-misidentify — individually and collectively.
MacIntyre’s attention to therapy and “the therapist” in After Virtue is somewhat different than Rieff’s riffs on Freud and his intellectual offspring. So MacIntyre begins with Irish philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s thesis in Modern Moral Philosophy that (echos of Rieff) morality conceived of as law — whether from a duty standpoint or a utilitarian one — cannot function without a law-giver, i.e., God. (Anscombe is an interesting person in her own right, a Catholic who dressed in men’s clothes, smoked cigars, and cursed like a drunken soldier.)
It was this critique of the inadequacy of both utilitarian and Kantian approaches to ethics that inspired a return to Aristotle and conceptions of embedded, practical virtue — the most prominent of the neo-Aristotelians being MacIntyre.
MacIntyre, while not making as big a deal of the “death of God” as Rieff, instead turns his focus — relying on Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim late medieval Aristotelians — on the underlying premise of early modern and modern English-speaking philosophers, stated explicitly by Hume, that no moral statement can be, on its own terms valid, because (absent the law-giver) whatever one claims is right or wrong, good or evil, is — at bottom — a statement of personal preference with no justification beyond some deep emotional attachment to that position. MacIntyre called this emotivism. In some sense, it reflects Dostoevsky’s ominous admonition that without God, people will do any damn thing.
Modern moral philosophy, says MacIntyre (who is also mistakenly claimed by some conservatives), has been an attempt to find some moral framework that can simultaneously accept the implicit moral pluralism of commodity-driven society and still have reference to some overarching and independent principle for the maintenance of general order. In that, it’s failed, because without some shared fundamental conception of the good we lack even a shared language — with shared meanings — upon which to base the kinds of discussions necessary to achieve social consensus. We not only can’t settle on a shared definition of “justice,” say, nowadays we can’t even agree on definitions of “man” and “woman.”
Now there was no direct correspondence between the rise of capitalism, or commodity-driven society, and the gradual ideological breakdown that leads to today’s increasing political disorder (including the rise of a reactionary right). As Brad Gregory shows in The Unintended Reformation, the initial successes and stabilities of the capitalist economy and its culture depended upon the forward historical drift of shared moral assumptions inherited from Christianity and Christendom — many of them shared inter-confessionally even after the violence of the Reformation between Catholics and Protestants. (I can find quotes from Calvin that sound like a present-day Leninist.) Capitalism benefited from the order achieved by privatized “religion” as long as most people in Western society still held to the older (non-capitalist, even anti-capitalist) frameworks. Accumulation proceeded apace, but cultural order and authority were still guaranteed by prior Christian moral commitments — by values that superseded the market.
The problem is — and this from a more Marxist interpretive scheme — the imperative of perpetual growth for capital keeps driving into material spaces until they are used up, then proceeds to other arenas to impose the process of commodification. Eventually — and sometimes not so eventually — this means the commodification of vice (and with it, the erasure of concepts of virtue that stand in the way . . . deathworks, anyone?) At some point, the Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) admonitions about selfishness run headlong into the demand production of the advertiser, who tells you you’re not only entitled to all “your” desires, it’s a mark of mental health to seek to satisfy them all. The problem with desire, per se, is that it’s a limitless abyss. An ethos of “the virtue of selfishness,” in the terms of the crackpot Ayn Rand, is the road to enslavement by one’s own unregulated impulses — to helpless addictions and compulsions.
At any rate, MacIntyre says that we do have a means for determining norms, which relies on some account of human nature, and that is to establish the proper function of a human being; this begins with animal necessities and expands into socio-political and cultural realms, and the question at the heart of it is, “What does it mean for a human being, a family, a community, and a polis to flourish?” In some sense, this means “you will know the tree by its fruits,” but it’s not utilitarianism — which aims far too high at universalism (and ends thereby in totalitarian nightmares). The good, says MacIntyre, can be discovered from our natures and through our practices — practices being the operative term that accounts for, accepts, and even celebrates the particularities that utilitarianism has to suppress.
In fact, says MacIntyre, in political practice, large-scale societies have been forced to adopt a kind of utilitarian and soulless bureaucratism to manage and administer an ever more fragmented and plural society. Aristotelianism, as applied by MacIntyre, actually gives us a means by which we can understand how modern practices and ideas — in which we are immersed and by which we are blinded — are misleading us about what and who we are. The therapist, according to MacIntyre — who he presents as a kind of epochal archetype, alongside the aesthete, the specializing expert, and the manager — becomes necessary to address the emptiness, anxieties, and confusion that are a result of our disembeddedness from those older, authentically particular cultures.
We’re all suffering an identity crisis.
You can see some parallels here with Rieff. The reason for what Rieff describes as a “turn inward” was the loss of our anchorage in more traditional cultures (and, for Rieff, the law-giver that anchored our perceptions of right and wrong in some independent final authority, giving us the means to decide). This loss of anchorage is an outcome of the progressive commodification society (Marx) and the dismbeddedness of the person (Weber), as the forward-drifting and once commonly-held moral orientations that held the earlier capitalist culture together continue to dissipate (Gregory).
The person is left without categorical authority or teleological direction; and the attempts of utilitarians to construct some new telos as well as the attempts to substitute Reason for God as categorical authority both failed. What was left was a person who became his or her own sovereign — a curse that appeared as a blessing. The political fiction that appeared alongside the emergence of the fiction of a sovereign, self-owning “individual” was “rights.”
The right to “health care,” or an “education,” or a “vote” presupposes health care institutions, schools, and election apparatuses. For these to be “endowed by our creator” presumes this endowment is not universal and transhistorical, but that the Creator is in an active process of granting new rights as they correspond to new institutions (transmitted by some Holy Counsel, no doubt). We run into some obvious problems when the management and administration of these institutions themselves are then contested, as we see now with public schools. You see, there’s nothing self-evident about rights at all, which is why I (under MacIntyre’s tutleage) say this is a political fiction. (I agree with some “conservatives” in principle, by the way, that compulsory public schooling should be abandoned. Unfortunately, these class-pre-sorting, propaganda machines — which have never fulfilled their alleged purposes — have become necessary as day care centers for millions of parents who have to get to their shitty jobs to survive. Now look at the mess we’re in.)
MacIntyre pointed out that the inevitable utilitarianism of the bureaucratic state which had taken up the impossible-to-define task of determining “the greatest good for the greatest number” has — in the case of liberal democracies —been founded upon this highly contradictory notion of rights, in a milieu in which no one can agree about what is the good, in particular the common good. The bureaucratic utilitarian state is structurally at loggerheads with the fiction of individual rights; and so we have a condition of moral chaos, without any truly independent higher authority to which to appeal for the settlement of debates. All debates are predicated on non-inter-operable and contradictory premises. With the dissolution of those forward-drifting common values that followed us out of Christendom, we’re left with nothing but assertion versus counter-assertion, and no possibility of settlement. Ergo, MacIntyre’s quote at the beginning of the article that we’ve devolved into protest and counter-protest, and instead of some common rationality, by which to settle our differences, we’ve naught left but mutual indignation and election campaigns which are forms of low-intensity warfare (regulated from afar by finance capital). MacIntyre notes that the shrillness of our means of argument now is a sure indication that no one has a winning argument. If you’re looking for the source of our current public incivilities, look no further.
The Lizzo/flute incident, I said, may have been a kind of bait; and baiting one another has become our main form or political discourse. When I’m scanning YouTube for lectures, The All Powerful All Knowing Algorithm throws up recommendations on the latest controversies, with titles like, “So and so humiliated by so an so,” or “So and so gets owned (or ‘cucked’).” There’s not even a pretense of trying to persuade one another, just two sides seeing who can throw the biggest rocks. In the image I stole at the very top, you see hyper-nationalist yahoos and aimless anarcho-punks pushing a trash dumpster against one another. It was impossible to resist this living metaphor.
The postmodern turn in philosophy and public discourse has responded to this impasse with another strategy, that of “unmasking” (and “deconstructing”) the emotivist motivations that underlay our assertions and protests. One common “debate” tactic nowadays is to employ a little pop-psychology against one’s enemies, a bastardized form of unmasking. Enter Nietzsche, who made a career of pointing to the hypocrisy of Christians like his father (Nietzsche’s own Oedipal crisis), and his attendant if non-sequiturial claim that the principle motive for all humans is a transhistorical and trans-social will to power. One can forgive Nietzsche, because as a contingent historical matter — taking his own ever more dog-eat-dog and hypocritical “Christian” culture into account — there was some truth in it.
Freud, who read Nietzsche as a teenager, just turned Nietzsche on himself. In 1900, on the occasion of Nietzsche’s death, Freud announced that we must resist Nietzsche, even though in some respects Freud agreed with the German iconoclast. Freud’s method was to unmask the unmasker and demonstrate his or her arbitrariness to him- or herself, with the super-ego being some vestigial moral appendage, itself without either categorical or teleological significance. This defined the turn to the therapeutic; but it had a materio-sociological context.
MacIntyre describes this cultural turn into late modernity using four stock characters, again, the aesthete, the manager, the expert, and the therapist. Rieff picked up the story at Freud; and it’s true that the sovereign individual was coming into his or her own at the turn of the century. But I’ll venture that what went furthest in the West toward nailing “God’s coffin” wasn’t the therapeutic turn — yes, it was part of it — but the destruction of the Idol of Progress by World War I. Progress is a good place to start in unpacking this notion of “modernity,” and why The Great War soured a generation of Western combatants about Progress’s promises of a New Jerusalem.
I have to thank various feminist historians for whatever insights I’ve gained into the Myth, or Idol, of Progress. Susan Bordo’s work on Bacon and Descartes, Carolyn Merchant’s groundbreaking book, The Death of Nature, and Maria Mies’ proofs that the witch trials, associated in the popular mind with the middle ages, were an opening salvo of modernity (Bacon himself was a strong supporter of witch trials). Bacon and Descartes justified and midwifed the objectification of something hitherto never thought of: nature (in opposition to culture). Bacon was explicit about his ambition to rip nature’s secrets out of her, like plundering her guts, with the intention of reconstructing a lost Eden. The progress narrative ever since — perfected by Hegel — has been one of marching toward a technological Utopia; so the transhumanists are just the latest captives of this five-hundred year grift. Capitalist accumulation, liberal philosophy, and the progress myth are the conjoined triplets of “modernity.” Men would conquer nature — from clear-cutting to atom-splitting to gender reassignment surgery to (oh gasp in awe) Meta.
The boosterism and hype about progress reached a kind of peak at the turn of the twentieth century, when somehow suddenly a generation of European and American men found themselves in filthy trenches, blasted into pieces in droves under artillery barrages, mowed down by machine guns, and gassed to death. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, men died by the tens of thousands. By the time the battle ended, over a million were casualties, and over 300,000 were dead. By the end of the war, the surviving men returned, scarred and stunned by their experience of “modern” war and its technologies. One only needs to read the post-war literature to get a glimpse of the disillusion, despair, and almost frantic hedonistic nihilism that followed the war. Progress had shown its other face. Modernity meant you were an expendable cog in a mindless machine. And God — out of whose hands the world — renamed Nature — had been taken by Bacon and Descartes and their philosophical offspring . . . God . . . was nowhere to be found.
In the nascent field of psychology, a new term was born: shell shock. Rieff doesn’t mention shell shock (now called PTSD) in his critique of the therapeutic. He was, however, as the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor, keenly attuned to the dark side of progress; and his critique fell most mercilessly on the valorization of transgression and mindless attacks on cultural authority (read: tradition) for their own sake.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx, The Communist Manifesto)
While Marx rather celebrated this dissolution of old forms as a first step toward his own imagined Utopia, his observation nonetheless haunts us with it’s Rieff-mirroring accuracy.
MacIntyre, the ex-Marxist neo-Aristotelian, said that modernity presents the Aristotelian — who understands that good persons are formed by good communities, by a good polis — with a dilemma. What happens in a bad polis? Is there little to no chance, then, for the formation of persons with good character? MacIntyre himself, famously, described late modernity as a bureaucratic individualist polis in which we’ve “lost the capacity to differentiate between manipulative and non-manipulative speech.” We are all caught within this competitively driven economy of monetary scarcity, wit its inhering dog-eat-dog ethos at the same moment in which we are being told that dog-eat-dog is wrong, at the same moment in which our very natures long for belonging, for reciprocity, for mutuality, for love. This fragmentation of consciousness, exacerbated by a state of restless commodifying change, leaves us all to some degree misshapen.
We are all in a chronic state of psychic turmoil, which we feel obliged to deny. We feel compelled to make a show of how we’ve got it going on. We smile for photographs that we share on Facebook; and we’ve seen the same smiles on the photographs of murderers and suicides, sometimes days before they break. We think that if we can just appear to be “well adjusted” it will come to pass. You can fake it ’til you make it. We’ve become our own performative propaganda. We lose not only the capacity to differentiate between manipulation and non-manipulation, but the capacity to be honest about and to ourselves, blanketing ourselves in layer upon layer of rationalization and self-delusion. It’s no wonder we seek “therapy” — those who can afford it. (The rest of us self-medicate, then find our way into twelve-step programs, or not.)
I’ll say it again. We’re all suffering an identity crisis; and this is what makes the search for “identities,” in the sense meant by post-structuralists, so driven and desperate. No Medieval European peasant ever experienced this turmoil. No pre-Colombian Comanche did either. Nor did they conceive of something called Nature that existed apart from persons or the polis. (Chesterton said, “Nature is not our mother. Nature is our sister.”)
Nature — even the kind in which social Darwinists and patriarchal restorationists believe — is just another fiction. Identity — the kind in which the post-structuralists and the “woke” believe — is likewise a fiction. It’s more than a little interesting that “the woke” and their antagonists, the breathless “woke-alarmists,” in their respective ideological tribes, look the same from the outside; that is, each and all of them operates a “smart” phone and a laptop. Neither recognizes the soft technological totalitarianism which envelopes them both. Neither seems to realize that they are both identitarians, and that they are so because neither has any embedded identity.
In a time where there is a sense of threat, a sense that we may become ungovernable, these fights break out over what Foucault called governmentality — not merely who is to govern, but by which mentality, and through which layers of means: state, subsidiary institutions, family. (In the two images above — as opposite as they may at first seem — I can assure you every one of those people has a “smart” phone.)
Paul Kingsnorth said recently that “You only have to talk about identity if you don’t have one.” When Marx said that “all that is solid melts into air,” that “all” meant traditions, embedded in practices, embedded in place. (There’s another of my books, The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi.) The whole thrust of modernity — even before it was realized by the modernists — has been toward the disembedding annihilation of tradition. Ivan Illich and Maria Mies described modernity as “a war on subsistence,” a war on vernacular cultures (which the nation-state explicitly sets out to destroy). And it was Alf Hornborg (The Power of the Machine) who alerted me to the fact that “the sacred” and “place” are joined in such a way that before the objectification and pillage of “Nature” can happen, this vernacular attachment to place and custom has to be destroyed. The wholeness of a place and its people has to be dissolved into constituent “resources,” reduced to prices, and this is in itself a process of desacralization, or objectification. In the same move, the sources of identity — not the desperately self-conscious elective identities of late modernity — are also dissolved. Suddenly, people ask those questions they’ve never asked before when it was self-evident: “Who am I? What am I? What is true?”
The answer, consistent with the voluntaristic fiction of modernity and its “transgressive” ethos, is, “You choose.” We can sell you some things to help out with that. The late modern, or postmodern, scramble for identities, which has come to be associated with “social justice warrior” types(what MacIntyre called “the protestor”), has granted, as a way to come to terms with liberal white guilt, greater status to the ostensibly (and sometimes actually) oppressed. This sets up the scramble for identities as a scramble for oppression-privileged status — or alliance with such — that these become combative identities, demanding recognition with a force as desperate as the search for identity itself. In a very real sense, just as Marx remained haunted by Christ, SJW types are themselves performing a bastardized Christianity, which Kingsnorth called “the Sermon on the Mount, without God and without forgiveness.” It’s also a form of politics defined by provocative transgressions (because no one can actually win an argument).
Rieff attacked Freud for encouraging patients to overcome repression, which Rieff saw as part and parcel of this whole modern thrust against tradition (and cultural authority). In a sense, I think, Rieff reversed cause and effect. Traditional identities had already been sacrificed on the Hegelian altar of Progress for some time. The identity crises of the twentieth century were in many cases related to the twilight of this new idol — at the Somme, in Auschwitz, in Hiroshima. Another god had failed.
It had begun as the accumulation of capital came to the fore as the organizing principle of society. But there was, in my view (and this is a view informed by two more of my authors, Paul Virilio and Jacques Ellul), another driver behind the “creative destructions” that defined modernity: war and its demonic technologies. (Tolkien, a survivor of WWI and witness to WWII, wrote his greatest villains as the captains of the conjoined evil of industrialism and war.)
Ellul and Virilio both lived in World War II France, and every phrase they cultivated grew out of that battered soil. No one can say that World War II was a triumph of capitalist enterprise. Yes, there are those who profit by war, but they are parasites — adding nothing and leaving their infernal machines, which come to colonize us all.
The liberal epoch’s liberatory promises are burning away like flammable curtains, revealing the technical Moloch to which flesh and blood, time and space, must be sacrificed. Behind it all, the logics of war, and behind that, the intransigent prince of this world — power.
Ellul was emphatic that all societies — even “secular” liberal societies — are founded upon and maintained by organizing myths — narratives that define the generative and the sacred. Against the Hegelian myths of History and Progress, the Baconian myth of Scientism, and the military myths of nation-states, Ellul and Virilio point to the Book of Genesis, Ellul associating the urbanizing Cain with the city (and technomanagerial society), who kills Abel (the vernacular agrarian); and Virilio incorporating Cain’s trajectory as city-builder into his critique of the worship of speed and power. The city is founded on murder (and in history, on the mass murder of war), with speed and power is its twin deities.
Ellul had his own three epistemic stages in history: mediation by nature, mediation by society, mediation by technique. For Ellul, war has spawned the idol of Technique; and for Virilio, the idol of Speed. Myth and the sacred didn’t die; they migrated.
Technique, for Ellul, signified the capture of persons by technological society. Think about getting rid of your “smart” phones, these walk-around computers, these infernal electronic leashes, with their “enabling” apps. When you assess all the ways in which you’ve become dependent on them, you begin to recognize what Ellul called technique, a latticework of material, psychological, and sociological relations that capture the person in the web of “technology,” yes, but also the sociology of technique . . . we are the captives of efficiency and (ever more necessary) convenience. Like the factory worker who is subordinated to the machines s/he works with, whole societies are now subordinated to the workings of standardized, technological grids. The internet was designed by the Defense Department as a means of communication in case of nuclear war (I hope were aren’t going to test that soon).
Virilio is easier to understand if one’s been in the military. Our experience has been more directly mediated by logistical thinking — and Virilio calls us a “logistical society.” As Virilio showed in Pure War and Speed and Politics, war — even in the absence of active combat — materializes “an infinite preparation” for war. If you ever visit Virginia Beach, your days will be constantly interrupted by ear-shattering (and insanely expensive) flyovers of combat jets, required to keep the aerial weapons and their human operators in good form. The residents say, “Oh, you get used to it.”
This constant preparation wicks into a society as a whole, and into the very structures of our consciousness. The business class studies warmaking theory. Policing becomes ever more militaristic. Surveillance is continually amplified. Information processing becomes faster and more detailed. Transportation is optimized. “Entertainment” and “news” become both overt and covert propaganda for the two-faced coin of violence and efficiency. These progressions are, in Clausewitzian terms, reductions of “fog” and “friction,” designed to increase the clarity and accuracy of intelligence and the speed of operations, military and otherwise.
Virilio — the phenomenologist — and Ellul — the sociologist — both emphasized the essential role in war-formed society of propaganda, not the heavy-handed kind still found in North Korea, but the more subtle, passive forms in which we swim in the developed metropoli. How technique and logistics impinge on our consciousness appears a peripheral matter for Rieff and his more conservative acolytes; but this is precisely what MacIntyre says neo-Aristotelianism can help us with — by giving us a means to understand how technique, logistics, and soft propaganda mislead us about who and what we are.
Our misshapen-ness is a consequence of these, of the ways in which we have to become interoperable with a world in perpetual flux, where “all that is solid melts into air,” a world where we are compelled to speak the languages of technique, logistics, and propaganda . . . the languages of interoperability.
Language structures consciousness.
And we call the multiplication of “identities,” in the world of Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos, diversity.
What some conservatives observe “through a glass darkly” is this soft totalitarianism, which they attribute — wrongly, because of propaganda — to “the woke.” They themselves are captives of the same machine — sorted into prefabricated tribes, algorithmically nudged into exploitable niches where the conflict between niches can be mined for money. The paradox is how this great chaos can be sustained only through great order. Multiple competing “realities,” one machine which we’ve all embraced with wide-eyed enthusiasm.
The isolated individual has to be simultaneously obsessed and entertained; and the dynamic of antagonistic realities serves both purposes. No different really than celebrity worship or conspiracy theories or porn addiction or drugs. And this form of misshapen-ness might very well require some form of “therapy,” or at least, psychoanalysis. (I promised I’d go here.)
In line with MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian diagnoses, one of the most difficult practices for those of us rendered interoperable with technique, logistics, and propaganda is truthfulness — truthfulness about the world around us, and about ourselves. Mired in manipulation, dissimulation, performance, and that sense of subterranean dread, we don’t know how to be honest about our own intrapsychic turmoil. We’ve been damaged by a bad polis.
I saw a lecture recently by Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst who is also a neo-Aristotelian. The lecture was about MacIntyre and “therapy.” In it, Lear — a Jew — compared the process of analysis with the Sabbath. He noted how, when analysands first begin talking to the psychoanalyst, they construct narratives not unlike stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends, quite often about their childhood and early life, intended to “explain” what and who they were. Lear doesn’t buy it for a moment. These are still performances. The point, says Lear, is to stop performing (and rationalizing) — in the way Jews are directed to stop working on the Sabbath. (Christians would do well to return to this tradition. All Jews need not be Christians, but all Christians should understand themselves as Jews.) The Sabbath was/is a time to free the pre-rational to meet the supra-rational, to just be in the presence of God and God’s creation — to place oneself within reach of that “knowledge” that surpasses all understanding. Sabbath is a time of unlearning the impediments to contact with God that accumulate throughout the work week, laboring and struggling in the broken world.
For Lear, the analysand — who shows up for “therapy” — has just gone through some disconcerting experience (death in the family, a bad breakup, etc.) which they have trouble handling. But, according to Lear, the source of their inner turmoil is even deeper, often philosophically deep — they can’t grasp their purpose in the face of mortality, e.g. That self-knowledge is buried under the “work week” distractions, habits, and rationalizations of their incessant performances and fragmentations. They can’t be honest about and to themselves because these deeper concerns are under all the clutter. (That Medieval peasant always lived openly, knowing her purpose, and consciously in the shadow of her and her loved ones’ mortality. She never said to herself, “Is this it?”)
How are those deeper concerns — unacknowledged and unaddressed — “coming out sideways” as participation in the algorithmically-moderated gladiator games of today’s escalating conflicts?
Lear — like Rieff, a critic of Freud — is nonetheless a practitioner of Freud’s craft; MacIntyre said that the emotivism (he calls it expressivism in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity) of Nietzsche and Freud “is not a mistake, but a lacuna.” There is a big hole in the middle of their analysis. They are “radically incomplete.”
Lear sees the linchpin of analysis not as a means of uncovering the repressive superego (what Rieff would classify as a release function) but as cultivating the ability to “say whatever comes into your mind” without rationalizations. This, it turns out, is an extremely difficult practice, because we have been formed in a polis, in a culture, where honesty (not cultural authority) has been devalued and even repressed. For Lear, himself a neo-Aristotelian, psychoanalysis is a practice of self-knowledge through honesty — its therapeutic value being historically contingent, a practice for a time in which a bad polis has malformed us as inevitably dishonest creatures. The psychoanalyst is the craft master, and the analysand is the apprentice, so to speak, in learning how to be honest and insightful about one’s own psychic turmoil.
I get his point, but I also remember that Rieff rightly describes the therapeutic human as “a man [sic] of leisure.” The rest of us are up Shit Creek, it would seem. In fact, speaking for myself, my experience of overcoming my own resistance to this kind of honesty began with drug rehabilitation, first, then with a long study of feminist works (not the superficial and opportunistic liberal feminism that has unfortunately come to stand for what feminism means). My own particular misshapen-ness was closely associated with an obsessive quest for masculinity — an especially violent one as it turns out — and feminism gave me many invaluable insights into the deeper motivations leading me into a career in war.
The thing is, returning to Lear’s twist on psychoanalysis, he is not promoting the withdrawal into self, the self-involvement, the self-centeredness that Rieff lamented in the therapeutic turn. Freud turns Nietzsche against himself; Lear turns Freud against himself.
IDK.
What Rieff bemoaned as the loss of theological authority was really the replacement of theology as “talking about God” by what Kingsnorth calls “a theology of self-creation.” But having already described his second world in functionalist terms, Reiff has participated in that theology of self-creation by putting himself atop a kind of kingly tower and moving God around like a chess-queen. Maybe we can’t talk about these things any longer without this compulsion to fly up into the abstractosphere — the God’s-eye point of view. Maybe that’s the trap set by the malevolent spirit, the serpent in the garden. (There’s another of my books.)
Maybe, what we’re living through is a spiritual catastrophe. The catastrophes of politics, ecology, sociology, and psychology are but manifest aspects of this catastrophe. Speaking now as a Christian — and not a very good one — my hope is not placed in a sociologically functional God, but in a story so strange in today’s world, one might appear mad (or at least perverse) for believing it. The author of the universe crashed through infinity and took up his vulnerable residence as his own offspring in the womb of a young woman in a backwater town at the edge of the Roman Empire. He grew up to become a construction worker, then a prophet. He preached against the authorities, performed miracles, and allowed himself to be tortured and killed by the state. Then he rose from the dead.
His followers kept expecting him to rise up and crush the Archons of power, but his conquest was accomplished (and has been accomplished, in spite of what we see around us today) through absolute vulnerability.
Christian conservatives, in particular, need to see how Christ fulfills the best aspirations of other traditions and philosophies, rather than holding himself up against them. The conservative attachment to Christus Victor, I’ll contend, is not an attachment to Christ at all, but to power. In relation to the spiritual catastrophe that is modernity, postmodernity, and the current slide into the next social and epistemological crisis (post-post-modernity?), Christ is not the sword-bearer, but the friend and physician; and our salvation doesn’t appear within the bottomless pit of desire fulfillment, but as freedom from the tyrannies of desire and conflict. There is a reason he preached enemy-love as the road to salvation. There is a reason that he said we have to die to the self, with its infinite well of lack. It’s really too bad that the great Augustine sent us down the wrong path about this with regard to the City, which was for him the Empire.
Stanley Hauerwas said that if you think you have to protect God, you can be sure you’re worshiping an idol. G.K. Chesterton, with regard to the idea that Christianity is dying or can die, noted how many times we’ve heard this pronunciation of death, but, he said, referring to Christ, that “God knows how to find his way out of a grave.”
The grave we’re in now is well-represented by the crackpot “evangelicalism” of a Marjorie Taylor Green, Christ weaponized in the service of an imagined America (or whichever nation). Kingsnorth believes our next resurrection has to wait until we are again the persecuted church, and not the one in power, seeking power, holding onto power. Illich said our institutions — grown out of the church in power — have become our modern Moloch.
“What’s goin’ on?” During the turmoil of the sixties and seventies, Marvin Gaye sang out the question. The question resurfaces today with a special legibility.
Rebellion. Rebellion against God, Rebellion in its Edenic form — in the ambition to become like gods. A well-know transhumanist said about her vision of escaping our very bodies through technology and transferring our consciousness to The Cloud, “we are making God.” It’s a delusion, of course. No such thing will ever even approach happening. It’s all just electronic parlor trickery; but it’s captured us no less than the serpent beguiled the original couple.
Crashes, Covid, fascist resurgence, nuclear stand-offs, the loss of confidence in institutions, the culture wars, the power struggles, the division of conceptual languages (and ideological tribes) . . . our Tower of Babel is falling, brick by brick. It may look like we’re undergoing a catastrophe (and we have been living in a spiritual one), an apocalypse. But it’s not that kind of apocalypse — not some dystopian novel or film. We’re living a revelation, and apokalypsis. The curtain is being pulled back on modernity and its aspiration to make the New Jerusalem with its own hands. Behind it is a character we’ve long known, coiled, telling us the lie. You can make yourselves; you can become as God.
Excellent, Stan, as usual. It's a pity that (as far as I know of) no professional academics are actively engaging with your writings, either in agreement or dispute. Perhaps they're intimidated by your writing ability, which so few of them are able to equal. Or maybe it's your erudition; not being tied to academic specialization or the duties associated with professorship, you have abundant latitude to keep up with your studies, on any old (or young) subject you feel like reading that might yield some extra insights on your uh fields of concentration, or particular focus (or whatever you call it, we all have them.) An intellectual method that's entirely at odds with the contemporary orthodoxy of the Academy.
If you're in the mood to accept a couple of recommendations to widen the scope of your studies (assuming that you haven't read them), I'd like to know what you think of these two books:
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings by Gore Vidal (2001) The prophet of polymorphous perversity for the modern age, getting off a lot of good lines in defense of social libertarianism, libertinism, and male bisexual hedonism. Freely acknowledging his own individually privileged standpoint, while remaining oblivious to the limitations, biases, and other pitfalls of the perspective granted by those advantages. (How anyone could view Vidal as a Leftist is beyond me; his political purview more closely resembles that of an Olympian archon.) Not overly polemical- in fact, much of the book consists of erudite literary criticism. As with literary antecedents like Alphonse de Sade and Aleister Crowley, I think Vidal gets a lot wrong, even while conceding some of his observations and philosophical points. Vidal is also often very funny (as are the other two mentioned writers, although I'm not sure how much of the humor is intended, and how much of it is risible pomposity.)
Ghost Dance: Origins Of Religion, by Weston LaBarre (1970) The magnum opus of Psychological Anthropology, a perspective long out of favor within the discipline. (Bafflingly, Cultural Anthropology has thereby ceded that focus of study to the field of Social Psychology- and, from there, to the ambitiously extravagant-yet-mundane speculations of "evolutionary biology" because-neuroscience just-so stories.) Ghost Dance is as much ethnographic historiography as it is anthropological metastudy, and LaBarre is an old-fashioned mid-20th century Western intellectual- the book is replete with allusions to Greek Classicism, Nietzsche, the Dionysian-Apollonian template, Freudian psychology, rational functionalist explanations of the religious impulse, etc. As a result, it's a circumscribed work; I don't recall LaBarre discussing anti-colonialist resistance or the standpoint of members of non-Western societies, other than some aspects that he highlights to support his particular focus on the role of personal metaphysical powers (mana and charisma), prophets and mystical revelation, crisis cults, cargo cults, religious revivalism, etc. (Especially relevant to contemporary times: the material on Crisis Cults.)The book is worthwhile for the compilation of historical detail alone; although LaBarre draws a lot on earlier works like Frazier's Golden Bough, the scope of Ghost Dance is much wider, and LaBarre's level of insight is much deeper than Frazier's gloss on the subject. That said, LaBarre maintains his detached, skeptical functionalist scholarly perspective toward religion, a perspective that some of us ahem find overly limited and arguably wide of the mark in some respects. LaBarre's own ethnographic fieldwork is best known for his research on American Christian snake handling sects, and also for his monograph The Peyote Cult- a study of the Native American Church that concentrates on the syncretic incorporation of indigenous tribal symbolism into a ritual framework that's ultimately centered on Christian belief (the Native American Church identifies as a Christian church.) As part of his research, LaBarre once ingested some of mescaline-containing peyote cactus; however, soon after he ate the buttons, he vomited all of it up before enough of the mescaline was absorbed to provide him with any psychoactive effect at all.. As he wrote afterward, "I'll take the visions on trust." An unfortunate failed attempt; he should have tried again, in my opinion. Regardless, LaBarre still has a lot to say in his work; for what it's worth, his papers are archived at Duke University, where he was once chair of the Anthropology department. I also find it unfortunate that LaBarre's tenure at Duke didn't overlap with that of Religion professor Stanley Hauerwas; presumably they never met. I think they might have had a lot to talk about.