Biden and Luck
Unlike those other systems, liberal democracies run on accidents and emergencies.
Now who needs a hug?
While no one seems to believe Trump won the debate last night, there is a broad consensus that Biden lost.
What this means today and will mean in November we can’t pretend to know.
But one thing the consensus suggests is that Biden, at 81, after a grueling month that included deafening orders from the murderous cyclops Netanyahu, and the felony convictions of his one surviving son, is deeply flawed and fallible.
He is not the Bellagio Hotel and Casino. He is not the house that wins every time. He is not the omnipotent Regime or the Cathedral or the Deep State.
MAGA is going to have a hard time conjuring the QAnon-era terror that Biden is Satanic after last night’s performance.
Instead, he’s a decent, broken-hearted, exhausted old man with a stutter who so far happens to be an excellent president.
A world of humans is very like a nation with a democracy, a cacophony of contingencies, luck good and bad, in which we together and individually struggle to forge harmony, purpose, and hope. Today’s contingency is Biden’s hoarseness, his stammer, his physicality, his malapropisms. Some contingencies are catastrophes. Some are just there.
–
Contingency is the real enemy of the right. The reason neo-reactionaries want kings is that they believe any “ambiguity”—humanity—in a liberal democracy is “an intentional loophole through which contingent history can squeeze,” as Curtis Yarvin puts it.
But only reactionaries fantasize about life without contingencies. Contingencies—accidents of fate, like the one that killed Biden’s wife and toddler in 1972, or the one that got Trump elected president without a majority in 2016—are gnarly historical facts that defy rational analysis or logical proofs. They are, to humanists, life itself. But they are despised in some quarters, especially by neo-reactionary intellectuals.
They are also despised by anyone who would put the so-called Ten Commandments on the wall of an American public school. To those who fear both good luck and bad, a moral system that they can pretend is as eternal as gravity—no adultery, no blasphemy, no graven images—can seem like a bulwark against a contingent idea like, oh, say, rights for gay people or likenesses of animals or leaves.
In a logical world, contingencies are elements of experience that might have been otherwise. To logicians, contingencies are notable for being neither impossible nor necessary.
Your own birth and mine are two major examples. Our births weren’t necessary for the world to be as it is; but nor were they impossible, since here we are. Of course, contingency for the two of us is quite mighty: the incalculably small chance of the precise sperm and precise egg meeting in the precise tube inside the precise body so as to make you—or me—determines only 100 percent of our existences.
Contingencies present an especially keen problem for rightwing philosophers with high levels of self-regard. These men are accustomed to seeing themselves as necessary for the functioning of the world. Such philosophers must with their every breath mightily repress the horror of what Heidegger called Geworfenheit (“thrownness”), the irreducible fact that each one of us was born entirely by chance into a place and time we didn’t choose—and every single event of our spell on earth follows from that. In this fearsome repression, at their computers blogging or writing fan fiction, such philosophers enchant themselves with self-made worlds of universal truths in which God or a king or they themselves hold dominion; everything in these worlds happens for a reason; there are no accidents; and any threat to the order—a hurricane, a new baby, a car crash, an emotion—must be obliterated.
–
.
However hard right-wingers try to make it true, however, liberalism—a bacchanal of contingencies—is not the Matrix from which only the enlightened escape.
But also, closer to home: Patriarchy is not the Matrix. White supremacy is not the Matrix. Dialectical materialism is not the Matrix.
Why not? There must be some set of systemic ideas and practices that constrict and subjugate us benighted souls who can’t see the medium we’re stuck in—and can’t find the shiny circus-colored pill that lets us escape it.
But no. Nothing is the Matrix because there is no Matrix. Just as there’s no blue pill, no red pill, no magic pills, no invisibility cloaks, no invisibility rings, no light sabers. These things are imaginary.
The Matrix—like Middle Earth or the Death Star or Yawknapatapha County in Faulker—is a fictional conceit. And yet many thinkers who made their bones studying disciplines like computer science or finance mistake works of fancy for works of philosophy. They are turned on to ecstasy by The Fountainhead, The Turner Diaries, or Dianetics—and then, without missing a beat, predicate whole ideologies on made-up characters in make-believe towns and on non-existent planets.
The simple thesis of this newsletter is that the way to tell fact from fiction is to learn how to read fiction. Facts are useful and have predictive power; fiction is beautiful and has the power to inspire. One is not good and the other is not bad. One is not a lie and the other the truth. They are ways of using language. But readers must know the hallmarks and pleasures of fiction to understand the uses of fact.
This task of discernment is especially important in digital media where genre-labeling has become a half-remembered artifact of the Dewey Decimal System. (The best system we had for organizing information before Google, Dewey makes much of genre.)
To take The Matrix as a literary text, it’s important first to recognize that the 1999 movie by the Wachowski sisters (then known as the Wachowski brothers), is an allegory. Allegory is a literary form in which elements—characters, places, actions—have a one-to-one correspondence with moral or philosophical precepts.
Allegory can be especially satisfying to new or reluctant readers. This is because allegory simplifies reality to bare moral principles and doesn’t require of its readers a higher-order facility with irony, metaphor, realism, or ambiguity.
I call such consumers of texts people who are “early in their reading journey.” Seems softer than “illiterate.” You’re none of those things—so next time we will discuss science fiction and ideology.
And if you like what you read here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can keep it up through the election.
I really loved this piece. It somehow salved my feelings about last night.
Thank you for keeping things in perspective.