Gotham Diary:
Matters of Senior Moment
4 December 2014
The mornings are difficult, fearful, especially when the weather is grey. My first feeling every morning is one of intense vulnerability. It isn’t just the new apartment, though, or the lack of Venetian blinds on the bedroom window. Nor is it altogether personal: I feel that everyone on the planet is vulnerable. And this is true. I needn’t sketch a list of dangers. The odds may be against anything bad’s happening, but they’re only odds. There is nothing unreasonable about feeling vulnerable, first thing in the morning or at any other time. But we believe that if the feeling becomes disabling, if it hampers, say, one’s desire or ability to get out of bed, then that is not healthy.
When I want to stay in bed, and never get up, not because I’m tired or plain lazy, but because I feel vulnerable — to disease (and the low steps of ageing all feel at first like illness), to social or economic catastrophe, to the loss of loved ones, to a fire in the apartment next door, to a shot fired by some local Adam Lanza, to a mine disaster in the new subway station, to a meteor plunging into New York harbor — if worrying is what’s keeping me in bed, then staying in bed becomes uncomfortable. Getting up and doing something — picking up the Times at the door, replenishing the ice in my water bottle — provides the relief of physical distraction. Reading the Times is almost medically reassuring. Nearly every story involves some sort of upheaval — to put it mildly, the disturbance of someone’s tranquility — and yet the newspaper remains unaffected. It looks just like yesterday’s paper. The sections are all in order. It’s Thursday: Styles and Home. The rich and famous, I know, are as vulnerable as anybody else, but they sure don’t look it.
Then I find myself here, writing. Writing begins with looking for a photograph to head the day’s entry. The business of selecting an image (which sometimes entails creating one), naming it, formatting it, and uploading it is almost always tedious. It intensifies my desire to be getting on with things. And waiting for calamitous apocalypse is even more boring than the tiresomeness of PhotoShop.
But this recent wave of vulnerability — I wonder if it isn’t a kind of spiritual morning sickness, the harbinger of a new look at life. Was it just an accident that I happened to be reading Marilynne Robinson while moving house?
In the best case such a China will overshadow the dear old West in important ways, presumably. In the worst case, it will become another adversary, and the potential for desperate and devastating great power frictions will be realized, testing the endurance of the habitable world yet again, and more severely. I would like to see the cost of these contests monetized, as they say. I know I speak very hypothetically when I say that nuclear plants might be built on the cheap, designed to operate for thirty years and built to last until their shoddiness is a problem that can no longer be ignored. A great deal of money changes hands, industries hum for a while. And what is the long-term cost when things go wrong? These reactors might, again hypothetically, be built in countries eager to take their place among the producers of export products that must, by every means, be made competitive — that is, far cheaper than they ought to be.
I choose this paragraph from “Austerity as Ideology” not quite at random. It captures the essay’s wild sobriety. The topic is the unsustainability of current economic policies), and Robinson moves among jarringly varied registers. The bit about China at the start strikes the admonitory tone of a deliberate sermon, and this ought to make the sarcasm of the remarks about nuclear reactors out of place, but it somehow doesn’t. At the end, we’re scolded, in a near-non-sequitur, about the competitive flood of underpriced goods. And, in the middle of everything, there’s the unexplained demand that we “monetize these things.” If we did, would we decide that war is impracticably expensive? Or rather, on the contrary, that it enriched many parties? I’m not sure. With the rest of the essay in mind, I conclude that Robinson is mocking “monetization” itself, the bad habit of putting a pricetag on everything, up to and including human lives. But it’s not entirely clear.
The very next paragraph reminds me that this essay’s enormous appeal for me is not disinterested: Robinson is saying many of the same things that I’ve been saying.
How should we reckon cost? And how to we reckon debt? Iowa, my adopted state, has a relatively small population and an economy based on agriculture. This has described the place for as long as it has been a name on a map. Iowa also has a fine system of public universities, which represent many generations of support from the people of Iowa, now more often called the taxpayers, so schooled have we been lately in thinking of our investments as exactions. Especially in the Midwest, state universities are flagship institutions, sources of pride and identity. They are virtual city-states, distinctive and autonomous. They carry on every kind of scholarship and research at the highest levels. Historically they have offered education at modest cost to the people whose support has created them and have opened their formidable resources to the public freely. Someone seems to have noticed that this sort of thing is not, under the strict new definition, capitalist. Something so valuable as education should be commodified, parceled up, and sold. The inefficiency of profit should be added, as a sort of tribute to this economic truth. The word “elite,” or “elitist,” has currency these days. Its connotations are bitterly negative in some circles. Universities and those who are associated with them are considered elitist, and this somehow disqualifies them morally for positions of public trust. But the whole point of the land grant system has been to create an elite so large the name no longer serves, to create a ruling class that is more or less identical with the population. To raise tuitions and exclude on economic grounds is the kind of “reform” that will create elitism of the very worst kind.
But I have lacked the genius to mention the inefficiency of profit. From the businessman’s point of view, efficiencies prove themselves as such by increasing profits: quite naturally, profit stands at the center of the businessman’s thinking. Sounding almost Marxian, Robinson turns this viewpoint inside out, putting human beings at the center of things, from which perspective profit is a fifth wheel grinding to a different gear.
Why aren’t we as generous as the Iowans who built and maintained their state universities? The answer always seems simple to me. The Iowans were being generous to Iowans, a class of white people that excluded Afro- and Latin-Americans — or that treated them as second-class citizens. The category also excluded most working women, especially the ones competing for jobs that men had thought to be reserved for themselves. How we define what it means to be Iowan or American determines the vibrancy of our public spirit.
Which rather platitudinous observation sparked a very dark thought: what if it was the lack of public spirit that allowed the legalization of same-sex marriage to spread throughout half the country unopposed?