What I Find Radical
Every morning, when I go out to do the chicken stuff, I think to myself, “Man, I’m really not doing enough daytime hot-tubbing,” but then, an hour later, I realize that’s because the noise environment of an American neighborhood is inhospitable to life during the day.
I had fairly radical politics growing up — you know, for an American — such that my present preoccupations with daytime outdoor hot tub conditions on private property would have been evil-old-person-coded, but speaking as an evil old person, I feel like I’ve come to understand something about my political evolution that might satisfy my young self.
I had a pretty lucky birth — as I feel it is safe to say many Americans do relative to the rest of the world — in terms of material safety and security. I did not face very many immediate existential threats growing up. This is a kind of freedom, and in my case — given my moral, intellectual, and cultural surroundings — I used that freedom to explore the state of the world as an abstraction. I was well aware of structural injustices and inequalities, and I developed what I still feel were fairly sophisticated big-picture political understandings. So when political matters arose, as they do in all interactions with the surrounding world to varying extents, my posture and perspective were oriented to the big picture.
I had big problems with the big picture, so that posture and perspective often struck my interlocutors in big-picture political conversations as radical. But here’s the thing: It wasn’t.
To make a reference I feel is becoming somewhat of a cliché, the definition of radical is about getting to the “root” of the problem. As you may gather from reading the rest of this website, I am generally unimpressed by big-picture abstractions in their ability to do anything whatsoever about the roots of problems.
I figured out that my big-picture perspective was not radical in two ways. One was in my work. This orientation drove me to work on the big picture, and what I learned after not really very long is that the big picture is comprised of a series of small pictures, all day long, every day, forever, and that big-picture politics actually operates on the level of “dealing well with the person in front of you,” even if the goal is “rewrite the constitution of the big picture.” My big-picture perspective was not great for that many-small-pictures part, and so this work frustrated me and shrank the size of my picture. It turned my gaze downward from the sky, where the limits that govern reality can’t be seen, to the ground beneath my feet, which is where roots are.
And the second way I figured this out was, I regret to report, getting older and more self-sufficient and responsible, because that made me much more concerned with the quality of everything I had to do. When the leak in the roof is your problem, you start to notice things about the colors of drywall that you were not attentive to before. This heightened vigilance quickly led me to realize things like, “Wow, it is really quite unpleasantly loud in this neighborhood.” And yes, young person, that does sound like a rather bourgeois concern, but you know what? It’s quite unpleasantly loud in every neighborhood, and once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it.
And this is what is radical to me.
When you realize that the material conditions of life in your society are neurologically inhospitable — even to people who are “neurotypical” (fake concept) enough to feel like they are able to ignore, say, ear-splittingly annoying noise being blasted into their brains at all times — you realize that it is literally impossible for this society as it is to be good. There is no “good” that is worthy of the name if everyone’s nervous systems are completely fucked all the time. And look around you and see how good people in your society are at regulating their nervous systems. They aren’t. They are zero good at it. They are freaking out on everybody around them all the time. Social media — itself a sort of superstimulus for forcibly distracting people from less intense unpleasant stimuli — is essentially an endless feed of this, packaged as entertainment.
People who grow up unable to ignore conditions that are neurologically inhospitable to them tend to turn out radical — in this sense — in a way no liberal arts education could possibly do to someone. But the reason such people are marginalized is because most people don’t notice them, any more than they notice their own utter discomfort with reality. And so society blunders onwards, making things more inhospitable to everyone, because so few people have confronted the root of their suffering or realize it could be better.
And it could be better. There are a million billion trillion ways everyone — human or otherwise — around you could suffer less every single day, and you could do something about a lot of them. I no longer daydream about worlds governed by different political philosophies, because I know that “political philosophies” don’t actually govern anything; individual humans uncomfortably on the phone with one another do. What I daydream about now is how people would behave and treat one another differently if they were suffering a little less all the time.
Anyway, my new campaign slogan is, “A peaceful hot tub in every backyard.”
