Sundry Notes, March

Notes on the mythic and the real

There’s really a lot happening in the world worth writing about, just at the point I’ve not nearly the kind of time I’d need to do so. That’s what my monthly Sundry Notes posts are for, a collection of sketches I’d develop into essays were the time available.

But first, four very brief announcements:

• You’ll have noticed I published an excellent guest post (from Natasha Clarke) last month. I’d like to do this often. Have an essay about related topics that you’d like me to host here? You can contact me at aulnaissance@gmail.com.

• Also,

  R. G. Miga
  and I are still looking for ideas for our new podcast’s name. Leave your idea as a comment on this post and if we pick it we’ll both kick you paid subscriptions.

• Sul Books and its sister imprints (RITONA, Sphinx, and Gods&Radicals) is having a sale on all digital titles, including all of mine. Save 25% off until 21 March with code EQUINOX25.

• Monthly and annual subscriptions to From The Forests of Arduinna are still 20% off until the equinox. No code or special link is required for this. Use the subscribe button below to lock this in.

On to this edition of Sundry Notes, this time organized around a common theme of the real and the mythic.

The addict intervention heard around the world

I’ve written much more about Ukraine than any of the subjects I’d really prefer to write about. That’s been for a good reason, though, which is that there’s no other situation in the world that best represents the strange deadlock of neoliberal idealism and its denial of actual material conditions.

The religious framework of neoliberalism — and yes, it’s quite religious — is founded upon the belief that idealistic principles will eventually transform the world because of their inherent power, and being guided by them will make righteous all actions performed in the name of those principles.

For instance, take “equality.” If you relentlessly insist that it’s an eternal virtue that will eventually manifest in the world, and you claim to be guided by it, then you can justify all manner of policies and actions that would otherwise seem utterly unequal. That’s how Ibram X Kendi’s “antiracist discrimination” works, for example. By claiming to be guided by antiracism, you can then use race as a determining factor in hiring decisions, as long as you’re doing so with the goal of equalizing racial disparity.

This same convoluted idealism functions more violently in the situation of Ukraine. Here, “freedom” is one of the primary ideals. Zelensky’s forced conscriptions, suspension of elections, and silencing of political opposition within Ukraine are all being done in the name of “freedom” despite being obviously the opposite of anything we would normally consider freedom.

That’s also how the international arming of Ukraine in which the tanks, missiles, and bullets that Zelensky’s soldiers use to keep the war going are seen as a way of preventing war with Russia. Neoliberal idealism allows us to imagine that, as long as it’s Ukrainians who are using the weapons we gave them, Russia won’t see those providing the weapons as also part of the war.

But that’s not how the real works. If someone forces me to kill someone else on their behalf and then tells me it’s because they’re making me “free,” I’m pretty likely to suspect otherwise. And if you’re witnessing a fight between two people, and then you see a third person hand one of them a weapon, you’re going to assume that third party is also involved in the fight as well.

Now, you’ve certainly seen the fascinating exchange between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky from 28 February. If you haven’t, or if you’ve only seen a short two-minute clip, I highly suggest watching the full version of it, or at least where the conversation, prompted by a journalist question, starts to go a bit wild.

As a result of the exchange, liberals and neoliberal leftists have been howling with rage at what they considered the “shameful” treatment of Zelensky. And of course, they’ve immediately begun to express their moral disgust by adding Ukrainian flags to their social media profile and reposting hagiographic tributes to everyone’s favorite stoner nephew.

There’s been lots of focus on a comment from J.D. Vance regarding “disrespect” as the trigger for the shouting match, but very little focus on what Vance said just before. After Zelensky demanded to know “What kind of diplomacy, J.D., do you ask about? What do you mean,” Vance replied: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.”

And then Vance continued, reminding Zelensky that he’s running out of soldiers and has been “forcing conscripts to the front line.” He then challenged Zelensky to admit this, but Zelensky avoided the question by responding, “during war, everyone has problems.”

And then, Trump begins speaking again, reinforcing Vance’s point about the forced conscription and, in what I can only compare to the kinds of interventions you do with an addict or an alcoholic, then unsuccessfully tries to get Zelensky to admit he’s losing the war.

When I first viewed this part of the exchange, a completely unexpected optimism about the world rushed through my body. I think this was perhaps the first time I’ve seen any world leader speak to the material reality of a situation, rather than relying on idealism, abstract principles, or white-light wishful thinking.

And just to be clear, there are no good guys here. But something happened yesterday that has the power to finally break the neoliberal spell and force us again to “face with sober senses” the real conditions of our world.

With Sober Senses

Let’s be honest — there’s not much good Marxist writing. Most of the Marxists I know aren’t writing, usually because they’re too busy working instead. And on the other hand, there’s no shortage of writers who call themselves Marxists yet write things completely foreign to any kind of Marxist analysis of the world.

Even worse is the dearth of readable Marxist journals. They’re either full of obscurantist academic language as undecipherable as most occult writing, or they’re Jacobin, which is even worse.

Still, I did happen to run across this refreshing piece at Damage, “Socialism is not Liberal Moralism on Steroids.” In it, Enzo Rossi essentially discusses the same thing that I mentioned in the previous note, that neoliberalism possesses a religious faith that idealistic principles will manifest themselves. This kind of framing is however completely foreign to Marxist material analysis, though, and I’ve bolded a few sentences I’d love your attention on:

Even setting aside the issue of whether moral ideas really can drive social change, “progressive” critiques typically run into a massive wall of pro-status quo moral commitments, or else degenerate into competitive outrage—which explains why “social justice” discourse is dominated by identitarians, including plenty of radical liberals cosplaying as Marxists.

What, then, is the alternative to moral talk and theories of justice? It’s simply to get things right, to describe human capacities in a non-ideological sense and reveal how the world actually works. Freedom, for instance, isn’t the ability to satisfy whatever desires we may happen to have here and now, in a world where so many of our priorities and even our tastes are dictated by the need to cater to the whims of the market. Market preferences under capitalism aren’t a good indication of what we really want, because so many widely held commitments—moral, political, aesthetic—are the self-serving product of the power of an otherwise barely visible ruling class.

If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist Left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works and how present dynamics limit our imaginations, to improve the position from which we make political choices. This is the sense in which our conception of emancipation is different from the liberal one: rather than striving for the freedom to get whatever we want here and now, we try to create conditions under which our desires are truly our own.

The difference he is describing is probably best explained by a really terrible and awful and quite gross thing I find myself needing to do quite often in my garden.

Unbeknownst to me, a few bags of potting soil I purchased to begin my balcony garden were infested with beetle eggs, which then hatched into grubs the first year. I didn’t discover them until expanding my gardening the next year, and because I didn’t know what they were and didn’t want to kill something just because it looked gross, I decided to leave them alone.

And then, when I saw the third year that they hatched into quite beautiful green and gold beetles, I decided I’d made the right decision. They’re gorgeous to look at, and rather cute, and anyway I told myself that I was “working with nature,” being a good organic farmer, and lots of other ridiculous ideological delusions.

What happened next probably doesn’t surprise any experienced gardener. Beetle grubs feed off young roots right at the moment the plant is starting to grow, and last year, I lost more than half of my plants to these fuckers, including some quite expensive ones. A Japanese cedar gifted to me from someone in the Netherlands, for example, and many other rare plants I’d started from seed and nurtured intensely in their first years.

So, in the last few weeks, and probably every week from now until the end of May at least, I've been digging through every pot of soil to remove the grubs by hand and then sterilize the soil to kill the remaining eggs.

There are hundreds of grubs, and they are too big for any of the birds in my backyard to eat, so I have to kill them myself with boiling water.

It’s fucking awful, really. But this is exactly what happens when you don’t look at the actual material conditions of a situation and instead lose yourself in ideological fantasies.

This is also exactly how neoliberalism works, and why the messes it creates later are much harder to clean up than they would have been had we been looking soberly at the actual situations we were in.

And also, the last sentences I bolded in Rossi’s essay are precisely the way to avoid these kinds of problems. Forcing ourselves to look at the actual “real” of a situation is how we are able to make better decisions, and to do so earlier. This doesn’t just apply to politics, either. Our current environmental situation is just like those grubs I’m picking out by hand. Had we learned to look at the real consequences of capitalist expansion earlier on, we’d not be in this situation. And we’d also not have capitalism.

The Mythic Real and Ideological Deceptions

In my essay discussing the problems that occurred at Repeater, I wrote the following:

For more than a decade now, a loud but very small crowd of disaffected self-appointed elites has managed to shape what is allowed to be thought, spoken, and published under the ever-more-irrelevant category of “leftism.” But rather than functioning as a vanguard of the working class, they’ve only managed to push workers as far away as possible from any kind of anti-capitalist politics and instead into the waiting arms of authoritarian strongmen like Trump.

One of the biggest ways this has happened is the way those self-appointed elites silenced any attempt to speak honestly about abuses from “our side.” For instance, to speak openly about the way some activists were acting like bullies was to be “repeating right-wing talking points,” similar to the way that things I’ve written about Ukraine get smeared as “repeating Russian propaganda.”

But it’s been exactly the silencing of these uncomfortable realities that ceded the ground of truth to others, and this is something from which the left will never recover.

One really tragic manifestation of this has been the way that the left exploited the mythic to obscure reality, rather than allowing the mythic to make the reality more real.

There’s a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin that shows what I mean here. I think it was in the foreword or afterword to one of her books where she said something along the lines of, “I’m lying to you because that’s the only way to tell you the truth.” This is also a bit like Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” In both cases, they’re pointing to how the mythic functions as a way of conveying truth.

Myth isn’t the opposite of truth or reality. Instead, it’s something that shows us the truth in a way that is otherwise impossible to convey by mere facts. What that means is that the mythic needs to be rooted in the real, otherwise it’s just a lie.

Many on the left just got really good at lying, and then built entire ideologies upon those lies.

One unfortunate example of this was the popular “myth” about the first brick at Stonewall being thrown by a trans woman. This wasn’t always the myth, however — in fact, when I first heard about it, it was a drag queen, not a trans woman, who had “started” the liberation of gays throughout the world. But then the story abruptly changed sometime early last decade, and now when the Trump administration removed the TQI+ bit from the official federal registry of Stonewall as a national monument, people began screaming about the “erasure” of that mythic heroism.

But, well, maybe you already know this, but the two people claimed by others to have been the first brick throwers both denied it, and others who were there said neither of them were actually at Stonewall that night. Yet the myth — well, in this case, deception — continues, because it’s become crucial to a way of re-inscribing current gender politics back into the event (re-inscribing in the same way that Joan of Arc is now called “non-binary”).

And because the myth wasn’t rooted in the real and was therefore a deception, the reactions to this changed history (or what some call an “erasure”) parallels exactly the right-wing rage seen over the removal of creationism from schools and other similar reactions.

When a foundational myth (a deception) is removed from official narratives, the ideologies built upon those foundations are of course threatened and this will always provoke fear. But the way to deal with this is to instead build on better foundations, and to be much more honest about the role of these myths. Discarding deceptions doesn’t mean that the truth they were attempting to convey also goes away. They just need to be replaced by truer myths.