Our Own Devices

I’ve been thinking lately about perspective as a sort of angel, a source of strength and protection, and wishing I could pass it along like a whisper or a kiss on the cheek because it’s only ever been given to me, it’s not something I can create alone. Last year, perspective rescued me from hopelessness. It rescues me still by providing a ground of reassurance that makes participation possible. I’ll give a small example. The fact of fire affects me differently if I regard it as a phenomenon we can understand, prepare for, and coexist with instead of an annihilating absolute newly wrought by climate change. The former offers opportunity, a place to move from, experience to build on, while the latter is simply “we’re cooked, so why bother?”

My problem in 2023¹ was an incomplete perspective, which is to say a wrong one. I was convinced human beings had passed a point of no return, cleaved irrevocably from our own future by violent repudiation of the conditions of our existence, and that our spectacular, rapid eradication was close at hand. What I believe now is nearer to the refrain used years ago by me and my friends during our yoga teacher training: “well, it is and it isn’t.” We answered any yes/no question and corrected each other’s statements this way, poking fun at our teachers. It’s a joke about truth and the absurdity of reality, a coin made of two sides that are not extricable. The whole that is unintelligible when treated as parts.

Our species will end because everything ends, even the sun, that avatar of unchangeability in which we are meant to take solace and do, because it lasts longer than us. Something always continues beyond ourselves and something always precedes us. We each die yet while we are alive, our actions have meaning and their impacts (for better or worse) are not negated by death. This is demonstrably so. Everyone is here by way of ancestors whose names they’ll never know and life forms that preceded names. Everyone reading this, I’m certain, has been intimately changed by those who’ve died—family members, teachers, pets, friends, musicians and writers you never met. But even if you accept this intellectually, it can be very hard to believe that your own presence and choices are consequential. The inadequacy, the sense of futility, can be so acute.

Fatalism, both in sincerity and as a joke that thinks it’s the truth, is all over social media. It’s contagious and self-reinforcing because the algorithm, as we know, rewards hyperbole and first reaction—the hottest one, the ready one, whatever billows up to the surface like a belch. There’s such a strong public undercurrent now of what is often called nihilism, but when people say “nothing matters” out of hopelessness, they don’t mean literally that. Ironically, they often speak out of the feeling that something matters, deeply, yet it feels like they can’t protect or even touch it. That’s not nihilism. Nor is the expression usually nihilistic; rather, it is cynical. In the words of Brother David Steindl-Rast, cynicism is an anger that arises when you’ve “set yourself limits you aren’t willing to transcend.”

I’ve come to suspect that the greatest injury inflicted on us by the internet is its perpetual circumscription of perspective. Content consumption, in whatever form the content comes, gives the sense of being immobilized at a near remove. You’re not forced to look at or read or listen to any particular thing but you’re locked into the same sense of distance from everything you see or hear: too close to be ignorant or apathetic, too far to intervene. Its limits are fabricated, false, and utterly debilitating. We feel powerless to do anything other than consume, so we keep watching and clicking and reading. Consumption becomes our action and commentary is the most one can hope to contribute—comment and circulation to others who will consume and “engage” in the same fashion. Across platforms and posts I see the recurring sentiment of “I don’t know what to do” and it’s shared with the implication that knowing what to do, and therefore doing something, is categorically impossible.

There’s so much inside and around this topic, I’ve written and removed thousands of words to get to the point: I think jailbreaking from the middle distance is transformative and liberatory, and I don’t think it happens automatically by putting your phone away. I think you have to make a conscious, curious effort and find the right teachers. The tools that worked best for me were history and religion, which are of course tightly entwined. With these lens, my perspective expanded a lot.

I was so subconsciously stuck on the notion of newness, the idea that everything about our moment is unprecedented: the rapaciousness of the bloodlust, the deterioration of conditions, the massacres and greed. Newness and insurmountability were one in my mind. The anguish and existential inquiry that I found in religious texts, especially, comforted me because it convinced me none of what I’m feeling or witnessing is new. The human condition itself is a sorrow so strong that it cracks open into hope, over and over again, generation after generation. The evil we’re pervaded by has always been part of us. The one struggle under many faces.

And once you zoom out, you can zoom in to find the individual acts of assistance. Reparative and corrective action requires getting close because it requires specificity and care. Weapons don’t; bombs don’t. But moral and loving work does. After zooming out, I was not so troubled by the insufficiency of action because I understood it differently—I am small but I am part of something that isn’t—and so action became available. In the middle distance, I think the most you can do is sign petitions or donate money remotely, neither of which feel like involvement. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be done, only that they are not acts that close the distance. They don’t bring me nearer to others or my own agency.

I’m coming to an awkward close. There’s more to say but saying more isn’t always helpful. I’ve been slowly reading Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, his account of his time in the concentration camps where he very nearly died. It was the only book he ever wrote and no superlative can convey what it’s like. The wind blows on his body outside and he thinks: the wind is part of the resistance, the wind brings France back to us. Gravity, too, is part of the resistance. The Nazis control so many things but if they trip, they fall. How did he see the situation this way while starving to death, scabbed from lice bites? How did he see them this way after he returned home? When he got back to Paris, he weighed 80 pounds, and no one wanted to tell him that his younger sister had died in Ravensbruck. I am overwhelmed by this remarkable world we have shared and are sharing, the world in which, for a moment, 78 years after he wrote it, 35 years after his death, he can help me see, too.

“We cannot have it that the SS does not exist or has not existed,” he writes. “They shall have burned children, they shall have done it willingly… They are a force… And as we are, too; for even now they cannot stop us from exerting our power.”

“The reign of man,” he writes, “man who acts and invests things with meaning, does not cease.”

1  https://meantforyou.beehiiv.com/p/writing-again