Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

on defining movements and categorizing people: the case of 68ers

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In 1968: Radical Protest and its Enemies (HarperCollins, 2018), Richard Vinen describes the ideals and mores of people he calls “68ers.” (He discusses the USA, France, Germany, and Britain and acknowledges that he omits Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the world where the events of 1968 were probably more consequential.) For him, the 68ers include Black Panthers in Oakland, Maoist professors in Parisian grandes écoles, striking French industrial workers in shrinking factories, Berlin squatters, and more.

How should we define such a meaningful but heterogeneous category? A similar challenge may emerge when we try to define any religious or aesthetic movement or historical period. This is not only a scholarly but also a practical issue, because words like “68er”–or “expressionist,” or “fundamentalist”–can be used to motivate or to criticize. We should be able to assess whether such words apply.

One option is to apply a general scheme. For instance, 68ers were on the left. That statement invokes the ideological spectrum that originated in the French Revolution. But 68ers often differentiated themselves from the Old Left, and both sides in that debate claimed to be further left than the other.

One could define the spectrum independently and then use the definition to settle the question of how far left the 68ers stood–but surely they did not agree with each other. Nor would they all endorse anyone else’s definition of the ideological spectrum. They devoted considerable attention to debating issues (with their opponents and among themselves) such as race, sexuality, violence, Israel, and voting. Where specific views of these matters fall on the left-right spectrum seems hard to establish without taking a substantive political position.

Another option is to use an exogenous characteristic that is directly observable to define the category. For example, surely 68ers were college students during the year 1968–hence, early Baby Boomers. But most college students were not 68ers (by any definition of that term), and some classic 68ers were considerably older or had never gone to college. Even the founders of Students for a Democratic Society were as old as 32 (Vinen, p. 30), and many important 68ers were industrial workers.

A third option is to use concrete behavior to define the category. Maybe 68ers are those who participated in mass protests during the year 1968. But the largest protest in Paris was in support of de Gaulle and the regime. Some classic 68ers never literally protested. Probably few thought that the act of protesting defined their movement. And “1968” was not constrained by the calendar year. Vinen thinks that most of Britain’s ’68 took place during the 1970s. The “hard hat riot”–in favor of the Vietnam War — took place a bit late (May 1970) but is still part of Vinen’s narrative.

A common approach in the social sciences would be to treat “68er” as a latent construct that can be detected statistically. Imagine a survey with numerous items: “Do you have a poster of Che on your wall?” “Would you abolish prisons?” “Do you live in a commune?” “Do you like the main characters in Bonnie and Clyde?” After many putative 68ers had completed the survey, researchers would use techniques like factor-analysis to detect patterns. The data might show that an individual’s aggregate score on a small set of the questions defines the category of interest. Then we would have a reliable “68er scale.”

I think that kind of method is helpful, but it cannot be presented as innocent of concepts. We might ask about communes and Che Guevara because we already have a loose mental model of a 68er. We wouldn’t ask people their favorite flavors of ice cream. If we did, and the answer happened to correlate with the whole scale, we would treat that result that as a curiosity, not part of the definition of a 68er. But, if we asked about food and found out that 68ers ate lentils, that would be meaningful. Evidently, we must already know something about what a 68er is as we draft the survey. What is already in our minds?

My own view would build on Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance. In Philosophical Investigations (67), he writes, “the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cris-cross in the same way.” He’s arguing that many useful words point to groups of objects that need not all share any single feature but that tend to share features from a list, much as a surname can point to a cluster of people who tend to display some of the same physical characteristics. (“Lots of the Joneses have curly red hair.”) Statistical procedures like cluster analysis can point to these resemblances.

But we know why physical features recur in families: DNA. Why would certain musical choices, political opinions, recreational drugs, hairstyles, and career choices cluster to form the group that we identify as 68ers? Is there an underlying cause?

I think of it this way: Each person holds many beliefs and values. Ideas come and go, and individuals hold them with various degrees of confidence. But ideas are not independent of each other. People think one thing and conclude something else as a result, thus linking two of their beliefs with a reason. For example, they might start by liking Joan Baez and come to oppose the Vietnam War, or vice versa. But there are many ways to put ideas together, and few do it in just the same way. You could hold a strongly anti-authoritarian premise that takes you to anarchism or to capitalism. You could begin by opposing the Vietnam War and find yourself against capitalism or against the state. (I’ve known some Boomer libertarians for whom Vietnam was the formative experience.)

Thus a group like the 68ers (and many others) consists of a cluster of people with a family resemblance, but the reasons that connect their individual beliefs and values together tend to recur, and they recur for discernible reasons. In that sense, a satisfactory account of the group is a list of many of their common specific beliefs and values plus a discussion of the ways that they tend to fit together. The resulting map will not describe everyone but it will capture some of the common patterns and explain on what basis members of the group disagree with each other.

See also: Levine, P. (2024). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2024.2344994

The Road to Wigan Pier revisited

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George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) explores the thesis that poor people would support progressive policies except that they don’t like the people who argue for progressive ideas. I am not sure he was right or that the same diagnosis applies today, but it’s worth considering.

Part I of the book is journalism: Orwell embeds himself in Northern English working-class homes, visits coal mines, and documents the degradation and suffering of poor British people during the Depression.

In Part II, Orwell tells how he came to do this kind of reporting as a child of the “lower-upper-middle-class” who had done a stint on the British colonial police in Burma. He identifies as a socialist but in a very vague and broad-church way. At one point (p. 154), he defines socialism as the premise that “The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody.” That leads to the conclusion “that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions.” Later (p. 200), he writes that “The real Socialist is one who wishes–not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes–to see tyranny overthrown.” These sentiments may be compatible with US-style liberalism as well as social democracy, especially since Orwell is more of an anti-authoritarian than an egalitarian throughout the book.

The question he sets himself is why “Socialism has failed in its appeal.” He perceives the left as rapidly losing support to fascism, particularly among the poor.

Orwell observes that many people who could vote for the left think, “I don’t object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists.” He writes, “Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents” (p. 156.)

So what did working-class voters have against the socialists of 1937? One part of Orwell’s diagnosis involves technology. He observes that advocates of socialism tend to be enthusiastic about machines, predicting that technology will liberate us from drudgery so that we can devote our lives to art and nature. They extoll the scientific progress of the USSR: tractors, rural electrification, and the Dnieper Dam. Orwell’s own view is that technological progress is inevitable but problematic, since the valuable parts of life involve work, which is being replaced by tools. “The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug–that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming” (p. 184).

This all seems sensible and relevant in our time, but the ideological polarity has switched. Today, the most blatant enthusiasts of machines are right-wing tech bros, and much of the skepticism comes from the left. This means that working-class hostility to progressives probably doesn’t involve attitudes toward technology.

Another part of Orwell’s diagnosis involves the cultural choices of self-appointed advocates for socialism. “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ’Socialism’ and ’Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ’Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” (p. 157).

I think he has two concerns. One is that socialists are preachy and quick to dismiss the everyday pleasures of workers. Presumably, it’s fine to drink fruit juice if you want, but Orwell is worried about the kind of person who preaches its advantages over a pint at the pub–“that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ’progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat” (p. 165).

A person might even acknowledge that we will all drink fruit juice instead of beer some day, because that will be better for us; but this fate “must be staved off as long as possible” by voting against socialists.

Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. ’Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight (p. 165)

His other concern is that left-wing intellectuals’ choices are simply unusual. Orwell says, “I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ’whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people” (p. 157).

I think it’s good to be a vegetarian (and obligatory to accommodate vegetarians), but their number has grown a great deal since 1937. Besides, Orwell assumes that vegetarians are motivated by health alone, “for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase” (pp. 157-8). In other words, in 1937, eating plants and drinking juice was not about saving the planet or animals but extending one’s own life, and that came across as sanctimonious as well as questionable on the merits.

The enduring challenge is that people who are critical of the existing social order (as Orwell is) appropriately adopt views that are currently unpopular. Orwell, for example, mentions “feminism,” and, although I am not sure how he would define that word, thoughtful and critical people should gravitate to what I would call feminist ideas even if those ideas are not broadly popular. However, there is a risk that progressivism writ large will become identified with unpopular causes. This danger is worse when progressive leaders adopt a tone of disrespect for most people’s folkways, and worse still if these leaders rarely come from working-class communities.

I think that current working-class objections to the left–not only in the USA but in most wealthy democracies–have many explanations. We should consider, among other factors, the actual limitations of leftish proposals for addressing economic distress, the erosion of organizations like unions and genuine parties, and the impact of media. Among these causes, the lifestyles of self-appointed progressive advocates may not be particularly important. Nevertheless, Orwell’s method is worth considering. As he says,

[It] is no use writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that distaste you have got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism, or at least regarding his viewpoint sympathetically. No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing. Therefore, rather paradoxically, in order to defend Socialism it is necessary to start by attacking it (p. 155).

“Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.

Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:

Complaint

Oh, the days they pass by uselessly
Like a never settled game,
The hours pressing ruthlessly,
Each play of pain the same. 

Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away. 
And I sing the old songs’ first lines—
Not whatever else they say. 

And no child in a dream could move
In a more predetermined way. 
No old one could more surely prove
That a life is long and gray. 

But never will sorrow soothe away
Old dreams, nor the insight of youth. 
Never will it make me give away 
The bliss of lovely truth.

 -- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)

This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.

For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.

Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.

Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.

Source: P. Levine, “Boredom at the Border of Philosophy: Conceptual and Ethical Issues.” Frontiers in Sociology, July 2023 See also: Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; on the moral dangers of cliché (partly about Arendt); Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; Philip, Hannah, and Heinrich: a Play; don’t confuse bias and judgment; etc.

tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy

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In this post, I’m proposing that it would be useful to develop a suite of practical tools for civic organizations. I believe this is an urgent task at the onset of the second Trump Administration as well as a more permanent need. I’ll start with a general argument and conclude with a preliminary list of needed tools.

First, the basis of a strong and resilient democracy is hands-on, local political engagement.

That is an old theory, but current evidence reinforces it. Just for example, I showed recently that Americans who participate in community groups are much less likely to dismiss the media and schools as sources of information, probably because participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information. Direct involvement is much more important than ideology or demographics as a predictor of trust in media and schools. People who are more engaged also hold Trump in lower esteem, regardless of their ideology.

However, not very many people address community problems in groups. In 2023, 21% of Americans told the Census that they “get together with other people from [their] neighborhood to do something positive for [their] neighborhood or the community.” That is a valuable base–millions of people–but it’s too few for democracy’s urgent current needs. And 21% may be an overestimate, since you could say that you’d “gotten together” with neighbors even if you just attended one event that didn’t amount to much.

I have argued that at least one million Americans not only participate themselves but also enable others to do so. These community organizers, nonprofit board members and staff, teachers, and other civic leaders help to organize opportunities to engage in local problem-solving.

The first Trump Administration was a stress test for democratic engagement–not because Donald Trump poses the only threat to our republic, nor because all local civic action should define itself as resistance to Trump, and certainly not because civically engaged people must be Democrats. Rather, it was a test because robust local organizations would at least push back against some aspects of the Trump agenda.

We learned from the 2017-2020 stress test that the one million local leaders and 21% of other engaged citizens can generate a lot of activity and resources, but they face limitations. They tend to direct money and attention to national organizations. They don’t hire people to work locally. When they grow, they don’t federate into state and local bodies, and they rarely form truly robust coalitions. Their own members come and go; many groups fade away.

One reason for these limitations was a lack of knowledge about how to organize sustainable groups that encompass diversity.

To be successful, people need big ideals and principles, allies and mentors, and inspiring stories. But I think that tools would also make a difference for our one million (or more) local leaders. I am thinking about tools like these:

Model documents and instructions for forming a new nonprofit in defense of democracy;
Model budgets (of several sizes) for such organizations;
Job descriptions (and pay ranges) for organizers, ranging from a part-time, paid student worker to an experienced leader of a team;
Bylaws for a local organization, for federated organizations, and for a coalition’s steering committee, including the roles of elected leaders and the responsibilities of members;
A model agenda for a first meeting in a community, plus agendas for several other kinds of meeting that might follow;
A discussion guide that a new group could use to analyze its local situation and begin to develop a strategy;
A member survey that an organization can field to collect anonymous guidance on its strategy;
A blank diagram (often called a “logic model”) that can turn into a strategic plan once the group fills in the empty boxes, which have labels like “assets,” “actions,” “outcomes,” etc.
Worksheets that can help a civic group troubleshoot its own limitations.
A simplified set of rules that can replace Roberts’ Rules of Order for groups that don’t want to deal with that book;
Scripts that organizers can use when they talk to residents for the first time in relational, one-to-one interviews;
Draft outreach emails requesting friendly initial meetings with local elected officials, editors, school superintendents, clergy, college presidents, and the like.

What else would be useful?