It’s Sunday the 13th, and I finally tested negative on Tuesday, nine days after the first positive, eleven days after the onset of symptoms (cough, one day of low-grade fever). I was self-quarantined until Wednesday, but I was never alone, not even when I was all by myself.
We never are, and not because social media have overtaken our everyday lives—since when have we, us human beings, been without them?
Once upon a time, we conveyed and stored knowledge in poetry and song, and in spoken commands or practical demonstrations of how, say, to tie a knot, plow a field, estimate an equivalent value, raise a child. Voices were the threads that stitched together generations and societies. The printing press made a difference, not least by enabling the Reformation, but the printed word was the privilege of the very few until the late- 18th and early 19th centuries, when the previously unlettered majority made a literary revolution, and with it an age of revolution as such, by reading, writing, and publishing pamphlets, petitions, broadsheets, bills, posters, captioned cartoons, pornographic caricatures, doggerel, short stories, narratives of captivity, newspapers, even novels as we understand them today.
The majority’s ability to read and write threatened inherited, mostly hierarchical forms of social order and solidarity. The locus of authority in all things was scattered as the dispersal of power from the state (as sanctioned by the church) to society proceeded, culminating in the two preposterous propositions that animated the American Revolution: the sovereignty of the people, on the one hand—that is, the supremacy of society over the state—and “all men are created equal,” on the other.
This same literacy allowed and enforced an invidious individualism; for the transmission and storage of knowledge no longer required the reciprocity that goes with oral argument, where the active, physical participation of the listener is as essential as that of the speaker. You need or you get separation from others—silence and isolation—when you read and write. (Or do you?)
The social media of our time are driving a comparable cultural revolution. No one knows how or where it will end; all we know for now is that it has demoted or fired the gatekeepers and lowered the barriers to entry in the marketplace of ideas, to the point where you might say that “all voices are created equal,” for far better and much worse. Which is to say that the democratization and the degradation of American culture, and this category would include our political discourse, are two sides of the same coin—or is it cryptocurrency?—circulated on and by social media.
The situation is especially frustrating for the well-educated (or well-credentialed) and articulate types, the “liberal elites,” the ones used to setting the standards and making the deplorables abide by them. These include educators as well as editors and experts, particularly those custodians of culture who occupy the higher circles of the higher learning—people like me, in other words, a guy who teaches at a Research 1 institution (Rutgers, the State University of NJ)).
But I’m not one to worry much about the explosion of unmediated, uncurated writing and performing enabled by the Internet.
How come? It’s not that I’m a better person or got a bigger soul than most professors. And I can’t believe in the “wisdom of crowds,” which is shorthand for neoliberal faith in free markets. Nor do I think there ever has been a free marketplace of ideas, not even now, and that’s probably a good thing because markets register only those preferences that can be assigned a monetary value as a consumer good.
And, after Aristotle, Madison, and Arendt, I don’t think majority rule is the sole measure of democracy, because you can’t justify the exercise of state power by reference to power, whether the power of arms or numbers. Without the consent of the governed, no state power is legitimate. (The fabled civility or comity that bipartisanship presumes is a function of consent; it no longer regulates political discourse because neither side of the debate about the future of the American experiment can accredit the other’s purposes, and so consent to the other’s policies.)
What is it, then, that keeps me hopeful, or at least beyond despair? My guess is that my background—as a dumb ex-jock, a graduate of a regional state university (once a mere “normal school,” a training ground for [mostly female] teachers), an itinerant adjunct professor, and a Freudian Marxist—has given me a faith in the subaltern sources of redemption, both psychological (the archaic language of the Id) and social (the poor, the meek, the excluded, and the oppressed among us). I’d emphasize that word “faith,” because that’s all it is, the conviction of things unseen, as Saul of Tarsus explained. And it’s all I got: “The absence of faith is a mental nullity,” as William James insisted.
I said I was never alone, not even when I was all by myself in quarantine. I had the smart phone, the land line, and the laptop to keep me company. I called the girlfriend two or three times a day, I chatted with friends, I took calls from telemarketers, I traded texts with the brothers from rehab, I read the papers and the magazines and then ranted or messaged at Facebook. And every morning at 7:30, I “went to” an AA meeting online, where I could see and hear other alcoholics talking about their affliction in the most cliched and yet imperative ways imaginable, always invoking—seeking out, running toward, falling back on—a “higher power” who would get them through these days, one at a time.
An AA meeting is like a rag-tag troupe of vagabond players that travels from town to town, staging a performance of a familiar script for people who have heard and maybe even memorized it all before. There are stock characters—wizened old-timers, righteous young heroes, leading men and women who speak most of the lines, anxious bit players—plus a technical crew that furnishes the props (the preliminary incantations, the textual citations), and an active audience with rehearsed responses. “Thanks for sharing,” “Keep coming back,” “It’s all right, don’t be sorry,” “We love you,” “You got this.” “Get some numbers.”
But there are no directors of the play, no matter where it’s staged. Of course there are conveners for the day, for convenience sake, but no permanent leaders outside the founders who populate the sacred texts, the Big Book and the 12X12, where Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob are the presiding spirits (Bill’s last request, as he lay dying, was for a glass of whiskey). AA is an “upside down organization,” as my first sponsor explained to me. It has no rules, no governing body, no requirements for membership except a desire to stop drinking. The closest any meeting comes to a prohibition is “no cross talk,” which means you don’t directly address another’s share unless you’re footnoting it as the occasion of your own.
Here, then, “all voices are created equal.” And yet each meeting develops a singular personality, depending on its go-to text, whether those first 164 pages of the Big Book or the discrete steps laid out in the 12X12, the Daily Reflections or the likeness of God at eye level in the rooms. Everyone learns to tell their story by inserting themselves into the master text of the pilgrim’s progress up from the slough of despond and repeating, in effect chanting, the homilies, slogans, and bromides that come attached to this grand narrative scheme.
So every meeting is as crowded by cliches as a jukebox crammed with country music. But, as in real country, the point of citing the cliche is to make it new, to show how a hoary stock phrase normally used to close a wound can reopen it if applied to a particular circumstance, by a specific individual. Time heals nothing in the rooms—30 years of sobriety can’t remove you from the insane desire to elicit, enhance, and then erase your emotions by drinking yourself into a stupor, the moving life of the dead.
In this sense, the vernacular, oracular speech acts of the AA meeting are anything but performative. They interrogate rather than accomplish what the words themselves express because real doubts about the location of that “higher power” animate the faith in its presence. In the same sense, there is no “doer behind the deed”— recovering alcoholics make themselves intelligible to others and to themselves by renouncing their will and acknowledging their powerlessness. They’re never alone unless they’re drinking.