Category: Cultural Commentary

the Territory to escape to

I wrote yesterday about Wendell Berry’s essay “Writer and Region”, and his reflections on Huck Finn and the failure of American society to reckon with the responsibilities of our demands for freedom. The whole essay is fascinating, and I want to take some time over the course of a few posts to reflect on the idea of the Territory that Berry establishes in the essay.

By “the Territory,” Berry means that place that modern society tells us all we must go to, the great westward land that the manifest destiny of modernity points towards, that place we are all called to go that leaves behind the ties that bind us to other people, to the land, and to the traditions that shaped us. In modernity, all such ties have no economic utility, and in fact hinder growth, and so must be escaped, and that escaping is prompted by the promise of something bigger, better, freer, and less full of responsibility for anything.

Berry draws the idea of the Territory from the end of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck embarks on a journey to some unnamed territory west of the Mississippi and the promise of greater adventure and riches, and freedom from the strictures of life with Miss Polly. Berry is quite critical of this ending to Twain’s novel, in short calling it a cop-out for the novelist, an abandonment of the story he had been telling up to that point. Thus, Berry makes the idea of the Territory a critical one, a concept to apply to all the ways we are all trying all the time to escape our lives and become something else, even if we don’t really know what that something is.

I want to take a few posts over the coming days just to recount the seven Territories Berry illuminates in his essay. I don’t know that I’ll necessarily have comments on each one. But I’ll at least quote a relevant passage from each. Taken together, I think they serve as a strong indictment of the modern character, and our overwhelming urge – fed by modernity’s demonic drive for more and more growth and acquisition and production and greed – to abandon ourselves and remake ourselves sui generis.

we do not yet want much to do with responsibility

It is arguable, I think, that our country’s culture is still suspended as if at the end of Huckleberry Finn, assuming that its only choices are either a deadly “civilization” of piety and violence or an escape into some “Territory” where we may remain free of adulthood and community of obligation. We want to be free; we want to have rights; we want to have power; we do not yet want much to do with responsibility. We have imagined the great and estimable freedom of boyhood, of which Huck Finn remain s the finest spokesman. We have imagined the bachelorhood of nature and genius and power: the contemplative, the artist, the hunter, the cowboy, the general, the president – lives dedicated and solitary in the Territory of individuality. But boyhood and bachelorhood have remained the norms of “liberation,” for women as well as men. We have hardly begun to imagine the coming to responsibility that is the meaning, and the liberation, of growing up. We have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life.

Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” from What Are People For?

I’ve always admired Wendell Berry, and his reputation, but mostly from afar. I am trying to amend that early on this summer by digging into his works a bit, starting with What Are People For?, a collection of essays he published in the early 90s. The quote above is pulled from the essay “Writer and Region”, in which Berry grapples with regionalism in American writing through the lens of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. This essay jumped at me not least because of the strange place occupied by that classic American novel in our culture today. It has come under heavy, and I’d say misguided, critique because of its necessarily contextual relationship to race. The book was published, after all, in 1885.

Berry does a good job of identifying why it is such an important book in the history of American literature, namely, its prolonged meditation on boyhood and the freedoms and responsibilities of growing up. The quoted passage really jumped at me because of the application of those themes to America – the America of today as much as the America of 1987 that the author was writing in. Maybe more so today, three-and-a-half decades on. We’ve learned very few lessons from Berry in that time, least of all what freedom and responsibility really mean for a people. We’ve leaned into heavily into the desire for freedom and rights and power, and away from the attendant demands of responsibility. Our economic, cultural, and military power has long been able to paper over this rupture, but it seems those days are coming to an end. The cracks are appearing as we continue to pull our demands for greater and greater autonomy away from any sense that that autonomy demands even more of us than we could imagine.

And this isn’t exclusively an issue of the right or of the left, a point I have been asserting more and more here and elsewhere. All points on our political spectrum have leaned into the idea that any ties that bind or responsibilities that demand or burdens that we may be asked to carry are somehow illegitimate and tyrannical. This is the freedom of small children, all expression and emotion and movement, and devoid of any sense of themselves as existing in relation to anyone or anything else. It’s the freedom of Huck Finn, as he desires to leave Miss Polly and the town and people he knows. It’s a freedom that takes the boyhood adventures of Finn as the only testament of life, rejecting the idea that Huck continued to grow beyond being a boy and into a man. Twain didn’t write that story, and we get to pretend it tells us something about the trajectory of our own lives.

I don’t want to rant too much here on this particular hobby horse of mine, so I’ll wrap this up. I’m looking forward to reading and sharing more of Berry’s works here over the coming weeks, and reflecting on his particular vision of life and his critiques of all of our cultural and societal shibboleths.

censoring your text messages

Michael Shellenberger had an important piece a couple of weeks ago about the efforts of corporate overlords to push their way into our text messages, in pursuit of “disinformation and hate speech.” Here are the key paragraphs:

The Omidyar Foundation, created by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, has advocated the spying on and censorship of encrypted wrongspeak. “Reports of violence, disinformation, and manipulation campaigns originating on private messaging platforms have become all too common,” warned Omidyar Foundation in a January 2022 report. “Not only are individuals’ lives and liberties impacted, but dangerous platform design choices also have devastating implications for our democratic institutions and the health and well-being of our societies.”

In late 2021, Wired, the formerly libertarian magazine that now champions surveillance and censorship, called for spying on private messaging in the name of preventing harm. Encrypted messaging apps “are intentionally built for convenience and speed, for person-to-person communication as well as large group connections,” wrote Wired. “Yet it is these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. As early as 2018, investigative reports have explored the role that these very features played in dozens of deaths in India and Indonesia as well as elections in Nigeria and Brazil.”

The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. “Privacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,” wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. “We believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.”

https://public.substack.com/p/now-theyre-trying-censor-your-text

This is really wild, and not just for the civil liberties implications. Let’s just ask ourselves a couple of simple questions here:

Do we really think heavy handed government censorship decisions in people’s pockets – a place most people regard as quite private, even sacred – is going to lessen disinformation and turn down the heat on anti-democratic and reactionary voices? Really? Where in history has that ever happened, and turned out well? How well has centralized attempts at speech regulation ever worked out?

Just look at the current reactions against anything considered PC or woke potentially being imposed by federal and state entities. How are regular people – and I’m not just talking right wing doom mongers and survivalists, but regular, everyday suburban folks – taking attempts to limit speech or punish non-mainstream ideas? And this by and large hasn’t even been the government! This has just been people on social media. Imagine when the government starts using its power to flag text messages. Imagine the first time your dad or sister or friend or whoever sends a slightly off color joke in a group chat and minutes after everyone reads it and either chuckles quietly to themselves or shakes their heads, the joke disappears, replaced by a message from the US government or some related agency declaring that message verboten and warning of future penalties and punishments? Is this really the future we want?

This is bonkers. It’s get at, once again, one of my overriding bugaboos right now, which is the growing tendency of my fellow travelers on the American left – a movement once defined by its counterculture nature, its location outside of power centers, and its commitment to sticking it to The Man – has now become the defender of coercive state and corporate power, all in pursuit of a nebulous agenda of social justice and equity. Just ask yourself for a moment; how well do you think MLK would take the government reaching in and censoring communications among private citizens, even a government run by so-called allies? This was the man who had his phones tapped by the government.

Maybe today we use text censoring to halt communications among KKK members and Neo-Nazis. Great. But what happens when our friends aren’t in charge any more? This isn’t an abstract thought exercise – remember Joe Biden is not favored to win next year! The potential of second Trump presidency or a DeSantis administration is very real! Do you want them having the power, crafted by good intentioned liberals and benevolent corporate tech bros with the quixotic hopes of somehow curtailing misinformation, to decide which text messages you can and can’t send? That seems less than ideal. The First Amendment isn’t an occasional conveinance that we can roll out for the good guys and deny to the bad. It details universal rights, even for the abhorrent and the terrible. Let’s not forget that.