The Season Of Savagery And Hope

The Season Of Savagery And Hope

by Ali Minai 3 Quarks Daily

April 2018: ‘Tis the Season of Giddiness in Democratlandia. Republicans are saddled with a widely despised President and riven by internal dissension. The Republican leadership in Congress is lurching from fiasco to fiasco – interrupted briefly by one great “success” on tax cuts. The zombie candidates of the Tea Party are still stalking establishment Republicans across the land. And, somewhere in his formidable fastness, the Great Dragon Mueller is winding up for the fiery breath that will consume the world of Trumpism like a paper lantern. And a Blue Wave – nay, a Tsunami – is headed towards the Republicans in Congress, looking to engulf them in November.

Time passes, and it is October. Anguish is all around. After snatching children from their parents and imprisoning them in cages, after giving a wet kiss to Kim Jon Un and worse to Putin, after having his former campaign manager convicted of crimes and his fixer plead guilty, after a virtual torrent of lies, after reports of a still devastated Puerto Rico and newly devastated Carolinas and Florida – after all this and more, Trump is more popular than ever in his presidency, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, and the Blue Wave is beginning to look more like an eddy. To be sure, Trump is still spectacularly unpopular compared to past presidents, with disapproval numbers at 50% of higher, but he seems to be rising. Rising! The very word is like a knell of doom. As Trump himself might say, “What the hell is going on?”

First of all, probably an over-reaction. A large part of US electoral outcomes can be ascribed to structural factors, such as the fact that 26 of the 50 states have conservative majority populations. Yes, these 26 states may add up to only 47% of the US population, but they elect 54% of the US Senate, and that cannot change. The number of reliably liberal states is much smaller – only 16 – and, though they account for 42% of the population, they only elect 32% of the Senate. The remaining 8 states – comprising 11% of the population – swing with the season, but supply 16% of the Senate. Thus, Democrats start off with a huge disadvantage in the Senate even in the best of times. Demographic forces will gradually change this situation, but slowly. Meanwhile, Democrats, as the liberal party, will always be facing the bitter choice of either accepting conservative senators in their own ranks or remaining a permanent minority in the Senate. Four decades of asymmetric political warfare has also left Republicans in control of most state houses, which they have used to gerrymander districts and pass laws to disenfranchise Democratic voters. That too is hard to change because these factors are custom-designed to perpetuate Republican majorities. But all is not lost for Democrats here.

Gerrymandering is, by its nature, a risky bet for the Republicans: Trying to create a majority of districts from a minority of voters means that those districts are barely Republican, while the minority of Democratic districts into which the majority of voters are packed are strongly Democratic. Even a small Democratic wave can easily flip many of the gerrymandered districts, which is exactly what polls suggest will happen on November 6. Thus, it still appears very likely that the Democrats will win more than the 23 extra seats they need to capture the House of Representatives, though perhaps less dramatically than looked possible a few weeks ago. The Senate, however, is another matter. Of the 35 Senate seats up for election this year, 24 are held by Democrats, and nine of these are in states that Trump won. Three of the nine – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin – are not really Republican states; they just went for Trump because Democratic voters were lulled into complacency in 2016. Florida is a Republican-leaning state, but Sen. Bill Nelson seems to be doing reasonably well. The remaining five – West Virginia, Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, and Missouri – are all in play. The Democrats are quite likely to lose two of these – probably North Dakota and Missouri – and possibly more. They could also pick up seats in Arizona, Nevada, and Tennessee. If they can win all three and lose only one on the other side, Democrats could flip the Senate. A month ago, that looked possible, but that has changed. The most likely outcome according to fivethirtyeight.com is a 52-48 Republican Senate.

It cannot be disputed that, in the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency, things went better than expected for those who oppose him – not least because Trump turned out to be his own worst enemy. But this should not have lulled anyone into believing that the strengths which got him into the White House in 2016 had diminished. The fatal mistake that Democrats made in 2016 was to count on a fundamental sense of decency in the American electorate. Once the Access Hollywood tape came out, it was assumed that all decent people everywhere would recoil in horror and vote against Trump. That turned out to be half correct: most people did recoil in horror – but then a good fraction of them went right ahead and voted for Trump. Their horror was compartmentalized into a compartment that was of vanishing importance compared to the monstrous urges Trump fed in their psyches: Xenophobia; racial and cultural animus; historical grievances; and – in some cases – economic anxiety. Those urges and Trump’s unique ability to satisfy them are both still there, and very much on display as he deploys them like a weapon of political mass destruction in his current barnstorming.

So what are the Democrats to do? Is all hope lost? Are we as a country stuck with a radical and ruthless Republican Party for the foreseeable future?

Any serious analysis of the situation must concede that, so far, Democrats have failed to find a magic formula to counter Trump. His historic unpopularity cannot mask the fact he still has far more support than he should in any rational world. And there’s the rub: The world is not rational, and Trump has learned to exploit its irrationality better than any recent politician. This is both a new phenomenon and one as old as civilization itself. For most of history, humanity has been ruled by Donald Trumps – only far worse. Disregard for decency, mass exploitation, shameless corruption, denial of reality, and, of course, wanton cruelty have been the staple of chieftains, warlords, kings, and emperors for as long as we know, and in infinitely more extreme form than we see today. Compared to past tyrants – and even present ones – Trump is positively a cuddly kitten. But he surprises us because we thought that, at least in the lands of stable democracy, we had eradicated the ancient disease of mindless tribalism and replaced it with an ethos rooted in fact and Reason. Trump’s great contribution to history is to burst the bubble of this fallacy, showing that the virus of barbarianism is latent In the body politic of even the most sophisticated democratic societies.

It has become common in some progressive circles to compare Trump and other authoritarian populists around the world to the fascists of the 1930s. In the United States, at least, this comparison is still far-fetched: Trump – mainly due to incompetence – is more noise than action. But, as David Frum, Bob Woodward, Madeleine Albright, and others have pointed out, this ineffectiveness should not lull anyone into a sense of complacency. Two years of Trump have already demonstrated that the institutions undergirding American democracy are far weaker than had generally been assumed. For liberals invested in the stability of institutions, this has been a rude shock, and explains much of their current disorientation. If facts don’t matter any more; if Reason cannot be the basis of argument; if science can be dismissed with the wave of the hand; if human suffering is of no consequence – what is a good liberal to do?

Over the course of the last two years, two distinct answers to this question have emerged among Democrats. One – promoted by establishment figures like Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, as well as Barack and Michelle Obama – advocates countering Trump’s uncouth challenge doggedly with a dignified rebuttal based on facts. The other – which has found its most recent avatar in the ferocious Michael Avenatti – would prefer to meet Republican fire with progressive nuclear bombs. Which of these is the right strategy? This is important for 2018, but critical for 2020: A Trump re-election would truly be the end of a recognizable America.

The recent events surrounding the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court provide some lessons. The original impulse of the Senate Democrats was to challenge the brute-force tactics of the Republicans through vigorous protest within the framework of the Senate process. However, once word leaked out about the accusations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a very different dynamic took over. Grassroots activists turned up the heat on pseudo-moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and Jeff Flake. There were altercations in elevators and ambushes in the hallways of the Capitol. All the energy of the MeToo movement was brought to bear on the Senators. And it failed. Kavanaugh was confirmed. The jury is still out on whether the whole episode energized Republicans or Democrats, but that is a momentary thing. Kavanaugh will likely be on the court for decades helping to change the very fabric of the country. How could this happen? The Democrats made excellent logical arguments for their case: All allegations should be investigated; All relevant people should be interviewed; the FBI must be given sufficient latitude and time to do a thorough investigation. Trump and the Republicans summarily rejected these arguments without giving any justification – and the public did nothing. There were no major demonstrations in the streets, no acts of mass civil disobedience, and, in fact, an uptick in the popularity of Republicans. For the thousandth time in the last forty years, it became clear that Fact and Reason have no real political power in America today.

There are good reasons for this situation. Over the last four decades, the Right has developed a vast propaganda machine through ideological think tanks, talk radio, and – since 1996 – Fox News. It has trained its voters to be more reliable and more committed. And when it has acquired power, it has deployed the machinery of government with ruthless efficiency to consolidate that power – public good be damned. In contrast, Democrats have consistently pushed a message of public service, fairness, accountability, and inclusion. Many, like Avenatti, would like this to change; they want to see a ruthless, ferocious Democratic Party that is willing to impose its will when it is in power. But that would be a mistake – mainly because, in the end, Democratic voters will reject it. If the Democratic Party becomes simply a Left-wing mirror image of the know-nothing, fact-free, ideological, authoritarian Right, it will lose the very thing that makes it attractive to the majority of Americans.

The future of the Democratic Party lies in diversity and innovation – both uniquely liberal values, both dependent fundamentally on openness to new attitudes and new ideas. Constructive anger – such as that which is driving the MeToo movement today – is a powerful force, but it must remain constructive, inclusive, and compassionate. It should lead to positive action that changes the world for the better, not to destructive nihilism or ideological radicalism. This capacity for positive and continuous change is exactly what distinguishes the liberal ethos from the rigidity and uniformity of conservatism. But it is also a real challenge. The history of humanity is the history of shibboleths; people need gods to worship and dogmas to believe in, whereas the core ideal of liberalism is to reject this attitude. The biggest reason why the Right wins so often, why Fox News works, why Trump can triumph – if only transiently – is that conservatism has a more accurate baseline model of human nature than liberalism. Perhaps this is reason for despair – but it may also be an opportunity.

One of the most important insights to emerge from the scientific study of adaptation and learning is the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. For an active agent to succeed in a complex environment, it must learn what actions or strategies are useful in various situations. It is often possible to discover fairly good strategies with reasonable payoff quite easily. Indeed, evolution has configured many of these into animals in the form of innate behaviors and instincts. An agent equipped with these strategies can just keep using them without further learning, and get the payoff from these actions. This is the policy of exploitation, and accounts for most behaviors in animals and humans. It is easy, cheap, and reliable if the environment does not change much, but it is also very expensive because of its fragility and its opportunity cost. The fragility comes from the fact that no complex environment is ever perfectly stable, and as it changes, the agents within it must adapt their strategies or perish. This is why evolution continually reconfigures instincts to keep up with a changing world. But more importantly, the obvious or innate strategies are often not the best ones even in a fixed environment. They are fast and good enough, but better ones are possible.

However, these better strategies can only be discovered by trying out risky new actions rather than remaining stuck with the safe, tried-and-tested ones. This is exploration. Humans – unlike almost all other animals – are especially skilled at such exploration. Indeed, one could argue that this is their essential characteristic, their primary advantage – a capacity to go beyond instinct, explore new strategies, and make them part of the behavioral repertoire. To succeed, an intelligent agent must find a good balance between exploitation and exploration, and so must societies. In the environment of human affairs, conservatism is the exploitative principle and liberalism the exploratory one. This is trivially obvious at one level: Conservatives prefer to stick with what already works whereas progressives want to try out new things. But the dichotomy holds also at a deeper, more profound level. Conservatism, and more broadly, any traditional top-down form of societal organization, seeks to exploit the well-known, primal instincts of the human psyche: Fear, greed, pride, group solidarity, etc. It sees human nature as it is, and pushes its buttons to accomplish its goal of stability. Liberalism – or more generally, the progressive mindset – looks more to human nature as it can be. It assumes the existence of latent capabilities, fresh attitudes, new ideas – seeking to discover and deploy these in the service of progress. It is this ethos of change that makes liberalism more attractive to the young, the powerless, and the marginalized. It promises a better world to those who are not satisfied with the world as it is. But it is always an uphill battle. Most of human history is a triumph of conservative exploitation, though it would be a mistake to think of the liberal impulse as just a new, post-Enlightenment thing. All the great thinkers, explorers, reformers, innovators, artists, poets, and discoverers – from Pythagoras to Galileo, Zoroaster to Nietzsche, Omar Khayyam to Shelley, Albiruni to Darwin – were the liberal minds of their age: Exploring ideas, bringing the new into being, and changing the world in the process. But it is also true that, with a few transient exceptions, liberal values have not been the norm in the area of governance. For almost all of history, humans have been ruled within a conservative framework that privileges tradition and order rather than change. While the liberal mind is as old as humanity itself, liberal democratic government is a young and fragile thing. Will it – can it – survive?

Some are already predicting its demise. Recently, The Atlantic has been running an entire series on the question: Is Democracy Dying? The question has become especially urgent in an age when global social media has supercharged the ability of humanity’s primal instincts to reach critical mass and blow up the world of Reason. In the lead article, the editor, Jeffrey Goldberg quotes the legal scholar, Jeffrey Rosen as saying: “The goal in America today … is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.” Yascha Mounk has recently compiled sobering figures showing that the bedrock principles of democracy are losing their grip among the young, and suggests that they can only be saved by liberals reconnecting with the problems of real people. On the other side, there are voices such as Daniel Treisman arguing that the rumors of democracy’s death ares greatly exaggerated. Whatever the case may be, it cannot be denied that liberal democracy is currently facing a crisis all over the world.

The crisis is only likely to grow as the world becomes more troubled by demographic pressures, economic inequality, social unrest and – above all – climate change. The conundrum is this: People have real and growing problems, and technocratic liberalism has assured them that these problems can be solved by rational policies. But the problems keep growing because – in a real sense – most of them have no quick solution. Yes, technology has solved many problems, but has also created new ones – unemployment, social isolation, mental health crises, greater economic inequality. Medicine has alleviated much suffering, but new forms keep emerging in a globalizing world. War and crime are everywhere. Famine is still a real threat in the 21st century. Great cities and whole countries are running out of water. The promise of rational, technical solutions to all these problems is simply not tenable. This too can be explained rationally, but as they say, if you’re explaining you’re losing. And as the stress grows, it is almost certain that people everywhere will fall back on instincts and innate behaviors, resulting in resurgent tribalism. Yes – as Mounk says – liberal democracy must solve real problems, but what it needs much more is a story, a vision that can connect with the more constructive instincts of humanity – “the better angels of our nature.” Conservatism has a ready-made narrative that is almost bred in the bone. An alternative liberal narrative is still lacking. Liberalism still relies too much on technocratic arguments – “mere” facts! But facts don’t move hearts or minds – stories do. In this time of crisis lies the opportunity to create such a story for American liberalism.

The young in America are distinctly more liberal than their elders. Immigrants, who had ranged across the liberal-conservative spectrum, have increasingly been pushed in the liberal direction by Trumpian policies – and by their children! Democrats have won majorities in five of the last six presidential elections, though Republicans took the presidency in two of those cases thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College. There is, in fact, an increasing moderate-to-liberal majority in the US. The old notion that America was a “center-right country” is demonstrably no longer true. For liberals and Democrats to seize this moment offered courtesy of Donald Trump is the opportunity of a lifetime – and perhaps the last one before darkness descends. By design or accident, the Democrats are doing several things right: More women candidates; more young candidates; less inhibition about proclaiming liberal ideals; fearless expression of inconvenient truths. But all these things have to come together into a vision. That process is still very incomplete. Barack Obama, for all his decency, intelligence, and charisma, could not produce that vision because he was too careful, too calculating and self-conscious. Perhaps young new leaders like Andrew Gillum, Beto O’Rourke and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will do the job. Or perhaps it will be more seasoned leaders like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. But time is running short.

For the last two decades, America has been governed mostly by a conservative minority through the machinations of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and constitutional quirks such as the Electoral College and equal Senate representation. Sooner or later – and evidence suggests very soon – the majority will no longer be passive. The convulsion that follows can lead in many directions, most of them unpleasant – ranging from authoritarian right-wing suppression to rampant left-wing populism. Some are even beginning to speak sotto voce about a new American “civil war.” But somewhere in this forest of hazard is a narrow path for liberal idealism to capture the country’s heart and bind it again to the ideals of democracy. Trump and Trumpism have opened up decent people across America – and across the world – to putting aside their differences and uniting in the cause of a better future. The opportunity for a transformational liberal movement is at hand – but it is a tide that must be taken at the flood or lost for the foreseeable future.

But what of the moment at hand? What are we going to see in a few days, and over the next two years as a possible new Liberal Narrative struggles to be born?

In the brave new world of cell phones, call screening, and cord-cutting Millennials, polls are of limited value. Organizations such as fivethirtyeight.com make valiant efforts to combine information from many polls to make predictions, but even though their predictions are reasonably good, they are far from infallible. Recent polls have shown a great deal of contradictory data – some with Trump’s approval rising and Republicans surging on various seats, others showing Trump stuck in the 30s and Democrats with clear leads in states like Florida, Wisconsin, and Montana. Early voting and anecdotal evidence both suggest that this will be a very high turnout election, which is much likelier to help Democrats, since Republicans turn out in high numbers anyway. Another excellent sign for the Democrats is that women favor them by huge margins – perhaps as high as 25%, which is astounding. Though men favor Republicans by a small amount, the women’s vote is both larger and more reliable. The most interesting aspect of this is to see how many nominally Republican women vote Democratic this time. And, though anything is possible, the Democrats look set to win back the House and probably not lose much in the Senate.

If this happens, one can make at least one unfortunate prediction: Donald Trump will surely find a hundred ways to harass the House Democrats using the machinery of the government he controls. Running against the Democratic House will be his ticket to renomination and possible re-election. At the same time, Democrats are likely to ramp up investigations of Trump very quickly. Look for everything to end up in court, and for the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh appointments to start paying off for Trump. On the other hand, if the Democrats fail to capture the House of Representatives on November 6, it will indicate that the United States is already on the slippery slope to a very grim future. Given all this, it is hard to predict which party will be angrier for the 2020 vote. One thing, though, is certain: 2019 and 2020 will be the vilest years of politicking in recent memory – but possibly also years where people turn more eagerly towards a better alternative if one is offered. The Season of Savagery – and Hope – is upon us.

Why the novel matters in the age of anger

Why the novel matters in the age of anger

In the 2018 New Statesman / Goldsmiths Prize lecture, Elif Shafak explains why – in a world ruled by fear and division – novelists no longer have the luxury of being apolitical.

By Elif Shafak New Statesman/America

I was an only child raised by a divorced, working, well-educated, secularist, Westernised mother and an uneducated, spiritual, Eastern grandmother. Born in France, I moved to Turkey with my mother when my parents’ marriage came to an end. Although I was small when I left Strasbourg, I often think about our little flat and remember it as a place full of French, Italian, Turkish, Algerian, Lebanese leftist students who passionately discussed the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, read poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky and collectively dreamt about the Revolution. From there I was zoomed to my Grandma’s neighbourhood in Ankara – a very patriarchal and very conservative-Muslim environment. Back then, in the late 1970s, there was increasing political violence and turmoil in Turkey. Every day a bomb exploded somewhere, people got killed on the streets, there were shootings on university campuses. But inside Grandma’s house what prevailed were superstitions, evil eye beads, coffee cup readings and the oral culture of the Middle East. In all my novels there has been a continuous interest in both: the world of stories, magic and mysticism inside the house, and the world of politics, conflict, inequality and discrimination outside the window.

I was an early reader. An avid one. But it took me a long time to learn to write. Being left handed, at school, like all other left-handed kids, I was forced to use my right hand instead. “If you cannot control your left hand, keep it under the desk all the time, just send it to exile,” the teacher advised. It was the first time I had heard the word “exile” and it stayed with me.

In my sloppy handwriting, I started writing stories. Not because I wanted to become a novelist someday – I didn’t think such a thing was possible. There were no writers around me; no literary role models. But as someone who often felt like an “insider outsider” even in her own motherland, stuck between cultures and cities, my need for an “elsewhere” was profound. Books became my friends. Storyland became my homeland.

When I look back, there are so many moments that have left an impact on me both as a reader and a writer. Here is one: in high school, one Saturday, I started reading a book by the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina. By the time I finished it something in me had shifted forever. Until then, at school, I had only learned an official version of Ottoman history: top-down. It was an abstract history in which there were no human beings, and the few names mentioned belonged to the sultan, shaykh al-Islam or grand vizier – always men. I was told that the janissaries, which composed the Ottoman military, were great soldiers full of faith and courage. But in The Bridge on the Drina I read the stories of the Christian families whose sons were taken away by the Ottoman state, converted to Islam and turned into janissaries. Yes, these boys were provided a great education and a good salary – and they could even make it all the way up to the top and become viziers provided they had the talent – but it all happened at the expense of never seeing their families again, forgetting their religion and fully erasing their identity. The truth about the janissaries was far more complicated than my history textbooks had made it seem.

Suddenly, I had to rethink what I thought I knew. I had to unlearn. What Andric’s novel did for me at that young age was to shake years of nationalistic education, and whisper into my ears: “Have you ever considered the story from the point of view of the Other?” This is a crucial question that we need to ask ourselves again and again, no matter which country we may live in, no matter which stories we might have been brought up with.

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The novel matters because it connects us with the experiences of people we have never met, times we have never seen, places we have never visited. The novel matters not only because of the stories it brings alive, but also the silences it dares to explore. As novelists we keep our ears pricked all the time, attentive to the rhythm of the language, the usage of words, the stories and legends swirling in the air – but we must also listen carefully to the silences. Here we find the things that cannot be openly talked about in a society; the political, cultural, sexual taboos.

A writer’s job is not to try to provide the answers. It is neither to preach nor to teach; just the opposite. A writer must be a student of life, and not the best student either, since we must never graduate from this school, but keep asking the most simple, the most fundamental and the most difficult questions. In the end, we leave the answers to the readers. Every reader’s experience is unique, and each will come up with their own answers – this the writer must respect. But the novel needs to be a free, egalitarian space where a diversity of voices can be heard, nuances celebrated and the unsayable can be said.

There are different ways of storytelling and very different traditions of writing novels in China, Russia, South America, the Middle East or Africa. There are striking differences within the same continent or even the same country, let alone across the globe. That is why, every time I hear someone praise a particular book by saying “this is exactly how a novel should be written!”, I flinch a little. Why try to reduce this amazing plurality of forms and voices worldwide into one single formula?

The novel as a genre has a very special place in Turkish cultural history. It is the youngest literary genre, and from the beginning it was regarded as an important vehicle of modernisation and Westernisation. The novel came to the Ottoman empire from Europe in the late 19th century, and the early novelists – almost all of them men – wrote with a mission. Known as “Father Novelists”, they situated themselves above their characters, above the text, above their readers. They saw their readers as their sons – children in need of paternal guidance. Every character was placed in a story to represent something larger than himself or herself. That is why in many Turkish novels language was neglected; it was kept simple to make sure the sons got the message right.

I have never felt close to the tradition of “Father Novelists” in which the author is regarded as the authority. Although this has been, and still is, the dominant tide in many parts of the Middle East, there have been many other undercurrents, including that of rebellious daughters – women writers of the Middle East who have refused to conform.

The novel matters because, like an alchemist, it turns empathy into resistance. It brings the periphery to the centre, it gives a voice to the voiceless, it makes the invisible visible. And it also distils the deluge of information into drops of wisdom – as argued by the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. Writing at a time when Nazism and the ideology of hatred were on the rise, and the world was turning upside down, Benjamin repeatedly made a distinction between “information” and “wisdom”. He believed that the writer, in the depth of solitude, shared his or her own experience or the experiences of others, and by doing this, shed light on “the perplexity of living”. But here is where Benjamin’s theory becomes all the more relevant for our world today. The more information is available and the faster it spreads, he thought, the deeper was the perplexity of living. The proliferation of information at the expense of wisdom, and the widening gap between the two preoccupied Benjamin. He was worried that this might bring along the demise, and eventually the death of the art of storytelling.

Writing in 1934, TS Eliot echoed Benjamin’s sentiment: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Susan Sontag, who was fascinated with Benjamin’s work, agreed: “Literature, I would argue, is knowledge – albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.”

In our digital world, Benjamin’s warning has become all the more relevant. We have plenty of “information” – and if we don’t we can always google it. Then there is “knowledge”, which, however imperfect, requires depth and focus and slowing the flow of time. “Wisdom” is harder won – I would argue that it embodies not only knowledge but also empathy and emotional intelligence. In life, you might come across very smart people with low emotional intelligence. Wisdom is difficult to achieve because it requires cognitive flexibility. It also demands that one steps outside identity politics and echo chambers.

In the light of all that is happening today, particularly after the global shocks of 2016, perhaps we need to add yet another layer to Benjamin’s theory: that of “misinformation”. We are all living in a liquid world. And we are constantly being subjected to not only a cascade of information, but also a cascade of misinformation.

In East and West, all extremist ideologies benefit from misinformation. All extremists yearn to dehumanise the Other. An Islamic fundamentalist and a white supremacist share the same mentality and cognitive rigidity. The opposite of a fanatic is not another fanatic. The opposite of a fanatic is a moderate, as the American philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out years ago in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). Populist demagogues dehumanise the Other because it provides fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of racism, misogyny and other kinds of discrimination. If you can convince masses that immigrants resemble animals, blacks are inferior, women have lower IQ, LGBT people are perverts, or Jews or Muslims are untrustworthy, you can legitimise all kinds of violence.

Here is where the novelist must speak up. For writers, there is no “us” and there is no “them”. There are only human beings with stories and silences. The job of a writer is to rehumanise those who have been dehumanised. As many who have lived through horrors have told us, including the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, the opposite of love, kindness or peace is not necessarily hatred and war. The opposite of love is numbness. It is indifference.

Too much information creates numbness. Then we stop feeling. Then we stop caring. Refugees become mere numbers, anyone who is different becomes a category, an abstraction. It is not a coincidence that all populist movements are essentially against plurality, against diversity. In creating dualistic frameworks and polarising society, they know they can spread numbness faster.

The novel matters because it punches little holes in the wall of indifference that surrounds us. Novels have to swim against the tide. And this was never more clear than it is today.

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After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with the growth of new technologies, there was so much hope and optimism. At the turn of the millennium, many people – including leading analysts, academics and journalists – believed that the triumph of liberalism was inevitable. There was a shared understanding that, sooner or later, all societies would become more modern, democratic and globally integrated. We would all turn into one big global village. There were expectations that religion would become irrelevant, that the nation-state would lose its power to supranational entities.

And the paradox is while all of these happened to a certain degree, the opposite also happened. Only two decades have passed since that time of optimism and we have entered the age of pessimism. Defined by anxiety, resentment and fear, this is an era in which emotions guide and misguide politics: Pankaj Mishra has called it the “age of anger”. And our perplexity of living, in Benjamin’s words, has become more acute.

If the world is changing, so must the literary world. Writers from wobbly and wounded democracies – such as Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt or Venezuela – never had the luxury of being apolitical. But something interesting is happening today: more and more Western authors are feeling the same kind of urgency that non-Western authors have been feeling for so long. Doris Lessing called literature “analysis after the event”. Writers need time – to process, to digest, to imagine, to write. But perhaps today there is such immediacy and urgency that more and more authors across the world are feeling the need to respond “during the event”.

I am not suggesting that every writer has to become politicised and I am not talking about being a partisan or even being interested in party politics. I am using politics in its broadest sense possible: as a feminist, I know that the personal is also political and wherever there is power and inequality there is politics. Novelists need to speak up about the dangers of losing our core values: pluralism, freedom of speech, minority rights, separation of powers, democracy. Benjamin believed storytelling had to turn information into wisdom. Today a bigger challenge awaits writers: how to turn misinformation into wisdom.

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I come from a land where words often feel heavy. Every Turkish writer, poet, journalist or intellectual knows that because of a poem, a novel, an interview, or even a tweet, we can be stigmatised in pro-government media, lynched on social media by trolls and possibly put on trial, detained or exiled. With more than 120 journalists still imprisoned since the failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016, Turkey has become the world’s biggest jailer of journalists.

We carry this knowledge at the back of our minds when we sit at our desk to write our stories. As a result, there is widespread self-censorship among writers. How do you even begin to speak about the kind of censorship that comes from within and not necessarily always from outside? This is what the loss of democracy and freedom of speech does eventually. It creates a climate of intimidation. As Arthur Koestler said, authoritarianism corrupts not only the politicians and the political elite, but also deeply damages the civil society. It damages the institutions that are essential for a democracy to survive. And it also damages collective memory. Turkey is a country of collective amnesia, and therefore, memory is a responsibility for us writers.

In a world beset with populist demagoguery and misinformation, memory is a responsibility for writers everywhere. We cannot forget what has happened in the past when tribalism, nationalism, isolationism, fanaticism and jingoism managed to get the better of humanity.

The novel matters because stories continue to connect us across borders, and help us to see beyond the artificial categories of race, gender, class. The world is frighteningly messy today, but a world that has lost its empathy, cognitive flexibility and imagination will surely be a darker place.

A version of this piece was delivered as the New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize lecture on 26 September

Simone Weil defies conventions

Strange and intelligent

Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions

Christy Wampole AEON

Simone Weil (1909-43) belonged to a species so rare, it had only one member. This peculiar French philosopher and mystic diagnosed the maladies and maledictions of her own age and place – Europe in the first war-torn half of the 20th century – and offered recommendations for how to forestall the repetition of its iniquities: totalitarianism, income inequality, restriction of free speech, political polarisation, the alienation of the modern subject, and more. Her combination of erudition, political and spiritual fervour, and commitment to her ideals adds weight to the distinctive diagnosis she offers of modernity. Weil has been dead now for 75 years but remains able to tell us much about ourselves.

Born to a secular Jewish family in Paris, she was gifted from the beginning with a thirst for knowledge of other cultures and her own. Fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 12, she taught herself Sanskrit, and took an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. She excelled at the Lycée Henri IV and the École normale supérieure, where she studied philosophy. Plato was a lasting influence, and her interest in political philosophy led her to Karl Marx, whose thought she esteemed but did not blindly assimilate.

As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. In addition to her intelligence, other aspects of her biography have captured the public’s imagination. As a child during the First World War, she refused sugar because soldiers on the front could have none. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she died at 34 when working for the resistance government France libre in London, refusing to eat more than the citizens’ rations of her German-occupied France. Teachers and classmates called her the Martian and the Red Virgin, nicknames suggestive of her strangeness and asexuality. A philosopher who refused to cloister herself behind academia’s walls, she worked in factories and vineyards, and left France during the Spanish Civil War to fight alongside the Durruti Column anarchists, a failed mission in many respects.

Several mystical experiences, including Weil’s discovery of the poem ‘Love (III)’ by the 17th-century poet George Herbert led her to embrace Christianity, and many have called for her canonisation as a saint. In her book Devotion (2017), the Francophile poet and punk-rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged, she coursed through the great halls of higher learning, forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice.’ The French politician Charles de Gaulle thought Weil was mad, while the authors Albert Camus, André Gide and T S Eliot recognised her as one of the greatest minds of her time.

Weil’s best-known works – The Need for Roots, Gravity and Grace, ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’, Waiting for God, and On the Abolition of All Political Parties, all published posthumously – offer only snapshots of the philosopher’s wide-ranging diagnoses of societal maladies. Based on her notebooks, letters and published essays, scholars have traced compatibilities between her thought and that of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Blanchot, Nikolai Berdyaev, Iris Murdoch, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Quentin Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Jan Zwicky, Meister Eckhart and John Rawls, to name just a few. Weil is a hinge between religious and philosophical thought, and her notebooks often do away with differences between them. All of her work constitutes an attempt to regenerate connective tissue between all disciplines, between culture and nature, science and art, and God and humans.

A Weil revival is underway, in part due to the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work. Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’ Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent. For this reason, she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian. To substantiate this claim, Weil offered three arguments:

1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.

2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.

3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.

These tentacular organisations make people stupid, requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’. Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’. People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups. In a resonant passage in The Need for Roots, Weil writes: ‘A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.’

She would have sided with even the most detestable of speakers: thy enemy must be known

Weil supported the freedom of individual expression. (She believed, however, in certain speech restrictions for institutions such as newspapers and government propaganda offices that, as collectivities, were, for her, naturally suspect.) She writes that ‘complete, unlimited freedom of expression for every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve, is an absolute need on the part of the intelligence’. The health of the intelligence relies on full access to the facts, and without it, thinking is always deficient. She would have sided with even the most detestable of speakers, if for no other reason than that thy enemy must be known. 

Weil’s writings are infused with care. She believed it politically essential that every human soul feel ‘useful and even indispensable’ within the social body. She offers the example of unemployed people and manual labourers, who often feel little responsibility toward a society that does not embrace them. Regarding criminal justice, she believed in the redemptive power of punishment, arguing that it should ‘wipe out the stigma of the crime’ and offer an education to offenders, allowing for full re-entry into the community. Her care-infused recommendations for how to think of one’s nation could be edifying to consciences troubled by the confrontational nationalist movements of today. She wrote:

[The] poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile, and perishable object has a warmth about it which the sentiment of national grandeur altogether lacks … A perfectly pure love for one’s country bears a close resemblance to the feelings which his young children, his aged parents, or a beloved wife inspire in a man. The thought of weakness can inflame love in just the same way as can the thought of strength …

Thinking of your nation as something vulnerable, something that must be nurtured, stands in contrast to the chest-thumping, hubristic barking of today’s ultranationalists. Weil’s political pliability could account in part for the surge of interest in her work. Perhaps we are looking for someone to lead us out of the forest in which we find ourselves, planted by the sowers of discord.

I reflected on my attraction to Weil’s thought, and on my habit of putting her books into the hands of my students and friends saying: ‘Read this.’ There are six reasons I return to Weil and want to share her: 1) the total absence of irony in most of her philosophical writings; 2) her sustained campaign against a self-interested, narcissistic citizenry; 3) the ethical urgency with which she approached the problem of education; 4) her emphasis on first-hand knowledge (of the assembly-line worker’s plight, for example, or the farmhand’s daily exertions); 5) her belief that technology’s distancing effects would lead to total alienation; and 6) the congruity of her preaching and her practice.

Weil’s emphasis on the ethical urgency of education and her pursuit of knowledge through direct experience both counter some of the worst traits of the academic humanities today. The strange proliferation of empty jargon and self-aggrandising theories, conferences and scholarly articles and books of dubious necessity, and the greed-fuelled transformation of houses of learning into houses of earning, all would have unsettled Weil. The precarious livelihoods of public schoolteachers and university adjuncts and lecturers would have bewildered her as well. Indeed, she keenly observed the connections between what was happening in the schools and in the factories: ‘The youth of our schools are as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piece-work are by their pay packets.’

I knew Weil was speaking my language when I came across this passage in her book The Need for Roots:

A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.

She described how those outside the intellectual class had been alienated from thinking, cut off from the great philosophy and literature of the past that caught the essence of what it is like to experience the world as a worker, a farmer, or a soldier. She hoped to restore these lost connections by introducing every person to history’s richest texts, particularly the Greek classics, which articulate what it means to fully inhabit the world. Weil would have appreciated Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project, which brings Sophocles’ war plays to military and civilian audiences in the US and Europe in order to ‘forge a common vocabulary for openly discussing the impact of war on individuals, families and communities’. Weil also believed that by infusing every physical movement required by one’s trade with full, contemplative attention, one could become woven into the vocation and into the generation line of forebears who’d also practised it. The alienation produced by the mind-numbing repetition of meaningless gestures would hence disperse, and factory workers, farmers and other manual labourers would recover the dignity they’d lost in the industrial age.

To try to understand the appeal of Weil to a contemporary person, I took a close look at three examples from the first two decades of the 21st century, instances where her thought and life have been harnessed toward imaginative projects: Chris Kraus’s book Aliens and Anorexia (2000), Anne Carson’s collection Decreation (2005) and Julia Haslett’s experimental documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil (2010). Weil’s work seems to have a particular resonance with women. In part, the radical embodiedness of her thought – with its apparent inseparability from her afflicted body – appeals to women because it invites everyone to recognise what they likely already know: that the body, with all of its burdens and pleasures, is the precondition for all thought and creation.

Weil is a compelling figure for anyone trying to insinuate themselves in a realm made by and for someone else

The bodies of male philosophers, artists, musicians or writers have been virtually irrelevant in considerations of their work, while a curious emphasis has been placed on the bodies or troubled psychologies of women thinkers and creators. Kraus offers an example, noting that though Friedrich Nietzsche had migraines, he was never thought of as the philosopher of headaches, while Weil is popularly imagined as the ‘anorexic philosopher’. Weil forces us to see the body as the vessel out of which thought arises. Her outsider status – as a woman in the man’s world of philosophy, as a mystic among secularists, as an intellectual among workers and peasants, as a woman whom Kraus calls ‘Bizarre-Simone’ and an ‘admirable freak’ – makes her a compelling figure for anyone trying to insinuate themselves in a realm made by and for someone else. Weil is the patron saint of anomalous persons. The women inspired by her see something of themselves in Weil.

For example, in Aliens and Anorexia, Kraus writes:

Re-reading Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, I identified with the dead philosopher completely. Like her I had a chronic illness that made it difficult to eat. Both of us had long necks and shoulders that hunched forward when we walked, a clumsy eagerness that tried against all odds to break outside our awkward bodies. We both smoked handrolled cigarettes and had absolutely zero sense of our own ‘femininity’ or gender. We’d both been ridiculed at school, and later too, in the eternal high-school of the artworld.

Kraus’s book tells of her failed attempts to find a distributor for Gravity and Grace(1996), her ‘experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction’. She alternates stories from her own life and from Weil’s, inviting the reader to notice resemblances, such as their shared penchant toward submissiveness – to God in Weil’s case, to her S&M sexual partners in Kraus’s. Weil’s term ‘decreation’, the will to undo the self in order to access God, returns again and again in Kraus’s book, particularly in the segments on anorexia. Kraus denounces the fact that ‘female acts are always subject to interpretation’, and asks Weil’s readers to stop seeking hidden meaning where there is none. Kraus asks us to take at face value what Weil tells us: ‘She hates herself, she can’t get fucked, she’s ugly.’ In short, Weil is the vehicle for Kraus’s critique of the misogyny that punishes strange, intelligent women.

Carson, a poet and classicist, also uses Weil’s term ‘decreation’. It is the title of her collection of poetry, essays and opera, in which Weil features in two sections, onecalled ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’, and another titled ‘Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts’. Carson highlights the spiritual aspects of Weil’s biography, writing that she was ‘a person who wanted to get herself out of the way so as to arrive at God’, and describes at length the process of this ‘undoing of the creature in us’. Weil is dead but we have her works, which act as a kind of ‘program’ for decreating ourselves. Carson is also interested in the physical manifestation of decreation. She writes: ‘Simone Weil had a problem with eating all her life. Lots of women do.’ Weil dreamt of a different relation with food – and with God – one that would involve not ingestion but absorption through the eyes. In her ‘Decreation’ opera, Carson depicts the fruitless attempts of Weil’s parents to save her from herself, writing:

She did not want to be a woman … She wanted to disappear. Certain aspects of disappearance had to be concealed from the parents and so her many letters to them are repetitions of the one same glowingly factitious postcard that every good daughter sends home – Dear people what splendid weather thanks for the chocolate I’m making lots of friends here kisses to all – meanwhile she was dying.

Carson’s ruminations invite readers to think of Weil as the daughterly type we all know in some capacity. Carson’s art helps to familiarise Weil’s sufferings. We see Weil as emblematic of women and daughters who suffer and yearn for something beyond the self.

‘Always do what will cost you the most’

Haslett’s documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil uses Weil to understand the suffering of others. The film is an exercise in empathy and, consciously or unconsciously, an exploration of white guilt. Haslett invokes the dead philosopher to answer the question that guides the film and others she has made, all of which document ‘people in distress’: ‘What response does seeing human suffering demand of us?’ Haslett wants an answer. She even hires an actor to play Weil, so she can ask her ‘in person’. Inspired by Weil’s sentence ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,’ Haslett wants to understand how someone – distraught, for example, by the atrocities committed by one’s own government – might use attention to lessen the horror.

As the film unfolds, viewers come to understand that the filmmaker also needs Weil in order to understand the suffering that led both Haslett’s father and one of her brothers to commit suicide. The film expresses some skepticism toward Weil, whose turn to God Haslett takes as a betrayal. Can Weil’s counsel actually change anything in the world, she wonders. Despite these hesitations, Haslett portrays Weil as a sage whose leadership might help people to live ethically in a world whose tribulations she shows us on the screen, from the war in Iraq and Guantánamo’s cruelties, to the genocides and wars that have scarred the 20th century, to the small tragedies of everyday human experience. She is moved by the advice that Weil gave to her students: ‘Always do what will cost you the most.’

Weil understood human vulnerability in the most visceral way. She argued that: ‘Fear and terror … whether they be caused by the threat of unemployment, police persecution, the presence of a foreign conqueror [or] the probability of invasion’, give rise to ‘a semi-paralysis of the soul’. Her objective was to use the individual as a conduit for bringing feeling back to the numbed limbs of the social body. In all of her recommendations, we see the connections between political theory and spirituality, which at times conflict. We see a tortured individual too susceptible to the world’s pain, too committed to her idealistic plans to live long enough to execute them. Surely this is not a model to emulate.

So, what can be done with Weil? If her psychological complexity makes it difficult to take her as a paragon, her work still offers an ethical invitation. She provides unusual but practical counsel for educators, students, workers and citizens. For outsiders of any gender, creed or colour, she has something to say. She is relentlessly anti-ideological, and gives judicious guidance for resisting the pull of narcissism. She invites us to act in the world, and to identify and eliminate the hypocrisies that tarnish almost everyone. Stressing the urgency to write, think and, most importantly, do, her life can inspire fictions, poems, songs, images and political action. She serves as a muse for those who are open to her mystery. Above all, in a society whose most distinct feature is alienation, Simone Weil proposes ways to feel at home again in a place that has become strange.

A Sirens’ Song

by Abigail Akavia 3 Quarks DAily

Two weeks ago, Maniza Naqvi evocatively wrote here on the resonance of a mythological rape in the eventual confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court (“The State of The Rape of Sabines”). Today, I would like to revisit Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, focusing on how the qualities of her voice were put front and center by those who refused to take her actual words seriously. In the Ford-Kavanaugh events, we witnessed, again, how female suffering—the female voice itself as it tells of violence and injustice—is dismissed and mistrusted. And I would like to show that this resonates powerfully with another two of our civilization-forming myths: the rape of Persephone and the song of the Sirens.

During her testimony, disparaging comments on Blasey Ford’s childish tone and her vocal fry appeared on social media; these qualities were, for those responding to it, signs of her untrustworthiness. Such disapproving comments are an example of fairly run-of-the-mill misogyny: a suspicion against what a woman has to say simply because she sounds too feminine. But with vocal fry in particular, there is an interesting inversion of expectations at work that is worth considering.

Vocal fry is a dip into the lower register of the voice, typically at the end of a sentence. It has become notorious in the last decade as a much-maligned characteristic speech-effect of college-aged women. Women who exhibit this kind of creaking low-pitch speech are perceived as less competent, less reliable, and less attractive. A study of the phenomena finds concrete and measurable effects of this perceived unreliability of a vocal fry-er: speaking with a vocal fry can lower one’s job prospects.

In 2015, Naomi Wolf made vocal fry even more notorious when she called on young women to stop using it in an open letter in The Guardian. In that piece, Wolf decries young women’s renunciation of power through their “destructive speech patterns.” She describes the way women consciously adopt certain trends of vocal expression, such as run-on sentences and “up-talk” (a rising inflection, as when uttering a question), in order to be heard more easily by their superiors or elders. There is a vicious cycle here: the tendency to be self-effacing, placating and apologetic, which these speech effects demonstrate, are coping mechanisms against a systemic mistrust of women’s voices—of what they have to say—to begin with. But these mechanisms then become another target for the same system, purportedly proving that women’s voices are untrustworthy.

Yet up-talk and vocal fry seem to me two different beasts: indeed, the women Wolf quotes do not address vocal fry as a conscious choice. And, as far as I can tell, vocal fry is perceived as particularly annoying precisely when it is combined with up-talk, whether or not the annoyed is aware of his combined bias. Both those who are suspicious of women who dare speak, and those who want to empower them to speak up, would claim that making your statements sound like questions is a problem, for it bespeaks a timidity and inability—or fear—to own one’s opinions and assert yourself. This is coded in our most basic communicative proficiency, in how we know language to work: at least in English, an upward intonation conveys uncertainty. Wolf’s exhortation in The Guardian was no doubt meant to be heard as empowering advice, a recommendation to behave authoritatively. She blames our patriarchal culture for making women adopt their destructive speech patterns: “It is because these young women are so empowered that our culture assigned them a socially appropriate mannerism that is certain to tangle their steps and trivialise their important messages to the world.” Wolf does in fact address the systemic misogyny at the basis of such disparaging perceptions of women’s voices, a system that finds ever new and apparently rational ways to upbraid women for, well, speaking while woman. But—as the backlash to Wolf’s letter made very clear—by asking women to stop using these vocal effects, and holding them responsible for inflicting upon themselves the disadvantages associated with these effects, Wolf herself takes part in the essentially misogynistic enterprise of policing women’s voices, thus (at least partly) perpetuating what she is fighting against.

It is admittedly hard to compare one speech trend and its underlying causes with another, but vocal fry seems much less of a conscious and intentional gesture than other speech effects. Researchers of this undeniably recent trend cannot say why it has become popular. But there are speculations as to why so many, particularly older men (particularly those with some measure of power), consider it so annoying. The prevalent explanation is that when the speaker is a woman, the fall into a lower register makes her voice sound less feminine, and that this departure from the social expectation of what her voice should be makes her sound (literally) less appealing. Along this train of thought, the vocal fry in women enacts a claim for maleness and the concomitant authority that might come with a deeper voice—a claim that is perceived as out-of-place and socially illegitimate, especially because it sounds inconsistent with the speaker’s normal voice.

What is particularly infuriating (read: standard) about the sometimes vitriolic contempt with which the voice of fryers is described (examples can be found here), is that this vitriol is reserved for women. While it is probably more common in women, male speakers also use vocal fry (British men apparently do it often). Yet, when a man does it the phenomenon is not perceived as problematic, presumably because his voice goes from manly to more-manly. This has no jarring effect—on the contrary, it may lend gravitas and credibility to his sound, and his words.

Vocal intentionality aside, the difference between urging young women to simply say what they want to say without apology, and asking them to stop using vocal fry, is that the effects of the latter exhortation are much less clear-cut, precisely since the causes of vocal fry are more opaque. In other words, there is a basic and seemingly unanswerable question here: when we tell women not to fry, are we telling them to stop trying to sound manly, or to stop sounding so feminine?

Blasey Ford’s vocal fry was held against her because it was perceived as a mimicry of young women, as an intentional effect she put on in order to sound young, and dishonestly arouse compassion for what she alleges her younger self experienced. Never mind that the stress of giving testimony very likely had an effect on her vocal chords. Never mind that none of these commenters had any encounter with her—any knowledge of her normal voice—outside of this singular event. And never mind that compassion for what happened to her in her teens is a legitimate outcome of her testimony. In addition to sounding female, which is bad enough, the claim was that this femininity wasn’t even genuine. Her voice was read as saying: I am pretending to be a victim by adopting the ultimate female voice.

Credibility is not, never was, an option in this game of speaking while woman. For there is always a double-bind in place: speak too authoritatively and you’re not woman enough, speak too emotionally and you’re too woman. What vocal fry adds to the mix, when it too is weaponized against women, is questions of gender-essentialism and dissimulation. Both gender and the possibility of deliberately misrepresenting it become coded into the very materiality of the voice as a physical trait, as something emanating from the body. Simply listening to what a woman has to say is, of course, out of the question.

***

I have been thinking for a while of the #MeToo movement in terms of a chorus of women, a group that speaks in the first person singular—one of the (many) stylistic peculiarities of choruses in Greek tragedy. Thinking of the expectation (by now a repeatedly frustrated one) that the transformation of a singular story, of a dozen singular stories, of a million singular stories into one collective story would finally make it audible, credible, and authoritative.

And this makes me think of another, different chorus: not one who sings “this happened to me”, as choruses in Greek tragedy often do, so often recounting the horrors of being a woman in the world. Rather, a group who sing “this is what happened… this is everything that happened”: I am thinking of the Homeric Sirens.

Sirens: you probably have in mind some kind of mermaid-like creature, captivatingly beautiful in both appearance and voice. Maybe you also remember how destructive they are, luring seafaring voyagers to the depths. In Homer, the Sirens are one of the hurdles Odysseus must overcome on his way home. The problem: their song is irresistible, but listening to it leads to certain death. Odysseus will not allow this tempting delicacy to go by without dipping his finger into it, so to speak. The solution: ensuring he is tightly tied to the mast of his ship so that he can’t jump off as they pass the Sirens, and plugging the ears of his shipmates with wax so that they are deaf to the enticing song (the credit for the ruse goes to Circe, one of Odysseus’ female immortal benefactors). In this way he gets to hear the Sirens without falling off track, without being derailed—without losing himself in it.

The Sirens sing the everlasting and true story of life. Like the Muses, they know everything “that happens on earth.” The Sirens, who know the names of every single one of the fallen heroes, are doomed to sing forever of the Trojan war: they are a repository of male trauma. Listening to this song means drowning in a sea of particulars, losing oneself in traumatic repetition that becomes the long narrative of life. The Sirens, for all their beauty, represent chaos: the totality of life that is always also jumbled up in death, the longing for an individual story that cannot but be devastated and devastating. What story would they spin in Odysseus’ ears, to lure him in? No tale would be more effective than that of his own heroic exploits, those of the Iliad, and then, surely also his endless trickery, as he tries to survive through the Odyssey. But Odysseus is the singular hero, the one that makes his way successfully back home (which is why we have an entire epic devoted to him). The Sirens singing of Odysseus is one of those loops that could have folded the Odyssey in on itself, but the Odyssey must go on. Odysseus alone, the ultimate individual, the subject of the epic narrative, can survive hearing the tale of his own life woven into fiction. He is Man, logical and self-knowing, the only one who achieves self-recognition in the Sirens’ song—in their voice that is beast-like and otherworldly, that is female. Odysseus moves on, and the Sirens stay in place, perched on a shore littered with the bones and rotting flesh of all the other heroes who did not survive the tale.

In archaic and classical myth, the Sirens are half-woman and half-bird, not fish. They are monsters, and to judge by archaic art, not really beautiful at all. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there’s an interesting retelling of the Siren’s origin myth. Here we learn, surprisingly, that these bird-maidens came to be in the aftermath of the rape of Persephone. In Ovid’s version, the nymphs who were playing with Persephone in the meadow when Hades snatched her away to the Underworld, go running to look for her. They pray to the gods for wings, to aid them in the search after their vanished friend. Their wish is granted, and so they become maidens with wings and feet of birds, but keep their sweet young voices. Their transformation doesn’t help, for Persephone is gone off the face of the earth, her voice no longer heard on land. Persephone’s friends, witnesses of female trauma, are now immortal singers. They have their voices left, which will always mark them as all-too-woman and not-woman-enough, or rather, beyond-human—which is to say, not-man. And even when they become mouthpieces for the song of men, they sing such searing truths that their voices can never be trusted. By connecting the Sirens to Persephone in the way that he did, Ovid points to how female suffering is enmeshed with its silencing, how it itself becomes the representation of the act of silencing, even when what so clearly remains is the voice.

In courageously speaking up, Blasey Ford ended up telling us, yet again, the same thing.