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  • Writer's pictureIsaac Cui

The Control We Have

A few days ago, the Federal Trade Commission and forty-eight states brought antitrust lawsuits against Facebook. I’m eager to see how the legal questions play out — my competition law professor seemed deeply skeptical of the arguments — but I wanted to take a moment to think through the sociopolitical context for this lawsuit.


Personally, my gut instinct is mixed about Facebook. My (not very informed) sense is that Facebook is a mediocre company that has developed a product that can be both deeply harmful but also really valuable for our livelihoods. But when I talked to one of my old Pomona friends about the lawsuit, he seemed much more skeptical of Facebook. For him, and I think for many, Facebook cultivates us as consumerist subjects. Its algorithms for microtargeting, feeding off the dumps of data we unwittingly provide, enable the platform to get us addicted, showing us exactly what we want to see so that we return to Facebook. The platform profits off our most powerful and destructive emotions; by stoking the flames of partisanship and by spreading misinformation designed to anger us, Facebook cashes in by hurting our democracy.


At least part of the motivation behind the angry backlash at Facebook, I think, is a sense that we’re losing control — of our relationships, increasingly mediated by not just people who are different from us, but by algorithms optimized not for our welfare but for profit; of our time, stolen from us by the equivalent of a personalized form of nicotine, gnawing always at our attention; and of our mind, programmed as it is by microtargeted ads meant to elicit a certain response and way of thinking. Personally, I am skeptical that Facebook succeeds at doing any of this. But I certainly think it’s plausible, and I can understand why these effects would lead one to feel a visceral anger at Facebook (and other kinds of social media).


I think our politics reflects this collective sense of loss, that sense that each of us has become, or has always been, disempowered. Think of QAnon, a phenomenon that my old political theory professor, Susan McWilliams Barndt, described in terms of mothers’ feelings that they’re unable to protect their children from all sorts of debauchery and immorality on the internet. Think of Justice Alito’s politically-charged address to the Federalist Society, where he talked about religious people coming under attack by contemporary social mores — about a perception that Christians have become a persecuted minority in the United States because media or intellectual elites have conditioned us into believing in a morality that opposes Christian tradition and, indeed, sees it as “backward.” Think of the President’s repeated claims that he’s been subject to a “witch hunt” or to a “coup” due to a system rigged against him — the most powerful man in the world, in other words, believes he has been disempowered by a cabal of globalist elites.


Of course, such a politics of loss and disempowerment is not limited to contemporary conservatives or Republicans. Think of traditional leftist politics, which is animated by an idea that certain classes of people are the downtrodden, the beaten-down, the losers in an unjust society that concentrates wealth, and propensity, and the good things in life in the hands of the few. Progressives profess to want to support racial minorities, people of lower socioeconomic status, LGBTQ people, and so on. These are people, progressives believe, who lack control and autonomy, battered as they are by discrimination from society. Progressives hope that the state, or some other entity, can promote these people’s welfare and thereby place control of their destinies into their own hands.


I don’t mean here to make a normative point. I’m neither making a “both sides are equally legitimate” claim nor a “one side is absurd” argument. Rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that so many people feel so disempowered — they feel that they have been dealt an unfair hand: city dwellers who feel that our electoral institutions unfairly benefit rural voters; rural dwellers who feel looked down upon by coastal elites and who feel that our culture privileges dependence on the state rather than personal responsibility, traditional communities, and moral righteousness; those who feel strangled by “PC-culture” that takes away their free speech and labels them as racists or sexists; those whose livelihoods feel defined by precarity and harassment due to prejudiced behaviors, institutionalized forms of bias, and material violence. For one last example, think about this passage from Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, where he says he was forced to target people through drone strikes because of “the world they were a part of . . . .” The most powerful man in the world felt as if he lacked agency over government decisions, even as he was the person in whom the “executive Power” is vested.


In the latest episode of Strict Scrutiny, one of my favorite podcasts, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described the conservative legal movement as motivated by a kind of “grievance politics.” Grief, I think, entails not just a sense of unfairness, of injustice and anger, but also of mourning — a sense of loss, of descent from an imagined state of righteousness. Progressives, I think, can’t be motivated in that same way, since they do not view the past as a time of glory. I think they tend more toward Butterfield’s “Whig histories,” where the past is explicitly seen as backward and wrong but leading to the promised land of the future. Progressives tend therefore to buy into a kind of providentialist politics, as I’ve written about previously. But the implications of both — grievance and providence — are the same. For when our politics invariably doesn’t deliver, we are always let down. Our grievances can never be fulfilled because they are matched against an imagined, romantic past. And our providentialist aspirations can never come true, because we compare them to a future that is always to come. Politics implicates wicked problems; part of the Sisyphisian feeling of politics comes from the fact that problem definition, itself, is always a moving goal post. There’s no perfect balance of our diverse political values. And so we are ever stuck in a struggle to get closer to that imagined, better world, which behaves like the fruit that Tantalus could never reach.


The sense that we lack control is, I think, an inevitable result of democracy. Democracy purports to empower people — we are made to feel that our vote, that our words, that our protests, can make a difference. But the reality is that democracy doesn’t empower individuals; it empowers people (“demos”) collectively. Power does not stem from my, or your, actions. It stems from our actions. I have little to no control. We do.


When I was in high school, I loved the philosophy of Chantal Mouffe, who wrote two decades ago about the “democratic paradox” at the heart of the project of liberal democracy. As I understood the argument back then — which, granted, is probably a poor understanding, because I was (and still am) bad at reading — Mouffe believes that (classical) liberalism contradicts with democracy because liberalism privileges individuals and their rights, whereas democracy empowers collectives. Minorities must be protected by the rule of law, according to tenets of liberalism. But democratic theory tells us that these kinds of protections enable rule-by-minority, which is deeply problematic from the perspective that the People ought to be sovereign. Thus, liberal democracy carries with it a core paradox — both liberalism and democracy must be limited, in some way, to coexist in a liberal democratic polity. Mouffe recognized the tension between the two political philosophies, and I think the resurgence of populism globally probably supports her analysis.


To this day, I think Mouffe’s argument is basically right. But I also think there’s a more profound way that liberalism and democracy are contradictory than liberalism’s protection of minorities. Liberalism believes that individuals are in some way inviolable. The philosophy, at its heart, is about either promoting the individual’s sovereignty or, in some variants, preserving that sovereignty. The individual’s loss of control today — whether due to unrestrained market capitalism in the digital age, changing social mores, or our careening institutionalized form of democracy — is the liberal’s worst nightmare. For our bodies, our minds, our beings don’t seem particularly sovereign today. It’s not like most of us can control what we put in our bodies or what we feed our minds. And if the political scientists are right that partisanship is a “helluva drug,” then maybe we don’t even have sovereignty over what we believe about the world.


I just finished the last season of The Good Place, and I think its depiction of the complexities of contemporary morality are really helpful. (There are some spoilers here, so CTRL+F “[END SPOILERS]” if you haven’t seen The Good Place and intend to.) In essence, the show discusses the place we go to after our death, and in the middle seasons, the protagonists find that no one has entered the Good Place in a long time. The karmic system that chooses where we go has made everyone go to the Bad Place because we’re embedded in complex organizations that penalize basically anything we do. Looking to buy a MacBook? It’s been implicated in global supply chains that harm the environment, and many of its pieces are almost certainly made by people working under deplorable labor standards. The same is probably true of any other computer that’s available on the market. So do you refuse to buy a computer? Do you try to be the moral saint, a Doug Forcett who, in the show, is so terrified of being sent to the Bad Place that he lives on only lentils, radishes, and recycled water, and he is grief-stricken to pieces merely by stepping on a snail? The life of the moral saint is surely not the life of a human. And it’s probably not even the most moral life — is it moral if you disengage from an unjust society, living by yourself in the woods and trying to maximize your own “points” while leaving others to get involved in what John Lewis famously called “good trouble”?


The Good Place’s critique of a karmic understanding of morality recognizes that if we have lost control over our actions, then we need a different understanding of morality. Its solution, presented in the final season, emphasizes learning. The Good Place proposes a system of moral judgment where people are tried, over and over again. They are given opportunities tailored to expose their weaknesses and flaws. The point of the system is to force people to live until they have learned to become better versions of themselves, after which they can ascend to the Good Place.


This is a model of morality that recognizes how we are all, or at least ought to be, muddling along to become better. It understands that humans are habitual beings who mostly stick to our old ways and routines, but also that we can incrementally improve given the right conditions. Foremost among those conditions, The Good Place suggests, is compassion from others. In this theory, learning to live a moral life is a social process. The main cast of The Good Place comprises four characters who journey together to become better. The four are originally chosen to torture each other; their personalities are fit so that each would pick at the others’ fears and insecurities. But through the process of living together, they become better. There is control, and power, in the interactions between the characters, rather than within each of the individuals.


The Good Place suggests that we need to break from ideas of individual autonomy in constructing a contemporary morality. We are moral not according to some absolute karmic value, the sum total of all of the good and bad things we have done as individuals, but insofar as we learn to become better over time. That learning happens through our interactions with others — when we observe and understand others, and when we fulfill our duties to each other. Morality is a social enterprise, rather than a matter of individual judgment or disposition.


[END SPOILERS]


If we return to Mouffe, then, we might diagnose our contemporary political malaise as deriving from the failure of that foundational assumption of liberalism — that we are autonomous individuals and that our personal sovereignty is, and ought to be, the basis for politics. Our contemporary circumstances and our concomitant morality is driven by social interaction. Our lives are dictated more and more by collective pressures, as power has shifted from particular, individual loci (the self, the head of the family, the teacher, the party leader, the monarch) and instead is now diffused through interactions between people mediated by technology and institutions that mould and produce those interactions. According to this way of thinking, we are experiencing the triumph of democracy over liberalism. We, as collectives, have control. But we, as individuals, do not.


Losing control as an individual — living a democratized life, in other words — is not a pleasant experience. Anyone who has done a group project will know how frustrating and difficult and absurd it feels to have to negotiate constantly over largely unimportant details. No wonder, then, that grievous or providentialist politics are such powerful forces in contemporary politics; they are symptoms of our desire to feel secure and in control. Fears of insecurity and loss of control are especially pronounced in an environment when opposite partisans are perceived so negatively. It’s easier to avoid being a backseat driver when you trust the driver. It’s much harder if you think the driver is manifestly incompetent or ill intentioned.


It seems like there are two (strawperson) responses to the democratized life. One response is to push back — to try to assert (reassert?) the individual’s autonomy. The other is to embrace the democratization of our life and to relinquish control. Both are, of course, absurd. The former is impossible, just like how the Lockean state of nature is a myth. The joke about classical liberalism is that it assumes that, in the state of nature, we’re all twenty-year-old men without familial obligations. The reality is that we are, of course, dependent on others, which means our choices are never our own. (Just think in the COVID context — when you live with others, your choice to go out and to risk contracting the disease is not only your decision, but rather, an implicit decision made on behalf of those you live with.)


On the opposite side, relinquishing control is also surely no way to live one’s life — that would be the default state that David Foster Wallace warned against. There is a truth in the existentialist perspective that what defines us as humans is our ability to make choices, to create ourselves. We have been gifted with the ability to think and feel and decide; we ought not, then, surrender that capacity to empirical circumstances and inertia, even if those forces are so powerful. There’s so much out there that shapes our lives and controls us, but there is also an inherent dignity that resides in each human. That’s, after all, the essential force of the great non-violent protestors in human history. Even in the face of pure violence and coercion, they maintained their dignity in their refusal to respond with force.


I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s new album (of course), and I actually think one of its best tracks can help us think through this conundrum. That song — “marjorie” — is written about her late grandmother and feeling her presence despite her passing. The essence of the song is heritage; the chorus is mostly a simple line: “What died didn’t stay dead.” When someone close to us leaves us, we yearn for their wisdom that we feel we have lost — “I should’ve asked you questions / I should’ve asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / ’Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me ” — and yet we are surrounded by their impression: “if I didn’t know better / I’d think you were talking to me now.”


From the perspective of control, “marjorie” calls our attention to two entwined phenomena: death and history’s effects. Death is, of course, the outer boundary of our control. Coming to terms with its inevitability is one of the age-old lessons of human experience — think of Gilgamesh and his quest to bring his friend back from the afterworld. Similarly, we are affected by how others have treated us — we feel their ghastly effects long after those experiences have ended, whether the “frozen swims” with one’s grandmother or the friend’s dad who “is always mad” and traumatizes his child into crying and “hid[ing] in the closet.” But to put a finer point on it, we have no choice but to be affected by others — their actions and their eventual passing. To be human — really, to be a social animal — is to feel a lack of control in some of our most powerful experiences.


It is not, however, to simply be a passive observer. Another aspect of “marjorie” that I think is compelling is how it centers contradiction. Obviously there is the contradiction between death and enduring presence (“What died didn’t stay dead / You’re alive, you’re alive in my head.”). But there is also contradiction in how we ought to make decisions: “Never be so kind / You forget to be clever / Never be so clever / You forget to be kind”; “Never be so polite / You forget your power / Never wield such power / You forget to be polite.” We are urged to find some kind of balance, to recognize that extremity in itself might be a vice. As applied to this post, “marjorie” urges us to acknowledge our loss, our inability to fully control our destinies, while refusing to surrender all agency. It urges us to openly embrace the contradiction. And in articulating contradicting principles, it suggests that abstract ideas alone can’t provide the answer. This is the arc (to return to spoilers of The Good Place) that Chidi, the moral philosopher, goes through. He spends his life searching for answers in philosophy and reason. He believes there is an answer out there, to be found with sufficient effort and intellect. But over his experiences, accumulated over eight hundred lives, he comes to a realization that he encapsulates in a note to himself: “There is no ‘answer.’ But Eleanor is the answer.” Experiences anchored in social relations, The Good Place suggests, are what teach us to navigate the contradictions in our lives.


I started this blog post thinking about politics and have ended up at moral philosophy based on a TV show by way of a Taylor Swift song. In part, that’s because I’m writing in a more stream-of-consciousness way rather than trying to write an organized essay like I would for an academic paper. But in part, I think it’s also just because I’m not sure what the application of these ideas to politics should be. The logic of this conclusion is a bit like saying that we need “greater morality” if crime rates are rising. It’s not that the argument is wrong. It’s just that the argument is kind of useless. One cannot by fiat make people more moral. In the same way, the solution to our political malaise can’t just be “we need to acknowledge that we as individuals lack control but that we can and should come together as collectives to become more moral and politically empowered.” On the other hand, I’m not sure these arguments are supposed to point to a solution; rather, I think they might help us understand why we’ve come to where we are. If I’m right, our malaise is a necessary result of democracy and the diffusion of power into social relations. Technology has exposed that wound, but I think it’s probably inherent in our system of government and way of life. The absurdities of our politics today perhaps are warning signs about trying to maintain the pretension of the liberal autonomous subject in our democratic society.


* * * * *


Rose: This was a good week, filled with friends: an outdoor breakfast with some other Marshalls (it was quite cold, but the cobbler they made was amazing); dinner with an LSE friend; a few long walks through the touristy parts of London (Covent Garden, Oxford Street, Soho) with other Marshalls in London; a few calls with Pomona friends; a visit to London from one of my old high school friends. I’m also hoping to get to Runnymede, where Magna Carta was negotiated and signed, sometime soon. But it’s a 20+ mile journey. So I’m relearning how to ride a bike (it turns out that you can forget how to ride a bike!), which has been quite the experience. Luckily, one of my LSE friends and my flatmate are both very kind souls who are entertaining my incompetence. Also, my flatmate taught me how to make baguettes! They turned out pretty well, although they were surprisingly tiring and difficult to make (and it obviously helped that he was there to guide the process/fix mistakes). Here’s a photo dump:



Bud: I asked my competition law professor to do research with her, and she found a potential project for me! It’s not (in her words) the most glamorous of assignments, and I haven’t technically accepted yet since she told me to spend time thinking about it, but I’m pretty certain that I’ll take the job. It should be fun and interesting.


Thorn: I don’t think I have much to complain about, to be honest. It really has been a positive week, one that has felt fulfilling and positive. The upcoming thorn, though, is that my remaining flatmate is going home tomorrow, so the flat will soon be empty for three weeks. We’ll see how that goes.


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