I'll add to your list of complete, yet-truncated, artistic trajectories. 'The Brothers Karamazov' -- one of the great apexes of the nineteenth century novel -- was to be a two-volume work, in whose second volume the "failed" monk Alyosha was to find his vocation as a revolutionary. It's a metamorphosis that would have struck Dostoevsky's Russian readers as completely logical, but might in retrospect have come to seem utterly banal. Lenin put paid, surely, to the world's guileless Alyoshas as agents of change.
Thanks. You concluding paragraph reminds me of Mark Fisher's notion of depressive hedonia... he develops this in his short book Capitalist Realism. Appreciated. D from Scotland.
I'm not in a position to consider, except in the most abstract sense, the daily life of an upper middle class American professional, because I've made choices that have taken me far from a path that would have led to that, but still I would like to make a qualified defense of Noah Smith's argument, or rather a twice-qualified defense, because I haven't read it, I've only read your response.
Noah says that we should try to eliminate suffering; you say that there is no such thing as a happy life without suffering. There is a contradiction here if the two of you have the same conception of suffering, but I'm not sure you do. To take myself as an example, I have never had AIDS, nor have I been in a car accident. But I promise I've suffered enough, all the same! The absence of these particular tragedies in my life have not prevented it from being a life that could, perhaps, in the long run, be called a happy life by you, which is to say a mixed life in the best way.
Isn't it surely the case that the same is true of middle class suburban professionals I am unlikely ever to cross paths with? Don't they face their own frustrations or limitations, make peace with who knows what disappointments, bear them quietly?
But what do AIDS and car crashes have to do it? Isn't Noah right that it is good for society to strive to prevent *that* kind of suffering? Where he's wrong is to suggest that Keith Haring's life would have been happy, had he been a mediocre artist who didn't die young. Coming to terms with being a mediocre artist, and yet still finding happiness in life—now that's something!
"the more the world approaches the frictionless utopia that many people are hoping for"
Could you spell this out a bit? Right now half the world's population lives on less than six dollars a day. Half of Americans are one financial emergency away from bankruptcy. Currently 10 percent, and if the Republicans get their way 20 percent, of Americans have no health insurance. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced recently in Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Millions of people throughout the world will likely lose their jobs to business-system AI. And by the end of the century, we will probably reach 3 degrees C. of global heating, which will mean millions of deaths from crop failures and millions of migrants from extreme weather and sea-level rise. Not to mention the possibility of a full-on authoritarian state and several other countries. I don't see much utopia in all this.
I'll add to your list of complete, yet-truncated, artistic trajectories. 'The Brothers Karamazov' -- one of the great apexes of the nineteenth century novel -- was to be a two-volume work, in whose second volume the "failed" monk Alyosha was to find his vocation as a revolutionary. It's a metamorphosis that would have struck Dostoevsky's Russian readers as completely logical, but might in retrospect have come to seem utterly banal. Lenin put paid, surely, to the world's guileless Alyoshas as agents of change.
Thanks. You concluding paragraph reminds me of Mark Fisher's notion of depressive hedonia... he develops this in his short book Capitalist Realism. Appreciated. D from Scotland.
I'm not in a position to consider, except in the most abstract sense, the daily life of an upper middle class American professional, because I've made choices that have taken me far from a path that would have led to that, but still I would like to make a qualified defense of Noah Smith's argument, or rather a twice-qualified defense, because I haven't read it, I've only read your response.
Noah says that we should try to eliminate suffering; you say that there is no such thing as a happy life without suffering. There is a contradiction here if the two of you have the same conception of suffering, but I'm not sure you do. To take myself as an example, I have never had AIDS, nor have I been in a car accident. But I promise I've suffered enough, all the same! The absence of these particular tragedies in my life have not prevented it from being a life that could, perhaps, in the long run, be called a happy life by you, which is to say a mixed life in the best way.
Isn't it surely the case that the same is true of middle class suburban professionals I am unlikely ever to cross paths with? Don't they face their own frustrations or limitations, make peace with who knows what disappointments, bear them quietly?
But what do AIDS and car crashes have to do it? Isn't Noah right that it is good for society to strive to prevent *that* kind of suffering? Where he's wrong is to suggest that Keith Haring's life would have been happy, had he been a mediocre artist who didn't die young. Coming to terms with being a mediocre artist, and yet still finding happiness in life—now that's something!
"the more the world approaches the frictionless utopia that many people are hoping for"
Could you spell this out a bit? Right now half the world's population lives on less than six dollars a day. Half of Americans are one financial emergency away from bankruptcy. Currently 10 percent, and if the Republicans get their way 20 percent, of Americans have no health insurance. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced recently in Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Millions of people throughout the world will likely lose their jobs to business-system AI. And by the end of the century, we will probably reach 3 degrees C. of global heating, which will mean millions of deaths from crop failures and millions of migrants from extreme weather and sea-level rise. Not to mention the possibility of a full-on authoritarian state and several other countries. I don't see much utopia in all this.
*in the US and several other countries*
I agree with you that no such utopia is on the horizon.
we could have a fake technological utopia in the developed ("developed") nations, though
🙏🏻