The Amphibium, pt. 5
This is Vol. 5 of the Amphibium.
Winning the Peace
Those of you who have been reading this newsletter since all the way back in the middle of last month will know that part of my goal has been to concentrate on cultural matters and leave politics to one side. You’ll also know that I have been only partly successful at this; it’s neither possible nor desirable to divorce culture entirely from the political. But the aspiration has been to treat culture neither as an occasional escape from the more essential work of politics nor as a form of politics by other means but as something that is, in itself, essential.
Politics necessarily entails attending to material concerns. When political movements aim to change the souls of citizens or to be the primary source of meaning in their lives, the results are usually catastrophic. This is the job of culture—in the admittedly squishy and imprecise sense in which I’m using the term right now—and we abandon it at our peril.
That’s not at all to say that material concerns don’t matter, just that they are not all that matters. Thus, this newsletter’s name: humans are the only species capable of living both a life of the body and a life of the mind, and a person who occupies only one of these realms is not living a full human life.
This is the underlying assumption of the Amphibium, but it is one that I have so far simply taken as a given rather than trying to defend. For the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, I have written a column arguing more explicitly in praise of (partial) political disengagement:
Knowledge and beauty; pleasure and delight; the contemplation of truth, irrespective of its instrumental uses; the intimate encounter with another human consciousness offered by the best works of art—these are among the things that make life worth living. If we set them aside until we have made it safely through our present emergency, we will never return to them, because our present emergency will never be through.
A large part of the point of this newsletter is to point people toward my writing, but if I’m being completely honest, I usually don’t care how many readers click on the links I send. There is a limited audience for, e.g., long literary essays about avant-garde Spanish novelists. Ideally, of course, my own long literary essays about avant-garde Spanish novelists would reach that entire audience. At the same time, I am under no illusions that such essays hold general interest, and I don’t begrudge anyone for taking a pass.
My column this month, however, is written for a general audience, and I’m hoping it will find one. Anyone who has enjoyed this newsletter at all will find that this column—which is not much longer than one of these emails—has something to say to them. You may disagree with it completely. (If so, I’d love to hear from you.) But I do hope you’ll read it. And if you find it at all interesting, I hope you’ll pass it along to others. It is rare—perhaps too rare—that I write something that is intended to engage a wide range of people. Now that I have, I’d like for it to find them. So much so that this appeal will comprise the entirety of this volume. Again, the link is here.