This should be all about Carter's "malaise" speech
Instead it's only a little about that.
A. and I performed our more-or-less-annual book culling Friday night. It’s a festive occasion because we spend an hour or two immersed in and thinking about books, but a difficult one because choices. Am I really going to ever get around to reading The Mirror Thief? Can I finally give up on it, finally?
When it comes to moving on from objects that have simply occupied space on a shelf since the first Obama administration, all the sunk costs to consider are existential. As long as it was here, it might have been read, might have changed a life or provided entertainment, grist for the mill. Abandonment, at last, retroactively empties those years of meaning. I should have done this a long time ago is a stupidly dramatic thing to think over and over again, stacking unread books in a box, but there you go.
Read books pose equally paralyzing dilemmas. Take for example The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley, with which A. was prepared to part, but whose surrendering I vetoed in part over guilt I felt for having earlier moved on from his unread The Island. Ditto several Vonneguts failed to make the cut.
I consoled myself with the assurance that we were putting them back into circulation. I’d slurped up the nutrients from Breakfast of Champions in another century. Why keep it around? Back on the market with you, Kurt! Back on the market The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes! Fish we’ve caught, perused, thrown back. Have life again!
The important thing is not to hoard, a tendency I fear and loathe because I understand it too well. We’re each challenged on a daily basis to operate at the fulcrum of a befuddling past and a future replete with unanticipatable needs. Shouldn’t we hang on to what we have?
I said to A. at some point, I think while contemplating a Christopher Hitchens memoir, “What bothers me is the idea that the past doesn’t matter anymore!”
“I know!” she yelled from the other room. “Me too!”
This strikes me as an old person thing to think—maybe the oldest-person-thing-to-think that I routinely think. I can’t think it without pointing an indicting finger at myself (“Old person!").
But I’m 44: why not embrace oldness? I can be old and cultivated at the same time. In fact it’s hard to do one without the other. Going in for a spot of nostalgia tourism need not be a wholly delusional, curmudgeonly or irrelevant act.
Faulkner showed us that it’s a fool who believes the past is past. Rather, it inheres and endures. It outlasts us. Since it’s not exactly going anywhere, we might as well try to shape the influence it exerts on the present. In this way (I tell myself), insisting on the continuing relevance of bygone norms (depending on the norm, of course) is an affirmative, necessary act. It is the behavior of someone who believes that something worth fighting for is being irreparably eroded, who believes that a superior future is still possible.
To ask that endangered customs not be ignored out of existence is an act of hope.
Do I have to insist that Faulkner still matters in order to insist that the past does? That’s a rhetorical question but it points up a real quandary. Faulkner’s mattering isn’t a terribly hard argument to make currently (depending on your audience), but it’s getting harder. It will keep getting harder to insist on the relevance of dead white men—particularly southerners.1 That’s just the tide of history. And because those tides are real the living are forced to make decisions about what to hold lightly, what to reinforce, and what to jettison. “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just,” said Norman Mailer (speaking of dead whites), “that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”2
Considered from the individual’s perspective, that law is cruel but just; from the society’s, it’s essential. How you behave doesn’t much matter to the world when you’re young because you aren’t heavy enough to affect it. Go ahead and grow. Grow however you want. The world won’t notice. Getting older means becoming heavier in experience and social networks and, hopefully, wealth, in influence over other people—particularly the young. Getting older sinks a person into the planet like a tree. It costs you more to stay the same because you can afford it, otherwise Mailer’s formulation wouldn’t allow for the possibility of resisting change. The whole shooting match hangs on adult spending power.
(“I hate late-stage capitalism!” I said to A.
“Me too!”)
A couple days ago, Elon Musk, world’s richest man, senior official of the Trump administration, said to someone with whom he had a policy disagreement, in public: “take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.” This was a shout-out to Tropic Thunder, a shlock-jock satire from 2008. The next day, Jimmy Carter died.
“We are at a turning point in our history,” the president told us 45 years ago. “There are two paths to choose. One is a path…that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” He went on to detail a solution to the energy crisis that would serve the dual purpose of rallying the nation to help “conquer [our] crisis of the spirit... It can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.”
This was an example of what the grandfather of quantum physics, Neils Bohr, would have called complementarity: the idea that the unique solution to any specific problem lay in the problem’s peculiar parameters. The nut teaches us how to crack it.3 Carter, a nuclear physicist, knew a lot more about Bohr than I do. He would have been familiar with the Dane’s efforts lobbying FDR and Churchill in the ‘40s to view atomic weapons as a terrible and unusable gift: a global problem that could only be solved by an insistence on world peace and transparency; a discovery whose catastrophic potential demanded the reimagining and overhaul of the system it resulted from.
Carter’s prescription for the energy crisis was the one we did eventually pursue. He sought to abolish our dependence on foreign oil by adopting an all-in policy emphasizing traditional drilling, shale-oil exploitation (fracking), and solar power. He wanted 20% of our power coming from the sun by 2000.
But FDR and Churchill went the other way, and we ditched Carter for Reagan, who told us comforting lies and took the solar panels off the White House roof. 43 years later the sun accounted for just shy of 4% of our energy production.
It’s going to be a hard year.
One resolution I invite you to share with me for 2025 is to choose Jimmy Carter’s path of civic virtue over Elon Musk’s.
I’m going to cultivate a fidelity to my favorite parts of the past in the hope that I can exert, in some trivial but non-zero way, a tiny healthy pressure on the present.
Care to join? First round’s on me.
A population I’ll be joining in a hopefully distant future.
I think that’s the second time I’ve deployed that particular quote in this substack. Twice I can maybe get away with. I won’t repeat it a third time without apologizing a lot. The economy and scope of the line! This time I’ll at least add a gloss.
Was reminded here incidentally of the scene in Cast Away in which Tom Hanks’s character, attempting to split open a coconut, breaks his rock over the coconut but is left with a sharper remnant that perfectly fits the bill.