1All Things Are Too Small
“All things are too small,” begins a poem by the thirteenth-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch of Brabant. She goes on—“to hold me”—but she did not have to. All things are too small, not just to hold me, but to hold anything. Cups are too small, which is why they demand such relentless refilling. Bodies are too small to encompass more than a sole inhabitant, except in rare cases of mysticism or possession (or the more familiar but perhaps no less astounding case of pregnancy). Books can be big—most of the best ones are—yet even the most encyclopedic affairs are too small to encompass the whole of the world’s wild machinery. Moby-Dick can’t reach its arms around a whale—although Melville aims, as James Wood writes, to touch every last word. I once saw a man in a restaurant finish his pasta, order the same dish again, eat it, then order and finish it a third time. His was the sanest response to his predicament, but he wouldn’t have had to grasp at such exorbitance if any plate available were big enough.
Plates, cups, books, bodies, and all the rest are too small, not contingently, but constitutionally. There is no way around the sense, lodged hard in the throat, that the greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfillment. To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it. Is it this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it? Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue. This is the minimalist tack, and these days, it is on the rise. At every turn, we are inundated with exhortations to smallness: short sentences stitched into short books, professional declutterers who tell us to trash our possessions, meditation “practices” that promise to clear the mind of thought and other detritus, and nostalgic campaigns for sexual restraint. These adventures in parsimony each make their own particular mistakes, but they also share a central failing. There is nothing admirable in laboring to love a world as unlike heaven as possible. All things are too small, but some things are less small than others. Even if paucity is inevitable, we can still fight emptiness with fullness. Better to order the third plate of pasta. Better to graze each word once.
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MATERIAL DEPRIVATION IS an especially stupid sort of smallness. It is unnecessary, for it can be ameliorated by commonsense political reforms, and it is especially abominable, for it is anathema to the excess in which humanity consists. As Marx writes in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, we are distinguished from animals insofar as our wants extend beyond our needs (whether this framing is fair to animals remains an open question): an animal “produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need,” but “man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” By Marx’s lights, a full-fledged person lives not only in accordance with the imperative for survival but also “in accordance with the laws of beauty.” Early capitalism and its disciplinary concomitant, the then-nascent field of political economy, understood workers not as people, with a craving for vastness, but as animals, who aspire to nothing more ornate than subsistence. Marx lambastes his contemporaries for truncating the worker, regarding her as “a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs.” He echoes his predecessor, the Romantic Friedrich Schiller, who lamented,
Art is a daughter of freedom, responding not to the demands of matter, but to the necessity in our minds. For the present, need prevails, and bends a sunken humanity to its tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers are in thrall and all talent must pay homage. On this crude scale the spiritual virtues of art have no weight and, bereft of all encouragement, it disappears from the tumultuous market of our century.
We have not evolved greatly beyond these obstacles. Most of us still spend our days scheming to survive, and even those of us fortunate enough to cogitate or make art for a living are rarely at liberty to form things “in accordance with the laws of beauty.”
In concrete terms, material security frees us to devote ourselves to more than subsistence. Only when we have managed our daily acts of bodily housekeeping, only when the dishes are done and the bread is won, do we have time and energy for the improvidence of art—and only when we are assured of obtaining the means of survival can we create oddities that the market may not reward. In less sober terms, economic justice is a prerequisite for humanity because it is a prerequisite for the pursuit of superfluity. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” writes W. H. Auden. Instead, it “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” It cannot be eaten or worn, lived in or wielded as a cudgel (which hasn’t stopped opportunists from trying to convert it into propaganda, a purpose to which it is fabulously ill-suited). As Edna St. Vincent Millay writes of an equally useless good, love, it is “not meat nor drink / Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink / And rise and sink and rise and sink again.” Millay knows it would be more practical to trade the memory of love for food. Still, she concludes, “I do not think I would.”
I do not think I would, either, although I often worry that someday I may have to. The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food. By this standard, our own form of life has not advanced very far.
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ECONOMIC JUSTICE IS a prerequisite for excess, but it is not itself excessive. Indeed, most egalitarian economic models promise each citizen as much as she is owed and no more. Glut is regarded with suspicion, and the few surpluses that are permitted must be rigorously justified. In John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, one of the classic works of egalitarian political philosophy (and perhaps my favorite), we are repeatedly reminded that the only inequalities of goods and privileges that we can countenance are those that benefit the least advantaged members of society. We can pay a neuroscientist more than a teacher only if doing so is in the interest of the most beleaguered demographic, understood roughly as the demographic with the smallest quantity of wealth and opportunity. What this boils down to, at least in my understanding, is that we probably cannot justify paying neuroscientists much more than teachers.
“The difference principle,” as this imperative is titled, may seem impossibly demanding. How could we ever hope to allocate everything in accordance with a metric so rigid? Must we esteem everyone to the same degree, or judge each artwork equally beautiful, unless conferring disproportionate accolades benefits the least advantaged? Luckily, in the ideal polity Rawls envisions, principles of economic justice apply only to public institutions. We are taxed with an eye to promoting equality, but we are allowed to love or loathe without reference to fairness. Proportion organizes the socioeconomic order, but emotion reigns supreme and anarchic in our private lives. Here, we are licensed to discriminate in both senses of the word, exercising aesthetic judgment so as to declare some works better than others, rejecting prospective friends and lovers for no good reason at all.
This distinction is at the core of Rawls’s theory, and it is what keeps his view from lapsing into inhumanity. Institutions can with perfect propriety be called upon to refrain from indulging their biases, but even the most uncompromising political egalitarian understands that nepotism is a requirement of the heart. In a world of absolute equality, there would be no place left for derangements of disproportion. That is, there would be no place for the enchantments of maximalism—for encyclopedic novels of exorbitant length, for stylistic effusions, for camp confectionery. And of course there would be no place for love, which is nothing more or less than favoritism par excellence.
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UNFORTUNATELY, WE GET matters backward. The logic of justice, proper to the political and economic domain, has infused the whole of contemporary existence. While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact, we insist on equality in love and art, on order and proportion in our minds and houses. In Sally Rooney’s wildly successful novel Conversations with Friends, one character informs another that monogamy is suspect insofar as it requires that we prefer some people over others. On Twitter, where the currents of culture are distilled into their most poisonous forms, the “feminist wellness educator” Melissa A. Fabello went viral upon suggesting that we resort to a “template” when we are too busy to deal with our friends. The resulting script imagines that each of us is a bureaucrat tasked with denying petitioners special privileges, rather than a person for whom it is imperative to retain prejudices in favor of loved ones, love being at its root a species of prejudice. “Hey!” the template reads. “I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone else who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect [later date or time] instead / Do you have someone else you could reach out to?”
In the arts, the misguided commitment to egalitarianism is most clearly crystallized in the commandment of the age, as articulated in a web comic that has since been snipped into a pithy catchphrase. In the first of the comic’s two panels—or at least, the first of the two panels that have been excerpted from a longer sequence, meme-ified, and circulated—a figure presses his finger against another figure’s mouth and says, “Shhh.” In the second panel, the silencer tells the silencee, who is evidently on the brink of saying something critical, “Let people enjoy things.” This image is reproduced, with varying degrees of venom, whenever someone criticizes a cultural artifact of widespread popularity. It is an instruction that conceals a threat: let people enjoy things—or else. When the film critic Marshall Fine wrote a negative review of The Dark Knight Rises, marring what had been a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, he received so many death threats that the website’s administrators were forced to disable the comments section. “Like This or Die,” a line from the critic George Trow, is the apt title of the critic Christian Lorentzen’s celebrated 2019 essay about the state of contemporary aesthetic appreciation.
In principle, the instruction to “let people enjoy things” (and even the more menacing instruction to “like this or die”) leaves open the possibility that the things in question may be terrible. Maybe acolytes of The Dark Knight Rises are willing to admit that it is a bad movie, and all they intend to request is that we allow them (as if anyone could forbid them, perhaps by irrupting into their living rooms and holding guns to their heads?) to take pleasure in it. There is certainly much to enjoy in films so aggressively bad that they are, if not beautiful, then at least perversely impressive—like the admirably incoherent cult classic Troll 2 (in which goblins, but no trolls, appear, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the original Troll movie). But “let people enjoy things” is usually deployed to imply that all art objects are created equal and any suggestion to the contrary smacks of snobbery. As the author Danielle Binks writes in the Australian arts magazine Kill Your Darlings, to propose that the immensely profitable and popular genre of YA (young adult) literature is less sophisticated than its adult counterpart is to indulge in “elitist, literary snobbery.” The notion that adults are more mature and emotionally complex than teenagers is further snobbery, as Binks tediously concludes. Adolescents, adults, The Dark Knight Rises, Troll 2—who can say whether any of these are better or worse than any other?
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WHAT IS THE point of all these unconvincing gestures at equality? Do toddlers become their parents’ equals when we deem them so? Do social differentials drop away when we agree to pretend that The Dark Knight Rises is on par with Cries and Whispers? Poetry makes nothing happen, but does letting people enjoy things have a higher success rate?
It may be that the urge to equalize in private life is compensatory, a product of the Left’s dispiriting failure to equalize resources and political power in the public sphere. “Having lost the economic battle to economic and political elites,” writes the essayist and critic Phil Christman, “we celebrate, again and again, our victory over the mostly imaginary cultural elite that would scorn us for watching 90 Day Fiancé. What you can’t accomplish in life, you repeatedly do in symbolism, until it becomes a neurosis.” The “democratization of culture” is a consolation prize, offered up in place of a political order in which people could exert meaningful control over the circumstances of their lives. It not only fails to make anything happen but actually confirms our impotence, our deep recognition that nothing is happening, at least when it comes to shifting a lopsided material distribution.
Or perhaps the mania for equalizing everything but wealth is the product of a conceptual error: the conflation of two distinct notions, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. What should be equalized in the arts, and perhaps even in the romantic domain, is access: everybody should have a real chance to produce art (which requires both education and resources) and a real chance at becoming an object of erotic interest. No one should be excluded at the outset from these systems of rewards solely by accident of birth. But even if we were open to suitors of all races and classes, this certainly does not mean that we will (much less that we should) end up loving everyone, any more than equalizing access to aesthetic education means that everyone will go on to become great artists or critics. There are moral and aesthetic reasons enough to insist on equality of opportunity without an appeal to the imperative to let people enjoy Troll 2.
Copyright © 2024 by Becca Rothfeld
