Well that was weird.
I've been working on this idea, probably not a new one, that there are two powerful forces at work in societies. One that keeps people together, and another that drives people apart. Centripetal and centrifugal.
Here's an example: the growth of societies requires greater and greater specialisation and stratification. People get organised into sub-groups who then have different interests and experiences. This creates conflict, which leads to them splitting apart.
Another: you love your family and feel a strong sense of belonging, but they also don't treat you how you would like, and perhaps they sometimes e.g. support causes with which you strongly disagree. Your family life becomes a delicate balance between these conflicts.
You can see this everywhere. Organisations hire, retain, and lose staff. Romantic relationships begin, persist, and end. Political parties. Friendship cliques. Group chats.
And each force comes with different feelings. Togetherness feels warm, safe, or proud and strong. Union feels like singing your favourite political anthem, sports chant, or religious song with tears in your eyes.
As such, it is easy to see the centripetal force as the better one. The more worthy. Joe Biden, in his speech yesterday, was powering up this centripetal feeling.
I pledge to be a President who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see Red and Blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people.
Through this lens, the challenge is to stay together. This is true both at the scale of the state, and of our own lives. Staying together is tough. Every day one has to get up and decide to stay together, to make the effort and do the work. It would be so easy to come apart, given how difficult and mean people can be. In a sense, the immense project of politics is just one job — integration. Please don't go, I can change!
And yet... the centrifugal force... the feeling of leaving home, striking out, of saying — fuck you! (I won't do what you tell me!) The feeling of righteousness, of standing up for what you believe in, of refusing to compromise. The feeling of deciding to thine own self be true, of taking the ultimate risk for a social animal — exile, a leap of faith, in search of better lands. To believe, in the words of one of the great centrifuges, that "true life is elsewhere".
It's not you, it's me.
Raoul Vaneigem, in The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little sacrifices in my empty presence.
But then...
Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.
Through another lens, this centrifugal force is the destruction that yields the creation, the rotting log that nourishes the soil and its embedded seeds. The US, like every social group, was created by the very same forces it now resists. Likewise with the EU and Brexit, the UK and Scottish Independence, and many others.
I am reminded of the triadic gods of Hinduism — Brahma the creator; Vishnu the preserver; Shiva the destroyer. Each has a crucial purpose. In fiction, immortal beings reliably suffer perverse effects. In our human naïvety, have we attempted to cohere too long? Not given our centrifugal impulses their due? Perhaps our society is now like two opposing magnets held very tightly together, suffused with intense potential energy, repressed and coming out fuckedupfuckedup.
Biden made a curious reference in his speech:
The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal.
On one level this is an understandable political platitude. On the other... it sticks in the mind. Here's the full excerpt:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
We might wonder how much he had in mind.
K