The two-edged sword that is modernity

All that advancement over the past 200 years has exhausted us

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How’s this for a cultural barometer?

You have to go all the way down to number 81 on Amazon’s bestseller list to find a book by a “literary” writer.

That would be “All Fours,” by Miranda July, the writer-filmmaker-artist.

Otherwise most of the top 100 is taken up Father’s Day books, Mother’s Day books, self-help, and airport fiction. The latter comprises paperback reads by authors like Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas.

There are a few oases: Griffin Dunne’s memoir about his family is at number 51. Stephen King, the rare commercial author who is also a writer, has a new title.

But things are so bad that Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” originally published in 1936, is at number 96.

What’s missing? What we used to call literary or quality books. There is no breakout hit. We used to read the bestseller list and count “real” books by Philip Roth, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, VS Naipaul, and so on. Even Amazon’s Literature and Fiction list is cluttered with pedestrian commercial fare, not the stuff that comes from the Iowa Writers Workshop, or Yaddo.

Again, on that list you have to go all the way down to number 43 to find “James,” by Percival Everett, the only literary work. Otherwise, it’s more Colleen Hoover, a posthumous Michael Crichton somehow constructed by James Patterson, movie tie-ins, and so on.

This shabby state of the business is definitely causing trouble in the book business. Three weeks ago, two major literary publishers were fired without notice. Reagan Arthur, the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf, and Lisa Lucas, the publisher of Pantheon and Schocken were dismissed. Lucas was so surprised that she freaked out a bit on social media and then headed off to Paris.

Last week, Little Brown laid off seven top editors including Tracy Sherrod, Pronoy Sarkar, Jean Garnett and Ben George. They were just as shocked.

All of this follows a huge layoff last summer at Random HouseAlfred A. Knopf that included veteran star Victoria Wilson, plus Penguin’s Wendy Wolf, Rick Kot, and Paul Slovak.

If you don’t think there’s a correlation between all these top people getting the axe, and real books disappearing, you’re wrong.

Meantime, publishers keep putting resources in books by personalities, only to see them backfire. Kristi Noem’s “No Way Back,” is already well below number 10,000 on amazon. Tom Selleck’s autobiography is number 598. Whoopi Goldberg’s memoir, which couldn’t have had more publicity, is at number 895. Michael Richards — Kramer from “Seinfeld” — has a memoir that expired within a week.

Meantime, Lorrie Moore’s “I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home,” which just won the National Books Critics Circle award for fiction, is at number 36,379 on the paperback list. Moore is an established author who’s won many prizes and publishes in the New Yorker. But it’s doubtful many people even know she has a book out, let alone an award winner.

What’s going on here? I recently responded to a Tweet from a frustrated author who was upset that she had to pay for her own publicity. But that’s been the case for decades. Publishers don’t care about creating legacies around important writers. If they ever did, that’s long over. They sell Colleen Hoover as if she was a vacuum, sucking up as much money as they can in the process.

Or this?

The string of pop flops is the latest evidence of how difficult it has become for the music business to generate the kinds of genuine moments that turbocharge sales and move the cultural needle, music executives say. Making pop hits has always been a crapshoot. But today, with the world awash in content, TikTok rewriting labels’ playbooks and listeners burrowing deeper into their own personalized niches, even avid pop fans don’t recognize what’s in the Billboard top 10. In such a decentralized market, pop stars face fierce competition. Disappointing albums, in turn, can hurt concert sales. It all adds up to music executives across genres seeming to wield less power over the star-making machinery than ever.

“It’s harder and harder to, a, get attention and b, maintain that attention,” says Benjy Grinberg, chief executive of music company Rostrum Pacific, parent of independent record label Rostrum Records. “Things have come and gone,” he says.

This weakness among pop stars is showing up on the Billboard charts. Now that these charts incorporate streaming, it’s normal for huge names to land tons of songs from their albums on the charts and then see most of them fall off. Lately, however, even artists’ anchoring singles—the ones they want us to pay attention to—have lacked staying power, according to an analysis for the Journal by Chris Dalla Riva, senior product manager for data and personalization at the streaming service Audiomack.

“Though many A-list pop stars released new albums over the last few months, it feels like many of those albums haven’t made the same cultural impact of their earlier works,” Dalla Riva says.

Now, check this next observation out. It’s a tacit admission that pop music has become a formula whereby stars get fans to buy into the stars’ self-absorption, with all this cycles, narratives and eras business, and in turn use said cycles and eras to “create a colorful imaginative universe,” i.e. get us to strap on the virtual marketing glasses and and bask in the star’s solipsistic insularity.

For years, pop acts have thought of themselves in terms of “eras” or “chapters”—ambitious, meticulously crafted promotional cycles that helped them build narratives, demonstrate personal or artistic growth and (of course) sell albums and concert tickets. Ideally, these eras created a colorful imaginative universe for fans and, over time, helped radio turn successful hits into inescapable ones.

Two of the most enduring facets of Western culture, literature and music, have been given over to the rankest mediocrity.

Pick any decade from 1850 to 1980 and you’ll find giants in either of those fields. The 1850s? Stephen Foster, Hawthorne and Melville. The 1920s? Hemingway, Eliot, Ellington, Gershwin. The 1940s? James M. Cain, Charlie Parker. The 1960s? Updike, Bellow, Vonnegut, Motown, the Brill Building, The Beatles.

One has to be careful about correlating phenomena from different realms, but I think there’s a plainly discernible parallel between the West’s material advancement and its cultural flourishing.

Occasionally it behooves us to consider afresh the pace of that advancement. It’s been breathtaking. An American born in 1830 who lived 80 years would have lived through wagon trains, a civil war, the advent of photography, telephones, automobiles, motion pictures and airplanes. My grandparents, all born around 1890, watched a moon landing on television in 1969.

In the course of building his argument about the danger of America’s societal fragmenting, Jonah Goldberg, in his 2018 book Suicide of the West, writes of The Miracle, by which he means the aforementioned pace of advancement.

The Cato Institute’s Marian L. Tupy provides a commendable summary of Goldberg’s discussion of The Miracle:

To appreciate Goldberg’s Miracle, consider the following. Homo sapiens are between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. Yet the modern world, with all the conveniences that we take for granted (I wrote this article sitting on a plane 8 kilometers above ground, using an internet connection provided by a satellite orbiting 37,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth), is merely 250 years old. Put differently, for the first 99.9 percent of our time on earth, progress was painfully slow. Then everything suddenly changed. Why? That’s the question that Goldberg strives to answer.

Goldberg has written two previous and popular books, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change and The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Goldberg’s writing style, as the titles of his books suggest, is geared towards a mainstream audience, but the AEI fellow researches his books with care. Of human nature, Goldberg writes:

“Humans were not designed to live in the market order of contracts, money, or impersonal rules, never mind huge societies governed by a centralised state. We were designed to live in bands, or what most people think of as tribes. The human brain is designed so that we can manage stable social relationships with roughly 150 people… We were designed by evolution to be a part of a group, but that group was very limited in size. These groups took on a variety of structures, but the basic anatomy was generally the same. There was a Big Man or some other form of chieftain or ‘alpha.’ …In the most basic sense, these bands were socialist or communist in that resources were generally shared. But the genetic programming clearly emphasised us over me. We still hold on to that programming and it rubs up against modernity constantly.”

Based on the above paragraph, readers will be able to deduce the crux of Goldberg’s argument. The Miracle happened not because of, but in spite of, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Our rule‐​based society, where equality before the law takes precedence over the social and economic status of the individual, a staggeringly complex global economy that turns strangers from different continents into instant business partners, and a meritocratic system of social and economic advancement that ignores people’s innate features, such as race and gender, is both very new and extremely fragile.

The Miracle emerged, probably by chance and after hundreds of years of trial and error, in the splendidly quirky island of Great Britain. It then spread, however imperfectly, into other parts of the world. Today, the outposts of the Miracle can be found not only in Western Europe, North America and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), but also in Asia (Hong Kong), Africa (Botswana) and Latin America (Chile). An extraordinary achievement.

It was great! Air conditioning! Heart transplants! Helicopters!

But, alas, like everything in the space-time universe, The Miracle had a shelf life:

In a refreshingly non‐​relativistic manner, which is one of Goldberg’s trademarks, he writes, “I believe that, conceptually, we have reached the end of history. We are at the summit, and at this altitude [political] left and right lose most of their meaning. Because when you are at the top of the mountain, any direction you turn — be it left toward socialism or right toward nationalism … the result is the same: You must go down, back whence you came.”

And that descent (decline, if you will) is the key threat that we all ought to keep in mind. The forces of tribalism always linger just below the surface and are never permanently subdued. From Russia and China to Turkey and, to some extent, the United States, the all‐​mighty chieftain is back in charge. From the darkest corners of the web, where nationalists and anti‐​Semites thrive, to the university campuses, where identity politics flourish, group loyalty takes precedence over the individual. These dangerous sentiments originate, it is true, in human nature. But their renewed lease on life springs, as Goldberg reminds us, from something much more banal — ingratitude defined as “forgetfulness of, or poor return for, kindness received.”

Now, from whence cometh this ingratitude?

I say we have to revisit that thread of human inquiry that we mention so often here at Precipice: Rousseau’s natural state of man, the Scottish Enlightenment, da Vinci, Newton, Marx, Freud and Dewey.

Shorthand for where I’m going with this: the last 250 years gave us air conditioning and Duke Ellington, but it also has given us nuclear weapons and Billie Eilish.

That mighty leap by which we surmounted thousand of years of grinding conditions for human existence has left us exhausted.

And also doubtful at best about a transcendent order to the universe. In the absence of any obligation to live our lives in devotion to a Creator, our notion of how to keep getting fancier in our material advancement takes such forms as sex robots and suicide pods.

It’s where we are, folks. There’s no magic cure for our jadedness. But maybe some figure will appear on the scene, perhaps in a realm like music or literature, maybe a really compelling public intellectual - I doubt it will be a politician - to make us realize that we are tired of the flatness of our existence, and to demand some richness.

Would be good if it happened sooner rather than later. Our jadedness may get the better of us first.