26 Comments

Josh,

You had me go back to look at my post, your comment to it, and my reply.

Simplistic grievance and hyperbolic analogies rub me the wrong way as well. And I agree that simple pleasures (picking cherries for you, playing tennis with friends for me) are far more edifying than "grievance porn" or doom-scrolling" I care a great deal about this election but recognize that life will go on whatever the result. Cherries will still be there for the picking. Trees don't care about the electoral college.

Expand full comment
author

Thank you, David. Trees might care about climate policy, but so much of that is beyond any individual's control that I think we focus on what meaningful action we can take. Food is one of those things that can have a big climate impact, so it's one of my sanctuaries. I realize that just owning my own place, with a sizable yard, represents enough privilege to buffer me from some of the exigencies of this election cycle. Like you, I'm deeply invested in the outcome. But I weary of the satisfaction that many take in dunking on each other.

Expand full comment

You'll both understand why I choose to offer my comment here, along with yours.

Of course, I understand that the madness and anxieties of the world can overwhelm and send us seeking quiet comfort and refuge in our gardens, real and metaphorical. Happens to me all the time. And I agree with Josh about the many excesses in language, behavior, and imagination that upset him. But I'll share a few observations, the first one anecdotal and that was a very instructive experience in my life.

Sixteen years ago, when I was a very active, significantly, though not solely, political blogger, I became involved in a joint discussion-debate series shared on our mutual blogs with a blogger of contrary political orientation. What either of us was is not to the point. We were opposites, as were our respective readerships. He proposed the series to me, and I eagerly accepted. He and I maintained to the end a very respectful public and behind the scenes relationship with each other, though I don't believe either of us ever influenced the other in our carefully reasoned and supported arguments. But our arguments with each other were only half the experience. We had very engaged readerships. His was especially so and much larger than mine, and the commenting readers on the whole, even when they were clearly educated and knowledgeable, were far less respectful. What I particularly found habitual was a pronounced inability to respond to my arguments on their own terms rather than to me as a misperceived symbolic representation of my political orientation. They argued against what they insisted were my ideology and leanings, and my unexpressed motives, rather than my arguments.

My point in this anecdote, from someone fully committed to reasoned argument, is to acknowledge, nonetheless, the limits of reasoned argument and persuasion, which rely, to start, on the goodwill of those arguing and the granted presumption of goodwill in one's interlocutor. And not all people exhibit or presume either.

My other observations are briefer. :)

One is that, yes, people cry, metaphorically, that the sky is falling all the time. Yet history does show us that metaphorically, and even almost literally, the sky does indeed fall sometimes, and we do, in anticipation, have to try to be able to tell the difference.

We need to be aware that when we retire to our gardens -- which almost all of us need to do sometimes -- other people remain unretired and are trying to shape our lives.

Yes, life will go on after whatever proclaimed calamity occurs short of meteoric destruction. The question is how it will go on.

Expand full comment
author

I appreciate this, Jay. One of the sections that hit the editing floor in an earlier draft was one about precisely this: telling the difference between real and imagined crisis. But I couldn't dig into that without getting political, which was not what I wanted to do in this piece.

There is without doubt something truly alarming about the prospect of electing a convicted felon with all of the foreboding predictions about what he might do. But I believe the constant noise and the fever pitch of our discourse has rendered it almost impossible to oppose Trump rhetorically. One can deconstruct his illogical statements, gather evidence of his troubling claims, make evidence-based predictions about a second term based on his first. But to what end?

Many of the deepest ills have nothing to do with Trump. The sky is falling in higher ed. It's been falling in K-12 for many years. The erosion of these two pathways to social mobility, and their contribution to the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, makes me truly despairing at times. Similarly, I see signs of decline in my beloved Montana due to climate problems every time I go back.

Neither of those problems will change one iota with me writing angry screeds or engaging on social media. I don't think principled arguments by me will have any effect whatsoever. The nature writer Rick Bass moved to my home community in the 1990s and spend the better part of his career lobbying for roadless area protection. He did so crassly and without sensitivity to working people, and so he wasted decades -- the pith of a life, as he put it once. I don't think his initiative is any closer now than it was when he began. Nor will he be remembered as a saint-like pioneer in that area.

So I'm making choices about how *not* to spend my life. I'm not a good activist. I have too many questions. And I lack the arrogance to think that I can actually move the needle. So I control what I can, which is often within myself and in my backyard.

Here's a final aside. I have been heartened by the joy coming out of the Harris/Walz campaign. What a happy outcome from what could have been a real mess with a brokered convention. But the very fact of Harris's candidacy is itself the result of a broken system. The establishment rallied behind Biden to stop Bernie who was speaking truth to the institutional rot that I mentioned above. Then the Biden team failed to anticipate his collapse. And the crisis mentality is what has allowed the transition to Harris -- who is revealing herself to be a far better candidate than many imagined, but who cannot be said to have been the people's choice. Process matters. And strong-arming candidates on the people is not a sustainable strategy for the DNC. I'll do what I can to see that Harris succeeds this time around, and I'll be happy for all of us, including my daughters, if she makes history. But I will not forget that the current ticket ran an end-around and is not what I think of as a democratic outcome.

Expand full comment

Josh, I understand. My purpose here wasn't political in a small "p" sense either, even though I'm being political for the duration of the campaign. And we all have fundamental ways of being in the world, ways that we're comfortable with and that make us feel right. I don't really consider myself an activist in the full-fledged sense. Though I was active in my youth, I only ever worked on a single campaign, in my teens. I was very active in the union at the start of my teaching career, but then withdrew. I was roused to action for a brief time by some events at CUNY a few years ago. But my proper mode is as a writer, and even there, I'm unhappy when I'm distracted into political writing -- more so all the time. My current efforts, as I say, are for the duration, which I hope can end in November.

What I intended to convey is a sentiment not against diverse manners of living our lives or the need to be quiet, even for a long time, but against quietism. I don't think angry screeds are of much use either, and my longer anecdote offered my sense that often reasoned argument isn't as well in any grand sense. But political battles -- not just the petty or the everyday ones but also the fateful -- are like other kinds of battles: they can be won or lost at the margins, boosting the resolve to vote of those who already agree but lag in committed energy, influencing those relatively few marginal voters, winning a legal challenge. Sometimes, rather than win an Oxford debate, we just have to win. The fruits of WW II were no less real because we didn't gain them via a persuasive argument.

Expand full comment

I haven't seen it referred to as grievance porn, but I have been thinking about this way in which victimization is a trap. Eve Tuck in RED PEDAGOGY wrote an essay back in 2009 regarding the ways in which storytellers inflict more damage if the only story they tell is trauma porn (others' grievances). Survivance stories are like you finding the Cornellian cherries.

Expand full comment
author

Thank you, Jill. Yes, trauma literature is another form that this sometimes takes. Telling survival stories that transcend this trap is an art. I don't know Eve Tuck, so thank you for the lead!

Expand full comment

Here's the essay citation. "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities," Eve Tuck, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2009: 409-427. She is also the author and editor of the anthology, Red Pedagogy.

Expand full comment

I love this, Josh. One of the things I value the most about living in the small community I do is the shared rituals of growing, preparing, and sharing food. It makes the ugliness of political polarization melt away.

Expand full comment
author

Yes, I'm often reminded of this because it's a commonality between me and my parents. And I think most people really value local food, even if they're not prepared to support it with public policy.

Expand full comment

Wonderful post. This: “The point of grievance porn is to achieve a predetermined catharsis.” ~ reminded me of the Al-Anon adage, “expectation is premeditated resentment.” Thanks for the reminder of the drama triangle. Such a useful visualization, a judgment-free mirror for self-awareness to free us from ingrained (unexamined) patterns. I think a lot about the Honorable Harvest as well, as a way to approach life and work. When my students read about it, they always get it.

Expand full comment
author

Thank you, Julie! I hadn't heard that Al-Anon adage, but it resonates. How interesting that the Honorable Harvest intersects with architecture, too (though unsurprising, the more I think about it, especially your recent essay on flow between the indoor/outdoor spaces). So few homes are built with an expectation of harvest, at least not at any scale.

Expand full comment

Well, so say I! After all, we are part of the larger ecosystem - and not only in the material sense. This post speculates on that ethos in our writing community: https://open.substack.com/pub/juliegabrielli/p/the-honorable-harvest-as-writers?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Expand full comment

Such a powerful, important essay and message, Joshua. I feel honoured to be mentioned in its midst. Thank you for that and for the reminder that we can turn our attention to what is real, what is grounded, what connects, and what is right in front of us. Really, what’s the alternative? All that grievance porn can offer is emptiness and desperation for more.

Expand full comment
author

Yes, what a perceptive point! I started a sobriety journey a year ago, and I recognize that a similar principle about short term gratification versus long term satisfaction applies there, too. But it takes some discipline to remind myself. Thanks for sharing your essay earlier -- it's nice confirmation that it's not enough for many of us to simply ignore the feed. We have to consciously guard against it.

Expand full comment

Dare I say...there's something in "Marxism" that feels apt here. Isn't there some balance between scarcity and surplus, between the fear of not having enough and the greed of having far, far too much? I'm offering this in general but trying to apply it more specifically to what I just read (bear with me!?). Something something 'I have SO many grievances and so much fear that I need to share some with the world but/and I need to husband some of them for later.'

I'm glad to hear that the destinations for the cherries include homemade kombucha. Where I live, everyone has a mother to pass around, divide or share, for 'buch or "get your friends thickened waistlines" dessert loaves or sourdough. My own mother culture is the one of...kvetching, of 'oh oh...,' and it takes regular work to see my little spot in the world with calmer eyes. Thank you for helping me do that today.

Expand full comment
author

Ah, thank you Rebecca. Glad that the essay achieved its purpose for you. I worried that I spent rather too much time kvetching myself! Writing pieces like this sometimes takes it out of me. But then I worry about not being provocative enough, if shifting toward too much serenity might grow saccharine. Haha. Increasingly I'm interrogating the "why" and "so what" of a piece, and part of me wondered if this one was best left as an internal conversation. So thanks for speaking up!

Expand full comment

Thanks for sharing such an interesting story, Love this 🥰🥰🥰

Expand full comment
author

Thanks for reading!

Expand full comment

I enjoyed this essay Joshua. Especially the paragraph where your friend reminded you to water that which you want to grow.

It reminds me of something frequently quoted in meditation circles : 'Whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind' – the Buddha

It also brings to mind something I often told my daughters when they were small, that if they wanted to know a person, pay attention to who their friends are. People surround themselves with others like them.

‘We become what we eat’ is another phrase that expresses the same concept. Flamingos become pink by their diet of shrimp and the algae they eat.

All this to say, as I did in a recent essay in my own, that I choose hope because it is what I am wanting to become more of. (The alternative of constantly looping in the Karpman triangle would be a living hell.)

Expand full comment
author

Yes, I remember your recent essay on hope. Becoming what we feed ourselves is a great way of thinking about it. There is a point in grieving at which *not* turning the corner to hope signifies stagnation or worse. Delicate calculus knowing which is more compassionate to oneself. Some of that process is recursive, I suspect. I'm reading Antonia Malchik's "A Walking Life" now, and she has an excellent chapter on how grief sometimes pushes us to walking, as if to literally force us to put one foot in front of the other. I've been itching to shake up some of the coping rituals that got me through my recent disruptions. This essay was an attempt at that, though a friend likes to remind me that we behave our way into better thinking rather than thinking our way into better behavior. So now the thing is to actively make those more restorative choices :)

Expand full comment

Grief is such a powerful emotion, for me also. There are times all I can do is to sit and stare into space,, no thoughts at all, just images of beautiful moments passing across my mind’s eye. Then I must softly shake myself and ask ‘what now?’

Expand full comment

Man oh man does this sum up a lot of our culture right here:

“Once you situate yourself as victim or rescuer, you need others to play their foreordained roles. You don’t want to think about exceptions, because the goal is to arrive at a rehearsed consensus that feels righteous.”

Expand full comment
author

Thanks, brother. This one took a lot out of me to write, but I think it holds up. And it cuts both ways. I'm glad you and I can connect across our differences in a culture where many others are trying to dunk on the opposing side.

Expand full comment

Beautifully written. Universally needed.

I’m going to go tend my garden.

Thanks for writing!

Expand full comment
author

Thank you, George. Happy gardening!

Expand full comment