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Winter storms across the United States have affected more than 2,200 flights so far today, with at least 1,109 delayed and 1,116 canceled as of 11am ET, according to CBS. Airlines most affected are SkyWest, Delta and Southwest, while Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Denver International Airport, Detroit Metro Airport saw the most cancelations and delays. — Read the rest
The three words most closely identified with the French revolutionary tradition must surely be liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And though the ideas of liberty and equality have inspired countless individuals to take up muskets or pens, not so with the idea of fraternity, which tends to inspire little more than indifference. Of the three elements in France’s national motto, fraternité is more like the poor relation that, as the political theorist John Rawls remarks in his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, “has had a lesser place in democratic theory.” In most school textbooks, life, liberty, equality, and property feature prominently in chapters about human rights, but fraternity merits not even a footnote. Rawls nevertheless argues that although friendship is not a democratic right, a democracy worthy of the name is impossible without it. The ideal of fraternity, he writes, implies “certain attitudes of mind and forms of conduct” without which liberty and equality would shrivel.
For Rawls to have espoused this view in the 20th century is one thing. But Mary Wollstonecraft—who died 225 years ago, after the difficult birth of her second child, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley—had similar ideas about friendship, ideas that remain as revolutionary in our age as they were in her own. In an era when political divisions harden, gender divisions weaken, and new technologies chip away at our understanding of older values, we might lend an ear to Wollstonecraft’s vindication of friendship.
Wollstonecraft was scarcely 30 years old when the defining event of her life took place: the taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Fiercely independent and largely self-taught, Wollstonecraft, like so many other English intellectuals, thrilled to the news of revolution on the far side of the English Channel. As William Wordsworth later recalled, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.”
A bright dawn it certainly was for the community of Dissenters in London—those English Protestants who had earlier broken with the Church of England and, because of the civil and legal disadvantages that ensued, embraced an event that promised full equality for all citizens. It was with that community of Dissenters that the young Wollstonecraft, determined to make a living by her pen, settled. A few months after the Bastille’s fall, the Dissenters’ leading light, the Reverend Richard Price, gave a sermon before the London Revolution Society that spoke for them all: “I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever … [and] the ardour for liberty catching and spreading … the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.”
But Price did not speak for Edmund Burke. Outraged by what, to his mind, was fanatical praise of revolution and foolish reliance on reason, the conservative thinker penned his most famous work, the preposterous when not prescient Reflections on the Revolution in France. On its publication, a polemical and political brawl erupted in London, one that Wollstonecraft, an ardent admirer of the elderly Price, quickly joined. With her publisher, Joseph Johnson, standing at her side, waiting to typeset each new page, Wollstonecraft wrote not one but two vindications.
To vindicate indicates one of two aims: to make a defense or to stake a claim. With the Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790, Wollstonecraft upheld the natural rights of man, a notion enthroned by the revolutionaries in their “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” embraced by Thomas Paine in his fiery pamphlet Rights of Man, and excoriated by Burke in his Reflections. Two years later, though, and to the shock of her critics, Wollstonecraft pivoted from defense to offense—in both senses of the word—by making a jaw-dropping claim. Natural rights, she declared, also belong to the other half of humankind: women. “I love man as my fellow,” she proclaimed in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “but his sceptre, real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage.”
Wollstonecraft was not alone in making so extraordinary a claim. The following year in France, the playwright Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Demanding full civil and political rights for both sexes, de Gouges insisted that a woman’s place in the public square was side by side, as a full equal, to man. “As a woman has the right to climb up the executioner’s gallows,” she affirmed, “she must also have the right to climb to the speaker’s trib-une.” (De Gouges was denied the second right, but not the first: she was guillotined during the Terror.)
But Wollstonecraft took a different and, at first glance, paradoxical tack. The revolution’s frontline was located at the home front. Political equality begins at the hearth, Wollstonecraft insisted, not on the streets; for a democracy to flourish, we must not only overthrow the monarchies in palaces, but so too the patriarchies at home. Only when a husband cedes his wife’s equal capacity to reason—a capacity formed in the same classroom—will he free them both from the unnatural social conventions that, for generations, have warped their characters and stunted their growth. She wrote:
In the government of the physical world, it is observable that the female, in general, is inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. … But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.
For Wollstonecraft, marriage must be built on a fraternal, not a sexual, foundation. By its very nature, passions of the heart are short-lived and self-destructive. Wollstonecraft had seen the lives of too many women, like her close friend Fanny Blood and sister Eliza Wollstonecraft, destroyed because of unwanted pregnancies or unworthy husbands. Love, as she explained in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “cannot long feed on itself without expiring. And this extinction in its own flame, may be termed the violent death of love.”
As a fervent disciple of the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft reasoned that marriage must be reasonable. And what could be more reasonable, after all, than a marriage based on the virtue of friendship? As she declared, “Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.” She was hardly the first to insist on such friendship. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle concluded that there was no friendship like virtue friendship—a friendship based on an admiration of the other’s virtuous traits and the aspiration to equal them. When we choose such a friend, he wrote, we choose “another self” who shares our convictions for what constitutes a life worth living.
Yet whereas Aristotle denied women the capacity for true friendship because in his view they lacked the capacity to fully reason, Wollstonecraft warned women against their capacity for love because they could lose their capacity to reason. In the end, a lasting and enriching marriage, she believed, could never be an affair of the heart, but only of the mind: “forming a plan to regulate a friendship which only ought to dissolve at death.”
A few years ago, when Netflix added the 1990s sitcom Friends to its lineup, it became one of the streaming service’s most-binged shows. More surprising, viewers included not only millennials but also Zoomers encountering the show for the first time. In search of an explanation, a television critic for Vulture, Jen Chaney, suggested that “Friends reinforced the idea that men and women could hang out in packs and maintain some platonic, cross-gender relationships within that group.”
This fall, I taught Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman in a class called “Frames of Modernity,” a weekly three-hour seminar devoted to books that, in various ways, reflect the modern age. It is often trying, not just because the students must grasp unfamiliar historical and philosophical contexts, but also because they must literally grasp a physical copy of a book—required for the class—and spend time solely in the company of its author. A few weeks into the semester, I asked my students whether they had ever watched Friends. Surprised by the question, seven or so raised their hands, another seven or so rolled their eyes, and some did both. A few students thought that Vulture’s explanation of the show’s popularity made some sense; Friends provided a model of sorts for their own friendships. A few others thought it nonsense. For them, the sitcom offered a kind of nostalgia for a past that never was. I also asked my own 17-year-old for her opinion of Friends. Louisa’s reply was curt: “It is the unfunniest show I ever saw.”
But even a show empty of laughs can be full of meaning. Although too much has been made of the rise of the so-called puriteens, studies do suggest that Zoomers are having less sex than other recent generations. Or, more precisely, they seem to be placing equal importance on friendship as on sex. Yet when I asked my students which of these relationships should define marriage, many thought they could have their wedding cake and eat it, too. They insisted that erotic love and platonic friendship were not mutually exclusive.
If you are, like me, a boomer, you are probably smiling. In both Vindication of the Rights of Woman and countless episodes of Friends, friends share certain values and goals that form a lasting foundation, one that allows them to seek different experiences—to experiment—in their own lives. As the script of Wollstonecraft’s own life reminds us, she fell madly, deeply in love outside her circle of intellectual Dissenters. Despite her allergy to passion, Wollstonecraft fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American chancer she met in revolutionary France, who soon abandoned both her and Fanny, the child he fathered. On returning to England, the desperate Wollstonecraft twice tried to kill herself. The wound in her heart, she later confessed, never healed, even after she married the radical philosopher William Godwin—a marriage based not only on eros but also on amity.
In a 1929 essay republished in The Second Common Reader, Virginia Woolf found her 18th-century predecessor’s friendship-based marriage with Godwin to have been Wollstonecraft’s “most fruitful experiment,” brief though the experiment was. (Wollstonecraft died from septicemia barely six months into their marriage, not yet 40 years old.) At the same time, though, Woolf’s imagination was captured by Wollstonecraft’s passion for Imlay, one that nearly ended her life. It is telling that Woolf found Wollstonecraft’s embrace of life, rife with contradictions, more compelling than her embrace of reason. It was a life with a sequel, with Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley in the starring role, one that was ultimately satisfying and true to life.
The post The Friend Zone appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the mid-1950s, the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance in New York City authorized the demolition of a working-class Black and Hispanic neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side—a culturally rich community that included among its residents Thelonious Monk, Benny Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. The clearance, part of Robert Moses’s widespread campaign of urban renewal in the city, saw homes, schools, and about 800 businesses razed to make way for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout the 1960s, the fortresslike arts campus arose on 18 city blocks, its buildings designed by such architects as Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Pietro Belluschi. Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall and now called David Geffen Hall) opened in 1962 as the new home of the New York Philharmonic. The Metropolitan Opera House, the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater), Alice Tully Hall, and the Juilliard School were completed soon afterward. Meanwhile, the 7,000 families that had been displaced during construction were forced to relocate to already overcrowded areas in Harlem and the Bronx. Segregation worsened on Manhattan’s West Side, as the gleaming new complex seemed to turn its back on the Black neighborhoods to the west of Amsterdam Avenue.
Lincoln Center’s origin story had been glossed over or ignored entirely in the decades since. But a recently completed $550 million renovation of the Philharmonic’s concert hall, meant to address its dreary acoustics and décor, has also spurred some much-needed introspection. Increasing diversity at Lincoln Center was one of three urgent priorities for the organization’s chief executive officer, Henry Timms, when he began his appointment in the spring of 2019—a process that took on greater urgency during the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd. “What we’re trying to do,” Timms told me, “is bake in a greater commitment to inclusion in everything we do, from who’s on our stage to how we spend our money to how we think about space.” Forty-two percent of the construction contracts for the hall’s renovation, for example, were awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses.
The Philharmonic’s new season began on October 8 not with the standard glitzy opening-night gala for black-tie patrons, but with a pay-what-you-can event where tickets started at five dollars. The concert featured San Juan Hill—A New York Story, a premiere by the jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles, who performed the work (named for the neighborhood that was demolished to make way for Lincoln Center and other new construction) with the Philharmonic and the ensemble Creole Soul.
On October 12, the orchestra began its subscription season with equally atypical fare. Instead of the kind of celebratory work often programmed for such an occasion (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example)—or even the usual concert format of overture, concerto, and 19th-century symphony—Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, conducted Oyá by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter and the Cuban-born Tania León’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Stride. León’s piece premiered in 2020, when the Philharmonic commissioned 19 women composers to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Oyá was named after the Yoruba goddess of rebirth, and in Balter’s program notes for the performance, he expressed the hope that the piece would “baptize and claim this new hall,” in clear reference to Lincoln Center’s controversial beginnings. The program also included My Father Knew Charles Ives by the American composer John Adams. The only work on the program from the standard repertory was Ottorino Respighi’s colorful showpiece Pines of Rome, which concluded the evening.
The Philharmonic performed with a dynamism sometimes missing in recent years. The orchestra’s red-blooded interpretation of the Respighi received an enthusiastic ovation, the clear and vibrant acoustics of the hall showcasing both the bombastic brass and the gentler woodwind lines. The subtleties of Adams’s gorgeous piece were also elegantly highlighted, as were the contrasting moods of León’s Stride, a work influenced by Louis Armstrong and West African percussion. The performance of Oyá, a vibrantly scored, engaging work for light, electronics, and orchestra, was marred only by the gimmicky effects, with strobe lights bathing rows of listeners in a harsh glare. Overall, the crisp acoustics proved a dramatic improvement over the muffled sound of the old hall, and the audience seemed as pleased as the orchestra to be back after an absence of more than two years.
Shanta Thake, chief artistic officer of Lincoln Center, has collaborated with Timms to develop programming directly addressing the institution’s mission to artistically explore equity and social justice. A program examining the theme of liberation, designed in response to Floyd’s murder and directed by Tazewell Thompson, will highlight Black artists, and the Philharmonic has embarked on community partnerships with organizations including El Puente, a North Brooklyn–based community human rights institution, and Harlem’s Mother AME Zion Church, the oldest Black church in New York State and a former stop on the Underground Railroad. The orchestra will also address the environmental crisis with works by composers Julia Wolfe and John Luther Adams.
The renovation comes at a precarious time for classical music, which (like many of the performing arts) is still struggling to recover from pandemic shutdowns. The Philharmonic, for example, lost an estimated $27 million in ticket revenues during that time. The hope is to attract a wider audience via thoughtful and inclusive programming, as well as with pay-what-you-can events such as the NY Phil @ Noon concerts in the intimate new performance space called the Sidewalk Studio. (Although the audience at David Geffen Hall on October 12 was, generally speaking, middle-aged and white, the 2022 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center attracted younger and more diverse audiences with pay-what-you-can concerts.) David Geffen Hall will host “The 65th Street Session,” a series of performances curated by mandolinist Chris Thile. Concerts there will be live-streamed to a 50-foot digital wall in the lobby, so passersby can drop in and enjoy the music for free. New amenities at the hall include an Afro-Caribbean–inspired restaurant headed by the James Beard Award–winning Kwame Onwuachi.
In the world of classical music, diversity didn’t suddenly become a buzzword in 2020. The industry has been trying to diversify and attract new listeners for many years, with a particular emphasis on increasing the number of Black and Latino orchestral musicians. But the social justice protests of 2020 led to many more concerts addressing themes of racial inequity. In Everything Rises, a multimedia stage piece performed in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Black bass-baritone Davóne Tines sang: “I was the moth, lured by your flame. I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access, and fame.”
There has also been renewed interest in Black composers such as Florence Price, George Walker, William Grant Still, and William Levi Dawson, as well as in Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose music has been championed recently by the violinist Augustin Hadelich. The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2021–22 season with its first performance of a work by a Black composer—Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow. In the spring, this institution, famous for its performances of the standard repertoire, will present Blanchard’s Champion—an “opera in jazz” based on the life of the Black welterweight boxer Emile Griffith.
It’s one thing, of course, to alter an orchestra’s repertoire, quite another to change the perception that the concert hall is a stuffy place governed by unwritten codes of conduct. Take the most recent Mostly Mozart Festival, at which newer patrons happened to clap between movements of a symphony. The audience members applauded, Timms told me, “because they were enjoying themselves so much and didn’t know” about the tradition of reserving applause until the end of a piece. (That tradition came about in the Romantic age; in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s time, symphonic works were often punctuated with eruptions of raucous applause.) Some patrons and musicians at Mostly Mozart, however, were irked by the enthusiastic outbursts. Meanwhile, at the opening night of Carnegie Hall’s season in late September, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, there was silence between movements of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 and the other works on the program.
It’s still too early to tell what effect the New York Philharmonic’s renovated theater and laudable programming will have in drawing a wider audience. But for Timms, these projects are essential. “From a moral perspective, it’s the right thing to do,” he said, “but from a strategic perspective, it’s also the right thing to do, because you simply cannot be an excellent organization if you have a very narrow focus in terms of your personnel and your program.”
The post Not Your Parents’ New York Phil appeared first on The American Scholar.
When Kevin arrived at the top floor and stepped into a long dark hallway, he couldn’t recall the circumstances of his getting there. Likewise, he faltered on the subject of his purpose, though he felt it related to something material, like architecture or interior design. The ancient elevator man with the scary swooping eyebrows had brought him to the 15th floor—he knew that much at least—but he was pretty sure someone had dropped him off at the front of the building. A very pale woman with reddish hair (his sister Michelle?) had waved from the open back seat window of a car and wished him good luck. On the way up in the elevator, he kept hearing inside his head the metallic concussions of a car crash.
The hallway, startling in length, was lit by industrial fixtures that cast perfect discs of light on a glossy navy-blue floor. He thought, Slippery when wet, and looked down at his shoes, charcoal OluKai Nohea Mokus, recently purchased online at REI, mainly because of their “vegan friendly construction,” a concept he sometimes pondered when he had trouble falling asleep. He imagined that the shoes, like his too-tight chinos and too-busy checked shirt, were all wrong for today, whatever today might be. Because of the fundamentally abstruse nature of clothing (a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma), he struggled with choosing what to wear. Most often he found himself distracted by thoughts of his body inside the clothes, as now, this moment, he felt sad and a little bitter about his damp white feet trapped inside the beautiful Mokus.
A door swung open at the farther end of the hallway—he glimpsed stainless steel kitchen appliances inside—and a young man about Kevin’s own age, wearing a narrow black tie and a white bistro apron, emerged; he smiled guiltily, took a phone from his hip pocket, and put one finger to his lips, as if to say, Don’t tell anyone you saw me out here.
And all at once, everything came into focus: Sunday afternoon, Manhattan, somewhere along the East River, a housewarming for friends, Ralph and Debbie, and their magnificent new loft. As Kevin moved toward the nearer door, the tune in his brain was The Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing,” which had claimed him via a SlimFast commercial three years earlier and which had still not let him go. He saw no button to push, no bell to ring. He inhaled deeply, lifting his shoulders, and exhaled a cleansing breath like a baseball player stepping to the plate. He turned the spherical brushed-nickel knob, the door opened easily, and he entered a foyer that was nearly as big as his whole apartment. He thought mudroom, and then sliced mudrooms, and then mudroom soup. He observed built-in pine cabinets and many closet doors, a powder room, and an unlit hallway off to the left that likely led to bedrooms. To the right was an enormous unfurnished room with a high ceiling, brick walls, and exposed ductwork and electrical conduits. From somewhere beyond, he heard the chatter of a cocktail party, which sounded to him like a flock of geese. Directly before him, on a dark cherry wall, hung a lithograph he remembered from Ralph and Debbie’s old place in the Village, an Alice Neel entitled Jar From Samarkand, noteworthy because Neel considered it a portrait of a friend despite the fact that the friend wasn’t in it. She’d meant to portray the friend’s absence, an abstraction that occasionally visited Kevin on the G train and at a Greenpoint coffee shop where he sometimes had breakfast.
As he walked through the big empty room, he heard the deep hum of an 18-wheeler idling outside in the external hallway—the mighty rig that seemed to follow him wherever he went and always parked close by. The room’s blond hardwood floor had the sort of grain that manifested faces of people and animals if you looked at it for very long. As he neared a pair of swinging doors with matching portholes set maddeningly off-center, he reminded himself to insert deliberate pauses into his thinking. Odd, he thought, to have to pass through the kitchen. He pushed open the doors: bright white tiles, an off-putting seafood and roasted meat aroma, four people resembling the guy in the hallway busy with food and drink. A girl at a soapstone sink caught his eye and, as if to help him, pointed in the direction he was already going.
Beyond a second set of doors, an unlit dining area abutted the palatial main room, the epicenter of the cocktail chatter, and right away he knew he would have to stay away from the wall of windows at the far end of it—a panorama, with undertow, of sky and water and the glass high-rises of Long Island City. He lingered briefly at the threshold, scanning the 25 or so guests for his friends. A darkly tanned middle-aged woman, perched on a burgundy Richmond ottoman about 15 feet away, looked directly at him and laughed, revealing tobacco stains on her teeth. He averted his eyes and remembered something a yoga teacher had often told him, that when you thought people were laughing at you, they were only laughing near you. “Oh, Kevin, Kevin,” called Debbie from across the room, and then every person was looking at him. He fancied himself made of wood, a decorative wooden mallet a giant might pick up and use for striking a gong.
Now it was extreme hugging, first from Debbie, looking elegant and fragile with her gray hair pulled back from her face, followed by the massive Ralph, who cried, “Buddy boy,” and wrapped him up so absurdly, it made Kevin think of the Milky Way. They each had a sharp and familiar scent he couldn’t name.
“Everyone,” said Debbie to the room, “this is our dear friend Kevin. He’s lovely and smart, and I hope you’ll make a point of meeting him.”
Despite his best intentions, Kevin squeezed his eyes shut—but exactly like a crazy person. In the darkness, he recalled that Alice Neel had painted a portrait of Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, memorable mostly for having once said to an interviewer, “I can explain it to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you.”
Kevin thought it kind of Debbie to introduce him to the room like that—she was only being polite—but he wished he’d been more prepared for it. When he opened his eyes, the guests were no longer looking at him, and Debbie took his arm and said softly, “I’m sorry, darling, forgive me. I shouldn’t have embarrassed you like that. Now where on earth is Michelle?”
“Do you mean pale Michelle?” Kevin asked.
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s who I mean,” said Debbie.
“Michelle is rather pale,” said Ralph, cocking his head to one side in an ironic way. “I’ve noticed that myself. Excuse me, I’m going to check on the kitchen.”
Once Ralph had gone, Kevin said, “I’m not sure where she is. She might have been in a car crash.” Then, because of the alarm on Debbie’s face, he added, “But don’t worry—I’m sure she’s okay.”
Debbie smiled the way people smile at puppies at a shelter. “Well,” she said, “I think I should give her a call. I expected to see her. I mean, I assumed she would … Are you sure she’s not with you?”
“I’m sure,” said Kevin. “You look wonderful by the way.”
“Thank you, sweetheart, why don’t you find a place to sit, and I’ll—”
“Doesn’t she look wonderful?” Kevin said suddenly, quite loud, addressing the room. The noise that had been pressing on his pineal gland had subsided, more quickly than usual, most likely, he thought, because of his having recently given up red meat, artificially sweetened soda, and fluoride toothpaste.
“That’s because she is wonderful,” said the woman on the ottoman, in a southern accent, and there followed a clamor of agreement, during which Kevin sat on the floor in a half-lotus. He thought, Ottoman Woman, and then Ottowoman. Debbie squatted beside him and put her arm across his shoulders, as if to subdue him. He admired the way she was able to keep her balance with only very high patent-leather heels for a pedestal. Her beautiful knees were near his face.
“And this apartment,” cried Kevin, determined to show her how fully he’d recovered from his brief discomposure. “How amazing! The perfect shade of gray on the walls, not too dark, not too light. In case you’re wondering if that’s a real Kandinsky over there behind the sofa, yes it is. Ormolu clock, check. Regency library table, check. Priceless 19th-century Amritsar carpet, check. Some of you might be thinking this place is over-the-top. Extravagant. Capitalism run amok. Look up income gap in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of us, right now, sitting here in this room. But in my opinion, Ralph and Debbie totally deserve a place like this. They’ve worked hard for their money, and they’ve always been immensely generous.”
During the distinctly awkward silence that ensued, Debbie kissed him on the cheek and stood up. Looking down at him, she said, “Kevin darling, wouldn’t you like to see the bedrooms?”
“Am I being too dominant?” he asked her. He turned to the room and said, “Am I being too dominant?” Then, to Debbie again, “I’m being too dominant, aren’t I?”
“No, no, darling,” she said, “not at all. I just thought you might like to see the rest of the new place. Since you love it so much.”
The guy he’d seen earlier in the hallway came by now with a tray of champagne flutes and lowered it to Kevin, but Kevin declined, not trusting himself to handle stemware. A huge reverberant orchestral chord exploded in his left ear, almost painful. “Okay then,” he said, getting to his feet. “But I would like to avoid any big windows if possible.”
“Not a problem,” Debbie said, as she began leading him back through the dining area. “Let’s see if we can find Ralph.”
Before she pushed open the kitchen door, Kevin took her wrist and said, “Debbie, are you very much in love with Ralph?”
“Well, yes, I am,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Sometimes I get these feelings,” he said. “A couple of minutes ago, I thought you were disappointed in him and possibly wanted to kill him.”
She laughed and looked into his eyes. There was a comb half-buried in her hair on one side, ivory with nine freshwater pearls. “Kevin,” she said. “You’re the most sensitive person I know. Rest assured, I love Ralph very much. I don’t know what I would do without him. I certainly don’t want to kill him. I just sometimes wish he wasn’t such a coward—emotionally, I mean—and that’s probably what you were picking up on.”
“Oh,” said Kevin. “That could possibly be hereditary, like something dogs derive from their wolf ancestors. He might not be able to help it.”
Barbara, the southern woman with tobacco stains on her teeth, went with her friend Roberta onto the terrace for a smoke. Roberta looked at the river, the sky, and then all around the terrace. She said, “There’s nowhere to sit out here.”
“No,” said Barbara. “She told me the furniture was supposed to have come yesterday, in time for the party, but it got delayed. I guess we can just sit on the floor and lean against the wall there. It looks clean enough.”
Once they’d sat down and got their drinks situated on the terra-cotta tiles, Barbara placed a green glass ashtray between them and borrowed Roberta’s cigarette to light her own. From their low position, they could still see a good deal of the view through the iron railing. They gazed across the river in silence for a while, and then Roberta said, “What the hell is in this punch?”
“Don’t know,” said Barbara. “Really good though.”
“Really good, yeah,” said Roberta, “but really strong. Just don’t let me go anywhere near that railing.”
After another silence, Roberta said, with no enthusiasm at all, “Quite a view.”
“I’ve never really liked views,” said Barbara. “There’s something so relentless about them.”
“Hmm,” said Roberta. “But didn’t you and Duncan have a view on Riverside Drive?”
“That was different,” said Barbara. “We looked out onto treetops. Not like this.”
A gust of warm air swept the terrace, and Roberta quickly flattened her hand over the ashtray. “Is it just me, or is Ralph unnecessarily tall?”
“Definitely,” said Barbara. “Not to mention unnecessarily rich.”
“What do you think this place cost anyway?”
“They haven’t invented a word yet for how much it cost.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what do you think happened here today? There’s like two dozen people in there, max.”
Barbara shook her head. “All I can tell you is that she told me yesterday she’d invited 60 people.”
“Sixty? Oh, my God, Barbara. That’s crazy. Is it because of that thing in the Times about Ralph? I don’t see why that would keep anybody away.”
“No, that’s not it,” said Barbara. “She sent out the invitations too late. The crowd they run with, you know they have those insane calendars. Every minute of every day, booked, months in advance. Fundraisers. Galas. Ballets. Operas. Dinners for 10, elderly men, from the UN.”
“Well, I’m busy, and I managed to get here.”
“You’re not busy, Roberta. You don’t even know what it means to be busy the way I mean it. Duncan and I, before the divorce, had something to do, somewhere to be, every single Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon. We never had a solitary minute for anything. It’s probably the actual reason we split up. I mean, aside from the fact that he was spending his lunchtimes shtupping Little Miss Barnes & Noble.”
“Barbara, you can be so funny,” said Roberta without laughing. “And who’s that boy? That Kevin person?”
Barbara shrugged one shoulder. “I saw him once before at Debbie’s,” she said. “Down on West 4th. I think they might be distantly related. Not by blood, but somebody’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s nephew or something. He has an older sister who used to work for Debbie in some capacity. I never got the whole story. You know how she is. She adopts people.”
“And there’s something not quite right about him, right?”
“I think he’s harmless,” said Barbara. “But probably on the spectrum or something.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” said Roberta. “Or maybe not autism exactly, but definitely some kind of mental illness.”
“Welcome to the club,” said Barbara. “Who do you know who doesn’t have some kind of mental illness?”
“Well, I guess it depends on how you define your terms. He’s cute, though. Don’t you think he’s cute?”
“Adorable,” Barbara said.
Roberta put out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, then removed her sunglasses, cleaned the lenses with the hem of her blouse, and put them back on. “And speaking of cute, how’s your darling Brett doing?”
“Still mad as a hornet,” Barbara answered. “Mad as a wet hen. Honestly, you’d think I’d divorced him. At the moment, he’s somewhere in Virginia.”
“Virginia?” said Roberta.
“Hiking the Appalachian Trail,” said Barbara. “I just hope to Christ it helps.”
Roberta upturned her glass and finished what was left of her drink. Afterward, she held the glass in her lap, idly rubbing her index finger a few times around the rim. “I’m drunk,” she said at last.
“Me too,” said Barbara. “Crap, I hate being drunk.”
“I know.”
“It’s just so unimaginative. I’m going to be 50 in December.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Oh, shut up, Roberta.”
“You shut up.”
“You know what I don’t like about the whole spectrum thing,” Barbara said. “It used to be somebody either had autism or they didn’t. Or maybe they had Asperger’s, you know. But now you’re obliged to say a person’s on the spectrum, the implication being that you don’t know where they are on the spectrum, just somewhere. I mean, it all just feels so, I don’t know what, like everybody’s floating around in space, on one spectrum or another. Like sexuality. Like gender. Two more spectrums everybody’s on. It’s like nothing’s specific anymore. I mean, how are you supposed to get your fucking bearings? It makes me think of my poor old mama. Last time I saw her, before she died, she was sitting in that dark living room shelling shrimp and tossing the shells over her shoulder. ‘Oh, I used to love doing this,’ she said to me, and she didn’t have a clue where or who she was—somewhere on the Alzheimer’s spectrum. It’s like life has become this big scary array of spectrums, and we’re sliding around on them wondering why we feel so confoundingly lost, so impossibly lonely all the time.”
Roberta knitted her brow and turned down the corners of her mouth. She widened her eyes and said, “Whoa.”
Barbara heaved a great sigh and said, “God, I miss my mama.”
Roberta reached for her hand. “Oh, sweetie, are you going to cry?”
After quite a long silence and without much conviction, Barbara said, “Maybe.”
The room where Kevin lay on the bed had no window and was therefore pleasantly dark, the only bit of light coming from the opening of the bathroom door, which was very slightly ajar. He’d fallen asleep, briefly, and now he rested on top of the covers thinking about pronouns. A few minutes before, when Debbie had taken him on a tour of the bedrooms, he’d remarked that this one was especially inviting. He loved its windowlessness and its sparseness, with only an ebony platform bed, a single nightstand and lamp, a dark red Chinese armoire, and a blue Persian rug. Debbie suggested he might like to lie down and rest, and though he knew she meant to dispense with him, get him out of sight, the idea of napping in the dim graceful room overrode any slight he felt. He’d removed his shoes and, in no time at all, dozed off and dreamed of meeting two beautiful Croatian women, separately and sequentially—bakers, who told him they’d drunk from a particular fountain in a particular town and that it had changed the direction of their lives. Then the rest of the dream was his trying and failing to get the two women together, since they were both bakers and had this other extraordinary thing in common. Soon he’d awakened thinking about his nonbinary friend MJ, whose pronouns were they/them/theirs. Secretly Kevin coveted MJ’s pronouns, for he thought their plurality had an unaccountable loveliness and would perfectly express the variegated nature of who he was, the prism of his real and true heart. Of course he knew without a doubt that any claim he might make to plural pronouns would be false and offensive, so it would have to remain a fantasy, unrequited—he loved the pronouns, but they didn’t love him. He thought, housewarming, and then saw in his mind’s eye a beekeeper, androgynous in a white bee suit, inspecting a hive, removing a frame, agitating the bees, and crying, “How swarming!”
He reached for his phone, which he’d left on the floor next to the bed. At 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, he was expected to report for work at the vintage furnishings store on Franklin Street where he served as a kind of jack-of-all-trades, performing every task his boss Mr. Delgado (who wasn’t the least bit delgado) didn’t like to do, including preparing, pricing, and then photographing, cataloging, and posting every item in the store on the store’s website. Now he needed to text Mr. Delgado and say he wouldn’t be coming in until midafternoon. “An urgent personal matter,” he wrote and left it at that. He knew that his boss would get over it, as Mr. Delgado was precisely the kind of man who got over things. The reason Kevin would be going in late was that he’d seen a free piano advertised on Craigslist, a 1920s Mathushek Spinet Grand, and he’d made an appointment to see it in the morning in Bronxdale. The piano’s owner was letting the piano go for free because it had a cracked pinblock and needed restringing, minor soundboard and bridge repairs, and some damper work. All Kevin had to do was pay to have the instrument moved. Kevin opened his email now and reviewed the photos of the remarkable treasure, a rectangular mahogany case that rested on four Adam-style legs. He had no explanation for why he wanted it so badly—after all, he’d never studied piano and knew nothing of piano restoration—but the moment he first saw it, he recognized it as a possible root to the problem of himself, something he could substitute for the unknowns and variables in a long, difficult equation and arrive at some clear solution.
The door to the room now opened, and two women stumbled in, laughing and then shrieking a little as they spied Kevin, on the bed, in the dark. “Oh, sorry,” said the woman he identified as Ottowoman with the southern drawl. “We didn’t know anybody was in here. We’re looking for a bathroom, and the powder room’s occupied, apparently indefinitely.”
Startled but determined not to show it, Kevin continued looking at the photos on his phone and said, calmly, pointing to the bathroom with his chin, “There’s one right there.” Superimposed on the Mathushek Spinet Grand was a detailed diagram of a mouth, stretched wide open, past a tobacco-stained grate of teeth, the medial sulcus of the tongue, the papillae, the uvula. At the same time, he heard, seemingly behind his own eyeballs, vibrating the bones of his cranium, a woman’s bloodcurdling scream.
“Me first,” said the other woman, who moved quickly across the Persian rug and disappeared into the bathroom.
Ottowoman, still at the door, said, “Sorry to barge in on you when you’re trying to rest. Is that what you’re doing in here in the dark? Trying to rest?”
Kevin, thinking papillae ever after, said, “I forgot to insert pauses into my thinking.”
As if she perfectly understood what he meant, she stepped forward into the room and closed the door behind her. “I’m Debbie’s friend Barbara,” she said. “Oh, it really is quite pleasant here in the dark. Calming, isn’t it? A nice contrast to the whatever you want to call it … the frivolity out there.”
She had not quite come into focus, but Kevin could see that she held a drink at her waist with both hands, rather ritualistically, and that she displayed an impressive cleavage in the deep V of a black blouse with shiny buttons. He judged her to be in her mid-40s and believed she might be leaning with her back against the door she’d just closed, a curiously tragic pose, he thought, and then he heard the flush of a toilet followed by running water in a sink. In a matter of seconds, the other woman came out of the bathroom, tiptoed past Kevin’s bed, giggled softly, and whispered, “Jeez, it’s dark in here.”
Once the woman had opened the door, mumbled something about prime rib to her friend, and left, Kevin said, “You’re not by any chance from Croatia, are you?”
“Croatia?” said Barbara. “Well, no, dear, I’m from Alabama.”
The room’s ceiling, which Kevin could have stared at forever, was made of polished red bricks. The gray lines of the mortar between the bricks occasionally coalesced into a grid and started to descend toward the bed like a great net, less frightening than mischievous. Barbara sat next to him, sipping her drink, her back against several pillows she’d arranged. She smelled of cigarettes and a citrusy perfume and had her ankles crossed below the hem of her white slacks. She had not removed her gold sandals. Kevin, gazing up at the ceiling, had just asked her if she could hear a deep humming noise that seeped through the walls of the room.
“I do hear something,” she said, seeming genuinely interested, “but I wouldn’t describe it as deep. More of a white noise, you know. Like the air conditioning or possibly the hum of the city or something.”
“No,” he said, “I hear that, too, but that’s not what I mean.”
“Sorry,” she said and then gave him a sideways, appraising kind of look, as if he were a patch of ice she was considering walking across. She said, “Tell me what you meant before, when you said you’d forgotten to insert pauses in your thinking?”
“It’s a strategy,” he said. “A way of preventing myself from spinning out, but I usually forget to do it. It’s too much to ask, really. Are you familiar with what’s called the pugilistic attitude in forensic science?”
“I think so,” she said. “You mean like with burn victims? It’s like this. The arms curl up as if they’re boxing.”
“That’s right,” said Kevin. “The croissant I had for breakfast this morning did exactly that. When I toasted it.”
She laughed, which pleased him. She seemed to notice this and was pleased herself. She took a sip of her drink and drew one finger across her right eyebrow, then the left. He had a feeling that she was feigning nonchalance when really she was uneasy. “And why,” she said at last, “did you ask me if I was from Croatia?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Kevin. “Something I dreamt. There were these women who made these beautiful cakes and decorated them like Kandinsky paintings.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s actually a really good idea. I mean, you could open a bakery that specialized in cakes decorated like famous paintings. Has somebody already done that?”
“Of course,” said Kevin. “You can order them online.”
“Just once, I would like to think of something that isn’t already online.”
Kevin considered this remark less than completely honest, that she might have simply been humoring him. “Listen to this,” he said. “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
“Oh, my God,” said Barbara, “that’s so beautiful. What is it?”
“Kandinsky,” answered Kevin. “He was entirely insane, but I like the idea of the soul being a piano.”
“I do, too,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m sitting in here with you in the dark like this. If somebody came in they’d think we were up to something.”
“We are up to something,” said Kevin, and right away, the theme to The Addams Family with the snapping fingers started playing in his head, quickly drowned out by Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor.
“Pray tell,” she said. “What are we up to?”
He shrugged. “The same thing people are up to all the time, everywhere. Sitting next to each other on a bus or on a beach. Riding up a mountainside in a gondola. We’re exploring.”
She laughed again. “Exploring,” she said. “I like that. I think the only gondola I ever rode in was the Venetian kind. And that was a hundred years ago, on my honeymoon.”
Kevin recalled that there was a cocktail called a honeymoon and one called a doppelgänger and an arboreal insect, Crematogaster peringueyi, commonly known as the black cocktail ant. He imagined a knock at the door, a middle-aged man dressed in camo bib and outback hat, her husband, who’d come looking for her. “I guess you’re divorced,” Kevin said.
“Is it so obvious?” she said.
“You were sitting on the ottoman,” he said. “Why did you get divorced?”
“Because of the biggest cliché in the book,” she said. “He was having an affair.”
“With a friend of yours?”
“No, no,” she said. “Just somebody he met in a bookstore. A girl, really. A clerk. About your age. About the age of our son.”
“And you couldn’t forgive him.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “I don’t think I tried very hard. And he didn’t seem very sorry.”
Kevin looked at her. She appeared older to him now. She picked up her drink but only stared down into the glass. She said, “Maybe you could give me some advice.”
“About what?”
“About my son Brett,” she said. “He’s just about your age, and he’s very angry at me about the divorce, even though it’s been two whole years already.”
“You think because I’m his age, I can give you advice?” asked Kevin.
“Of course you can’t,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’ve had too much to drink. I wouldn’t even be here if I wasn’t a little sloshed.”
“Does he like baseball?” Kevin asked. “Is he a Yankees fan? A Mets fan? I guess you could give him tickets to a game. He’d probably like that. Or maybe this amazing sterling silver letter opener from the store where I work. Though nobody really gets letters anymore. It might just end up being a murder weapon. You could give him a telescope. Or you can never go wrong with a really good aviator watch.”
At that moment his phone buzzed. He sat up, looked at the screen, and said, “Uh-oh.”
“Do you need to take that?” she asked.
“Yes, but don’t leave,” he said. “I might have some more ideas for you.”
It was Michelle, his sister, and the first thing she said was, “Why didn’t you tell Debbie I was coming in a little while? Like I asked you to?”
“Oh, right,” said Kevin. “But she didn’t ask me if you were coming.”
“Well, I know she was wondering where I was because she called and asked me.”
“Where are you anyway?”
“Now I’m in a cab on my way up there. I told you when I dropped you off that I had to go downtown to the theater and that I would be back in about an hour.”
“Right, the theater,” said Kevin. A red velour curtain rose above a proscenium arch to reveal a young man in a wooden chair, shirtless, a patient in a psych ward, stark against a backdrop of bare ruined choirs.
“Kevin,” she said. “Did you take your meds?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I took my meds. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Barbara stood up now and whispered that she thought she should give him some privacy, but he waved her back so violently, she sat down again.
“I’m just asking, Kevin,” said Michelle.
“Okay,” he said, “but I want you to think about something. Think about me asking you whether or not you used your deodorant this morning. There’s an implication and you should recognize that and think about it before you ask.”
“All right, Kevin. It’s just that you assured me you’d be all right for an hour.”
“I was all right,” he said. “I am all right.”
“Debbie said you seemed a little agitated, that’s all. I’ll be there in 15 minutes. But I really don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.”
“I need you to go with me to the Bronx tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t start with that business about the piano again. You have work tomorrow morning, and so do I.”
“I have an appointment,” he said. “I’m going whether you come with me or not.”
“No, Kevin, you’re not,” she said. “You absolutely are not. We’ve gone over this already about a thousand times. Now I’m hanging up the phone.”
“Wait,” he said. “I want to ask you something important. Is it true that right before Mother died, she sat bolt upright in bed and said, ‘I didn’t know there would really be trumpets’?”
After a moment, his sister said, “According to Daddy, yes, it’s true.”
“I’ve always liked that, that she said that.”
“I know it, Kevin,” said Michelle, “but really, I can’t keep doing this.”
She did hang up then, and Kevin said to Barbara, “Right before my mother died, she sat bolt upright in bed and said, ‘I didn’t know there would really be trumpets.’ ”
Then, to his own surprise, he heard himself making a hissing sound, like a pressure cooker he’d seen long ago in a cartoon. Barbara quickly set down her drink on the nightstand and took him into her arms, whispering, “Oh, my poor boy …” He rested his chin on her shoulder and wept, and he was 99 percent certain that she was crying too, only more softly. He sensed that the gray mortar net on the high ceiling was descending slowly toward them, and when he looked up, he counted nine faces of deer behind the mesh. Barbara still smelled like cigarettes and a lemony perfume but also like something new, something along the lines of wet wool. Zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds, he thought, and then he tried to kiss her. He felt her breath on his lips, finer than dew, a thimbleful of mist. She slid both her hands onto his chest and pushed him an inch or two away. “No, love,” she said, “no, no. That wouldn’t be okay. Maybe okay for you, but not for me.”
And they separated and sat as before, side by side. After a few seconds—because he’d already begun to think about dying, and how, according to a theory he was passionate about, when you die, if you die young, you just wake up in another life and take up right where you left off—he said, “Do you believe in parallel universes?”
She made an airy little laughing sound, took a tissue from a box on the nightstand, carefully dabbed her eyes, blew her nose, let out a once-and-for-all kind of sigh, and then reached for her drink. “I think so,” she said. “I never really thought about it before, but hell, sure I do. Why not?”
The main reason why not, thought Kevin with a tinge of impatience, was that nobody had ever produced any empirical evidence for such a thing. Still, evidentia, from the medieval Latin, meant “that which is obvious.” And, regardless of whether we lived in a finite or infinite universe, matter could be arranged in only so many ways and was bound, eventually, to repeat itself.
The post Housewarming appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1887, when real estate developers Harvey and Daeida Wilcox founded the Hollywood subdivision outside Los Angeles, there were already two famous Hollywoods in America: a luxury hotel in New Jersey and a cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. The cemetery was especially well known, celebrated in newspapers nationwide as a kind of Confederate Valhalla for secessionist luminaries. So it’s surprising that if you search online for the origins of Hollywood’s name, neither of the two appears.
Why has there been a collective forgetting of the 19th-century history of “Hollywood”? Is it because both famous Hollywoods had intimate ties to the Old South, and Californians are attempting to prune Confederates from Hollywood’s family tree?
That’s getting harder to do, now that Kevin Waite has produced West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (2021). Waite writes that in the mid-19th century, Southern California experienced an influx of settlers from slaveholding states who sought to extend slavery all the way to the Pacific. As a result, during the Civil War, Los Angeles was a hotbed of secessionists. “Let it never be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Bulletin’s Southern California correspondent in 1862, “that the county of Los Angeles, in this day of peril to the Republic, is two to one for Dixie and Disunion.” Hundreds of these rebel sympathizers went east to fight for the Confederacy, and about 80 joined the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, the only Confederate militia to be organized in a free state. Meanwhile a federal garrison was stationed in Los Angeles County, after General Edwin Vose Sumner, commander of the U.S. Department of the Pacific, complained that he was struggling to contain tens of thousands of pro-Confederate Californians. Even in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat, L.A.’s secessionists continued to push a white-supremacist agenda: California was the only former free state, during Reconstruction, to reject both the 14th and 15th amendments, which granted citizenship to former slaves and gave Black men the vote.
After reading Waite’s book, I began to understand why Southern California responded so enthusiastically, in 1915, to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, and why the film industry so readily embraced Margaret Mitchell’s Lost Cause epic, Gone With the Wind. As James Baldwin later wrote, “There is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.” Yet for all of his excellent research, Waite does not address the Confederate history of “Hollywood”—an important story if we hope to understand the nationwide legacy of the Lost Cause.
Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery was established in 1847 by a pair of wealthy Virginians who had visited Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wanted to build an equally grand garden cemetery for the South. They got the name from the property’s holly bushes, which flourished in southeastern soil and had inspired a host of smaller Hollywoods, including a Hollywood resort in Mobile, Alabama, a Hollywood vineyard in Natchez, Mississippi, and Hollywood Plantation in Benoit, Mississippi.
In 1858, Hollywood became firmly established in the national imagination when President James Monroe’s body was disinterred from a New York City grave and transported to Virginia. Details of the commemorations surrounding the president’s reburial, which attracted thousands of southerners and lasted several days, were publicized in The New York Times and other newspapers across the country.
Hollywood continued to make news during the Civil War whenever a favorite son of the South was buried. Most notable was the funeral of President John Tyler in 1862. Although Tyler had requested a simple burial, Jefferson Davis devised an elaborate political event to celebrate the southern cause. Two years later came the burial of J. E. B. Stuart—the much-idolized young cavalry commander—and Hollywood was on its way to becoming the holy wood for Confederate heroes.
In May 1866, just over a year after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, a vast crowd of Richmonders gathered to place flowers on the cemetery’s Confederate graves, which numbered in the thousands. The Richmond Times, in an article reprinted in newspapers as far afield as the Dallas Herald and New Orleans Times, described the event as “the pilgrimage to Hollywood, the Mecca of the South.” Attending the following year’s “pilgrimage,” the Richmond correspondent of The New York Times wrote, “There is not this morning, we suppose, a single flower left upon its stalk in Richmond or its environs,” since “troops of little girls” gathering flowers had completely “traversed the city.”
Meanwhile, southern women went about transforming the cemetery into the official city of the Confederate dead. The Lee-Custis family estate, Arlington, had been appropriated by the federal government in 1861 and was later made into a national veterans’ cemetery, but Confederates were banned from that ground. The Ladies Hollywood Memorial Association embraced the mission of bringing to Hollywood the remains of Confederates that were, at that point, scattered across the country. In 1869, they erected a 90-foot granite “Confederate Pyramid” at Hollywood, which today is surrounded by the graves of 18,000 Confederate enlisted men, including most of the almost 3,400 soldiers who, by 1873, had been disinterred from Gettysburg. Hollywood eventually became the final resting place of 28 Confederate generals, as well as Jefferson Davis.
By the mid-1880s, Hollywood Cemetery’s fame had spread to California. The Los Angeles Times first mentioned “Hollywood” on May 21, 1885, almost two years before the Wilcoxes founded their subdivision, in a brief item about the new Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond. The name would also have been familiar to the Confederate veterans who dominated local politics. When the Wilcoxes arrived in California in 1883, the mayor of Los Angeles, Cameron Thom, was a Confederate veteran from Virginia who had fought at Gettysburg. None of this necessarily means that Daeida Wilcox or H. J. Whitley—a real estate developer known as the “Father of Hollywood”—borrowed “Hollywood” from Richmond’s cemetery (Daeida reportedly said she liked the word because holly brings luck). But it demonstrates that the word was an established part of American culture long before Daeida and other Californians adopted it.
Another famous Hollywood that preceded California’s was John Hoey’s Hollywood Hotel, in Long Branch, New Jersey—one of the most extravagant properties of the Gilded Age. In the 1880s, wealthy New Yorkers spent their summers reveling in Hoey’s extravagant gardens, and their winters marveling at his “miles of greenhouses,” described by The New York Times as a tropical paradise. According to one Times correspondent, “travelers from all parts of the country went to Long Branch to see Hollywood.” H. J. Whitley and Daeida Wilcox, therefore, might have associated the word with Gilded Age excess rather than unpleasant ties to the Old South. But if so, this would merely introduce one degree of separation: Hoey had made his fortune with money he earned in the Old South, when he extended the operations of the Adams Express Company south of Washington, D.C., to establish what became known as “Hoey’s Charleston Express.”
Hoey’s extensive southern business ties probably wouldn’t have troubled the New Yorkers who frequented his hotel. Like the early leaders of Los Angeles, members of New York’s elite were quite comfortable with southern culture. Many of them had prospered as loyal subjects of King Cotton. On the cusp of the Civil War, the city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, actually pushed for New York to secede from the Union and establish itself as a sovereign city-state so that it could maintain its lucrative business with slaveholders. The idea didn’t get far.
The New Yorkers at John Hoey’s hotel almost certainly would have known that it shared its name with Virginia’s cemetery. Before the war, New Yorkers visiting Long Branch had mingled with southern aristocrats, including Jefferson Davis, whose wife, Varina, was the granddaughter of New Jersey’s governor. After her husband’s death, Varina settled in Manhattan but was ultimately buried at Hollywood, along with her husband and children. When she died, her coffin processed through Manhattan before journeying to the much-romanticized cemetery. According to a piece published in The New York Times almost 40 years earlier:
Thousands visited the beautiful graveyard, wandered through its valleys and over its hills, and lunched on sandwiches and strawberries by the side of its cooling brooks. … Love-making, too, during the entire day was carried on to an unlimited extent, and many a troth was plighted, and many a doubting, fearing heart made glad, beneath the trysting shades and amid the grand mausoleums of romantic Hollywood.
It is difficult to imagine that the founders of Los Angeles’s Hollywood Cemetery, which opened in 1899, could have been unaware of its resonance with Confederate mythology. The Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy made the connection explicit in 1925, when it put in place a six-foot granite monument to the Confederate dead, which was surrounded by 37 graves of Confederate veterans, including several who had been residents of the Confederate rest home “Dixie Manor,” in nearby San Gabriel. Yet today, the cemetery—now called Hollywood Forever Cemetery and home to a who’s-who of dead celebrities—doesn’t outwardly acknowledge any southern roots.
Neither did Hollywood’s Chamber of Commerce, when in 1989 it filed a trademark claim seeking royalties from other Hollywoods throughout America. One of them—Hollywood, Alabama (named in 1887, incorporated in 1897)—responded by painting “we’re the real hollywood” on its water tower. Ultimately, a judge balked at the idea that trademarks could be applied to names of incorporated cities and towns. However, the chamber of commerce did manage to trademark the all-caps Hollywood sign that presides over the Hollywood Hills, even though it looks suspiciously like the similar all-caps sign that already stood outside New Jersey’s Hollywood Hotel in the early 20th century.
All of this brings us back to Kevin Waite’s research for West of Slavery, which he outlined in a 2017 Los Angeles Times op-ed. There, he drew attention to the Confederate monument in Hollywood Forever Cemetery and explained why he hoped it would not be taken down:
It serves as a needed corrective to a self-congratulatory strain in the stories Californians tell about themselves. Angelenos might be tempted to view the current controversy over Confederate symbols, and the ugly racial politics they represent, as a distinctly Southern problem. But a visit to Hollywood’s cemetery plot and some historical perspective teach us otherwise.
Waite’s op-ed was published on August 4, 2017, just eight days before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Four days after that national trauma, the monument at Hollywood Forever was taken down, and in 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, almost all of California’s remaining Confederate monuments were removed. Perhaps the monument at Hollywood Forever needed to go, but the inscription on its granite marker contained a valuable message that still bears thought: Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget.
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In 1981, when Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) was a young artist in search of a style, he received a present that would change his life: an extensive archive of photographic negatives that had belonged to the father he’d never known. Thomas Ellis, a postal clerk and former U.S. Marine, was killed by two off-duty police officers in 1958, when his wife was pregnant with Darrel. The elder Ellis’s photographs of his extended family became central to his son’s artistic endeavors, which included photography, figurative painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. As Darrel Ellis cultivated his own evocative, elusive style, he seemed to be continually engaging, in ways both subtle and overt, with the story of his father’s passing. Ellis’s depictions of his family are quiet and poetic. Some appear to be cut up, fragmented, riven by an unknowable force. Yet despite their elliptical quality, the pieces invite a visceral response. As the scholar Derek Conrad Murray writes, “It is precisely the fractured and unreliable nature of our memories, the conflicted and often fraught relations with family, combined with the joys, traumas, and disappointments of our past, that render this work so incredibly poignant.”
Ellis lived his life in New York, moving between the Bronx of his birth and Brooklyn. By the mid-1980s, his work had begun receiving extensive critical praise, and it eventually featured in more than 20 group exhibitions both here and abroad. Now, 30 years after Ellis’s death from complications related to AIDS, he is the subject of a major retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
In 1987, Ellis went to work as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, where he spent many hours studying the seminal pieces displayed there. If only he had known that one day, his own art would be as celebrated as some of the works over which he kept watch.
All quotes from David Hirsh’s interview with Darrel Ellis, January 21, 1991
The post In the Frame of the Father appeared first on The American Scholar.
If humanity’s technological progress can be compared to climbing a mountain, then the Anthropocene finds us perched on a crumbling ledge, uncertain how long we have until it collapses. The most obvious way out is to turn back and retrace our steps to an earlier stage of civilization, with fewer people using fewer resources. This would mean acknowledging that humanity is unequal to the task of shaping the world, that we can thrive only by living within the limits set by nature.
But this kind of voluntary turning back might be so contrary to our nature that it can never happen. It is far more plausible that the human journey was fated to end up in this dangerous spot ever since we first began to change the ecosystem with farming and fire. Such a view forms the basis of antihumanism, a system of thought that removes humans from their pedestal and contends that, given our penchant for destruction—not only of ourselves but also all other species—we are less deserving of existence than are animals, plants, rocks, water, or air. For antihumanists, the only way off the precipice is a fall, with the survivors left to pick up the pieces. And if there are no survivors, that wouldn’t be a tragedy; there will always be beings in the world, even if there are no human beings.
Australian philosopher Toby Ord uses the image of the crumbling ledge in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). “Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves,” Ord writes. He believes that the odds of this happening in the next 100 years are about one in six, the same as in a game of Russian roulette. “Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover,” he concludes.
Ord is not an antihumanist but rather a transhumanist, a research fellow at the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which looks to scientific and technological advances as the only path forward. Transhumanists agree with antihumanists that human nature is morally and physically circumscribed in ways that make it impossible for us to get past the precipice. They likewise agree that Homo sapiens is doomed to disappear. But for transhumanists, this is a wonderful prospect because we will disappear by climbing instead of falling. As Ord writes, “Rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today.” That something will no longer be “us” in the strictest sense, but our posthuman successors will preserve what is best and most important about us. “I love humanity, not because we are Homo sapiens, but because of our capacity to flourish,” Ord writes.
Assuming that our technological capability continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the past 200 years, it will become the means of our salvation. “If we can last long enough,” Ord declares, “we will have a chance to literally save our world.” And that’s just the beginning. The future holds “possible heights of flourishing far beyond the status quo, and far beyond our current comprehension.” Transcendent happiness and wisdom are beckoning, just as distant galaxies are waiting for us to colonize. Homo sapiens has existed for about 200,000 years and has recorded history for just 5,000, but “trillions of years lie ahead of us,” Ord promises. “The future is immense.”
There’s only one catch, and it lies in the word us. We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only so high. There is a limit to how much we can feel, how deeply we can think, how fast we can move. As for those other galaxies, as long as our bodies need oxygen, water, and food, reaching them is impossible; even a trip to Mars is hard going. In this way, transhumanism soon runs up against the same problem of limit that defines the Anthropocene. At some point, the limitless human will must confront the limited capabilities of nature, including human nature.
Transhumanism emerged as a distinct school of thought in the 1980s, when philosophers, scientists, and artists began to think intensively about how technology might transform human bodies and minds. By the 1990s, it had its own publications and nonprofit organizations, including the Extropy Institute, now defunct, and the World Transhumanist Association, which was renamed Humanity+ in 2008. In his book To Be a Machine (2017), Slate columnist Mark O’Connell profiled some of the leading personalities in the transhumanist movement, finding an eerie comedy in the “extremity and strangeness” of its ideas.
A concise statement of the movement’s ambitions can be found in the Transhumanist Declaration, issued in 1998 by a group of about 20 scientists and writers. Starting from the premise that “humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized,” the declaration calls for using technology to “[broaden] human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” While acknowledging the “serious risks” that come with new technologies, the declaration unequivocally endorsed an ambitious program of species transformation, which will make possible “wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.”
Traditionally, when people speak of “the human condition,” they are thinking about lack and limit. “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” the book of Job says. The biblical story of the fall of man explains why we are condemned to be born in pain, earn bread by the sweat of our brow, and finally die. But technology has already palliated Adam’s curse, and transhumanists believe that the next few decades will begin to complete our liberation from “involuntary suffering.” Aging will be dramatically slowed or abolished, so that we will measure our lives in centuries rather than decades. Our senses will be refined, giving us access to colors, sounds, and feelings for which we currently have no vocabulary. Our brains will be supercharged, so that the average person will think more rapidly and deeply than Einstein. We will be able to redesign our bodies to make them more efficient or simply more aesthetically appealing.
These changes will make the lives of our descendants immeasurably better than our own. They will be the supermen Nietzsche could only dream about. Nick Bostrom, the leading academic philosopher of transhumanism, outlined this future in his 2006 essay “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up”:
You have just celebrated your 170th birthday and you feel stronger than ever. Each day is a joy. You have invented entirely new art forms, which exploit the new kinds of cognitive capacities and sensibilities you have developed. You still listen to music—music that is to Mozart what Mozart is to bad Muzak.
Such aspirations have already spread far beyond the transhumanist subculture. Ideas like radical life extension, mind uploading, and interstellar exploration now have powerful supporters among the billionaires of Silicon Valley, for whom the transformative potential of technology is self-evidently good. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and of the data analytics company Palantir, is an investor in life-extension research and a member of Alcor Life Extension, an Arizona nonprofit that cryogenically preserves its members’ brains when they die, in the hope that the technology to resurrect them will one day be invented. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, established a division called California Life Company, or Calico, devoted to anti-aging research; Time magazine reported on it in 2013 under the headline “Can Google Solve Death?” Elon Musk created SpaceX in 2002 with the aim of lowering the cost of space flight to enable the colonization of Mars.
It’s no coincidence that transhumanism took off in the early 21st century at the same time as the concept of the Anthropocene. Both ideas rest on the intuition that human life can’t continue the way it is now, that our world is on the brink of a fundamental transformation. This gives them the appeal of all apocalyptic thinking, which endows the present with extraordinary significance by seeing it as the hinge of history, the most important time of all. Ord writes that “we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species.” Physicist Max Tegmark, associate director of the Foundational Questions Institute at MIT, writes in his 2017 book, Life 3.0: “Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.” Physicist Michio Kaku agrees. “Humanity is about to embark on perhaps its greatest adventure,” he writes in The Future of Humanity (2018).
In the past, apocalyptic belief systems have been religious in nature, looking to God to bring about the end times. Transhumanism maintains that we ourselves hold the keys to the future, in the form of the technologies abbreviated as GNR—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Soon, genetic engineering will make it possible for us to eliminate many diseases, halt the aging process, and enhance our physical and mental abilities. Nanotechnology will enable us to build atomic machines measurable in nanometers—one millionth of a millimeter. Robots on this scale can be injected into the bloodstream to continuously repair damage on the cellular level, preventing disease and aging. In his 2009 essay “Welcome to the Future of Medicine,” nanotechnology researcher Robert Freitas wrote that “performance improvements up to 1000-fold over natural biological systems of similar function appear possible.”
The imminence of these technologies means that human beings alive today have a chance to become effectively immortal. English longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey believes that we will soon achieve “longevity escape velocity,” the point at which life-extension technology will outpace biological aging, making death from old age a thing of the past. In 2008, de Grey posited that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old had already been born. Inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, a leading popularizer of transhumanist ideas, declared in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, that he intended to be one of them. “I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week,” Kurzweil wrote. By aggressively “reprogramming [his] biochemistry,” he hoped to extend his natural lifespan until the advent of technologies to reverse aging “in the second decade of this century.”
That target has already been missed. Freitas wrote in 2009 that he expected “the design and manufacture of medical nanorobots for life extension” to happen “perhaps during the 2020s,” and that goal too now looks unlikely. As these examples suggest, transhumanism has an innate tendency to overpromise. The big breakthroughs always seem to lie just over the horizon, inviting the suspicion that they’re as unreal as a receding mirage in the desert. As Bostrom sardonically observed in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), “Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred.”
This is another way that the prophets of transhumanism mirror those of the Anthropocene: those who warn of an impending climate catastrophe also tend to locate the planet’s point of no return in the middle distance. But in both cases, they are extrapolating from developments that are undeniably real. Biochemists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on CRISPR, a tool for deleting and replacing individual genes that makes “gene editing” a practical possibility for the first time. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to create the world’s first genetically edited babies, twin girls designed to be resistant to HIV.
Far from being welcomed as a transhumanist breakthrough, however, this development was greeted with worldwide condemnation, and the scientist was sentenced to three years in prison. Clearly, most of us aren’t yet prepared for such a dramatic blurring of the distinction between nature and technology—what Kurzweil calls “reengineering the computer of life.” And there is a good argument for caution. When technology gave us the power to extensively reshape the planet in the service of our desires, the result was the devastation of the Anthropocene. If we start to reshape our bodies and minds, the result might be equally dismaying.
One of the most eloquent opponents of transhumanist ambitions is Leon Kass, a molecular biologist who emerged in the 1990s as a leading conservative bioethicist. In his book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity (2002), Kass asserts that “in some crucial cases … repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.” Our instinctive revulsion toward incest, for instance, goes beyond a rational critique of the genetic dangers of inbreeding; we see it not as a mere error but in terms of “horror” and “defilement.” If cloning provokes a similar repulsion in most people, Kass writes, that proves it involves a “violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.”
This idea, which has come to be known as “the wisdom of repugnance,” accurately captures the basis of many people’s instinctive opposition to transhumanism. But it also reveals the incoherence of that opposition, its inability to give a convincing account of itself. Racial mixing and homosexuality also once looked like defilement to most people; slavery and the caste system were things humanity held dear for millennia. Entrenched evils can be overcome only when they are subjected to rational scrutiny, which is exactly what Kass seeks to avoid in the case of genetic engineering and cloning. The wisdom of repugnance means that reason falls silent when it most needs to be heard.
For Kass, human nature is constituted by limits—to our rationality, our power, the satisfaction of our desires. If science and technology succeed in abolishing those limits, we will forfeit what we value most in ourselves, the quality Kass calls “human dignity.” Dignity may elude exact definition, but he is certain of “what a dignified human life is all about: engagement, seriousness, the love of beauty, the practice of moral virtue, the aspiration to something transcendent, the love of understanding, the gift of children and the possibility of perpetuating a life devoted to a high and holy calling.”
It’s not immediately obvious what all these things have in common, or why a cloned human being couldn’t experience them as authentically as an identical twin, who is also the genetic duplicate of another person. But Kass’s objection becomes clearer if it is understood as a defense of the value of striving. The good life would be cheapened if technology could give it to us on a silver platter, no effort required. To use Bostrom’s example, there’s no glory in being Mozart if genetic engineering makes everyone as superior “to Mozart [as] Mozart is to bad Muzak.”
Transhumanists have long experience with this kind of moralizing opposition, which is one reason why they tend to be libertarians. As the Transhumanist Declaration states, “We favor allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives.” People who feel that their dignity is impaired by too much power, health, and pleasure should be free to avoid transhuman enhancements, but they shouldn’t be able to limit the options of those who feel otherwise.
In a 2001 essay titled “Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It,” neuroscientist Anders Sandberg goes further, asserting that there is a human right to “modify oneself according to one’s desires.” This right follows logically from the beliefs we already hold about bodily autonomy. Disabled people shouldn’t be compelled to have surgery to correct their disabilities, since that would be a violation of their autonomy and dignity; people have the right to keep the bodies they want, regardless of society’s view of what is most desirable. By the same token, Sandberg continues, people shouldn’t be prevented from having surgery or other treatments to achieve the bodies they want, even if society sees them as abnormal. As Sandberg puts it, “If I want to have green skin, it is my own problem—nobody has the moral right to prevent me.”
Even if governments want to ban such procedures, it may be too late to draw a clear line between human beings and the human-machine hybrids known as cyborgs. The word cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism,” has long been associated with sci-fi villains like Star Trek’s Borg who warn their enemies that “resistance is futile.” So it was a transgressive gesture when feminist literary theorist Donna Haraway, in her influential 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” recast the cyborg as a liberating role model for “a post-gender world.” “My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work,” she wrote.
For Haraway, the cyborg’s uncanniness was liberating rather than threatening. In the 21st century, however, the most notable thing about cyborgs is how banal they are. The fusion of biology and technology hasn’t taken the spectacular forms imagined in movies such as Robocop or The Terminator. Rather, as N. Katherine Hayles observed in her 1999 book, How We Became Posthuman, it has taken the innocuous form of “electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin.” By this definition, Hayles writes, “about 10 percent of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense.”
No one feels “the wisdom of repugnance” about an elderly person whose life is extended by technology, or a baby whose life is made possible by it. When the first infant was born via in vitro fertilization in 1978, the advent of “test tube babies” seemed sinister to many. Today, some eight million human beings have been born through IVF, and many insurance companies cover it as they would any other medical procedure. It’s likely that CRISPR editing will follow the same route: what now sounds like tampering with the code of life will become standard prenatal care.
Indeed, history suggests that as long as GNR technologies are understood as means of curing diseases or overcoming disabilities, people will embrace them. Who would turn down an injection of nanorobots if it guaranteed freedom from cancer and Alzheimer’s? Once gene editing is perfected, refusing to eliminate genetic diseases in an embryo will be as rare as refusing to allow a child a blood transfusion today, and might provoke equal indignation from secular, scientific-minded people. Adopting new technologies is perfectly consistent with continuing to fret about their social and ethical implications. Just look at smartphones and social media, which everybody uses even as we deplore misinformation and shrinking attention spans.
For the most radical transhumanists, however, reengineering our bodies isn’t only about therapy or disease prevention. Aesthetic motives like adornment and self-expression are seen as equally valid. Natasha Vita-More, an early transhumanist theorist, envisions a new art form, “human biosculpture, where the human body, mind, and identity are modified by the user. … For artists and designers in the biological arts, the idea of molding or sculpting the human form has enormous potential.”
Vita-More sees posthuman bodies developing from the technologies now used for prosthetics: “robotic electronics, AI-generated programming, lightweight silicone, titanium, aluminum, plastics, and carbon-fiber composites, and aesthetic streamline design.” Rather than replacing a missing body part, why not create a “prosthetic you”?
Such ambitions make clear that what transhumanism rejects isn’t simply mortality and suffering but the very idea of a fixed human nature. Our minds and bodies should be endlessly plastic, able to assume whatever shape and enjoy whatever experiences our ingenuity can invent. As the transhumanist thinker Max More, who is married to Vita-More, wrote in 2013, “Transhumanists regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect, and not as having any claim on our allegiance. Rather, it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway and we can learn to reshape our own nature in ways we deem desirable and valuable.”
According to Genesis, the human form is divine: “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.” But from a Darwinian standpoint, there is nothing unique about Homo sapiens. We are one of countless life forms to have emerged from the blind, purposeless play of evolution. As Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Homo Deus (2015), a skeptical survey of transhumanist aspirations, “For 4 billion years natural selection has been tweaking and tinkering with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that Sapiens is the last station.”
The only thing that makes humanity unique, transhumanists believe, is our ability to compensate for our biological weaknesses with the power of technology. Slower than horses, weaker than elephants, less versatile than roaches, humans dominate them all because we are able to change ourselves, while they are stuck with the abilities nature gave them. It’s not recent technologies like pacemakers that make us cyborg-like; we have always been cyborgs because technology has always been a fundamental part of human being.
A delighted admiration of humanity’s ability to explore and change is one of transhumanism’s legacies from classical humanism. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, published in 1496, imagined God telling mankind:
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, [are] impeded by no such restrictions. … We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
Philosophically inclined transhumanists like to quote the Oration as a precedent for their view that the only thing permanent about us is our need to change. There is no static human nature to which we can appeal in an attempt to halt technological progress. On the contrary, in transcending Homo sapiens, we are actually preserving the most authentically human thing about us. As Kurzweil writes, “If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”
This belief allows transhumanists to face a posthuman future without dread. In Richard Powers’s 2018 novel, The Overstory, one of the characters drinks poison as a sacrifice on behalf of the trees, demonstrating that human beings are capable of forming such a strong bond with the nonhuman that they are willing to die for it. For transhumanists, the replacement of humanity by a better, more intelligent, more capable successor species is a similarly worthy sacrifice, even if it ends up creating a world in which human beings can no longer find their own reflection.
This essay is adapted from The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, published by Columbia Global Reports.
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