Why progress is hard to see | The Gray Area
Vox
0:00 We don't really know who we are
0:01 because mainstream and right-wing media has worked
0:04 really hard here in the US to convince us that the minority is the majority.
0:08 That this angry minority that's antivax,
0:12 anti-immigration, anti-reproductive rights, anti-trans and queer rights,
0:17 anti-environmental and climate action is really the majority.
0:21 And it makes people feel powerless and isolated
0:24 and alienated when in fact we are the majority.
0:45 Rebecca Snit, welcome to the show.
0:48 My pleasure.
0:48 Hello.
0:49 Hello.
0:50 I like the way you write.
0:51 Can I just say that right at the top?
0:54 Hell yeah.
0:55 I do not object to that kind of remark as you might expect.
1:01 Um, this book reads to me like it was written with urgency.
1:06 I mean, it kind of felt like you felt like you needed to write it right now.
1:12 Is that right?
1:13 I see a lot of my writing dealing with politics in the very
1:17 specific sense of the current US crisis in the broader sense as equipment.
1:22 And I wanted people to have this equipment as soon as possible.
1:25 The book is rough in places.
1:27 There's a few repetitions and things.
1:30 And there was this moment where I was like, well,
1:32 I could bring it out in the fall of 2026 um and take some more time to revise,
1:38 but I wanted it out now.
1:42 And I actually think we're on this the upswing in a lot of ways.
1:45 everything.
1:46 Trump is kind of imploding, collapsing, decaying,
1:49 starting with the guy himself who just looks like
1:53 he's rotting in every possible way mentally and physically.
1:58 But, you know, I wanted to hand people this other picture,
2:02 this longer perspective on where we are, how we got here,
2:07 how much the right is engaged in backlash against
2:10 everything we've done over the last 70 or so years.
2:14 Yeah.
2:15 To equip people for what we need to do.
2:17 This is a book about change.
2:19 Um, we we'll get into the meat of that, but something
2:23 you you talk about throughout is that we're
2:26 actually pretty bad at recognizing change or at least pretty
2:31 bad at recognizing positive change while we're living through it.
2:35 Um, why do you think that is?
2:37 Are we just wired for pessimism?
2:41 There's a bunch of different pieces that come together to create that condition.
2:45 One I would diagnose is amnesia.
2:49 If you to perceive change,
2:52 you have to see time in increments as big as the changes.
2:55 Something I run into all the time, for example,
2:57 is people saying either that feminism failed as though you should undo millennia
3:03 of patriarchy in one lifetime or you're not doing anything, feminism is dead.
3:09 So if you don't have the memory of what
3:10 the status of women was before second-wave feminism in the '60s,
3:14 you can't see that change.
3:16 That's one piece of it.
3:18 And there's a way that we have to lock on to the short term in this moment.
3:22 What happened today, what's going to happen tomorrow that doesn't help us see
3:26 what happened over the last 10 and 20 and 50 years.
3:30 And then there's a third thing.
3:31 I think there's something in English-speaking world
3:34 that's kind of puritanical and Protestant and wimpy
3:38 that is kind of doomer defeist grumpy
3:42 negative pessimistic um full of premature surrender.
3:48 I thought Timothy Snider's 20 rules for surviving authoritarianism he wrote
3:54 right after Trump got elected the first time was so important.
3:59 you know, the do not surrender in advance.
4:02 Um, which is essentially deciding the regime
4:05 has all the power and you have none.
4:07 Obeying when you don't need to obey, um, giving up the power you have.
4:12 And people do that a lot.
4:13 They decide they have the gift of prophecy.
4:16 Oh, they're going to do they're going to hold all the power.
4:19 They're going to do this.
4:20 They're going to do that.
4:21 There's nothing we can do about it.
4:24 And I see people all the time give up the real power we
4:26 have to make the future in the present because the future does not exist.
4:31 It's a result of how we show up.
4:34 Well, staying with this this the theme of change.
4:36 Um I think a fairly popular view of the last 50 60 70 years of American
4:43 history at least is that it's mostly
4:47 a story of disruption and and cultural decline.
4:51 Lots of backlash, lots of anger and discontentment.
4:55 You know this narrative.
4:56 The book is largely a response to it just right out of the gate.
5:01 Do you think it's true that story?
5:05 I think it's there's a lot of truth in it,
5:08 but it's tracking a specific number of things.
5:12 You know, often the left is so busy watching the right, it doesn't watch itself.
5:18 Something I found over and over as I participate in movements is
5:22 that our enemies take us seriously even when we don't take ourselves seriously.
5:26 Occupy Wall Street, for example,
5:28 which I often hear people say didn't achieve anything,
5:33 um, achieved so many things, but at the time that it was erupting,
5:37 not just in lower Manhattan, but all over the US and beyond,
5:41 there was an Occupy Auckland in New Zealand.
5:44 It was really scaring the captains of industry,
5:47 the people at the top of capitalism,
5:50 they saw us as very powerful even when there was a lot of grumpiness about,
5:54 you know, not doing anything, not having any power.
5:58 The apherism at the heart of this book is
6:00 the famous one by Grahamshy that an old world is dying,
6:05 a new world is struggling to be born, now is the time of monsters.
6:08 There's lots of attention to the old world dying.
6:11 And I believe a lot of the kind
6:13 of misogynist white supremacist hyper capitalism, environmental destruction,
6:19 climate denial of the Trump administration
6:22 and authoritarianism generally is a kind
6:24 of supernova and a kind of backlash against what we've achieved, you know.
6:30 So the monsters get lots of attention.
6:32 The old world dying gets lots of attention.
6:34 I felt like people weren't really seeing the new world being born.
6:38 Uh we have changed the world so profoundly um through the anti-racism,
6:44 the civil rights movements,
6:46 the feminist movement, queer rights, disability rights.
6:49 Um, underlying them all, a kind of human rights agenda
6:53 that insists on universal human rights, on equality,
6:57 on breaking down a lot of the aparthide
6:59 and segregation and separation that was so normalized
7:04 in the world I was born into, which was
7:06 a world in which a lot of Africa was colonial,
7:08 aparthide, had been instituted in South Africa.
7:12 Jim Crow still existed and was dominant in the American South.
7:18 Women were such marginalized, disempowered,
7:21 degraded um creatures in this society.
7:25 To be queer was to be considered mentally criminal,
7:30 mentally ill or criminal or degenerate or all of the above and treated as such.
7:35 Which is why queer people mostly had to live in hiding.
7:40 um you know that there was no language to talk about the environment,
7:45 no awareness of the systemicness,
7:48 which means that everything you do has these ongoing consequences,
7:53 the poisons, the radioactive fallout, the environmental degradation.
7:58 And so, you know, the new world being born
8:03 is all those movements that have actually been incredibly
8:07 successful and powerful and have made the right very
8:10 angry and frightened because if you listen to them,
8:13 they are angry and they are frightened and they think they're losing,
8:17 which is really telling, you know, and it's put us in a really
8:20 different position than the one we're used to.
8:22 And the language of progressive and left activism
8:26 is we are fighting to try to get something.
8:30 It's a little confusing when we've become the status quo of voting rights,
8:36 reproductive rights, marriage equality,
8:39 environmental protection where we're the the brand new status
8:43 quo and we have to fight to defend it.
8:45 you were touching on on something I wanted to ask you about
8:47 which is like what do you think fundamentally the backlash is about
8:52 in this moment because there's clearly a backlash and you know I
8:58 disconnection isolation um you know these are big themes for you and if
9:05 America has an ideology it is hyper individualism that is very much
9:12 our thing do you I think maybe at bottom what's happening is
9:17 there is just a deep-seated revolt
9:20 against interdependence itself like against this idea
9:24 that we are all connected and therefore we owe one another something.
9:31 Yeah.
9:31 And it's been so interesting seeing
9:34 Christianity which in American politics long felt
9:37 like it was the territory of the right
9:40 become something very progressive and left.
9:42 And of course there were always Quakers and Unitarians
9:45 and Methodists and all the rest who were progressive.
9:49 But we're seeing a lot of Protestants including um
9:52 these white Christian progressive candidates like James Terico show up.
9:58 We're seeing a super cool pope.
10:00 We're seeing love thy neighbor being laid down again and again.
10:04 We're seeing an interdenominational religious showing up against ICE.
10:09 that includes Muslims and Buddhists and everybody else.
10:13 Um, you know, progressive Jews against the genocide in Palestine, etc.
10:20 But yeah, and and in a way,
10:22 you have to have a backlash when your status quo is challenged.
10:26 There's a lot of ways that the United States was about rugged individualism,
10:31 about isolationism of various kinds,
10:34 built on um white male supremacy because that's who was supposed
10:38 to be the great bol self-made man pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
10:44 Forget that a woman gave birth to him.
10:46 Um forget that other human beings fed and clothed and educated him.
10:50 Forget that a whole system made it
10:51 possible for him to be a successful businessman.
10:54 forget all the people who worked in his factories
10:58 or you know built his roads um saw that his water
11:02 was drinkable and um you know he was never
11:07 really separate but it was an ideology something I
11:11 find fascinating is that for the American right the very
11:15 science of climate change is offensive to them because
11:18 they're deeply committed to what I call the ideology
11:20 of isolation um which is ultimately a kind of nihilism.
11:25 Nothing is connected to anything else because if things are connected,
11:29 then there are consequences to our actions.
11:32 If there are consequences to our actions,
11:34 we have to take those into account when we act,
11:37 whether we're building a dam or cutting down
11:40 a forest or dumping toxic chemicals or burning fossil fuel.
11:45 And they see in the ideology of isolation
11:50 an individualism where the individual's rights are absolutely unlimited.
11:55 And of course these rights don't apply to everybody.
11:58 Um they really you know for example they want to take
12:01 away reproductive rights which you would see as part of rugged individualism.
12:05 I have the right to control my own body.
12:08 But women are just another thing that men have the right to control.
12:12 women are just part of nature that men get to, you know, dominate, control, etc.
12:20 And so it's this very ugly version of I um, you know,
12:25 individualism that leads also to emotional, spiritual uh,
12:30 moral isolation that I think breeds a lot of loneliness.
12:34 One of the striking things about the contemporary right
12:37 from the Silicon Valley oligarchs through the manosphere to the Trump
12:41 administration is that they all seem angry and miserable
12:46 and there's something so deeply joyless about them, so disconnected.
12:51 But Silicon Valley is hyper white patriarchy, is hyper individualism.
12:56 And it's created so much more loneliness, so much more isolation,
13:02 helped people abandon the old ways we used to connect in person,
13:07 feel much more in person and local sense of belonging and membership,
13:12 which I think people are now really trying to recover.
13:15 And of course, AI is only the next step of it.
13:18 AI saying like, "Oh, since you no longer have access to human contact,
13:23 you need a substitute lover, a substitute therapist, a substitute counselor,
13:28 a substitute teacher." And capitalism also runs on scarcity.
13:33 The idea that there's not enough to go around and we need to compete for it.
13:38 And Silicon Valley is very excited about the idea that there's somehow
13:41 a scarcity of human beings on this planet of 8 billion people.
13:46 But as is almost always true of capitalism, there is no real scarcity.
13:50 There's just a distribution problem and there is no shortage of human beings.
13:55 We just have a distribution problem Silicon Valley
13:58 created and is very un uninterested in solving
14:02 except by offering us human substitutes that are
14:05 part of their kind of ugly new world.
14:10 Yeah, that is a world that sees itself
14:14 very threatened by the idea of anti- capitalism, by feminism, by anti-racism,
14:21 by climate action and environmentalism because they
14:27 benefit from the opposite of all things.
14:29 They benefit from the ideology of isolation
14:32 that wants to return to that world of separation.
14:35 So I see it very much not just as a philosophy,
14:38 one that was actually very easy to belong to.
14:43 You didn't have to defend it because it was the dominant ideology,
14:47 you know, in say 1955.
14:50 Now it's a backlash because they're trying to return
14:53 to the world before we change things so much.
14:56 And they're angry and frightened because it is no
15:00 longer a given that we will have this radical inequality.
15:04 We'll have this unfettered individualism.
15:07 We will have this deregulated world in which you can
15:10 destroy the environment by burning fossil fuels um cutting down forests,
15:15 mining and polluting.
15:18 Well, I mean that that has always
15:19 been the problem with libertarianism in general,
15:23 like from my point of view, that it gives us a language of rights,
15:28 a very clear language of rights, what I'm entitled to, what you cannot do to me,
15:34 but it has no language of obligations
15:36 and responsibilities to other people and to the environment.
15:40 And I think we're just we are just continually
15:43 colliding with the consequences of that kind of thinking.
15:46 Um, and you know, I just that is that is why I've always been uncomfortable.
15:52 I just don't think libertarianism really scales
15:54 um in a world that's actually interdependent.
15:57 Um, which it is.
15:58 Um, but just to step back a little bit, um,
16:03 because I think a sympathetic skeptic who digs what you're saying,
16:10 who wants to believe that the the gains and the progress
16:15 is real and kind of does believe that it's real,
16:18 probably still looks around and sees all the problems you're talking about,
16:22 the alienation, the corruption, the ecological breakdown,
16:25 the authoritarian resurgence, all of it.
16:27 and they just don't find a lot of solace in the victories you're highlighting.
16:31 I mean to that person and admittedly I am kind of that person.
16:35 You say what?
16:37 Oh my gosh.
16:38 Um well I am familiar with the species and a lot of what
16:42 I find is people don't actually know and pay attention to the victories
16:47 and they tend you know they don't see the change and a lot
16:50 of people don't know for example that the great majority of people
16:53 on earth support climate action take
16:56 climate change seriously there's been a number
16:59 of studies that show that the people when you take a survey
17:03 people are like yeah I support climate action but it's a minority
17:06 view We don't really know who we are because mainstream and right-wing media
17:11 has worked really hard here in the US to convince us that the m
17:16 that the minority is the majority that this angry minority that's antivax,
17:21 anti-immigration, anti-reproductive rights, anti-trans and queer rights,
17:26 anti-environmental and climate action is really the majority.
17:30 and it makes people feel powerless and um isolated
17:35 and alienated when in fact we are the majority.
17:38 So changing the story is not changing
17:41 everything but it's the beginning of changing
17:44 that and um you know there's a piece of it's a wonderful life.
17:52 I've always loved the part where the angel Clarence shows Jimmy Stewart's
17:57 character what his town would be like if he'd never been born,
18:01 if he'd never run his progressive savings and loan to help
18:05 these workingclass people get an economic foothold to build a life.
18:10 And um we never see what the world would be
18:13 like if there had been no g no queer rights,
18:16 no feminism, no environmental protection.
18:19 And a lot of times our victories look like nothing.
18:22 You know, the the coal burning plant that didn't open,
18:25 that didn't give the kids asthma.
18:27 Uh the forest that wasn't cut down.
18:30 Um the people who didn't die of cancer,
18:33 the um women who didn't die of back alley abortions, um things like that.
18:42 So you know but it's also there is a habit of this progressive left
18:48 whatever we're going to call it of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
18:51 So these are habits of mind and it's also really
18:55 hard to get people to see that yes the bad
18:59 things exist and also the good things exist to see
19:02 that the world is actually multicolored not even shades of gray
19:06 um pardon the reference uh let alone simple black and white
19:11 that we have not lost everything because we have not
19:14 won everything there's this wonderful passage by Vaklav Havl people
19:19 quote all the time saying that hope is not a prognos,
19:24 you know, prognosis.
19:25 It's an attitude of the spirit.
19:27 But what people don't remember is he said that some years before
19:31 he helped topple the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia when for all he
19:36 knew he would spend the rest of his life under totalitarianism
19:40 in a regime that had imprisoned him
19:42 repeatedly and would continue to imprison him.
19:46 So that radical uncertainty of the future is
19:50 also the realm of possibility that is also something
19:54 that saddles with a kind of responsibility to make
19:58 the future with all the power that we have.
20:00 And I see not the most oppressed people,
20:03 but the least oppressed often as the ones
20:06 who want to surrender that power that is responsibility
20:09 because it really gets them off the hook
20:12 and because they see grumpiness as a form of solidarity.
20:16 I think part of it is just a a fear about the fragility of the gains.
20:23 I mean, you you're you're definitely right
20:25 in that the backlash proves the gains were real.
20:28 I mean that just has to be true on some level, right?
20:30 And then the question is all right, well it hold
20:34 but I I mean it is kind of just
20:37 an eternal political reality that no victory is final.
20:41 You know, you win ground and then
20:42 that ground has to be continually defended and redefended.
20:46 That's just democracy, right?
20:48 So like that procarity is just baked into the cake.
20:50 But I think there there is a there there's
20:51 an impulse that people have where there the fear that it's
20:54 that the backlash isn't just a backlash that it's a reversal
20:58 I think taps into that that fear of losing the ground.
21:01 But that's not a reason to despair.
21:03 It's just a reminder that that doesn't hold itself and you have to
21:08 keep defending it.
21:09 I've always hated the save the whales language because it sounds
21:12 like we will permanently put whales either in a piggy bank
21:15 or a Christian heaven where they are somehow beyond reach rather
21:19 than that the process of protecting the oceans and stopping whaling will
21:24 be an ongoing process you know and it's interesting but it
21:28 is about how you tell the story and Row versus Wade
21:32 was overturned you know and that's a reminder that those reproductive
21:36 rights were gained um in 1973 3 and lasted for 49 years.
21:42 And there's a lot of ways you can tell the story.
21:44 I often hear it as though you yet another.
21:47 And people love to write obituaries for feminism.
21:50 Even when I was in Europe on book tour last year, people were like,
21:53 well, doesn't the overturning of Row versus Wade mean that feminism failed?
21:56 And it's like, you're in Europe.
21:58 Row versus Wade is not relevant, you know?
22:01 And there's so many different ways to tell that story.
22:03 You know, women gained reproductive rights first with a some a victory people
22:09 don't remember Griswald versus Connecticut that gave
22:12 married couples a right to birth control.
22:14 People don't even remember unlike Row versus Wade that there was
22:18 no right to birth control and that was only for married couples.
22:22 There was a second Supreme Court decision
22:24 that gave independent women a right to birth control.
22:27 And then came Row versus Wade.
22:29 when it was overturned, it went back to the states,
22:33 but also at the same time that the right
22:36 in its long effort to dismantle abortion rights was happening.
22:42 Four Catholic countries, Argentina, Mexico, Spain,
22:47 and Ireland all granted women reproductive rights.
22:51 So, there's lots of different ways you tell the story.
22:53 There's a there's a way in which this one thing is everything and it's all over.
22:58 A bunch of blue states have fought to expand reproductive rights.
23:02 But then the biggest thing of all, I think,
23:04 is people do not willingly surrender their rights.
23:07 You can take away the legal right.
23:09 You can't take away the belief to that right as easily.
23:13 In fact, I think abortions have actually
23:14 increased partly because medication abortions are available,
23:18 including by mail in a lot of those states.
23:21 So, we're in the middle of the story.
23:22 The end of Row versus Wade is not the end of everything,
23:26 you know, and that's a way in which you can't go back.
23:29 You can take away rights,
23:31 but you can't take away the belief in those rights um so easily.
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24:56 My political identity is sort of rooted in the materialist left.
25:02 So there's always a part of my brain
25:04 that's always trying to distinguish or that that's always
25:09 looking out for um the differences between shifts
25:15 in real power and shifts in language and cultural legitimacy.
25:20 And I get that shifts in power can
25:22 be downstream from shifts in in culture and language.
25:25 I mean often they are the real ones are.
25:28 But you know this often power rebrands
25:30 itself without ever actually changing or conceding anything.
25:34 And knowing that I admit it makes me a little jaded sometimes.
25:38 Um but at least I'm honest about that.
25:42 Whatever that's worth.
25:44 Well, I think it's, you know, I think it's really important to recognize
25:47 that stories do not do the work by themselves,
25:50 but they change the foundation on which decisions are made.
25:54 Early in the 2000s, the Supreme Court had
25:57 this kind of weird ruling in retrospect decriminalizing anal sex,
26:05 which was used to criminalize homosexuality.
26:08 And their attitude towards um queerness was radically
26:15 different than in 2015 when they legalized marriage equality.
26:20 And so why did the Supreme Court see it this way in 2015
26:25 in a way they could not possibly have seen it say in 2003?
26:29 And because the story of what is normal and who we are had changed radically.
26:35 And that story had been changed not by legislative
26:37 action but by countless queer people coming out
26:41 of the closet by ending that world where people
26:44 thought they didn't know anyone who was gay by Yeah.
26:48 you know, which was also the word used for, you know,
26:50 lesbians and the whole LGBTQ spectrum.
26:55 And so there's a short-term version where the, you know,
27:00 the nine gods of the Supreme Court handed down a decision from above.
27:04 There's a long-term way in which what constituted normal
27:08 and reasonable and who deserves rights had been changed radically.
27:15 not through the law, not through legislation, but through changing the story,
27:21 by changing who we are, by all those queer people with incredible bravery,
27:26 particularly early on in the' 60s and' 70s, um,
27:31 showing up as who they really were and getting,
27:36 you know, the straight world, the heteronormative world used to that.
27:41 And you can see that young people are just
27:44 a lot more fluid around gender and sexual orientation.
27:47 It is a genuinely different world that I do
27:50 not think will change back to there are two genders.
27:54 They each belong in their airtight little boxes
27:57 and the only legitimate sexual orientation is narrowly heterosexual.
28:03 You know, the right is trying very hard to make that a reality,
28:07 but I don't believe it will work.
28:09 And you know what's interesting about that, Rebecca,
28:11 and you sort of alluded to it earlier.
28:15 You talk about this in the book, and I think it's true.
28:17 The right seems to grasp much better
28:21 the depth of all these changes than the left,
28:26 even though the left has been on the winning side of a lot of these changes.
28:30 Why do you think that is?
28:32 And it goes back to what I said at the beginning.
28:34 the there's a lot of kind of mournful, defeist,
28:40 gloomy attitude that's really just kind of a cultural attitude.
28:44 I don't know if it's like being heirs to the Puritans or what in kind
28:48 of the white English-speaking left that I think
28:51 is different in other parts of the world.
28:54 But also something I said at the beginning of this conversation,
28:57 our enemies take us seriously even when we don't take ourselves seriously.
29:01 And one of the core arguments of this book is that if you listen very carefully,
29:05 the right is telling us five things.
29:08 The last two are familiar, but they're built on the three.
29:12 I don't hear people articulate very often.
29:14 What the right is telling us is you all are very powerful.
29:19 You have changed the world profoundly.
29:21 All that stuff you do is actually all one project, one agenda.
29:26 The thing everybody does here is we hate it.
29:28 We want to change it back.
29:30 But why would they hate it?
29:31 Why would they be so upset about it?
29:33 Why would they be so angry if it didn't matter?
29:36 And so we sell ourselves short and our enemies estimate us truly.
29:40 And that's a lot of what this book tries to do is to look at the sheer
29:48 power and scope of all these changes
29:52 to create a world that is so profoundly different.
29:55 You could say that it is a different society.
29:58 You could almost say it's a different civilization because so many
30:02 assumptions are so radically different than they were in that world.
30:08 And it's weird because even people my age
30:11 and older often don't remember the changes.
30:14 I feel sometimes like the ancient mariner or some character, you know,
30:19 in a horror movie who sees the thing other people don't
30:23 see and wants to testify and get people to see it.
30:27 But I don't see the zombie apocalypse.
30:29 I see the long arc of change and to see it is to see our own
30:34 power and to which I think really
30:38 reinforces the confidence that we do have power
30:43 and the commitment to protect the changes
30:45 that we've made and to continue making those changes
30:48 because it is by no means a finished project and there's so much we need to do.
30:53 Let me um I actually want to hold on on on what you were saying for a minute.
30:58 Um because you you I mean I think of you at least as both uh a theorist
31:05 and a practitioner of political activism and I have
31:10 always looked at politics uh as a political theorist.
31:13 I mean that's my background as basically a struggle to navigate this tension
31:19 between order and progress.
31:21 If societies change too much or or too fast,
31:25 if there's too much disruption or too much backlash,
31:28 whatever progress they've made tends to unravel.
31:31 Um, and also if they don't evolve fast enough,
31:35 if they don't adapt fast enough, they get stuck.
31:38 And society also unravels for different reasons.
31:41 And so the challenge for me is always
31:43 living in that tension without careening too far,
31:46 too quickly in either direction.
31:48 And I say all that to basically ask you as an activist, I mean,
31:51 have you thought much about the pace
31:53 of change and what's sustainable and what isn't?
31:57 How do you think about living in that tension?
32:01 I don't know because we've actually seen profound changes
32:04 in this country and other countries and societies continued.
32:08 But we abolished slavery in this country.
32:10 And of course undoing reconstruction,
32:13 building Jim Crow, the KKK were a backlash.
32:16 But they did not restore the country to and black people to pre-1865 conditions.
32:23 Women got the vote in 1920 and somehow the country did,
32:28 you know, did not fall apart.
32:31 And a lot of things have changed really profoundly.
32:34 People are actually quite adaptable.
32:36 and you see revolutions overturning monarchy,
32:40 um, other forms of radical inequality,
32:44 and sometimes you get the French Revolution and then you get the terror,
32:47 which is something I hear about all the time.
32:50 But I read this piece when I was writing a paradise built in hell.
32:53 I wish I could find again a beautiful academic journal article
32:56 that pointed out France never went back to absolutist monarchy and the idea
33:01 of the rights of man you know from which the idea
33:03 of the rights of women arose by Mary Walstone Craftton etc was un loosed
33:08 on the world influenced lots of other people and and continued to kind
33:13 of work like a yeast in the dough of France to feed
33:17 further revolutions further movements towards democracy
33:22 and equality And so things can
33:26 regress but they never go back to as though this never happened.
33:31 Uh you know you can change regimes for more democratic and and equal for more
33:37 authoritarian and unequal but you never really forget
33:42 the new idea that's out in the world.
33:44 You know I don't think women will ever go back.
33:48 You know they've been forced back in places like Afghanistan.
33:52 You know, but we'll never go back to the old equality.
33:56 Now that so broadly and so deeply women have had the vote,
34:01 women have had other kinds of equality and public participation.
34:04 The idea that women are somehow fundamentally so flawed, so inferior,
34:10 so mentally deficient that they cannot
34:14 participate in in governance in intellectual spheres.
34:20 We live in a world that was inconceivable
34:22 and unimaginable to the people of 1955 or you know
34:28 to the world that I was born into if time
34:31 travel was a real thing if you brought someone forward.
34:34 You could not explain all this stuff to them.
34:37 And that's, you know, the kind of subtle invisible incremental
34:41 change that both proves that we're actually
34:45 quite adaptable and that actually this stuff
34:48 has been really powerful in changing things.
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37:08 You've been writing about home for a long
37:10 time and not like in a glib quicksotic way,
37:13 more in like a lucid philosophical way.
37:16 But do you ever waver in that?
37:19 You ever wake up some days and go we lost?
37:24 Yeah.
37:24 I asking for a friend.
37:28 I I have to say that I wrote the book A Paradise Built in Hell about
37:34 the extraordinarily beautiful and joyful way people often
37:37 respond to disaster because in those moments of emergency,
37:44 they feel a sense of solidarity with, you know, everybody around them.
37:48 That book is a very positive view of human nature.
37:50 The way it's been complicated since 2016 is
37:54 by seeing how driven people are by in-roup behavior
37:59 by f doing what it takes to belong
38:02 to an in-roup which often requires punishing the outroup.
38:06 And that is very true of the left as well
38:09 as of the the right and every other part of the spectrum.
38:15 And um you know and just seeing that that a lot of times the political views
38:20 people embrace feel like they're less about
38:23 the actual ideology than I am in this group
38:27 and you know I get my identity from belonging to this group and I prove
38:31 that I'm in this group by punishing anybody
38:34 who is not totally 100% squarely in this group.
38:37 And I think this is part of how the left eats itself.
38:40 I think a lot of young people start out saying like,
38:43 "Oh, these are the the positionings, the values I want to embrace,
38:47 and then they're like,"How do I act
38:48 on those values?" And they somehow get tutored by example.
38:52 Oh, we just punish all the people who aren't as pure
38:55 and perfect in their embrace of these values as us.
38:58 My friend Yo Maron wrote this beautiful essay years ago saying,
39:03 "At some level, the left doesn't believe it can win.
39:06 And if you can't win, all you can do is be perfect." And of one of the ways
39:10 that perfection exercises itself is by punishing the people who are imperfect.
39:16 And that includes the people who have come more recently to embrace,
39:21 you know, Palestinian rights or queer rights.
39:24 PE and in this moment where a lot of people are leaving MAGA and the right,
39:32 there is this big question.
39:34 Do we welcome them or do we punish them for having the wrong views?
39:38 Do you want to build a big tent or do you want to have
39:40 a perfect little tent with only perfect people who have always been perfect?
39:45 I think perfect is one word for it.
39:49 Simplistic or neat is another.
39:51 I think a lot of it comes down to just comfort with uncertainty.
39:54 You write about this.
39:55 I mean, you're very attuned to the power of political stories
40:01 and people just want all or nothing stories.
40:03 Um, and and anything that disrupts that binary is just doesn't compute.
40:09 And I think it produces a lot of political pathologies that get in the way.
40:14 Something that's Yeah.
40:15 Something that's been so interesting to me
40:18 recently is Adorno's work on the authoritarian
40:21 personality and just seeing that some people need to have a really orderly,
40:28 pigeonhold, categorized world.
40:31 And there's a lot of people, they're not the majority,
40:34 but there's a number of people who are supposed to be on the left,
40:37 but who like ultimately like authoritarianism,
40:40 like punishment, like these very neat categories.
40:44 There's other people in what's supposed to be
40:45 the left who just need a very simple,
40:48 categorizable world and who tend towards these very simplistic stories in which,
40:53 yeah, they're often very binary.
40:55 there's the you know the very the category in which
41:00 everyone in it is good and the other category
41:02 in which everyone is bad and um you know
41:06 and I've make an equation in this book that came
41:09 to me recently and in writing about hope I've
41:12 written about what the Buddhist teacher Pemma Chadran calls comfortable
41:18 with uncertainty a lot of people are uncomfortable with uncertainty
41:23 and therefore sees these on false certainty about the future.
41:28 Um you know they create a more predictable
41:32 categorizable containable world in terms of the timeline.
41:37 They also with category create
41:39 another more predictable categorizable containable world.
41:44 And I like to say categories are where thoughts go to die.
41:48 Once you've decided that this person belongs to this group and you
41:52 know all people of this religion or ethnicity are this way um all
41:56 people of this sexual orientation are that way all people of this nationality
42:01 or political party are this way you can stop thinking about them.
42:06 You can stop observing the contradiction and the complexities
42:10 the reality that all all categories are leaky.
42:13 So that com comfort with uncertainty and that comfort
42:16 with a reality that will always overflow and break through categories.
42:22 Um I think it's in some ways a personality
42:26 trait but is also about how you've been trained
42:30 to think just as that reliance on category and predictability
42:35 is also often how people have been trained to think.
42:38 And I'm so much in all this work trying
42:40 to give people equipment to think more complexely to see
42:44 that the categories are leaky to see that the future
42:47 is uncertain and that another word for uncertainty is possibility.
42:52 I've always found you to be such a valuable read and I always feel
42:57 like there's a there's a a cocktail in your work of both pragmatism and also
43:06 like fearless revolutionary kind of spirit um that exists
43:12 I think in in a in a healthy
43:14 unique way and it's always made your work dynamic and interesting to me.
43:18 Um, so, um, all the which is to say it's so good to talk to you.
43:23 I'm glad I finally got you on the podcast and, um,
43:27 I love that there are people like you doing the work as long as you have been,
43:31 like in a very, um, I think honest consistent way.
43:35 Once again, the the book is called The Beginning Comes After the End.
43:39 Rebecca Snit, a pleasure.
43:40 Thank you.
43:41 Likewise.
43:42 Thank you.
43:43 Thanks for watching.
43:44 Each week, we'll be in your audio and video
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