Things that Work are Just Things that Have yet to Break
Why I am and am not a brokenist.
1.
Every once in a while, I read something online that sticks with me. It’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence but it is worth noting, if only because most takes are crafted to be disposable. That thing “everyone” is freaking out about on the timeline today will be instantly less important tomorrow and all but forgotten next week. A year from now, it’ll be something only recalled with an ironic gesture. “Hey, remember when we all freaked out about gas stoves? Yeah, me neither.”
Treadmills aren’t meant to take you anywhere. They’re just meant to exhaust you.
All of that is a long-winded way of saying that Alana Newhouse’s Tablet magazine article on “brokenism” really resonated with me. It’s partly because when I read it on my phone, the screen had just cracked, capping off several days of having my most used pieces of tech get lost or go kaput.
The failures built on one another. The left side of my big headphones stopped working, which wasn’t a huge deal since I had a pair of earbuds that I use more anyway. But then, one of those earbuds went missing. With both of my wireless options gone, I fell back on wired headphones. And it was fumbling with the wire that caused me to drop my phone and crack the screen.
It was all a very frustrating series of events, but I finally had to admit to myself that the cost of using technology is to be perpetually frustrated. Things break. Performance erodes. I’m still pissed about stuff that I rely on everyday unexpectedly breaking or having to be replaced too soon, but accepting this reality has at least talked me down from the ledge of despair.
Newhouse’s piece, which you should read, is not so much about things that are broken, but about how broken things relate to our politics and to our political alignments.1 The main thrust of her observation is that our traditional political alignments have been steadily breaking apart and rearranging themselves into those who believe in America’s institutions and want to defend them, no matter their faults, and those who believe that those institutions are irredeemably broken and want to consign them to history’s dustbin.
Newhouse’s basic observation is unassailable. Yes, the traditional left-right split and the various class factors that have determined the composition of America’s two main political parties has always been in flux. But now they are twisting in ways barely recognizable. Those old coalitions are fracturing and individuals are increasingly re-organizing along either side of this “brokenist” axis. Putting the truth of this observation aside, I’m not sure that I can clearly identify with either side.
2.
Recently, I watched a clip of Neil Degrasse Tyson on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which Tyson expressed his suspicion of the increasingly popular use of psychedelics. As is, the human brain barely works at grasping physical reality, or so Tyson claimed. He brought up various optical illusions that fool us into incorrectly perceiving the measurement and relative position of objects. I cop to being one of those people interested in psychedelics, but I am sympathetic to Tyson’s position. The line between what works and what doesn’t work is often razor thin and only a matter of context. Given our tenuous hold on reality, why chance it with our already unreliable mental faculties?
More germane to this essay, Tyson’s observation helped to clarify why I don’t quite subscribe to either the “brokenist” or “not-brokenist” camp. Seeing the above Tweet from Nathan J. Robinson has helped to further clarify.
I will most likely never read Robinson’s book, so it would be unfair to try and offer an opinion about its contents. I tend to avoid explicitly political media. There is something about how we do politics today that leads people to believing that there is ‘one true way’ and that any failure of that ‘one true way’ must be either slander or entirely the fault of those on the other side of the issue. The end result is a belief that our preferred policies can never fail; they can only be failed. In other words, we construct political faery tales.
I am reminded of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, along with Martin Heidegger and French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has been most central in forming my philosophical world view. Wittgenstein was one of the formative figures of analytic philosophy. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he sketched out many of the elements of philosophical logic that inform the analytic methodology. Later in his career, however, Wittgenstein began to move away from his previous formalism and to rely more on the use of metaphors and analogies, something normally associated with the Continental tradition.
In one of Wittgenstein’s later works, he uses the analogy of a riverbed to illustrate his model of human knowing.2 The thing that we call a river is not one thing but is composed of multiple layers. There is a geological foundation of the riverbed that is fixed in place and only shifts in timespans not noticed by humans. Then there is a layer of semi-permanent features, like large rocks, which erode and move with the river over years instead of eons. And then there is the water itself, which rushes by and is constantly in flux.
Human cognition is like the riverbed. There are things we know and believe that play a foundational role in who we are. There are discrete bits of information that we are constantly updating in real time that barely impact us at all. And then there are a whole range of things sitting between the two extremes.
This epistemological model works quite well at explaining how I’ve come to almost all of my present political positions. I have some foundational beliefs about right and wrong, for example, the inherent value of human life. I have a set of accumulated learnings that tell me what tends to work and what tends not to work in honoring and fulfilling those foundational beliefs. And I have a steady stream of new observations, new information that continually updates and influences the deeper-level beliefs.
To put this another way, I do not believe that there is one true politics. Or maybe there is, but I’m neither smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to know what it is. All I can do is try to remain true to my foundational beliefs while also constantly updating those beliefs with new information.
So, how to tie this all back to “brokenism?
3.
A few months ago, I passed through Rhodes on my way from Greece to the Turkish coast. In Rhodes town, I went and had a look at the footprints of the Colossus. Where once an ancient wonder stood, now there are only two deer sculptures. Of the Ancient Wonders of the World, only the Great Pyramid of Giza remains and even that has slowly eroded, losing its shining white limestone cladding, it’s once sharp and level edges becoming softer and rounder.
The United States is a young country, but at just shy of 250 years old, it is quite old as a continuously functioning political system. Democracy is not a pyramid. It is even more subject to the slow and steady erosion of time. Things break or become obsolete. Just like your new iPhone or LED TV, America’s institutions, even those that were once state-of-the-art, will start to break down.
Instead of facing this reality head on, what tends to happen now is that we break down along partisan lines or increasingly, as Newhouse points out, into those who refuse to acknowledge that anything is wrong with their preferred institutions or those who believe that everything is wrong with those institutions and that they are irredeemable. There’s simply no way forward under this model.
Political faery tales have their uses, but there is a point at which we ought to grow up and accept that everything that is built will one day fall apart. Everything that is planned will begin to go awry. Even more importantly, we ought to accept that building things that work and fixing things that break is an iterative process, which requires us to fight a losing battle against entropy. It is a commitment to being wrong more often than not.
While I don’t quite fit myself into Newhouse’s categories, I still find her basic thesis to be a hopeful one. As she writes, “we must accept what is broken beyond repair in order to build our communities and institutions anew.” Good politics has to be about more than simply picking the right side of some arbitrary ideological divide. It has to be about a willingness to accept that things break and a willingness to do the hard work needed to repair them. After all, nothing lasts forever, not even cold November rain.
Newhouse did publish an earlier article called “Everything is Broken.”
The work is On Certainty, which was published posthumously and compiled from a series of notes that Wittgenstein had written in response to G.E. Moore’s arguments in favor of a common sense realism and against idealism and skepticism.