Look in the Mirror. Do You Read the Future There?

Marina sunrise, Monday, October 1, 2023

What kind of world do you see around you today, and what future world do you envision? Is it one you want?

 

Years ago here in Northport, when our community was even deeper in the doldrums than the rest of the country, a series of “visioning” meetings was held for local residents, and at one meeting, we were asked to draw a picture of our “vision” for the future. I use scare quotes there because I interpreted the word as meaning something positive – something like a best-case scenario that we might be able to work toward and bring about. (Yeah, yeah, prepositions at the end of the sentence. Move along, move along!) One local woman, however, took “vision” to mean a prediction, and hers (obviously based on the times we were in) was ominous: her drawing showed a street of empty storefronts with big CLOSED signs on all the windows. Very unhappy "vision," I thought. 

View from inside my bookstore to Saturday morning preparations for street fair --

Leelanau UnCaged 2023! Northport was full of life!

My bookstore, like all the village, was full of life, full of people this past Saturday for our annual street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. Music, food, arts and crafts, face painting and art fun for the kids! It is a happy day in Northport, and my guest poets, Fleda Brown and Michael Delp, read to an attentive audience – though I fell down on the job, neglecting to pick up my camera, too overwhelmed by their powerful words. If you weren’t here, I’m sorry you missed them.

But coming back to my sheep (meaning and origin of that French phrase here): Asking the question about the future today, I’m not trying to elicit only positive visions but not exactly asking for predictions, either. I’m asking what you expect, personally, in our country and in the world in the coming years. Is yours an optimistic or a fearful vision? Do you welcome the future you see? Or maybe you don’t look very far ahead, but even if you’re focused more on today than tomorrow, please keep reading, anyway, because today is where we all are now.

 

This post will not be a book review. (For a fuller idea of the contents of the book, please see the publisher’s description I have included in the comment section below.) Everything Naomi Klein has written in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is worth reading, and most of it is very, very important, but I want to address a single narrow issue, more or less, one that has been hurting my heart. And I’m not just pointing a finger, either, because the temptation and danger are there for me as much as for anyone else. 

 

Klein notes that as the political divide has widened across the U.S., thinking has become binary on the left as well as on the right, with the left, simply to counter lies and conspiracy theories on the right, often defending the status quo rather than offering nuanced critique.

 

It's as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes…. 

 

When fear-mongers on the right encourage panic, the left knee-jerk is to dismiss all worry, and vice versa. The problem doesn’t stop there, either. 

 

There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.

 

I added emphasis to the sentence above and set it apart by itself (though it does not take up three lines on my laptop screen) because that sentence brings into focus my today's concern. 

Potentially murky waters --

 

There were groups of people during the height of COVID concern who refused to wear masks, and when some went so far as to say it was for the good of the country and the human species if the weak and old were to die, mask wearers were indignant and horrified at such heartlessness. And yet, when unvaccinated people began to die, how many mask wearers made jokes about people dying of stupidity? “How,” Klein asks, “did we cede so much territory? Become so heartless [ourselves]?"

 

Klein uses this insight to introduce Steve Bannon’s strategy, that of picking up and using the left has dropped,

 

…identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have left neglected or betrayed…

 

-- but my concern here and now, in this post, is with what we are all becoming. The radio/television network that its followers call “conservative” has long hosted name-calling screamers who ridicule their opposition. (I choose to read their news online occasionally to know what they’re saying without having to hear the mocking voices.) I find it equally disturbing, however, when my fellow liberals stoop to name-calling and bad jokes, though I understand the temptation. “We have to laugh so we don’t cry,” one friend told me. But ridiculing our political opponents and those the opposition holds up as leaders and pundits will not open a single mind or heart, and, beyond that, it certainly does not make us kinder, happier people. A hate-filled future for our country? Is this what we want?

 

*****

 

Okay, let me switch gears. How do we escape from what Klein calls “the mirror world”? When I had almost reached the final chapter of her book, I picked up a paperback from 1962, The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Historian Boorstin’s thesis was that America had replaced originals with images, and now, like Narcissus in the Greek myth...

 

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. 

 

When cursed-by-the-gods Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love with his image and “died of languor” on the spot, his own image a narcotic that not only put him to sleep but ended his life. And so Boorstin can’t help but wonder,

 

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power? 

 

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirrorlike.

 

(Are dogs wiser than humans?)

Again with the mirrors! In the mirror world both Klein and Boorstin describe, the kneejerk reach for false villains is matched by an equally desperate reach for false heroes. And here is a problem I have with e-mails that plead on a daily basis for my donations in these “dangerous” times: It isn’t that I don’t see our times as dangerous, because I do, but I see our fear and fixation on opponents as dangerous narcotics, too, not as signposts to peace among neighbors. Because what we are being asked to fear is our neighbors! Each other!

 

I don’t know how much common ground there might be between Boorstin (who died in 2004) and Klein, since the former traveled from Communist Party membership to mid-20^th century conservatism, while the latter makes no bones about being an anticapitalist eco-leftist. Boorstin saw the beginnings of today’s mirror world when advertising invaded American politics, and Klein sees how the mirror world has divided Americans until, gazing at doppelgangers of one another over the abyss, we no longer share a view of reality. But somehow I don’t see them greeting each other as hard-and-fast comrades, because while they see similar dangers, they reach very different conclusions on what we need to do to get beyond the impasse.

 

Boorstin’s map for escaping the mirror world is stronger individualism:

 

Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

 

“Each of us must disenchant himself,” he counsels. 

 

Klein, on the other hand, sees too much individualism as part of what lures us into the mirror world – the idea that each of us, on our own, is responsible only for ourselves. The first wave of COVID, like the shock of 9/11, initial brought Americans together in common cause. Quickly, however, we retreated not only to our respective “sides” (and in the case of COVID, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so, to the safety of our private homes) but also from connectedness. And now, too many who should be making common cause on important issues have become sidetracked into splinter groups with tiny, often entrepreneurial, self-admiring agendas. Fearing and ridiculing a dangerous, monolithic opposition, we subject one another to scrutiny, too, and who on earth can measure up on all possible counts? Even if we don’t begin from individual isolation, it’s where we may end up if we can’t give each other a little slack!

 

So Klein’s recipe for exchanging mirrors and images for reality is not more individualism, but solidarity and connections.

 

We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

 

Our doppelgangers can teach us, she urges, that we are “not as separate from each other as we might think.” And while working on ourselves is a start, changing the larger world requires collaboration and coalition, even in the face of discomfort.

 

I cannot urge too strongly the reading of Doppelganger. Naomi Klein writes as a friend, trusting readers with her own errors and weaknesses and difficulties in her journey through the mirror world. As I said, this is not a book review, and I have left vast numbers of the author’s ideas for you to discover on your own, because I have been wanting for a long time to address what I see as outright meanness in utterances and writings of those with whom I otherwise agree, and it makes me sad, and one of the things I most love about Naomi Klein is that she refuses to stoop to unkindness. 

 

Besides, it’s a fascinating journey! Doubles, twins, identity thieves, avatars, doppelgangers, a house of mirrors – it’s an irresistible story, isn’t it? 

 

But now I need to get back to Iain McGilchrist, because a common underground thread I see connecting all of us in this splintered, divided, many-mirrored world is what McGilchrist identifies as a cultural over-reliance on the left brain, that narrowly logical, super-rational “emissary,” with its intolerance for ambiguity and an inability to make room for facts and ideas that conflict with its orderly catalog of guarded knowledge. 

 

Another strength of Klein’s view and her book: she sees the irresistible temptation to judge characters globally on the basis of single issues. Is so-and-so this? Or that? We are all, she says, both this and that, neither devils nor angels. 

 

And every new day is an opportunity for us to make better choices.