Welcome to “Above the Fray”

What do Agnes Callard’s experiments in living have to do with “Everything Everywhere All at Once”?

Unlike with the “Eyes on the Right” newsletter, which began in June 2022, and “Looking Left,” which got started this week,” “Above the Fray” doesn’t lend itself to a programmatic, manifesto-like launch statement. It’s a newsletter devoted to non-political, critical reflections on culture and the arts, and developments in American and Western society as a whole. It’s also a place where I can write personal essays and reflections. To a considerable extent, that means that the rule here will be “anything goes,” with anything constrained only by my interests and sensibility as a writer.

As I noted earlier this week in my (re)launch statement for “Notes from the Middleground,” I will probably end up writing in “Above the Fray” more about rock/pop music than I do about anything else—because that’s the art form that matters most to me and about which I’m most informed. But I also expect to write about books, film, theater, poetry, academic scholarship, and other types of humanistic endeavor.

I’m not exactly sure where the cultural thoughts I want to share today fit in on that list, though the theme of expressive individualism and its discontents is one to which I expect to return in future posts.

Being All That You Can Be

Over the last week or so, two of the most frequently discussed topics in my household and Twitter feed have been the New Yorker profile of University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard and the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won numerous Oscars, including Best Picture, at the Academy Awards on Sunday evening. To lay all my cards on the table right from the outset, I found the story of Callard’s family life (which I’ll summarize in a moment) pretty off-putting, and I disliked the movie much more than most of my friends, and certainly more than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But I think they’re worth discussing, and discussing together, because they both stand as artifacts of a culture struggling to make sense of how to live and thrive in a world dominated by expressive individualism—a vision of human life that’s both deeply aspirational and utterly lacking in any fixed standard of which ends are worthy of aspiration. We are free to “be all that we can be,” to paraphrase the tag line from a popular TV advertisement during the 1980s and ’90s for (of all things) the U.S. Army. But what is that? What can we be? What should we be?

We really don’t know. So we try on different options, like arms full of outfits taken to the changing room at Nordstrom. What about this? How do I look in that? But all the while time is ticking away, our finite lives careening toward oblivion. And unlike with trying on clothes at a department store, each thing we try on in life changes us, constricting our future choices. We only get to start out from scratch one time, at the very beginning. After that, we’re moving in a direction, opting for one possibility over another, and then making future choices on the basis of the narrower possibilities still available to us in a present shaped by those past decisions. It’s quite a burden—and quite possibly the perfect recipe for acute anxiety.  

Or so it seemed to me as I read the New Yorker essay about Callard, a writer whose work and lively Twitter presence I’ve enjoyed and learned from over the last few years. But at the risk of sounding a little harsh about someone I respect, I can’t help but admit that the home life described in the magazine struck me as a kind of parody of John Stuart Mill’s classic description of expressive individualism as an effort to undertake “experiments in living.” Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say Callard’s home life appears to confirm that the original idea behind expressive individualism—Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s suggestion that human beings are defined by both perfectibility and radical open-endedness (an incapacity to determine in advance what constitutes perfection)—is a recipe for the perpetual unsettledness of aimless striving. (It seems apt that Callard has written a book titled Aspiration.)

If you haven’t read the essay, it describes how Callard, married with two children, fell in love with one of her graduate students, told her husband she wanted a divorce, ended her marriage three weeks later, and eventually invited her ex-husband to move in with her, their two children, her new husband, and a new child fathered by the second husband. As the story goes on, we observe Callard and her ex-husband lead a philosophical discussion of marriage before a room full of college students, despite the fact that he expresses (and displays before the audience) discomfort with acts of personal self-exposure. We also hear about and eavesdrop on complex philosophical discussions between Callard and her second husband (Arnold) that include them contemplating whether they should get divorced, whether doing so should be considered a failure, and whether they should instead embrace polyamory, each becoming erotically and emotionally involved with others while remaining together as a married couple.

Performative Self-Absorption

I have no interest in condemning Callard and her romantic and familial decisions in print. Most of us are expressive individualists to one extent or another by now and would come off looking pretty shabby if our marital lives were written about at great length in a mass circulation magazine.

But that raises an interesting question: How did the New Yorker come to write at great length about Callard’s marital life? It’s one thing to be an expressive individualist treating one’s life as an ongoing, aspirational experiment in living. It’s quite another to share the rather … inconclusive results of that experiment with an audience of millions. I don’t necessarily mean to condemn that either, but it sure is noteworthy and downright perplexing—unless flagrant exhibitionism is the latest step in the experiment.

Since it isn’t addressed in the essay, it’s impossible to know how the feature came to be written. Or whether anyone in the family objected or expressed apprehensions about having so many details of their lives displayed before all the world in such an extreme act of self-display. Or why Callard herself would want or even be indifferent to inviting so many strangers into her home, her bed, and her mind.

Less baffling but more bewildering to me is Callard’s tendency to treat her experiments in living as vital experiential information (I almost want to use the word “data”) to be analyzed and rationalized in philosophical dialogue with Arnold. There’s something extremely … precious about the conversations reproduced by author Rachel Aviv. Freud used the term “sublimation” to get at something similar, but that’s not quite it. Sublimation is the act of raising up and transforming a base or dangerous desire or idea into something noble and socially salutary. But what Callard and her husband do is more like an exercise in performative self-absorption.

Arnold fell for his teacher, and she fell for him. So she ended her marriage and married him. Now they’re getting bored with each other and thinking of seeing what else is out there while staying together as a couple or maybe just going their separate ways. It really is as mundane as that. Yet the two of them speak as if they’re communing with Plato’s Ideas or making progress toward achieving contact with the “unconditioned” in Kant.

Few things get me as excited as philosophy, but I have to confess that listening to these two go round and round about whether their marriage can solve the perennial problem of existential loneliness, or whether it’s possible to get divorced “correctly,” or whether one or the other is entitled to feel jealousy, or whether “there [is] something I’m getting right in feeling this way”—well, it left me wanting to put down my well-worn collected volume of Aristotle’s writings for a while so I can just get on with living.

The Many Versions of Me

But what should I do in that living? For the expressive individualist that might well be the defining human problem—much as it was for Socrates. How should I live? What’s the best way of life for a human being? Those were his questions, though our late-modern variation on them is somewhat different. Not: What’s the best way of life for a human being by nature, so that I can fulfill the soul’s truest longings? But: What’s the best way of life for me, right now, at this moment? And the problem is that at any given moment what feels like a recipe for living “my best life” (as we like to say these days) is liable to be unstable and prone to shift with my passions and moods between now and the next moment.

I don’t want to delve into an extended discussion of the plot of Everything Everywhere All at Once, because I’ve already gone on for quite a while in this post, I found the film to be extremely tedious, and I don’t want the post to begin resembling the movie. One reason why I didn’t like it is that it’s really just a Marvel movie with an art house aesthetic and a modest budget—and I really dislike Marvel movies. But that’s not all it was. It was a comic-book-style action flick with big philosophical ambitions wrapped up with the idea of the multiverse. That, of course, is the theory according to which every potential series of events actually takes place in another universe. Though since the theory of the multiverse defies empirical confirmation of any kind, it might be more accurate to call it a theological postulate.

Whatever term we use to describe this view, I find it thoroughly uncompelling. For one thing, musings about the multiverse in popular culture invariably focus on the potential series of events flowing out of the subjectivity of individual human beings. Even at the level of my specific life, the number of potential timelines following from my individual subjectivity is stupefying. I sat at my kitchen table from 7 to 8:15am on Thursday morning working on this post. But in a different timeline, I got up for a second cup of coffee at 7:30 and in my agitated caffeine high went on a tangent in the post that ended up wasting two hours of my morning, sending me on an errand to the grocery store later in the day than I in fact did, leading me to interact with a COVID-positive cashier who started her shift late in the morning. In this alternative branch of the timeline, I caught the virus from her, leading me to take time off from writing for this Substack next week, when I otherwise would have written a viral post that greatly increased the number of my paying subscribers, making the endeavor more viable over the long term, etc, etc.

Each step in that imaginary timeline contains other potential timelines for myself and every person with whom I interact, and each step in those timelines also branch off into other timelines. Now multiply that by every individual who has ever lived and by every event that takes place in our universe with no connection to a human subject and we’re left with a mind-melting plethora of universes in the multiverse. (For the purposes of this post, I’ll leave aside the cogent philosophical question of whether “events” can even be said to “take place” apart from a mind that perceives them.)

And yet, it’s unclear to me why, even if this astonishing, empirically unconfirmable postulate is presumed to be true, I should care. I have no access to any of those alternative timelines. I only live and experience this one, the one constituted by the choices I have in fact made. Once I’ve made a decision, I don’t get to take it back, reverse course, and head on down another, different path of causality to see how that one works out instead. So what’s the point in imagining that all of those unexperienced alternatives actually take place somewhere?

Oh, the Regrets!

I’m not sure it has a point, but it does have a reason. It makes perfect sense that a culture of expressive individualism would fasten on to such an idea, because it’s a statement of the expressive individualist’s deepest conviction—which is that you can be anything. It’s all there, laid out before you. All you need to do is choose your path. Your options are infinitely open-ended. Anything (everything everywhere) is possible. At least until you make a choice, commit to a fate. Then your options are more limited. And then more limited still once you make your next choice. And so on. You go to this school, major in that, take this job, move to that city, marry this person, have that child, and so forth. Soon your destiny is sealed. And then you die.

But you might have done otherwise! And if you did, you wouldn’t just be a stay-at-home mom struggling with postpartum depression in a small house in the Atlanta suburbs hoping to make a little extra money doing consulting work you feel is beneath you. Or, like the main character of Everything Everywhere All at Once (Evelyn), you wouldn’t be stuck in a struggling business with complicated tax problems, an unfulfilling marriage, and a difficult daughter. You’d be doing something, anything else. In fact, though, you are doing something, indeed everything, else, just in other universes, as Evelyn discovers, somehow, through the events recounted in the film. (If you’re concerned about spoilers, you might want to stop reading here.)

Evelyn is granted glimpses of numerous alternative timelines for herself because in one alternative timeline her disgruntled daughter has managed to glimpse all the timelines and as a result has ended up in a state of profound existential despair that has turned her into a supervillain out to destroy the entire multiverse. (I told you this was just a Marvel film dressed up for an all-night rave.)

How this all gets resolved is immaterial (it makes just as much sense as the film’s confounding underlying premise). What’s interesting about it is the true psychological insight that the infinitely open-ended aspirations of the expressive individualist culminate (for some people at least) in crushing disappointment. You could have been anything! And you ended up as just … this? Doing this unfulfilling job? With this unappealing spouse? And this annoying kid? Oh, the regrets! It’s even possible that one of those infinite alternative versions of you would be so disgusted by this outcome, so consumed by resentment about it, that, like Evelyn’s daughter, you would be driven to smash it all (the multiverse as a whole, and everyone and everything in it) completely to pieces.

But what about the rest of us? We merely struggle with anxiety and depression, make bucket lists and spend money on “experiences,” ponder divorce and ethical nonmonogamy, drink too much booze and smoke too much weed, play Wordle and Call of Duty, binge watch the latest TV series and pay $2,000 for tickets to Taylor Swift. (I’ve only done some of those things, mind you.) Distractions and coping mechanisms can be helpful. But even better is the pursuit of reconciliation to the radical finitude of the lives we’re living—to the reality that we never had infinite possibilities to begin with, and that the surest way to avoid or at least minimize disappointment is to have realistic (which is to say: modest) hopes and expectations.

That’s easier said than done. But we really ought to try. Nothing less than our own happiness is at stake.