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| A rainy evening in NYC, Marion Wolcott Post, 1939 |
This is Bora Mici’s original French to English translation of the end of Simone de Beauvoir’s travel journal America Day by Day, or L’Amérique au jour le jour in French. In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir spent four months travelling around the US, and she was most impressed by New York City, where she spent most of her time. She was struck by how intellectuals and artists in the US were so marginalized and so lonely. And American idealism is something she muses over, both praising it and criticizing it in this particular passage and throughout the book. In light of a philosophy podcast (Parole de philosophe) I recently listened to about George Orwell’s 1984 and the importance of Newspeak and thought crimes in explaining the current climate of irresolvable contradictions, in which the crises of individual privacy and the culture wars are slowly eroding factual reality and the reliability of science, I reflected on Simone de Beauvoir’s text and how American idealism has created a post-truth society where individuals are more and more disenfranchised by rising new technologies, social media and clickbait political messaging. In wanting to impose our will upon the facts, we have created a grand illusion of persistent denial and have lost our grasp on what is a shared reality. Are we all being brainwashed or can we think for ourselves? Do we still have a commitment to truth or do we think everything is relative and open to interpretation? How do we distinguish trends from what really matters? What kind of a world do we want to live in and what values do we want to impart to each other and to future generations?
L’Amérique au jour le jour, excerpt translated from French into English by Bora Mici
Columbus Circle, Broadway, Times Square. Four months have gone by. It’s the same crowds, the same taxis, cars, the streaming of the lights. The drug-stores and the high-rises have not lost any of their magic. I know why I love them. There is a fascinating mirage that takes shape through the conveniences and generous abundance of this civilization: that of an existence that is not consumed through its maintenance and that could be entirely used with the goal of surpassing it. Eating, commuting, clothing oneself, all this is done without any effort and without spending too much time: starting from there, anything could happen. My dizzying attraction to America, where the nearby memory of the pioneers still roams, is that it seems like the realm of transcendence; contracted in time, magnificently expansive across space, its history is that of the creation of a world. That’s what moves me in the high-rises: they shout out that man is not a stagnant being, but that he is momentum, expansiveness and conquest; and in the shameless profusion of the drug-stores, there is a poetry that is just as hopelessly passionate as in a baroque church; crude being has been caught in the trap of man’s desires; he affirms the power of his imagination upon matter. New York, Chicago reflect the existence of this demiurge with imperious dreams, and that is why they are the most human and exciting cities that I know. There is no room here for the gloomy wisdom of the petit-bourgeois in his slippers whose only project, as he expresses it for example in the famous sonnet on happiness “is to wait for death pleasantly at home.” Dedicating yourself to such a wait is already death. In this way, Americans are very much alive: they live with life in mind and not death; they are not satisfied with inertia; everyone is judged based on their actions; in order to be you have to do. The large metallic bridges, the buildings, Grand Central, Park Avenue, the airports, the roads, the mines are the confirmation of this faith.
It will be difficult for me to be separated from these great visions of hope; however, I also know their false attraction. Life is exhausted through its maintenance in this country too. “I have been out since 6 a.m.,” a taxi driver was telling me around 10 p.m. yesterday. “Imagine how badly I want to go home.” I remember the rush towards the New Jersey ferryboat. All of my friends have told me how difficult the workdays are in this city where the distances are so great; particularly women who have to keep up a job and a household and are worn out when evening comes; often I have seen them too exhausted to say yes to going out or to enjoy it. I have also understood that people don’t drink so much out of obsession; they need a pick-me-up at the end of the afternoon. And the most common cause of death in New York is heart disease.
That’s not all. One has the exciting feeling that anything could happen. But what happens in reality? What do people do with their time and the money they’ve earned? It goes without saying that I have not met any of the leading classes, those that study, invent, go into business, fight; but they only make up a small minority. Most Americans are similar to the ones with whom I have rubbed shoulders: they allow their life to go round in circles. They have neither the taste nor a feeling for collective life; they are not concerned about their individual fate either. That is where the sadness I have felt among them comes from: this world full of generous promise crushes them; and its splendor soon becomes sterile because there are no men to dominate it. All civilizations offer man the diversion of “the banality of daily life,” but what is specific here is the extent to which this diversion is systematically organized. Neither his education nor the social setting in which he grows exist in such a way as to enable the individual to discover his interiority. He becomes conscious of himself not only as a body made of flesh and blood but as an organism that protects and prolongs an arsenal of mechanical devices: he goes from one floor to another in an elevator, he commutes on the subway, speaks on the phone, writes with a typewriter, sweeps with a vacuum cleaner; canned food factories, refrigerators, electric stovetops come between his food and his stomach; between his sexual desires and their satisfaction, there’s a whole paraphernalia of moral principles and hygienic practices. Society gets a hold of him as soon as childhood. He learns to look outside of himself, in the other, as a model for his behaviors; that’s where what’s called American conformity comes from. In reality, individuals are just as different, just as separated from one another in the new as in the old world, but for the former, it is easier to find the means to escape their singularity and to avoid the sentiment of the “original abandonment;” or maybe they don’t find it, but they look for it more obstinately. Like everyone else, they experience boredom, dissatisfaction, doubt, but they try to rationalize their anxiety by setting out their “problems;” instead of relying on their solitude, trying to surpass it by deepening it, they cling resolutely to what’s given; they see the source of values and truth in things and not in themselves; their own presence is just a fluke to which they don’t want to attach any importance. That is why they are interested in the crude result, not in the mental process that begets it, just like professor T’s students who did not want the proof of a formula. In the same way, they think they can isolate the part from the whole, as shown by the investment in specialization that is prevalent in technology, science and culture. In Hegelian terms, we can say that the negation of the subject leads to the triumph of the understanding on the Spirit, that is to say the triumph of abstraction. And that is why in this country that seems so inclined toward the concrete, the word abstraction has so often been on my lips; the idolized object loses its human truth and becomes an abstract thing, for concrete reality is that which includes both an object and a subject. That is the paradox of all positivisms, of all pseudo-realisms that depart from man in order to affirm things; they miss the thing itself and only produce concepts.
What I have often felt in listening to their jazz, in talking with them, is that the time itself in which they live is abstract. They respect the past, but as an embalmed monument. The idea of a living past that is integrated in the present is foreign to them. They only want to know a present that is cut off from the flow of time; and the future in which they project themselves is one that can follow mechanically, not one in which a slow maturation or sudden explosion implies unpredictable risks; they believe in the future of a bridge, of an economic plan, but not in that of an art or a revolution. Their time is “the time of the physicist,” a pure exteriority that is coupled with that of space. And because they refuse duration, they also refuse quality; it’s not just for economic reasons that “artisanal arts” don’t exist in America; even during free time as part of domestic life, one does not seek a qualitative achievement; one cooks food and conserves fruits as quickly as possible; in all fields of life, you have to hurry up out of fear that the result is already out of date at the moment it has been attained. Cut off from the past and future, the present is without substance; there is nothing more foreign to Americans than the idea of seeing the moment as compounded time, a mirror of eternity, and of grasping it in order to understand eternal values or truths; the content of a moment seems precarious to them just like the moment itself. Because they do not accept that truths and values become, they also don’t know how to preserve them in the movement that surpasses them; they disown them. History is a great cemetery here; men, works and ideas die almost as soon as they are born. And every individual existence also tastes like death; from one minute to another, the present is just an honorary past; you have to constantly refill it in order to hide this curse upon it; that’s why Americans like speed, alcohol, thrillers, sensational news; they feverishly ask for one thing after another because they don’t rest on anything. But here, like everywhere else, life repeats itself day after day; so people have fun with gadgets, and because they lack real projects, they cultivate hobbies; through this obsession, they pretend to make daily habits their own by their own choice. Sports, movies, comics offer diversions. But ultimately one has to contend precisely with what one was trying to escape: the dry crux of American life is boredom.
Boredom: loneliness too. I’ve mentioned it a thousand times and it’s true: the people I rub shoulders with are alone. Because they are too afraid of and run away from their original solitude, because they run away from themselves, they do not really have a good grasp of themselves; so how could they give of themselves? How could they receive in return? They are, however, open and welcoming, they are capable of tenderness, passion, sentimentality, politeness; but it is rare for them to know how to build a deep love, a lasting friendship. They are far from being heartless, and yet, their relationships remain superficial and cold. They are far from lacking vitality, momentum, generosity, and yet, they still don’t know how to dive into the enterprise of their lives; it’s for the same reasons. Being Julien Sorel or Rastignac requires taking charge of oneself and not looking away from oneself; there are very few real ambitious people here; they idolize heroes, capriciously by the way, but when it comes to oneself, one does not wish to do more than rise one or two steps in the social hierarchy; at most, if a young man wishes to distinguish himself, it will be as a citizen and not as a man; he will not dream of standing out from the given world, a dream that is symbolized by the treetop on which Julien Sorel is perched, the summit from which Rastignac arrogantly looks down at Paris. These desires of grandeur are a source of many disappointments and often underscore petty faults, which Americans do not have; they possess the virtues that come from an indifference as to themselves; they are neither bitter, nor haunted, nor mean, nor jealous, nor egotistical. But they do not have an internal fire. As much as they have gotten lost in the object, they find themselves without an object. They experience the “original abandonment,” which their civilization pretends to mask, in a different way. It is even this contrast between their secret fragility and the things they’ve build with so much pride that makes them so pathetic.
It seems to me that it is because of the abstract atmosphere in which they live that money assumes such a disproportionate importance here. These people are neither miserly, nor petty; on the contrary, these are the faults for which they criticize the French; they do not desire money in order to accumulate it, they spend easily, and for the sake of others as much as for themselves; giving comes naturally to them; they are not materialists either; they do not go after great fortunes in order to satisfy extravagant appetites. If money is for many of them the only goal, it’s that all of the other values have been reduced to this common denominator; it has become the measure of all human accomplishment, when it is only an abstract sign of real wealth. It is because they do not know what makes up and affirms concrete values that Americans are satisfied by this empty symbol. In reality, they are not satisfied by it; excepting the high-flying capitalists, they are as burdened by their dollars as by their free time activities. I guess it’s one of the reasons why American women have come to stand in for idols: the dollar is too gloomy of a god. Man is not unhappy to justify his work and his earnings by dedicating them to another being of flesh and blood. But the cult of the woman, just like the cult of money, is nothing but a stand-in. The destiny of the American man would not be meaningful unless he were able to give a concrete content to the abstract entity that is his freedom. Here we have a vicious cycle because, in order to fill this empty freedom, it would be necessary for him to change the political and social conditions in which he lives and which are the ones that beget his inertia. Certainly, thousands of Americans work toward breaking this cycle. And of course there are also thousands of other Americans to whom my reflection here do not apply at all or only a little. But as long as we can allow for generalizations, most of them are victims of this machinery: running away from boredom and loneliness gets them stuck in boredom and loneliness; because they wanted to get lost in the world, they have lost their grasp upon it.
One of the characteristics that has most stood out to me is to what extent they refuse to question both the world and themselves. They need to believe that Good and Evil are clear-cut categories and that the Good will easily be achieved. I had sensed this from the beginning of my stay. But recently, I have had clear confirmations of it. Among other things, I caused a scandal among practically all of the students, without exception, at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, when I spoke to them about the dilemma presented in Rousset’s book, les Jours de notre mort. On what criteria should rely those who are in a position of responsibility for saving the lives of two or three of their friends who have been deported to a concentration camp? They stubbornly responded: “No one has the right to decide on the life of human beings” or “What right do they have to choose?” If one retorted that not choosing would have meant not saving anyone, that at any rate, the positive act of saving two lives was more valuable than a murderous abstention, they would shut down; I believe that, as for them, they would have preferred to let the whole group perish instead of taking up a difficult initiative. Or rather, they could not even imagine a situation where they would have had to admit evil, which, however, is the only way to fight it. One refuses, for example, even when one shows good will, to establish clearly the current conflict between justice and freedom and the need to come up with a compromise between these two ideas; one prefers to deny the existence of injustice and the lack of freedom. One does not want to admit that the complexity of the factors in action creates problems that go beyond all virtuous solutions. Evil is just a residue that we will be able to eliminate gradually through a more rigorous application of institutions which are healthy in themselves. That’s what so many idealistic souls believe; and if this optimism seems too easy, then we will choose to create an obsession that must be eradicated: the Soviet Union is Evil. All we have to do is destroy it, and we will find ourselves again within the realm of the Good. This is what explains that these very students, who were so respectful of human beings, quietly discuss nuking Russia.
If I have formulated so many criticisms while thinking again about all these things, why is it still so painful for me to leave? First of all, one could formulate the same criticisms about our European civilization, about the French civilization, which I will return to, other, different criticisms but equally depressing ones. We have other ways of being unhappy, inauthentic, that’s all: my judgements about Americans during this journey are not at all accompanied by a feeling of superiority. I see what they are lacking, I do not forget what we are lacking. And beyond what I love and what I hate about it, there is something fascinating about this country: it’s the innumerable chances and risks it runs after, and the world with it. All human problems are at play at a mind boggling scale: and it’s largely the solution that will be found here that will retrospectively shine a light of pathos upon them or drown them in the night of indifference. Yes, I believe that is what moves me so much just before my departure: here is one of the places in the world where the future of mankind is being played out. To like or not to like America: these worlds have no meaning. America is a battlefield, and we can only become passionate about the fight it wages within itself and its stakes would have us forego all measure.
