By Amelia Morris
This essay has been lightly adapted from its original, which was published on Amelia’s blog.
“She’s just trying to be relevant,” a friend said forgivingly about a person we both know, a person whom I thought was being too loud and assertive with their opinion.
And I keep thinking about it — this notion of being relevant. The term is necessarily relative; relative to whom, and for what? If your goal is to be relevant to the broader world, then, yes, I think you have to be quite loud and assertive. This feels stressful to me. And also somewhat dangerous. But if your goal is to be relevant to yourself and to those closest to you, well then, that feels way better. That f…
By Amelia Morris
This essay has been lightly adapted from its original, which was published on Amelia’s blog.
“She’s just trying to be relevant,” a friend said forgivingly about a person we both know, a person whom I thought was being too loud and assertive with their opinion.
And I keep thinking about it — this notion of being relevant. The term is necessarily relative; relative to whom, and for what? If your goal is to be relevant to the broader world, then, yes, I think you have to be quite loud and assertive. This feels stressful to me. And also somewhat dangerous. But if your goal is to be relevant to yourself and to those closest to you, well then, that feels way better. That feels doable.
That being said, wanting to be relevant within a larger context, wanting — for example — Ezra Klein to respond to your thoughtful emails, to have your exact point of view heard and considered by a larger audience, of course I relate to that. But what I’m realizing is that this second type of relevancy can’t be the priority. Because if it is, I think one runs the risk of spouting a hollow morality. The George Saunders essay “The Braindead Megaphone” keeps coming to mind. It’s been way too long since I read it, but the feeling that’s stayed with me is one of a disconnected person being loud.
But, again, that term is relative. Disconnected from what? The word that arrives first is the “source.” The source? Hm… I’m assuming I thought of “source” because I’m trying to avoid the word soul. Because source feels slightly more solid, slightly more acceptable to literary, progressive types (If I’m trying to remain relevant, alas, it’s to this group) than soul.
Because “soul” seems to imply religion. And religion is not overly welcome in literary, progressive circles. It’s not exactly unwelcome, but if you’re going to be religious or write about religion, you better do it rationally. You better appeal to their intellect.
Okay, then. Challenge accepted.
An alt title for Ana Levy-Lyons’ The Secret Despair of the Secular Left could be The Braindead Megaphone, although not actually because “braindead” feels too mean-spirited for Levy-Lyons, who via this book, makes a strong case for religion while also being very sympathetic to why so many of us on the left threw the baby (a specific religious practice) out with the bathwater (the ways that specific religion made us feel very bad about ourselves).
Levy-Lyons, however, grew up with no baby and therefore, no bathwater. No, she grew up with what she refers to as “nothing,” i.e. no faith tradition. She writes, “My parents were Jewish by heritage but so disconnected from the tradition that it never came up.” (There’s that word again — disconnected!)
But when she says that her parents’ ethno-religious origins never came up, they *really *never came up. She didn’t find out she was Jewish by heritage until her twenties! She describes how something clicked for her in that moment of discovery, but she didn’t really know what to do about it. Even when she decided she wanted to pursue a life of religious study, “the rabbinate seemed out of reach.” (Partially because she didn’t know Hebrew.) So, instead, she turned to Unitarian Universalism — UU, as she often refers to it—and became a minister. She did this for eighteen years before realizing it wasn’t working for her.
Though I’d heard of Unitarians, I’d never done so much as a Google search to find out what it was they believed, so I found her description of the religion really fascinating. In a nutshell, UUs sound a lot like… me. People who don’t want — for good reasons — to be a part of the religion they grew up with, but still want something. People who are “spiritual but not religious.” People who want to celebrate diversity, instead of excluding specific groups, who believe in individualism and classically liberal ideals.
What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, in the interest of not paraphrasing Levy-Lyons’ entire book, I would say that that’s where the word despair comes into play.
Maybe you’ve already noticed this, but people on the left don’t seem happy. Very recently, a fellow parent whom I hardly know, casually, but also with a note of sadness, told me that she wouldn’t dare have a second kid because of the bleak state of the world right now. This is and has been the general vibe on the left, has it not? It’s almost as if we’re not allowed to be happy because we can’t put down the world’s burdens for even a few minutes, even while standing in the Southern California sun, watching our kids run and chase a soccer ball while wearing knee socks and matching shirts.
In a recent conversation between Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein, I really appreciated the following exchange:
Douthat: I also think that there’s a way in which at the peak of progressive cultural power, there was a sense that progressives were censorious scolds who certainly didn’t like populists and conservatives, but seemed to not like a lot of people generally. Today, I feel like it’s almost — and this is, again, impressionistic — but do progressives like themselves?
Klein: You really want to put them on the couch. But the answer is no. [Laughs.]
Douthat: The answer is no, right? And in a way, that’s always been true — nothing like a self-hating liberal.
This exchange lit something up inside of me (validation is a powerful drug!), but it also made me want to scream. Because: no! Because I *don’t *hate myself. And I don’t want to be around people constantly telling me that I should.
In my opinion, in The Secret Despair of the Secular Left, Levy-Lyons gets to the source of our discontents.
[Ancient religious and indigenous cultures] celebrate a kind of materiality that is quite the opposite of the empty, disenchanted materialism of so much of secular life. It is an enchanted materiality — one in which the whole world vibrates like a gong struck with meaning and purpose. In this worldview, everything that we do has cosmic significance.
Are you familiar with this word, materiality? I’m not sure why it feels so revolutionary to me. The definition is so simple: “the quality or character of being material or composed of matter.” Except it does surprise me in a religious context, which typically promotes a more gnostic spirit-over-matter philosophy.
While Levy-Lyons doesn’t promote one specific religion as more valid than another, she does lean heavily into Judaism, to which she eventually found her way back and was a rabbinical student while writing the book. And so, in the very beginning, she uses three Hebrew words/ideas as a kind of organizing principle as to how religion can be a safeguard against despair. They are: nefesh, *am *“(rhymes with ‘mom’)”, and adamah. And indeed, each one of them is “composed of matter.”
Nefesh is the soul-body composite that is our human self… Am, in its simplest meaning, is a community… Adamah means earth, soil, or land — the substance of the living planet herself, from which we are made and to which we return.
And even though I wouldn’t classify myself as a religious person (yet!) and my family couldn’t realistically adapt some of the practices she advocates — e.g. actually observing the Sabbath, which I think would mean no youth hockey (what?) — I would classify myself as someone who is already bought in on this materiality stuff.
In fact, reading The Secret Despair of the Secular Left felt at times like Levy-Lyons was explaining me to me.
The chapter titled “Being Worthwhile,” which tackles abortion, family planning and pregnancy, I found to be both moving and challenging to my modern, individualistic worldview. Reading one portion in particular felt like holding a large mirror in front of my face. Levy-Lyons describes pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing as “values-shifting processes” and ones that are incompatible with the economy.
Yes, of course, when I was pregnant with my first child, twelve years ago now, I understood that I was being changed by the experience. And I certainly understood, when my husband’s job offered no paternity leave, that it was an experience incompatible with the economy. I’ve written about both of these things a lot — how instead of being at odds with my body, I felt so into it for the first time in my life during pregnancy. Life-alteringly so. I felt the boundaries between my mind and body dissolve. Something akin to nefesh.
Regarding the economy, prior to becoming a mom, I was a writer with a day job. But five months into the pregnancy, I quit the day job and figured I could still write while being the primary caregiver. And sure, in some ways I did; but in many ways, motherhood eclipsed writing. I hadn’t placed a lot of my self-worth in my day job. It had been easy to leave it to focus on writing; but I couldn’t just “leave” motherhood. And so, I wrote less and felt bad about my productivity, my worth. I looked at my community (my am) here in Los Angeles. None of the highly educated women in my circle were stay-at-home mothers. Neither were my college friends, who lived on the east coast. And so, I doubted my choices. I basically wrote an entire illustrated memoir — Resume Gap — about this.
But reading Levy-Lyons book, I wondered if I’d been in a different community, if I’d had kids in the suburbs of Pittsburgh (where I’m from), would I have been less of an outlier? Would I have felt more supported in my desire to be available to my kids? It’s impossible to say and it brings up other questions, like: Would I have been an outlier for other reasons, anyway? Namely, my constant need to write everything down — my constant need to check in with the* source*.
Still, something about the left is borderline hostile to people who allow family life to alter them materially. Even a male artist like Cameron Crowe, someone who has experienced the height of success, has to explain “what happened” to him to The New York Times (a secular, left institution) when they come asking about his later films, as they did in their podcast The Interview. In this conversation, the journalist David Marchese prods Crowe about his later films, which he effectively says he didn’t find as good as his earlier ones.
I’m paraphrasing, but Marchese says: What gives, Cameron?
And Crowe responds: Well, you know, David, I got really into my kids and being a dad. Also, hey, I like those movies!
Also worth noting is that if you listen to this interview, which I encourage you to do, Crowe doesn’t sound very despairing. He sounds optimistic and inspired.
But this material alteration can happen through more pathways than just parenthood. *If *you’re interested, then Levy-Lyons (and I) would say that you have to engage the physical body (which, remember, is entwined with your soul) and we have to touch some grass, i.e. engage adamah. And to do this, we have to get offline.
This is a major focus of Levy-Lyons’ book: describing what we’ve lost by shifting so much of ourselves to the digital realm. During these chapters, she is — I think — mostly speaking to the choir. I feel like many of us across the political spectrum are theoretically ready to throw our phones into an industrial-grade garbage disposal. (But we all have to do it at the same time, right? Guys, are we ready? Okay. One… twooo… three! Gah, no one threw it!)
But Levy-Lyons is sympathetic to our inability to stop scrolling. In a section titled, “Technology as a Tourniquet,” she presents the metaphor that technology is staunching the bleeding of this cultural wound. The wound of being physically separated from our family and friends. Because, despite this geographical distance, we still need to connect with people. Despite having overcommitted to our careers and ambitions that leave little time for the physical world, we still need adventure, drama, something.
But I think some of us are bleeding out anyway.
In an interview for ARC: The Podcast, Nichlos Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart author, said something that has stuck with me. He said:
…if communicating too much is a problem, then the obvious solution is to *not *communicate so much.
This is a challenging idea to a writer. But then I thought about how often people don’t get what I’m trying to say. I thought about how badly arguments via text message and email and (god forbid) Instagram comments can go — like a loop of miscommunication. More words in these scenarios don’t typically result in better communications. They just add to the noise.
Reading Ana Levy-Lyons’ book, the word that kept coming up for me was friction. In a way, that’s what she’s arguing for: less convenience, more friction. More impediments to our freedoms. More obligations to our specific community and the exact place where we live. It feels counterintuitive to happiness, but I think she’s right
In Sharon Olds’ famous poem, “I Go Back to May 1937” she imagines a kind of immateriality, of being able to travel back in time to before her parents get together to warn them of the bad things to come:
I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it — she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do,
But in this thought experiment, she doesn’t go through with it. Why? Because, she writes, “I want to live.” She needs her progenitors to get together in order to be born. She cannot throw the babies (her parents) out with the bathwater (the psychological and otherwise harm they will cause).
I did email Ezra Klein. (This wasn’t the first time!)
Because I guess as much as I believe that my happiness depends on being relevant to myself and my family first, I also believe that I have something to contribute to the culture at large because of this. And because I’m not despairing, because I don’t hate myself, and I want Ezra to know that.
In his book, Consolations, the poet and philosopher David Whyte defines the word despair in a couple of pages.
Despair is a last protection. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.
Reading this, I’m reminded that I have been there. I have despaired. And I’m sure I will despair again. But the trick is not to tend to the despair. The trick is to let it move through us and to change us.
To keep despair alive we have to abstract and immobilize our bodies, our faculties of hearing, touch and smell, and keep the surrounding springtime of the world at a distance.
And if it’s religion that helps you do this — that helps you mobilize your body, helps you get out of your own deadly tech-fueled isolation to check in on some shut-ins who are part of your congregation to see if they need help taking out the garbage, that helps you learn how to roast enough chicken thighs for six adults and four children for a Shabbat dinner (even as you roll your eyes a little bit because of course it’s the woman who is gonna do this work), that helps you to look for some star or phase of the moon in the night sky, that prompts you to walk around your house until you can actually find it and to feel, even for one half of a second the “the whole world vibrat[ing] like a gong struck with meaning and purpose” — then, yeah, I think maybe, just maybe, I am up for a more religious life.
*Amelia Morris is a mother and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her most recent book is Wildcat: a novel. *