So what is it about Kenyon College that inspires such great commencement speeches?! Maybe it’s the creative residue that Bill Watterson left behind at his alma mater (or John Zahl for that matter). Whatever the case, Jonathan Franzen followed in his friend and colleague David Foster Wallace’s steps and delivered this year’s address, an essayified version of which appeared in The NY Times last week. Franzen took the opportunity to rhapsodize on a number of our favorite subjects: human narcissism in relation to technology, the promise & power & problem of l-o-v-e, and inspiring call of (mocking)birds. At one point in particular, you can almost hear him consciously refraining from invoking religious language/imagery. Meaning, the love of God – as we understand it – fits perfectly with what he’s describing, in that it is not a hippie-dippie one-size-fits-all type of love. Or even a cosmic “like.” No, the love of God is made specific in Christ, and therefore general. Or generally specific. Or specifically general… You get the idea. It’s certainly the epitome of the down-and-dirty, costly sort of love that he’s talking about, the kind that really matters in life.
Only exception I might take here is with the assertion about our ability to love every particle of another person’s real self (which is also where the bird imagery loses me, what with love of animals seeming more akin to the technological one-way eros he’s talking about than the complicated feelings we have for other people. But hey, I’m speaking as someone who’s never had any pets…). Regardless, even the fractured kind of love we get to occasionally experience exposes the lie being peddled by the Facebook culture.
Finally, you have to hand it to Franzen for framing his thoughts so descriptively and resisting the urge to exhort. It gives the whole thing an air of wisdom that one all-too-seldom finds at these affairs. Go Lords and Ladies, ht CR:
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self…
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving.
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqt85uAZmWY&w=600]
COMMENTS
6 responses to “Franzen on Technological Grace, The Dangers of Liking and the Cost of Loving”
Leave a Reply
Breathtaking modern restatement of the ancient problem of love. Echoes of C.S. Lewis’ famous quote on love: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, dark, safe, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the perturbations of love is Hell”
Though I disagree that we don’t love every particle of a person. If loving is understood as not liking but seeking another person’s ultimate good, it can be said that we one-way love every particle of another person, even the more broken and difficult ones, into greater wholeness by wanting and seeking the good of the whole, rather than picking out what you don’t like and seeking to “love” it to make it into something it’s not=transaction. My 2 cents 🙂