Endless sand-reckonings

We need to reckon—doesn’t it seem to you?—with COVID learning loss. We also need to reckon with 2020, and how we went too far in reckoning with racism and sexism that year, but also how we didn’t go far enough. While we’re at it, we should reckon with the vibe shift, but also with the fact that the vibe is shifting back. We need to reckon with how nasty this Michigan primary got and how bad the DSA is for the Democrats but also how bad the Democrats are for the DSA. Then when we’re done with that, we need an urgent national reckoning about all the urgent national reckonings we haven’t had. When are we going to reckon with antimicrobial resistance? The Filioque? The effects of the development of agriculture?!

I’ve been thinking about this particular turn of phrase, the combination of “we” and reckon,” in connection with the discourse about poor Jason Arday. I don’t want to speak blithely about this incredibly sad case you’ve probably read about, but the facts as I understand them are these: a British professor is supposed to have been promoted beyond his abilities, and with insufficient scrutiny, because he was black and autistic (his promotion is taken to mean that Cambridge was Reckoning With Its Institutional Racism a little too close to the sun), and then it turned out he was a plagiarist and fabulist, and boy, do we need to Reckon with Political Correctness Run Amuck at Cambridge (even though the actual number of black professors at Cambridge is so far below population levels that this is pretty much definitionally not what happened here). So then the UK press ran a number of stories about him that was wildly disproportionate to the public interest in or general relevance of one fabulist at Cambridge. They hounded him in a way pretty clearly driven by racism—I guess we didn’t reckon hard enough in 2020, even though we also reckoned too hard and it led to an electoral backlash that nobody can find statistical evidence for.1 So the professor, Jason Arday, committed suicide. And so now I keep reading that “we” need to have a “reckoning” about the disproportionate use of public shaming, or about racism (I mean, sure), or about how to do a better job of resisting right-wing moral panics, or about the Culture of the University (which somehow never includes community colleges or state schools or any of the places from which most of the people one actually knows hold degrees), or something else.

I just have two questions. Who is “We” and what is a “reckoning”?

It’s really hard to avoid using “we” when you write sweeping essays about large concepts with hazy borders. Believe me, I know. I am a shameless hypocrite about this. I constantly catch myself trying to conjure a “we” that is everybody, and more often than not I let myself get away with it. We is my favorite protagonist to use in my nonfiction; I am always keen to have another look at on Our adventures.

Why is “we” so appealing? What are, well, we doing when we use “we” thus? In the “morally suspect” column: we’re trying to make our private experiences seem universal enough that strangers might want to read about them. Sometimes we’re trying to make our personal sins everybody’s. We’re falsely inflating, perhaps out of mere insecurity. In the neutral column: we’re objectifying a personal experience, trying to see it from an angle in which it’s not private anymore. (The pronoun “you” often fulfills the same function in personal anecdotes. You get—see?—to a certain point in a story and seem to watch it from outside, and the protagonist, who was I, becomes “you.”) In (I think) the positive column: “We” can have a theological meaning. In Christian language, human beings are illimitably distinct from each other, but yet there’s also some sense in which we’re one vast subject, an antihero redeemed from outside by God (who we are, in yet another sense, endlessly becoming, or at least invited to endlessly become). In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. And yet: “For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.”2 What can I say, you either find this vision beautiful or you don’t. I find it too beautiful not to grant it the status of truth: it seems arrogant to think that my little imagination outdo the universe.

So there are times to use “we.” But we—fuck it, I at least—could stand to be a little less promiscuous about it.

What about “reckoning”? If it means “talking and writing,” well, a, we have a lot of that, b, if a conversation doesn’t seem to be happening, you have to start it. You might sound weird, and you might not be able to place it in a general-interest magazine right away. But you need to say your thing. And the best way to start it is usually to say your thing, rather than gesturing at a conversation-shaped hole and stopping at that. I am ready to read arguments like “The tabloid press bears responsibility for Jason Arday’s death,” or “If you joined in the rubbernecking at this sad case, you helped create the incentives that the tabloid press responded to.” I am ready to read arguments like “Cambridge may have put this particular professor on a glide path to a career because they, as an institution, are so racist that they look for a spectacular token rather than twenty qualified serious people.” (Personally, I suspect that take is true. It’s a dynamic that elite institutions often fall into. There’s a reason that Eldridge Cleaver got to write a shitty memoir that was reviewed everywhere and sold heavily in paperback while Albert Murray got to appear in Harpers now and then.) I am ready to read arguments like “You, personally, should stop using all social media, because it promotes the kind of mobbing-up that may have killed this guy.” (If I bought this take, I’d nuke my BlueSky account. But I can’t rule it out, either. Maybe I should nuke all my accounts.) “We” need to have a “reckoning” about it? I can’t do anything with that. I don’t know what I’m being asked to sign on to.

More to the point, if you’re going to restrict the move you’re making to the mere invocation of a conversation that doesn’t yet exist, you should at least specify who ought to have that conversation. And if it’s a group that doesn’t include you, you should at least consider whether it’s going on already and you’ve missed it because it’s a group that doesn’t include you. The national media loves to scold the left for failing to deal with our excesses, bad arguments, unclear or inconsistent moral standards, etc., and you know what, that’s all true! But that conversation isn’t going to take place in the New York Times or the Atlantic. All that is accomplished by scolding pieces in those publications, pieces written often enough by people who are clearly unsympathetic to the left’s goals and hopes for the social world, is that then leftist organs of opinion have an excuse to write an umpteenth “Reactionary Centrists Don’t Get It” essay in response, rather than getting into the intra-subculture arguments that leftists do need to get into. The same is true in lots of other directions; this is just the example I’m thinking of because it’s relevant to me.3 If you write from a fake position of concern about a group you have no interest in, people can tell, and it ruins any good point you might have to make. It also keeps you from asking yourself whether you really know anything about the conversations that are happening Over There, and maybe doing a little research, and putting yourself under the kind of pressure that might lead you to say something interesting. It’s bad for the audience and bad for the writer.