The Strenuous Life

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Oct 17

A few years ago now, Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook wrote a book called Lean In, which I certainly did not read, since I am a respectable academic and people like me do not read best-selling self-help books by business gurus, especially when the business is social media. But respectable academics have no compunctions about citing things they don’t read, so I am going to borrow her title and suggest that one of the best responses to our current political malaise is to lean in.

Of course it makes all the difference what we lean in to. I gather from her critics that Sandburg was just dressing up garden-variety corporate greed as liberatory feminism, but whatever she meant by “lean in,” to me it recalls the older and, shall we say, more masculine mantra of Teddy Roosevelt, who in his famous speech to a Chicago men’s club, called on Americans to live “the strenuous life.” I think Roosevelt’s vision of the strenuous life – an antique vision, to be sure, a little stuffy and more than a little tainted with delusions of imperialist grandeur – is the antidote to a kind of life with which it is easily confused, and with which we are all too familiar, because it is the kind of life into which most of us lean. We might call it the stressful life.

Stress, as all good psychobabblers know, does not come from having a lot to do, but from having a lot of nothing to do, or from having to do a lot that leads to nothing. It is the feeling of being “busy” with “work” that is no better than busywork. Furthermore, stress is usually not just a matter of having too much of nothing to do, but of having too many different and incompatible things to do. We are not “stressed” by activity, but by the frustration of activity, by the dissipation of action into multiple tasks that do not cohere (“multi-tasking”). Stress is the consequence of what Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society distinguishes as “hyperactivity”: activity that carries us helplessly along, to no end.

Han’s “hyperactivity” finds an echo in Aton Jäger’s “hyperpolitics.” For Jäger, “the mood of contemporary politics is one of incessant yet diffuse excitation. Emotionally, it is related to the crisis of attention characteristic of the age of the internet and smartphone. . . . Rather than concrete results or new social relations, this political tendency seems to mark its influence by its ability to reproduce its frenetic form of activity . . . . Hyperpolitics comes and goes, like a neutron bomb that shakes the people in the frame but leaves all the infrastructure intact.” The news never stops, but nothing ever happens.

Hyperpolitics is busywork politics. Apparently our job as citizens is to get excited about everything that doesn’t matter without getting excited enough about anything that does matter to actually do something about it. Our job is to look busy and politically “engaged.” (David Graeber might call this kind of citizenship a “bullshit job.”) So it’s no wonder that when I ask my students not what they think but how they feel about “politics these days,” most of them say something about how stressful it all is. They’re talking about hyperpolitics.

Roosevelt’s strenuous life is the true opposite of hyperpolitics. Our politics is stressful precisely because it is not strenuous. The stressful life, the hyperpolitical life, is a life of furious engagement with a spectacle of “engagement,” where nothing is really at stake. It sounds a lot like the life of “those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat,” as Roosevelt put it. Hyperpolitics is full of dramatic confrontations but empty of the “strife” that Roosevelt embraced. “Strife” is not something my students really seem to enjoy. They mostly avoid genuine conflict, in no small part because they have been trained to do so by all the various tutelary institutions that are now in charge of raising our children.

The strenuous life is a life of action, the life lived by Roosevelt’s “man in the arena.” It is not the kind of action that always succeeds, but it is genuinely action because it aims at something that is possible, rather than losing itself in that peculiar aimlessness that comes from imagining that nothing is impossible, which is what the internet makes people do. It is action that is energized by contact with reality, which is to say, contact with limits. It is action because it has an end, which means that it can come to an end, even if the end is defeat. By contrast, hyperpolitics is politics in the absence of limits. After all, there are no limits online: the scroll goes on forever. The busywork of “engagement” is never done, and will never be done – not until we act, and be done with it.

That, paradoxically, is what the strenuous life should aim at today, if we aim to dispel the frenetic spectacle that’s stressing us all out. We should aim to be done with it. Now Roosevelt himself had different ideas about what we should aim at: to my mind, a lot of spectacular and destructive fantasies about greatness and empire and “moral duties” that look pretty self-interested, not only in the light of hindsight but in the plain sight of any of his contemporaries who might well have wondered whether colonizing the Philippines was really an act of liberation from the tyrannical Spanish, as opposed to the tyrannical act of brash young Americans who were just as susceptible as any conquistador to the perennial lure of gold, God, and glory. I don’t want to lean in the service of today’s empire-builders, whether they’re corporate titans or government do-gooders. I do want to recover the ideal of “the strenuous life,” but I also want to remember that any ideal can be gang-pressed into the service of money and power, Roosevelt’s no less than others.

What matters is the recovery of action, of the possibility of action, and above all this means the recovery of that sense of limits mentioned above. I think the imperialism Roosevelt praised for its ability to inspire action ultimately saps the imperialists, or their children, of their capacity to act. Empires always end in decadence. The strenuous life today may look to the highly engaged like a withdrawal from politics, but it will be in fact an effort to find the limits to engagement that make politics meaningful.

These limits are first of all limits of scale: the strenuous life is a withdrawal from bigness into smallness, from the mass society to the local community. Real politics is where the action is, and the real action is where we live. In a hyperpolitical society, where everything is “political” because everything is a spectacle, real political life is more likely to be found in what is most unspectacular, in those places that have the least to do with “politics.” The building of families and friendships, of neighborhoods and churches, of little platoons with no time to nurture what Roosevelt calls “empires in their brains,” may be more politically important than the building of parties and platforms. The strenuous life today is the local life, the concentrated life against the dissipated life, of smallness with no time for bigness, of politics against “politics.”

And yet, another presidential election looms, a truly spectacular affair on the grandest scale. Living the strenuous life means withdrawing from the spectacle: does it also mean avoiding the ballot box? Some days I think so, but that feels a little weird - I do teach politics for a living, after all, and my students are already apathetic enough. And in fact I think it is the wrong conclusion. If local life is more genuinely political life, national politics still genuinely matters, precisely because it can make the strenuous local life more or less livable. The policies made by presidents and legislators can make it easier or harder for citizens to act. Presidents can send our children to war, for example – as Roosevelt himself did. There are some causes worth dying for, and many that are not. Issues like that are worth paying attention to, even if we are trying to keep the spectacle out of our heads.

But I think that is our first order of business now: keeping the spectacle out of our heads, and keeping our heads down and strenuously bent on whatever good work needs doing wherever we live, even if we also make time to cast a ballot come November. Maybe later we’ll have room for bigger things, if not for empires.