Living in Interesting Times
The present moment is one of those that brings to mind the apocryphal curse “may you live in interesting times.” We don’t entirely know whether this was a real historical curse or something invented by a modern mind and falsely attributed to a mystical ancient wise man. Origins aside, though, the premise rings true enough that most people are able to accept the sentiment for what it is regardless of the source.
I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot lately for obvious reasons, but I wanted to sit and think about it in a more sustained way through writing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: writing is a form of meditation. And it is a magical practice. It can help give shape to formless thoughts by finding the edges and currents running through vague intuitions. It can find connections between different things and bring them together so that they have meaning. And then it helps sharpen, weave, whittle, and channel them into something distinct.
In today’s case, I was confronted by a toss-off post on social media.
scores of pissed off Mormon CIA agents who just got canned are ideologically cross-pollinating with platoons of fired trans FBI agents. we are on the verge of new types of politics our ancestors could only dream about.
Despite being thrown into the world as something of a joke, it touched on something much deeper and more serious about interesting times that I think a lot of people haven’t confronted meaningfully yet. This was especially obvious in the comments, with the typical and tired litany of “allies” to queer causes coming in to declare that they would never, never form an alliance with Mormons of all people. Haters. Racists. Bigots. Cult members. Fuck them, the indignant posts wanted to let us know. I would never.
But here’s the thing. Those things that the principled holdouts want us to know that they would never, never touch? The capitalist magics, political magics, chaos magics, racist magics? All like writing. They take apart what exists so that it has less form, and then they rework it to give it new shapes, because having less form means having more potential. There are, of course, degrees to this. The tech industry’s keyword is “disruption,” which is just to say they intentionally break things so they can pick up the pieces and put them back together to suit their own ends. But one does not have to go to these extremes to create change. Indeed, if part of what you are raging against is the kind of attitude that would destroy things that are good and that work for the sake of your own selfish ends, then obviously this kind of destructive attitude to the world is what you seek to change. But this does not mean that such moments of formlessness do not exist around us all the time. The people you are so against are actively making them constantly. We do not need to be destructive ourselves in order to exploit the destruction that others engage in, harnessing those moments ourselves to create the world we want to see.
There is a profound opportunity right now to take advantage of the historical alliances that are being broken in order to remake them into something more powerful and desirable than what we had yesterday. In the same way that British queers allied themselves with miners, that the Black Panthers allied themselves with the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, so can queers ally themselves with Mormons if they make the choice. The Mormon church, like any institution, is diverse, complicated, messy, and filled with cracks. What began as a quasi-communist sex cult at war with the American government slowly gave way over many decades to appeasement tactics to make itself more palatable to mainstream Americans. Those tensions between the old and the new were themselves places of formlessness and ambiguity, ones that the far Evangelical rightwing in the US began to exploit in the mid-twentieth century to push the Mormon church further right, hijacking it for their own ends.
But these kinds of efforts are never complete. History leaves traces of itself in things. What this means, in practice, is that there are still strains of the Mormon church that adhere to the old ways. Liberal strains. Queer friendly strains. Strains who remember how Evangelicals used to treat them before they put on the sheep’s clothing and who recognize a false friend when they see one. There are boring, run of the mill strains who detest what they see as increasing extremism on the right in the church, just as there are ones on the left who feel the same. There are others who have been just fine with the rightward shift and leaving behind all these weird ass anti-government types to the dustbin of history, but were rudely surprised when the government, which they worship and have devoted their lives to, unceremoniously fired them for no reason at all.
All of this is to say, the Mormon church, like any institution sitting on a lot of history, is complex. It is not one thing. It is formless all the time. The far right has pushed those strains to their breaking point. Consequently, the Mormon church is sitting at a moment in time where the Church risks a profound schism. When it finally happens, which side will be sitting on that trillion dollars of money and far flung bastions of the worldwide faithful? The side that fought for literal decades to desecrate the LDS church and make it Evangelical, or the side that walked away and washed their hands of it while they did? Or will it be a new side? One made up of those who stayed and pushed it into a different direction, who breathed new life into the old spirit that suited and not into the old spirit that didn’t?
When I say we have not appreciated what it means to live in interesting times, this is what I mean. The dynamic happening here is not unique to the Mormon church. Walking away and handing the reins to the worst actors is the status quo, one that is the prerogative of the privileged with better options. It happens everywhere, all the time. Academia. Science. The local schoolboard. That job with the shitass manager who keeps getting on your nerves.
This is something organizers fighting against creeping anti-democratic reforms in the US South have been trying to get the rest of the country to understand for decades. Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. Voter suppression is anti-democratic. Fining and jailing people for having their yard grass the wrong length or having a propane tank too close to the house is anti-democratic. These practices all tailor who the electorate will be until the cut of the suit is made for the gerrymanderers. These are the battles that Southerners have been waging for as long as they can, and they could use more help. So when more comfortable people in other parts of the country say we should walk away from organizing in these places because the South is too far gone — comfortable people who have frequently done little to no organizing themselves because they live in safely democratic states where they’ve never had to do any meaningful political work themselves and have simply never learned how — they are doing work for the other side by making it easy for them to walk in and make their anti-democratic agenda happen with no resistance, no pushback.
People who say we should walk away are letting the worst actors shape the formlessness however they want with nothing but a tut tut and a tsk tsk. Because they never learned what it meant to approach politics as work. They cannot get their hands dirty or expend the time or effort needed to even roll up a sleeve and throw a fist in the air to support the people on the inside doing the hard work. Instead, they tell us the work isn’t worth doing and we would all be better off to stop. That we should simply hand over the reins. They are leaving millions of good people twisting in the wind because they don’t want to break a sweat.
Interesting times offer us something outside of that status quo, though. They give us a moment where doing something different becomes easier. Where those cracks and strains and weird alliances suddenly make more sense, because the formlessness becomes greater than normal. The rules we thought existed suddenly reveal themselves as far more fragile than we thought they were. We have a choice in that moment to recognize that and create new forms, or we have a choice to fall back on the forms we know, recreating them because “that’s how it’s always been.” This greater-than-usual-formlessness is a key feature of disruptive regimes, and it is also one of their weaknesses. And it is why Hannah Arendt, one of our best modern theorists on authoritarianism, believed that the new was a literal miracle. Because it allowed us to let go of the old and break the chains of the past in order to create something better. It is why her work was so concerned with the many ways that we let go and forge ahead. With tools like forgiveness and forgetting. Even the root of the words is the same. In the forge, we burn away the past and shape the future. How, she wanted to know, can we do that earlier in the process? Recognize these opportunities sooner so that we can change course before things reach their absolute worst?
The curse of interesting times is not that they are old. It is that they are new. The curse is that your old way of doing things no longer works. The way you got used to. That was easy. That let you turn off your brain and set aside your work and coast on what you thought you knew. The curse of interesting times is that the universe requires you to meet the moment. But in that curse, there is also a blessing lurking, one you can seize if you accept that requirement instead of running from it. You break the hex when you take those times into your own hands and write a new story out of them.
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