Alas, Tiny Desk, I Knew You Well

Whither the twee British bands who met at Uni and the bearded men with guitars who recorded their albums in log cabins in Maine?

Image by Ronald Ruiz via playgroundai.com

I used to depend heavily on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert for a bead on where to get my new music. It was such a wonderfully micro-targeted stream of twee British pop bands whose members first met at Uni; sensitive singer songwriter dudes who recorded their albums in a log cabin in Maine; and the occasional international act that seamlessly integrated bits of retro American pop songs into their soulful ethnic mélanges.

Then everything went to shit  Tiny Desk Concert began to really diversify its offerings, I assume because it grew into such a high-prestige appearance for musicians that it was no longer viable to focus so heavily on white male singers with acoustic guitars who were saved from their demons by free spirited women. Thus more musical genres, more musicians of color, more international acts who see no need to integrate American pop songs into their soulful ethnic mélanges, etc.

I have no reason to believe there’s been an overall decline in the quality of the music—it’s probably gone up, in fact, since it’s drawing from a much vaster pool of potential talent—and it still has stuff for me (see for instance this wonderfully twee set by the English band caroline, who did in fact meet at Uni). The ratio has changed so much, however, that it no longer functions efficiently as a default for delivering new music to me. And nothing has replaced it! The content is out there, of course (you’ll never stop the sensitive white men with guitars), but the well-resourced, high profile curating platform is gone.

It’s a small loss, but it’s a loss, and (and I’m being serious here) it kind of hurts. Or it does when it’s stacked on top of all the other small ways in which the culture reflects me less and tells fewer stories that seem engineered to resonate precisely with me. I was fortunate enough to come of age in a period of time when people like me—Jewish, educated, politically liberal and culturally rather libertine—had an immense and immensely disproportionate amount of influence on the culture. We still do. We still will, I’d predict, for a long time. Middle-aged white guys in general still have some fuel in the tank, and Jewish middle aged white folks still punch way above their (our) weight when it comes specifically to a certain kind of cultural production. That’s not going to disappear, but it has diminished, and I don’t enjoy that diminishment, both in terms of its specific consequences for cultural production (less content for me) and as a signal of my group’s relative decline in status and influence.

I have been immensely fortunate in my life. I have good health, some degree of affluence, an intact family, good friends, healthy children who only periodically tell me I suck, a moderately high-status job, and a very (very) minor role in the public discourse. This is what they call “privilege.” The notion is that if you have such privilege then it is super yucky to mourn, say, a shift in the creative direction of Tiny Desk.

I understand this perspective, but as Lieutenant Commander Jo Galloway defiantly said in A Few Good Men, I object, I strenuously object. Privilege is real, but privilege is wasted if it’s used as an excuse to do less thinking .Privilege should be the privilege to think harder, not less. It should enable one to resist all the unconscious strategies that we tend to deploy when confronted with feelings of cultural loss and dislocation that don’t have a socially sanctioned grounding. In particular, for my purposes, it should mean neither repressing those feelings nor converting them too easily into abstract matters of principle, whether the principle is left wing (“people with privilege need to step back and allow other voices to lead and be heard”) or right wing (“the woke mob is destroying liberal principles of meritocracy, free speech, and individual responsibility”).

Instead, I need to properly mourn the loss. I wrote a piece last year on Imagining the End: Mourning and the Ethical Life, the latest book by psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear. For Lear, as I characterize it, mourning is:

a more expansive activity than just grieving a loss. It is at the center of what it means to be human and to grow and develop psychologically. It is a creative response to what has been lost, whether that’s a beloved spouse, a past version of ourselves, a classroom of murdered children or the Earth as it once was. In the face of loss, our brains go to work.

Lear was writing about mourning in the context of personal or societal or global catastrophe—the death a loved one, mass shootings in schools, climate change. I’m appropriating him for a more modest, less universally empathized with experience of loss, but I suspect he’d say roughly the same thing. Our task in the face of loss of any sort is to sit with it, creatively make sense of it, and use it as an opportunity to better understand and refine our sense of ourselves.

***

On a recent podcast episode, “The Fall of the White American Gay,” I talked to Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick about the relative decline of status, in certain elite or progressive spaces, of white gay men. We connected that phenomenon to what’s happened to the Jewish people in America in recent years, which prompted the exchange below with an old friend of mine (a Jew, natch) who has a much more social science-y mind than I do.

I had framed my thoughts on white gay male and Jewish decline as matters of politics, culture, and ideology. I was missing, he said, what surely was the more important role of basic demographics in the whole thing. In his words: “cohort effect might be swamping the status effect.”

This was a fair, albeit annoying, point. Surely much of what’s going on in terms of the general decline of the visibility and influence of Jewish intellectuals, vis a vis the overall scene, is simply numbers. Or not simply numbers, since the overall Jewish share of the U.S. population hasn’t changed so dramatically over the last century. It reached its proportional peak in the late 1920s, at about 3.5% of the U.S. population, and has been relatively stable for the last few decades at 2.4% or so. That’s a relative decline of about a third since 1927, but the straight numbers have almost doubled in the last century or so.

What’s changed, I think, is the composition of that 2.4-3.5%. Fewer American Jews are now immigrants and first-generation. A much higher percentage of religiously observant Jews are ultra-orthodox, and therefore less inclined to push their kids out into the mainstream. Fewer non-ultra-orthodox Jews are raised in religiously observant but secularly oriented homes, which is a combination that seems to confer advantages in the secular educational world.

As a result of these and other factors, the percentage of Jewish undergrads at Ivy League colleges is now at around 10%, which, though still quite high, is considerably lower than it once was:

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a Jewish news wire service, reported in 1967 that Jewish students had reached high numbers at the Ivies after decades of low enrollments. The news outlet cited a New York Times survey at the time, which found that the student bodies at Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania were 40 percent Jewish. Jewish student populations at Harvard, Yale and Cornell were estimated to be between 20 and 25 percent, while those at Dartmouth, Princeton and Brown hovered between 13 and 20 percent.

If one wonders why Jews have been so over-represented among university professors, editors and writers, directors and producers, and other thought-fluencing sub-populations, the decades when we were killing it in the Ivy Leagues had a lot to do with it. Or rather, the conditions that produced that Ivy outcome had a lot to do with it.

We used to have much more of that insane immigrant striver energy, and we used to have much less competition in the hardcore recent immigrant grind lane. As our Xtreme immigrant energy has waned, and as other striving immigrant populations have arrived to compete for slots within elite spaces, the importance and influence of Jewish intellectuals, artists, journalists, etc. has naturally diminished as well. There’s no complex ideological or cultural analysis of the kind I like to do required. There are now merely many of us in the spaces where once we were legion, and those of us who do occupy the heights perhaps have less to prove. We don’t carry the weight of our people, and the expectations of our parents, on our shoulders in the same way.

I think there’s a lot to this analysis. That said, if you’re considering the downstream implications of a loss of elite status among a given population, pointing to politically neutral demographic facts doesn’t actually resolve the question. It just provides a different backstory for it.

When your group has numbers in elite spaces, after all, one naturally ends up with a greater sense of being a representative person within the larger whole (of, say, America). The group is more able to influence cultural and political narratives in a way that incorporates the specificity of the group and inoculates against negative stereotypes and representations of the group. When you have numbers, and have converted that into power, the mayor comes to your synagogue to pay his respects when he’s running for re-election. When someone paints a swastika on the door of a Jewish-owned store, community leaders from all the different tribes can be called upon to issue public condemnations. You get nine seasons of Seinfeld.

When the numbers go down, the vibe of it all changes, incrementally but after a while palpably. If you’re part of a group that is experiencing a demographically driven loss of status, it feels like you’re being driven out, ignored, replaced, because in some fundamental sense you are, even if there are no bad guys orchestrating the change. There will be fewer TV shows about people who seem like you, and fewer feature stories about novelists who look and sound like your uncle Aaron. Fewer slots in the Ivy Leagues. Less ritual obeisance from politicians. Fewer of the high-prestige cultural awards go to your people.

And here’s the thing. It’s likely to feel the same as if it were motivated by ideology and animus.

This is exacerbated because groups that are in fact hostile to you may begin to have a more visible presence and influence in the culture, in no small part because your capacity to politically discipline them has diminished. So at the same time that you’re experiencing a sense of loss, you’re also noticing an increase in public voices that seem hostile to you and may even offer explicit rationales for why your diminished status is thoroughly deserved (because of your privilege, your complicity in some larger social ill, the sins of your ancestral country). It becomes very, very easy for your psyche to assign responsibility for your loss of status, which is primarily a function of numbers, to the malign intentions and actions of others.

This is all standard analysis, I realize. It’s the implicit or explicit hypothesis of a million newspaper stories about, say, the rise of Trump and the grievances of a declining white majority. It’s the subtext, and sometimes just the text, of much of the culture war stuff that’s been going on for the past decade.

What I think is under-explored, however, is what it actually feels like, from a first-person perspective, to go through this loss of status. So many of the structural analyses we see in the papers and magazines and academic journals are of those people on the opposite of some wall from you. It’s easy to see how the forces of demography, culture, politics, and history inflect the lives of people from groups of which you are not a part, whether it’s the left behind, de-industrialized, deaths of despair white working class or the overproduced latte-sipping elite competing with each other for a limited supply of high-prestige jobs and roles. But what does it feel like to be one of those people, to feel a rising or declining sense of relative status and power affecting your sense of self and belonging and representation? What does it feel like, in particular, if you can sit with these feelings candidly and non-judgmentally, without falling into either an abiding state of resentment or performative high-mindedness?

Speaking only for myself, it feels complicated. Genuine annoyance (tinydeskconcertgrrrrr). Genuine suspicion (did he get that plum prize because they really deserved it?). Unkind visceral feelings about groups who seem to be getting slices of the pie that my people used to get, as well as specific resentments toward members of those groups who are getting the awards and rewards in the realm (writing) where I’m fervently pie-seeking.

In tension with all of those feelings are the voices of what it is perhaps too easy to call the better angels of my nature: my core political commitments to equality and fairness; my historical and psychological understanding of the ways in which ethnic and racial resentment is corrosive; my sociological understanding of the complex and always evolving demographic dynamics in a pluralistic society; a general affinity for the underdog; my visceral distaste both for the politics of resentment and the people whose worldviews seem to center on victimhood and resentment; and a strategic sense of self and group interest (the politics of resentment rarely end well for the Jewish people).

I don’t think there’s a simple, clear answer for what to do with this stew of emotions, reactions, and thoughts. What I’m pretty sure of, though, is what not to do with it, which is to refuse to dignify its complexity. In Imagining the End, Lear has a lovely essay on how Freud wrestled with the sense of loss that he experienced in reaction to the savagery of World War I. It decimated his pride in European civilization as a noble and grand project, his sense of himself as heir to this extraordinary legacy of great minds and extraordinary cultural and scientific accomplishments.

This civilizational pride was, by Freud’s own later lights, a rather irrational and immature thing. Of all people he should have known better than to invest too much of himself in a simplistic notion of the goodness of Europe or for that matter the intrinsic nobility of any collective product of human activity. He knew what a dark and tortured species we are, and how fragile and compromised our achievements. And yet there it was in him, nonetheless. Lear quotes Freud’s from the end of his 1916 essay “On Transience“:

…the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

Lear elaborates on this:

Freud is clear that we form attachments not only to other people but also to ideas and ideals, to nations and causes and peoples, to religious beings—God and angels and spirits—to cultural achievements and natural wonders and beauties. Through all our attachments, we make ourselves vulnerable to loss. Indeed, we inadvertently make ourselves doubly vulnerable. For as we form our attachments, we are liable, without quite noticing what we are doing, to identify with them—that is, to take personal pride in, say, the purportedly eternal achievements of civilization. Should there be disillusionment with the ideal, we not only suffer that loss, we also, as it were, are snuck up from behind and have to suffer the unexpected loss of a piece of ourselves.

It is a terribly bad idea to too quickly attach moral judgement to this pride and its attendant sense of loss, however immature and blinkered we may neutrally assess the pride to be. If we look hard enough, we are likely to find within all of us reservoirs of the pride from which, when pricked, such feelings of loss will seep out. Let’s not condemn our experience of loss, but instead save our condemnation (or at least our critique) for those who fetishize it, deny it, or construct fortresses of ideology around it. Far better, as Lear writes of the endeavor of mourning, to “get busy emotionally, imaginatively, and cognitively, and at least try to make sense of what has happened.”