Curtis White

I picked up this book at secondhand in 2009, when it was only a few years old, but I didn't get around to reading it until 2026, when it had been twenty years since it was written. Alas, the ills that White attempts to diagnose here are only worse now. For example, his section on "Isolation" (52-57) could hardly have imagined the social consequences of pandemic lockdowns and the epistemic closure of online demographics. Still, I think many today fail to realize (or remember) how similarly show more dismal the late years of the Bush presidency were as we suffer under the predatory kakistocracy of Trumpism.

In the broad outlines, I was in strong agreement with White's positions in what is essentially an ethical study, but I wasn't impressed with his rhetoric or his attention to intellectual detail. Rhetorically, he overuses the first person plural, almost always to mean implicitly "white US Americans," if not something even more restricted to his educated class and nebulous identification with Christian culture. While White has a handle on the importance and dangers of religion, he is not a scholar of the topic. He gives himself away with blunders like "the first four 'synoptic' books of the bible" (164). I enjoyed the sympathetic quotations from Nietzsche, but I was frustrated to find them all sourced to the Modern Library Philosophy of Nietzsche anthology and a secondary text by George Allen Morgan.

The book's third chapter is centered on the concept of "the Holy Whore" as White has received it from filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I never felt like I fully understood what White meant by this phrase, partly because it came to me so weighted with prior associations, both ominous and numinous. He implies that the Holy Whore is a paragon of "bad faith," and he applies the term to a pair of liberal political comedians, Al Franken and Bill Maher, along with their humorless right-wing nemeses Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter (84-87), in all these cases seeming to use it pejoratively. But he also uses it to signify an evidently admirable style of self-criticism and subversion identified with Fassbinder himself.

White asserts the perennial durability of ideological opposition between left and right, rationality and religiosity, Humanists and Evangelicals, coastal cosmopolitans and heartland yeomanry--all of these summed in the obfuscating color code of the 21st-century US mass media ("blue" and "red") that facilitates partisan sorting (99-101). (I think Cabell calls these parties gallantry and chivalry.) White observes that both sides of the coin spend the same, supporting an inertial state of affairs with a deathward trajectory. His desire to get outside of that binary straightjacket leads him to the third term of Romanticism, emblemized by Blake, Ruskin, and the Concord Transcendentalists, and still manifested in twentieth-century US counterculture (103-5). (A deeper historical sensibility would have shown him its presence in the early Rosicrucians and the Neoplatonists of antiquity.) White's titular "Spirit of Disobedience" is from Thoreau, but I was necessarily reminded of Crowley's "Hymn to Lucifer": "The key of joy is disobedience."

The book's final chapter is a set of three interviews, which doesn't support the volume's sense of cohesion. But the three "neo-fundamentalist" themes chosen were ones I would find hard to top for Curtis' declared purposes, and the interviewees were all new to me, at least in their own voices. On the value of "time," White interviewed John De Graaf, whose views are a notable improvement over the assumptions and inclinations of contemporary US labor ideology. As noted in their discussion, European social democracies are better attuned to this value than US American "democratic" capitalism is.

The second interview concerns "home," comprehending architecture and local community. For this topic, White interviewed James Howard Kunstler, whom he had cited earlier to the effect that the world would have passed peak oil by 2026 (117). Kunstler's anathemas against the car culture of the US were satisfying to me, and I was especially delighted by his invective against the "evil" of gerontocratic planning boards (144-5). This section determined me to read Kunstler's 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere, developed out his unpublished essay, "Why Is America So Fucking Ugly?" I have placed a library loan request for it.

The third interview is on "food," and it elicits from Michael Abelman some unusual views on farming and the nature of personal and social nutrition. These are not topics that I ponder routinely, but the radical passion exposed in this interview was compelling in terms of its social vision, even if I don't see it guiding me to any individual path of action.

In White's epilogue, just as in the Holy Whore chapter, he seems somewhat paralyzed by his own reflections. Even though he instructs the reader to "Misbehave," he doesn't even have the strength of his own convictions to renounce his automobile ownership--a simple step that I took well before 2006, after making many of the same observations that account for fifteen pages referenced in his subject index. He enjoins the reader to "Try to win," but the winning condition is still not well defined. The Spirit of Disobedience hasn't become obsolete in twenty years, but the book doesn't go far in offering methods to fulfill its appealing subtitle: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work. show less

This is a collection of essays that appeared separately in various magazines, so it doesn't build up a single big argument. But the pieces cohere well enough.

The art here is music, poetry, and painting in Europe: Wordsworth, Haydn, Van Gogh, Mahler. Art is similar to Buddhism in that they both work to help us transcend conventional perception, seeing things in conventional terms. This transcendent European art paved the way for the welcoming reception of Buddhism in Europe more recently. show more

White singles out Stephen Batchelor for some pointed criticism. White observes an inconsistency between the earlier Batchelor, e.g. The Awakening of the West, and the later, e.g. Buddhism Without Beliefs. I think White is on target with this. The whole idea of discarding karma is just absurd... well, for a Buddhist. White gets karma just right, I think. It's really just habit, at whatever scale. What's key is to explore the depth of our habitual patterns. Habits are impermanent, cultural patterns are impermanent... our modern way of life is impermanent.

Where White goes astray... well, perhaps there is an earlier and a later Karl Marx, too! To explore the dynamic arising of social and economic patterns, class structure etc., this could be the earlier Marx, and a cornerstone of social science. The later Marx would be the utopian Marx, proposing inevitable progress to some ideal pattern. White portrays the Buddhist sangha as some ideal social pattern, similar to a Marxist utopia. But that's not what the sangha is. For starters, the original sangha went out begging every day for their food. There was no notion of self-sufficiency. Maybe one could look at Tang dynasty Buddhism for a reformulated sangha where the monks were farming.

Anyway my quibble is rather minor. The issue is very deep - for sure we have monstrous problems of all sorts, but what is the vision that can guide us in responding?

OK, my favorite sentence in the book is the last sentence: "But as jazz Arkestra leader Sun Ra once said, 'Heaven is where you'll be when you are okay right where you are!'" show less

After reading this, I wrote a letter to send to Curtis White but couldn't figure out how to get it to him. So, here it is. I'll just call it an "open letter" now:

Greetings.

My name is Yupa. I’m writing to you regarding your book, Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed. I became aware of you and your books upon seeing one listed in the notes for “Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd edition”.

I want to write to you about the possibilities and difficulties of show more counterculture. As someone who rejects this society and wants to life to look very different, I have spent time think about this.

I’ve observed that rejection of the normative culture or form of life is no longer fashionable, but “political awareness” seems to be increasing. In the lingo of the Sixties (which I’m probably butchering), everyone is a politico rather than a dropout, even the radicals who previously tried mixing the two.

I’ll admit that “normative culture” is an imprecise idea. For the sake of keeping this letter short, I’m basically referring to elements of the society that could not exist if there was no state or capitalism. So, I view compulsory labor and everything that rests on it as part of the normative culture.

I don’t believe computers, automobiles, and extensive division of labor would exist in a sustainable society. If there was no rent to pay or cops to push us around, I doubt people would do most of the labor to keep producing these things. So, I imagine a counterculture trying to build a life with these ideas in mind.

It doesn’t seem like people my age feel the same except for some anarchists. Even the social struggles that erupt now are in opposition to mistreatment within this society. They do not call for a new way of life. It doesn’t seem like people dislike the world now, they just don’t want to be excluded from it. This is understandable of course. Nobody should be killed by police or subject to premature death and misery the way marginalized people are. But I am curious why there is so little rejection of the society from the root, and I believe this reason is related to the dearth of counterculture.

You wrote that younger people don’t want to write code for Google. In my experience, that’s not true, even among those not in tech. People my age are stoked to learn coding because it’s both a marketable skill and gives them a sense of power. Being able to code mimics the feeling of creating something in the real world. I’ve heard people jokingly refer to coding as their magical power.

Though radicals and progressives don’t like Google, I think most people do. Or, if they don’t like it, they never say anything and still use its search engine despite plenty of alternatives. Besides that specific example, I’m not seeing the anti-work critique offered by the Situationists and Bob Black embodied among most peers. Sure, liberals want Amazon and McDonalds workers to be unionized, but there’s not a glimpse of opposition to work itself except among the “underclass” who already lack prospects.

Additionally, professional work culture has changed. Work is increasingly team-based, which means that slacking and other forms of resistance are seen as harmful to one’s co-workers and not the bosses. Hierarchies are still there, but middle management becomes less of a thing as time moves on. At my job, I have a “team leader” who essentially bottom-lines that things get done, but we are treated as autonomous people who take work initiatives as we see fit. They assume we self-police rather than need orders given to us all the time. While I get that most work isn’t like this, I think this transformation of work culture for professionals makes them feel more autonomous and less alienated at work.

Moving on to leisure time, the various social media platforms and contemporary forms of entertainment (Netflix, podcasts, YouTube, video games) meets people’s needs in ways that the culture probably did not in the Sixties. For one, there is constant amusement and entertainment. There is a flood of memes, videos, and other content to keep one occupied at all times and in many contexts. The culture is no longer boring the way the Situationists described it.

Another reason people don’t turn away from entertainment media is how “woke” everything is becoming. More people see themselves in the people on TV and in movies and are thus less alienated from it. Additionally, The Sopranos and The Wire ushered in an era of “Good TV” where the medium is more reputable than ever before. The only thing about TV that people are dissatisfied with now is that they’ll never have enough time to watch everything they want to!

YouTube, reddit, and social media generally offer opportunities for people to have discourse, however impoverished it might be. And, given how disconnected and atomized this society had become at the turn of the century, the internet is seen as gifting us with human connection, especially among marginalized people. Even to radicals I have to explain there are more options for life than this social media hellscape or isolated Nineties ennui.

Turning to the economy, I think its financialization discourages people from considering dropping out. The welfare state has been gutted and people get by with debt now, which enslaves them to work. I know my student loans are only reason I am working full-time at the moment. I think people are less thinking of how to get free and more how to get debt-free, which means they embrace work.

The cost of real estate is also a hindrance if we’re talking about living off the land. During the Great Recession, it was easy for me to live in a city with a bunch of friends in a house where most didn’t work. Now, housing prices have skyrocketed. This means people have more pressure to work full-time and land higher-paying jobs. Looking at past subcultures in contrast: the German Autonomen and NYC Lower East Side squatters in the eighties and nineties thrived when real estate prices were low and urban vacancy was high. (Discovering that a real estate market crash took place in the late Eighties gave me a new context to appreciate Linklater’s 1990 film “Slacker”)

It’s possible that, with the rich and middle-class flocking to the cities, some suburbs will see falling home values, and thus more vacancy and affordable rent. But since houses are many people’s primary asset, I think lingering homeowners will resist this pretty hard. Also, it’d be difficult to get away with experimental living there due to zoning regulations and more uptight neighbors.

Rural areas host possibilities but if there are no urban enclaves for people to meet and develop ideas and practices, I don’t see an actual counterculture developing. Or, if it does, it will probably involve the internet to connect like-minded countercultural dropouts. Personally, I would only want to live rurally only if it was relatively close to a city, since I can imagine going nuts only being around the same group of friends.

Another impediment to counterculture is how neoliberalism affirms people’s hobbies and interests in a way that I don’t think society did in the Sixties. People can be and look as kooky as we want now as long as we work and stay connected to the machine through phones and social media. If anything, society now encourages people to speak up constantly and “be ourselves.” With the internet, we live in an attention economy where everyone is trying to be noticed the most. It seems like, in the Sixties, people were discouraged from self-expression, which is partially what the counterculture reacted against.

Now, I’m no cheerleader for neoliberalism’s promises of individual freedom. They are not only limited, they actually produce a new, more insidious conformity. We can express ourselves, sure, but we become irrelevant, lonely, possibly without a job, and out-of-touch with our peers unless we have smartphones and social media. This society nudges us into conforming and using these technologies. The more invasive these technologies become, the more our activities are logged and monitored, creating a panoptic effect at minimum. The more connected we are, the more invasive the systems of control become. For example, when I have my phone on me at all times, my boss can always reach me. I know all that, I’m just pointing out the ways that culture preempts people from looking for something new.

All of this is to say, I agree with your call for counterculture, but there are barriers. Hopefully not insurmountable ones. Since you were around in the Sixties, I’m curious what you make of all of this.

Thanks,
Yupa show less

Mr. White is a man trained in philosophy, and here he seeks to join people like Marcuse and McLuhan as a social critic. Like Marx, he is a philosopher who can set out a problem quite vividly. His references include a number of my favourite HBO limited dramatic series, "The Wire" (possibly the USA's War and Peace!), "Detective Story"s first season, Wagner's operas, especially "Rheingold", and the novel "Tristram Shandy".
Perhaps it is indicative that Mr. White doesn't deal directly with show more Sterne's glorious exploration of the novel, but with a French take-off of it, written by Diderot.
The theme of White's book is a rejection of what he calls the various robotic approaches to society and its ills. Setting up sections dealing with the various approaches or "-bots" as he calls them, the Science-bot, the Money-bot, the Buddha-bot, the Eco-bot, and the Art-bot, he diagnoses the current society and the major responses to our current feelings of distrust and pessimism. To some degree, these are Straw-bots, convenient to his theme which is that Capitalism, the Money-bot, is a complete victor in practically all fields of human endeavour, and those who are not part of the monied group or their servants, are due to endure a very restricted future, and life expectancy.
He does define the servants of the rich quite broadly, but still the world entourage will only number in the hundreds of thousands at best. So what are his possibilities for the rest of us?
It seems it will be small scale market gardening, or to be the kind of servant to the rich which they will want to provide the arts that amuse the rich, or they can be be convinced are part of their proper life-style. To be Moliere to Louis XIV or Hadyn to the Esterhazys. The rest of us, will either die off in the coming environmental crisis, or evolve some undreamt response that will somehow preserve unsubservient population. In the meantime, this generation can involve itself in Art, most especially music, and go out humming.
While I like his ability to establish a question, as an optimist, I have to look elsewhere for my prophet of the future. show less