If The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or The Financial Times or even The Economist are taken, broadly speaking, as the major organs of the financialized evangel, I still hold that it is The New York Times which best represents the way the rentier class in America self-perceives and self-represents. The former are a sort of priestly class; the Times is a congregant and a believer. It sits in the pews, prays to the gods, and authors the temple newsletter. When some doubt arises about the rightness of global capital, when some evidence appears that the augurs have been diddling the young pigeonkeepers behind the altar, it wrings its hand with worry; fortunately, all depredations are ultimately revealed to be aberrations—indeed, to be extravagantly so.

Signs and wonders! The Times has discovered, mirabile dictu, that “inequality” is not getting worse, as is the conventional wisdom. Not only that: it is getting better. “Inequality” is already a dire euphemism for capital—ownership of and access to—but let’s not reinvent the wheel again. The Times has discovered, or has, more accurately, discovered someone discovering, that if you look at the recent percentage changes in annual incomes, the very, very rich have seen far steeper declines. Ergo, therefore, and hallelujah.

I assume there’s a certain joy in delivering the good news that the world really is, after all, mounted on the back of a turtle. You may all recall, some years ago, that Stephen Pinker delivered the great, good news that the modern world is not only a kinder, less violent, more gentle place than it has ever been, but that it is measurably so. There’s the old saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics, but the last of these should really be percentages. David Bentley Hart was onto him:

Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.

So too, this idea that a larger percentage change in a very large income number is in any meaningful sense a greater loss or gain than a commensurate change in a very small one. If a investment banker with a base salary of a million bucks makes two million in bonus in a very good year and only a million the next, his income has declined by a full third, but he’s still making two million bucks in a year. If a guy making twenty bucks an hour working 37.5 hours a week for fifty weeks a year has his hours cut back to just thirty hours a week, his income declines only 20%, but it represents the loss of 10 months’ rent. Also, he loses his health insurance. Also, he’s paying about a third of his income in taxes, whereas Joe Millionaire is at half that. Did we mention that the Times is looking only at pre-tax income. We mention it now.

You might argue in good faith that inequality doesn’t matter, that it’s fine and well to have a society in which a very few people are very rich and many people are just scraping by. I’d disagree, but there’s a legitimate argument that, so long as there exists some open path for the guy making forty grand a year to one day make forty million, however unlikely, then there’s not a structural problem. But to say, instead, that because very large incomes are more volatile than very ordinary incomes, therefore their recent declines represent a countervailing trend to the concentration of wealth is to engage in what I choose to interpret as an astonishing stupidity lest I have to believe it an even more amazing dishonesty.

In general, I take it as a wholly salutary sign that something as fundamentally inane as the largely (though not entirely) unofficial speech codes of (some) universities and a small subsection of online discourse might be perceived, for better or worse, as the sort of thing worthy of, what is that charmingly stupid American phrase? A national conversation. In a better world, we would spend a trillion dollars investigating who exactly is silencing whom with their withering verbal disapproval, while conflicts between nations would be fought and settled entirely by pseudonymous tweeters pwning each other for the cost of monthly broadband. Alas, the fallen state of Man, etc. Whatever Weird Physics may murmur in its fever dreams, there is, for us at least, no other world but this one. And hey, is it actually so bad that the merits of, say, intersectionality—as an idea, as a practice—merit discussion, even if only for the purpose of dismissal, in a major magazine? I’d say it’s not.

As a general rule, I find the more elaborate rituals of call-outs and trigger warnings as tiresome and banal as the political right, in which I’d include someone like Jonathan Chait. The second, in particular, with a basis in the subtle possibility of “re-traumatizing” the previously traumatized seems to me to suffer from the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy: no one believes in anything that is actually true with such fervor. Humans surely suffer, and those who deviate from the broad norm suffer more and more deeply, but I think we are far more defined by our resiliency than by our traumas, and I believe in the corollary: that speech itself is what best transmutes the latter into the former. For all the hocus-pocus and pharmacological excess of the modern psychological disciplines, and for all its founders’ silly ideas, there’s some truth to your mom’s old saw. Maybe you’ll feel better if you just talk about it.

On the other hand, the complaints about this minor, if zealous, policing of the boundaries of acceptable discourse are so operatically hysterical (and yes, I’m aware of the irony of using that particular word; sorry), so grossly out of proportion to its actual reach and effect, that I feel compelled to take the side of the language cops—if only because it’s so absurd to call them cops. What you actually see, when the wild-eyed radicals from the gender studies collective, come baying about the Western Canon’s awfulness, is a minor exercise of political power by people who otherwise have very little—because of their age, because of their race, because of their gender, etc. That they so frequently flex this power within the institutions of their universities says little about the nature of their cause or the great meaning and vitality of the university. We all enact our political will within the confines of some proximate community. The staff meeting is closer than city council, which is nearer than Harrisburg, which is a shorter drive than Washington D.C. The dean is more likely to hear your petition than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And, obviously, people outside of the university rarely complain about any of this until, by accident of intersecting institutions, this local kind of politics gravely affronts the prerogatives of exactly such august power. When Condoleeza Rice gets disinvited from giving the same speech she has given ten thousand times before, it’s because that’s easier for some assistant vice provost for external affairs in the grand scheme of his every day at the office dealing with these kids than the opposite. The idea that this has anything to do with discourse, ideas, freedom, liberty . . . for God’s sake, leave the weed-smoking to the youth. No idea has ever been transmitted during a commencement address or convocation series in the history of commencement addresses and convocation series. These are opportunities to mutually burnish reputations by rubbing them against each other in a grotesque exhibit of hierarchical frottage that is itself the dourest form of pornography. In the meantime, what have the students in this example done? Well, they’ve organized collectively toward a mutually desired end and exerted rhetorical and perhaps minor financial pressure in order to achieve it. In other words, they’ve learned-by-doing an important and excellent lesson in the operation of power in an oligarchic democracy. Which ain’t a bad thing.

This, by the way, is why I think that the fear expressed by some more genuine people of the left—that these tendencies toward internecine pissing matches over who has or has not most thoroughly purified themselves of all wrongthink leads to a fractious and disorganized left that will never mobilize against the iniquities of global capital and imperial militarism—are misplaced. First, because, for all their persistence within the cycling generations of universities, these questions are formative, but not necessarily normative, especially for people who leave the academy. I know that I got pretty wrapped up (sometimes for, sometimes against) in speech codes and all that when I was a student at Oberlin College lo these many years ago. I think it made me a better and sharper thinker about questions of equity, equality, and power than I would otherwise have become, even if I now find the particulars of those debates very silly. Second, because I think that people tempered by these debates will—some of them—ultimately develop a subtler understanding of the operation of power within and by global capital, which has, after all, resisted and redirected a hundred years of mass movements and solidarity with hardly a hiccup. In other words, and as I endlessly repeat, I think the kids today are all right. Better, very frequently, than we were.

Every several years, about one third
of the people go into the temple and
exsanguinate a bull upon the sand,
release an auguring flock of city birds,
divine the numerology of words,
each predetermined cry of pleasure planned
to simulate a state of utter aband-
on; past the city gates the shepherds herd
their flocks; they are as young as the gods appear,
as beautiful, and like the gods they do
not care for the rites; they’d rather truly fuck,
drink, breath, walk, live, sleep, and hear
their own singing voices than what should be true
according to the augurs. They believe in luck.