On Radical Hope

Or how (not) to disappear completely; Or the collapse of civilisation

Laura and Paul Jewill Hill | Harold Charles Harvey (but it’s actually about the distressed little fish)

For the past four or five weeks, I have been trying to write two separate essays and failing spectacularly to develop both of them. The first one was about the monstrous Agatha Christie AI creative writing course that BBC Maestro released in early May. The second one was about online discourse around the claims that the Humanities are dying - usually pushed forward by North Americans or Western Europeans who see the downfall of the neoliberal structure their universities subsist on as a sign of the dying of the light. Yes, austerity sucks, but, you know, it might not be necessarily wise to quote Caius Marcius Coriolanus here, but why not: there is a world elsewhere. The reason neither essay took off, I now realise, is that that’s actually the same essay and not even about greedy literary estates, shitty AI, or the so-called death of the Humanities, but rather about the mysterious wizard behind that soul-crunching sense of imminent collapse we (dare I say it) have been experiencing online, in our classrooms, in our personal relationships, and just looking out the window.

I only realised that my writer’s block was actually a block around the question I was writing about - through my silent, tongue-tied spell - by going back to Yeats, who I’m revisiting for a module I’m teaching my graduate students next term. I always find that it is only through art that I can make sense of myself and that still gives me some hope in the middle of doom. Brace yourselves for a “The Second Coming” insert, for the centre certainly cannot hold, though. While the idea of mere anarchy getting loosed upon the world could be directed at anything - from our horrendous world leaders to war, nuclear weapons, and genocide - I’m trying to grasp something that lies even further. There is definitely a looming sense of collapse; what, exactly, is collapsing seems to be the question.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

I feel one must cast the net even wider, as all of those rabid, vicious faces of violence are not the thing itself, but merely symptoms of something more evil, more pernicious and destructive to the fabric of that thing we call society. Earlier today, I saw a tweet about a young university professor who recently died of a heart attack. Her last Instagram post addressed not only the end of term burnout that comes out of being constantly and perennially overworked, but also what could be summed up as the decay of institutional relationships with students and administrators. Communication gets hindered by the mere fact that people are never ever present anymore and therefore never listening. If every human interaction is quid pro quo, with the other party always either distracted or wondering what they can get out of it, there’s no possibility for interaction at all. I feel that woman’s pain, not only because we share the same ungrateful career, but because the loss of her, one that the people who loved her will feel deeply, reflects something I have been thinking and writing and talking about a lot, at least since I started this newsletter.

Loving your career, finding fulfillment in it, is beautiful, as long as you are aware that regardless of how successful you are, a career will never love you back. On the thread that addressed Professor Catalina’s death, someone shared a screenshot of a series of DMs they exchanged with the university she worked at: this person was asking why there was not a post talking about her, giving out information about the funeral, anything. Their response was that that kind of thing does not get circulated on social media because they have a rather wide audience there. And that’s the thing, right? You can burn yourself out to the point of getting physically ill, to the point of losing your life, but to the marketplace of paid employment you’re not even worth disturbing an Instagram grid aesthetic. Though the marketplace logic should - and to a point is - somewhat hindered at the institution where I work, one that is public and funded by the people, I have no doubt in my mind that I am one-hundred-percent replaceable, regardless of how much anybody there might love or hate me and my work. Between the gossip and the occasional back-stabbing, there are some really great days. But then again, a lack of care disguised as superficial kindness is a given, and sorry to quote myself again, but. You will always be easily replaceable, except in true love.

I recently had a conversation with one of my closest friends about this sense of decay, a loss of something: is it breathing room, is it empathy? What is this unsettling grief all about? As we tried to put our fingers on it, we came not to a conclusion, but to a word.

Carelessness.

You broke something here. […] You were careless. You’ve been careless of me.

I remember being stricken by this scene when it first aired and it has come back to me again and again, so that is the word we came to. The beast slouching towards Bethlehem, the only suitable image for all the things that have unsettled me into writing this. We could call it indifference, but I feel (or fear) carelessness is more precise. For it is because of a lack of care that people stay numb towards children getting bombed to death, towards workers getting exploited to the point of literal, physical collapse, towards the destruction of the environment we inhabit, towards the pain of others (which gets rebranded by online therapy lingo as emotional labour: I am very sorry to drop my suffering in your way, let me pick it up again).

I find that harshness any, everywhere: I see it happening in online communities where people hardly bother to show up anymore, I see it happening in the classroom and in academic spaces, where people grow more and more vicious over stupid, daft, vain things in a never-ending cycle of hurt and lack of self-awareness. I see it in people embracing AI without a shred of critical thinking because we have collectively decided to sell our souls for the promise of eternal convenience and distraction.

Nightmare fuel.

The Agatha Christie AI monstrosity that everybody hated somehow subsumes all this sense of dread accumulation, because why on earth would her estate and the BBC think it is acceptable to exploit her likeness for purposes she could never consent to and put a dead woman to work for someone else’s profit? We have no idea what Christie’s take on AI slop would have been and that is precisely the point. Doomsday scrolling, targeted ads, social media algorithms, as well as AI, have already caused so much cognitive damage not just to young people but especially to them, and we have not even scratched the tip of the iceberg.

We are afraid of getting involved, we are afraid of speaking out and getting misunderstood, we are terrified of saying the wrong thing, we are hesitant, and busy, and tired, and in pain, but meanwhile the worst are full of passionate intensity. I do not claim to know the way out of carelessness as a social evil, but I have been trying to be radically unhesitant regarding the things and the people that I care about. Consciously caring, or caring deeply, is the only way to live and not just survive. If I’m haunted about Marcia’s you’ve been careless of me, I’m also propelled forward by that scene where Belinda (the extraordinary Kristin Scott Thomas) tells Fleabag that “there’s nothing more exciting than a room full of people”. When Fleabag counters that most people are a bit shit, Belinda is relentless in her reply: “people are all we’ve got”.

I am so counterintuitively hopeful. It might just be Emily Dickinson’s fault, but I feel that daring joy, love, and light might just be the way out of this mess. And if they’re not, at the very least we’ll have some togetherness and may be of some comfort to each other as the world falls down.