I spent an enjoyable chunk of New Year’s Eve reading Helen DeWitt’s newish novella The English Understand Wool. It’s brilliantly written, dryly hilarious, and a quick read because unputdownable. But that’s not why I want to write about it on this blog. I’m writing here because I think that, despite the satirical tone of the novella, it should be read as an earnest case for two underrated virtues that are crucial to a better future. So I’ll get right to the point and describe those virtues. If you want more details on the plot and more conventional review commentary, many other reviews like this one will fit the bill.
Beauty isn’t truth, but it’s still necessary
The first virtue is taking aesthetic excellence seriously and attending to it mindfully. DeWitt’s narrator is at pains to describe the great beauties and sensual pleasures that arise from world-class art and craft, from the texture of a piece of artisanal fabric to the taste of a Puligny-Montrachet to the sound of a virtuoso musical performance. She pays attention to these experiences and judges those who don’t make the effort to do so. More importantly, she pays homage to the artists and craftspeople who bring those great things to life, and rejoices in the disciplined work it takes to make it possible to do such things.
Why is this relevant to futurism? Because in a richer future, especially one where most traditional work is automated away, mindful attention to beauty, appreciation for craftsmanship, and being part of that craftsmanship ourselves will be essential paths to meaning and fulfillment in life. And the beauty we attend to must be the concrete, real-world kind that takes hard and careful work to make. Nothing else will get us free of the anomic temptation of wireheaded passivity and ground us in the world beyond our heads.
Because the milieu DeWitt describes is so rarefied and aristocratic, there’s a temptation to read her as sending up the shameless materialism and clubbiness of a class exemplified by, say, Frederick Seidel. But I think there’s something more emotionally complex and humane going on here. Most of us can reasonably aspire to enjoy more beauty and cultivate better taste in some way; most of us, too, can aspire to some greater level of creative development. And I read DeWitt as saying, through the ironic mask of her “naive” and “sheltered” narrator, that doing these things can and should be not about grasping for class status, nor only satisfying material wants, but also about the improvement of our minds’ engagement with the world. In a time characterized by interlocking crises and a retreat from reality, that is a message worth our mindful attention.
Finding the moral in the transactional
The second virtue is imbuing formal, transactional, and hierarchical relationships with respect and empathy. The narrator’s worshipped Maman is lovingly described in her thoughtful consideration for seamstresses, house servants, music teachers, and on and on. While sometimes this consideration has an aspect of feudal paternalism, more often it is distinguished by a reverence for those people’s skills, a creative zeal to avoid burdening them, and a determination to enable them to grasp the freedom and agency they are due.
This matters because in any realistic, wealthy human future, there is no way around having these kinds of relationships loom large in our lives. We need to have structured, goal-oriented cooperation with strangers, and often that cooperation will produce power dynamics which have to be frankly acknowledged. There is no running away to the Romantic dream of restoring the preindustrial intimacy of family and village, nor any way to make anarcho-communist equality scalable and powerful enough to keep the lights on. Attempts in these directions bring not freedom but the tyranny of structurelessness.
So if we want a thoroughly good future cultural life, we have to imbue our structured, institutional transactions with that thorough goodness. DeWitt shows us one plausible path to doing so: it’s a bit over-the-top, a bit fantastical, but a heck of a lot more practical than common alternatives. Moreover, she shows how the right combination of moral and pragmatic attention to these relationships can make them fulfilling and pleasurable for all parties, real contributions to flourishing human lives, despite being arms-length and unequal. That’s a lesson I’ve found immensely useful to learn at work, through managing great people and being managed by great people. I wish it were taught to every new manager.
That is not all
For all that, The English Understand Wool is still worth reading in part as a satire of a sheltered, blinkered scion of over-mannered wealth. This is because the narrator prizes the above values to the exclusion of all others, fatally limiting the real improvement in quality of life she can achieve. DeWitt is thus alive to the need for balance and the complexity of the quest for the good life. These underrated virtues are very far from sufficient in that quest: but in isolating them as the focus of a character’s zeal she shows us how necessary and neglected they are. I wish more fiction did that; DeWitt is in the company of such eccentrics as Richard Powers, Nell Zink, and Vikram Seth here. I already ordered more of her stuff. You should too.