At re-reading “Slouching towards Bethlehem” I feel the same sharp and sad after-taste that any other novel of Raymond Chandler leaves me with. It isn’t a novel, though. Back in 1967 Joan Didion was capable enough to see the same harsh reality of Los Angeles a decade or two after Chandler, even if anybody else would have seen, and write about, the summer of love. But it wasn’t love what drove the hippies to be hippies. It was the decaying corpse of a culture, of a bankrupt country. And so, through the eyes of Didion I see the disconnection, the atomization of people that had no shared identity no more.
One could argue that nowadays the yuppies are exactly the opposite to the careless acid trips, the endless nights on booze and the lack of any wish of having any future. A yuppie is driven, is tight. It has a plan, want to make money and go places. Perhaps some cocain… but marihuana? no way, that would affect his productivity.
And yet, both are products of the the same fragmented society.
Some of my friends are fairly close to being hippies, even today. What strucks me from them every other time is the weird combination of their activism and their certainty that politics does not work, that the society is corrupt, that everything is going to the dogs. And then my yuppie friends, who are desperately running the rat race to pay the mortgage of a house that is anyway bigger than what they really wanted and saving for the bizarrely called “bug out money” Meaning that, at the core, they are as contradictory as my hippies: investing more energy than what they have in totally opposite goals.
Perhaps this is why we talk so much about networks today.
Ever since Didion described it, and possibly before, our sense of collective identity is broken. There are many reasons for that, surely the increasing diversity of our societies, but also the nightmares that a nationalistic identity has created. In any case, we all feel something faked, something unreal, when we try to describe ourselves as members of a group. There is always a “but” creeping in the next sentence. I am argentinian, but grew up in Venezuela. I am dutch but only because I love a dutch lady. I am member of the Greens, but don’t agree with all what our leaders say.
Yet we all feel a network. Not a group that define us, not an identity that shape, and eventually obliterate, us. Nothing like that. More like a set of connections, the sum of the relations that make us think in, or work with, or love, other people. A thing that happens between equals, because we have learned that rigid hierarchies are not the way. An idea that changes and evolves, since you yourself can sever relations, or add new ones. A fluid tool to organize many things, solidarity if we want, collaborations if we want. Perhaps more important than it all, a thing based on individuals. A model to make sense of the terrible atomization that we live since past century.
We are all connected, we say. This is how the atomization stops, this is how we don’t go back to the meaningless masses of the past. Perhaps this is our opportunity, our answer. No Bethlehem no more, but towards a new Babel.
Without the crash.