Season 7: "Sensibilities and Styles"

"We are going to die in a world that is very different than the one we spent the first half of our lives in and in a world which is different than our parents ever experienced and our grandparents ever experienced., and that is very, very bracing. It was once common experience to be born into one world and die in another. But in America we got used to a forty year period of Liberal Democracy and The “Rights Of Man” and Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of History”. And although that was a really interesting theory I think it turns out to be incorrect.” Personal Correspondence with fellow Gen Xer

“I think its very important to make a distinction between sincerity and good intent. There’s a lot of people doing very bad things out of a sincere commitment to certain principles while at the same time also being motivated by destructive elements of intent. Sincerity is often underestimated. A heck of a lot of destructive action is done out of sincere ideas.” Vlad Vexler

“People are always saying that what is going on now isn’t really unprecedented but the fact that they have to reach all the way back to Andrew Jackson and the 1830s for their example itself shows that this is, practically speaking, unprecedented.” David Frum

“In 1976, if you asked high school seniors whether they had read any books in the last year for fun, about 40 percent had read at least six books for fun in the last year, and only about 11 percent hadn’t read a single book for fun. Today those numbers are basically reversed. About 40 percent haven’t read a single book for fun” Ezra Klein, (New York Times, May 2025)

“One of the things that is important to understand when thinking about History in any context is that you are both looking for breaks with the past, for changes over time but you are also looking for continuity. That is how human societies work. There are rarely cases where there is a total, hard break. Often it is a slow, gradual change and continuity with things that came before.” Jamielle Boule in May 2025

“A single still image is sacred. “ Cindy Crawford

I’ve long loved the photograph that sits at the outset of this post - without fully comprehending or even knowing all the facts to what it is a witness. It appears one of those legendary street photographs that so captured a moment in time of its most colorful eras of the 1970s into the early 1980s. Of course as I get older and grow into wherever I happen to find myself in the 2020s and, hopefully, 2030s, I will see different things in this snapshot. The more salient feature of this photograph to me is not the usually arresting details - the furtive nature of the woman going into her purse or pocketbooks, the roller skates, and the dated clothes and hairdos more generally.

No - for me it is the fact that it is a public space populated with people on foot, sharing space on the street, fearlessly committed to being exposed to each other, come what may, with lots of commercial and other kinds of activity being practiced in the open. In saying this this does not mean that the former qualities fall away or lose all importance: it is a question of the nature of how temporal and historical time informs our personal psychologies.

This gets at the possibly deeper question of how we live in general, the foundations and infrastructures of a life, rather than their aesthetics, if we can separate these.  For roughly three decades of my adult life I led a particular and perhaps even peculiar lifestyle: all sorts of things were constitutive of this lifestyle, more numerous than can be comprehensively itemized in the context of this, or possibly any, post. For example most of my life was lived on foot, which added to at least a mile or two of walking every day.

Alongside this fact of my peripatetic  lifestyle was that I watched about three to four movies a week - in theaters. Both of these activities brought me out of the house of course and all of it involved myself constantly “getting exercise” as a pedestrian. And above all, for a good fifteen years from the late 1980s until the early 2000s I had work as a musician, for example playing “cocktail” piano in bars at hotels, mostly in the Summer months. Writing and composing music during this period was an extraordinarily arduous activity; my pace of work was far slower than other composers and, accordingly, it took up many hours of day and night. Any kind of writing was a solitary, even hermetic affair and this made my need to venture out into the wider world all the more necessary.

I have only one document of myself engaged in composing music from that era, in this case in a seaside motel in York Beach, Maine, 1995.

A word and concept that I have perhaps not used enough in this podcast is sensibility -

I have discussed the centrality of styles of course and that styles are always plural but the role that sensibility plays is best thought of as an overarching cosmology or total worldview which in turn makes this or that style conceivable, possible and finally, doable.

Each one of us is essentially a motley, rather diverse and frankly disunited mosaic of emotional and intellectual features, many of which reflect universal potentialities in humanity as a whole but none of which are not unique and for which there is little precedence and “evergreen” status. This is a particular view of what a self is and I certainly don’t expect anybody else to share this view even though I think it far better than alternatives on offer, both spiritual and scientific. If we pull back from this we can consider entire sensibilities and with these eras sand epochs and in so doing see that even though we are told constantly, especially now, unfortunately, that History tells us that nothing we are experiencing is new, there being this or that form hundreds of years or a thousand years ago and so on, we can also see that there are always new things under the sun and that there is a place for the word unprecedented in our vocabulary from time to time.

I do think both the political and technological foundations of our world in 2025 is sufficiently new enough as to be something more different than similar than most times in the past and that attempts to reach for parallels in even the recent past - usually under the false equivalence that because any two things are equally bad they must be definitionally the same kind of thing precisely because they share badness - fail to prove the parallels.

Because of my dramatic (and largely negative) move in the years of 2017 and 2018, I have been compelled to think all of the time not only about styles but about the possible shifts in sensibility that govern how people live in, say downtown Boston, as opposed to the smallest country town in North Carolina, or the ways that Harry Reasoner or Walter Cronkite narrated the factual events of the day as opposed to a Tucker Carlson or a Jon Stewart.

I am guided in my reflections here mostly by one scholar in particular - Daniel Wickberg. Like myself, Wickberg defines sensibility thus:

“The history of sensibilities focuses on the primacy of the various modes of perception and feeling, the terms and forms in which objects were conceived, experienced, and represented in the past.”

Professor Wickberg

Wickberg’s statement is inadequate of course - but it is all that can be really said in one sentence about a concept and social reality that is both most abstract and most decisive and influential in everyday life.

The best way to identify and comprehend a sensibility is to first make a generous list of the artworks, both commercial and anti-commercial, that populate the era in which a sensibility is in charge. (And wherever you find yourself there has usually been a sensibility in charge and just as usually unacknowledged as such, even by its most fervent practitioners and true believers. Instead of the word sensibly you might find words like facts or truths.)

I approach the subject of sensibility through the perspective of intellectual history.

Here is more from Wickberg: “We are studying the activity of thinking in the past rather in the same manner as you would study anything else in the past” And, in another moment, intellectual history “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which mind structures experience.”

These admittedly abstract words` Wickberg’s summary entails are necessary and form a kind of essential language if we are to pull back and get an overall sense of our daily lives over a period of time.

I don’t think any sensibility - no matter how well considered, planned or however much its practitioners (to put it bluntly, everyone alive in any given era or epoch) feel that their choices are metaphysically justified or grounded - is not at least partly a motley pluralistic construction, rather than an integrated whole.

Any sensibility will encompass mixtures of the ethically good and bad, will contain powerful influences of all sorts of emotional and psychological biases, and be subject to if not captured  by quite differing interests.

Indeed, I would go further and say that almost always no sensibility forms a cohesive and coherent whole although they will necessarily be described as such in practically all of the better scholarship on a given sensibility.  (Gary Gerstle’s The Rise And Fall Of The Neoliberal Order is exemplary in this regard. Although it aims to give a comprehensive summary of quite a long period of time - it involves every year I have been alive until 2025 - it always maintains that this period had as many positive and negative developments, a perspective that has doubtless annoyed the more far Left anti-neoliberal readers of Gerstle’s text).

There can be elements inside of a sensibility that are at odds with one another and at different times one of these may alternately dominate or recede. This last fact is why it is incredibly hard for commentators to make sense and fully comprehend any sensibility, and those that have the experience of a sensibility, those with the most authority, might also be the most self deluded and least informed about the meaning of a sensibility even though they know the facts of the sensibility best, having lived the facts.

I don’t know how to accurately give expression to the world wherein we find ourselves in 2025 going into 2026. I can only give some impressions here.

Sometimes it feels as if we are  in the grip of a definite sensibility. Although that sensibility, if it a singular one (more on that in a moment)  is not without any virtues, probably one or another of new improvements or innovations that are positive, in this or that realm of life, it is a sensibility that is the most negative within my particular life thus far. And, whatever positive things boosters love to claim for the computer screen, the internet and social media, it is mostly these things that are responsible for the negativity.

I suspect that the naive and pollyanna ideas and ideals of the early computer enthusiasts led them to think that E. M. Forster’s bromide “only connect” was sufficient or itself aways a good by which to live when in reality the global population was essentially shoved or thrown together on these things we call computers and we simply are not equipped for that kind of connection and in that form.

Now you can say that at the very least their intentions were quite far apart from any malice. The Gen Xer in me is probably not as generous to them as I could or should be. But just as we can’t help who we are, as George Trow says, we can’t help who or what we love, and I never loved those particular dreamers and visionaries though I also can’t hate them.

A second thought I also have that is in tension with what I have offered above is that maybe what we are living is not a single sensibility but a collection of differing sensibilities - all rushing to us from the past - and there is simply an algorithmic and financial  contest or war for which sensibility will become the dominant one.

I honestly don’t know which of these accounts approaches the truth. This is one reason I have centered the sensibility upon what it is we are all really doing - being on computers and looking at screens. This one act alone would appear to have so much to do with all that we are experiencing in our moment.

As I have said above, sensibilities are much more a collection of features that have an ad hoc quality. I do know the center of the current one seems to be the computer in general and the screen in particular.

Since I am not a determinist I don’t think there is anything inherently bad about the computer: it

did not have to turn out this way, but I do think it probably favored this particular turn.

For the first time in human History we can look and gaze upon documents or artifacts of past sensibilities, in a phrase, ‘side by side”. This is most dangerous because, more often than not peoples’ observations are only semi-literate, utterly severed from needed information and context to comprehend what is being viewed. Some good words for the many forms of misreading are Gothic, apocalyptic, paranoid, reactionary and dogmatic. These are choices about narrative responses to the facts of the world never transparent descriptions of that world. For every evil we encounter there are still many goods.

Even with the many misreadings we still do have all of these achievements at our disposal, at the click of a machine button. Indeed, through internet sites like Project Gutenberg I can read now some of the greatest works that humans have ever created! It is of course, ultimately up to us what we are to do with all of it - even if the decision is to have a machine “decide” for us.

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