Antivirals - by L. M. Sacasas - The Convivial Society

Antivirals

Metadata

Author: L. M. Sacasas
Full Title: Antivirals - by L. M. Sacasas - The Convivial Society Antivirals
Category: #articles
URL: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/antivirals?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6980&post_id=83211131&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email

Highlights

It brought to mind the distinction between internal and external goods. The pleasure he felt in doing good, unobserved and unrewarded, was the pleasure appropriate to the deed itself. It was internal or intrinsic to the act. By contrast, deeds done for the sake of the approval or approbation of others are done for the sake of a reward external to the deed. Had he gone on to share the story with others, he might have been commended for it. He might have accumulated some small bit of social capital. But that praise would have been at a remove from the logic of the act. It was not as if he had acted because he would be praised, but to knowingly elicit that praise retroactively was not an altogether different thing.
Relatedly, there was also the matter of pride. Not only would the purity of the deed and the enjoyment of its proper reward be jeopardized, he might invite pride or vanity into the affair by yielding to what he came to understand as not just an impulse, but, more specifically, a temptation.
My friend was chiefly struck by the rarity of what he experienced—the experience, that is, of possessing some small treasure whose value lay precisely in its humble, hidden quality. How odd it felt to have done something and kept it veiled from view. It was a small thing that began to feel as if it had a strangely revolutionary character. I suggested that the revolutionary character of the act was not merely in its performance, but in its private nature and his ultimate refusal to speak of it. By so preserving the integrity of the deed, he enjoyed a taste of a form of life many of us have forgotten.
- Tags: #favorite
To play with words a bit, it was as if this small deed acted as an antiviral. It combatted the effects of the attention economy powered by the promise (or threat) of virality. It counteracted the corrupting influence of social media’s reward mechanisms. It was a counter-practice designed to preserve some aspect of the good in itself by refusing to turn all aspects of our experience into standing reserve for the attention economy.
I’m tempted to call it the Auden Option, a life committed to secret acts of generosity. In a 2014 essay, “The Secret Auden,” Edward Mendelson pieced together traces of this secret life:

“I learned about it mostly by chance, so it may have been far more extensive than I or anyone ever knew. Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.

Someone else recalled that Auden had once been told that a friend needed a medical operation that he couldn’t afford. Auden invited the friend to dinner, never mentioned the operation, but as the friend was leaving said, “I want you to have this,” and handed him a large notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety. The University of Texas bought the notebook and the friend had the operation.”
I’m not suggesting that we conduct the whole of our lives by this principle. But I’m fairly certain that such practices will yield more good for all involved than the form of life that emerges out of the imperative to blur the line between the private, the public, and the publicized.
Hannah Arendt once observed that “everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.” I think about this line all the time. In the era of social media, we have yielded to the strong tendency to thrust more and more of our lives into the light without availing ourselves of the nurturing darkness. In Arendtian terms, we sacrificed both the proper goods of private life and the proper goods of public life by subsuming both into a realm of digital sociality. It is time, I think, to allow ourselves a respite from the public light, to rediscover the pleasures that attend practices and deeds done for their own sake.