We Are Losing Air
While reading Astra Taylor’s newest collection of essays Remake the World, I couldn’t stop thinking about whipped cream.
It stems from a line that’s dropped subtly into the book’s first chapter, aptly titled ‘Breathing Together’. The line in question is a quote pulled from an article written in April 2020 by Dr. Kathryn Dreger as Covid was just beginning to be understood by researchers and epidemiologists. Dreger, in her piece on ventilators, takes us to our lungs -- beginning with the breaths we take through the trachea, followed by the air ‘branching’ into little pipes called ‘bronchioles’ and into a field of “microscopic sacs called alveoli”. It’s here that Dreger writes
“These millions of alveoli are so soft, so gentle, that a healthy lung has almost no substance. Touching it feels like reaching into a bowl of whipped cream.”
As the virus spread (and still spreads today), it was noticed that patient’s lungs were calcifying, with Covid filling the lung’s air sacs with a “gummy yellow fluid” that changed the organ’s texture to that of a “stale marshmallow”. It was the kind of fact I wish I hadn’t known – not just for the unsettling imagery, or the kind of queasy feeling it gave me, but for the simple knowledge that something as essential as our lungs could be as delicate as a mound of cool-whip.
With a lot of writers, that ‘whipped cream’ line would just be there to puff up her writing before being abandoned. But for Astra Taylor, the fragility of essential things is the point. Taylor argues that the past two years have been a rapid assault on our ability to breathe and live freely. Just think of a few pivotal moments in recent memory; the tear-gas choking out protestors during the BLM protests, the great fires destroying the trees and forests that serve as nature’s air purifiers, the virus itself literally attacking people’s ability to use their lungs. Air is almost an infinite resource, ripe to be taken for granted – but when it’s missing, the gears of life grind to a halt, and taking a simple step forward feels like climbing a mountain.
If the healthy part of our system is soft and malleable, like reaching into whipped cream, then trying to grasp the problems facing us in the world today would feel like reaching into an infinite bramble of barbed wire. There’s the climate crisis, our massively unequal economy, the rampant oppression of people of color, the rise of a conspiratorial far-right, the rapidly evolving world order, and comatose political institutions completely incapable of passing the tiniest reforms. This is all a recipe for confusion and despair, and it’s almost impossible to imagine where we should start when it comes to fixing things. The looming weight of all of these separate (though interconnected) crises is almost impossible to comprehend. As Slavoj Žižek has said, “It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than the end to Capitalism.” It’s why we have movies about cataclysmic asteroid strikes and far less about political revolutions that spread wealth from the rich to the poor.
What’s wonderful about Astra Taylor’s writing is that it’s deeply human and inspiring, without being falsely reassuring. In the language that guides much of left-leaning dialogue, there’s a tendency to rely on the specter of apocalypse. On issues such as climate, it’s not entirely inaccurate. But it is misguided. As Joanna Huxter makes note of in her research on the climate movement, our doomsday language leads to a kind of psychological ‘shutdown’ in the audience, locking us in confusion and angst. More often than not this leads to retreat, which is about the last thing you want when trying to rally public support to challenge the issues of our day.
Taylor avoids this tendency. She speaks about what the world faces with clarity, but it doesn’t feel rehearsed or trite. With each new piece, you have the sense that she’s teaching as much as she is learning. A page in her book oddly feels like a real collaborative space, and when she writes it’s almost like she is sitting right there with you, leading you through her thoughts without ever getting too preachy. I think this is incredibly deliberate of her. In her piece ‘The Right to Listen’, published originally in The New Yorker, she describes her experience attending a forum put together for community members struggling with debt. While sitting in the room, listening as the attendees shared gut-wrenching stories with incredible force and honesty, her perspective on the role of an activist changes. She says
“As an activist on the left, I long assumed that my role consisted entirely of raising awareness, sounding alarms… It took me years to realize that I needed to help build and defend spaces in which listening could happen, too… We’ve been slow to see that, if democracy is to function well, listening must also be supported and defended.”
Most of our politics prioritizes talking, punditry, and dramatic speeches. But maybe listening deserves a new age of focus. Taylor mentions the ancient philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak “. Listening – perhaps the essential bedrock of healthy relationships, and honest communities – is absent from most modern political discussions. It doesn’t help that television news, in places such as MSNBC and Fox News, makes the viewer a passive consumer of a very narrow range of loudly spoken views. But as Taylor writes about with apps like Facebook and Twitter, social media “keeps us scrolling, conjuring the illusion of listening. But, by design, such feeds amplify the shallow, outrageous, and self-promoting, discouraging the prolonged engagement that deeper forms of listening require.” We don’t engage with mediums that merely negate listening; our mass forms of civic communication actively destroy and degrade it.
There’s a kind of endless debate of what actually is a meaningful political act. Is it voting? Knocking on people’s doors for a candidate? Building community outside of electoral politics? Storming the palace with a Molotov cocktail? No matter our answer, I think we have a similar answer to who leads political change. Maybe it’s a President, a Senator, a community organizer – but either way, they’re almost always hyper-social, extroverted, and imbued with a kind of mystical charisma that makes people oooh and ahhh. As Taylor writes, “There’s a myth that activism is the natural domain of a certain subset of human beings that thrive in group discussions, protest planning sessions, and vegan potlucks”. Outside of this narrow vision of the ‘great leader’, or the ‘great activist’, there’s a whole class of other people who might not fit the ideal model, and Astra considers herself among them. She writes
“I, for one, would rather read about history than make it… (activism is often) reactive, not contemplative, and I prefer life with more of the latter.”
And while she sits with that thought, she returns to that myth of the extroverted political animal. If you’re an introverted, heady-type that prefers to approach politics a little more quietly, then the myth excuses you from action. The myth, she says, “lets us off the hook, perpetuating the old idea that it’s someone else’s calling to actually make change.”
This is why I love Astra Taylor’s writing, and why I’m quick to point readers in the direction of her work. She’s relentlessly open about her own perspectives and shortcomings without being navel-gazey or too self-focused. Taylor writes about a tension that a lot of us grapple with our own lives – namely, that of deciding when to engage with the world versus pulling back into our shells. That tension is maybe one of the trickiest ones that’s often left unexplored in modern American life. After all, much of American culture tells us this; no matter how nasty or uncomfortable the outside world gets, we can find refuge in our own private lives by wrapping ourselves in work, diving into distraction, and buying our way out of misery.
What do we do? There are never easy answers. I certainly don’t have them! But Astra Taylor leaves us with hints of what a more engaged and collaborative civic life could look like. On the topic of lungs and their hardening from virus, tear-gas, and environmental destruction, she writes
“To be soft and permeable like a sponge is to be healthy. To be rigid and closed off, fortresslike, spells doom. This is true, it turns out, not just for our lungs but also for our very selves.”
So will we be open with the world? Or will we retreat behind walls and hardness? As I’m sure Taylor would say; we’ll have to create the answer ourselves. But this book is a wonderful place to start.