Rejuvenation II: The Swerve
We are staring into the abyss of a generational opportunity—it must not be squandered.
This essay is part of an ongoing exploration called Rejuvenation, a reflection on navigating our stuck time. Part II considers the generational opportunity we face. Like Part I, no tidy conclusions. No attempt at ultimate answers. Not trying to pile on more explanations of the present. There are many good ones out there.
Just trying to navigate our time by orienting toward a better future.
2016, 2020, 2024
Sisyphus pushes his rock up a hill only to have it roll back down. The Eternal Recurrence of a futile task.
This system is working exactly as designed—predictable, efficient, with no variations or breaks.
It is, however, a divinely ordained punishment for a human being who repeatedly outsmarts the gods.
More than a repetitive task, Sisyphus’ punishment nullifies his cleverness. He is entrapped in a perfect system that allows for no innovation, no growth, no further outsmarting of the gods.
Camus insisted that ‘we must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Happy because he finds stability in the repetition? Because he has adapted himself to the absurd?
Today I imagine Sisyphus not as one person, but as two: Liberal and Conservative taking turns. One waits at the bottom while the other pushes the rock only to be punished in the next cycle. 2016, 2020, 2024.
Nothing is new, nothing is old. Every four years we return to the polls to vote for our side.
This is the opposite of rejuvenation. We should not imagine ourselves—or Sisyphus—happy.
The Swerve
Sisyphus makes a brief appearance as the symbol of a dysfunctional politics in Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things. He seeks ‘power that is illusory and never granted,’ like pushing a rock uphill only to watch it ‘roll back from the summit’ (3.996–1002).
This world is closed, repetitive, and stuck—incapable of change or progress.
It lacks is a clinamen—Lucretius’ word for the swerve that breaks routine. Swerves can create turbulence, but they also open the door to something new—better or worse.
Nothing is predetermined by a swerve; it is just a swerve. Yet it forces a choice—a choice that Sisyphus cannot make.
Lucretius invokes two gods as motivators of this choice.1
Venus: the goddess of generation, rejuvenation, springtime, and abundance.
Mars: the god of destruction, scarcity, and the fury of war.
Lucretius begins his poem, On the Nature of Things, by invoking Venus. It ends with Athens decimated by plague.2
Demographics as Destiny
When Obama was resoundingly elected, many thought, including me, that Sisyphus would finally plant the rock at the summit. This story had been in the works for some time.
The Emerging Democratic Majority (2004) suggested history was automatically pushing to the left—we only had to wait and have faith.3
Stephen Colbert told W., ‘Reality has a liberal bias.’
November 4, 2008: the time had come. The kingdom had drawn near. We just needed to heed the good news: ‘Demographics are destiny.’
Our faith had a perception of time and motion right out of Newtonian physics: all objects naturally move at in straight lines unless knocked off course.
Amidst this Venus-like exuberance, some even invoked a bit of Mars and took some pleasure in divine retribution:
The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction.4
This vision of time has not aged well. The identities we believed would stay in their lanes have swerved. The rock did not stick.
Lucretius used Epicurean physics to define an ethics inspired by Venus. We have fallen victim to treating our politics as Newtonian physics.
We have ended up as Sisyphus with his rock.
A Republic in Motion
Democratic pollster David Shor quantifies this demographic swerve: so-called “
‘non-white’ voters have been drifting to the right.
We did not simply misunderstand the data. We did not misread the tea leaves. We misunderstood the nature of reality.
Instead of Newton’s solid objects moving in straight lines, we should have seen a sea with many currents, eddies, and waves—innumerable swerves that could beget turbulence.
Instead of a divine kingdom drawing near, we should have seen ‘the varied mix of motions that are the instruments of nature’s work’ (On the Nature of Things, 2.244).
This is not merely abstract. When identities prove fluid, when they swerve out of the lanes we’ve laid out for them, we risk resentment.
Venus or Mars? Abundance or Scarcity?
Swerves are always with us. Sometimes quiet, sometimes turbulent. Never only one. Without them, Lucretius tells us, ‘nature would never have created anything’ (2.224).
A swerve always forces a reaction and therefore a choice. Venus or Mars? Abundance or scarcity?
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have laid out the choice:
The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.5
Popular among those of us looking for an alternative political and economic vision, Abundance is a call to compose time and motion in the spirit of Venus.
But we also must recognize how deeply we’ve been worshipping Mars.
As politicians’ choices descend into our daily lives, we face the evermore urgent choices of how to respond within the growing turbulence.
This is the problem and opportunity of rejuvenation. Venus or Mars?
Rejuvenation
The rejuvenation I seek invokes Venus while knowing that Mars is always never far away, and that scarcity and vengeance can also be its byproducts.
Swerves are as much opportunity as abyss. Their motions can change with time. The Venus of Rome derives from the Aphrodite of Greece, who awarded Helen to Paris and set off the Trojan War. She was famously shacking up with the god of war behind her husband’s back.
Our choice for Venus must constantly be renewed because Mars is always hanging around.
Rejuvenation does not want to fill the abyss with more red tape, more bureaucracy, more regulations. But it cannot abandon the habitability of our planet, just as it cannot abandon affordability and economic growth.
Rejuvenation does not throw up its hands because this work is hard.
Destruction is easy. Rejuvenation is tough.
Rejuvenation is not a political program. It is not a religion. It is not a philosophy. It is not an economics or even a ‘rationality’ or a ‘logic’. It is all of these, and none of these.
It is a fluid capacity to move within and across these realms.
It is a renewable choice for Venus over Mars.
It is essential to a well-functioning republic.
Example of a swerve that seeks rejuvenation: Pete Buttigieg shows up on Flagrant because:
This moment demands more than just good ideas - it demands that those of us who oppose the chaos and cruelty coming from Washington are showing up consistently in spaces where not everyone shares our views, or has even heard them directly from us at all.
Can we see in this simple swerve the possibility, perhaps down the road, of a new order in the turbulence?
Rejuvenation cares deeply about law and process, but it stays focused on outcomes.
Rejuvenation looks at problems and asks, ‘What is the outcome we want, and what is the minimum required to achieve it?’ It asks this even when it is unclear who are the relevant we’s and they’s. It may not know at the outset how many of them there may be.
Rejuvenation starts moving and figures it out along the way.
Rejuvenation knows that it has blindspots. It seeks to remove them without ever believing in the ability to see everything everywhere all at once.
Rejuvenation knows how to be clear when clarity is called for, but it also knows how to complicate when clarity comes too early, when clarity is blind.
Rejuvenation does not wrap the Self in its own virtue as it watches smuggly from the sidelines.
Rejuvenation is Epicurean ataraxia (a calm mind) in motion and in the world. I do not wish to lock it up in the Garden, though I may take occasional refuge there.6
Rejuvenation is what the American Pragmatist John Dewey called ‘democracy as a way of life’.
He didn’t mean that politics invades us from above but that our institutions should arise from below, from how we deal with each other day after day.
Rejuvenation is cut off when we ‘strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences’.7
Rejuvenation is never surprised by democracy’s fragility. It knows that America is an ongoing experiment and expects the abyss to open from time to time. It believes that time can be sent in a new direction.
It looks at Sisyphus and sees punishment, not happiness. It says, ‘I don’t want to live this way.’
Rejuvenation, therefore, cannot be a weak neutrality. It is watching the current destruction looking for opportunities, not to wag its finger, not to say ‘I told you so’, not to rebuild with old policies and tired ideologies, but to meet the rebuilding process where it is and in whatever form it finds it.
It invokes Venus, while always knowing that Mars is close.
Lucretius’ poem, written around 58 BCE when Julius Caesar was on the rise, is often read as emptying the universe of gods. Yet it opens with a hymn to Venus (1.1-43). Gods do exist as inspirations for human action: ‘there is nothing to prevent us from living a life worthy of the gods’ (3.322). See Martin Ferguson Smith’s introduction to his translation of On the Nature of Things (Hackett, 2001), pages xxviii-xxxi.
Is the work finished as Lucretius intended, or is it not? Scholars disagree. See David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. For those interested in an accessible summary of the main ideas of Lucreticus’ poem, see Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer winning The Swerve: How the World became Modern, pages 182-202. I am partial to Michel Serres’ more fluid reading of the poem in The Birth of Physics. See especially his use of Sisyphus throughout.
See also James Carville, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, and John B. Judis and Ruy Texiera, The Emerging Democratic Majority.
Jonathan Chait, ‘2012 or Never’.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance, page 4.
Both Epicurus (fourth-century BCE Greece) and Lucretius (first-century BCE Rome) were writing amidst very violent societies with little prospect of reform. Withdrawal from public life was understandable. We’re not there yet.
John Dewey, ‘Creative Democracy—The Task before Us’ (1939).