Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction

by Lionel Shriver

I’ll let you in on a secret: our income is more “comfortable” now, but nothing’s changed. We still prefer to eat at home. We still buy quick-sale vegetables at the supermarket, because frugality is a state of mind—one suspicious of haughty entitlement and realistic about self-indulgence, since most pampering doesn’t work. Our pleasures will remain simple, like most true pleasures: other writers’ novels; three hours of tennis on affordable courts; popcorn, as close as a snack can get to free; sleep, which is free. With more money, you’d just be flummoxed, as we are now, by what to buy. Enjoy, then, your ingenious scrimping, the game of it. Know that in time you will be better rewarded for the fruits of your labors, and it won’t matter.

“Happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something—when not a lie—the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”

Thus religion represents to me an earlier evolutionary stage. It is a calcification of our forefathers’ efforts to explain the world with magic—so maybe the “man” in First Corinthians who must put away childish things is more generally the human race.

Yet fiction and religion do part ways in one crucial respect: I know, and my readers know, that my stories are made up. Indeed, the most destructive interpretations of sacred texts are literal. Fundamentalist readings of the Bible or the Koran insist that stories that could be illuminating as metaphors happened in exactly this way and represent the irrefutable, factual truth. Literalism leads to inflexibility and fanaticism. Certitude about the truth of stories that are scientifically impossible encourages an irrationality that spreads to everything, and that starts ominously to resemble mental illness.

Thus maybe the “childish thing” that we secularists need to “put away” in adulthood is our ridicule, our hostility, our incomprehension—our beloved bafflement that anyone buys this twaddle.

For too long, I have personally depended on rejection of faith as a substitute for faith, and as I advance into my own old age it would behoove me to shift my focus from what I don’t believe to what I do. Surely it’s time to release those bitter memories of being dragged to church by the hair. How much better with my father in the twilight of his life to seize not on what divides us, but on what we share.

Still, it’s worth remembering that behind all that bloat and disability was an extraordinary person—a brother, a son, a father, a friend, and, yes, a genius—if only to remember that other distended and damaged bodies disguise unusual people whom families and friends desperately love. That’s one thing I learned from Greg during his latter life; I think he increased my compassion. That’s a compassion that we can all continue to spread around to folks who are still with us.

In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing or saying things that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look but don’t touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities”—ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic underprivilege and disability—are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

author of the essay “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me” describes higher education’s “current climate of fear” and its “heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity”—and I am concerned that this touchy gestalt, in which offendedness is used as a weapon, has spread far beyond academia, in part thanks to social media.

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being poor. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly—Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough. Not only as writers but as people, surely we should seek to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others often try to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

Only other liberals will be shamed into silence by terror of being labeled a racist (a slur generously lobbed at me in recent days, and one that, however unfounded, tends to stick). But there’s still such a thing as a real bigot and a real misogynist. In obsessing over “microaggressions,” like the sin of uttering the commonplace Americanism “you guys” to mean “you all,” activists persecute the very folks who already care about decency and equal rights, while providing fodder for proper retrogrades, who can dismiss concerns about still-pervasive discrimination as so much twaddle.

The “safe spaces” cropping up on university campuses aren’t shelters to protect students from hailstorms, or havens for young women whose boyfriends beat them up, but bubbles in which to hide from ideas—to hide from words.

More broadly, enjoying any kind of “privilege” means you sacrifice your right to free speech. Sorry to go all American on you, but our Constitution’s First Amendment protecting freedom of expression doesn’t come with an asterisk: “*Unless you’ve hitherto had it too good.” I’ve heard from multiple male colleagues that they’d like to champion free speech, but sitting at the very bottom of the victimhood totem pole they “can’t say anything.” To quote an ex-president whom I quite miss: “Yes, you can.”

Whereas a privilege can be acquired through merit—for example, students with good grades got to go bowling with our teacher in sixth grade—privilege, sans the article, is implicitly unearned and undeserved. The designation neatly dispossesses those so stigmatized of any credit for their achievements, while discounting as immaterial those hurdles an individual with a perceived leg up may still have had to overcome (an alcoholic parent, a stutter, even poverty). For privilege is a static state into which you are born, stained by original sin. Just as you can’t earn yourself into privilege, you can’t earn yourself out of it, either.

Rare instances of left-wing understatement, “problematic” and “troubling” are coyly nonspecific red flags for political transgression that obviate spelling out exactly what sin has been committed (thereby eliding the argument). Similarly, the all-purpose adjectival workhorse “inappropriate” presumes a shared set of social norms that in the throes of the culture wars we conspicuously lack. This euphemistic tsk-tsk projects the prim censure of a mother alarmed that her daughter’s low-cut blouse is too revealing for church. “Inappropriate” is laced with disgust, while once again skipping the argument. By conceit, the appalling nature of the misbehavior at issue is glaringly obvious to everyone, so what’s wrong with it goes without saying.

Assumption of the Left’s prescriptive patois may indicate solidarity with fellow travelers, but it also betokens the insularity and closed-mindedness of any indiscriminate embrace of fundamentalist dogma. It instantly alienates people who don’t sign up for the same set menu of views—which may sometimes be the intention. Referencing the “cis-heteronormative patriarchy” in discussions with strangers suggests either that you presume these people already agree with you on virtually everything, or that you’re interested in talking to them only if they do. Even when speaking to moderates, much less conservatives (who have their own coded lingo, such as “snowflakes,” “virtue signaling,” and “grievance culture”), you have shut down conversation.

Yet American coverage of the surprise victory for Vote Leave in Britain’s 2016 referendum was universally aghast. The bigoted barbarians had overrun Buckingham Palace with pitchforks and torches. Curiously, my fellow Americans rarely consider that we’d never have our own country join an autocratic, unaccountable supranational entity whose laws and courts supersede our own. (Well. With Trump? Maybe we would just now.)

Journalists and politicians alike have argued for overturning or neutering the referendum result because Leavers didn’t have all the facts, had been misled by their politicians, and “didn’t know what they were voting for”—allegations that could probably be made about most electorates in the world. Multiple parliamentarians have asserted knowingly that “no one voted to be poorer!”—although when polled in 2017, over 60 percent of Leave voters were willing to accept “significant damage” to the British economy in return for political independence; nearly 40 percent would even accept losing their jobs. Besides, if unintended consequences were grounds for invalidating an election, we’d have to nullify most elections, or we’d simply stop bothering to hold them in the first place.

Why is having hit the ball correctly thousands of times before never any guarantee of hitting it properly this time? That is the central puzzle of tennis, a mystery on parade at Wimbledon as well as in public parks. Even professionals will abruptly futz a shot they’ve hit dazzlingly since they were five. Part of the answer is that there is no “this shot.” Any impression of having hit a ball before is an illusion. “Baseline forehand” is a crude umbrella under which cluster a constellation of infinitely various circumstances. Geometrical elements make every shot distinctive: angle, velocity, spin, and bounce. More interestingly, emotional variables equally pertain. How confident do you feel today? Did you lose the last point? Did you lose the last ten points? Are you still a little pissed off that your partner showed up fifteen minutes late? Are you focused, or merely telling yourself to focus? That is, are you dwelling fully in the moment, or did you just start debating lamb patties versus haddock for dinner?

I cannot be the only American repeatedly forced to vote Democratic because the Republican social agenda is retrograde, if not lunatic—at the cost of unwillingly endorsing cumbersome high-tax solutions to this country’s problems. My comrades and I don’t all sit around reading Ayn Rand novels, either. In fact, the abundance of my natural political bedfellows don’t call themselves libertarian—though “socially liberal economic conservative” is a mouthful. We aren’t bigots, and we’re not evangelical. We are live-and-let-live about sexuality, accept human influence on climate change, and believe in evolution. But we’re also concerned about the national debt, oppressed by an arcane, punitive tax code, and unenthusiastic about widespread dependency on the state.

Acquisition has become a standard form of entertainment. Perhaps the best definition of the middle class is people who are grateful to run out of shampoo. Needing a consumer good, a far superior experience to merely wanting it, presents the delightful prospect of both purposive activity and one of the few quests in this life that can almost certainly be fulfilled.

So give me my “grandma furniture” any day. Our walnut dining table is more than two hundred years old. It has therefore been recycled in multiple households. It’s hand-hewn and funky, and no one else in London has one just like it. I have owned that table for nearly twenty years, and you’d think I’d have tired of it by now. But something happens when you hold on to things: rather than weary of them, you grow more attached. Not unlike some husbands, come to think of it.

Combating injustice with more injustice, and racism with more racism, is philosophically contradictory and pragmatically ham-fisted. In the United States, affirmative action has entrenched racial divisions and pitted minorities against one another. These finger-on-the-scale policies have often benefited the economically well off who happen to tick a racial box. Intrinsically paternalistic, affirmative action has stigmatized and demoralized the very populations it was designed to help.

At eight p.m. we lean out our front windows and bang pots with wooden spoons to express our gratitude for NHS staff. We feel a warm glow of conformity. The dented pots are ruined, but that’s all right because banging out the window makes so much difference to what happens.

I associate happiness with energy, with direction, with being interested—whether that’s interest in figuring out what happens next in chapter 11, in reading an article about conflicting research on the economic effects of immigration, or in deciding how much to increase the allspice in a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe. I associate happiness with having a plan. The Plan, mind, doesn’t have to be grand, like “Write one thousand pages in three weeks” or “Save the world.” It can be, “Find out if Lidl is still selling shelled pistachios” or “Please get around to replacing the water filter in the cellar this afternoon, you idiot.” Happiness isn’t a position. It’s a trajectory.

More a continuous affair, happiness isn’t getting something, but wanting something. It’s having appetite, being filled with desire. It’s being pointed in a direction. It’s caring about something, which means the condition always comes with the threat of disappointment, injury, or loss. As giving a toss about anything or anyone makes you a sitting duck, happiness is intrinsically precarious; it entails putting yourself at risk. It has nothing to do with feeling pompously, fatuously puffed up over your wonderful self and your wonderful life. It’s being too driven, too busy, too focused on what’s on the docket for today to remember to even ask yourself if you’re happy. If you’re really happy, you’re probably thinking about something else.

On the other hand, subjectively, life is getting worse. That is, for individuals, every day that passes makes the time remaining twenty-four hours shorter. The very structure of biological existence is apocalyptic, which may incline us to look for mirrors of our own horrifying mortality in the outside world. For all us pre-dead people, catastrophizing is a form of projection.