Years ago I thought that it was possible for the novelist to change the inner life of a culture. Today, human bombers and killers have captured this terrain. — Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is my favorite contemporary novelist, although that word “contemporary” is becoming a stretch. He’s 88 years old, and his most recent novel “The Silence” came out in 2020. But all of DeLillo’s books, and I’ve read them all, feel contemporary. He sees the world we live in like no other writer of our time. DeLillo’s novels are often divided between men of words, writers mostly, and men of action, various terrorists, assassins or other people who shape the narrative of our times with violent acts.
This Montaigne essay isn’t wrong. It says something that throughout history has been valid, that people of words can be manipulative and move people away from reason. But DeLillo’s work reminds us that this has become a quaint notion, that the people of words have lost influence in the world, or if their words have influence, it is only because they are backed by horror.
The Unabomer is a perfect example. Ted Kaczynski is best known for planting bombs that killed three people and seriously injured many more. But he also has an enduring place in the popular culture for a manifesto he wrote, a fairly unoriginal attack on the role of technology in modern culture. This screed was pushed in part to help smoke him out and it had that effect — his brother recognized the prose style and ideas and turned him in to the authorities. But the long term legacy of the manifesto is troubling. Someone whose ideas would never have been given weight has an enduring place in the marketplace of ideas only because of the murders that were committed. DeLillo’s argument has been validated.
Recently, we saw another example of DeLillo’s theory played out—the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. I won’t even get into the immense public attention, even adoration, Mangione has received for this act. Rather, I want to focus on the press stories about his short, not-terribly memorable statement about why he killed Thompson and all of his previous opinions expressed on social media. The media has turned what otherwise would have been just another random guy posting on social media into America’s most prominent health care policy critic. All because he murdered someone.
Keep this in mind as Montaigne writes lines like this:
A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great. That’s a shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot. They would have had him whipped in Sparta for professing a deceitful and lying art.
As an example, don’t these Montaigne words sound much more apt if applied to an Instagram feed than a speech in today’s culture?
It is a means invented for manipulating and stirring up the mob and a community fallen into lawlessness; it is a means which, like medicine, is used only when states are sick; in states such as Athens, Rhodes and Rome where the populace, or the ignorant, or all men, held all power and where everything was in perpetual turmoil, the orators flooded in.
Has any culture been in more perpetual turmoil than ours? I can’t even shape an accurate timeline of all that has happened in the past month. Today, everyone seems to be freaked out about drones in New Jersey. (Fun fact: ground zero for this invasion is roughly where I was born and grew up until I was 10.) Or maybe they’re alien craft? Or a distraction from what some unnamed enemy is really up to.
So, yes, the hype is insane and all turmoil is spawning new turmoil. But can we take solace from Montaigne’s point of view? I’m not so sure. He prefers men of action over men of words—never mind the obvious irony, that Montaigne was a failure as a public official, but a historic figure as a writer. But take his opinion at face value. Are the “men of action” actually better? DeLillo would argue no, that our culture defaults to celebrating wealth and fame, so if any anonymous man of the crowd wants to break through, he better grab a gun.
Leave a Reply