On Words and Things

Greetings from the Great North,

As Kanye West said to his presidential campaign consultants, let’s keep this short.

When I started working on my first book, I got a great piece of advice from a philosopher. (I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s true. He was an academic philosopher who wrote about stuff I was interested in and we emailed occasionally). And since I’m in Alaska, I should say he told me “don’t eat the yellow snow.” Or maybe that “the way you tell black bear crap from grizzly bear crap, is that the grizzly bear crap has the little bells and whistles they give hikers to scare away grizzlies in it.” 

But what he really told me was: Don’t confuse words for things. He was referring to intellectual history stuff, specifically. We have a tendency to think ideologies exist separate and apart from the human beings who represent them. Bolshevism, fascism, or any other –ism, good or bad, exists in some platonic realm of ideas, separate and apart from their human avatars.

In one sense, this is obviously true. These ideas are in books, among other places. But as a matter of how ideas move in the world, ideas aren’t like ghosts or spirits that inhabit a body and define that body’s actions. Particularly among powerful people and movements, self-interest usually drives events, and the labels for those actions come later. Looking back, we often get that causality backward. Sure, the Bolsheviks were inspired by ideas, but whenever Lenin needed to consolidate power, he minted new ideas to rationalize his actions.

Anyway, that’s a subject for another day. 

I have a much less eggheady point to make about words and things than what my friend told me: They’re just different.

I am a big believer in the power of words. Words convey ideas, and ideas shape how we see the world. (Physical things contain ideas too, but I’ll get to that.)

But words don’t do the same things as things. Words don’t dig holes, flush toilets, start fires, move automobiles, etc. Things, admittedly with the effort of people, do that stuff. We have a word for when words replace the need for shovels, toilets, matches, or cars: Magic.

In fiction, when people say magic words or phrases—abracadabra, shazam, Anáil nathrach, alakazam, hocus pocus, Ala Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Walla Walla Washington, Sim Sala Bim!—cool stuff happens.

(In recent years, as we’ve become more internally directed, you’ll notice that magic phrases are used less and less in pop culture. Instead, you get the knowing, two-second closing of the eyes, so as to summon your chi or marshal your midichlorians or otherwise concentrate your telekinetic powers—perhaps at the cost of a small nosebleed—in order to move things around or start fires with your mind.)

But in real life—Alexa, Siri, and Google Home notwithstanding—when you just say stuff, nothing really happens. Try it, I’ll wait. Ask a pot of water to boil or a nail to drive itself into a board. “Stupid toilet! Why aren’t you flushing!?”

A few years ago, Peter Thiel offered a theory for what some describe as our stagnation, “I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated.” What he meant by this was that people using ones-and-zeros were given a free hand. But if you were interested in really making stuff—really thingy things—there were a lot of hurdles that made everything more expensive. “If you are starting a computer-software company, that costs maybe $100,000,” and you were free to experiment. But “to get a new drug through the [Food and Drug Administration] may be on the order of a billion dollars or so.” 

In popular parlance, this insight boils down to, “This is why we have Twitter, but not jetpacks.”

I think there’s an analogue here to what’s driving all the madness in the lower 48. Getting new things done in politics and media is really hard. Getting people to use different words is much easier. Fixing health care, balancing the budget, paying the debt, fighting COVID-19, reforming the police, starting new media companies, replacing lost advertising revenue: This stuff is really frick’n difficult to get done. 

But harassing people for what they say, rightly or wrongly? That’s super easy. Capitalizing “Black” when referring to black Americans? Just hit the shift key and—abracadabra—progress!

Just imagine if someone said right after the George Floyd killing, “Well, the Redskins are going to have to change their name now!” Or even, “Bari Weiss’s days at the Times are numbered.” Our political passions are pursuing the path of least resistance—the stuff that’s easy to change. Does anybody think that the top priority for Native Americans in this country was changing the name of the Redskins? Anybody? I’m not saying the name change isn’t a real issue, I’m just saying that if I went out on any reservation out there and offered: 1) better health care, or 2) a name change for the District’s football team, the name would remain the Redskins for a very long time. 

Think of creativity, outrage, frustration—whatever motivating passions you can imagine—as a raging river. If one path is blocked, the water moves into another, seeking its own level. In the past, when Americans were highly motivated, they did stuff, they made things, they went places. Dams were built, roads cut through the wilderness, machines were invented. What if people are just as highly motivated today, but they lack the skills, incentives, opportunities, and most of all, the imaginative ability to see a path ahead in the physical world? What do they do with all that passion?

They argue about words.

They spend weeks debating whether “cancel culture” exists—and if it exists, whether it’s good or bad. Spoiler: It exists and it’s bad. But it also disproportionately affects people in my line of work, so we probably spend more time than we should on it. That doesn’t mean we should unilaterally disarm. I’m just pointing out that if you’re really passionate about cancel culture it’s probably because you have an outsized professional interest in it, either because it threatens your livelihood or because it promises to be a new lucrative career or cause for professional advancement for you. 

It’s all over politics as well. Yes, the president is a good example of our dysfunction. He’d rather tweet insults and complaints than do something. Why? Because he knows how to do that; he doesn’t know how the government works.

But even people who do understand how it works spend their days tweeting about Goya (the bean folks, not the painter) or some other Twitter-driven argle-bargle rather than doing anything substantive.

Earlier, I said that things—not just words—have ideas in them too. I didn’t just mean ideas about math or engineering, but about culture as well. Whatever you think about handguns or birth control pills, there are a whole lot of cultural assumptions and associations embedded in them. A society that only had, say, buses, would be very different than one that only had motorcycles. Cultures create the things they want to solve problems. Those things then simultaneously reinforce and change the culture. But sometimes cultures get stuck and start creating things that reflect the culture’s dysfunction and stagnation rather than its historic ambition.

For whatever reason, we got stuck. Or at least one path for the river of our passions was blocked. So rather than load up a wagon train or connect the nation in whatever the modern equivalent of railroad tracks would be, we invented stuff that made staying in place easier and more enjoyable. We created an environment where we argue about words (and images, etc.), not things. We measure progress by improvements in the words, not innovation in the things. We judge people by the words they use, rather than the things they do. We created Twitter and Facebook because we couldn’t invent jetpacks, moon colonies, and floating cities. And now, thanks to things like Twitter and Facebook, we waste even more time arguing about our intangible creations. 

Where I’m at.

For those interested, I’m writing from Homer, Alaska. Specifically, from a parking lot at the end of the Homer Spit, which apparently boasts the longest road into ocean water in the world.

We drove all the way from Denali yesterday—starting with a five-hour bus trip at 6 a.m. from the backcountry.

If you’ve never been to Alaska in the summer, you really should do it if you can. (If you’ve never been to Alaska in the winter, you really should do it—if someone else is paying for it.) The trip from Denali, around Anchorage, down the Kenai Peninsula into Homer is easily one of the prettiest drives in America (and I’ve driven almost all of them). Visually, it’s a bit of a mix of Wyoming/Montana “Big Sky” and Northern California mountains, but just on a massive scale, with so much less humanity and commerce. 

We even stopped in Wasilla to check things out. Actually, we just stopped for coffee. It’s a suburb of Anchorage these days, and a nice one from what I can tell. It’s just funny how spaces mean different things here. Wasilla is about as far from Anchorage as Baltimore is from DC. And while it’s true that Baltimore is something of a commuter suburb for D.C. these days (which is sad given the fact that, for more than a century, Baltimore was by far the more sophisticated and developed town), the difference is that there are a lot of closer-in suburbs to DC than Baltimore. But up here, it’s pretty much just mountain, coastline, and forest between Wasilla and Anchorage.

When I started asking my wife questions about Wasilla, she pretty much cut me off, saying, “The only thing I knew about Wasilla growing up was that it was where the reform school my parents were always threatening to send us was.”

Anyway, rather than continue complaining about words—with even more words!—I’m gonna go do something with my family. Maybe even catch some fish.

Photograph of Homer, Alaska, by Andrew Woodley/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.