It’s an Olympic year, which brings to mind colorful flags, the strains of the orchestral anthem (“Bugler’s Dream”), and possibly the most popular feature, the human interest stories that introduce us to the lives of the athletes. Pious, heart-stirring TV profiles are a staple of Olympic viewing. Many of us remember as children being introduced to regular people trying to pursue an Olympic dream within ordinary life. Would the risk pay off? Would their hopes be crushed in front of the world?
Such is the way Olympic athletes are marketed as devoted followers of a noble calling. Every two years, a TV network has the task of making household names out of anonymous athletes. And so, it paints their lives as both full of promise and one step away from disaster. A swimmer rises at 4 a.m. every day for two years and swims a thousand laps in the pool. A skier goes into debt to train, never knowing whether the gamble will pay off.
Aside from the sensational sentimentality of these profiles, which are surprisingly enjoyable for being insincere (does a TV network promote salt-of-the-earth sacrifice at any other time?), there’s an element of truth the TV executives hit on, a primal fear. What if you toiled in obscurity and nothing ever happened, like a prisoner forgotten by the world? What would life be?
Olympic athletes must risk everything for a shot at glory. Most participants will miss getting a medal at all, and a vast majority of competitors fail to make an Olympic team. Is it wise to direct one’s life toward a singular pursuit that fails? If you’re an athlete and nobody knows you, can you be a winner?
The person sitting at home wonders about this as well. Maybe the so-called average life of the masses is a blessing in disguise.
The life of an author has much in common with that of an Olympic hopeful. A writer follows a repetitive regimen of grinding out the pages of a book-in-progress. There’s a day of reckoning for both athletic and artistic pursuits. A writer will often go into debt in order to have a shot at writing’s version of a gold medal: a publishing contract. A fundraiser is rarely held for a writer-in-training. No one knows the writer exists. The competition is invisible and just as lopsided as an athletic one for the losers. Winners are mercilessly few.
Another similarity is in the nobility of the writer’s calling. In athletic competition, we find inspiration in a person trying to reach a distance, reduce time, or display the proper form in a rigorous event. There’s an ideal everyone collectively sees, and there’s an awe-inspiring witness in watching the attempt. The writer also sees an ideal in the vision for a new book. That writer attempts to fulfill this ideal through perhaps years of writing it. The great writers of history’s classic books seem to cheer him on.
Of course, writers aren’t athletes. One key difference separates the athletic and artistic in this analogy. The athletic field remains the same as the ancient Olympic games. The playing field for writers has changed dramatically. The society a writer creates in and for has been damaged. If an Olympic stadium were struck by a meteor and the track left broken and uneven, the 100-meter dash would be impossible. The athletes could hop around the rubble in a different sort of competition, but it wouldn’t be the sprint it was meant to be.
Today’s writer has no foundation on which to create a universal narrative. The agreed-upon standards have been cracked by cultural warfare, politics, and, specifically, an anti-humanistic movement that purports to be an evolution of the race but is a disfigurement. There is no basic agreement on any objective reality. One side of the culture war insists humanity has grown beyond reality. It is what one chooses to make it, they say. We’re free of old conventions at last. Whether aided by scientific manipulation, aggressive technology, or hyper-wealth, this faction of society has decided natural truth (and the severe consequences of disobeying it) is fiction, an enemy to defeat.
Making matters worse, those who promulgate this virulent idea are the very gatekeepers of culture, the elites, who once protected it from such assaults. The world’s insiders are the ones dragging functional society to the ground.
The classical author suddenly is out of a job. The powers that be are occupied with destroying the tenets that supported writing to begin with.
Is there a legion of writers inside this faction trying to codify the movement? The world’s dictators have demonstrated how words can be forced onto paper. A book can be assembled and held up as true. And yet, persuasive writing doesn’t spring forth from propaganda. Truth informed by reality is a prerequisite of a compelling narrative, as classic books show. No one reads lies for fun. You can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.
The elites have read 1984. They know propaganda isn’t sufficient, as much as they continue to create it, being as cheap as it is to make. They also know eternal truths found in classic literature remain profound down through the generations. Modern writers who follow stylistically in the footsteps of great authors do a similar disservice to the cause of remaking world society for post-humanism. It’s why classic books are being attacked as backward and old. It’s why the profession of modern novelist has been made redundant.
Even the safest genre for non-political expression, such as Young Adult (YA), has been under fire. JK Rowling was canceled over her common sense views that defy the new claims of human evolution. With her cancellation, writers in the genre she made famous are put on notice: promote the new teaching.
The elites can afford to ignore dissenters, yet they respond to the criticisms, overcome by a need to control every conversation. In the area of books, they parrot Olympic coaches. “If you were good enough and made the grade, we would take you.” And yet, the modern publishing system doesn’t take a book anymore. It shapes a book with the help of sensitivity readers, the goal being to reinforce the narrative of post-humanity. A book can convey the subject in many ways but must articulate this post-truth, or it’s rejected as useless.
“Go west, young man.” So said a newspaperman in 1865 to Americans seeking their fortunes. Today, the writer is told to seek out readers in the new frontier of independent publishing. Many people, the non-elites, resist the new message we’re told. Although they would never use the word, they are traditionalists. They don’t want to read lies. Where are these readers?
They’re not reading. They’re us. They’re caught up in the habits afforded them by a technological world. They’re playing video games, on Facebook groups, streaming movies and TV shows, and shopping online. They’re not reading books in the numbers of generations past. There’s little cultural reward for reading a book, which is seen as an ancient artifact, not news.
Worse, these former readers are captured by “doomscrolling” or obsessing on Twitter about toxic politics. A horrific news cycle has many people staring at the ceiling at night. Will there be yet another war? Will the country they grew up in become dangerous and unrecognizable? Will their children be safe?
A combination of overbusyness and overanxiety has stifled a person’s natural instinct to pick up a book. It is an instinct you observe in a one-year-old who can only turn the pages. Somehow, this healthy desire to read books has been blocked in people, which serves the powers that be just fine. Reading leads to thinking. The post-human ideology can’t survive critical thought.
The phrase “toil in obscurity” was likely coined by a writer. Not only for its poetic quality. It describes the writing life. As stated in a previous essay, books are everywhere, but writing is an invisible profession. At one time, the road of hardship for a writer was a journey worth taking. The Olympic gold of the writing profession, a book contract, was possible for a person to achieve after a lot of hard work. The publishing industry had enough readers to justify giving one.
Today, a pursuit of the beauty in writing is all that’s left. The potential for a writer of independent subjects is nil. No publisher wants this kind of book, and no reader who would theoretically be interested has the time to discover it. The classic novels of old, the “high school lit” books, are as obscure to the modern person as an old painting in a gallery. The world’s great writing is hidden in plain sight, referenced for pop culture reasons, and then forgotten.
Olympic athletes set their sights on the record holders. Writers who recognize classical greatness seek to emulate their heroes’ celebration of the human spirit. This message is an enemy of post-humanism and should be.
As the post-humanists are fond of saying of themselves, these writers are on the right side of history but with no reason to write, neither an economic one nor a promise of a single reader’s time. If an athlete were barred everywhere from competition, would that athlete continue to get up at 4 a.m. to train?
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