Lili nods, drawing her knees into her chest. There isn’t a sweater in his hands.
Why is he here?
Why is he here?
Newspaper rustles on a nearby bench, left behind. Pigeons coo, bobbing along the path. As silence drifts between them, she glances at him.
He is not looking at her. He watches the park, leaning forward with elbows against his knees. He’s pulled on a sweater since she saw him, shoulders tense. His eyes, just barely, are red.
Lili frowns, seeing that. But she waits for him to speak.
Uncertainty has never been a comfortable thing for her.
It’s from uncertainty that much of Protestant moral culture emerges.The memory of Kerr’s voice, across the lecture hall. One of her first classes with him in early undergrad. Economic Sociology, a 400-level course she’d finagled her way into.Grappling with the uncertainty inherent in predestination, anxiety around their own individual salvation—this is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Protestant moral framework that becomes secularized.
Around her, the scratch of pens on paper, typing on laptops. But Lili hadn’t been able to look away from Kerr, lecturing off the cuff.
These anxieties around predestination,he continued, there’s a direct through line to the anxieties of late capitalism. To echo Fromm, we’d say that the most significant psychic need in the Protestant character structure is the need for relief from this immense anxiety about salvation. That psychic need persists today, although we’re not concerned about the afterlife and salvation, but the material outcomes of our uncertain world.
Work then becomes—as we know Weber argued—an act of signification; the answer to that psychic need, an attempt to soothe that unsoothable anxiety. For Weber, Protestants worked so diligently because through such labor, theycould find proof that they were among God’s chosen, the saved—diligence as a sign of salvation. A way to deal with the uncertainty.
Now, that same type of existential anxiety drives modern capitalist societies today—greases the wheels of capitalism, as you all like to say. Today, in secular society, most of us don’t believe in heaven at the end of all this, once the curtains close. So, the stakes of this earthly world become staggering. The world is what we make of it. And while yes, we have more agency in our dominant moral frameworks than the Protestants, we continue to feel this deep-seated, propelling anxiety to deal with a fundamentally irresolvable uncertainty—yes, front row there. Marwan, is it?
She nodded, dropping her raised hand.Isn’t that overreaching, professor?she asked.To draw such a direct line between religious belief and secular culture?
How so?
It seems... too neat. To translate that hope—this tension between fundamental doubt and unattainable certainty—into how we live our lives today.
Kerr had smiled, good-natured.You’re here, Marwan, in school—academics as a form of labor, albeit elite—because you are hoping, no? For something better for your life, attempting to shape the uncertainty of all that your life might be?
She’d frowned.Well, yes, but that’s human. The hope for something more, the worries about what our lives could be—that exists separate from the anxieties of capitalism.
Does it?Kerr asked.
Of course! I mean—respectfully, yes. That hope, that grappling with uncertainty, that’s part of what it means to be human. That’s not economics, that’s people.
Ah, but economics are people,he said.Market swings, stock performance, domestic product—we try to put numbers on it, but economies are human, at the end of the day. They are the expression of what we believe, and think, and feel, an accumulation of all our anxieties and hopes. All of our economic theory, it’s an attempt to map our desires, our wants, our fears into something logical. We are all of us, trying constantly to make sense of the world. A way to make the uncertain a thing we can grapple with. That, Marwan, is the foundation of economics.
Uncertainty.
Always difficult for her, yet so familiar: those months after her parents died, weeks in the group home; arriving in Marin, redwoods and fog; years fostered, Jane’s yellow house, unable to fully relax; would she be able to stay, was this home now?Faced with uncertainty, she has always rather tip the scales, force a decision into one outcome or the other, rather than linger in the unknown.
Instead, now: She waits and lets it be. She feels almost adrift in her lack of hope and expectation; no chance of losing him, no chance of having him.
When he exhales—a hard, disciplined breath—Lili flinches.
“Three weeks,” he says. Traffic and the sounds of the park grow distant as she focuses on him. “I didn’t know where the fuck you were, or what had happened, for three fucking weeks.”
“I know,” she whispers. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
Insufficient words, but what else is left? What else is left, between her and him?
Aleksandr sighs again, still watching the park.
It will get better,her friends had said. These people who care about her, people who saw her pain, and could not touch it—that she did not let touch it—but who still tried to soothe her.
He did both, once. He did both.
