That Was the Year That Was

A look back and a look forward

At the end of 2021, I did a comprehensive recap of the year and of my writing. I didn’t do anything similar last year, but I probably should have. It’s good to take stock, and the turn of the calendar provides a good an excuse as any to do so. So I’m going to do that here, and I hope my readers will excuse the navel-gazing.

While I’m aware of the negativity bias in media that no doubt shapes how we all perceive reality, I find it hard to look back at 2023 without feeling that it was a very ominous year. That’s partly because of some notable bad trend lines and events of 2023. Most prominently, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 looks likely to break records again. Moreover, progress in fighting climate change hit some important snags in 2023, with emissions rising once again largely due to increases in China, India and the rest of the developing world, and with the deployment of renewables not proceeding as quickly as necessary due to a combination of financial, practical and regulatory obstacles. In recent years, I’d been feeling more optimistic on the climate front primarily because of the dramatic decline in the price of renewables, and recent news hasn’t erased that good news, but it has tempered it.

Another major long-term trend got worse in 2023, and in this case I don’t see larger contextual reasons for optimism. That trend: the decline in global fertility. The drop over the past few years has been so dramatic that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe it as a free fall, and the trend is evident far beyond the most developed regions of the United States, Europe and Northeast Asia. Even if you think that a modest and steady decline in the human population would have ecological or other benefits, the extreme declines we’re seeing now presage severe economic and social problems that we have not even begun to grapple with. As with climate change, there’s a pronounced tendency to moralize the problem and fold it into preexisting a culture war frame, and as with climate change I think that tendency makes it far less likely that we’ll actually get a handle on what is happening and what we might be able to do about it.

News in war and peace has been distressing in the extreme. Obviously the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Gaza war hits home in a personal way for me, which is why I’ve written about it so much, both directly about the conflict and the larger context in which it has unfolded. (Examples include here, here, here, here, here, here and here.) But that is hardly the only depressing development on the international scene. Azerbaijan’s successful ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and the possible genocide in Darfur both point to the new reality of the international system where such events are unlikely to draw any meaningful response. And the nearly complete failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has brought more and more observers around to the view that the war cannot be won—or to creatively but unconvincingly redefine victory so that they can claim it still can be.

The persistence of right-wing populism and the response of what might be called reactionary liberalism continue to threaten the stability of liberal democracy worldwide. I take some comfort from a number of signs that the populist right is accommodating itself to democratic norms and that the mainstream is coming to accept that the populist right isn’t going anywhere and needs to be accommodated in some fashion. But there’s nonetheless a feeling of eternally recurring political crisis that makes it hard to settle into anything as a “new normal.” This cartoon from 2020 expresses it well in American political terms, but it’s not just an American phenomenon, and it’s a wearying one.

Not that there was no good news in 2023: far from it. Yet we can’t seem to feel it, and I include myself in that inability. Domestically, for example, America not only managed to tame inflation while avoiding a recession (so far), but to sustain an extraordinary continuation of high growth overall, and high wage growth for the lowest-income workers in particular. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the Biden-Powell economic record is just about as good as could possibly be imagined given the circumstances they had to work with, and that the biggest problems in the American economy now are structural ones that require regulatory and other reforms to tackle rather than macroeconomic fine-tuning. Yet Americans as a whole remain strikingly pessimistic in their assessments of the economy. This puzzle (one that I grappled with here and here) is perhaps the most important one for students of political economy to solve: whether the government is wrong or the people are, the political system that has evolved over the past century simply cannot function if we can’t tell a good economy from a bad one and reward or punish political actors accordingly.

I feel similarly about the state of public safety. Rates of violent crime, which had been rising since the mid-2010s and spiked dramatically in the late Trump years during Covid, are now dropping dramatically. Yet public perception is almost completely divorced from these statistics. Is that because certain aspects of disorder—like the prevalence of homelessness, exacerbated by the surge in asylum claimants and migration more generally—have not adequately abated or have even worsened? Whatever the reason, the disconnect between the data and perception is an enormous problem for political accountability regardless of who is correct.

Finally, I feel a profound ambivalence about the biggest technology story of 2023 (though the story really broke toward the end of 2022), the emergence of a new generation of large language models that many seem to believe are a leap in the direction of true artificial general intelligence. I’m an inveterate skeptic of AGI, but these models really can do extraordinary things that I did not expect them to be able to do. And yet, my primary reaction remains less a fear that they will be better than humans at what makes us most human, but that they will be good enough at faking it that we will adapt ourselves to them more than adapting them to us, and thereby become more artificial and decidedly inferior versions of ourselves.

Now, I’m something of a natural pessimist, inasmuch as my general assumption is that most things won’t work out quite as people imagine. Historically, though, I’ve been what you might call a cheerful pessimist, largely because I’m as inclined to doubt the likelihood of catastrophe as I am to doubt the likelihood of dramatic success. Most trends, good or bad, are unsustainable, and most systems—both human social ones and natural ecological ones—are remarkably adaptable, so I’ve generally been able to view most developments with a certain sangfroid. I don’t know how much I should blame the world for this and how much to blame changes in myself, but that kind of confidence born of a broad perspective has been harder for me to come by of late.

If there is a personal reason for it, the answer probably lies in what should have been a reason for great excitement in 2023: this was the year I finally directed a feature film. And I am very glad to have done it, and truly excited about the project’s prospects as we head into the next year. But making that film was also the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and post-production has taken much longer than I anticipated, all of which has taken a steady toll on me. Part of a generally upbeat orientation is the belief that, even if this or that thing doesn’t work out, other opportunities will always come along. I’ve had more trouble than usual feeling that lately, more trouble than usual picturing a world of possible futures that I might yet come to inhabit. And that just makes greeting each new day with cheer a little bit harder.

But while I can cast blame in a lot of directions for that personal situation, most prominently at myself, I cannot blame the movies. 2023 was, in my opinion, the best year for film in a number of years. I’ve seen more films released this year than I have any year since I’ve started keeping track, and I’ve liked a lot of them. I feel more optimistic about the prospects of the movies as a business in part because two non-franchise films of significant ambition by relatively young directors—Barbie and Oppenheimer—found enormous domestic and global audiences, and proved that movies still can matter to the culture as a whole, and not just to their particular niches. But there was just an incredible slate of more modest films this year that struck me as serious, well-made and actually about something, films that deserve recognition. More encouragingly still, it looks likely that in many cases they are going to get it. I’ve written about some of them, and I hope to write more. It’s the least I can do to support an art form I care so much about.

I hope to write more, generally, in the year to come. Not including this post, I wrote 55 posts here this year. Over two-thirds of those posts came in the second half of the year, because gearing up to make and then actually directing my film took up so much of my attention in the first half of the year. In a sense, I hope that problem recurs, as I hope completing the post-production process and then getting the film out on the festival circuit and distributed will occupy a lot of my time in 2024—but I hope to do a better job of doing two things at once than I did in 2023. I hope, in particular, to write more pieces for this Substack that delve into a question that doesn’t really require a news hook, pieces like this one about chance and divine free will, this one about retribution or this one about the relationship of cosmopolitanism to particularism. I also hope—and I know I say this every year—to write more about the arts, about literature, theater, film, visual arts (which I didn’t write about at all in 2023): the works.

I also hope to write more for other outlets. I did some of that this year, but I got out of the habit of “wrapping” my writing here on a weekly basis because I no longer had my weekly columns at The Week to anchor such an effort. But hopefully if I start writing more frequently for other publications I’ll have reason to return to the practice, if not weekly than maybe monthly.

In the meantime, here’s a rundown of stuff I had published elsewhere that my readers here might not know about since I haven’t made a point of talking about them here.

At Modern Age:

— “The Djinn and the Bed Trick,” about George Miller’s 2022 film, Three Thousand Years of Longing and a Stratford Festival production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, two fairy tales of wish-fulfillment.

— “The Oscars’ Night of the Living Dead,” about Oscar-nominated arthouse remakes of classic films in 2022, all of which I found disappointing relative to the originals.

— “Wes Anderson: Maturing Auteur,” an assessment of the director’s oeuvre by way of an interpretation of his latest film, Asteroid City, and the ways in which that film feels like the director’s own self-reckoning.

— It’s not on line yet, but it’s in the latest issue, so keep checking their website for “Barbie and the Franken-Feminists,” my piece on the films, Barbie and Poor Things, in which I read the latter as a dark doppelgänger for the former.

At The Jewish Review of Books:

— “Tamar, Helen and Love’s Ambition,” another foray into All’s Well That Ends Well, this time as a lens through which to understand the biblical Tamar of the Judah/Tamar story, as well as Thomas Mann’s version of Tamar in Joseph and His Brothers.

Finally, I’d love to hear from you. What have you particularly appreciated about this Substack in 2023? If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, what do you miss? Whether you are or not, what would you like to see more of—or what would you like to see added that I’m not doing already?

I appreciate all of you, and I particularly appreciate those of you who have helped make it possible for me to continue spending time on this by supporting this endeavor monetarily. If you do appreciate what I do, and have the ability to go from a free subscriber to paid, please do so. And if you know anyone who you think would appreciate what I do, please point them my way. This Substack has grown almost entirely on the basis of word-of-mouth and recommendations from within the Substack network. There’s no better way for you to show your appreciation for my work than by spreading it around.

Onward to 2024!