Redrawing the Map: O’Rourke Kinda Won Texas in 2018

(Note: This post is by Robert Martin from the Decision Desk HQ newsletter. I asked him if this was posted online anywhere; it isn't, so I posted it here)

One of the most common refrains of US elections is that the failure of the Beto O'Rourke campaign to win the Texas Senate race in 2018 against Ted Cruz means that Joe Biden will be similarly unable to do so in 2020 against President Trump. The view, informed by the fact that Beto raised more money than any other candidate in 2018 and that Ted Cruz was seen as a vulnerable candidate, has informed the consensus around the race. That Texas is just too red, and inelastic of a state to vote Democratic in 2020. However, when looking at the level at a more granular level, it becomes more and more clear that isn’t the whole story. That Beto made historic gains in the Lone Star State in 2018, but his inability to carry it wasn’t due to inelasticity, but a lack of enthusiasm and support of minority voters. Let’s redraw the map, and see where the data takes us instead of the common media narratives.

The above two maps are how everybody views 2016/2018, and to be fair, they are the most accurate representation of what happened. By coloring in the margins of where each candidate won, and by how much, we can see that areas where Clinton did well very clearly overlap with where Beto did well. Not only did Beto replicate Clinton’s map, but he also made large inroads into suburban Texas; Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, etc. This can be more accurately seen with the shift map from 2016-2018, as shown below.

This map clearly shows exactly where Beto did better than Clinton, and the suburban parts of Dallas, Houston and Austin are stand out as very large Democratic shifts from 2016. However, there are some problem areas in the map. One of the benefits of Beto in 2018 that Clinton didn’t have was that the environment was much more favorable for Democrats, D+8.5 instead of Clinton’s D+2 National environment. In this way, you should generally expect Beto to do 6.5 points better in every precinct. However, it is very clear from this map that didn’t happen, that Beto did better in some areas and worse in others. Most notable of all is the Rio Grande Valley, which is normally a Democratic bastion of support that not only had some small shifts to Beto in 2018, actually had many shifts against him in the particularly rural areas. Let’s look at another map, this time subtracting 6.5 to the shift from Beto, to see where Beto had an above average shift, and where he severely underperformed.

This second map is both very alarming and very promising to Democrats. It shows Beto making large inroads in Suburban Austin, Dallas and Houston. However, it shows a potentially large problem for Democrats, as Beto actually suffered a swing against him (given the change in National environment) in some of the most Democratic areas of the state (Downtown Dallas, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley). How is this possible? Beto clearly energized a coalition of suburban college educated whites to support him over his GOP rival Ted Cruz, but clearly Hispanics that turned out to vote for Clinton decided to stay home, and as such the GOP share of the electorate as Hispanics that voted for Trump grew, as they now occupied a larger share of a smaller pool. Looking at this data, it is hard to argue that Cruz is only the Senator from Texas due to lower numbers of Democratic leaning Hispanic voters in the Midterms. Additionally, while on the surface the PVI of Texas appeared to not change from 2016-2018 (Texas still leaned to the right of the nation by 10 points in both elections) it is clear that the only reason that happened is because of the notional swing Beto suffered in the Rio Grande Valley and Downtown areas. If those minority voters had come out to vote, this article would be about Senator Beto O’Rourke, and how Texas is an elastic state due to their fast moving suburbs.

Looking at this on the Congressional level shows an even more alarming trend for the GOP. Hilariously, the GOP drawn maps from the 2010 redistribution are backfiring at an alarming rate. Their surgical precision to target minority Democratic voters in urban districts while isolating suburban voters in GOP Leaning Districts is readily apparent from the below map, especially in the Dallas and Houston area, as the red areas on the map (areas where Beto had a below 6.5 or negative swing from 2016) are almost exclusively contained to the Safe Democratic districts the party has held since 2010.

From these maps, the path for Biden to win Texas is very clear: replicate or improve on Beto margins in the growing suburbs (of which there are thousands of new voters from just 2018 alone) while getting the same turnout and vote share Clinton did with rural Hispanics in 2016. While many models relegate Texas to an unobtainable goal for the Biden campaign, as a inelastic state that isn’t competitive unless Biden is winning the popular vote by double digits are missing a huge piece of the puzzle from 2018. If Biden wins the popular vote by a similar margin to 2018, a D+8.5 environment, and are able to get the same level of Hispanic turnout as Clinton in 2016 then Texas is legitimately competitive. A surprise Biden win in Texas very well could be moment on election night we all remember when thinking back to the moment we all knew the election was over, and that Joe Biden would be the next President.

Robert Martin (@RobertMartinLT) is founder and CEO of LeanTossUp.ca and a contributor to Decision Desk HQ.

Book Review: Robin DiAngelo - White Fragility

Imagine a guy arguing with his girlfriend by simply repeating "you're too emotional" at her for a few hours, and that's DiAngelo's book in a nutshell. One of the most depressing things about racism, apart from its immorality, injustice, etc., is how stupid it makes us all. I don't know how else to explain the popularity of this cynical, predatory cash-in, other than that emotionally-charged subjects like race remove our ability to think critically. Scam artists like DiAngelo claiming to palliate racism through word games, sophistry, bad history, and gimmick corporate seminars should remind us of medieval physicians waving leeches at us to treat an imbalance of the humours, but here we are sending her book up the charts in a desperate effort to avoid real work about racism and systemic inequalities

A rational society would think twice about the incentive structure behind DiAngelo's business model - a white person paid thousands of dollars an hour to tell other white people what the correct opinions about minorities to have are - but an increasingly bureaucratized America addicted to rebranding its social problems as HR issues will naturally turn to familiar corporate solutions like this. Anyone who's had to sit through mandatory training knows that it's easier to just turn off your brain, let this stuff wash over you, and check the box marked Training Complete at the end: who wouldn't rather do that than real work? This book is short, repetitive, and written at bozo level, so if you are a white American who's feeling lazy, then buying and reading it might be a fairly cost- and time-effective alternative to activism, independent thought, self-education, or, god forbid, actually talking to a person of color.

Like many people, I came across this book just after the George Floyd protests. I think active anti-racism is incredibly important, and anyone with a conscience should be disgusted and outraged not only by specific instances of police brutality, but about the entire social system behind events like that. We have an obligation to each other and ourselves to speak up when something is wrong, and there's absolutely no shortage of work to be done. Part of that work is self-education, which is why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to this vile little tract, which DiAngelo frankly admits is not designed to convince open or even closet racists to be less racist. Quite the opposite - its goal is to convince well-meaning white people trying to be not-racist that in fact they were actually racist all along without them having known it. This is a strange tactic if your goal is to reduce the overall goal of racism in a society, but DiAngelo's real goal is to maintain her lifetime sinecure of bullying hapless victims in corporate workshops with carefully constructed trap-door arguments about privilege that are impossible to engage in good-faith dialogue with. 

A great example of how poisonous DiAngelo's approach is comes in chapter 5, which begins with the banal observation that the world is not neatly divided between bad racism and good anti-racism, and ends concluding that thinking some more about anti-racism is the best thing to do (or something; it's often hard to tell what her point is, especially when she starts "conceptualizing myself on an active continuum"). DiAngelo shares a story from one of her workshops where a participant related an interaction she had with some parents protesting against the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren. In retelling the incident, which concludes with the teacher admitting that one particular protestor was correct to point out that she didn't understand the schoolchildren and so she needed to do some further thinking, the participant imitated the protestor in a way that was "bordering on racial mockery".

DiAngelo heroically points out the participant's problematic racism-adjacency, the particpant gets a bad case of white fragility and quits the workshop, and DiAngelo is acclaimed by the rest of the participants, white and black alike, for her virtue (no, DiAngelo is not being a white savior, how dare you even think that). To DiAngelo, all that matters is that one white person might have told a difficult personal story of vulnerability and growth, in a workshop theoretically designed for that very purpose, in a problematic way; to anyone else, this is a near-criminal exercise in missing the point. What about the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren? How is DiAngelo helping those children via her terrible facilitation skills? Is DiAngelo actually accomplishing anything at all here?

This book is a master class on how not to run a seminar, in particular chapter 10, where she systematically explains why normal rules for facilitators like Don't judge, Don't make assumptions, Assume good intentions, and Respect don't apply to her. Throughout the book, DiAngelo takes advantage of the fact that an effective debate tactic is to choose your terms so that it's definitionally impossible to respond to you. This makes you come off like an asshole, but in scenarios where you don't actually care about having a real dialogue - you're in high school debate club, or you don't care if your girlfriend breaks up with you, or you're leading a mandatory corporate seminar and your audience effectively isn't allowed to disagree with you - it works great. The classic example is accusing your opponent of being "disagreeable", which gives your victim 3 basic options to respond:

1. Disagree, which means they prove your point
2. Agree, which means they concede your point
3. Try to deny the premise indirectly, which is usually too difficult to do on the fly and makes them look like they're dodging the question

This kind of vague character-based attack often works because it's very difficult to instantly refute, and partially because if you do it right it's undeniably true, up to a point: of course every single person disagrees with at least something at some point in their life. We all know people who genuinely are disagreeable, in the sense that they are exceptionally quarrelsome or disputatious, but there isn't a bright line between those people and you or I, because basically all interesting human behavior exists on a spectrum. This means that the term usually isn't very meaningful as an insult, and so we need to reserve it for exceptions; throwing out the accusation "disagreeable" in an argument with the goal of scoring a point will serve only to shut down discussion and annoy most people, who correctly recognize it as a cheap debate trick, while paradoxically making the actual disagreeable people delighted - after all, they love to disagree! Apparently the fancy term for this is "Kafka trap", from his novel The Trial, and it works similarly with any other charge where your only real goal is to wrong-foot your opponent (accusing someone of being "defensive" is another classic). Heads DiAngelo wins, tails you lose!

This rhetorical snare is DiAngelo's entire shtick with "white fragility", a term she invented herself and which she finds everywhere she looks. (Does the term "white fragility" logically imply related terms like "white robustness" or "black fragility"? It's better not to ask.) Maybe it's impolite to notice that DiAngelo makes a lot of money off of her white fragility concept (in 2019 she charged the University of Kentucky $12,000 for a 2 hour workshop, and she does plenty of these events), but you just can't help but be skeptical about the convenience of her circular logic as she continuously diagnoses everyone who questions her premises as exhibiting more white fragility. She writes about the idea of white fragility at great length, yet for much of the book there is no simple handy definition for the reader to be able to know it when we see it as we page through her muddled sociology and examples of her victims getting reacting poorly whenever she lobs the term at them. As far as the reader is concerned, "white fragility" seems to boil down to "doesn't like to be called a racist", but much like with calling someone "disagreeable" this isn't very helpful: yes, you would expect a racist to react poorly to being called out, but you would also expect that from a non-racist. The closest intelligible definition of white fragility we get is a bullet point list in chapter 4, which she says is the "foundation" of white fragility:

• Preference for racial segregation, and a lack of a sense of loss about segregation
• Lack of understanding about what racism is
• Seeing ourselves as individuals, exempt from the forces of racial socialization
• Failure to understand that we bring our group's history with us, that history matters
• Assuming everyone is having or can have our experience
• Lack of racial humility, and unwillingness to listen
• Dismissing what we don't understand
• Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
• Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to "solutions"
• Confusing disagreement with not understanding
• Need to maintain white solidarity, to save face, to look good
• Guilt that paralyzes or allows inaction
• Defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism
• A focus on intentions over impact

There are a handful of bullet points in this list that DiAngelo is unambiguously correct about: yes, someone who prefers racial segregation is definitely a racist. Most of this list, though, has less to do with racism and more to do with "doesn't react well to DiAngelo". This conceptual slipperiness behind the title concept should bother a fair-minded person in any setting, but DiAngelo leads workshops, which is where much of the book is focused. She spends a lot of time gleefully recounting the confusion and hostility of her workshop participants, yet it genuinely seems not to occur to her that vulnerable employees in a workplace setting might react poorly to being accused of any amount of racial insensitivity in front of people they have to see and work with the next day, or that she could simply be wrong.

DiAngelo is Seymour Skinner in that immortal Simpsons meme, wondering "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the recipients of my incredibly correct racial insights who are wrong". Only a liar or an idiot would deny that workplace racism is a serious problem in America, but only a grifter like DiAngelo would conclude that the best way to address discrimination at places of employment is to hire an academic to facilitate struggle sessions for non-unionized workers when the wrong word could be the kiss of death. She only barely alludes to and doesn't discuss in detail any of the countless actual instances of explicit racial discrimination in hiring, promotion, retention, or salary structure that have come up over the entire history of the United States and persist today, all she's interested in are vague thoughtcrime sentiments, because word games are her bread and butter.

For anyone hoping to actually learn anything from this book, that's probably the single biggest obstacle. She's using terms like "racism", "white supremacy", etc differently than normal people, in classic academic jargon fashion, so that you can then hire her to explain it to you. There are thousands of books debating race as biological vs sociological vs legal construct, but most people have converged on basic common understandings of words like "racism" as "an act of discrimination based on someone's race", or "white supremacy" as "the belief that white people are inherently superior to other races", and so forth.

That's not enough for DiAngelo, who is trying to ensure a broader market for her services by connecting racism to as many other concepts as possible, even theoretically neutral ones. It's one thing to point out (correctly) that in practice, America's rhetoric of individualism, meritocracy, and so forth has not matched its practice, or that racists have often couched their appeals in the seemingly neutral language of small government, low taxes, and neighborhood character. It's quite another to identify those very concepts themselves with white people, because that leads her to say weird things like this:

Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one's life and perceptions.

The reason that it's difficult to think that way is because the only people who take thought patterns like that seriously are white supremacists! DiAngelo is almost too interested in getting white people to explicitly think of themselves as white people, in a manner that should set off alarm bells in your head. Hitler jokes aside ("You know who else really wanted white people to think about whiteness as a specific state of being?"), reading this book is to discover that DiAngelo actually sees the world very similarly to white supremacists, just with the sign reversed. In anecdote after anecdote, DiAngelo is incapable of understanding the world through any frame but one: white people are history's protagonists and everyone else is sort of along for the ride, forever outsiders, incapable of agency or defining their terms of their existence on their own, caught in a web of white supremacy that they can never escape (unless someone pays DiAngelo a lot of money, presumably). 

DiAngelo can get away with this because, as she says, her primary audience is white people, specifically white people in the Anglophere, but really just the United States. So if you are among the more than 95% of the planet who is not a white American, this book is basically just a testament to the true force of white narcissism at maximum intensity. This extends to her scholarship: a few nonwhite people get quoted from time to time, but never in a manner that indicates that DiAngelo is actually in dialogue with them, only that she's willing to appropriate their words for her own project. Let's not even discuss her historical inaccuracies, which a less polite person might term "lies".

I will try to find some good things to say about the book, because DiAngelo does at least mention many true facts: it is possible for well-meaning people to be complicit in or promoters of racism; there are massive racial disparities in power, wealth, health, and social status in America; American history is littered with criminal racial violence from the beginning up to this very day; racism hurts everyone, including white people; white people could stand to consider the impact their thoughts and actions have on others even if they didn't think they were being offensive; white people often artificially separate elements of non-white American culture like food, dress, music, and history from "mainstream" American culture into special non-white ethnic categories; patterns of racism and segregation are frequently maintained using carefully-chosen neutral phrases and legal regimes to disguise disparate impacts; merely to live your life in America as a white person can mean taking much for granted without even realizing it (white privilege is absolutely real); all of us could do more to make the America and the world a gentler and kinder place.

But you solve no problems by giving DiAngelo a single penny, whether by buying this book (I didn't) or ponying up for one of her seminars. When you get right down to it, DiAngelo's efforts to focus all attention on your individual thoughts and behaviors and none on America's broken laws are exactly identical to all the tedious debates you hear about whether it's fair to force people to not use plastic straws, when meanwhile fossil fuel plants are burning billions of tons of CO2 a year. If you actually care about climate change, then it's a complete waste of time to guilt-trip people about straws - you should be helping to get clean energy laws passed (and given that people of color are disproportionately affected by climate change, you'd be doing even more good). Go donate money to sustainable energy groups! Support the Green New Deal! But then there wouldn't be any money left to pay a straw fragility consultant thousands of dollars an hour to lecture you about how even if you don't use straws at all you're still destroying the planet, and as it turns out strawmen, are DiAngelo's entire business model.

Recipe: Roasted eggplant parmesan

Adapted from here, see also here.

Ingredients

• 2.5 lbs eggplant unpeeled, sliced 1/2 in thick
• .75 cup olive oil
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 24 oz jar marinara sauce
• Kosher salt/fresh ground black pepper
• .5 cup julienned fresh basil leaves
• .5 lb fresh buffalo mozzarella thinly sliced
• .5 lb goat cheese
•  1 cup Parmesan cheese

Topping

• 1.5 cup bread crumbs
• 4 garlic cloves minced
• .25 cup chopped basil leaves
• .25 cup olive oil

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and arrange 3 racks evenly spaced.

2. Slice eggplant and season heavily with salt. Lay the eggplant in one layer on all 4 sheets. Brush both sides with olive oil. Sprinkle with oregano, then salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn the eggplant and rotate the pans. Bake for 10 more minutes. Leave the oven at 400 degrees.

3. In a 10x14x2 inch baking dish, spread a third of the marinara sauce. Arrange a third of the eggplant on top in 1 layer, then spread a third of the basil, mozzarella, goat cheese, and Parmesan. Repeat twice.

4. For the topping, place the bread crumbs, garlic, and basil in a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the olive oil and 1 teaspoon salt and pulse to combine. Sprinkle the mixture evenly over the dish.

5. Bake for 45 minutes until bubbling and golden brown. Let sit for 10 minutes before serving.

Book Review: Michel Houellebecq - Serotonin

Serotonin is clearly a step down in ambition from Submission, and in many ways the grimmest of his works. Its theme - the uselessness of trying to revive the past to avoid facing down the present, or worse, the future - is delivered in a more constrained and less engaging manner than his other novels. Houellebecq gets his obligatory unhappy anhedonic author surrogate protagonist free from all his attachments quickly, only to have him stare blankly at fate over the course of the rest of the book. He puts in nods to contemporaneous social movements that just aren't as provocative as his other books, with rare exceptions. It's really bleak, a novel that perhaps could only have been written by an old man, with an overwhelming sense of numbness, exhaustion, and futility. I don't expect novelty from Houellebecq, exactly, but if you step back and look at his whole body of work, maybe it's easier to see how this particular iteration of his idées fixes - the erosion of communal attachment, the moral and spiritual void of Anglosphere capitalism, the dull horror of modernity, the pointlessness of traditionalism and nostalgia, the empty void of the future, the irresistibly obsessing but ultimately unfulfilling trap of sexual desire - is a perfunctory rehash, without the philosophical connections to life's struggles that made his earlier works so memorable and thought-provoking. By the end it's clear why he's written the novel this way, but that doesn't make it more satisfying.

You know the drill: protagonist Florent-Claude Labrouste doesn't like his cushy job, doesn't like his sexually adventurous girlfriend, and just plain doesn't like anything about life. He tries anti-depressants but they aren't really doing it for him, so rather than stay in his life and slowly suffocate, he cashes out his savings, lies to his boss about another job opportunity, and ghosts his girl to run off to a bucolic small-town nowheresville in order to do not much of anything. Flush with cash and freed of all responsibility, he stays in some hotels, reflects on the shabbiness of the much-vaunted but little-respected French countryside (it's always funny to me how unfond Houellebecq is of France), and then lodges with his old college friend Aymeric, a descendant of the Normans who's taken up the family business of farming on his inherited estate. The two have several discussions, informed by Houellecq's background in agronomy, about the seemingly irreversible economic decline of the idealized rural lifestyle due to the impersonal forces of globalization and European Union agricultural policy, which eventually leads Aymeric to participate in a sadly doomed protest against economic reforms that echoes the recent Yellow Vest protests that occurred just after this book was published.

Most importantly, while staying with Aymeric, Labrouste is overcome with regret at the long-ago collapse of his relationships with two women (melancholy Houellebecq is the best Houellebecq, he's able to perfectly capture the subtleties of mourning for things beyond recovery). He blames himself for these failures, but though his youthful romance with Kate has affected him deeply, it's his love affair with Camille that actually meant something profound to him. He becomes obsessed with the idea of reanimating their romance by murdering the child she now has and then "coincidentally" running into her, which would theoretically correct his mistakes and let him start anew by rebuilding what they once had. On the very cusp of going through with his deranged plan, as he has Camille's son in his rifle sight, he realizes, more out of despair than morality, how foolish, cruel, and most importantly futile this action would be. The past is dead, ultimately you have no one but yourself to blame for your failures, sometimes there is no fixing what's been broken, and there's truly no point in trying to either bring back what has ended or to farcically continue what isn't fulfilling. Even if you can't bear the present and have no hope for the future, you won't find any answers in reviving the past.

And that's what the book is about: coming to terms with your own failures, and the absence of second chances at some of the most important things in life. Serotonin is the chemical responsible for producing happiness, we are told, and once the narrator realizes that he's been reduced to artificially obtaining it from little white pills that will inevitably stop working someday, he's left with some grim realizations about what kind of life he can look forward to: "The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea." This is almost certainly indicative of Houellebecq's own life in some way (to a greater degree than as usual in his novels, anyway), especially because there's a lot of discussion towards the end about the relationship between art, particularly literature, and sex. Houellebecq has never had a high regard for his own profession, and in his trademark style of smut + cynicism has the definitive opinion that all of the high-minded ideals of the great novelists are worthless in the face of the logic of sexual desire, which is worth a lengthy quote:

For a long time I had planned to read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; I had a sense that it was a gloomy book, but that suited my situation and it was probably time. So I dived into it, at first with admiration, then with mounting reservations. Even though its range and ambitions were considerably greater, the ultimate meaning of the work was basically the same as Death in Venice. No more than that old imbecile Goethe (the German humanist with a Mediterranean inclination, one of the most sinister dotards in the whole of world literature), no more than his hero Aschenbach (broadly more sympathetic, however), Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann himself – and this was extremely serious – had been incapable of escaping the fascination of youth and beauty, which he had in the end placed above everything, above all intellectual and moral qualities, and in which, at the end of the day, he too, without the slightest restraint, had abjectly wallowed. So the whole of the world's culture was pointless – the whole of the world's culture provided no moral benefit and no advantage – because during those same years, exactly those same years, Marcel Proust, at the end of Time Regained, concluded with remarkable frankness that it was not only social relationships that supplied nothing substantial, friendships didn't either, they were quite simply a waste of time; and that what the writer needed was not intellectual conversations, contrary to popular belief, but 'light affairs with young girls in bloom'. At this stage of the argument, I am keen to replace 'young girls in bloom' with 'young wet pussies'; that would, it seems to me, contribute to the clarity of the debate without detracting from its poetry. (What could be more beautiful, more poetic, than a pussy that is starting to get wet? I ask you to think about that seriously before giving me an answer. A cock beginning its vertical ascent? There are arguments in favour. It all depends, like so many things in this world, on the sexual point of view that one adopts.)
Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, to return to my subject, might have had all the culture in the world, they might (in those impressive early years of the twentieth century, which summarised eight centuries and even a bit of European culture all by themselves) have been at the head of all the knowledge and intelligence in the world, they might respectively have represented the peak of French and German civilisation – that is to say, the most brilliant, the most profound and the most refined cultures of their time – but they were at the mercy of, and ready to prostrate themselves before, any wet young pussy or any valiantly upright cock – according to their personal preferences, Thomas Mann remaining undecided in this respect, and Proust being somewhat vague as well. The end of The Magic Mountain was thus even sadder than a first reading suggested; it didn't just signify, with the two highest civilisations of the day rushing, in 1914, into a war as absurd as it was bloody, the failure of the very idea of European culture; it signified the final victory of animal attraction, the definitive end of all civilisation and of all culture. A Lolita could have made Thomas Mann lose his marbles; Marcel Proust would have crushed on Rihanna; these two authors, the crowns of their respective literary cultures, were not, to put it another way, honourable men, and we would have had to go further back, probably to the start of the nineteenth century, to the days of early Romanticism, to breathe a healthier and a purer air."

The entire armature of theory around the production, consumption, and analysis of literature is wrongheaded, openly meaningless and beside the point. This makes it perhaps a bit easier to understand certain artistic choices that Houellebecq has made here, as it's difficult to actually internalize this profound point and then blithely continue to write afterwards. There is a glancing reference to Gogol's superb novel Dead Souls, which doesn't appear to mean anything, but in my mind the true reference point is Camus, who goes unmentioned, even though the entire novel can be seen as a dramatization of Camus' famous statement in The Myth of Sisyphus that the question of suicide was the only real philosophical problem that existed.

Houellebecq's way of approaching this issue almost couldn't be more different than that of Camus - Camus' idea of a shock to the conscience leaned more to the purposeless murder in The Stranger than to the stupid bestiality and pedophilia references here - but the protagonist's quest for a final answer to himself about what makes life worth continuing is precisely in that vein. Houellebecq has a much more dismal conclusion, however. One of the more interesting aspects of Submission was the main character's fruitless attempts to find answers in Christianity, under the theory that no amount of material comfort can soothe a spiritual ache. Though that novel definitively concluded that there was nothing there, here Houellebecq concludes with a poignant reminder in the language of the New Testament that unhappiness is often chosen; people are entirely capable of pursuing the most self-destructive paths with fervor and aplomb, and that ultimately the true source of our dissatisfaction in a universe overflowing with wonder lies in the mirror:

God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away – those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates – are extremely clear signs.
And today I understand Christ's point of view and his repeated horror at the hardening of people's hearts: all of these things are signs, and they don't realize it. Must I really, on top of everything, give my life for these wretches? Do I really have to be explicit on that point?
Apparently so.