current issue

 

 

UDAY S. MEHTA

IMPATIENCE AND MODERN SOCIETY

Impatience is a defining aspect of the modern world and its identity, as is starkly exemplified in the emphasis on technology. It is the central mode along which individual and social life are organized. In contrast, for Mahatma Gandhi patience is the crucial category for healthy individual and social existence.

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NOAM YURAN

BEING ONLINE

Two critiques of mass media in the twentieth century gestured at its effects on the capacity of patience. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image examine how the media changed our imagining of the world, the scope of its relevance for us, and our ways of being in it. This article follows their lead by inquiring how being online further undermines the capacity for patience, manifested most clearly in the self-generating rage characteristic of social networks’ discourse. It refers this effect to three basic elements of the online world: the ubiquitous timeline format, the hybrid creature of written speech created by it, and digital objects that adapt themselves too closely to our needs, imaginings, and desires. All three foster a disruption of distances, where the remote and unfamiliar are experienced as unbearably close, a blurring of distinctions between inner life and external reality. A world composed of digital objects has lost what Hannah Arendt described as its power to “relate and separate people at the same time.”

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CASS R. SUNSTEIN

IMPATIENT CONSUMERS

Many consumers suffer from present bias. To present-biased consumers, the long term is a foreign country, and they are not sure they will ever visit. If consumers suffer from present bias, there is room to rethink national policies in multiple domains. Regulatory mandates might turn out to be better than economic incentives. Fuel economy and energy efficiency mandates might produce billions of dollars in annual savings to present-biased consumers. The net benefits of mandates that simultaneously reduce internalities and externalities might exceed the net benefits of incentives that reduce externalities alone, even if mandates turn out to be a highly inefficient way of reducing externalities.

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PAUL A. KOMESAROFF

A RACE AGAINST TIME: PATIENT SUFFERING IN THE CLINIC

The play of patience and impatience is often powerfully active in the experiences of the clinic. The onset of an illness, the exposure to suffering, and the awareness of our mortality that it awakens compel us to negotiate and renegotiate our relationships with time and with others. Seen in this way, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, what emerges is not a fixed value but rather a continuous axis in relation to which we valorize the complex and multifaceted ways in which we relate to the unfolding of time.

 

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NEGUIN YAVARI

PATIENCE IN THE ISLAMIC LIFEWORLD

While the exhortation to patience is commonplace in literary and religious traditions across the world, equally widespread are diverging etiquettes of patience and varied histories of its reception. The focus in this essay is on the medieval reception of patience in the Islamic world and the manifold ways in which that history has informed its modern invocations. Finally, the political purchase of patience is brought under relief by juxtaposing competing languages of statecraft in Iran and the United States.

 

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JAMES CHANDLER

HOURLY GRATIFICATION: THE POETICS OF PATIENCE IN AN AGE OF SPEED

The first serious and sustained literary response to cultural acceleration in modern society comes not from Benjamin or Simmel, as some have suggested, nor the work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, but the poetic experiments of Wordsworth. At the turn of the nineteenth century Wordsworth confronted an impatient mediascape, inhabited by readers requiring “outrageous stimulation” that the “rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.” He published poetry that programmatically tried the patience of his readers and changed the course of literary history. He also evolved a theory of patience, passion, and poetic genius that shaped literature and criticism through the twentieth century, but had its opponents early and late, from Percy Shelley to Raymond Williams.

 

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RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR

ALL HE NEEDED WAS A HULL: SLOW CRITICISM IN CANCEL CULTURE TIMES

The essay traces an arc from a true story of shipwreck involving the ships Patience and Deliverance in the seventeenth century to a twenty-first-century conversation between the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT and the author on the subjects of patience and narrative crisis. It is suggested that deliverance from crises is integral to the conceptual structure of both patience and narrative. Features of patience as a “postcrisis virtue” are then sought to be captured within a triangulation of concepts: urgent patience (paradoxical and action-oriented), narrative patience (methodological and linguistic), and fake patience (mechanical and emotionless), leading on to a tentative listing of some features of a “slow criticism” attentive to the fractious anxieties of our times.