Plastic is a marvelous petroleum byproduct. It is useful, chiefly, in its capacity as a lightweight, impermeable barrier; secondarily, in its ability to be easily molded; finally, in its transparency.
And if the world were boring, and the people in it prosaic, this would be the end of the story. We would use the stuff where it worked, worked well, and did no harm in other regards. We would ditch the stuff where it was unnecessary, worked poorly, or caused some degree of damage beyond its obvious use as a transparent barrier and a moldable substrate.
As it stands, something about plastic turns us into raging psychopaths. I have marveled at the single bell pepper, placed like the head of John the Baptist on a styrofoam platter and triple-wrapped in cling film. I have witnessed a shrink-wrapped banana. I have witnessed a shrink wrapped bridge. I have tried to use my own grocery bags, but I find their presence causes some deep, spiritual offense to grocery store employees, apparently chartered to double-bag even the most molecular of grocery items. I have pondered the sale of plastic things in plastic. I have opened plastic boxes of lunch-meat only to find plastic bags of lunch-meat within—the world’s most disappointing Russian-doll.
Like most people, I learned that plastic recycling is largely a scam; that we mostly just ship the stuff to China to burn. At best, something like 5% of plastic actually gets recycled, and only at the cost of enough energy consumption (hey, more petroleum byproducts!) to make the association of recycling with something “green” into a sick joke. Recyclers still dutifully recycle—priests performing the temple rites long after their god has been melted down for coinage.
Even those opposed to “single-use plastics” (Europeans, mostly) speak of it in tones heavy with fate: apparently we simply will produce this stuff until the oceans are traversable by foot. Apparently all of human history was unfulfilled in its most basic operations until poly-vinyl chloride rescued them. As always, we can’t go back.
Plastic receives no odes, like gold or silver; it arrived too late to receive a god; it’s not dignified enough for a patron saint; it is made of oil, the stuff of anointing and kingship, but no poet I know of has bothered with the association. Plastic wants simply to be used: a boring, neutral, liquid-proof substrate put to pragmatic purposes by industrious people. But the trouble with pragmatism is that people aren’t pragmatic. We are all busy building a world without symbolism, but we have yet to build a person who is not a symbol-user. Like electricity, plastic symbolizes despite itself.
And whatever plastic symbolizes, it’s more than our need for waterproofing and Buzz Lightyear figurines. In modern societies, the idea of an impenetrable barrier is not a neutral one. It resounds with meaning. It symbolizes an impossible ideal, one which forms the basis of most modern thinking: that man is an individual.
This myth is the basis of most of what we call modernity: that every person is most fundamentally a thing separated from all other things; that he enters into relationships as some move subsequent to his original state; that social phenomena are not really social. Rather, much as “love” is described by chemists as really just a chemical in the individual’s brain, so all which appears as “social” is really just some more or less painful amalgamation or coincidence of individuals, individual desires, individual rights, individual property—and so forth.
This idea took off with various mythic reworkings of the book of Genesis, all of them designed to eliminate the Bible’s insistent description of man as constitutively social; male and female; linguistic by nature; naturally pursuing the common good; gardeners from the first; always for and to and with each other. Enlightenment philosophers chewed the cud of pagan texts and came up with new origin stories in which “individuals” spent the early hours of human existence “wandering up and down the forests,” without “moral relations or determinate obligations one with another,” from the beginning “without industry, without speech, and without home ... neither standing in need of [their] fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another.” That was Rousseau. Hobbes had already described the same scene with less frills: agreement “of men is by covenant only, which is artificial.” Locke is a milquetoast Hobbes. His individualism is the same: men by nature are in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit.” (Children? What children?)
This is the individualist climate we have never left. Living according to the myths of such men makes each of us into what Charles Taylor called a “buffered self,” in which we guard and govern our little asocial core, seek our private goods—and complain about the “social constructions” that impinge upon our efforts at self-realization. “Postmodernity” is just a new way of asserting this old individualism.
Genealogies like this are always suspect—is this really how Americans came to enjoy hearing things like “you do you” and “my body, my choice”? By reading Locke? Yes and no. Individualism is the rote life-form of modern people, not because they have considered it, but because it is embodied in their work, technologies, laws, and customs. We live in a world in which there are no legally common spaces—with the possible exception of the middle of the ocean and outer space. Most travel consists of the operation of a large piece of private property threatened with destruction by other people driving their large pieces of private property. The family—with its obvious sociality—is conceived of as a strange aberration to be repudiated when one enters the “real world” at the age of eighteen. Marriage is conceived of as a dissolvable contract made by two individuals and kept insofar as both individuals are happy. Birth, and so new human beings, are described as the product of our individual “choice.” Success is defined as the attainment of individual goals rather than measuring up to an objective, social standard. People have fewer and fewer friends. Social media redefines communion, sharing, and belonging-to as moves that the individual “account” may or not make. The list goes on.
Individualism fits our world—sort of. It suffers the slight difficulty of being mythic nonsense. It obliges us to twist ourselves into the most embarrassingly complex descriptions of simple phenomena. You know the substitutions: friendship as a mutually beneficial contract; love as a chemical compound; the dependence of children as an unnatural affront to the true essence of humanity; charity as some kind of self-interested power-play; sharing as self-service for the sake of genetic superiority. In every case the given world must be explained-away by reference to a mythic one which never appears. The worst parts of Hobbes’ Leviathan consist in just this straight-faced individualizing: where a man’s pity and compassion become “the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe,” and Good and Evil are only “ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so,” and a mother’s society with her child consists in her deciding not to kill it.
The modern person is faced with the difficulty of rising to meet a description of himself which never quite pans out. He is an individual! And yet he finds himself constantly falling in love, and getting tangled in duties, obligations, and responsibilities that sure do seem to treat him as fundamentally social. He is good and holy and authentic in his asocial core! And yet he finds that he is not satisfied unless others recognize this fact. He belongs to no one but himself! An idea which is only believable in relatively good weather, insofar as he retains good health, is not old, and has forgotten his childhood. This embattled individual is profoundly prone to doing and purchasing things by which he might achieve the individual nature he was promised—the one he is supposed to already have and yet never quite experiences.
Plastic packaging forms a barrier between objects, but the barrier they form is transparent and easily shaped to the packaged object—which continues to appear. And this continued appearance of the thing, even as it is separated from the rest of the world, has symbolic value, as a little totem of the man we would be.
For you can touch a thing wrapped in plastic, you can see it and know what it is, it is in some sense available to society, and yet, between the thing and the world, there is a shield. Plastic packaging is a promise—of a sort—that the thing has not been touched. It is the great technology of “safety”—everywhere separating things from human hands. Plastic “makes” a thing present to all and yet seals it within itself, which is of course, the liberal description of the self.
As members of liberal states, we use plastic like shamans—a fact on full display during Covid. Here, despite our knowledge of germs and airflow, we separated human encounters with plastic shields that hardly reached above the heads of those “protected” by them. Grocery stores and banks erected them with little openings for transactions—but as the plastic barriers made it hard to hear the other person, everyone would lean in to speak through the portals, defeating the purpose. People wore plastic face shields. We were scared for our health, yes, but more fundamentally the disease gave us occasion, as we lived out that fear, to make plain our perception of society as a threat to the sovereign, free, individuals we are supposed to be—and yet never quite are. We thought other people were diseased and gross and intrusive and unfit to our being long before the Wuhan shuffle. A global disease just proved it.
Pope Francis’ antipathy towards plastic—whether thrown in the ocean or otherwise—is an antipathy natural for a pope. He represents the very anthropology that plastic liberalism was designed to destroy, leads the very “body of Christ” that individualism renders impossible, violent, and even disgusting. Our late inability to act scientifically with plastic exposed the symbolic power of the stuff. It wards off a description of man as fundamentally social, as always already in communion with others, as a person made for love. As long as it provides for us in this manner—we’ll use it. Everywhere.
This essay is part of a series on technology in preparation for New Polity’s upcoming conference, “Should We Therefore Destroy The Servers?” featuring Matthew Crawford, Andrew Willard Jones, and D. C. Schindler. Limited tickets still available.