Ask what a poem is good for and you’ve already agreed it needs an excuse.
A friend asks why you are reading a poem that will not improve your career, tending a garden that barely produces food, or spending an afternoon with someone who cannot advance your plans. The question sounds practical, even caring. Most of us would try to answer it on its own terms: the poem sharpens your writing, the garden lowers your stress, the afternoon is good for your mental health. Each answer is true enough, and each one quietly concedes something. It accepts that the poem, the garden, and the afternoon have to earn their place by producing something beyond themselves.
That concession is what this note is about. “Yes, but what is it good for?” is a reasonable question to ask of a hammer. Asked of everything, and asked under enough competitive pressure, it carries a whole metaphysics, one in which nothing is allowed to be valuable for its own sake. Why does such an ordinary question end up corroding the things it is asked about?
Usefulness keeps asking for another reason
A useful object points beyond itself. A hammer is good for driving nails. Driving nails is good for building a house. The house is good for sheltering a family. At some point the chain has to arrive at something worth having for its own sake: warmth, safety, the experience of being at home.
If every answer receives another “what is that good for?”, the chain never arrives. Family life becomes useful for raising successful children. Successful children become useful for preserving status. Status becomes useful for gaining options, and options for gaining more options. The means proliferate while the end disappears.
Under enough pressure, every value gets translated into the language of competitive return. Friendship becomes networking, art becomes content, education becomes credentialing, love becomes mate selection, and life becomes portfolio management. Each conversion is reasonable in isolation. Together they create a world in which nothing is allowed to be an end, and the poem survives only if it can be filed under professional development. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl gave that world a name: Moloch, “whose mind is pure machinery.”
Moloch is the conversion of all values into instruments for winning. The sacred, in that world, is whatever refuses to justify its existence before the tribunal of usefulness.
Why nobody can refuse alone
Moloch’s advantage is that each individual sacrifice is often rational. The employee who refuses unpaid availability loses to the employee who accepts it. The company that preserves humane slack loses to the company that extracts it. Nobody has to announce a war on the sacred. It is crowded out by thousands of defensible improvements, which is why the friend’s question sounds caring rather than hostile.
The resulting system can be materially successful and spiritually vacant, and its winners are not spared. They may be the people who surrendered most completely: the student who cannot read without extracting a lesson, the artist who cannot see without imagining the post, the executive who experiences friendship as poorly structured networking. The horror is not merely that some people lose. Even the winners can be mutilated by what winning required.
Instruments become idols
None of this makes money, competence, measurement, or winning into enemies of the sacred. They often protect it. Money buys time with a dying parent. Measurement reveals damage that intuition missed.
The corruption begins when the instrument becomes sovereign, when life must keep demonstrating its usefulness to the tool that was built to serve it. Tools serve life. Idols make life serve them. An idol is a partial good promoted into the final judge of all other goods. Money as an instrument asks what can be funded; money as an idol asks why anything that cannot pay should exist. David Foster Wallace put it in religious language: everybody worships something, and if what you worship is money and things, you will never feel you have enough. The practical difference is between I win so that I can live and I live so that I can keep winning.
Some goods appear only once the evaluation stops. A partner’s traits matter when deciding whether to date, but catalog mode turns corrosive when comparison continues after commitment and the beloved becomes a bundle of features. Friendship may create opportunities, but it cannot remain friendship if every encounter is audited for return. These goods need moments when the optimization problem is retired, and that permission is not laziness. It preserves the ends that discipline, markets, and measurement are meant to serve.
So the friend’s question about the poem, the garden, and the afternoon does not need to be refused, only turned around. Ask of any instrument: what good thing was this instrument originally supposed to protect? The career was supposed to protect a life with room in it for poems, gardens, and unprofitable afternoons. If winning completely would leave none of those alive, the instrument has already begun asking for sacrifices.
References:
- Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
- David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”