Alan Jacobs

A bluntly powerful essay by my friend and colleague Jonathan Tran:

What began as a struggle of and for the dispossessed has devolved into a culture war fixated on harms, microaggressions, and sensitivity trainings. No one can live up to the standard of being sensitive to every possible sensitivity, setting everyone up to fail. More importantly, almost none of this has anything to do with repairing and redistributing structures and systems.

Nothing captures antiracism’s mission drift better than the explosive growth of its billion-dollar diversity industry, which promises to address inequality by diversifying the faces of gatekeeping institutions—the very institutions that facilitate upper-middle-class mobility precisely by leaving inequality in place. These antiracist initiatives, often staffed by well-meaning and high-minded people, bring with them all the conviction but little of the power to actually get anything done, at the end of the day achieving so little that one begins to wonder if futility was the point.

The Jellyfish Tribe - by Paul Kingsnorth:

The growing loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years is like nothing else I’ve seen in my lifetime. When, I wonder, did that contract begin to expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the US and UK launched the Iraq war were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or perhaps when the near-collapse of the global economy in 2008 brought the real impact of Machine globalisation, which had long been felt in the poor parts of the world, home to people in the West. Or maybe in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European ‘populism’ happened, and suddenly liberal globalism was under attack in its heartlands. From then on, we learned that populism was fascism and elected presidents were Russian agents and nationhood was white supremacy and free speech was ‘hate speech’, and while we were still trying to work through all that, along came covid and we all fell into the rabbit hole forever.

An excellent find, in excellent condition, and for eight bucks! Also a neat little window into classical music culture ca. 1972. 

I get the security concerns that have prompted the move to passkeys, but the new strategy forces us to have our smartphones on us at all times. For someone like me who wants to carry my smartphone less and less, this is a major frustration.

I often see quoted a line by Carl Schmitt:

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.

But I don’t think we can understand Schmitt’s point by quoting that sentence alone; we also need to quote the one that follows it: 

To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. 

If you only quote the first sentence, then you have a version of a famous but inevitably misattributed line: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” But Schmitt is not dismissing the very concept of “humanity”; he is making a more complicated (though still cynical) point. “Humanity” and “humanism” are “ideological instruments”: they can be and often are used as levers of power, as means by which one may gain dominance over one’s political enemies. The danger lies not in the very notion of humanity but rather in the ways that that notion is susceptible to being monopolized and weaponized by parties in power. That Schmitt does not want to do away with the notion altogether may be seen in his condemning accusation of “inhumanity.” 

Given the enormous damage the reign of identity politics has inflicted on our common weal, our ability to live in peace together, what we need, I believe, is serious work to restore and renew the concept and practice of humanism. My recent essay “A Humanism of the Abyss” is a step in that direction. This is a matter I will return to — and, also, see the tag for my earlier reflections on the topic.