Tuesday, April 28, 2015

‘Readers will like this book’: Highlight the book, not yourself, in a review

Like the blurb on a book's dust-jacket or a plot summary, a book review indicates the subject matter of the book being reviewed and the approach that the book takes, but it goes further by inserting the reviewer's personal opinion about whether the book was any good. Academic reviews demand a brief analysis and critique of a book's main arguments, while popular reviews might instead focus on the entertainment value of a sports anthology, the believability of a novel's plot line or the utility of a particular recipe collection as a holiday gift. Just because the reviewer should provide her opinion, however, doesn't mean she should use the first-person voice when writing the review.

First-, second- and third-person voice

First-person language includes pronouns like "I," "me," and "my." It also includes the plural forms "we," "us," and "our," especially where this is not intended to refer to humanity as a universalized whole, but to an exclusive sub-group such as English literature teachers, teenage fans of musical theater or members of Aunt Mabel's book club. Some publishers do not permit writers to refer to themselves and to their personal affiliations via the use of first-person language.

Book reviews for these publishers should use the third-person voice. Just as the book's author is a "he" or "she," potential readers should be considered as "they," rather than the "I" who was inspired to write the review or the "we" who gathered at Aunt Mabel's last Tuesday night to discuss it.

In some cases, the second-person voice, "you", may also be appropriate, as in: "You will like this book if you've liked the previous books by the same author."

A book review is not a journal entry

It's easy to write a book review almost as a diary entry about what it felt like to read the book. However, reviewers should not fall prey to this temptation. Many sentences in first-person can be rewritten to convey similar information in the third-person voice. The book review usually sounds better when this is done.

Below are some negative examples - that is, what not to do - regarding first-person language. Explanations are given about what falls short and how it can be corrected.

'My hot date at the movies'

"I read the book before (or after) I saw the movie."

The person consuming the book review doesn't care about the reviewer's hot date at the cinema. The reviewer will better serve the reader by providing information such as: "Many already have seen the movie, but the movie is no substitute for the book, as the book contains interesting dialogue that never made it into the screen adaptation."

'My speed-reading abilities'

"I read the book in one sitting."

The reviewer may intend to imply that the story holds his attention, but instead appears to be bragging about how quickly he reads. Would it matter if the reviewer needed three months to finish reading the book? Or if someone else wanted to read it while running on a treadmill? It shouldn't. So, instead, the reviewer might consider calling the book a "page-turner," a "riveting account" or an "absorbing story."

'I was absorbed in this book because my life is otherwise boring'

"I read the book in one sitting while flying across the country in an airplane."

This is a common variant of the above claim to speed-reading, but it's a less-than-ringing endorsement of a book. The simple fact is that air travelers engross themselves in books because it is more entertaining than staring at the backs of strangers' heads for six hours. Since most people fly rather infrequently and have few other opportunities to allow themselves such uninterrupted reading time, the experience of reading a book on an airplane may be personally transformative for the particular person locked in that situation at that time, but that in itself doesn't imply that the book is unique. The same goes for reading in a hammock on an island vacation or in a bed during a lengthy hospital recuperation. The circumstances that force a particular person to focus on reading material are not related to the book's content, nor to what others (who cannot be assumed to have airplane seats at their disposal to enhance their reading experience) are likely to gain from the book's message.

Incidentally, the author is unlikely to feel resoundingly complimented by the insinuation that it was at least easier to read their book than to sit in bored or miserable inactivity. If, on the other hand, one feels transported to another dimension while reading a book because of its inherently beautiful language (and does not feel "transported" merely because one's plane has just arrived in New Jersey), one should comment on that within the book review.

'Imagination fails me'

"I can't think of a better book about gingerbread decoration."

Unless the reviewer is familiar with at least a dozen books on the subject, this sort of comment only highlights her unfamiliarity with the topic. It would be disingenuous to rephrase it into a declarative statement that this book is, objectively speaking, the best book, as long as the reader still has no expertise to back up this assertion. It would be more helpful to tell potential readers of the book that "this book contains all the information that a beginning cake decorator is likely to need, as well as some expert-level tips." Ultimately, it doesn't matter how the book stacks up in objective or subjective rankings against other books. Most people just want to know whether it's useful or beautiful as a stand-alone purchase.

'Other stuff I like to read' 

"I usually like (or don't like) books about steel imports."

This is often embedded within a lengthier comment about the reviewer's longstanding preferences about steel imports and a confirmation that this specific book is, indeed, about steel imports. Why should the reviewer's usual personal preferences be of interest to anyone? The prospective reader wants to know what they can expect to learn about steel imports and whether this book will be an enjoyable read, not about how the reviewer's tastes have evolved over time nor about how they read the book only to impress a teacher. The reviewer could instead advise: "This book encourages business owners to look at steel imports from a new perspective."

'Full of stuff I didn't get'

"I didn't agree with everything, but maybe I just didn't understand it."

If a reader isn't confident that he understood the core elements of a book, he shouldn't publish a review. An exception occurs when the failure definitively lies with the book itself, not with the reader. If the book is so poorly conceived or executed that it would be incomprehensible even to educated, patient people who make a good faith effort to read it, it is acceptable to say so. A reviewer might therefore legitimately complain: "The argument in the first half of the book is straightforward enough, but shockingly, the author contradicts himself in the final chapter." 

'All about my day, which happened to include this book'

"I went to the library for a book about ostriches, but I accidentally checked out this book about medieval swords, and at first I didn't enjoy it, but later I realized that was only because I had a headache, and after I took a pill, I decided the book wasn't half-bad, and I was even willing to pay an overdue fine so I could finish it."

The deficiencies of this tale should be obvious. The easiest solution is to delete this sentence entirely and to replace it with a sentence with a dramatically shifted emphasis that communicates useful information. The only thing that a stranger might care about within the narrative above is what library carried the book. The book reviewer could therefore write: "This book may be difficult to find at public libraries, but some academic libraries have it."

'All the good features of this book were pleasing to me'

"I liked the book."

This is all right, but technically, it's the first-person voice. Even if the publisher permits the first-person voice, using it at all — even sparingly — risks leading the reviewer further astray into irrelevant first-person narratives. The reviewer can instead make authoritative comments about what's good (or bad) about the book's objective characteristics. For example:

  • "The characters' original antics and witty banter are entertaining."
  • "The moral lesson about the importance of charity is heartwarming."
  • "This book has sold millions of copies, and based on the deep truths it expresses so eloquently, it's easy to see why the author is a household name."

The reviewer's personal appreciation for the book is implicit in these statements. Obviously one endorses one's own declarative statements.

That's all there is to it

When these approaches are taken, it's clear that the review has been written from a particular person's point of view, without the reviewer ever having to use the pronoun "I."

If a book review has already been written in the first person, it can probably be converted into third person without too much effort and without significantly changing the meaning. It's worth a try! Doing so will make the piece eligible to be published for a broad audience.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 15, 2012.

Image: Toilette - Frau vor Spiegel (Woman in front of a mirror). Art by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) © public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Novelists on the mysteries of the passing of time

These novelists have questioned how we understand the passing of time.

Ismail Kadare:

Events had so stunned the city that it was hard to believe that this was still the same day. The very word ‘afternoon’ seemed not to fit any more. Should it be called the second part of the day? The last part? Perhaps the most treacherous part, harbouring a centuries-old grudge against the day as a whole, or rather its first part, which you might call fore-noon; forget the idea of morning. Its malice had rankled, to erupt suddenly that mid-September.

There was also a sense of gratitude to destiny for at least having preserved the city from other long-forgotten calamities such as the Double Night, a sort of calendrical monster that beggared the imagination, a stretch of time that was unlike anything else and came from no one knew where, from the bowels of the universe perhaps, a union of two nights in one, smothering the day between them as dishonored women once were smothered in the old houses of Gjirokastër.

George Orwell:

To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

Amor Towles:

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions – we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

Michael Ondaatje:

We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.

Sources

Ismail Kadare. The Fall of the Stone City. [Darka e Gabuar] (2008) Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (2011) New York: Grove Press, 2012. p. 19.

George Orwell. 1984. (Originally published 1949.) New York: The New American Library, 1961. p. 10.

Amor Towles. Rules of Civility (2011). New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

Michael Ondaatje. Coming Through Slaughter. (1976) New York: Vintage International, 1996. p. 87.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Literary references to low sexual libido

Some people (and fictional characters) admit to lack of sexual interest.

Andrei Platonov's fictional character Zakhar Pavlovich said, and the character Alexander reacted:

"every man has an entire imperialism down there, in the lower place...."

Alexander could not feel the imperialism within his own body, even though he deliberately imagined himself naked.

The mathematician Paul Erdos said:

Actually, I have an abnormality. I can't stand sexual pleasure. It's a curious abnormality. It's almost unique.

Nina FitzPatrick wrote a fictional character of a priest who initially does not feel sexual but then finds himself attracted to a woman:

Father Francis had never got an erection while listening to a beautiful woman. Or a man for that matter. It dawned on him, not for the first time, that he was born to indifference the way cuckoos are born to neglect their young.

* * *

It was odd to hear her addressing him as Francis rather than Father Francis. He felt it defrocked and re-penised him.

Alternatively, some people begin life with a strong sexual interest that wanes over time for various reasons. Evans D. Hopkins wrote:

Have I become a prude, in prison, you may ask? I don't think so. Rather, I have chosen celibacy as an exercise, as a means of withdrawing from the immediacy of the visceral world, in order to see things with greater clarity. Standing at some remove is almost a prerequisite for sanity in prison; the immediate world is one of clanking bars, piercing announcements, echoing shouts. The discipline of celibacy is a means of escape, of transcendence, of maintaining self-control. So no, I am hardly a prude. Sometimes I want a woman so bad I ache – longing not just for sex but for the feminine voice, the gentle touch or just the image of someone who cares for me to hang on my wall. But I have come to understand that human sexuality is a precious and powerful force that affects us both in its presence and its absence. ... The desire for sex, I have concluded, is often a guise of the broader need for human joy, and sex doesn't always satisfy that need. At the risk of sounding square, I think I have learned to satisfy my deepest needs through writing; I feel I've been able to call upon that emotional quality referred to by early philosophers as agape – love of truth, justice, beauty and humanity. I believe that my period of celibacy has helped me ground myself for this greater purpose. I no longer feel in danger of losing moral focus, or relying upon a relationship to define myself. I am by myself beneath these trees and great sky, but I am not alone. I turn to a fresh page from my notebook, and begin to draft an ad for the personals: Single Black Male, seeking special lady who wants something real this time...

Sources

Andrei Platonov. Chevengur. Translated by Anthony Olcott. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978 (written 1928). p 48.

Paul Erdos, interviewed in a 1993 documentary

Nina FitzPatrick. Daimons. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co, 2003. pp. 48-49, 143.

"Sex and the (Somewhat) Celibate Prisoner." Evans D. Hopkins. ©1997 Evans Hopkins and Nerve.com

'Uvatiarru': Past and future all around us

Authors on the past, present and future.

Charles Rowan Beye:

One wants to sort out the details of the past, but often it is like going through yesterday’s wardrobe, surprised by the irremediable damage and wastage of so much lying in those drawers next to undeniable treasures. It is not what one had expected.

Douwe Draaisma:

Thinking back about an event that has made a great impression on us, we tend to underestimate the time interval separating us from that event. Such illusions have their counterparts in psychiatry. Traumatic events are repeated in flashbacks, memories that penetrate the psychological present and that cannot be removed from it at will.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Carl Honoré:

In some philosophical traditions – Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three – time is cyclical. On Canada's Baffin Island, the Inuit use the same word – uvatiarru – to mean both "in the distant past" and "in the distant future." Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going. It is constantly around us, renewing itself, like the air we breathe.

Alan Watts:

The partisans of historical culture seem to congratulate themselves on having escaped from cyclic into linear time, from a static into a dynamic and "on-going" world order — failing to see that nothing is so cyclic as a vicious circle. A world where one can go more and more easily and rapidly to places that are less and less worth visiting, and produce an ever-growing volume of ever-less-nourishing food, is, to cite only the mildest examples, a vicious circle. ... The sudden outburst of history in the last five hundred years might strike one as more of a cancer than an orderly growth.

Sam Keen:

The second mode of time, kairos, is organic, rhythmic, cyclical, intimate, and bodily. In the right moment, in the kairos, a woman gives birth, a man dies in the fullness of his years, winter yields its icy grip to the soft breezes of spring, grief gives way to gratitude, anger runs its course, and forgiveness blossoms.

* * *

It is within the leisurely movement of kairos that we learn the lessons of dreams, mark the passages from one stage of life to another, and measure the growth of faith, hope, and love. In the New Testament, kairos refers to the moments in which God breaks into history, making an appearance through the prophets or Jesus. In a wider sense, it is any moment when an ordinary event becomes an epiphany.

Erik Davis:

"But as Giorgio Agamben argues in The Time That Remains, his illuminating treatment of Paul's letters, parousia is better read as presence—a presence that is yet to come, and so beyond the clutches of representation, including the calendar. As Agamben explains, Paul uses the term parousia [second coming] to underscore the notion that messianic time is made up of two heterogeneous times: the chronos of everyday, historical time — like February 20, 1974 — and the eruptive, immanent Now of kairos.

Messianic time is out of joint; it is dislodged from ordinary chronology but has not yet arrived at the end of time. Using one of Dick’s most memorable metaphysical terms, we might say that messianic time is orthogonal to ordinary history.”

* * *

At the same time, we miss the power of messianic time by only understanding it in terms of waiting and deferral. As Agamben explains, the parousia yet to come paradoxically makes messianic time available across time. ‘The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable.’ The parousiais not just the original event or the future fullness; it is also something in between, the fragment or bit of realized time we face in the otherwise mundane moment. Paul (and Dick) capture this quality through the image of twinkling—a term that refers not only to an evanescent moment, but to an almost diamond-like play of light.”

Eric Rhode:

Intuitions in the consulting room recall these birds. They are tokens of a new life. The ancient Greeks had no category for time. Cyclical time is a modern concept. It is we, and not they, who believe in a return of the seasons. In their thought there was return in space and not in time: there is an eleusis, an anados, seasons come “from below” and not from “yesterday.” The perpetual movement of the universe depends on rhythm and not time, as in a dance [...]. The rhythm is always one-two, one-two (Daraki, p. 166).

Sources

Charles Rowan Beye. My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. [Kindle Edition] p. 4.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 205.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Quoted in Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. 74. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)

Carl Honoré. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. p. 29.

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman. (1958) New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 19.

Sam Keen. In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. New York: Harmony Books, 2010. p. 38.

Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019.

Eric Rhode. On Hallucination, Intuition, and the Becoming of O. (ESF, 1997) Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Posición 653.

Monotony and excitement: Perceptions of time

Elizabeth Gilbert mused on the monotony of a long marriage, specifically on how the monotony builds intimacy and might be essential to the marriage. She wrote:

The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens "between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies" – the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody – so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Yet another Gilbert, on the difficulty of achieving momentum to make significant change:

The problem, [Daniel] Gilbert points out, is that we humans are constrained by ‘presentism’: ‘Most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today.’

Fernando Pessoa wrote of how a life made deliberately monotonous will find excitement in the smallest things. One might interpret this as deliberately lowering one's standards. Regardless, as a trick of the mind, it might be effective.

I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I'm about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws the restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, from reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more the possessor of the truth than I am, because the truth doesn't belong to anyone; but what he does possess is happiness.<>BR
The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance. After his third lion the lionhunter loses interest in the adventure of the hunt. For my monotonous cook there is something modestly apocalyptic about every streetfight he witnesses. To someone who has never been out of Lisbon the tram ride to Benfica is like a trip to the infinite and if one day he were to visit Sintra, he would feel as if he had journeyed to Mars. On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5,000 miles around, because he's always seeing new things; there's novelty and there's the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.

The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn't need to talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five senses and a soul innocent of sadness.

One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony.

Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888) had a contrary recommendation. In the passage below, he is interested not in the excitement value of any single new thing, but in how to create the impression of a long, full life overall.

If you want to lengthen the perspective of time, then fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things. Go on an exciting journey, rejuvenate yourself by breathing new life into the world around you. When you look back you will notice that the incidents along the way and the distance you have travelled have heaped up in your imagination, all these fragments of the visible world will form up in a long row, and that, as people say so fittingly, presents you with a long stretch of time.

Cicero looked at old age more purely as a chronological fact, something that would have been attractive per se in the ancient world especially because it was more difficult to attain then. Logically, he says, if it is desirable to live long, then those who are old should be happier on this count than those who are young, since they have achieved the goal. In his writings, he argues against hedonism, and in this passage, he suggests that in old age one finds joy in the remembrance and the rewards of a life virtuously lived.

An old man indeed has nothing to hope for; yet he is in so much the happier state than a young one; since he has already attained what the other is only hoping for. The one is wishing to live long, the other has lived long. And yet, good gods! what is there in man’s life that can be called long? ... For when that [old age] arrives, then the time which has passed has flowed away; that only remains which you have secured by virtue and right conduct. Hours indeed depart from us and days and months and years; nor does past time ever return, nor can it be discovered what is to follow.

Sources

Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 196.

Daniel Gilbert's idea described by Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 19.

Jean-Marie Guyau, quoted in Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 207.

“Cicero on Old Age.” Chapter XIX. Printed in Cicero’s Three Books of Offices, and Other Moral Works. Translated by Cyrus R. Edmonds. Bohn’s Classical Library. London: George Bell & Sons, York St, Covent Garden, 1890. p. 248.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

When 'nature' symbolizes life itself and human existence

"Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all," said Kathleen Raine.

Rene Dubos:

Sophisticated and civilized as we may be, we have retained from our distant ancestors the ability to derive profound satisfactions from the small happenings of daily life – when we eat, drink, and love; sing, dance, and laugh; dream, tell stories, or illustrate them in pictures, participate in events where we can be at the same time author, actor, and spectator. ... I also long for these simple but fundamental satisfactions which reflect what was best in the biological and social past of humankind.

* * *

The present world-wide effort to save the quality of the environment transcends the problems posed by pollution and by the depletion of natural resources. It constitutes rather the beginning of a crusade to recapture certain sensory and emotional values, the need for which is universal and immutable because it is inscribed in the genetic code of the human species.

The writer Edward Abbey – wrote Wendell Berry about him – "understands that to defend and conserve oneself as a human being in the fullest, truest sense, one must defend and conserve many others and much else."

John McPhee: "The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers."

Petrus Severinus said: "Go, my sons, burn your books and buy yourselves stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth...Observe and experiment without ceasing, for in this way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the true nature of things."

Sources

Rene Dubos, Beast Or Angel?: Choices That Make Us Human, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. pp 7, 149

Wendell Berry, introducing a collection of Edward Abbey's writings, The Serpents of Paradise, ed. John Macrae. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Inc., 1995. p xi.

John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1971, 1992, p 159.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Human calamities aren't caused by an angry God

Tornado twister.

Many religious people blame God for terrorism, natural disasters and other calamities. They may interpret a disaster as God's collective punishment – usually acknowledged as eminently reasonable, since it is God's will – visited upon a large group of people for the offense of a subgroup. In the cases where such thoughts are expressed out loud, they may appear on the surface to provide an explanatory cause for the disaster, but they actually exploit and redirect the public's negative emotions surrounding the disaster, often with the intent of maligning an unpopular group.

Jerry Falwell's comments about Sept. 11

Two days after the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2011 in which militant Arab Muslims attacked New York and Washington, Rev. Jerry Falwell appeared on "The 700 Club" television show and declared:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'.

The usual theological clarification of this statement is that God did not actively violently attack people, but rather lifted his usual protection (Falwell called it a "curtain") and allowed the attacks to happen; one might see the moral distinction as analogous to that between active and passive euthanasia.

Related: Anna Merlan's 2019 book Republic of Lies notes a similar distinction on a political rather than a theological level: "conspiracy theories relating to September 11" suggest "that the Bush administration either passively allowed the attacks to happen or orchestrated them for political ends. (The two branches of 9/11 conspiracism have become so entrenched that they have their own acronyms: LIHOP, for 'let it happen on purpose,' and MIHOP, 'made it happen on purpose.')"

At the time, a few prominent people agreed with Falwell. That year, on Oct. 4, the Rev. Lou Sheldon opined that relief services for victims of the terrorist attack should be meted out with a priority rating based on the victims' sexual orientations and marital status.

Most people, however, leapt to disagree with Falwell's statement. Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American way, called Falwell's broadcast "absolutely inappropriate and irresponsible." Spencer Phillips made the pointed jab in Front Page Magazine on Sept. 17, 2001 that Falwell's type of coercive, us-and-them fundamentalism "may have been the inspiration for 9/11 because it is an opinion wholly shared by the Islamic fundamentalists behind the attack."

In 2006, David Kuo, former special assistant to President George W. Bush, wrote of Falwell's original statement:

No one doubted Falwell's ability to make outrageous statements. This wasn't outrageous. It was immoral. It was insane.

In 2011, Biblical scholar Jennifer Wright Knust debunked the late Falwell's claims as having

no parallel at all in biblical writings: the word 'pagan' does not appear; abortion is not discussed; there was no ancient 'feminist' movement; 'gays and lesbians' with a 'lifestyle' are never mentioned; 'secularism' as a concept had not yet been invented; and 'pedophilia' is not talked about, let alone defined as a crime... The American Civil Liberties Union said they 'refused to dignify' Falwell's broadcast with a response. Despite the wishes of many that Falwell's statement could be swept under the table, the words still ring powerfully in people's memories years after they were spoken.

Other attempts to link 'homosexuality' and 'terrorism' in the public perception

The idea that homosexuality draws God's wrath in the form of terrorist attacks resurfaced several months later in Israel. Jerusalem's first Gay Pride event was held on June 7, 2002 despite the mayor's refusal to finance it. One writer praised the gay activists for "beat[ing] the system by ignoring it, acting as if justice and peace were fait accompli instead of a receding fantasy." Counter-protesters accused the marchers of angering God and leaving Jerusalem prone to terrorist attacks.

The association of homosexuality and terrorism persisted on a subconscious level. Fox News Channel talk show host Bill O'Reilly complained on "The O'Reilly Factor" on June 2, 2010 about a new advertisement that McDonald's was airing in France inviting gay people to "come as you are." O'Reilly asked, “Do they have an Al-Qaeda ad, you know, come as you are?”

The idea that God is angered by human sexual transgression is very old, going back at least as far as a Byzantine association of homosexuality with paganism. In the year 528 CE, earthquakes hit Antioch and destroyed much of the city of Soloi Pompeiopolis. Some people blamed God's anger over human sexual transgression. The next year, a bishop from Rhodes and a bishop from Thrace were tried before the city prefect of Constantinople; one was tortured and exiled, the other castrated and put on display. "Justinian then ordered a more comprehensive round-up of people engaging in pederasty....The penalties for conviction on charges of 'religious deviance' included public humiliation, flogging, and castration – sometimes inflicted with such brutality that the victims died." Basianius, a supporter of the Greens, was "dragged out of a church" on Theodora's orders, "tortured during the trial and castrated upon conviction," according to Procopius. (David Potter, Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 135-136.)

In August 2019, Ohio State rep. Candice Keller (R-Middletown) posted to Facebook saying, "Why not place the blame [for mass shootings] where it belongs?" She cited a long list of what she considers to be social ills, beginning with "the breakdown of the traditional American family (thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates)," and then closed ominously, "the fury will continue."

In March 2020, Meir Mazuz, an Orthodox Sephardic rabbi in Israel, said that the appearance of coronavirus in Israel was God's punishment for gay pride parades. Mazuz, according to The Times of Israel, is "the former spiritual leader of the defunct ultra-nationalist and homophobic Yachad party, and is head of the Kiseh Rahamim yeshiva in Bnei Brak."

How do the injured parties give an account of the situation?

The otherwise satisfying belief that victims, however remotely, somehow deserve their suffering has a shortcoming: it is primarily reassuring when one's enemies suffer, and it is never a satisfying explanation for the suffering of oneself and one's allies.

Why was a flammable, six-story-tall Christian statue known as "Touchdown Jesus" in Monroe, Ohio struck by lightning in 2010? Perhaps God was angry at atheistic culture, so he stopped protecting Christian works of art?

When someone is personally injured, they may feel angry, and that anger may tie in with anger about unrelated subjects. There may be a tendency to conflate two issues together even though they are plainly unrelated; in this way, people may experience complex anger about victimhood. In his book "The Belief Instinct," Jesse Bering quoted Ray Nagin, the African-American mayor of New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, who conflated his anger about the Iraq war with his anger about the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina when he said to reporters: "Surely God is mad at America. Surely He's not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely He's mad at black America, too. We're not taking care of ourselves." Nagin subsequently had to apologize and backpedal.

Collective punishment

According to theologies that involve collective punishment, people don't always suffer for the contemporary sins of their neighbors; God may turn against an entire country for something that happened hundreds of years ago.

The German Evangelical Conference at Darmstadt, soon after World War II ended, "claimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust had been a divine visitation and called upon Jews to stop rejecting and crucifying Christ." As Bart D. Ehrman noted in God's Problem, it "was not German Christianity's finest moment." More recently, Rev. John Hagee argued that Hitler was the "hunter" referred to in Jeremiah 16 who pursued the Jews and who therefore at least indirectly fulfilled God's will by hastening the creation of the state of Israel. Sen. John McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement of his 2008 presidential bid due to these comments. (Hagee also called Hurricane Katrina "an act of God for a society that has become Sodom and Gomorrah.") Jews, for their part, have a long history of theologically interpreting ethnic and religiously based hate crimes against them. The Jewish response to the deadly 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, Russia, “reveals how fully [the idea of] God’s retribution had given way to a secularistic commitment to human responsibility," wrote Eugene B. Borowitz in his 1991 book Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. He said: "one would have to search hard to find a lament that Jewish sin had brought this evil upon the community. Instead...moderns knew that human freedom, not God’s retributive pedagogy, lay behind these events.” (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. p. 35.)

In 2014, Susanne Atanus, running in a primary election to become a Republican Congressional representative for Illinois, said that God was angry about same-sex marriage and abortions and that he was punishing Americans with tornadoes and autism. The state's Republican party denied that it had ever supported her and recommended that she withdraw from the race.

The Liberian Council of Churches released a statement, as noted by Joel Baden and Candida Moss in 2014, that ebola, a contagious viral hemorrhagic fever, was evidence that "God is angry with Liberia" for "corruption and immoral acts (such as homosexualism, etc.) that continue to penetrate our society."

In 2018, Franklin Graham (the son of Billy Graham) responded to a public figure's support of same-sex marriage by saying that "God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality."

In 2018, two days in advance of the expected landfall of Hurricane Florence upon the Carolinas, South Carolina-based pastor Rick Joyner claimed that God was punishing people for the sin of abortion. Later that year, in November, David Johnson, chairman of Ohio's Columbiana County Republican Party, posted online images stating that the raging fire in California that had killed dozens of people was "God’s Punishment to Liberal California" and that it was “Hell on Earth, brought to you by the liberals in California."

Right-wing Christian activist Mary Colbert said on television in June 2019 that "earthquakes, tornadoes, storms" are caused by human sin, not by climate change, and indicate that the End Times are approaching.

Christians in Florida prayed against the approach of Hurricane Dorian in August 2019.

Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles — who in November 2019 referred to Trump's impeachment as a "Jew coup," for which Trump rewarded him with a hotel room and press credentials for his "TruNews" to cover the World Economic Forum the following January — referred to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic as punishment for the Jews. "God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ," he said.

See my Medium article, "Atheists Don't Fear Divine Punishment," for examples of collective punishment (and other such things) from Pat Robertson.

Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

Responding to the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, media mogul Ted Turner said in an interview:

I'm not a real religious person, but I'm somewhat religious and I'm just wondering if God's telling us He doesn't want us to drill offshore, because He sure is setting back offshore drilling. And right before that we had that coal mine disaster in West Virginia where we lost 29 miners and...the Chinese lost 29 miners too in another mine disaster over in China...I think maybe we just oughta leave the coal in the ground and go with solar and wind power and geothermal...could be He's sending us a message.

A different Ted Turner — the Rev. Theodore Turner of Boothville, La. — said: "The oil spill is part of prophecy. The Bible prophesized hardships." At least to the extent that he was quoted in this article, he did not, however, make the extra leap of claiming that he knew why certain hardships were befalling certain people. His seems to be a more honest, humble approach.

Not just Christianity

People of religions other than Christianity may subscribe to analogous theological beliefs.

Former Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu blamed opposition to the state of Israel for causing the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Asia, and, not having learned his lesson, he told an ultra-Orthodox radio station in 2007 that the Holocaust, which killed millions of Jews and non-Jews, was God's indiscriminate punishment delivered because some Jews were modifying and liberalizing religious tradition.

Iranian Muslim cleric Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi said in a YouTube video in 2010 that inappropriate female dress leads to promiscuity, and "when promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase." The reference to earthquakes was pointed, as tens of thousands of Iranians died in an earthquake in 2003.

The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, said that an earthquake-caused tsunami that killed thousands of people was divine punishment [tembatsu] for the sin of "egoism and populism." John Nelson, a professor of religious studies at the University of San Francisco, explained that the Japanese Buddhist idea of "the gods having an agenda was instrumental to the ideology of the prewar years, when it was said to be Japan's divine mission to conquer Asia and establish an empire."

Bigotry against anyone doesn't improve the victims' condition

Many people assume that God exists. Others add that this God is offended by certain human behaviors. But why go on to assume that God wants to make large numbers of innocent people suffer? Much of human suffering is caused by humans ourselves – and there's no need to compound our collective pain by lacing misfortune with bigotry.

Image: Tornado in Elie, Manitoba. Image by: Justin Hobson © GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version Wikimedia Commons.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 21, 2011.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Are we making progress?

How do human civilizations change their technologies so quickly? The interpretation of time itself changes along with technology. Richard Wrangham: "If the Waorani someday do become fully Westernized, they will have traded a life marked by the flight of a palmwood spear for one measured by the parabola of a ballistic missile.
"

Often a society's infrastructure changes faster than its constituents can adjust to it. John Steinbeck: "Another flight of jets exploded through sound. We had maybe a half-million years to get used to fire and less than fifteen to build thinking about this force so extravagantly more fierce than fire. Would we ever have the chance to make a tool of this? If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, can fission be happening in the soul? Is that what is happening to me, to us?"

Alan Watts said that some cultures have a idea of linear change that creates a historical narrative, while others see events as more cyclical and they are more likely to see "balance" as an ideal.

We might call these two types of culture progressive and historical on the one hand, and traditional and nonhistorical on the other. For the philosophy of the first is that human society is on the move, that the political state is a biological organism whose destiny is to grow and expand. Examining the record of its past, the progressive society reconstructs it as history, that is, as a significant series of events which constitute a destiny, a motion toward specific temporal goals for the society as a whole. The fabricators of such histories easily forget that their selection of "significant" events from the record is subjectively determined – largely by the need to justify the immediate political steps which they have in mind. History exists as a force because it is created or invented here and now.


 On the other hand, traditional societies are nonhistorical in that they do not imagine themselves to be in linear motion toward temporal goals. Their records are not histories but simple chronicles which delineate no pattern in human events other than a kind of cycling like the rotation of the seasons. Their political philosophy is to maintain the balance of nature upon which the human community depends, and which is expressed in public rites celebrating the timeless correspondences between the social order and the order of the universe.
"

One of the dangers of the "progressive"/"historical"/"linear" worldview is that people sometimes see violence as an unavoidable means to whatever they see as the next end of the narrative. "History aches for such an act of greatness," said William F. Buckley, Jr., advocating pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Communist China's developing nuclear capabilities – twentieth-century war we must be relieved did not come to pass.

How do we collectively avoid the error of advocating violence? Nuclear war brings to mind great violence and the silence that follows. Stephan A. Hoeller said that we must be able to envision a positive alternative to war:

"Dennis Stillings wrote in 1988 that he attended a lecture by a New Age lecturer who said that if you visualize world peace, you can bring it about. But the lecturer failed to provide a concrete image of peace. Stillings doubted that such an image was possible – he could only imagine the silence after a nuclear holocaust. 'In my opinion, there is no clear and definite image of peace that does not also draw into consciousness imagery of its opposite: violence and war.'"

A clear image of peace would enable us to aspire to achieve it, whether we understand war and peace and our civilization itself as linear or cyclical.

'Linear' and 'cyclical' are not necessarily the only two perspectives that can be taken about time. Another question to be asked is whether all eras – regardless of whether they have an element of repetition or return – have similar meanings and worth. Heschel:

"The historian Ranke claimed that every age is equally near to God. Yet Jewish tradition claims that there is a hierarchy of moments within time, that all ages are not alike."

Sources

Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. p. 80.

John Steinbeck. The Winter of Our Discontent. Penguin, 1983 (originally 1961). p 175.

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (Copyright 1958). p 16.

William F. Buckley, Jr. Quotations from Chairman Bill: The Best of Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. Compiled by David Franke. Pocket Book, 1971. p 4. from NR, Dec. 29, 1964, p 1143.

Dennis Stillings, quoted by Stephan A. Hoeller. Jung and the Lost Gospels: Insights into the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989. p 237.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951. p. 96.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

When the Taliban shot child peace activist Malala Yousufzai in Pakistan

An award-winning young Pakistani peace activist was shot in a deliberate attack in October 2012. She underwent surgery, the cost of which the Pakistani government and several hospitals promised to cover, and she was expected to recover from her injuries.

The shooting targeted Malala Yousufzai, 14, who for several years has advocated secularism and education opportunities for girls in a blog for BBC Urdu. She reported on life in the Swat Valley where the Taliban was burning girls' schools. Last year, she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize and received the National Peace Prize from one of Pakistan's former prime ministers. 

On Oct. 9, 2012, strange men disguised with scarves approached a school bus in Malala's hometown of Mingora, asked the children to point out Malala to him, and then fired. Two bullets struck her head and neck. Surgeons said her skull was cracked, and although the bullet did not penetrate her brain, her brain swelled and she was unresponsive. A bullet had to be surgically removed from her neck.

Two of her female classmates were also wounded in the attack. They were shot in the shoulder and in the leg.

News of the attack quickly spread across the world. At a concert in Los Angeles the next day, the singer Madonna stripped to her bra, displaying the name "MALALA" written on her lower back.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attempted assassination. Calling the girl "pro-West" and "against Taliban," the group's spokesman warned that they would try to kill her again if she survived her injuries, and that "anybody who speaks against us will be attacked in the same way."

All schools in the Swat Valley – a large area near the border of Afghanistan that is home to about one million Pakistanis – temporarily closed in response to the shooting.

Speaking two days after the attack, Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said that about a hundred people had been arrested for possible connections with the attackers.

Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari condemned the attack. Zardari has unfortunately been affected by such violence many times, including by the assassination of his own wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, in 2007. In the wake of Malala's shooting, Zardari invited former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown to travel to Pakistan in the near future to discuss children's education. Brown accepted, and he referred to Malala as an "icon for courage and hope."

"Directing violence at children is barbaric, it's cowardly," said a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.

The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the Secretary-General's sympathies were with the wounded girls' families, and that he "expresses his solidarity with the Government and people of Pakistan in their efforts to confront violent extremism."

After her injury, Malala continued her advocacy work for the rights of all children to have an education. Two years and a day after the shooting, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2014. Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, called her “the pride of Pakistan”. Malala cannot go home to Pakistan, however, for her own safety. She attends school in Birmingham, England.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 12, 2012. Pencil drawing by Tucker Lieberman, based on a photograph of Malala Yousufzai.

Ten years later:

"As of late August [2022], the southern province [of Sindh] had already gotten almost six times as much rainfall as its 30-year annual average.

Those rains combined with glacial melt have caused the flooding that has devastated the country.

* * *

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said the floods have killed at least 1,314 people, including 458 children, according to The Guardian. Around 33 million others have been affected by the flooding. Many have had to flee their waterlogged homes to stay in shelters or tent encampments.

* * *

Climate change fueled the floods in multiple ways. Intense heat waves earlier in the year caused the air to hold more moisture, and meteorologists at the time said that would lead to “above normal” rain in the monsoon season, Islamabad water-resources engineer Zia Hashmi told the journal Nature. That same heat melted glaciers in the north of the country, swelling the rivers that lead to the south.

* * *

...while Pakistan contributes to less than 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, it’s one of the top 10 countries hit hardest by rising temperatures."
— "Pakistan's Devastating Floodwaters Could Take 6 Months To Recede," Hilary Hanson, Sept. 14, 2022, Huffington Post, 2022

How to find your muse

Are you artistically "blocked"? The majority of frustrated artists have simply lost contact with their muse, the sublime inner voice of inspiration. Here is a twelve-step guide on how to find your muse and wrap her around your little finger.

Genesis

The creation story begins with separation. So does all philosophical inquiry worth its salt. You can't find anything until you've defined what you're looking for.

Technology

Choose the tools you need to find this wayward lady muse.  Your technology will be specific to the muse in question. For example, if you were searching for any of the following things, you'd need the special search tool indicated.

  • the Loch Ness Monster: sonar
  • the Yeti: snowshoes
  • pennies on the beach: a metal detector
  • your lover's secret lover: tracking by the phone company
  • an old newspaper article: library microfiche
  • an answer to a problem: a weeklong vacation
  • a lost cat: posters on utility poles
  • a missing cordless phone: its pager
  • the burst Christmas lightbulb that interrupts the whole circuit: process of elimination
  • a certain brand of fruit juice: customer service
  • a crashed kite: the end of a tangled string
  • the names of the Seven Dwarves: persistent recitation
  • love: craigslist

Faith

Cognitive scientists have demonstrated that you can find something faster if you are certain it's there to be found. Your next step is to believe you have a muse who's waiting to reveal herself to you.

Echo / Antiphon

Say whatever you please, first in your own voice, then imitating the voice of your muse. This will annoy her enough to come out of hiding and talk back. Surprise! When she answers you, she'll say something you could never have thought up yourself. That's how you'll know it's her.

Play hard to get

Now that she's planted her fingers on your hips, think happy thoughts about something you've always wanted - aside from your muse.

Lust and the identity of desire

Who or what inside you desires a muse? What, for that matter, does your muse see in you?

Shadow

This may come as a staggering revelation, but it is not by luck alone that your muse finds her way through your haunted forests - she is part of you.

You are what you eat

Speaking of which, what have you eaten lately?

Exomologesis of scrumping

Make a formal confession of the wrong paths down which you've galumphed; eating pears that weren't yours while you were supposed to be searching for a missing lady.

Reverse psychology

Disabuse yourself of the notion that your muse cares about you or your work. She doesn't.

Shrink

Be a headshrinker to your muse. If she's been silent for a long time, chances are she's felt isolated and needs professional help.

Cleanse

Prepare your mind and body to receive your muse with a sacrificial offering. This cleansing has a double meaning: for thousands of years, roasting animal sacrifices dripped fat onto ashes, making soap. Thus, if you cannot sacrifice, at least take a shower.

These twelve steps virtually guarantee that you will find your muse. If you do all these things and she still isn't yours for keeps, face facts: she ran off to Vegas and married someone else. Get over her, and write your book by yourself.

Originally posted to Helium Network on May 26, 2010.

Image by D. J. Shin. Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Public shamings

Christie Thompson's article for The Marshall Project lists incidences where judges have required offenders to hold signs in public identifying their crimes, ranging from illegal whitewater rafting to killing someone while driving drunk. Sexual crimes have also been punished by public shaming: men have had to wear chicken suits as punishment for soliciting sex, or put their photos in the newspaper identifying them as child molesters.

“Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.” She used the same tactic for a man who called 911 and threatened to kill police officers. His sign read: “I apologize to officer Simone & all police officers for being an idiot calling 911 threatening to kill you. I'm sorry and it will never happen again." What Everyone Gets WrongPublic shamings are not just for petty crimes: In 2012, a Texas man on probation for drunk driving was ordered to return to the scene of the crash for four Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a sign reading, “I killed Aaron Coy Pennywell while driving drunk.”

Extrajudicial public shamings are another matter. These occur when someone is angry and decides to embarrass or humiliate another person. This can happen en masse on social media, especially when someone is perceived as being socially privileged and being snotty at, dismissive of, or cruel to less privileged people or otherwise abusing their own privilege.

"Doxxing" is a term that refers to exposing people online. Some people have described "ethical doxxing" or "doxxing for good," meaning that cruel or unjust people should be exposed as punishment. One problem is that playing whack-a-mole with an individual – or two – who happens to express a bigoted opinion – or three – may not be the most effective way to change what ails society. Another problem is that collective bashing can easily target a person who happens to be actually innocent of what the mob accuses them. Furthermore, “when we look at language used around doxxing for ‘good,’ it’s very similar to the language used by those trying to silence us.” After all, “in social justice, the ends don’t justify the means: The means are everything. There is nothing more than what we are actually doing right now. If our pursuit of justice means that a few innocent people are subjected to injustice due to our actions, can we actually say that it’s justice we are fighting for?”

Jon Ronson (@jonronson), author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, explained that the instant virtual mob is not always rational in its evaluation and selection of a target, and that it is rarely merciful. It often occurs when someone makes a joke that is meant to be contrarian or sarcastic and misfires because it is taken out of its full context or is otherwise simply not skillfully done or very funny at all.

Ronson referenced the incident where a young woman made a comment on Twitter implying that only black people, not white people, get AIDS in Africa, and while she was sleeping on a long flight from the US to South Africa, her comment became the top trending tweet worldwide and she was subject of comments that amounted to aggressive public shaming – in addition to, and probably also as a result of which, she was fired from her job. Ronson said on the On Point radio show on April 2, 2015:

"One person wrote [on Twitter] while she was asleep [on the plane to South Africa]: Somebody HIV-positive should rape her and then we'll see if her skin color protects her from AIDS. Nobody went after that person because we were all so excited about going after Justine Sacco. It's like we can only – it's like we're so primitive – like our shaming on Twitter is so primitive, we've only got enough space in our brains to destroy one person a night. We couldn't handle destroying someone who was inappropriately destroying Justine. So in fact while she slept obliviously on her plane, she united the world in condemnation from nice people like us who were saying 'I am going to donate to aid to Africa in the light of this disgusting tweet,' through to 'rape her.' She united the world in condemnation."

Another example occurred when two young women had a running joke with each other in which they would pose in front of randomly selected posted signs appearing to engage in behavior that contradicted the sign's instructions. The problem occurred when they found a sign in Arlington National Cemetery that commanded "Silence and respect," and they posed for a picture demonstrating disrespect. The context was that they were simply contradicting whatever the sign said. Collective outrage was sparked because the background was Arlington National Cemetery. They were intending only to make fun of signs in general, but because of the inelegant selection of national sacred ground, they were subjected to intense public shaming.

He also acknowledged that people who participate in the social-media shaming of someone else may be drawing attention to themselves, and may themselves suffer consequences, including losing their jobs.

"See, everybody thinks they're punching up, right? Everybody thinks they're fighting the good fight, they're being like Rosa Parks. Of course, they're not like Rosa Parks, because Rosa Parks was courageous. And it's just carnage."

He said that this kind of "surveillance" is an "unfair" and "damaging way to create a society" because it attempts to characterize people based on only one or two comments, which may have occurred long ago and may not be representative of what they currently think or of what they ever thought. The risk of backlash is "chilling ideas" and pushes people toward conformism.

He also spoke about judicial shaming. He found that people who were forced to hold placards on street corners often received empathy from passersby and offers of help to turn their lives around. Social media shaming, he found, is rarely informed by that kind of empathy.

Ronson: "On the Internet, nobody is saying to the shamed person: Everything's going to be OK. In real life, we are lovely; on the Internet, we are drone strike operators."
Ashbrook: "Why is that? What's unleashed here?"
Ronson: "I think it's partly because social media is set up as a kind of mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other."

This somewhat contrasts what Christie Thompson found, at least in the 2012 case of a Texas man whose punishment for a drunk-driving fatality was cut short after he claimed to have received death threats while holding up a sign admitting to his offense. Those labeled sex offenders, in particular, rarely meet with empathy.

In Monica Lewinsky's March 2015 Ted Talk, "The price of shame," she acknowledges that her name is in "almost 40 rap songs." She says that most people do things at 22 that they later regret, including falling in love with the wrong person or even one's boss. The boss she fell in love with happened to be the President of the United States, and therefore, she muses: "I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again." What was unique about her story was that it broke online. Even though, in the late 1990s, social media hadn't been invented yet, they did transmit information online, and it was "a click that reverberated around the world." She says: "I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on the global scale almost instantaneously." People began to have images of their private lives made "public without consent, public without context, and public without compassion." In 2010, she empathized with an 18-year-old college freshman whose sexual interaction with another male was videotaped and distributed; he immediately committed suicide. Learning of his death was her personal "turning point" that made her want to get involved in understanding and fighting against "technologically enhanced shaming" for the sake of others who are enduring it. She acknowledges the cycle of "the more shame, the more clicks; the more clicks, the more advertising dollars." Readers are being used: "The more numb we get, the more we click." She acknowledges that she was personally "saved" from the consequences of her ordeal by compassion from others, and she quotes Brené Brown: "Shame can't survive empathy."

Lewinsky asks: Are we speaking up with intention or for attention? Too often, it's the latter: "The Internet is the superhighway for the id."

Leora Tanenbaum wrote in I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet that, given our society's understanding of femininity and sexuality, it is "rational behavior" for girls to deliberately project a sexual image and simultaneously claim that this is not their intent. The double standard for boys and girls has always existed, but today, "there's always someone nearby with a smart phone, ready to snap a photo, upload, and tag," Beth Schwartzapfel explained in an article about Tanenbaum. One of the responses is a focus and a centering in human dignity. Tanenbaum wrote: "Remember, you are not a slut. And neither is anyone else."

Sources

"Public shamings: Why judges sometimes opt for sandwich boards, chicken suits, and other embarrassing punishments." Christie Thompson. The Marshall Project. March 31, 2015.

"Taking Down Bigots With Their Own Weapons Is Sweet, Satisfying – And Very, Very Wrong," Ijeoma Oluo, Medium.com, April 6, 2015.

"Shame: What Is It Good For? (Probably Nothing)." Jon Ronson, interviewed by Tom Ashbrook. On Point. April 2, 2015.

"The price of shame," a Ted Talk by Monica Lewinsky, March 2015.

"Who's a slut?: How to grow up under the scrutiny of smart phones and social media sites." Beth Schwartzapfel. Brown Alumni Magazine, March/April 2015. pp. 42-43.

Friday, April 3, 2015

What is neoliberalism?

Liberalism, as Osita Nwanevu explains, "is an ideology of the individual⁠. Its first principle is that each and every person in society is possessed of a fundamental dignity and can claim certain ineradicable rights and freedoms. Liberals believe, too, in government by consent and the rule of law: The state cannot exercise wholly arbitrary power, and its statutes bind all equally." This is well known. Two liberal values sometimes conflict: "freedom of speech, a popular favorite which needs no introduction, and freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values."

But what is neoliberalism?

Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015)
In this book, I treat neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. Importantly, this is not simply a matter of extending commodification and monetization everywhere — that’s the old Marxist depiction of capital’s transformation of everyday life. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres — such as learning, dating, or exercising — in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.

She continues,

Here’s where thinking about neoliberalism as a governing rationality is important: this rationality switches the meaning of democratic values from a political to an economic register. Liberty is disconnected from either political participation or existential freedom, and is reduced to market freedom unimpeded by regulation or any other form of government restriction. Equality as a matter of legal standing and of participation in shared rule is replaced with the idea of an equal right to compete in a world where there are always winners and losers.

The promise of democracy depends upon concrete institutions and practices, but also on an understanding of democracy as the specifically political reach by the people to hold and direct powers that otherwise dominate us. Once the economization of democracy’s terms and elements is enacted in law, culture, and society, popular sovereignty becomes flatly incoherent. In markets, the good is generated by individual activity, not by shared political deliberation and rule. And, where there are only individual capitals and marketplaces, the demos, the people, do not exist.

An example? Take, perhaps, Saudi Arabia's recall of its ambassador to Sweden, after Sweden's foreign minister Margot Wallstrom criticized Saudi Arabia in March 2015 for its treatment of women (who cannot leave home without a male guardian and cannot drive under any circumstances) and for its sentencing of blogger Raif Badawi to 1,000 lashes. She went on to voice her opinion that Sweden should not sell arms to Saudi Arabia. Leaders of major Swedish companies voiced their opposition to Wallstrom's comments, and Sweden's king and prime minister struck a note of apology with the Saudi king. Nick Cohen observed the economic importance for Sweden of its relations with Saudi Arabia:

Sweden is the world’s 12th largest arms exporter — quite an achievement for a country of just nine million people. Its exports to Saudi Arabia total $1.3 billion. Business leaders and civil servants are also aware that other Muslim-majority countries may follow Saudi Arabia’s lead.

Cohen said that "the rest of liberal Europe shows no interest in supporting her," and he added that "a Europe that is getting older and poorer is starting to find that moral stands in foreign policy are luxuries it can no longer afford."

The military aspect of neoliberalism will be perceived differently depending on which end of the gun you stand, of course. Writing literary criticism in 2021, Aaron Bady said he wasn't sure "what I mean by" questioning whether "this novel is neoliberalism." To one person, neoliberalism might imply "something more like the Chicago boys and privatization," but, he imagines, another fictional character might ask: "Doesn’t neoliberalism in Latin America come at the barrel of a gun? Wasn’t what neoliberalism felt like, on the ground, wasn’t it a little more like murder than literature?" For many of Roberto Bolaño's generation of Chileans, Bady says, "'neoliberalism' named the very specific reason they also went into exile."

"Neoliberal Chile," according to an article in Dissent Magazine, had been

"designed during the long counterrevolutionary military dictatorship initiated in 1973 and continued with some reforms after the negotiated transition to democracy in 1990. The most tangible symbol of that era is the constitution, ratified by the Pinochet dictatorship's fraudulent plebiscite in 1980. The document consolidated a mix of limited democracy and market economy, oriented around the interests of big business. It devolved social rights previously guaranteed by the state to the market, and at the same time weakened labor and union rights, undercutting the power of workers to organize. It is no coincidence, then, that the recent uprising [in October 2019, Estallido Social] coalesced around the demand for a new constitution."

A 2018 Project Syndicate video said:

“Austerity is closely associated with the neoliberal doctrine advocated in the 1970s and 1980s by the likes of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, and embraced in the 1990s by major center-left parties, when it became known as the Washington Consensus. The first pillar of that Consensus is increased economic competition achieved through deregulation, market opening, and free trade. The second is a reduced role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt. ...neoliberal economists have sought to prove that government spending is either destructive or futile.”

Christopher Lasch wrote in 1984 that the social changes brought about by industrialization

have gradually transformed a productive system based on handicraft production and regional exchange into a complex, interlocking network of technologies based on mass production, mass consumption, mass communications, mass culture: on the assimilation of all activities, even those formerly assigned to private life, to the demands of the marketplace. These developments have created a new kind of selfhood, characterized by some observers as self-seeking, hedonistic, competitive, and ‘antinomian’...Critics of ‘hedonism’ attribute its increasing appeal to the collapse of educational standards, the democratization of an ‘adversary culture’ that formerly appealed only to the intellectual avant-garde, and the decline of political authority and leadership. They complain that people think too much about rights instead of thinking about duties.

This criticism — and its common rejoinder that it’s good to give people options in life — both fail to question, Lasch wrote, “the debased conception of democracy that reduces it, in effect, to the exercise of consumer preferences. Neither side questions the equation of selfhood with the ability to play a variety of roles and to assume an endless variety of freely chosen identities.”

Lizabeth Cohen calls it “consumerization of the republic.” (Hence the title of her book, A Consumers' Republic.) Tressie McMillan Cottom explained it in 2022: "This is the idea that we perform our greatest service to the collective good not by voting or organizing or performing mutual aid but by pursuing our individual private consumption. We buy, therefore we are."

Lasch explained some of the philosophical history behind this assumption:

The highest form of practice, for Aristotle and his followers, is politics, which seeks to promote the good life by conferring equal rights on all citizens and by establishing rules and conventions designed not so much to solve the problems of social living as to encourage citizens to test themselves against demanding standards of moral excellence (for example, in contests of oratorical skill and physical prowess) and thus to develop their gifts to the highest pitch. The Aristotelian conception of practice has more in common with play than with activities defined as practical in the modern sense. Practices in the Aristotelian sense have nothing to do, as such, with the production of useful objects or with satisfying material needs. This goes even for the practice of politics. Only in the sixteenth century did Machiavelli and Thomas More define material survival, the physical maintenance of life, as the chief business of the state. From that position it was a short step to the modern conception of politics as political economy, which assumes, as Jürgen Habermas points out, that “individuals are exclusively motivated to maximize their private wants, desires, and interests.”

In The Midnight Kingdom (2023), Jared Yates Sexton explains the work of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who

"was a prominent proponent of a worldview that had come to be known as neoliberalism. He vehemently opposed any notion of government interference in the economy whatsoever, forwarding the idea that for it to invest in projects, distribute favors or resources to certain groups, or even make value judgments in regard to redistribution of wealth was for it to infringe on the rights of every citizen. This, he posited, amounted to a “totalitarian state” and violated the entire liberal idea of liberty. Democracy was particularly dangerous, as leaving these issues to the public will would almost always lead to tyranny and result in the society destroying itself because of seductive notions of egalitarianism and rumors of greater freedom. Neoliberalism had emerged in the summer of 1938 as Nazism and fascism gained a foothold in Europe and as the liberal democracies of the world were faltering. Faced with the possibility that the liberal project, with roots tracing back to the eighteenth-century period of Enlightenment, might be reaching its fatal conclusion, French philosopher Louis Rougier summoned the brightest minds he knew to Paris to discuss ways to reinvigorate the philosophy."

A neoliberal assumption is that you don't need democratic participation or political ideology if unconstrained markets are taking care of people's basic needs and if individuals can channel their psychological impulses toward consumerism rather than ideas. This assumption depends on another assumption: the markets will stay intact and continue to function, and will not lose battles to ideologies (anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, etc.) As Sexton also writes:

"Designed as a means of separating markets from democracy and ideology, this New World Order would not prove as all-encompassing or unassailable as Fukuyama or its architects would have hoped.

The weakness proved to be its attempt to eliminate ideology. Neoliberals had meant to counter the ideologically driven conflicts of the twentieth century and negate the “dangers” of mass democracy and populism. Believing economics were much too important and complex to be left to the people, they designed a system to transfer democratic compulsions to the market and political expression into consumerism, all while disarming the danger of ideas. But that brief respite, in which the political and economic elite came to believe their system would be everlasting, came crashing down with the towers of the World Trade Center, a structure ironically built to embody the neoliberal project.

"Neoliberal capitalism," says Benjamin Cain, "rests on a modern Enlightenment conception of individual rights. But that status quo was established by a secularization of those rediscovered ancient revelatory insights." Today, neoliberalism implies the privatization of "the prison industry, health care, and democracy."

Indrajit Samarajiva in an October 4, 2022 article:

"...fascism emerges quite naturally from liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is defined by the exclusion of ‘illegal’ people who don’t have full rights because paperwork. Liberal democracy is defined by the primacy of property rights over human rights. It is defined by political symbolism over actual economic power. As Wang Huning wrote, 'the equality guaranteed by the Western system is only formal political equality, not social or economic equality.' This wretched system gets deified through simple hypocrisy and symbolism, but when people's material conditions get wretched, the whole facade comes down."

David Callahan, also briefly: "Liberals have made serious mistakes in the past forty years. In a sentence, they have failed to think enough about either the downsides of social freedom or the upsides of economic freedom."

Boada and Toledo wrote of "el falso paradigma esgrimido por el neoliberalismo de que 'todo es solucionable por el mercado y la tecnología' o de rechazarlo oponiéndole una nueva utopía." Enrique Leff has said, as paraphrased by Boada and Toledo, that "el neoliberalismo está transformando la percepción del desarrollo sostenible en esta dirección: si en 1970 se creía que la causa principal del deterioro ambiental era el crecimiento económico, actualmente se considera que esté es más bien el resultado de una insuficiente liberalización del mercado y de no haber asignado formas de propiedad y precios a los bienes comunes de la naturaleza." (Read more on my Medium article: "Economics Doesn't Crunch 'Environment' Well")

S.Y. Lee:

"The first three posts of my Japanese National Railways series spanned its lifetime between 1948 and 1987 and detailed its political birth and its political death. Created by American occupiers in the image of New Deal corporations, JNR met its end under the banner of neoliberalism promising a rejuvenated Japan through a Reaganite/Thatcherite revolution [e.g., tending toward privatization].

* * *

The major [railway] fare increase [in 1975 in Japan] and continuous labor disruptions marked JNR as a public agency not only financially unstable but culturally as well. This sentiment was keenly expressed by exasperated bureaucrats and politicians who sought to reconstruct Japan’s public finances in the new economic system gaining traction in the West: neoliberalism. Killing off Japan’s militant labor unionism would soon surface as a key desired effect in their neoliberal laboratory of the 1980s."

Siva Vaidhyanathan explained neoliberalism in 2011:

The notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good was impossible to imagine, let alone propose.

This vision was known as neoliberalism. Although Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed it, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair mastered it. It had its roots in two prominent ideologies: techno-fundamentalism, an optimistic belief in the power of technology to solve problems (which I describe fully in chapter 3), and market fundamentalism, the notion that most problems are better (at least more efficiently) solved by the actions of private parties rather than by state oversight or investment. And it was not just a British and American concept. It was deployed from Hong Kong to Singapore, Chile, and Estonia.

Martin Lukacs in 2017 wrote that Thatcher and Reagan's neoliberalism "has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will." Emphasizing "privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals" has "liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare." Labor unions have been undermined, for example. Neoliberalism wants to make the following steps "culturally unthinkable," but these are what needs to happen to lower greenhouse gas emissions: "take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it."

Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.

Rachel Maddow wrote in 2012:

Counterinsurgency doctrine [for example, that produced by The U.S. Army /Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual by David Petraeus, which Maddow described as “a can-do treatise on how to fight wars that were both indefinite and expandable, a full-on twenty-first century rewrite of US military doctrine”] is elegant and fulfilling as an academic exercise, particularly for liberals: the story of how a public entity (that is, the military) does everything the right way, anticipating and meeting a population’s every need, and thereby wins. The idea is that the Iraqis will love us in the end, and want to be like us, as long as our military applies the correct principles.

Stanley Fish, in 2009, said that he has been accused of wanting to neoliberalize academia, based on his arguments that professors should stick to academics inside the classroom and keep their political activism separate. (His critics find this unnaturally limiting for the professors and less than exemplary for their students.)

...neoliberalism is a pejorative way of referring to a set of economic/political policies based on a strong faith in the beneficent effects of free markets. Here is an often cited definition by Paul Treanor: “Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services . . . and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.” (“Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition.”)

* * *

Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state interventions — governmental policies of social engineering — are “presented as the problem rather than the solution” (Chris Harman, “Theorising Neoliberalism,” International Socialism Journal, December 2007).

* * *

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (A Brief History of Neoliberalism.)

Timothy Snyder, in 2017:

We learned to say that there was ‘no alternative’ to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called ‘liquid evil.’ Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it. Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony.

In Robert Wright's "Nonzero Newsletter" on March 7, 2020, he wrote: "Unlike most ideological labels, it ["neoliberal"] is claimed by virtually no one. It's used mainly as a pejorative, typically to mean something like 'a free market fundamentalist who happily does the bidding of corporate overlords, helping them run roughshod over the world’s working people.'" Nonetheless, "it's possible to apply it with some precision. If you follow the term 'neoliberal' back to the 1990s, you’ll find it referring to a distinct set of policies — policies collectively called 'the Washington consensus' — and an underlying philosophy."

“Laying the problems of American capitalism on the poor is a staple of neoliberalism that protects American exceptionalism mythology," Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong wrote in 2019. "American exceptionalism tells us that it is the ‘high-risk borrower,’ the individual who failed to ‘make it,’ who is responsible for whatever economic ailments plague the United States."

In a Project Syndicate interview sent by email on 12 November 2019, Paola Subacchi mentioned the failures of the free markets.

PS: You’ve suggested that neoliberalism is actually a form of social engineering, in the sense that those societies that embraced free-market ideology “have become increasingly divided in terms of economic power, influence, education, and health.” And, judging by many of these societies’ politics today, there has been considerable buyer’s remorse among voters. Which policies would do the most to address their grievances?

[Paola] Subacchi: The failures of neoliberalism, from sharp inequality to environmental degradation, confront us every day. In my forthcoming book The Price of Free Money, I argue that, after the 2008 crisis, the world’s major mistake was to reset the system, rather than overhaul it.

But it may not be too late for significant reform. The key to success would be a kind of “New Deal” that balances traditional economic objectives – growth and wealth creation – with a range of other priorities, including strong social safety nets, equitable labor markets, fair distribution of resources, environmental sustainability, and community openness.

And: How is it influenced by conservatism? Peter Levine, in 2013:

The conservative movement had intellectual forebears, writers like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley. But its signature policies were not necessarily consistent with any of these authors’ ideas (which, in any event, conflicted with one another). That is not a criticism but a respectful acknowledgement that conservatism was a balance of diverse principles, heroes, examples, and cultural expressions — not a simplistic application of ideas.

Corey Robin, in a 2018 edition of his book The Reactionary Mind:

“The Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek is the leading theoretician of this movement, which is often called neoliberalism but can also understood as the most genuinely political theory of capitalism the right has managed to produce. The theory does not imagine a shift from government to the individual, as is often claimed by conservatives; nor does it imagine a shift from the state to the market or from society to the atomized individual, as is often claimed by the left. It takes what Nietzsche called grosse Politik — a conception of political life as the embodiment of ancient ideals of aristocratic action, aesthetic notions of artistic creation, and a rarefied vision of the warrior — and locates that vision not in high affairs of state but in the operations and personnel of a capitalist economy. The result is an agonistic romance of the market, where economic activity is understood as exciting rather than efficient, as the expression of aristocratic virtues, aesthetic values, and warlike action rather than a repository of bourgeois conceits.

* * *

As Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism is, among other things, the conquest of political argument by economic reason."

Will Storr in 2018 defined it as "a heightened form of individualism":

"It’s as if the brain asks a single, vital question: Who do I have to be, in this place, to thrive? If it was a boastful hustler in ancient Greece and a humble team-player in ancient China, then who is it in the West today?

The answer is a neoliberal.

* * *

For Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, saving ourselves meant rediscovering our individualist roots.

They cut taxes and regulations; they battled unions; they shrunk the welfare state; they privatized assets and weakened the state’s safety nets. They pursued the neoliberal dream of globalization — one free market that covered the earth. As much of human life as possible was to become a competition of self versus self.

Here's a similar use of the term. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, "like conservative thinkers, often blames material problems on personal failures," Noah Berlatsky writes. "Her ideology may sound airy and inoffensive, but it is ultimately one of neoliberal victim shaming."

As an example, Remington Breeze said: "as Derrick Jensen mentions in his article Forget Shorter Showers (which is worth a read if you have the time), if every American did everything they could to reduce their carbon footprint, it would only reduce U.S. gross emissions by about 22%."

To some extent, this hearkens back to an ethics question about whether you need to be virtuous to do "the right thing," or whether you can just make some calculation or follow some rule, or whether the situation can be better designed to somehow take care of itself.

"The Political Philosophy of Care," Dissent Magazine, Winter 2022

[Deva] Woodly: If your politics is based on a distributive model, meaning that everything is about handing out goodies—whether those goodies are material or in terms of status and rights—the flip side is a scarcity mentality. That is [political scientist] Iris Marion Young’s argument in Justice and the Politics of Difference. That scarcity mentality leads us to a place where we think that care is not important, because there’s not enough. We are at war, and we have to get the thing that is enough.

[Sarah] Leonard: Sort of a neoliberal mentality, right? Like all historical change is up to me, personally.

Woodly: Only I can fix it, yeah. ... What I think is so promising about the Movement for Black Lives and movements that have arisen in the twenty-first century that center care is they give us a chance to move beyond that twentieth-century mentality.

Adam Piore:

"Bailenson, who has a PhD in cognitive psychology, came to realize one of the main reasons we fail to act on social problems is that we tend to blame individuals for their problems, not any situation or social condition. In social psychology, blaming an individual is known as “the fundamental attribution error.” [The term was coined by Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross.] When bad things happen to them, it’s their fault. When bad things happen to us, it’s not ours. We lose sight of ourselves in the social fabric. In recent years, however, research has shown that granting somebody the perspective of another person can reduce the fundamental attribution error — seeing the world through another’s eyes can make us less quick to judge them."

Lauren Berlant, in their 2011 book Cruel Optimism, referred to "that moral-intimate-economic thing called 'the good life'" (Introduction, p. 2) and asked: "What is the good life when the world that was to have been delivered by upward mobility and collective uplift that national/capitalism promised goes awry in front of one?" (Chapter 2, p. 69) "Neoliberal interests are well served by the displacement of so many historical forms of social reciprocity onto emotional registers, especially," they observed, to "dramatize" the idea that freedom is just around the corner. In other words, solidarity (which might actually achieve a political goal) is converted into individual hope (which cannot, and merely disguises loss). (Chapter 6, p. 222)

The serial killer has "an anxiety produced by obsessional neurosis," Anthony Faramelli says — he pursues "the ecstatic destruction of the object," which means he no longer has the thing as soon as he gets his hands on it and he must find another one to kill. And so: "People who fall in love with serial killers do so precisely because they are the embodiment of the ecstatic destruction that neo-liberal modernity is based on." Faramelli goes on to explain: "This reading of love foregrounds the obsessional matrix of neo-liberalism. The obsessive thought is a thought of jouissance as well as a vehicle for jouissance. That is to say that the obsessive trapped in the cycle where the object is constantly sought after and destroyed is the motor for neo-liberal's libidinal jouissance. For both Freud and Lacan the object at the centre of obsessional anxiety is the mother, that is to say, it is the loved object within the Oedipal matrix. As such, neo-liberal jouissance is profoundly Oedipal, and barriers a significant relationship to narcissistic love in its relationship with death. ... The love that the serial killer exudes is conditioned by the necessity of the love object's repetitive destruction. The killer is identified within the divine love of the object, but must eternally destroy it to quantify the love."

Michelle Goldberg:

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, America has tended to value individual market choice over collective welfare. Even Democratic administrations have had to operate within what’s often called the neoliberal consensus. That consensus was crumbling before coronavirus, but the pandemic should annihilate it for good. This calamity has revealed that the fundamental insecurity of American life is a threat to us all.

“There’s no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” Tell that to the families effectively under house arrest until society gets this right.

Christopher Forth on willpower and food:

Having been described as a life-shortening and disfiguring disease since the 16th century, “obesity” became even more vocally denounced by doctors as the harbinger of sickness, disability, old age and death. Demands that people curb their appetites while adopting healthy diet and exercise regimes transformed the body into something that had to be regularly managed through sheer acts of willpower. All of this reflects the paradoxes of a mass society that encourages consumption while simultaneously demanding greater self-control. This self-control, in a further paradox, requires purchasing fitness products and services that are part of the same consumer society credited with producing fatness.

These trends would develop more fully in the decades to come. With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, as well as the attendant “culture of bulimia” that coupled compulsory consumption with an equally insistent demand for self-discipline, fatness would become one of the most recognizable emblems of a loss of personal control and a social fall from grace.

Naomi Klein:

"...a core message of neoliberal wellness culture: that your body is your primary site of control and advantage in this cruel and polluted world. So get to work optimizing it!"
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Klein again:

"...at least for these trainers, if you aren’t as peak fit as they are, you don’t have a right to have opinions on any aspect of health — and you definitely don’t have a right to ask anything health-related of them. The core Covid- era public health message — that we all needed to undergo some individual inconveniences for the sake of our collective health — enjoyed majority support. Yet it simply could not be reconciled with the wellness industry’s own overarching message: that individuals must take charge over their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control, and competitive edge. And that those who don’t exercise that control deserve what they get. Neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form."

Klein says that some climate crisis-aware people have this narrative:

"I'll be okay, I'm prepared, with my canned goods and solar panels and relative place of privilege on this planet — it's other people who will suffer. The trouble with that narrative, though, is that it requires finding ways to live with and rationalize the mass suffering of others."

Klein connects it to neoliberalism:

"In Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in September 2022, tracked the ways that the quest for health and wellness became obsessive pursuits in the Reagan and Thatcher era and has only grown in influence since. She argued that this turn was a reaction not to feminism’s successes, but rather to the failures of revolutionary movements, when the high hopes of the 1960s and ’70s slammed into the brick wall of ’80s neoliberalism."

In Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider identifies tuition hikes as a neoliberal policy.

Jason Stanley says that neoliberalism rests on assumptions of social Darwinism:

"Once fascists achieve a requisite level of respectability, fascism itself can start to plant roots. At its core, fascism is based on a particular understanding of social Darwinian struggle – hence the title of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). And social Darwinism, in turn, is the common bond linking neoliberalism (or economic libertarianism) and fascism. This is why it is no surprise to hear Trump talk constantly of “winning” in business, regularly signaling his disdain for “losers.” Now that he is in the White House, this facile ideology is being translated into a project of national struggle against other countries."

In a 2018 article for Medium, "Holding Patterns: On Academic Knowledge and Labor," Eugenia Zuroski points out that "minority status...is a foundation of particular forms of knowledge and expertise that universities have a way of recognizing and extracting without crediting." Furthermore, "all expertise is hard-earned," in this case "by living through, and thinking through, unjust conditions of being." It is not automatic or "a natural byproduct of identity." A common "neoliberal fallacy" maintains that people with minority status either they haven't gained real, meaningful, worthwhile knowledge as a result of their minority status or they happen to have such knowledge but they didn't have to put in effort to acquire or develop it; that their minority status is a kind of power or privilege that gains them "preferential treatment"; and that they are disproportionately or undeservedly sought after for academic job offers. The same neoliberal thinking also fails to realize how the academic institution is still built around the dominant identities and supports and rewards them disproportionately while extracting undercompensated knowledge from people with minority status (e.g. by having them serve on diversity committees) and tokenizing those minorities by actually positioning them, or by depicting their position, as giving information or credibility to the institution without having the institution change to really include or reflect them. To use some of Zuroski's assumptions, then, one might say that neoliberalism has to do with upholding current power structures while pretending to critique them (or even perhaps really believing that it is critiquing them when it is not).

"The neoliberal economic paradigm," said Shoshana Zuboff, aims to "reverse, subdue, impede, and even destroy the individual urge toward psychological self-determination and moral agency." More:

"Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This 'paranoid style' favored self-management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices. In a parallel development, the 'war on terror' shifted the government's attention from privacy legislation to an urgent interest in the rapidly developing skills and technologies of Google and other rising surveillance capitalists. These 'elective affinities' produced a trend toward surveillance exceptionalism, which further sheltered the new market form from scrutiny and nurtured its development." — Zuboff

At the end of Jeff Chon's novel Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun (Sagging Meniscus, 2020), a drug dealer tells a thirtysomething man: “We felt bad for you, so we kicked a little money your way here and there, gave you odd jobs to do, but we did you wrong.” The drug dealer tells a parable: the pizzeria arcade “used to give you tickets for every game you played,” but kids “stopped loving those tickets when the time came to cash out.” The kids thought, “‘I’m gonna use these to get that PlayStation,’ when in reality all you can probably get is a fucking Calico Jacqueline keychain or some stupid inflatable sword if you were lucky.” In the novel, at least one character who overhears this is unclear what it means. It might mean that money you get from fooling around seems valuable at the time, but it “incentivize[s] children to play more games,” and thus it never gets you anywhere and isn’t, in a sense, real money in terms of its ability to improve your life. If you haven’t earned certain amounts in certain ways, you won’t be able to use them productively — and when you realize that your income has been a scam, there’s no point complaining that it’s been a scam. You should just be glad you had a good time up until that point. (more about this novel)


Erica Fretwell @upstaterica Question driven by idle curiosity: When did


On the political agenda behind insisting that artists make everything "cozy" and infantile, which "is leading to this culture wide phobia of sex which in turn is becoming a useful vector for the increasing spread of fascism":

Jessica Ritchey: So much YA and children's cartoons, and adult Gogurt content like the MCU movies, is about making good soldiers of neoliberalism. This is the best things can be. Don't look to change vastly unjust systems, just figure out how to throw an afghan and mug of tea over them. And love can be a radical act. Love is inherently an anti-capitalist act, it's given freely and expects nothing in return. And sex can be a profound part of that, either in committed relationships or in sheer pleasure which is a worthy end it itself. Neoliberalism always needs to justify things for profit. 'Why is this here? This doesn't serve the plot.' Neoliberalism is terrified of pleasure for pleasure's sake. The idea that you have a sex scene because it's hot. Because you have a right to pleasure.

Neoliberalism promises men 'self-confidence' while giving them only misogyny

Lisa Sugiura writes in The Incel Rebellion: "Bratich and Banet-Weiser (2019) point to the failures of neoliberalism as being the underlying cause for the increase in violence seen within the manosphere. Neoliberalism has failed to give men the self-confidence it promises, instead relying on misogynistic ideas, which has resulted in reactive violence against women who do not comply with patriarchal gender roles for sexual reproduction."

Sources

Booked #3: "What Exactly is Neoliberalism?" Wendy Brown, interviewed by Timothy Shenk. April 2, 2015.

"Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all," Nick Cohen, The Spectator, March 28, 2015.

"PS. In Theory: Rethinking Austerity." [Video.] Project Syndicate. July 20, 2018.

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