Progressive Infighting, Fetishizing Childhood Innocence, and Alternatives to Life Eternal - Dinner Table Digest № 21
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
You'll notice that I have skipped Dinner Table Digest № 20. This is because I made a promise in Digest 19 to feature the five best pieces since I started doing these digests. But then my decision paralysis got the better of me, and my ADHD-led procrastination has refused to cooperate, so I'm saying fuck it, and I'm skipping right to Digest 21. No point in getting myself hung up over nothing! It’s still coming, it’ll just be further delayed.
Without further hubbub, I've got a few fascinating pieces for you today:
If God is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence - Michael Bronski
Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Organizations to a Standstill - Ryan Grim
If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything - James Wood - The New Yorker
Every summer I try and take advantage of the New Yorker’s $6 for 12 issues offer, in part because it comes with access to the magazine’s archive. While my Pocket App allows me to bypass the paywall, my summer subscription is the part I can play in highlighting good journalism. This 2019 piece is a review of a large philosophical opus produced by Swedish Professor of Comparative Literature Martin Hägglund which proposes to reinterpret Hegel and Marx to build the godless socialist paradise of our dreams, without importing any of the nasty stuff that characterized the 20th century. Since my gateway to all things both godless and socialist was reading the original devil Karl Marx himself at Bible College, I figured Hägglund’s book was probably going to go onto my must-read list.
Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.
That is the theory, at least. I’m not sure Hägglund can quite summon this ideal generosity toward all forms of religious practice. In “Field Flowers,” Glück’s flower scoffs that “absence of change” is humanity’s “poor idea of heaven.” But the religious believer might object that Hägglund’s idea of eternity is equally poor. In fact, his book is in danger of becoming a victim of its own argumentative victories. For if most religionists perform in ways that are unconsciously secular, as he observes, don’t many secularists behave in ways that are unconsciously religious? Doesn’t Chekhov, in the passage I quoted, sound quite religious (“our eternal salvation . . . the higher aims of our existence”)? I suspect that Hägglund would claim this as precisely his point—and as a win for the secular side. He is insistent about the secular importance of enjoying things in themselves and for themselves; treating them as a means to a different end becomes, for him, almost a secondary definition of what is wrong with the religious impulse. But don’t most of us, nonbelievers and believers alike, often substitute one thing for another—which is to say, read the world allegorically? Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.
None of these objections disarm Hägglund’s essential argument, which I find—having been raised in a Christian tradition relentlessly committed to preferring the eternal to the worldly—beautifully liberating. But “This Life” is aimed at what he sees as the very foundations of religious appeal; the buildings—the structures housing the exemptions, compromises, and fudges that religious people enact daily—interest him much less. He talks a good Hegelian game about the dignity of religious community, but actually he soars above it.
While Jenny has apparently passed away, she brought a lot of joy to Frankfurt, Germany, where she took daily walks by herself through her neighbourhood.
Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence - Michael Bronski - Boston Review
I'm fascinated by the fact that I have never connected the mythology of the Fall and consequent Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to the mythology of childhood innocence as a standing for the Nation. I mean, it's pretty obvious when you think about it, right?
The mythology of the Fall is structurally the basis for the nostalgic idea that childhood should be bracketed from the world as a sphere of pure innocence. This in turn has shaped ideas about how children should be educated and treated, and the attitudes of adults toward the institutions of childhood. But it has also overdetermined the regret, envy, and anger that many adults feel about their own childhoods, their eventual loss of childhood innocence, and their rage toward those who do not ascribe to the same fantasies of childhood innocence. Children themselves can easily land on the wrong side of this: they are a theological wild card, in a presexual state of “innocence” but also, in Freud’s view, polymorphic perverse, and thus continually on the verge of grievous sin. This has led to quixotic, intense levels of anxiety and ambivalence toward children in the Western imagination. Children are commonly referred to as both “little angels” and “little demons,” “a joy and a burden.” They are the hope of the future if they do not—as they must—leave the garden. In the meantime, they must be obedient.
Metaphorically the journey to adulthood is the expulsion from Eden. As a result childhood innocence must be maintained, or prolonged, at any cost. Adam and Eve were expelled for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The best way to protect children is through enforced ignorance. The visceral myth of paradisaical childhood is fueling the extraordinary desperateness of these laws. What we see at play now are measures to “protect” children from the current trinity of forbidden fruit: sex, gender, and race.
To a large degree, the “child” these measures seek to protect is not actual children but the nation.
Kitchener’s J.J. Wilde hangs out with friends à la That 70’s Show and smokes some of the good ol’ Bushweed. She’ll be performing at Kitchener Blues Festival on August 5.
Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History - Ryan Grim - The Intercept
If we’ve chatted one-on-one over the past few years, I’ve likely confided to you about how frustrated I am with leftwing in-fighting. I’ve spoken a lot about Purity Culture among Christian Evangelicals - there is a different kind of Purity Culture among the progressives, with its focus on complete adherence to a specific set of progressive propositions, which often shift and change, and ofen very quickly at that. The thing is, nobody knows what that set of propositions is until one of them has been violated and an unfortunate someone has been “called out” for their failures. This Intercept story looks at how internal strife has been roiling some of the United States’ most important progressive advocacy organizations.
That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.
In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:
Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.
Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.
“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”
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