Yes, you can be not racist

29 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Politics

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Probably the most widely quoted passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is this one:

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. (9)

Let us suppose that one goes into reading this paragraph believing – as I do, as most people used to, as most people quite possibly still do – that it is indeed possible to be neutral, to be simply not racist. What reason does this passage then provide to believe anything different? What argument is being made for the claim that one cannot be neutral, beyond the bare assertion, beyond the equivalent of stomping one’s shoe on the table? As far as I can tell, there is none. You just get the assertion that “‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism”, and you’re expected to swallow it whole without any criticism.

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Breaking my silence on Ibram X. Kendi

22 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Fear, Politics, Work

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Advertisement for BU’s Day of Engagement.

Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:

Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.

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Online course: The Seven Universal Virtues

19 Thursday Sep 2024

Posted by in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Greek and Roman Tradition, Virtue

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Seth Zuihō Segall, longtime friend of Love of All Wisdom and author of The House We Live In, will be offering an eight-week online course, called The Seven Universal Virtues, offered through Tricycle magazine. On each virtue, Seth will be in conversation with another thinker; I’m doing the one on temperance. (Others include Sharon Salzberg, Stephen Batchelor, Jack Petranker.) The course takes inspiration from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius and their shared point that good lives are those that cultivate virtue and wisdom through practice and study.

You can enroll for access to approximately six hours of material, plus contemplative exercises and two live Q&A sessions with Segall on October 22 and November 10. The course starts begins on September 30, so sign up today if you’re interested. You can learn more by watching a preview lesson.

So we can all agree Obama is white, right?

15 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Family, Politics, South Asia

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Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)

Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.

News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”

To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?

… right?“

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In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

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Being Ezili Freda

01 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Aesthetics, Attachment and Craving, Deity, Economics, M.T.S.R., Rites, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.

As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.

But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.

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How to live knowing the world will die

25 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Daoism, Death, Despair, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Foundations of Ethics, Hope, Metaphysics, Physics and Astronomy, Politics

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We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.

I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.

This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)

NASA image of a dying star from the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be the eventual fate of the sun.

How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.

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Eventual human extinction and why it matters

18 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Biology, Christianity, Death, Deity, Despair, Foundations of Ethics, Hope, Metaphysics, Physics and Astronomy, Politics, Protestantism

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There will, eventually, be an end to the human race. We don’t think enough about the significance of this fact.

I am not even talking about avoidable apocalypses, as real as the threat of those is. I am assuming for the sake of argument that we will manage to avoid being stupid enough to kill ourselves off in the next few centuries, through global nuclear war or climate change or AI robots or nanotechnology or a newly emerging plague. Many if not all of those are real threats and we should do whatever we can to prevent them from destroying us. But for my purposes here I’m assuming we’re smart enough to fend them off. The point is that humanity will end even so. It may take a very, very long time. But it will happen.

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What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

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My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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