I meant to do a post based on Jed Esty's Ailing Empire Blues, but two years have gone by, so enough is enough.
Decline is a fact; declinism is a problem. American decline is happening, slowly but inevitably. It is a structural and material process. Declinism is a problem of rhetoric or belief. It is the way that media elites predict the future of an aging superpower for its educated public. Stretching audiences between false alarm and false hope, declinism sells a fallacy: the idea that America can stay atop the global system indefinitely. But as the British ruling classes learned after 1900, there is no reversing history. Number one will always become number two someday.
The United States stands now where Britain once stood, at the threshold of a dramatic reckoning. The signs are everywhere. The 2020s culture war is a history war, and it turns on the meaning of national decline and lost hegemony. As the new history wars unfold, the British precedent sheds light on several facets of American decline and division.
The struggle to redefine national culture after empire has been underway for generations in the UK. To gather insights from it, we can revisit an extraordinary body of work in cultural history produced in the 1960s and 1970s by the British New Left. I think of the UK historians of that time—especially Stuart Hall, Tom Nairn, Perry Anderson, Raphael Samuel, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams—as intellectual “first responders” to the contraction of British power. They developed a genuine theory of national decline. Their synthesis of politics and culture gives us the most integrated way of approaching both actual decline and superpower nostalgia (declinism) in the contemporary United States.
I recommend the novels of Orhan Pamuk for his views on this subject (and also because they are great novels).
Another article that I meant to include in a post is A Summary and Analysis of Immanuel Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Kant begins ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by asserting that enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity. He defines ‘immaturity’ here as the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. Kant’s message to his readers is that they should have the courage to use their own understanding, rather than relying on another person’s guidance. That is the ‘motto’ of enlightenment.
Kant acknowledges that remaining ‘immature’ is the easy option for most people, because it’s the lazy option. People can turn to a priest to be their moral conscience for them, or a doctor to determine their diet. Women have been rendered perpetually immature by men in order to keep them meek and ignorant.
The key to enlightenment, Kant asserts, is freedom. If people are granted that, enlightenment will follow. The problem is that most people aren’t free. Even those ‘guardians’ and authority figures who keep others enslaved are themselves victim of this system, which they inherit from those who have gone before them.
I have a strange relationship with Kant - I like some of his ideas, but his system is off-putting. This is another argument that I like, so I wanted to share it. I just did not have time enough for a fuller discussion - go read it and make up your mind. Also, ask if you are immature or not.
When I was a kid, I would sneak into the Anderson Newscenter to look at Heavy Metal magazine. I lost track of it as I got older, only to learn how it had problems keeping in publication. Now, it is reborn.
Matthew Everhard's Jonathan Edwards’ Complex Views on Race is for those interested in America's great Calvinist theologian.
USGS Maps pretty much says it all - for those, like me, who really dig maps.
I do not shy away from the law entirely, Pink Tape is an English family law blog that has been around for ages - I used to read it regularly when I was a lawyer - and I suggest it for reading by American lawyers. Why? To learn that the problems of law attorneys are pretty much universal.
I confess to having ignored Jotwell - there are limits to my attachment to my old profession.
The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics can go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new scholarship relevant to the law. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.
A book for you: Reconstruction beyond 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom
Another I wanted to write a separate post about: Why We Made Fewer Memories during the Pandemic. The same thing happened to me while in prison, and I suspect for the same reasons. I guess the country got a taste of what it was like being incarcerated.
Is it too late for A National Divorce? Separating the Red and Blue? Or did Trump's re-election overturn the whole idea?
Big Think for those wanting to educate themselves: "Explore our library of more than 2,000 interviews with the world’s biggest thinkers."
Another subject I did not have time for was Franzen’s Anger.
Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset. The metaphors he uses are powerful; most conversations about him enter their universe—accept, even in disagreement, their terms. The oppositional framing of Franzen’s career—the opinions Franzen holds, his means of expressing them, the positions they invite others to take with respect to his work and persona—flatten nuance, entrench stances, limit exchange. They “leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction” and, over time, stand to “incrementally entomb” many conversations about Franzen and—perhaps most of all—the author himself.
I circle Franzen wondering if he does or does not have a problem with being from the Midwest (well, Missouri, I think). He is good, even if he treads a path of a certain sameness. And what has he published lately?
Arcade: A Digital Salon is curated and maybe over my head, but that is how we educate ourselves, isn't it? Also, a bit stiff might be Special Issue: Truth or Post-Truth? Philosophy, American Studies, and Current Perspectives in Pragmatism and Hermeneutics. One I will be getting back to if I can get the time.
Museum of Madison County History. That is Madison County, Indiana. It looks much more impressive than it did before my arrest.
I had to skim American Revanchism: On Karen Joy Fowler’s “Booth” (LARB) by Bennett Parten since it had been so long since bookmarked the review. Pretty sure it was this paragraph:
We might need to consider this essay even more now. How do we explain the demographic shifts that pushed Trump past Harris? Let me disclose a lesson I learned in prison: fascists do not need to be white. What appeals to the fascist - fear of losing one's stability of position, an overweening masculinity - is not the sole property of the white supremacist.That’s one way of looking at it. Another, perhaps more uncomfortable view is that we’ve never needed to know John Wilkes Booth more than we do right now. His politics — white supremacy, grievance, conspiracy, revanchism — have suddenly broken open and become our politics. His contemporaries aren’t the United States’ mass shooters so much as the right-wing extremists who stormed the capital on January 6 and who now have apologists in the highest rungs of American government. Booth may be remembered as an egomaniacal lone wolf — this despite him working with a group of conspirators, most of whom would later hang for their crimes — but the truth is that he embodied a political tradition as American as the man he shot dead. Indeed, to know Booth, to fully reckon with who he was and to grapple with why he did what he did, is to have a window on the modern United States.
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