Readings - Stroll Along

 I have been trying to catch up on too many fronts. What energy I have had today is long gone. Therefore, some notes on readings for the past few days.

Chain of Ideas by Ibram X Kendi review – anatomy of a conspiracy theory (The Guardian)

The central thesis is that the ideological origins of what Kendi terms “our authoritarian age” lie in the so-called “great replacement theory”. This is defined as “a political theory that powerful elites are enabling peoples of colour to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms of White people, who now need authoritarian protection”.

Is this not just white nationalism by another name? Not exactly. “Since Trump’s election in 2016 great replacement politicians and theorists had been increasingly organising international meetings, networks, charters, and associations,” Kendi argues. “For a long time, these extremists had concentrated domestically … before shifting to the transnational battle to defend the White race … which is why terming great replacement theorists ‘white nationalists’ doesn’t fully capture their new identity and ideology.”

Crucially, great replacement theory is not a single concept but a chain of interlocking ideas. The idea that racism against peoples of colour is over is connected to the idea that anti-white racism is on the rise, which is connected to the idea that insurrections against democracy protect the nation and so on. These ideas are easily challenged when looked at in isolation; it is their interconnectedness that gives the great replacement theory its emotional resonance. If the chain concept sounds familiar, by the way, that’s because it is borrowed from a quote by the 18th-century French lawyer Joseph Michel Antoine Servan, cited by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: “A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas.”

I should put Anne Fadiman on Essays, Personal and Historical over on the writing blog, but my idea for that blog is to showcase fiction. 

The Varieties of Religious Experience is the one William James book I  have meant to read for almost a half century. There is now a free e-book.

You probably have never heard of of Howard Jacobson. I ran across him in prison. In my mind, back then, I categorized him as an English Philip Roth without Roth's prickliness. If I can find time, I would read more Jacobson, but now he has a new a novel you might check out, The Guardian review, Howl by Howard Jacobson review – a tragicomic portrait of a Jewish man’s despair, makes a quick introduction that does not contradict my memories of what I read.

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits’ end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession. And Jacobson’s men do the opposite of suffering in silence (although they do that too); they are much given to exhaustive and exhausting disputation, to arguing their point long after their interlocutors are longing for bed, and not in the fun way all parties might hope.

I am making the same decision for Empty Hiss; The short story form is an uneasy vessel for Helen Garner’s particular intensity by Max Callimanopulos (LARB). If not the short story, what format for intense emotions? Poetry?

 sch