Threedom! (#6) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM! (#6) M L Clark’s Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
Welcome to the new digs, folks! You’ve been ported over to Threedom!’s new home… on Substack. Ugh.
Now, I want to be clear from the outset: Substack is not an ideal choice on ethical grounds, and if you choose to unsubscribe on that basis, I’ll completely understand.
Ostensibly, my industry was last year among those outraged by its shady business practices, which include platforming a lot of people with hateful and ill-informed views, and obscuring the ways in which it curates or finances certain writers over others. This was part of the reason I chose TinyLetter over Substack when first starting out with the newsletter, even though TinyLetter is massively underpowered for the work of building a deeper conversation with monthly mail-outs.
(Massively underpowered. I’m still agog at how many little details are far easier here—and there are possibilities for streamlining a podcast into the newsletter, too!)
Mind you, TinyLetter was really good for helping me get over my perfectionism, because once something’s posted on TinyLetter, that’s it! No re-dos, no refining the copy in your archives.
But now that I’ve surmounted my nervous period, and as I launch into a year of many more forward-facing ventures, I have a serious question to ask myself with respect to how hard I should be making this process of platform-building for me. I’m trying to develop a range of literary initiatives, and I’ve already had to change quite a bit of workflow to make them sustainable. (Code for: My laptop is super underpowered, too.)
Meanwhile, my industry has not moved en masse from Substack—in part, I suspect, because we’re all terrifically selective about our outrage. And… maybe have to be?
After all, if you want to talk about a platform that has reprehensibly uplifted toxic voices, and that we haven’t yet walked away from as a group… Oh, hi, Twitter! But in that case, too, we’ve seen very little investment in making other spaces to replace the work that Twitter allows those in publishing to do.
So. I certainly won’t be making any money on this site (Stripe doesn’t work in Colombia), but I’ve still chosen to switch to a free-to-use website that can better help me to grow my platform, instead of sticking with a more ethical website with far fewer opportunities for audience engagement and multimedia outreach.
And there’s no “but at least” here. This is an ethical compromise. One of many that comes with being a writer with an online presence, I’m sure—but this one is mine.
So, thanks for sticking with me, if you do. I appreciate your support of this newsletter, as I do the very kind support of all my patrons, and folks who donate to my ko-fi, too.
Completely understandable, though, if you don’t.
Hopefully this won’t be a forever-home!
Table of Contents
Three episodes of SRSLY WRONG (a podcast)
“Wrong Boys Investigate: Election Fraud 2020, pt 1” (SW1)
“Disability Justice with Lateef McLeod” (SW2)
“Reading Black Anarchists with St. Andrew” (SW3)
Three works of visual media
Nine Days (V1)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (V2)
The Golden Girls (V3)
Three social commentaries
The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (SC1)
“The History of Predicting the Future,” by Amanda Rees (SC2)
“The Fallacy of Representation,” by Camonghne Felix (SC3)
Three “ways in” to humanism
OnlySky (WH1)
Anarchism/mutual-aid networks (WH2)
Constructive dissent [a.k.a. not the Substack/Meta/Twitter model] (WH3)
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A photo (M2)
Mr. Rogers’ “The Truth Will Set Me Free” (M3)
M1. A quotation
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
In another issue of Threedom!, I pushed back on a much-abused quotation by Hegel, in which the “we” who fail to learn from history (and are thus doomed to repeat it) more accurately refers to nation-states and broader systems than to individuals—with all our complex relationships to agency, irrespective of how much history we learn. This matters, because the nuanced reading more accurately reflects our collective psyche: a body of individuals with sometimes extremely acute senses of historical precedent, far removed from the centres of power making cyclically ruinous decisions for us all.
Here, too, I’d like to begin by pushing back on a familiar quotation, this time from the writings of Marx. The whole 1852 monograph from which it comes, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is an excellent meditation on the uses of history, shaped around a recent political episode in which revolution stumbled—hard and fast—because its past was never fully confronted by participants therein. The piece also talks about the propagandizing use of past civilizations to lend a sense of glory to any current common cause. And it starts with one of my favourite non-fiction openers:
Hegel says somewhere that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.”
But the part I’ve bolded, in the opening to this section, is routinely condensed until its meaning markedly changes from the themes discussed in the rest of the monograph. I even came across one such distorted distillation in The Dawn of Everything, a book I discuss in SC1. There, the authors write: “Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.”
And yes, granted, those opening lines offer a terrific concept on their own, when used to suggest that we’re more deeply shaped by our environments than we often realize. But Marx launches from his original comment into something quite different than what this offhand phrase suggests. Marx’s piece, after all, focusses on how human beings actively draw upon past rhetoric as propaganda and framing devices for current campaigns. Marx then argues that this was a major cause of a mid-century French political revolution’s failure: because one needs time to bury the past in full, to make way for better reforms.
But the misreading is rather ironic, no? Because Marx’s first line, on its own, calls for us to accept that many aspects of our struggle are shaped by environmental factors that we could not control. However, inside the paragraph’s and the essay’s fuller contexts, Marx then does something extraordinary: he argues that knowledge of this fact can be its own sort of leverage. “Aha!” he’s essentially saying: “Until a few sentences ago, you might well have contented yourself in an ignorance that is the natural inheritance of all humankind—but now that I’ve pointed out this ignorance to you, you have a responsibility to pay attention to it, so that your future activism will be all the more improved!”
And so, as Marx’s monograph later argues:
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past; it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past. Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach its issue. With the former, the phrase surpasses the substance; with this one, the substance surpasses the phrase.
This matter of letting “the dead bury their dead” is a complex one, but important; it involves remembering that many systems which developed as an initial reaction to other, unjust systems (for instance, the massive and intricately in-fighting bourgeoisie that earlier established itself in the wake of feudalism and the monarchy’s collapse) are ill-equipped to carry the cause of justice and reform any further. By virtue of existing as a reaction to previous unjust orders, their entire group identities are still shaped around toxic vocabularies of power that could easily be leveraged by enterprising individuals, to the detriment of all further advancement. Thus was certainly the case in the mid-century French revolution under Marx’s immediate analysis in this essay, for—
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken unawares; and the people proclaimed this political stroke a great historic act whereby the new era was opened. On the 2d of December, the February revolution is jockeyed by the trick of a false player, and what seems to be overthrown is no longer the monarchy, but the liberal concessions which had been wrung from it by centuries of struggles.
So ended a brief but striking period that had promised a more democratic political order, yet only delivered a new despot—precisely because the revolution had not been couched in enough progressivism. Because these promising new reforms relied on a class of citizen molded in the collapse of an older, empire-driven order (and taking up much of its rhetorical mantle) made the cause vulnerable to individual exploitation.
Now, I’ve left out all the specific details about that revolutionary moment, but only because it’s more important to dwell on what’s happening in this century—and how dangerous it can be to rest on a misapplied use of one of Marx’s most famous quotation to come to grips with it. Yes, it is very true that we are born into specific material contexts that shape specific material struggles in our lives. But it is also true that, once cognizant of the fact that we are shaped by our environments, we gain an immediate obligation to know them better, and to learn from that course of study how best to keep them from over-determining our worlds to come.
We no longer have the excuse of innocence, in other words.
What will we do now with our ignorance?
V1. Nine Days (2020)
Edson Oda calls his directorial debut, a piece called Nine Days (2020) that he also scripted, a work of “spi-fi”—“spiritual fiction”. As much as I find many of our genre terms goofy, I’m not entirely opposed to a name that softens the hard cultural edges of “science fiction and fantasy” without also reaching for the overly dramatic supernatural fiction. Nine Days sits with the strange wonder of being human, and the ways in which a key part of “being human” involves trying to catalogue the experience.
The film’s premise is simple, not simplistic: Our protagonist lives in a spiritual limbo of desert and junkyard debris, in a little house where he watches select lives in our world play out. These lives belong to every successful candidate of his past interviews with souls that are born with distinct personalities and live for up to nine days—before disappearing forever, if not selected for the great adventure of Real Life.
At the film’s outset, a vacancy opens up, and so the interview process begins. We have a woman with so much love to give, a man who enjoys a good time, a man who reacts firmly in the face of injustice, a man who sees beauty in everything but himself, and… a woman like no other, fascinated indiscriminately with all that life has to offer.
But the vacancy’s emergence is a source of trauma for our Watcher, our Interviewer, and that trauma—along with his own experiences from once being Alive—shapes what he looks for in his candidates. It’s not that he hates the candidates who show love and gentleness, weakness and struggle; it’s simply that he does not want them to suffer as he did in the Living Realm.
“I send flowers,” he rages at his closest friend in limbo, a man who never Lived, “and other people send pigs to eat them!”
And it certainly is true, as we watch the screens revealing the lives of all his other successful candidates—all the souls that he sent out into the world to be born—that many other Real People seem poorly chosen by other Interviewers. Why might that be? The film doesn’t attempt an answer. It’s simply a hard, cruel fact of the system.
What kind of system is this, anyway? The spiritual philosophy in this film does not align with any clear Abrahamic paradigm, but it also doesn’t fit neatly into Eastern concepts—not quite Bardo, not quite a return to Oneness. It might be better viewed as a meditation on parenthood, really: the choice, that is, to give birth to a child, knowing full well what the world contains, and struggling with how best to prepare them for it. But a spiritual Just-So interpretation is not entirely off the table, either, because recent developments in IVF processes have allowed scientists to more comprehensively quantify how many nonviable embryos die long before the fact of pregnancy would even be noticed. We now know that around 60-75% of fertilized eggs do not make it to term—not a number far removed from the one in five souls given a chance at Real Life in this film. This film could be said to explain, then, what happens to all the other conceived humans in their first, fleeting “days” of existence.
Either way, the film has a highly stage-theatre feel to it, which is why its closing scene, a breathtaking rendition of the final canto from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, plays masterfully here in a way that might not be permitted in a film more committed to more expressly cinematic spectacle. And it should be said, too, that Winston Duke is perfect in his role as the Watcher: controlled right up until this final, full immediacy of human feeling. The result is a piece that makes no great revelation about “being human”—but also, one that calls upon its viewers to make a revelation of the experience on whatever ground we stand.
Easier said than done, when we feel constrained by circumstance.
And all the more gloriously done, when we try to surmount it anyway.
SW1. “Wrong Boys Investigate: Election Fraud 2020, pt 1” (SW1)
In previous newsletters, I’ve skipped through a range of podcasts. In this one, I’d like to dwell on three excellent episodes of a series I find to be densely packed with potent insights. SRSLY WRONG is a humorous utopic-leaning political podcast, which makes use of playful skits, tongue-in-cheek “ad” spots, and deep, nuanced conversations on theory, to convey difficult topics in accessible and justice-seeking terms.
I genuinely had a tough time choosing just three episodes, because I also loved the episodes on the theory of economics (222), changing corporations from the inside (247), sheeple (229), the anarchist programme (245), the tragedy of the commons (239), the gatekeeping of “theory” itself (215)… Ugh. You get my point. This podcast meditatively and playfully interrogates a wide range of themes and terminology often taken for granted in political discourse, but critical for developing a deeper understanding of the systems that shape our world, and possible changes to them.
But I’ll just focus on three today, starting with the “gateway” episode for me: “The Wrong Boys Investigate: Election Fraud 2020, pt 1.” The title is a bit misleading, because the episode is actually a wonderful meditation on how difficult it can be to debunk wild claims, and it takes as its core example a failed attempt by the two hosts, Aaron and Shawn, to de-radicalize a friend who gradually came to believe in U.S. election-fraud conspiracies. After exploring some of the reasons why it takes so much more work to disprove extreme claims once they’re believed with great conviction, Aaron and Shawn reflected on some of the common ground they probably should have accentuated, to have any chance of reaching their radicalized friend.
In particular, Aaron and Shawn have their own concerns with the U.S. electoral process, and they felt that these conspiracy theories generated schisms between many people who should in fact have plenty of common cause in their concerns about the state of U.S. democracy. After all, as the pair noted,
The whole system is set up structurally for the benefit of the rich and for the exclusion of everyone else. … Representative democracy is a corrupt version of democracy in the first place. The idea of having a representative of hundreds of thousands of people, making decisions on behalf of them … is a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. It was from its start conceived as something that would make sure the power of the rich would remain strong enough against the masses to defend against the sort of chaotic anarchy of the masses.
Democracy used to be seen as a synonym for anarchy or just for chaos or for a type of system that can’t work because of a whole bunch of misanthropic claims about the capacities of the average human being to make decisions about how to run their own lives, and rationalizations about why the people in power deserve to have that power. When I think about a democracy that I actually want and like and care about, I’m thinking about a system where you don’t just get to vote for your political boss every four years; you get to actively participate in shaping the way society is run, in all the relevant aspects [in which] it’s run, that matter and affect you. The more democratic something is, the more you’re able to—along with the community around you that is also affected together—make and shape these decisions, as a collective body. Not just picking someone from an already limited set of people to make all those decisions for us.
…
But if you really want to have a deep democratic system that brings out the wisdom of crowds and the brilliance of everyday people, political education would be seen as a lifelong part of the democratic process. We think about votes and ballots as the embodiment of democratic process, but at the very least, that’s just one piece. Democracy is built through education, deliberation, and—yes, in some cases—voting, but it’s ultimately about making sure that everyone’s voice matters, and that everyone’s voice is welcome, and that we can come to conclusions by working together in a way that values everyone. That’s what [full] democracy sets out to do.
This meditation on common cause, which takes place well into the podcast, after they’ve described some of their failed attempts to use evidence with their friend, is what sold me on the concept of this podcast. It is, after all, so easy to take pot-shots at people who’ve fallen hard for conspiracy theories, and to mock them for failing to see the obvious. It takes a whole other level of critical thinker—my kind of critical thinker—to reflect on a) the material conditions that drive some people into those radicalized belief-sets in the first place, b) the mistakes that we have made in trying to change minds in such a confrontational way, and c) our ideal end-state: a situation in which common-cause issues are addressed to the extent that everyone, including the once-radicalized, truly feels heard.
Oddly enough (or not oddly at all, depending on how you feel about the show), South Park also illustrated this concept well, in an episode where the girlfriend to a U.S.-President-cipher of an Eric Cartman finally leaves him, and returns to the fold of all the friends who were against his hate-filled politics from the get-go. Only… these morally righteous folks could not let up; they kept ribbing her and ridiculing her for having gone along with his rhetoric for as long as she did. And so, shame kicked in, and she reverted to the side of hate. Should she have been stronger? Should she have done “the right thing” and endured constant mockery for her past mistakes?
There’s the puritanical answer to these questions, and then there’s the answer that better heals the world. We can only ever be free of past oppressions when we’re willing to give up all the transitional power that our positions in historical fights once gave us. A daunting task—but not impossible.
And far less difficult to envision, when podcasts like this one model the kind of behaviour that allows us to remember our ultimate and far more revolutionary ends.
WH1. OnlySky
OnlySky is live, which means that this global humanist now has a lot of work to do. I was waiting to see what “launch” would look like, and while the site is going through normal adjustment phases (especially for commenters acclimating to our comment system, which is streamlined to favour deeper conversation over sensationalist posting), I realize that I might have to change a few things about my approach, too.
First and foremost, I really have to build a reader base again. So it goes, but I’m already not sure if my initial plan is going to work. Yes, I’d been talking out my premise for this forum for a while, but the site has been evolving in development, too. I originally wanted to curate a conversation around dedicated posts that built on one another over the week (i.e., with an opening essay on Mondays and a more constructive, collaborative post on Wednesdays), but now that the site is live, and I’m observing the cadence of what gets signal-boosted and how, that might not be a useful strategy.
Or, maybe it’s just too soon to tell?
It’s difficult not to rush to conclusions in early days. I’ll still start posting the accompanying podcast on the site soon, but the key here will be to pay attention to reader responses, and to make adjustments as I go. I’ve certainly gotten used to adapting mid-stream in the past year. It’s time to put that knowledge to work.
One other reflective moment came from the first media spot I did for OnlySky, on The Thinking Atheist’s podcast. It was a bit of a blast from the past for me, because the host is definitely someone who, living in deep Bible-belt USA, establishes himself through a firm, emphatic anti-theism. Other interviewees also invoked the anger that they feel at the rise of Christian nationalism/militia groups in the U.S., and what they consider to be the stupidity of religion… which is not in keeping with my humanism, but understandable within a context where the church/state divide has been crumbling.
I, meanwhile, live in a Catholic country where shockingly one can be openly secular humanist and run for president—something that would be unheard of in Evangelical-driven US political culture. So, it was an interesting interview. I still got to stump for my global humanism and critique of surrounding institutions! But now I have to follow through—and I plan to. I already have a really challenging article in the works for the features section, for instance, which will look calmly and empathetically at a site of extremely violent actions elsewhere in the world. And I hope to pitch other such pieces thereafter, to really solidify the work that a global humanist means to do.
And… beyond all that, we’ll just see what happens next, I suppose?
Nothing ever works exactly right for me the first time—but I’m definitely getting better at rolling with the initial failures.
SC1. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Speaking of rolling with failure (and other forms of play in the creation of better worlds!), I know I mentioned in another Threedom! that I had reservations about reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, but I dove into it all the same this past month—and had to chuckle at what various critiques of the book clearly missed about its stated aims.
This is historiography more than anthropology: the study of the writing of history, with all the biases that invariably contains. Certainly, there are many anthropological case studies in this book, but the vast majority of the work is still more an exploration of why we have certain stories of history, and not others. Instead of serving as a definitive account of humanity’s progress, the book’s greatest strength lies in how it illustrates the deep biases that shape our most “obvious” human histories, as they’ve been presented in a range of political science, philosophical, anthropological theory.
Everything has a context.
Even and especially a lot of what we now take to be “just common sense”.
The core idea of Graeber and Wengrow’s 600+ page tome is this:
Contemporary Western-industrial societies conceive of themselves as a kind of upper echelon in the history of human organization, and believe that human beings had to pass through a series of more primitive developmental stages to achieve their level of self-evidently advanced political activities. As this story of humanity goes, first we were hunter-gatherers, and clearly could not achieve much in the way of political or cultural nuance, because most of our time was spent scraping by to live. Only with agriculture, the tale continues, did we develop the leisure time that allowed us to explore different opportunities, build more elaborate social groupings, and advance human rights and justices causes like never before.
And all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is just a story.
(Be brave, my Sid Meier’s Civilization-loving heart!)
Okay, no—not exactly: it’s not “just” a story. As Graeber and Wengrow illustrate, it’s a story of civilization that Western-industrial countries started telling themselves in reaction to a body of socially destabilizing reports from explorers who had debated different political arrangements with various Indigenous groups in the Americas. Many of these new discursive partners, coming from communities where theoretical debate was a more quotidian political activity, regarded Europeans as less free, less rich, and certainly less just—after all, just look at their restrictive approaches to work and law, and their rationalizations for poverty on their streets!
Soon after, folks in Europe—including people who had not ventured to the New World themselves!—took up the invitation presented by these popular travelogues, and made up outsider-tales of their own, as a narrative foil to critique what they disliked about their cultures, too. And amid this churn of new intel and social commentary, so much of which alarmingly seemed to challenge the intrinsic superiority of Western societies, a body of core philosophical texts began to form—through essay contests, and general magazines—that would more soundly reassert a political hierarchy in which European orders were clearly superior to all others.
From this delicious story of the history of European political science, Graeber and Wengrow then set about destabilizing the “common sense” version of humanity’s progression from “primitive and simple” to “civilized and advanced” political cultures. They debunk the idea that hunter-gatherer lifestyles were so stark as to deny members with time for leisure and culture-building. They challenge the idea that hunter-gatherers didn’t have intricate forms of social order, and that they hadn’t left their own, massive structures and signs of far-ranging trade in the archaeological record.
The two further debunk the idea of a primitive “innocence” by illustrating that elaborate tyrannies were absolutely possible before agriculture (something that many argued could only happen after the establishment of property in its current form), and they also present a number of case studies that illustrate how agricultural development was by no means universally desired or seen as superior by ancient peoples. Its normalization came in fits and spurts, and with plenty of backtracking.
This story of a far more fluid and experimental past, one in which human beings dabbled in all manner of sociopolitical relationship, then leads to the book’s main question: What got us locked into such a severe and unequal social order, when our ancestors were clearly capable of so much more variation in society-building, and inventiveness in the construction of their own lives? Where do we set the blame, when the rise of agriculture can no longer be used as a decisive dividing line between an age of “simple”, idyllic, pre-oppression living and one of dictatorial oppression?
Theirs is a worthy book to idle in a while, then—but only if you go into it with an exploratory mindset, because that’s the real crux of this text’s purpose. Yes, the authors obviously present anthropological arguments, and arrive at related conclusions. But all throughout, they’re mostly cautioning against advancing a too-definitive an approach to human history, by illustrating the ways in which political-science, philosophical, and anthropological stories of human “progress” have ever and always been shaped by their authors’ immediate contexts.
This is a book made for mental “stretching”, in other words, so as to allow for multiple ideas of human development—and multiple possibilities for human civilization!—to be held together (and hopefully all the more constructively) in mind.
M2. A photo
A pause. A breath. I live at the northern outskirts of my city, where I can see the dwellings of people from all manner of socioeconomic class pretty much from my balcony, and where I can wander out a little ways to immerse myself in more nature.
And sometimes, as I do—as I did, for instance, on the near-sundown stroll captured in the above photo, taken on a bridge with a bright orange archway that swayed just a touch in the stiff evening breeze—I think about the limits of our discourse. All our human chatter. All that feels so urgent to us online, and in dialogue with one another: how we speak of the past; how we react in the present; how we dream for the future.
Down in the shallows of this glistening river, a flock of long-legged, black-bodied phimosus infuscatus, called “coquito” locally and “bare-faced ibis” elsewhere, use their long curved beaks to pick through the stones for sustenance. The sun readies to set behind the distant mountain, hazy blue from the shadows and the moisture in the air, and trees and shrubbery lining the riverbanks are susurrous in the wind. Distant apartment complexes pock the scene: strange, rigid new growth of brick and concrete, with hints at further propagation in the construction equipment also looming high.
Even in trying to describe a natural scene, though, do you see how many histories, how many cultures and contexts I invoke? There’s no way to speak even of one’s experience away from discourse without also somehow coming right back to it.
So why keep the urge to pretend it could be otherwise? There’s a myth of the pristine that we must do away with, to fully appreciate our wandering into “simpler” realms. As much as we might think ourselves cleansed or otherwise refreshed by our venturing out into nature—away from the keyboard, away from the discourse!—we’re still at risk of shaping the experience within the parameters of what we were initially escaping from—and, more critically, how we choose to use the experience when we return to a far more storied human realm.
Does that mean it’s impossible to immerse oneself more fully in nature on its own terms? Unsure. Next time I go for a deeper wander, for instance, I think I’ll tell no one about what I saw there, or how it made me feel. And maybe I won’t even take a single photo of it to share!
But now that I’ve made this promise, have I not already bounded the experience?
Maybe the aim is not to fight with the fact that we are living histories, wherever we might wander, and wherever we may roam. Maybe the aim is simply to deepen our awareness of how many different histories are pulling at us all the time.
V2. The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
The power of Shakespeare’s Macbeth lies in how it grapples with the power of the Word. A traitor is one who swears to something, then breaks their Word. But a traitor is also one who speaks treason in his wife’s ear, then dares to hesitate on execution—because the Word has already been uttered, no? It has already created a reality that now compels its pursuit to the very bitter end. And even if you yourself did not speak the Word into being—even if the Word was given to you unasked by supernatural beings—are you not obliged to follow that Word, too? Is that Word from authority no less undeniable than the Word of, say, a king who sends you off to die in battle?
But also, is the Word, while absolute, always to be trusted? Or can the Word be uttered in a way that is both accurate and unwavering, and also… misleading? Can confidence in the surface truth of a given Word not still consign a man to his doom?
It would be foolish to pretend that ours is an age where a Word does not have power, but it is fair to say that in 11th-century Scotland, when and where the events of this play were set, there was a concept that has fallen largely into disuse today: the notion of the “wyrd”, which is a worldly pull that lures us to our fate.
Many versions of Macbeth try to convey that estranging quality through minimalism, but Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) is easily one of the best in this regard. Black and white, in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio (the size of a 35mm frame, to accentuate the classical effect), Coen’s Macbeth builds a smoky, chiaroscuro-driven study not so much of contrasts, but of the inevitability of greys in life throughout.
And as for the Word of the Bard? Oh, the Word is resolute, as ever (if also streamlined in Coen’s scripting, to accentuate his attention to a central theme), but thanks to exquisite cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel, the characters also hang about in worlds of relentless uncertainty about its implications and obligations.
When a Shakespearean play has been staged this often, there are key moments that serve as signatures for directorial style. “Is that a dagger I see before me?” has often been performed quite literally, for instance, with an illusion of a dagger hanging in midair before Macbeth—but in Coen’s version, it is but a well-placed glint off the handle of a chamber door. Thanks in large part to shot selection (which favours classic close-ups), we are instead called to dwell upon the troubled mind that knows it has lost its capacity for discernment: real or illusion, destiny or choice, guilt or circumstance.
Another key moment in Coen’s thesis comes with Lady Macbeth, in her last, supposedly sleepwalking soliloquy. Played to strong effect by Frances McDormand, Lady Macbeth is overheard confessing to her crimes, but in many versions this is all passively done—the body involuntarily uttering what the conscious mind seeks to suppress. In Coen’s, though, there is one devastating moment when she looks back at those watching her in the night, as she speaks her final lines—and in that backward glance, there is a profound change in interpretation. Did she really confess unconsciously? Or had she used the ruse of sleepwalking to confess?
Not all the choices in this piece were to my preference, granted. I am, for instance, forever smitten with Ian McKellen’s take on the classic “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” soliloquy. I understood why Denzel Washington’s Macbeth takes a flatter, more bitten-off approach to these lines—his whole performance is dissociative, a mask of inevitability that carries the weary man within it along the tether of his fate. But it was not as distinct a performance as I would have wished.
Easily stealing the whole film, though, was Kathryn Hunter as the Wyrd Sisters—because yes, she is all three witches—and more. Between her contortionist’s body, the features of age that she wears in their full splendor, and a wonderful guttural corvid squawk, she reconfigures these characters as crows that sometimes take human aspect. The physicality of her theatre in both critical scenes is a rare gift in today’s cinema, and also serves to uphold the liminality of this film’s “natural” world—a world where men not born of women yet exist, and whole forests can march upon a castle, and a spot might well persist even if it cannot, to the naked eye, be seen.
Taken as a whole, then, Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth earns the viewer’s return to old lines and a seasoned tale. There are times when diving into past rhetoric is dangerous escapism, but Coen’s piece, in calling sharp attention to the way that Word has power, does not leave the story as a relic of the past. Today, online and in our courts, in international negotiations and regional debate, the Word still has power—whether or not it’s ever telling us the full truth.
We simply tremble less around the wyrd-ness of it all, these days… and quite possibly, to our detriment, and impending fall.
SC2. “The History of Predicting the Future,” by Amanda Rees
So here’s a fun article that leapt out at me both because it touches on my work as a speculative-fiction writer, and because it reveals a rather cursory flattening of Marx (among others, but we’ll just stick to the Marx) in some of its most potent lines.
Amanda Rees’s “The History of Predicting the Future” looks at what drives us to try to anticipate the future through predictive modelling in the first place, and then moves through major problems with the endeavour, both in theory and in practice. But the crux of the piece, for me, lies in how she chose to describe two schools of thought with significant failings. As Rees writes,
AS THESE STRATEGIES have continued to evolve, two very different philosophies for predicting communal futures have emerged, particularly at the global, national, and corporate level. Each reflects different assumptions about the nature of the relationship between fate, fluidity, and human agency.
Understanding previous events as indicators of what’s to come has allowed some forecasters to treat human history as a series of patterns, where clear cycles, waves, or sequences can be identified in the past and can therefore be expected to recur in the future. This is based on the success of the natural sciences in crafting general laws from accumulated empirical evidence. Followers of this approach included scholars as diverse as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Tonynbee, Nicolai Kondratiev, and, of course, Turchin. But whether they were predicting the decline of the West, the emergence of a communist or scientific utopia, or the likely recurrence of global economic waves, their success has been limited.
…
Another set of forecasters, meanwhile, argue that the pace and scope of techno-economic innovation are creating a future that will be qualitatively different from past and present. Followers of this approach search not for patterns, but for emergent variables from which futures can be extrapolated. So rather than predicting one definitive future, it becomes easier to model a set of possibilities that become more or less likely, depending on the choices that are made. Examples of this would include simulations like World3 and the war games mentioned earlier. Many science fiction writers and futurologists also use this strategy to map the future. In the 1930s, for instance, H. G. Wells took to the BBC to broadcast a call for “professors of forethought,” rather than of history. He argued that this was the way to prepare the country for unexpected changes, such as those brought by the automobile.
As readers here no doubt already know, I do not like strict binaries, and this one is an especially illustrative example of how much they overlook.
If you recall what I noted in M1, around a common paraphrase of Marx, Marx’s monograph on a failed mid-19th-century revolution does indeed discuss history in replicative terms—but he was also arguing that this sort of historical patterning can and should be resisted, by allowing a proper “burial” of past rhetorical cycles so as to make way for a better world ahead. Or, as he wrote:
The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past; it can draw that only from the future.
Meanwhile, on the “other” side of the binary constructed by Rees, you have Wells arguing for more “professors of forethought”, people who can anticipate known and unknown unknowns alike. But on the basis of what? No science-fiction writer comes to their work without a context; we are all schooled in imaginative possibilities by the works of those who’ve come before us (and if not on the page, then in the world around us). There is no such thing as a disembodied theorist, or theory.
Rees constructed this narrative binary, of course, to provide a kind of answer at the article’s end: a proposed a synthesis from a contrived dissent, to offer the reader a pleasing resolution. That trick isn’t the strongest—but the overall idea of the article is still sound, for all its rhetorical handwaving. We are driven by a strong compulsion to understand the future soon enough to be able to “do” something about it. And as our current passage through an unfortunately dull-witted timeline clearly suggests… we will also probably fail more often than not to get it right.
How shall we live in this knowledge without deepening in despair?
SW2. “Disability Justice with Lateef McLeod” (SW2)
The next episode of SRSLY WRONG I want to call your attention to was refreshing on a few levels. In “Disability Justice with Lateef McLeod” (direct MP3 link here) we hear from Lateef McLeod on the importance of integrating, naturalizing, and foregrounding issues of disability justice and related accessibility concerns into any work we do to prefigure* better societies.
(“Prefiguration” acknowledges the need for a more pragmatic path to utopia; we can rarely upturn an entire civilization’s worth of toxic practices overnight, so what we need to do is try to inscribe as many deeply revolutionary ideas and practices into our existing material realities—and not just to bring us closer to our ideal ends, but also to habit the practice of engaging in related work, and seeing its results.)
You can follow the episode’s transcript here, but if you’re able to listen, I highly recommend doing so, because what immediately struck me about McLeod was his voice. He uses AAC technology, Augmented and Alternative Communication—which most of us know from generic audiobook readers and Stephen Hawking’s famous voice—but this was I think the first time in my whole darned life that I’d actually heard a distinctly Black-ethnic voice used to represent a disabled person.
And it blew my wee little mind—because right until I heard it, I realized that I’d never taken the time to think about what it must be like to have such a limited range of voices to choose from. To have to go through your whole life speaking through a generic register that didn’t represent how people around you use language, simply because you couldn’t operate your vocal chords in a certain way.
But, in some ways, that kind of mental “stretching” shouldn’t have surprised me, because similar calls to action underpinned the whole episode. Interwoven with the trio’s commentary about why disability cannot ever be seen as a side conversation in any meaningful justice work was a series of skits that illustrate how disability advocacy is never fully finished—at least, not if you’re doing it right. In these skits, a group of activists is presented with an issue of access to their meeting space, but even after they’ve solved their first problem, another problem arises, and another. After putting in the work over time, they finally come to this resolution:
Activist 1
Wow, you did a really great job as the access coordinator on this week’s meeting. I think we may have succeeded in making sure every access need we know of is met.
Activist 3
Thanks. Well, I hope so. But there’s always a possibility that we’ll find more. We’re making it a priority to request feedback on access needs actively. We ask people to state their access needs at the start of our meetings as part of the way to introduce themselves, creating a culture where people think actively about how to make sure that everybody can be included. I think it is a good way to familiarize ourselves with new members that join.Activist 2
Yes. I mean, it is great we have a lot of new members showing up. My access needs have been met from the start I guess, but seeing all these new people here, I realize that their access needs are tied up in my own because we were missing out on all these voices and we can’t really get free unless we all get free together.
Activist 1
Y’know, I didn’t even realize until we put in the soft lighting and the fragrance-free requirements, but I actually prefer things like that. Sometimes being around those things gives me a headache. And y’know, it sounds like a lot when you put it all in a list, but when you remember each of these needs isn’t something abstract, it represents a real person who has things to contribute, and people who are often left out of spaces like this, you really realize how important it is.
Activist 3
Yeah, and you learn to think about it. Learn to pay attention to it. And each piece feels smaller and smaller when it becomes normalized. It’s work, but it’s not that much work, especially when you plan for it. And the more we make our work accessible, the better off we all are.
It’s a really happy ending, but getting there took some trial and error—and also involved overcoming many unhelpful attitudes. In previous sections, one of the activists immediately went on the defense when someone else’s unmet needs came up; he was so worried about being blamed for having failed to meet a need that he fixated on the idea that it wasn’t his job. Meanwhile, another activist did something that I probably would have done myself, in other phases of my life: He allowed himself to be crushed by his failure to have anticipated every need right out the gate, and spiralled into self-loathing at his failure to facilitate properly.
Both attitudes are human, and unhelpful.
In this happy ending, then, the incorporation of disability justice as something that everyone has an active and ongoing responsibility to address not only helps individual members to be heard, but also changes the entire group dynamic around power. It reduces opportunities to think of any setback as a chance to lay blame on individuals, and instead cultivates communally oriented problem-solving, in which every oversight becomes an opportunity to reflect together, and to strive to do better going forward.
This, to me, was a perfect encapsulation of why we impoverish ourselves by viewing justice issues through narrow categorical lenses—a matter that is, of helping “those people” or “that group.” Certainly, a well-developed democratic space will help people who use labels that you, individually, do not—but it should never be a patronizing sense of charity that informs our investment in one another. We are all made more “capable” when a community of full inclusion is normalized as our collective goal.
WH2. Anarchist/mutual-aid networks
As much as I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with the OnlySky platform, I know that I actually have two uphill battles ahead of me, with respect to what I know will be conventional rhetoric and focus on the site. One such battle, as I noted in WH1, relates to the fact that a site seeking to address the full nonreligious spectrum is going to include (and in many ways still be guided by) folks engaged in more direct critiques of religious text, doctrine, and worldly action. I belong to a different contingent; my humanism is much more focussed on how we can all work to improve human agency from whatever cosmologies we might have. Now, granted, the site’s mandate is built in my favour—but I still have a lot of work to do to keep pushing our overall conversation into less combative and more constructive modes.
(See, for instance, my Monday post, “Conspiracy cultivation (and me, and you)”, on how some of our everyday actions on social media unfortunately help to foster a culture that can all the better sustain wildly toxic conspiracy theories.)
But the second uphill battle is built into the site’s U.S. focus, which also tends to mean its focus on U.S. institutions. And… that’s a tricky one, for me as a global humanist—because as I seek to advance more humanist public policy, I find myself questioning whether existing institutions are really going to provide us with the answers our hurting world requires. As Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020) noted, plenty of traditional economies (and their institutions) are under threat from climate change pressures alone. Meanwhile, the U.S. hasn’t ever had a real democracy, but the tightrope of political action currently around voters’ rights and critical judicial appointments (and their unfolding consequences) might as well have become a noose.
Has my situation in Colombia “radicalized” me? Yes. I’ve slipped through a very important societal crack, and even though I was always a strong advocate of immigrant rights before this set of experiences… firsthand experience has lent an edge to my views that will never go away, and always inform my choices here on out.
Even then, though, when I look to and listen in on many conversations taking place among mutual-aid, anarchist, and broadly leftist groups in the U.S. and Canada, I realize that there is already a significant groundswell of folks trying to turn political efforts inward: to create more hyper-regional locii of global governance, and figure out better ways to care for local communities through direct democracy.
So, I’m going to say that I’ve been made more exploratory, more open to playing with many different ideas held in tension—and I sincerely hope that some of my future writings will better convey the fruits of that process.
All I know is, the world is undergoing a wide range of uncertainties for which the confident depictions of social order given to me as a child no longer pass muster—and probably never did. I was ignorant to the full consequences of these biased stories of our potential—and to the fullness of possibilities that exist.
Knowing the shape of my ignorance, though, has since allowed me to work to fill it up with new knowledge. And that work—while neverending—is now as much a joy as it is a moral obligation to take up, and call my own.
V3. The Golden Girls (1985-1992)
I know, I know, this seems a bit out of left field, considering the other two pieces of visual media discussed in this issue, but Betty White’s passing hit a nostalgia switch, and I took up re-watching the first three seasons over meal breaks this past month. And… of course, because I can never switch off my brain for basic “comfort viewing”, I was struck by a few things of immediate relevance to my routine banging-on about the importance of historiography.
One of them has to do with sheer culture shock, because this piece set in 1980s Miami, among four older widowed women living their best lives together (due to the impossibility of living alone on their incomes), serves as a stark reminder of how much the lifestyle wars have escalated in ensuing decades. Raised in the Depression, these women get by industriously, and although we sometimes see new technology—VCRs, handheld cameras—these are folks who still feel comfortable sharing a bed to make space for guests, and this is still a household that opens its doors for extremely low-key wedding receptions and local political events.
Another key difference is that these four white women (Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia) are much more in touch with their individual heritages—which allows the show’s fleeting brush with systemic racism, through one of Dorothy’s brilliant students in Season Two, to grapple with a sharp contrast between the immigrant-built “America” of a nostalgic past and the migratory restrictions of the present. (It’s not the most incisive episode, granted, because Rose is fixated on the idea of “illegality”, but it also makes a point of contradicting these older women’s naive ideas that “legality” in the U.S. immigration system is anything but arbitrary.)
These characters’ individual heritages also speak to how much we’ve “grouped up” notions of whiteness in these past decades. That kind of uniformity-thinking was always present, but in shows like this one, you can really see how much we’ve lost with respect to vocabularies capable of naming and connecting with the immigrant journeys in all our families. (I say this as a Canadian who can trace roots back to perhaps the first “white” child born in the colonies, but who also chose to emigrate.)
Is The Golden Girls without its cringe? Oh goodness no. Sporadically, it plays on transphobia, biphobia, and a few racist assumptions (that other characters shut down)—but it’s also striking that the eldest of the group, Sophia, is always on the side of “Mind Your Own Business” when it comes to others’ lives. This, too, serves as a pointed reminder that there is no clear generational divide in the struggle for justice; her daughter’s generation in some ways comes off as far more judgmental (or just plain nervous) about natural human variation than her own.
One last striking note, then: As I’ve remarked in other issues of Threedom!, many of our neoliberalist activist communities are shaped by a misguided belief that representation will fix everything. It won’t, but we still spend so much energy on those battles that we often lose sight of the bigger systemic changes required to bring all demographics closer to equity. And so, in The Golden Girls—a show expressly about the later-life sexual, relational, intellectual, and social dynamism of women—we find yet another sharp reminder that we’re often reinventing the wheel in contemporary debate. Yes, shows like Grace & Frankie have absolutely been developed with historical awareness, but we also first had to get through that long, tedious era of Sex & the City fever—which was presented as if it were revolutionary for centring sexual women.
And the belief stuck, too! I know quite a few folks who believe that women’s sexuality wasn’t something we talked about until recently: that women werenaturally repressed, that shows like Sex & the City (with all its very conventional, I-bet-at-least-one-of-the-four-would-have-voted-for-Trump white feminism) were “breaking the mold”.
All marketing, though. All an illusion of subversive firsts to sell new products.
Meanwhile, so long as there have been human beings, there have been human beings expressing themselves in all quadrants of their lives. I highly recommend, for instance, going back to pre-Hays Code films, because before the 1934 morality laws cut-off, you saw wide-ranging female performances of gender, sex, and orientation in major mainstream features.
Then Hollywood crushed the presence of such things in film until 1968… or, well… sort of—because if you watch films from the Hays period, you’ll still see plenty of exceptionally clever coding in characters, scenes, and contexts. People didn’t stop being people, after all, just because the laws said they couldn’t perform themselves in specific ways. We all just got better at finding different ways to tell our tales.
And in 1960s through late 1980s sitcoms, prime time, and prominent talk shows? Oh my yes, variation yet abounded: in the performers, as in the lifestyles being performed.
Watching The Golden Girls, then, I’m almost left doubting the Marxist quotation discussed in M1: a quotation that suggests history inevitably shapes the context of our current struggle, and that we tend to draw from it, to cloak ourselves in it, to our great ruin in the present. If we did pull more from our history, we might instead find ourselves fortified by a sense of continuity with struggles come before. Instead, in a neoliberal context that desperately needs “firsts” to move merchandise and sell brands, the context that shapes us seems to be one of relentless a-historicity. And thus are we driven, over and over, unwittingly into battles already fought and (once) won.
So, how do we break free of this pernicious cycle? How do we not only learn to embrace the best of our pasts, but also to rebuild our current systems in such a way that might lessen the likelihood of those fuller histories being forgotten again?
SC3. “The Fallacy of Representation,” by Camonghne Felix
I swapped out my original third article to make space for this wonderfully resonant, late-breaking piece from The Cut, Camonghne Felix’s “The Fallacy of Representation.” The piece is a retrospective, involving the ten-year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death and a range of activist movements and supposed “wins” in that same timeframe.
I’ll just go ahead a post a few choice sections from the piece. I think you’ll be able to guess immediately what leapt out at me:
What my generation started to learn about power the day of Obama’s Baltimore remarks was that the power of the people might never translate to the presidency. That emulating the power structures that govern us could only get us so far. Most critically, we started to learn that, regardless of how successful representation might appear, representation alone isn’t The Work. One too many “Cousin Pookie” references on top of President Obama’s suggestion that Black poor mothers feed their children cold Popeye’s for breakfast, and we’ve seen representation’s ugliness made plain.
And,
Representation has, in many ways, gotten us closer to the truth about how our politics actually work. And it’s taught us everything we need to know about power: that it’s a limited resource. That figureheads of democracy are just figureheads unless the tools of democracy belong equally to the people furthest from the power structure. It taught us that while the ruling class has racial permeability, our ability to move through the corridors of power doesn’t inherently constitute an ability to change the structural functions of power to empower. And it taught us that no matter who owns the keys to the White House, the power and persuasion of the executive branch will likely bend toward it.
And,
But what I discovered is that representation is, fundamentally, a metaphor. And a metaphor is made up of two parts, what Jericho Brown calls, the tenor and the vehicle. The vehicle of the metaphor, in its most literal sense, brings you closer to the thing you want to know more about, moves you closer to meaning. We say, “There is power in representation,” because power is the thing we want to know more about. And when we talk about representation in our politics, what we’re trying to understand is how power works and then how to emulate it. This is representation’s true utility: it tells us what we need to know about power so that we can get around it. It’s not the nail; it’s the hammer.
Oh be still my heart.
It is no surprise that, when I bang on about representation not being enough, there is very little purchase to any of my claims. I’m not grousing about that, either! It’s still my responsibility to do my part to normalize conversation about these most critical issues of social equity. If I were only saying these things to be platformed, to gain cache, I’d be operating at cross-purposes with my stated goals.
Nevertheless, reading articles like the above reassures me that maybe change in our activist strategies is on the way! When I see these conversations coming from the people who do have the cache, the platform, and the positioning to speak such truths with full authority, I certainly start to get excited about the possibility of a better discourse.
And do I also grieve, alongside this writer, the disappointments and setbacks that led her to this weary (if also highly resonant) conclusion? Do I not also wish that Obama, say, wasn’t the right-of-centrist he always seemed to me to be, in both his speeches and his policies? Do I not also wish that people didn’t have to learn the hard way that even a campaign funded by small donations would mean nothing if the elected politician still had to play ball with Wall Street investors who refused to fund new welfare projects unless Obama allowed them all their aggressive fracking plans? Do I not also wish that the Nobel Peace Prize wasn’t given to a drone-strike president who also intensified deportation activities on U.S. soil?
Of course I do. Of course.
There is so much to grieve together, when reading of someone else’s journey toward disillusionment in an idea of power of representation that I’ve always found flawed.
I’m also simply elated to see that journey shared widely—because maybe, through Felix, and other openly disillusioned writers like her, it will motivate real change in related movements: In how we organize. In how we invest our energy. In how we talk about “win conditions” in the struggle for greater equity.
And if so? Oh, I also cannot wait to see what new vocabularies and approaches might grow out of the rhetorical beginnings seeded here.
SW3. “Reading Black Anarchists with St. Andrew” (SW3)
Okay, now hear me out: What’s not to love in an exploration of better justice that involves rewriting a beloved children’s classic? For most of its run-time, “Reading Black Anarchists with St. Andrew” beautifully articulates why it’s incredibly misleading and counterproductive to position racialized justice as a cause in tension with class and/or workers’ justice. The discourse between Aaron and Shawn and Saint Andrew in the show’s “theory” components is excellent—clearly outlining and debunking a great deal of rhetoric used to turn racialized and classist activism into competing tribes.
Nevertheless, the skits in this episode are also highly memorable, standalone arguments for how best to carry all the aforementioned knowledge more fully into the “real world”—and all with the help of a children’s book. In particular, the team looks at the failings of Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. Supposedly a book commenting on the horrible foolishness of racism, it has its problems: for instance, in the way that the two groups’ struggles are equivocated, and the way that Star-Bellied Sneetches continue to try to differentiate themselves once the Plain-Bellied Sneetches have found a way to bridge their demographic divide.
Drawing from Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s “The Progressive Plantation: Racism Inside White Radical Social Change Groups”, Aaron and Shawn imagine a better future for these Sneetches. I’ll excerpt a bit below, but as with most children’s books, it’s definitely better to hear the work performed:
The Sneetches II
With Apologies to Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin & Dr. SeussNow, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches Had none upon thars.
Those stars weren't so big. They were really so small
You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.
Because the Star-Belly Sneetches Had This Mark Upon Thars
They would brag, "We’re all equal, I don’t even see stars."
With their snoots in the air, they would snort and they’d bob,
While the star-bellied bosses hired other star-bellies for jobs.
And if a plain-belly sneetch does get a higher vocation,
Their paycheck depends on defending the corporation,
They’re the plain-belly rep, tasked to stop discrimination
And if racism continues, the star-bellied bosses replace ‘em
…
Many left wing sneetches with stars still find themselves caught
And ultimately conditioned with the same star-supremacist thoughts
You find elsewhere in star-bellied supremacist civ
That exploits and extracts more than plain-bellies would give
So plain-belly sneetches might not trust or work united
With star-bellied sneetches who don’t try to fight it
Who don’t amplify plain-belly sneetches struggles as real
And instead hide in delusions to protect star-bellied feels
…
The working class sneetches have bellies of all types
With different struggles and different dislikes
Listen to everyone, lived experience is personal
The fight for all bellies dissimilar can be made universal
Oppressed sneetches have a right to self-determination
To set their own rules and make their own organizations
They don’t need backseat star-bellied opticians
Remember: One sneetch mouth to talk; two sneetch ears to listen
This is basic, it’s justice, it should just be elementary
But star-bellied radicals want to debate it endlessly
It’s not fun to confront shortcomings, your own especially
But you can’t confront sneetch society without confronting star supremacy!
If it’s not already obvious to readers, I really do love the amount of play that goes into the SRSLY WRONG podcast. There are so many other episodes that I would have loved to share, but I think these three give a decent sense of range and attitude in the production—because it has its segments focussed on theory, and wonderfully rich discussions with relevant experts, but… play is also important!
I use speculative fiction, after all, to explore the consequences of different alt-justices. In a similar vein, these hosts use skits—sometimes scripted, sometimes off the cuff—to tease out the nuances and absurdities of topics in other parts of their show.
And all of it is constructive, because you can feel in every part of their podcast a sincere desire to explore the vocabularies given to us by our social contracts, along with the vocabularies we’re endlessly creating with one another—and then to use that exploratory process to make more informed choices about which ideas will most usefully advance us into more collaborative and equitable social futures.
Simply put, for all the uncertainty and all the gaps that still exist in my life (as in the world)… I feel quite optimistic when listening to their work.
I hope some of you will, too.
WH3. Constructive dissent [a.k.a. not the Substack/Meta/Twitter model]
I received the most amusing bit of backhanded praise this past month, when someone remarked that I seemed to understand the system of publishing far better than most—so, why wasn’t I more successful in it? If I knew how to “game” it, why didn’t I?
This was the most darling little observation, though, because it came packed with two major logical leaps: 1) that understanding “the game” is the same as having power within it, and 2) that understanding “the game” is reason to try to win it.
The first is fascinating, because it feels like an extension of flawed meritocratic thinking, namely: “You’re so smart! Surely smart people should be the winners in society, no?” Good gracious, no. Everything about that premise is wrong.
But it’s this second logical leap that I really want to explore, because as often as I dwell on my many failures to achieve what I set out to do, some of my most important self-education has come from interrogating what I was setting out to do in the first place… and then to get more comfortable openly saying, “Oh, I think I might have been misguided in my aspirations. I need to rethink my priorities, not my strategies.”
I’m a bit of an odd duck in my literary industries, for instance, because I don’t regard dissent as intrinsically dangerous or hostile—or as something that one should wield as a measure of intellectual and moral superiority. Instead, I celebrate a range of paths to the goal of prefiguring and then building a better world. This means, for instance, that I’ll openly observe how neoliberalism shapes the value of individual identity—and still wholeheartedly signal-boost fellow writers who have embraced this pathway, as a means of building up the importance of their work in an unjust system.
Why? Great question—because I think that’s the part that makes many unsure of what to do with me, and maybe more reluctant to support most of what I do. (And that’s fine! No grousing. Just observing human behaviour with interest.) It really is difficult to know where to “place” me, after all, if I don’t want to be, say, read first and foremost because of my “labels.”
Does… does that mean I’m anti-label? Is this a slippery slope to radical conservatism?
(No. Good gravy, no.)
But… why not? If I disagree with a popular form of activism-within-capitalism—if I have no interest in using it to advance my own writing career and to broaden my own platform—why aren’t I at least raging against it, some might ask. Surely I could just as easily shoot up in the market if I took an incendiary stance! Built up a tribe of naysayers! Fashioned myself as a contrarian and looked the other way when all sorts of toxic contrarians band-wagoned around me as “clearly” one of their own!
Ugh.
Constructive dissent is not actually difficult. It’s just that, thanks to major sites like Substack, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter, along with apps like Spotify, we’re habituated to seeing discourse about dissent through an extremely narrow lens. Dissent, the way these forums try to craft the historical narrative, is always about censorship—or, to be more precise, about cultivating an aesthetic and identity around the act of defying censorship. X doesn’t want you to know Y! Cancel culture is coming for Z! Subscribe to A, B, and C to fight the power!
Combative dissent is so lucrative for capitalist industry that we all tend to hanker for our next fix. But we don’t have to—and we should at least try to practise other ways of engaging with so much divergence in our wealth of human experiences and outlooks.
How? Well, that’s where the nifty business of humanities-inspired humanism comes in. I call these “stretching” exercises, but they’re really just about learning to hold ideas in tension, and to trace the external manifestations of specific beliefs to any number of underlying root causes. The aim here is to understand the foundations—and to focus on the foundations—of dissenting points of view.
Why? Because any given flash-fire of debate didn’t emerge from the ether. When one person says or does something that another person then finds problematic (to say the least), and when a wildfire of response whips up around the established binary of moral reaction… What actually is achieved, at the end of the day? What have we accomplished, except to train ourselves yet again to see these flash-points as the most important value-tests in our lives?
Conversely, though, what if we could learn to better deny ourselves, and others, the addictive high of provocation and response? It’s not easy to do, mind you! But it is thoroughly rewarding, when habituated, because it frees us from having our energy (and blood pressure) rise at the beck and call of another’s provocation. It lets us reflect more consistently on our moral baselines on more comprehensive terms, and to imagine a less reaction-based approach to enacting our moral views within the world.
And yes, this is “dull” work, comparatively. It’s certainly not as thrilling as reacting to the next trending controversy in a way that affirms you’re part of the “right” tribe. This is why I have very little expectation of ever being “popular” in these systems (or really, even interest in that aim)—but also, why I’ve learned not to see popularity and “winning” in this unjust system as (for me) the most important goal.
And if you believe otherwise? Well, sure, I’ll support you in your struggle—because I know that, at the end of the day, we’re all simply trying to get a little more safety, a little more security, in a mad, mad world.
M3. Fred Rogers’ “The Truth Will Set Me Free”
I’m cheating a bit here, with my closing segment, because I said I’d only stick to three episodes of SRSLY WRONG, but in “The Emotional Intelligence Spectacular,” there was a lovely closing clip by—who else?—Mr. Rogers, speaking about the importance of “emotional archeaology”: a careful and honest exploration of one’s feelings.
And I think it’s a perfect closer for this issue, too.
Sometimes I’m deeply unsettled to realize how much more than “emotional archaeology” we need today, because our highly commercialized culture leaves us struggling mightily not to forget our often more informed and articulate pasts.
And yet, the work of reforming the world around us is invariably tied up in the work of reforming how we, ourselves, move within it. To that end, then… Is there even a single note in this little ditty for children a few decades’ past that doesn’t still ring true—for all of us, adults and kippers alike—today?
I wish I could find a version of it that stands alone, mind you—but at least the following link jumps directly to where the recording shows up on the podcast:
And here are Mr. Rogers’ words, for those who don’t want to click through:
Those things have deep roots. I guess that— You know, I must be an emotional archaeologist, because I keep looking for the roots of things, particularly the roots of behaviour, and why I feel certain ways about certain things. The truth is inside of us, and it’s wonderful when we have the courage to tell it.
What if I were very, very sad
And all I did was smile?
I wonder after a while
What might become
Of my sadness?
What if I were very, very angry
And all I did was sit
And never think about it?
What might become
Of my anger?
Where would they go and what would they do
If I couldn’t let them out?
Maybe I’d fall
Maybe get sick
Or doubt…
But what if I could know the truth
And say just how I feel?
I think I’d learn a lot that’s real
About… freedom.
Are you discovering the truth about you? Well, I’m still discovering the truth about me. That’s what we do as we keep on growing in life.
In this past month, I’ve come to a deeper peace with my own process of ongoing learning. I have lost a lot of community—and still I remain. I have lost a lot of past illusions, and hopes for many of my works in progress—and still I remain.
As I explore and adjust for next steps with ever so many projects in the coming month, then, I can only wonder what I might next lose… and what else might still remain, when all that fresh “losing” is also through.
May your own journeys of self-discovery be ever so revealing to you, too.
And until March 1, as ever—
Be kind to yourselves, and seek justice where you can.
-M