Archives: briefs

Shadi Hamid isn’t someone whose work I’ve ever been much a consumer of. I don’t find the variety of liberal-ideal commitment one associates with him especially interesting, partly because it has for me in so many ways the odor, a little bit paradoxically, of Christian-West right-liberal culture of my own background. (In what kind of contrast Hamid really stands with those whose liberal-ideal commitments I have felt helped in thinking about, e.g. Vlad Vexler, is a question I would gladly give time to with opportunity, on the other hand.) But following Hamid ‘on social’ plays a small part in what is an attempted blogging turn of importance to me here, a few years ago, toward more deliberate concern with American and global liberal-order phenomena and fascistic continuity. I don’t compulsively ignore him.

Hamid, touring new book, guests this month on the Thinking Muslim podcast, it happens — an oppositional voice in a setting shaped principally by such perspectives as that of Sami Hamdi (like Hamid an anglophone-Western child of North African émigrés), whose recent detention in the U.S. on trumped-up visa-violation charges, a borders-enforcement bone thrown to G.O.P. Islamophobes, led me to a rare post of greater length in November. A Hamdi-Hamid head-to-head would be something! — though you can imagine it bringing more heat than light. What Thinking Muslim gives listeners in fact, in this episode, is cordial but not uncontentious exchange, Hamid interviewed by U.S.-born, ethnically Christian-Italian convert to Islam Tom Facchine, ‘Imam Tom.’

Find that recording at bottom of post as usual. Here’s an excerpt from shortly after introductions, suggestive of circling-around and recursion in the conversation throughout:

TF:I think a lot of people might accept that, the general notion that, that power is required for morality to exist. Um, I think the open-ended question is: What is the nature of American power, or Does American power have a particular nature — how plastic is it, right, um, or is there something in its DNA that makes it particularly um ill-suited, right, for, for true morality? There’s a separate question whether whatever would replace it is worse, right, but I think the first question is Is American power such that — because, because even just leftists, not even Muslims, leftists will say, America was founded on the, [on] slavery, and the extermination of Native Americans; so, What about American power is redeemable? Like, why do we, why do we expect that American power in particular can be redeemed from this sort of, uh, ‘original sin’ of, . . .

SH:Yes.

TF:. . . of the American state or project? Is it just a bunch of high-falutin’ language, and idealistic language? Uh a cynic would say that this is just a legitimizing discourse for really a more sinister game that’s going on. How would you like respond to that?

SH:Well I think, first of all, one thing that should be — maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not: I’m an American; if we’re Americans, this is our country, so, at some level, we have to want it to be better. It’s, I think there’s something very odd about being an American who is secretly wishing for America’s demise, and, um, I just wouldn’t want American Muslims to, to lean in that direction.

TF:Is there a third option, though? Is there, like — ’Cause I get you, yeah, I mean like there’s some people that are calling for, like, an accelerationist — like, We want it to all fall apart.

SH:Exactly.

TF:But — You think that there’s probably a middle ground in there? where they’re saying, well, right now we have American power, it’s, it’s hegemonic, um, it’s funding and producing the genocide in Gaza, it’s intervened in over twenty countries since World, since the end of World War Two, right, um — that, maybe that a, a defanging, or a, a degree of defanging, could at least create — people talk about ‘multipolarity.’ Like — that there’s a middle ground, maybe, is there a middle ground in between having America as the hegemon that’s running everything and therefore our only hope is to, is to redeem this, this force? or American demise? Maybe there’s something in the middle of those.

SH:Look, there could be. I think it’s hard to see — How would the defanging of America actually work, and who would gain more power as a result of that — and that goes back to the question of who the competitors are and whether they’re worse or better, and I think that they’re worse, China, Russia, other authoritarian powers.

But to go back to your previous question, which is really important I think: We are, for, for all of our original sins, America is, I believe, founded on a set of moral ideas and convictions that are universally appealing. Now, we haven’t always lived up to them. But we have lived up to them sometimes.

TF:Give some examples maybe, for the skeptic.

[ laughter ]

SH:Yeah, well! I mean, the very fact that my parents chose to come here — and so many people who have, who are born and raised in authoritarian regimes say, at the end of the day, We want to get out of our, we don’t want to live in our countries anymore because they are oppressive and don’t have opportunities . . .

TF:Right —

SH:. . . and then oftentimes America is the choice, because they see that America offers that promise of freedom and opportunity — unlike other Western, European countries, the fact that you can become American. And to see my own parents, the process of them becoming American has been a beautiful thing to see. . . . The beautiful thing about the American project is that you can actually become American. And that’s in part because of our founding documents that allow for that process — the Declaration of Independence, um, the Constitution, are documents that really enshrine certain moral ideals that provide an open space for people to come into America, if they subscribe to American ideals and the American project — and anyone can do that, it’s not ethnically or, or religiously based. And the fact that, also, America is religiously open, that you can be fully practicing as a Muslim and that doesn’t detract from your Americanness — that again is a very unique thing.

Also, and this is maybe more controversial: The world did get better post-World War Two. So, kind of coinciding with American dominance and hegemony . . .

TF:For who? — did it get better?

SH:Oh, for the world more broadly. I think, if you look at . . .

TF:You think, like, the whole, in general. . . .

(Nice for comparison: older and younger members of the secular-left Jewish Currents community clashing on religious inheritance and the idea of common American identity, a June 2024 brief item.)

Reporting by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain in a succession of Drop Site News articles over a number of weeks since September is background to a new podcast conversation between Jewish Currents editorial head Arielle Angel, Grim, and long-time Currents writer Noah Kulwin. ‘Was Epstein Mossad?’ isn’t so much a thing to get hung up on, it’s in reality straightforward to see, as one finds it necessary to appreciate this picture of Davos players and back-channel expediencies in which Israel’s is of course one government whose members will figure prominently.

AA:There’s . . . this great line, Noah, in the piece that you published with Ari Brostoff in 2019, that says, ‘Rather than endlessly tracing these webs of influence, we might do better to just listen for ideological echoes.’ I love that line in terms of how to understand some of this stuff.

And I’ve been thinking of Epstein almost a little bit as a cipher, like as I’ve been reading these Drop Site pieces, in the sense that Epstein is the conduit for a lot of this stuff and he is directing some of this stuff in certain kinds of ways, but he’s almost just the mirror of the flow — like, the way that we see the flow of power in action. You know, there’s so many other different interests, obviously, being represented, and he’s extremely interesting just in terms of what he tells us about our world and how he reflects it back to us in all of its sordidness. And, you know, obviously like he’s an individual who did really terrible things, but for me, like, in terms of the way the story operates, you go through, in the Drop Site pieces, whole sections without mentioning Epstein. Because so much of like what is set in motion by a meeting then takes on a life of its own and has its own impacts in the world. . . .

NK:One thing that I think is really helpful as well is also to consider that Epstein-like figures have existed before. Like it’s a, almost, an archetype, to consider the person he most reminds me of is a guy named Sidney Korshak, who was the Chicago Mob’s big L.A. fixer. He was this really infamous figure, everybody was connected to him. And there’s a great book about him called Supermob. And one of the things that it gets at is the idea that stuff like organized crime, and that figures like a Korshak or, in today’s age, an Epstein, these essential conduits — to use your word, Arielle — are a key part of explaining how the world works today. . . . There’s a way in which, I think, today, again, in a more globalized society, in a society where ownership and the assetization makes this kind of influence a little bit different — you see the sort of power-brokering, though, emerge in these similar kinds of underground criminal networks, however you want to call them.

But rather than . . . get caught up, trying to determine ‘Who’s the real Jeffrey Epstein, what was he really doing? . . . ,’ instead of trying to come up with some distinct, singular truth, in the Robert Caro sense perhaps, to me it’s been helpful to think about — in the context of all of this reporting and all the specific facts we’re learning, that, like, these are evidence of how these kinds of criminal, power-broker, underworld overlord type figures operate — . . . that it also, you know, it doesn’t make us cynical to see that people like this exist and operate, you know, free from democratic and public vision and control, but that it does, like, sharpen our understanding of how it is that the ruling class and how the power elite are able to maintain that power and propagate it. ’Cause people like Jeffrey Epstein would not exist were he not viewed as indispensable toward that end by the highest, most powerful people in our society.

Listen to the whole (44 min.):

[UPDATE (6 Dec. ’25): Currents has followed the Epstein episode with one on Israel’s place in global trade in arms and enforcement systems, ‘Debating the “Palestine Laboratory,”’ a good companion listen — link below.]

A great gift to me two summers ago was a recommendation from a friend, a fellow ChiCommoner, to check out something Pankaj Mishra had written. (An LRB essay, chances are, though it might have been Age of Anger. I don’t remember.)

Toward end of year, a handful of his books under my belt, I was saying here that I wanted to start devoting space in posts to the thought and writing Mishra’s considerable reputation today owes to. A year later, now, I haven’t done that. Indeed I’ve been failing for months even to get to the little book he must have been at work on about then, February’s The World After Gaza.

As to that, at least, just in the last week I’ve turned corner. This is thanks particularly to John Ganz’s newsletter / blog Unpopular Front and its new move in a podcasting direction, inaugurated with Mishra interview. That recorded conversation is very good — see link at bottom (or, for present anyway, download file, 36 MB).

Here, an excerpt from mid-way through:

PM:The impulse to resist oppression is obviously something that cannot be disapproved of. I mean it’s something we have to support. But at the same time, we have to be extremely wary when that impulse becomes a desire to create political institutions and arrangements which in turn will be oppressive to another set of people.

And so I mean, I’m, you know, I find myself somewhat at a distance from people in Europe and America who criticize Israel from an anti-colonialist point of view. For me it’s a very dated perspective, because, you know, if you’ve lived long enough in India, you know we have moved very far away from anti-colonialism. We have gone through a whole cycle of historical experience, which has made anti-colonialism seem like a very inadequate perspective. I think we have to learn now from the experience of postcolonial nations. It’s, it’s not enough to say that the answer to, uh, the Israeli violence and oppression is another Palestinian state. We have to already foresee the problems that Palestinian state will have.

JG:Yeah.

PM:So we have to be a lot more imaginative than just thinking of Palestinian national sovereignty in simplistic ways. At the same time, you know, I think, when you’re facing that kind of genocidal violence, I think a lot of those, a lot of these kinds of conversations have to be shelved. Like, we are, you know — people are literally fighting for their lives. And, and, you know, but at the same time, for those of us who are not actually you know directly involved in these battles — for intellectuals, for historians — they certainly have to keep talking about these things. That’s, that’s certainly what I’m trying to do.

JG:I think that, you know, some of the most interesting figures you talk about in your book made the decision, even — so, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Kohn a little bit before, Hannah Arendt directly after the Holocaust — they made the decision — which I think was a very difficult one, when the urgency was felt among Jews that said, ‘Well yes, you know, maybe there’ll be problems down the road but we just went through this, so we can’t think about this’ — and they actually did the hard work of thinking about what the future might entail. And now their work seems prophetic. But it perhaps wasn’t that hard to see how things would develop.

And yeah, your point is really taken about the, the anti-colonial side of this. I mean, I, the status of Israel as a post-colonial state is complex, because on the one hand it was fold-, it’s folded into a friendly relationship with the, with imperial powers; on the other hand, you know, the dominant ideology of Israel now, this revisionist Jabotinsky-ite wing, you know, they, they, they were terrorists against the British, and they thought they were throwing off the British yoke. And they have some, some claim to being an anti-colonial movement, although they were themselves settler-colonialist.

So I think the entire, this conflict in particular, with the histories of the peoples involved, perhaps confounds and should be a place to put aside some of those easier narratives of resistance to colonialism, or ‘This is an outpost of civilization,’ or ‘This people has a right to a certain degree of violence because of their past’ — in a way it’s this knot of all these historical problems. And I think this is why — I mean there are other reasons that are material reasons — but certainly why it kind of, a conflict in this part of the world kind of pains the heart of the entire world, because it points to all of these contradictions. And I would hope — and I’ve been struggling to articulate and to convince people of this — that perhaps some of the terms should be abandoned, because we can see what they lead to.

That I couldn’t have told you, had you asked, who style commentator Derek Guy is before this weekend says about me I guess a number of things, not all of them necessarily to my discredit. I’m fortunate, anyhow, in having mentioned yesterday to a friend that I was listening to the new Ordinary Unhappiness episode, Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele featuring, and having learned in turn from him of Guy’s just-published Nation article on what leading Republican party types are wearing these days. (Links to both at bottom.)

From this I found my way to the podcast conversation Toby Buckle recorded with Guy and published in two parts last year. It’s that that I mean to recommend particularly with this post.

I’m not quite nerd enough — unlike Guy! — to have known Buckle’s podcast, Political Philosophy, already. I believe I’ll be giving it more attention in days to come. But this extended interview is for me something of a gift by itself, a boost to thoughts I’ve tried to give expression to in longer posts over a few years’ span now, wondering about fascistic (re)turn in coexistence with liberal order/society/culture (or just ‘the liberal,’ as I kind of prefer to put it).

Partly that’s about finding my appreciation stoked (or refreshed) for the central significance in each, the liberal and the fascistic, of aesthetic currents and conflicts — territory of question I’m in some ways unusually attuned to but feel even so, always, a great personal poverty in resources for talking about well.

Not to suggest that it’s issues aesthetic that really fuel this discussion between Guy and Buckle. Not at all — and what the burning issues in it are is another thing for coming back to elsewhere.

Bridget Read’s Little Bosses Everywhere, from Crown Books in May, and Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job, January from Harvard UP, cover an awful lot of shared ground. I’ve read neither. I’ll hazard a guess that they are pretty different reads. There is at any rate under present circumstances more than room, it’s fair to say, for two on this turf.

In the usual way, I’m getting to know the material through author interviews. Absent from the promo-tour media rounds, as far as I can tell, is anything bringing Read and Baker together to discuss their common subject with each other. Can’t help wondering how such a conversation might go! Anyway, down below is a little collection of their podcast chats I’ve benefited from time with, two with Read and two with Baker. (Many more out there to be found, of course.)

Added to these four is one interview with another author, Cara Wallis, about recent work of entirely distinct focus through which, interestingly, you can get a glimpse of Read’s and Baker’s shared subject from alternative angle — less historical in outline and decidedly less bound up with the U.S. culturally.

Also below, last, is video of a scholarly talk Baker delivered at Columbia U. in spring 2023, while his book was still in the works.

But first, an excerpt not from that 2023 lecture but from Baker’s visit with Know Your Enemy guys Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell this January (first of the podcast episodes I list at end of the post):

EB:The way that I stage it is to kind of try to show the way that these very eminent social scientists are kind of having this similar debate among themselves about the kind of predominance of material reality or intellectual ideational reality that these sort of New Thought charlatans are having, but you know of course in a much more elevated register. So one thing to note is that, even though this is a peculiarly American story in some ways, the underlying forces at work in capitalism are of course replicated in all kinds of national contexts, including in Germany — which at the time is undergoing its own experience of industrialization, the formation of a mass working class — and so, just as there are in the United States, there are social scientists who are trying to figure out the best way to deal with the social problems that result from these processes. So there’s a similar kind of debate — you know, if we want to understand what is driving history in the biggest sense, but more particularly sort of driving the emergence of, of labor movements, making workers unhappy: Should we, sort of, focus on their material circumstances, or you know should we kind of focus on their cultural or intellectual world? And the social scientists who are, who are interested in subjective experience, they’re really into this figure of, in German, the Unternehmer, which is, is translated to English via French as entrepreneur . . . and you know there’s this, of course, you know a lot of these guys are readers of, of Nietzsche, and you know they have this vision of this strong, charismatic leader who’s able to kind of go above material circumstances, you know, create a new reality and sort of conjure up this kind of environment of passionate commitment to a shared project.

MS:Erik, is this foreshadowing anything? [ laughter ]

EB:In Germany?! In early twentieth-century Germany? No I, there, there’s nothing that really comes to mind!

SAB:I have no idea what you’re talking about.

EB:You definitely do not want to look up what political party Werner Sombart supported in the 1930s at the end of his life. [ laughter ] No, right, so I mean the, it’s kind of stereotypical, but you know, at the time, people don’t fully know where this story is going. And, and so this vision is taken up in American business schools — and, you know, often by people who actually are quite frankly sympathetic with these political projects of the, the European far right. And this becomes an opportunity — again, there are other figures in management theory who are focused on, on the material reality, whether that’s compensation, or some of the sort of physical details of the conditions that people work under — but, uh, this vision of the entrepreneur gets taken up as a way to say, you know, If we have the right kinds of people in, in management — again, it’s all about kinds of people — you know if we have the right kinds of people with the right sorts of virtues and, and capacities, you know, then it’s possible to sort of spiritually transform the workplace — to sort of turn it into a place that’s kind of energized, again, by this sort of shared commitment, you know: We’re creating something new here. And so again, that’s sort of where it links up with this broader popular culture of, of success.

SAB:And the important thing obviously is to get people invested — via their, say, dedication to a charismatic leader — in a corporate project which is not, you know, horizontally solidaristic, right?

The greater narrative Read and Baker complement each other in, here, is complex, subject naturally in many ways to varied interpretation. Both tend to talk about the New Thought phenomenon, say, in terms I’m not so sure are satisfactory. (Something maybe to return to in a longer post sometime.) Crowded and diverse though their story is, in any event, we might observe that among characters taking the stage in it, in demonstrations of real personal virtue it would seem to prove, not surprisingly from present vantage, rather thin.

A thought you may find recurring, should you give these discussions some time: What if American labor at its strength in the 1930s and ’40s had transcended trade-unionism and pressed the fight for all workers — had really dug in, had insisted that none is protected until all are?

I don’t play the guitar. I do however find myself (an ex-carpenter who misses his tools and shop space) strongly drawn to the vast ‘creator’-content genre of guitar making and repair. For eight or so years now, my weekend includes without fail Hamilton Ontario luthier Ted Woodford’s Sunday release, and usually one by New Haven-area’s Tim Sway, at least (though I have cut back). I’ve learned a lot this way.

Writer on comics Zach Rabiroff is in Flaming Hydra last week with a fun interview with Billy Bragg, in youth a fan of comic books American and Brit. The image of Bragg the piece uses (hard to say why) is this two-decade-old photo from Wikimedia:

Though I’ve wound up later in life the kind of person whose political-things ideas you’d associate with Bragg’s, I have no history of listening to him. (For my youthful music-consumption-as-identity, a long time ago — I’m a dozen-plus years Bragg’s junior — there was instead a pretty different working-middleclass-audiences guy with guitar and a two-plus-one-syllable name, born, as it happens, the same year as Bragg.)

Anyway, Rabiroff mentions Bragg’s playing a Telecaster. The guitar in the pic is Tele-like, of course, but plainly something else. If I knew Bragg, I might have recognized that this is the same guitar he’s always on stage with now. But I don’t. Curiosity led me to dig a little bit. Turns out that this is a guitar by Australian Jim Dyson, a relative rarity. (People who get into this sort of thing may appreciate a short conversation with Dyson recorded about the time he was giving up the business.)

The short item I really mean to advert to (below) in present post is one Bragg participated in the making of last year — one not about him but about a guitar build. Chances are that this is a build video (a Duck Duck Go search return for me on ‘Billy Bragg guitar’) I’d have never stumbled across apart from getting curious about that old photo of him, above, with main live-date axe. The production on this thing is first-rate, but view numbers, for whatever reason, are quite low — a want my posting it here will do little to help, sadly.

What’s lovely about this is the people and place you get a glimpse of, an evidently well-loved, busy community space in small-city UK, in Gloucestershire a little way from Bristol. How fortunate to be part of that scene, to share in the experience of such a group.

I appreciate Matt Duss, in conversation with Jeet Heer on Heer’s podcast last week (before Saturday’s realized eventuality, the U.S. strike against Iran’s more fortified nuke plants), pushing back against Heer’s reproducing casually a tail-wags-dog account of the Israel-U.S. relation:

JH:And I think there might be other indications as well, uhm, that, like, the opposition to this war uh would be coming not just from you know the usual . . . chunk of the United States that, like, is not enthusiastic for war but, like, within the military-industrial, uh, side of things as well. Because, like, in a lot of ways . . . for the United States to get into a war with uh Iran right now, like, makes no sense! — and, like, you know, like, I would have to imagine that there are people, you know, . . . traditionally very, uh, centrist, hawkish type people, uh, who are perhaps less beholden to AIPAC than Chuck Schumer, who are like kind of actually worried, like, you know, like ‘What exactly is the United States doing?’

MD:No, I think that’s exactly right. And for good reason! We, we’ve run this play before! Um and this is part of what’s so baffling about this.

JH:Yeah! Yeah, no no, especially baffling — I mean I think maybe to underscore the you know national security side of things, or the uh American national interest side of things, I mean like, it seems to me that, like, Israel or at least Israel you know as Netanyahu conceives of it, . . . the Israeli government, the Israeli, you know, political point of view, is to get the United States involved with Iran — and like that kind of makes sense, like, if I were a small nation you know in this region . . . like, I would want like you know Big Brother to come in and do my fights for me.

But, like, if I were, like, the Big Brother, I would also think like I actually have like other interests rather than, than Israel. . . . Like I can kind of see like what Israel’s goals here are, and it’s not just stopping Iran’s nuclear program, right? Like because I mean like Netanyahu’s been talking, talking about regime change — and I think one should actually conceive that as uh regime smashing . . . . But they want, they want a, a civil war and a divided Iran . . .

MD:Yeah I mean uh it should go without saying . . . . Yes, he has a very specific vision of what, you know, security means for the state of Israel that is, you know, is inextricably um intertwined with his own political survival, um, and —

You know I would also add this: Even though, clearly, we are in this mess because he was able to convince and manipulate Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is very easily manipulable for people who know how to do it, ’cause he’s an ignorant and deeply emotionally damaged uh person — um, you know Putin was able to do the same thing — um, I do, I, I kind of, I don’t like when people are saying ‘Oh we’re — Israel is controlling U.S. foreign policy.’

No! I mean — we have gotten into this mess ourselves, we have a long history, there are people in this country, um, who believe that the best way to handle the Middle East is for us essentially to empower Israel as our local sheriff. Um, and it makes sense what, what Netanyahu is trying to do, as we see him like, attacking in Yemen, attacking Lebanon, attacking Syria, now attacking Iran, it’s not to you know collapse these states, it’s just to make them weak states that cannot challenge Israel and the U.S. in the region in any meaningful way. And I think the idea that this will lead to durable security and stability is a dangerous fantasy . . . .

I’d wish to see it expressed in rather stronger terms, with recognition of this U.S.-dominance relation’s roots in an earlier — and still quite recent! — condition, when the liberal-imperial center of gravity was with France and, above all, Britain, before Europe’s implosion of the first half of the last century. (Heer and Duss do at least identify Germany in its present European role, a bit further on in their discussion, as key party in the liberal-imperial international configuration of our own moment.)

No principal political party of the U.S. as we know it is ever going to be ‘anti-war.’ (A warring world, indeed, is what we came about for in the first place.) But let the title’s fiction of ‘reclamation’ go. It’s a worthwhile listen.

[UPDATE (29 Jun. ’25): Heer’s subsequent episode (link below), David Klion as guest interlocutor, is a sort of round two of the general discussion, U.S. militarism and its domestic politics — likewise well worth listening to in my judgment.]

My interest in appreciating the story of modernity as one of ‘West’-meets-‘East’ persists. A name to connect with Helena Blavatsky’s and Henry Steel Olcott’s is that of contemporary Edwin Arnold, editor-in-chief of the Telegraph in the turn-of-twentieth heyday of newspapers, but celebrated in his time rather for a work whose title a book by U. of Edinburgh historian Christopher Harding, out last year, reprises.

Harding, interviewed in April for New Books:

So you get this I think interesting moment in the early nineteenth century where Europeans who’re interested in Asia pivot from China to India — um, I think we’ve given a flavor of why that is. One more reason I think that is is that the interest in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is happening against a backdrop in Europe of all these wars of religion. So Europe is a highly unstable place, and the idea that China is a stable country, and has been so for thousands of years — the Jesuits start to dig up all these records that shows just how old China really is — is another reason why Europeans have enormous respect for China. By the time you get to the early nineteenth century, things are changing in Europe. One of the things that Europeans start to idolize instead, in a country or a culture, is not stability but dynamism, and change and growth and progression. Because, whether it’s in the area of science and technology, or perhaps politics as well, some of the, uh, most powerful European countries — like Britain for example, and later Germany — are the ones who are changing rapidly. That starts to be what people are looking for.

And so they think that China, actually, is not so much stable as stagnant. And instead India becomes really interesting because they think of it as a place, at least many centuries before, where there was this kind of pure intuition of reality as it really is, and that some Indians, this is the way Europeans start to think, some Indians, however they do it, they retain this connection with reality at its most fundamental and its purest, perhaps via Nature, perhaps via — some Indian ascetics they encounter, who go through these extraordinary prostrations or diets or whatever it might be to maintain that connection — um, a lot of Europeans are really impressed by that, by what they think, anyway, is going on in India.

And so across the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries it’s much more India than China that’s thought to be this kind of fount of spiritual wisdom. And Edwin Arnold, uh who you mentioned, I think he’s really — yeah he’s really quite important to that. So he’s writing — he’s a journalist with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, he’s spent some time out in India, he reads Sanskrit — and he writes this long poem, ‘The Light of Asia’ — as you say, we even borrowed our title from him — which he publishes in the latter part of the nineteenth century in several editions.

But he does something extraordinary: because before Arnold, the general idea about Buddhism in Europe is that it’s this kind of dark and nihilistic religion. People don’t understand it well, but one thing they think they do understand about Buddhism is that the aim of religious practice is to extinguish yourself. And I think the Europeans find that really hard to get hold of, because they have this sense of, that of, you know, a virtuous life in a Christian tradition, crudely, gets you into Heaven, right? . . . The idea that you would spend a life of religious practice only to then not exist afterwards, . . . if that’s the best, as it were, posthumous outcome you can hope for, then this really is a bleak worldview. . . . Edwin Arnold I think manages to give it this kind of makeover — and it’s a makeover that tells you almost everything you need to about how Europeans in, especially educated Europeans, in the second half of the nineteenth century felt about the world, and felt about themselves.

Um, partly, I think, this is about new scientific discoveries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. . . . For all sorts of . . . reasons, Europeans are finding Christianity less plausible. And what Edwin Arnold seems to manage to do is present the life of the Buddha almost as though he were a Victorian gentleman, and kind of a Victorian scientist. So he tells the story of the Buddha as someone who won’t accept the received wisdom of his day, but who sees all this suffering going on around him, and so he goes out and he tries lots of different things — you know, famously the historical Buddha leaves his palace and goes to study with all different, uh, forms of Indian practice of his day, it was quite a rich world when the historical Buddha was alive — and he tries all these different things, as almost, you can almost imagine him with a lab coat on, as a decent scientist would back at home, until he finds the thing which works. . . . So Edwin Arnold presents him as someone who’s really easy to understand for nineteenth-century Europeans — and also someone who’s a little bit Christ-like, as well, in his deep compassion for all who suffer.

What he also does, I think, the last thing he does in that poem — again, the reason why I think it’s so popular — is he actually borrows a little bit from Hinduism. So, rather than say at death you simply cease to exist, he has this lovely line, um, he says, ‘The dew-drop slips into the shining sea’ — so you merge back into this great Consciousness from which you came in the first place, which is much more of a consoling image, I think, than you simply extinguish yourself, um, completely.

So he puts together this long poem presenting Buddhism in this way, . . . and the result is this poem which sells extraordinarily well — it’s on a par with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for sales. It goes on to shape how Europeans think about not just Buddhism but about India. It influences people like Gandhi and Tolstoy, operas get made, films get made. . . . Not only does it get really well received amongst critics, but all these rebuttals start to get written by Christian missionaries who’ve actually worked out in Asia. . . . Some of those take-downs of The Light of Asia [laughs] are extraordinary, they’re really powerful. Um, but nevertheless, as you say, he’s a real hinge figure. Because even people who don’t necessarily end up converting to Buddhism nevertheless, uh, are sold on the idea that Buddhism is an elevated philosophy worth exploring — and, more broadly, India, China and Japan are places where you might go to seek out spiritual wisdom.

Earlier in that conversation, Harding mentions to interviewer Matt Fraser that it was in fact Theosophists, the network around Blavatsky and Olcott (whom Arnold evidently knew well, though e.g. Wikipedia won’t tell you that), who introduced the young Gandhi, studying law in London, to the sacred-text tradition of India (a thing you can learn from Wikipedia).

Listen to the whole:

I think that, instinctively, where my head goes in terms of what I study and what I teach, you know, the most kind of obvious and surface-level comparison that I would make immediately is to the actions of Herschel Grynszpan, when he assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November of 1938 — he was seventeen years old — and that act served as a pretext for the subsequent violence across Germany that has come to be known as Kristallnacht. Now I don’t want to suggest that that’s a perfect historical comparison, but it’s sort of just where my head goes to when I think about political violence against diplomats. . . . And then of course, interestingly, after, there was a whole kind of campaign led by, I think, Dorothy Thompson, a U.S. journalist, to sort of defend him. But I think in that case — again, I don’t think it’s a perfect comparison for many, many reasons, but I think what you do see is how there is a kind of act of almost spontaneous, individualized political violence, right, on the one hand, and then there is a whole kind of apparatus of retaliation that is using that as a pretext.

For my part, I’d say that a far more potent demonstrative act, if Elias Rodriguez felt some mark must be made through targeting of politicians’ subordinates, would’ve been to take down a congressional staffer or something at last summer’s Democratic National Convention, showcase of the U.S. party in power — power at the heart of everything where Israel / Palestine is concerned — during most of the last two years’ obliteration of Gaza, while American advocates for Palestinian lives in attendance were being barred from participation in the proceedings. He need never have left Chicago — though if there’s any significance in what Rodriguez did do, it was that it brought violence in the name of the Palestinian cause home to Washington.

I condemn Rodriguez’s act — not narrowly for the antisemitism in it (which to my mind is neither greatly in doubt nor immaterial) — and don’t otherwise wish to dwell on it. But I think the kind of discussion people ought to be having about it, the Jewish Currents podcast roundtable excerpted with comments by Ben Ratskoff above, playable in full below, is a helpful instance of.

By coincidence, I’ve been giving thought to Dorothy Thompson antecedent Henry David Thoreau recently. The meaning of John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, infinitely better backed and planned but possibly no less ill-conceived as a matter of express aim than whatever Rodriguez imagines he was doing at the Capital Jewish Museum last week, lay afterward, and lies today, in how the thing done came to be received — initially very uncertain in issue even among many of the day’s opponents of our founding national slavery regime. The moment, as we look back on it, is as much Thoreau’s as Brown’s in a way.

Israel is at an apex of global disfavor. A new Trump administration, unprincipled and all too accommodating toward more open forms of antisemitism on the right, is adjusting the U.S.’s approach to ‘special relationship’ with Israel and to relationships with Israel’s regional neighbor-rivals. Understanding well the part the political murder Rodriguez has introduced may play amid all this could take a while, it seems fair to say.

In longer items I post from time to time in the older ongoing blog on this site, I refer pretty often to YouTuber Vlad Vexler, whose ‘high liberalism,’ as I like to shorthand it for myself (here with a more historical and general, less Americanized idea of liberal in mind), increasingly I reject.

Crudely speaking, you’d place me to Vexler’s left on the spectrum. You won’t hear me speak as Vexler does, for instance, of a Western world of democracies losing their democratic way, since with many generations of e.g. anarchists and socialists I see this West’s standard liberal-democratic democracy as sham democracy, largely, to begin with. Separately but not unrelatedly, I’m quite doubtful about Vexler’s talk of a line recently crossed from an alternative-reality to a post-truth form dominant in political messaging, useful though it can be to think in those terms.

That acknowledged, I share the video below because to my mind it’s a very good one. Anybody living with the last decade’s shift in global political conditions precipitated by (among many factors) the Mid-East / Central-Asia wars of (with large supporting cast) the Bush and Obama governments can profitably lend Vexler an ear here.

Note that Vexler sometimes records from bed owing to a severe myalgic encephalomyelitis turn since contracting Covid last summer.

Vexler in quotable mode at about the 10-minute mark:

Repressions, as they extend in a de-politicized society taking authoritarian turns, will be pointillistic. — um, It’s easy to have the effect you want to have by picking up very very very few people, in the contemporary context. That’s very well illustrated in Russia; the number of political prisoners in Russia is in the low thousands. But that’s sufficient — in a modern society — to have a desired asphyxiating effect.