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I actually think that a lot of these technologies, a lot of these systems, that we see as immensely complex, so complex as to ward away anybody from thinking that they can understand how a machine-learning system works or how a . . . deterministic algorithm does its thing, or whatever it might be: I think a lot of that is complex by design, right? It’s not inherently complex in the sense of, like, people can’t grasp it. ‘Complexity,’ there, is a lot of warding people away from it — it’s forbidden knowledge, right, or it’s secret knowledge that you can’t get to unless you’re part of the priesthood or whatever it might be, or unless you have passed the right test and entered the right guilds, or whatever . . .

Unless you’ve ‘learned to code’ and . . .

Unless you’ve learned to code!

And I think the kind of old idea of a guild is actually a lot more appropriate, because part of the guild was as a way to create social protections around specific skills and forms of knowledge. So that you can then, you know, for whatever reason, for good reasons but also for bad reasons, have control over who has access to those skills, who has access to that knowledge — and that might be so that you can be in a better negotiating point with employers or with lords or with whoever it might be, to say, ‘Well you need the skill of a carpenter, but all carpenters are part of the carpentry guild, and we have very hierarchical and formalized systems of what that means, to acquire that skill, to sell that skill,’ and so on, right? But I think part of the guild system, as well, is to ward away . . . . ‘You can’t possibly understand how two pieces of wood are joined together, it’s far too complex for your mind.’

And we see that same kind of thing happening with forms of engineering, forms of programming, and so on. So for me, . . . what I do like about the idea of the mechanic is that it does have in it a bit of a hobbyist idea, that you can . . . be a mechanic who just, like, tinkers on the weekends, right? — acquires these kinds of skills and knowledge through the act of doing it, through . . . being mechanically curious. And I think that is something that has been really robbed from us, is the mechanical curiosity, the idea that we should be curious and interested in how the things around us work, and that that curiosity and interest can actually be fulfilled without having to enter a guild or enter into, you know, the rarified halls of academia or a corporation, or whatever it might be.

One of the reasons why I didn’t call it ‘The Engineer and the Luddite’ is ’cause the engineer already emerges from, as a profession, a highly formalized set of skills and knowledge, which is itself also — as we know from the work by people like David Noble, who’s a historian of engineering and technology, and he has a book, America by Design . . . — the origins of the engineer as a profession come out of industry needing to create certain kinds of knowledge and skills, and people who hold those knowledge and skills who can then contribute to the motivations of industry. And so the engineer is deeply and integrally related to Capital — from its origins up to today. . . .

And it feels like the engineer also comes in to, like, remake these systems in such a way that the mechanic, or the workers who are more involved in this, are having their power over the system, their understanding of how it all works, you know, degraded or reduced, so that Capital has more power.

Jathan Sadowski and Paris Marx, above, mid-way through the most recent episode of Marx’s podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, below, on aspects of being in a position to get how stuff works and also of finding oneself barred from it, things Sadowski considers in new book The Mechanic and the Luddite.

I learned a few things over the weekend about illustrated Turkic-readership journal Molla Nasraddin and Russian-trained Ottoman German illustrator Oskar Schmerling in the era of major European counterparts Le Rire and Simplicissimus (e.g.), and about the long career of Iranian-Russian Soviet poet-bureaucrat Abolqasem Lahouti, among other things previously unknown to me, through the New Books conversation with Yale lit scholar Sam Hodgkin appended below.

Pulled in, I wound up listening as well to Hodgkin in another (quite different) discussion of his book on Ajam Media Collective’s podcast and, then, to a film-oriented lecture given at NYU the previous year, both linked below. A rich vein, promising to add a good deal to the picture I’ve begun to get mainly through the work of Priya Satia and Pankaj Mishra.

No plans to pick up Hodgkin’s book, priced for university library acquisition, anytime soon. I will be (that is, am) listening to more from Ajam Media, though — for the religion content and the political-world content both.

Pankaj Mishra, in the course of tightening up on the large subject of his From the Ruins of Empire (2012), in the book’s last chapter:

For a while at least, the Third World, as a large part of the postcolonial world was inaccurately called, seemed doomed from a Western point-of-view, the site of obscure civil wars and the source of needy immigrants.

The picture is a lot clearer and multifarious after more than half a century of change, when many of the ideological blinkers of the Cold War no longer exist. Moral idealism rather than practicality and effectiveness seems to have defined such broad transnational groupings as the Non-Aligned Movement, which almost all postcolonial Asian nations joined in an attempt to build an alternative to the crude polarities of the Cold War. We can see that the seemingly wholesale adoption of Western ideologies (Chinese communism, Japanese imperialism) did not work. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic revolution and Islamic movements continue to have an afterlife.

Many new nations, such as Pakistan, never recovered from birthing traumas; their liberationist energies dispersed into political-religious movements of an increasingly militant nature. Others, such as the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia, despite some serious setbacks, managed their economic growth and sovereignty to the point where their cumulative heft now seems to pose a formidable challenge to the West itself.

Recent history tells us that there are more such challenges — political, diplomatic and economic — still to arise from large parts of Asia. More than half a century after decolonization began, we continue to live in what the American writer Irving Howe called ‘a revolutionary age.’ . . .

Replacing Europe’s power with its own, America, Howe wrote, was ‘sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved. But the world resists this will; it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own mode of response.’ Written in 1954, these words sound no less convincing a year after the Arab Spring and the collapse of several pro-Western dictatorships. Chaos and uncertainty may loom over a wide swathe of the Arab world for some years. But the spell of Western power has finally been broken. If uprooted Muslims defy it contemptuously, others such as the Chinese have adopted its ‘secrets.’ The sense of humiliation that burdened several generations of Asians has greatly diminished. The rise of Asia, and the assertiveness of Asian peoples, consummates their revolt against the West that began more than a century ago; it is in many ways the revenge of the East.

Yet this success conceals an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future.

It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.

I’m new to Mishra — learned of him only a couple of weeks ago from a ChiCommons co-worker. From the Ruins is the second of his books I’ve finished (audio, via Everand, where I’m happy in finding a lot of his output available) in the short time since. He’ll turn up in future longer posts here, I expect, soon enough. If I can get to them.

This is material that goes hand-in-hand with that of Priya Satia, historian at Stanford U., of whom I first learned two years ago and whom immediately I found so helpfully provocative. As it happens, I wasn’t to finish her Time’s Monster then, life being what it’s been; this year, a few months ago, I returned to it and made it through to end, at last. That’s primed me well to take up Mishra now.

M:The best story — that sums this whole thing up, in the way that I think your analysis is so wrong about ‘our failure’ to reproduce something — is, 1974, I decided I was, like, moving to Israel, I was going to the furthest left kibbutz I could find. My plans were to spend time on the communist kibbutz. And I told my immigrant granma, ‘Granma, I’m going to Israel, I’m moving to Israel.’ And she said to me: ‘Michu, you’re an American.’ And she got it exactly right. I’m an American, my son’s even more American, my granddaughter is even more American — and you’re still a Jew through all this! And it’s something that I always tried to teach my son, that we’re Jews, and so we’ll always be different.

A:I’m not different than most of my peers in my age group who are not Jewish.

N:I just think this is really at the heart of the question. To me, that vision of Jewishness is, like, very appealing, and, also, I think there’s a real — I put it lightly — question about its indefinite reproducibility. You know and maybe it’s fine that it dies out — but if you have any investment in the possibility that it would not, I think it’s clear that the further that Jewishness gets from the source in which it has a different kind of grounding textually or historically, it can feel like kind of a performance, or put on.

And I think for those of us who are white, especially, and who are fully assimiliated, you know, I think there is a real element of the reclamation of religious practice and religious texts that has to do with a kind of interest in undoing a kind of assimilation, of recovering some of that alterity, and to thinking, what are the ways that are available to us to do that? You know, I think — and just what you were saying, Mitch, the idea of, ‘We’re Americans’ — for those of us on the Jewish left, I think we see that, and we feel that, and that’s not what we want for ourselves. Seeing the way in which that identification that our ancestors strove toward has made us complicit in a project whose politics we don’t agree with.

And I think that — just, on the other side, as Arielle was talking about earlier, the way in which Zionism has come to stand in — those have been kind of like the twin nationalisms that have been at the heart of what American Jewishness has become. And the interest in religion is one key way, I think, of exploring, like, a way out of that, toward this sense of Jewishness as alterity. I don’t think it’s the only way. But, I think, left to our own devices, there will be no Jewishness that is not Americanist or Zionism.

Mitchell Abidor, Arielle Angel, and Nathan Goldman, from a conversation recorded for Jewish Currents’ podcast On the Nose, coinciding by chance, just a couple of days apart earlier this month, with my last occasional longer thing. For me, this discussion among members of the Currents community sits usefully, provocatively — not to say simply neatly correspondingly — alongside what I’d been wanting for a long while to do some thinking about, there, in blog-post form. So the timing is nice.

[UPDATE 16 June: ] I’m appending below a link to the latest episode of Yahav Erez’s Disillusioned, which was published Tuesday and which I’ve just listened to. In its first half, as the guest recounts family history and upbringing as West Bank settler, this theme of complexity of place of religious text in contemporary Jewish life both secular and religious comes in recurringly.

When I was still a PhD student, I thought that what we’re doing in the professional community — I was the, uh, the secretary of the Israeli Oriental Society back then — the Israeli Oriental Society has really nothing to do with the orient or with mizrahim, it has to do with the discipline of middle east studies in Israel — uhm, was established in 1949, just a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, uhm, and this is basically an academic society of scholars and professionals dealing with middle east and Islam. And I thought that — as the secretary of the society, I thought that we should talk to society, we should talk to Israeli society. We have a lot of information, a lot of knowledge about Islam, about the middle east, about whatever —

That the Israeli society doesn’t have.

That the Israeli society doesn’t have. And we’re the professionals, we should, you know, reach out to them. You know, academics operate in English, they write papers in English, they give talks in English. And — and they’re West-bound.

Yeah. And it’s also not very accessible to anyone who’s not an academic.

Right. Right.

But — can I just back-track. Why is it important for Israeli society to know about Arab culture, about the middle east, about Islam — I mean, there are people who are experts on this, but they do it to serve Israel’s security.

Not even from security reasons. Only just because you’re an Israeli, and half of your own Jewish citizens of Israel are of Arab origin, and their families are of Arab origin — some of us speak Arabic with our families, with grandparents, with Palestinians, we work with Palestinians, and we’re, again, in the middle east. So however you look at it, you have to know Arabic, and you have to know what’s going on in your neighborhood. And you cannot be isolated from your neighborhood.

It seems like Israel’s policy is to keep the society in an isolated state of mind, in an isolated psyche — not to feel like they’re part of this place but more to feel like they’re a branch of Europe, or the U.S.

Right. Right! A villa in the jungle, like Ehud Barak, the prime minister and former chief of staff, said.

From a conversation with Assaf David podcaster Yahav Erez has up this week (and which I learned about this morning via Yair Wallach on Bluesky). I’m looking forward to getting to know Erez’s show, Disillusioned, better.

It’s well known, of course, that Jewish bibles do not contain texts that Christians call the New Testament, and it’s also well known that Catholic bibles include additional deutero-canonical texts. And just as the multiplicity among bibles is a matter of common knowledge, so too with the multiplicity within. It’s often noted that our singular English term ‘bible,’ paradoxically, derives from the Latin plural, biblia. What makes this paradox more than etymological trivia, however, is its power to remind us of a tension we habitually forget. . . .

Research on the formation of biblical canons has tended to take our modern notion of the closed and fixed text of the bible as its assumed telos and culmination, tracing a thin line from the formation of biblical texts to their elevation and interpretation as scripture, to the shifting technologies of their transmission from scrolls to codices and finally to . . . closure . . . . What might we miss, then, both about the present and the past, when we focus on the origins of this one modern ideal of the bible as a single, set, printed and bound set of books? . . . Instead of asking when the biblical canon was closed, my interest is in exploring some of the limits of the process of canonization, as well as some of the other ways in which the biblical past made cultural meanings, both before and after.

Annette Yoshiko Reed, delivering a paper several years ago, the promise of whose title never quite gets fulfilled in the video but which makes for really a good compact listen on scripture and scriptural proliferation even so.

This is housed in an odd way, at a YouTube channel that looks like it might originally have been meant to represent Texas mainline-Protestant institution Trinity University’s religion department in a general way, but in the end is only a repository for five recorded talks from the school’s 2016–17 Reinventing the Bible seminar project. I haven’t listened to all five yet, but those I have have well repaid the time given.

One in particular of the other four, Michael Satlow’s, covering material from the popular-audiences book he’d had published a year or so before, makes for a decent intro in some respects to what I post here now just about a year ago — to Yonatan Adler’s Origins of Judaism talk, at least. I want to listen to all the readings from that conference again.

I find real limits to futurity after the last few years. Like I think, the data’s clear on what COVID can do to children, um, and we’re seeing declining rates of vaccination in certain populations — not just [for] COVID, for all kinds of things now — and so I think that there are real limits to it. And I loved what you were both talking about, like, what fantasies emerge, which are engaged and which are displacing other things we can’t think about? . . . I think it was just last Thursday the 9-11 Emergency Act was re-authorized for the twenty-first time. And, you know, the COVID public emergency’s over, even as it kills hundreds of people a day, still, in the United States, but the 9-11 myth of the outsider coming in to harm us — we’re still taking off our shoes, we still can’t take, you know, a can of Coke onto a plane — and that fantasy pushes away, in some ways, the thing that’s too difficult to think about.

And I think the animality is interesting that way too, because — you’re right, Patrick, like, if we look . . . you know, we can see, as we’re treating people in prison the same way that we’re treating hogs, it affects them both, it also affects the workers in those environments as well, and everyone in their networks — but I think what’s really being displaced with a lot of animal things is the ‘ick’ factor of people wanting to see a separation that’s not there. They don’t like, we don’t like to think that we’re close enough to a monkey or a pig that we could share viruses. And the viruses, like, show that’s not true. …

This might seem like a tangent, but I did a panel at the socialism conference about leftist political possibilities in popular science fiction, and it led to — I thought no one would come, it was the last morning of the conference — it was packed, and it led to so many interesting conversations, including, after the fact, talking about space travel in a way I had not heard, from an indigenous perspective. The idea of another planetary — like, being able to colonize, and using that word purposely — um, colonize another planet is laughable if you think about how dependent we are on other systems. Like, it’s like thinking your fingernail is going to represent life. Um, that we could live on another planet without, like, everything in the sea, and everything in the air, and every other thing in the land.

And I think that viruses, like, make us confront that reality, that we cannot separate — as much as we want to see a hard line between humans and non-humans, um, the viruses say, ‘Nope.’ Like, this one will jump between deer and humans, this one between rats and humans — not all of them do, but a lot of them — this one will go between birds [and humans], some will move between some species and kill, and not kill, some will kill both of them — um, but there is a relationship. And I think if there’s one over-arching lesson I’ve tried to work through in this book: that everything is about relationship, there is no ‘I’ by itself. And that is a fundamental threat to, like, the American sense of itself.

Steven Thrasher, talking with Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield about themes of his book The Viral Underclass for the podcast they co-host, Ordinary Unhappiness.

My interests in American history and culture have never led me to serious attention to the Kennedy family or the Kennedy White House, so I didn’t expect to be drawn in especially deeply by last week’s new Know Your Enemy recording, a conversation Sam and Matt have with (ahem, comics scholar and ever-lovin’ Canadian) Jeet Heer about Garry Wills’ writing on the subject — appended below.

There’s a lot going on in this episode, but what took me particularly was the discussion’s occasional turn to something you might think I’d have given at least a little thought to before now: the clues the elements of cultural affinity between JFK and a guy like Bill Buckley or the pre-war politics of Kennedy dad Joe Sr., FDR’s late-1930s ambassador to the UK and friend of Nancy Astor, offer toward a coherent story of the United States’ ambivalence (or essential non-opposition, rather) toward fascism. That troubled national posture, with widespread popular tendency to less than straight telling of our recent history that follows, is one subject much on my mind for several years. You might indeed think it would have occurred to me to look into the Kennedy position, but it never has.

Not germane in the course of what Matt, Sam and Jeet have to talk about but point of curiosity my mind quickly ran to while listening was whether there might be a ’60s-period connection between Philip Johnson and the Kennedys.

It’s some years since I’ve read anything about Johnson. Chances are that I knew at some point that the JFK cenotaph in Dallas, 1969, was his work, or of his close association with Jacqueline Onassis in ’70s New York and to end of her life. If so, though, I’d managed to forget it. Some territory for exploration presents itself here, then, if I can make time eventually.

Been getting a strongish dose of Steely Dan the last few weeks — a lot of it as ear-worm, in my head. Snatches of ‘Home at Last,’ ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ &c. kick in as I’m waking in the morning or at random while at daily work when not otherwise accompanied auditorily. For better or worse, this music is never far from me right now.

I probably owe being any kind of Dan listener to begin with, compared to the average American acquainted with classic-rock-station fare I took moderate helpings of often enough a couple of decades or so ago, to long-time online friend Darrell’s repeatedly coming back to Becker & Fagen on his blog over the years. But the near occasion for being a shade more than usually casually attentive to the band’s catalogue is the video below — which, let me go ahead and say, is great stuff, eminently worth the ~10 min. of play time.

I’m a follower of Turner’s channel and those of some of the other Brooklyn-based young performers he’s most associated with (Neely, the bassist, I’m able to follow on Nebula, happily), but this item escaped my notice until some months after it went up. I’ve been preoccupied this year. And I’m nothing like a big enough Dan fan to have known the story of the abandoned track or the forgotten tape’s coming to light before hearing it in Turner’s telling. If you are such a fan, please pardon me the passing along old news.

I love this group’s pains at respectable homage (whatever the level of accuracy they achieve, a question well beyond my ability to evaluate) and the pure fun they have in going for it. I’ve played the recording quite a few times. What I’m struck by in the end, though, top-notch as the video is, is how unlike listening to a Steely Dan track this effervescent tribute collaboration turns out to be. This isn’t a reflection touching ‘fidelity’ but a sense stemming from some other point altogether, to do with inter-communicative ‘energy’ and contrasts between the scene this music was conceived in a short half-century ago and the one Turner, Neely and friends are making their careers as music-nerd ‘creator’ artists in today. But I have no intention of trying in this post to put my finger on whatever that thing I’m dimly sensing is.

In the world of American Evangelicalism, I’m of a generational cohort tending to abandon the fascination with schemes of the eschatological, surging in the decades immediately after WW2 and shaping our upbringings, and to go instead very sober and historical-minded (as we supposed) about our Christian faith and thinking — away from the know-nothing pietistical and enthusiastic, toward the ecclesiastically ‘confessional’ and the ‘orthodox.’ The LaHaye & Jenkins Left Behind publishing phenomenon, for instance, launched when I was in mid-twenties, I avoided altogether. I’m long in the habit of tuning out ‘end-times’ noise.

I have a certain tendency too, not coincidentally, somewhat to tune out liberal-Christian critics of Evangelicalism like James Tabor when the topic is examination of that modern American end-times obsession I was raised with. Their criticisms may be agreeable to me, but the whole business is a little tedious nevertheless. So though I’d been vaguely aware of a Bible prophecy series Tabor started on YouTube a few months ago, I’ve paid it no attention — until, that is, this week, as media concern with Evangelicals and Israel continues intensifying. (The biblical prophets themselves, it’s important to say, are by no means reducible to the various accounts of ‘last things’ the texts coming down to us offer, as a talk Tabor recorded well before beginning this series may help to show.)

The video series is linked below. Something I hardly anticipated, listening back through earlier items in the collection over the last few days, was to hear any mention of American-scene popular illustration and cartooning — let alone to be introduced to a cartoonist of great influence whose name I hadn’t previously really known. The cartoonist in question was, it happens, both a person highly placed throughout mature working life as a leader in Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, a church group Tabor also had involvement with as a young academic, and also a notable precursor to and source for such celebrated ‘comix’ figures as Crumb and Spiegelman: Basil Wolverton. Remarkable.

I’d have known about Wolverton if I were more inclined toward the Mad Magazine ideal or to gross-out humor, no doubt. But I never have much been so inclined. I have a good deal to learn here. (Further reflections in a longer post to come, maybe, if I can get to it.)

Turns out, by the way, that Basil Wolverton’s son Monte, my parents’ age (and Tabor’s), is likewise a career cartoonist — and though far from comparable to his father in reputation, he is curiously somebody whose name one might encounter in news and commentary around Israel-Palestine conflict just at the moment.