Excavation 1/2024: Essays and Articles
A guide to writing on Handful of Earth
As mentioned in my New Year’s Update, today and the following Friday will feature curated guides to the flagship content on Handful of Earth in lieu of standard Weekly Groundings. These Excavations of previously published work can be used however you see fit—as a reminder of content to return to, a prompt to read further, or a document to share with friends and family who may be interested in Handful of Earth.
Whenever I publish an essay, article, review, or interview, my hope is that its value transcends the immediate moment in which it was written. Though I regularly address current events here on Handful of Earth, my intention is to offer grounded thinking with roots strong enough to weather the storm of the news cycle and nourish readers who may discover my writing months or even years after its first appearance.
This week’s Excavation features the essays and articles published on Handful of Earth to date. If you appreciate my work, please consider sharing Handful of Earth with your friends and family to help ground them in the new year.
Without further ado, here is a guide to the writing on Handful of Earth.
The Left’s Problem With Technology
This was the first essay I wrote for Handful of Earth well before I developed a more cohesive vision for the publication over a year later. I had been mulling over the ideas in this essay for quite some time before writing it. My personal and political disillusionment with much of the left led me to eventually join Substack and publish this piece independently. In it, I argue that what are commonly framed as “culture wars” in American political discourse are more accurately understood as “technology wars.” I go on to explore the role of technocratic fantasy across wide swatches of the historical and contemporary left with a particular attention to automation, cybernetics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I draw on the history of the Luddite movement and the thought of James Boggs, Martin Luther King Jr., and Leo Tolstoy to argue for a renewed critique of technology in the 2020s.
Elite Universities and the Impending Booster Regime
This article was written to explain what led me to start a petition against the University of Pennsylvania’s covid booster vaccine mandate. While it reads as quite measured from the vantage point of 2024 (too measured, in my opinion), many of the points here were extremely controversial two years back, as some of the comments indicate.
Mask and Vaccine Mandates: The Need for Discernment
Continuing on the theme of covid, this piece argues for the importance of the reasons behind opposition to vaccine versus mask mandates. It was born out of my frustration with the covid dissident right, which often promoted a knee-jerk opposition to any and all covid policies. While I make the case against both vaccine and mask mandates, I argue that the reasons for opposing these two kinds of mandates should be distinct.
Lift Every Voice
In this meditation on a hymn by James Weldon Johnson, I ponder the relationship between voice and politics. In particular, I reflect on the unique resolution to the problem of the individual and the collective implicit in black American music and spirituality. I also touch on the themes of genius, chance, and the human being.
Telos or Transhumanism?
This was the first essay I wrote after developing a clear vision and consistent publication schedule for Handful of Earth in May 2023. It was written in the midst of sudden public attention to the question of artificial intelligence and existential risk prompted by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s piece by in Time Magazine and Geoffrey Hinton’s resignation from Google. I step back from the immediate debate surrounding AI and existential risk to explore the foundational worldview that creates the conditions of possibility for this debate to occur in the first place. I contrast the Aristotelian idea of telos with the scientistic push toward transhumanism to argue that accepting human limitation is part of what makes us complete beings.
The Truth of the Anecdote
I explore the philosophical presuppositions underlying Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in this essay on the ethics of covid vaccine mandates. I argue that EBM’s moral elevation of the randomized control trial (RCT) ignores the moral weight of the anecdote and, therefore, leads to the unethical practice of medicine. The essay also explores different levels of truth, the problem of scale in moral thinking on medicine, and the distinction between tools and ethics.
Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament
As of writing this Excavation, this is the most widely read post on Handful of Earth. This comes as somewhat of a surprise, since it is inspired by a film that is over 20 years old about events which happened even earlier. The popularity of this essay, I think, speaks to a renewed interest in twentieth-century technological developments and their discontents in the midst of the present technological revolution. I use Lutz Dammbeck’s film, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet, as a jumping off point to explore the relationship of the hippie movement to Silicon Valley, the connection between cybernetics and artistic experimentalism, and the contours of intellectual life in postwar America. I conclude with reflections on the significance of Ted Kaczynski’s resistance to technology in light of these developments in the post-World War II United States.
Why Free Speech? (Part 1)
This is the first of a two-part essay on the justification for free speech. It was inspired by my attendance at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and debates surrounding free speech in contemporary America. I report on the FIRE conference, explain and critique the classical liberal justification for free speech, and explore the need for alternative arguments in support of free speech with a particular attention to the work of philospher Akeel Bilgrami.
The “Free Speech” Right Embraces Cancel Culture
Expanding on the theme of free speech, this article takes the American right to task for abandoning its principles on liberty of speech in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli siege of Gaza. In particular, I discuss the response to these events by Dave Rubin, Richard Hanania, Bari Weiss, and Jonathan Haidt to demonstrate the consequences of the conflict for freedom of speech in the United States.
Penn's Pandemic Power Play
This post summarizes and links to an op-ed that I co-wrote with George Borg for the University of Pennsylvania campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. We offer a retrospective account of the University’s covid vaccine mandates and argue that Penn miserably failed to provide justification for its coercive pandemic policies.
The World Is Built by Gratuitous Kindness
In this essay, I read Jewish theologian Michael Fishbane’s work in light of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. In particular, I explore the distinction between nomos (normative law) and hesed (gratuitous kindness) as it relates to Jewish ethics and spiritual practice. I argue that the Sate of Israel has abandoned the essential moral grounding of hesed found in the Jewish tradtion.
Why Free Speech? (Part 2)
This continuation of my essay on the justification for freedom of speech takes a more constructive tone than Part 1. As alternatives to the classical liberal argument, I offer five distinct arguments for free speech: The Argument from Creativity and Diversity; The Argument from Dialectics; The Argument from Just Deserts; The Argument from Religious Humanism; and The Argument from Duty. It is best read after reading Part 1, but can also be read on its own.
I hope you find this guide to my writing on Handful of Earth useful, and I look forward to sharing more original work with you in the coming year. In the meantime, stay tuned for a guide to reviews and interviews on Handful of Earth next Friday.
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