Monthly Muse: 11/2023
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the November 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
Commentators on both the left and the right seem to agree that the world (or at least some significant part of it) is in crisis. While the signs and symptoms are all around us—widespread drug addition, suicide, chronic disease, urban violence, war, and so on—there are competing perspectives on the root cause.
These perspectives can be broadly divided into ones that focus on political-economic causes and ones that focus spiritual-religious causes. Unfortunately (perhaps due to an intransigent dualism whose reductive power is all the more alluring in times of crisis) these perspectives are rarely combined, let alone reconciled. As a result, we find ourselves swimming in a sea of compelling, yet partial, explanations of what is going on in the world.
This month on Handful of Earth, my appearance on the What’s Left? podcast as well as my article on Jewish theology can both be understood as efforts to bridge the gap between these two perspectives on crisis.
The podcast discussion is in dialogue with and response to Marxist approaches to the history and philosophy of science. What emerged from the discussion was a complex picture of scientism as a force that moves easily across the boundary of the metaphysical and the material and, thus, must be understood and critiqued on both levels.
I wrote “The World Is Built by Gratuitous Kindness” in response to the failure of political-economic perspectives on the crisis in Gaza to engage with the theological dimensions of the present predicament. At the same time, many commentators of the spiritual-religious persuasion have remained silent on the current violence, apparently preferring not to intervene at all in such controversial and worldly affairs. This, too, is a deeply unsatisfactory approach given the urgency of the situation.
I believe that we need to draw on the resources of multiple, often superficially juxtaposed, intellectual traditions in order to make sense of the overlapping crises within which we find ourselves enmeshed. First and foremost, this will require moving beyond hard-and-fast divisions between the material and the spiritual, the political and the religious. This is easier said than done, which is why so few people even try. But an attempt—even a failed one—seems more valuable to me than a continued reliance on limiting and incomplete frameworks.
What do you think?
Provocation
“[H]istory forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant—the historical event—which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way history runs its course like a natural process, and has substantially the same laws of motion. But, because of the fact that the individual wills—each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)—do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.”
—Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Joseph Bloch”