Monthly Muse: 2/2025
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 passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the February 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
As regular readers of Handful of Earth know, I write a lot of commentary on American politics. My interests, however, lie less in political commentary per se and more in the deeper conflicts that politics illuminates. One of these conflicts is over the definition of the human being.
Beyond its obvious role in promoting its own business interests, the technocratic right-wing progressive wing of the Trump movement proposes a particular definition of the human being. Its definition is an essentially quantitative and computational one amenable to scientific management. Against this, another faction of the fragile Trump coalition takes a more conservative approach to defining the human being, where limits—biological and moral—are given central importance.
The contemporary left, in contrast, seems to take little interest in the question of the human being. It is content to criticize both elements of the Trump movement in one fell swoop without asking itself where it stands in relation to this pivotal conflict. By default, it tends to align with the right-wing progressive camp on the question of the human being, for reasons I have analyzed in depth in my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology.” This increasingly hegemonic view of the human being—bolstered by both right- and left-wing progressives—is not the only possible definition. This is abundantly clear when we consider the contemporary debates on the right, but it is also evident that the historical left proposed its own alternative visions (which I discuss in the aforementioned 2022 essay).
My essay this month, “Everybody Is a Star,” looks at this question from the perspective of the musical culture of the 1960s. It takes as its starting point the conception of the human being found in the work of Sly and the Family Stone. The Bay Area counterculture with which the group was associated has taken a lot of heat for producing the later excesses of the cultural left. I myself have made a version of this argument in “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament.” However, this was a complicated moment and it is unfair to treat it as a whipping boy for whatever aspects of contemporary left politics one dislikes. “Everybody Is a Star” is an effort to reexamine another aspect of this moment and emphasize how relevant it is to contemporary conflicts over the definition of the human being.
For those who are interested, I address the question of the human being in a number of other essays at Handful of Earth, including “Lift Every Voice,” “Telos or Transhumanism,” and “The Truth of the Anecdote.”
Provocation
“The scientific management movement was backed by many international bankers and industrialists. In 1905, the vice president of the National City Bank of New York, Frank Vanderlip, made his way to the speaker’s podium at the National Education Association’s annual convention to say: ‘I am firmly convinced the economic success of Germany can be encompassed in a single word—schoolmaster. From the economic point of view the school system of Germany stands unparalleled.’ German schools were psychologically managed, ours must be, too. People of substance stood, they thought, on the verge of an ultimate secret. How to write upon the empty slates of empty children’s minds in the dawning era of scientific management. What they would write there was a program to make dwarf and fractional human beings, people crippled by implanted urges and habits beyond their understanding, men and women who cry out to be managed.”
—John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Read the John Taylor Gatto quote as if he were a contemporary advocate of wokism. There you have precisely why left is the new right.