Monthly Muse: 3/2024
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.
Weekly Groundings will be back next Friday; today, I offer you the March 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
This month, I took up
call in “A Better Model of Political Categories” to explore different possible combinations afforded by his new model. I focused on the “CEIS political personality type.” This exercise reminded me of one of the things I most appreciate about writing on Substack: the cross-pollination among different publications and authors. This is one of the reasons I strive to share and comment on at least one other (often more) Substacker’s writing in my Weekly Groundings. More generally, I endeavor to put my original work at Handful of Earth into dialogue with other publications on this platform.Lyons’ post, as well as other content featured this month, such as
’s guest post on ’s Substack, also demonstrates that intellectuals on Substack are doing much more than “public-facing” academic writing. The platform has emerged as an important domain for critical discussion and debate independent from the academy. Authors who otherwise are marginalized in dominant academic and intellectual spaces can not only reach a much larger audience on Substack, but also address issues from angles that are “always already” canceled in college and university spaces. Don’t go to a gender studies classroom to find Harrington and Tsantekidou’s fascinating back-and-forth on a topic like “reactionary feminism.” And don’t go to a political science seminar in search of serious discussion of political categories beyond the left-right paradigm along the lines of Lyons’ model.Substack has proven to be a much more fruitful place for these kinds of truly cutting-edge and pertinent conversations. I look forward to reading and participating in more of these exchanges in the future.
Provocation
“Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself. This invitation to commoners extended by America was the most revolutionary pedagogy of all. Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense. No one can do this very well without learning ways of paying attention: from a knowledge of diction and syntax, figures of speech, etymology, and so on, to a sharp ability to separate the primary from the subordinate, understand allusion, master a range of modes of presentation, test truth, and penetrate beyond the obvious to the profound messages of text. Reading, analysis, and discussion are the way we develop reliable judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances. Without the ability to read and argue we’re just geese to be plucked.”
—John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education