Monthly Muse: 4/2026
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 April 2026 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation
Contemplation
In my interview this month with Frederick Schminke, I asked him about the different kinds of objections to what he calls “gender ideology doctrine”: liberal, leftist, conservative, post-conservative, naturalist, scientific, religious, etc. While many people have come out against the doctrine, they often do so for vastly different reasons and can only find unity on a single-issue campaign due to deeper-seated disagreements.
I was reminded of how common this predicament is across a range of contemporary political issues: someone’s opposition to or support for something doesn’t imply that we automatically know the reasons for his or her opposition or support. This is nothing new in the realm of gender politics. It was, after all, radical feminists and evangelical Christians who were the most vocal opponents of pornography in the 1980s and, in some cases, the two camps actively worked together to build a single-issue campaign.
Such strange bedfellows are even more commonplace today across a wide range of issues, not least opposition to Big Tech, where we have seen the emergence of parallel but distinct attacks on Silicon Valley. In my review of Adrian Daub’s book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, I note that, for Daub,
the problem with Silicon Valley is found not in its imposition of the technological mindset on the rest of society but, rather, in its whiteness and its maleness, attributes that are conveniently mapped onto “bad thinking.” If the Valley just becomes more DEI-ified, this perspective implies, the thinking will get better and tech can be reformed and redeemed after all…I believe that many culture wars are, upon closer examination, conflicts over the place of technology in society, whereas Daub endeavors to further culture warify the critique of tech.
I concluded the review noting that, “if the tech-critical left and the tech-critical right are to find common ground and mount a united challenge to Big Tech, we cannot avoid the question of why we criticize Silicon Valley in the first place.”
While I am sympathetic to Schminke’s single-issue activist approach in times of extreme ideological polarization, fracture, and heterogeneity, I do think that we will, at some point, have to squarely address this “why” question on a host of hot button political issues, lest the seeds of new and even deeper divisions be sowed under the guise of populist unity. What do you think?
Provocation
“What the concept of the work of art demands…is not only universal access to a good education, a demand often enough made but perhaps not realizable in societies such as ours. Rather, it demands the de-instrumentalization of education itself, a demand that is certainly not realizable in societies such as ours, whose educational systems are geared toward producing workers at the increasingly polarized skill levels that the economy requires. That such a demand is unrealistic is not a critique of the demand, but, rather a rebuke to the conditions that make it so. As long as the pursuit of noninstrumental knowledge is reserved only for a few, the directly humanistic noises we make about it are vicious mockeries of themselves. But the degree to which we no longer make them reveals the degree to which we have stopped pretending our societies are fit for human beings.”
—Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism