Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“America and a Crumbling Global Order”
Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman takes stock of the multiple crisis facing the Biden Administration: “The Biden administration is currently trying to deal with wars in the Middle East and Europe, while preparing for a surge in tensions between China and Taiwan…The combination of all these events is creating a palpable sense of tension and foreboding in government offices in Washington. It is not just the sheer number of crises coming at the Biden administration, but the fact that many are heading in the wrong direction — the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, for example. And the polls look bad for Biden.” Rachman continues: “A chaotic and divisive US election — with Trump as the central figure — will contribute powerfully to that impression of US weakness and decline. China, Russia and Iran will relish asking how America can promise to defend democracies overseas, when its own democracy is in so much trouble at home. Unfortunately, it is a good question.”
“The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era”
On a related note,
wrestles with how to describe this period in world history at The New Yorker. He favorably invokes’s idea of “polycrisis,” which captures not only the Biden administration’s current predicament, but also the state of the global order as a whole. Chayka goes on to note how high tech plays an outsized yet intellectually unhelpful role in making sense of the 2020s: “Artificial intelligence threatens the status quo in ways that can be hard to predict. Already, the technology makes humanity start to seem somehow irrelevant: if A.I. can do everything we can do, what purpose do we have left? But when I asked ChatGPT to offer its own snappy name for our times, the results were ineloquent (The Epoch of Disarray), overly optimistic (The Resilience Renaissance), or self-aggrandizing (The Algorithmic Ascendancy). None had the requisite compressed poetry or catchiness of a global meme. When it comes to labelling our era of technological supremacy, the tech itself is not yet up to the task—which perhaps we can count as a small win for humanity.”
“The Case for Left Conservatism”
Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that many thinkers are searching for ways out of the polycrisis of the present. At Unherd,
argues for a “Left Conservatism,” which she describes as “something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry…In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.” Regardless of what you call it, “the local, the particular, and the human-scaled” have been central themes here on Handful of Earth.
“Spirituality Among Americans”
Left conservatism and similar emergent ideologies often call into question the exclusion of the spiritual from the domain of politics. This new Pew Research Center survey indicates that such a perspective may find find fertile ground in the United States, where—despite being the global icon of consumerist materialism—the vast majority of people attest to the existence of an unseen spiritual realm. Most notably,
These sorts of attitudes have often been dismissed by the left as backwards superstition, on the one hand, and appropriated by the right for religious realpolitik, on the other. However, I suspect that many Americans are ready for a different approach to the relationship between spirituality and politics. For more on this relationship, see my recent essay, “The World Is Built By Gratuitous Kindness.”
“To Fight Antisemitism on Campuses, We Must Restrict Speech”
This week, I published Part 2 of my essay, “Why Free Speech?” Since I started writing on this topic, the need for a compelling argument for free speech has become more and more apparent in the face of a new wave of censorship and cancel culture flowing from American college and university campuses. This op-ed in The Washington Post by University of Pennsylvania law and philosophy professor, Claire O. Finkelstein, is a prime example. Finkelstein, who is (believe it or not) a member of UPenn’s Open Expression Committee and chair of the law school’s committee on academic freedom, overtly advocates for a crackdown on free speech at academic institutions, stating that “the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses. As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech — even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities. With the dramatic rise in antisemitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake: Antisemitism — and other forms of hate — cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities.” In an even more bizarre turn of events, Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature have blocked funding to UPenn’s School of Veterinary Medicine as a punishment for an alleged culture of antisemitism on campus. I wonder where this political will was during UPenn’s massive conflict of interest surrounding the mRNA covid vaccines.
“Substack Shouldn’t Decide What We Read”
It is not only colleges and universities where free speech is under attack, but also independent online platforms like Substack. A recent article by Jonathan Katz in The Atlantic, entitled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” advocates for centralized content moderation policies on the platform in order to censor distasteful speech. Fortunately, prominent Substacker
of has circulated a letter explaining just how wrongheaded this move would be: “Substack is not just a model for a better social media, or even a better media—it’s a model for a better internet. That’s why, alongside the incredible writers who have signed this letter below, I am not advocating for a lack of moderation, I’m advocating for community moderation. I’m advocating for decentralized moderation. Together, we’re advocating for a future internet where we decide what we read, not an algorithm or a company—where we can create small gardens on the internet where all of us can flourish.”
“There’s No ‘Best Ever’ in Art”
- argues against the use of superlatives in the music world at . He critiques this “Orwellian destruction of language in which my experience…has to be validated by making it the greatest of all time.” He observes that “this language of ‘the best of all time,’ ‘the best ever,’ has become such a staple of the culture” and, in response, militates against the “idea of ranking artistry like you’re ranking sports teams.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Solid writing and analysis here. Simulacrumorphosis is the effect of AI on humanity, subjugating humans so successfully to authoritarianism that obedience becomes “intelligence” and therefore things to be traded to further propel the de-humanization. People are forced to live in artificialized existence and we thereby become things of it and inextricably for it.