Knocking At The Gate

Writing in The Hedgehog Review , Yale professor Phillip Gorski examines the roots of resurgent authoritarian movements all over the world, and how the conflicts between immanence and transcendence in religion are manifested in political belief: In the American context, these phenomena are usually attributed to populist ideology, racial backlash, or Christian nationalism. Such explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They cannot explain certain puzzling features of the MAGA movement that are also evident outside the American context, including the outlandish behavior of the political leaders, the swirl of conspiracy theories that often surrounds them, or the lack of any clear policy platform. Nor do those explanations account for the enthralling worldviews of the new authoritarian movements, which mix religion, magic, conspiracy, and popular culture in a toxic stew. Historical anthropology and cultural sociology can help us here by placing neoauthoritarianism i...

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Atlantic about how things got this bad, and offers suggestions on how to respond: Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon. But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent? This, I believe, is...

Jenny Holzer. (1983). " Survival." Cast aluminum.  Much more insight and wisdom from the amazing Jenny Holzer here.

  David Potter in Aeon : "What can disruptions of the past – with their diverse outcomes – tell us today? The value of history is that it enables us to detect patterns of behaviour in the present that have had serious consequences in the past." * * * * * Potter, D. (2022). A history of disruption, from fringe ideas to social change in Aeon Essays . Melbourne, Australia: Aeon Media Group. Retrieved 24 January 2022 from https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-disruption-from-fringe-ideas-to-social-change.