I spend a lot of time thinking about politics, and some time writing about it here. Most of the time that writing is done at a fairly abstract level, and I think that that’s defensible, but a concrete point today: If you can make it to any of the public rallies opposing Israel’s genocide, do so. The past year and a half has been an absolutely ruthless demonstration of actually-existing liberalism’s ‘values’, and standing against this is important.

To return to the abstract. As I make my way through the pragmatists, and note the closeness between the problems they deal with and my own, I have started to wonder if this is just because I have grown up with their problematics and vocabulary. It seems very plausible to me that they simply shaped the history of recent political philosophy thoroughly enough that I’ve implicitly adopted their positions, even when I haven’t read them directly. Rawls would be another example of this, though in his case I’m more-or-less familiar with his arguments. Just being familiar with these problematics doesn’t explain why I still find them challenging (live?), though. I think that this is something that Marxism (in many of its guises) sometimes struggles with. At the abstract, theoretical level liberalism raises interesting and difficult challenges, and the way that liberals have approached these challenges has continued to evolve. There’s sometimes a lazy pseudo-genealogical argument against liberal positions that I think underplays the problems that they are really trying to solve.

Another problem that I have been idly thinking about recently relates to the ‘masculinity crisis’ and its relation to a ‘lack of male role models’. Those scare quotes are lazy, but hopefully do serve to get the point across… I basically think that this crisis is bullshit, and a distraction from the really rather terrifying wave of misogyny sweeping the globe. One way to think about some of smoke-and-mirrors of the debate could come from a comparison of different approaches to representation (the limits of representational politics aside) taken by mainstream feminism and the notion of ‘good male role models’. My hunch is that the former want an opening up of the social roles available to women, rather than providing role models for how one should act qua womanhood. The latter, of course, seeks to redefine how men should act qua manhood, and thus restates the gender categories in question. Anyway, I certainly need to read more feminist work before bloviating on this any further.¹

What else? I’ve been reading Patrick White’s plays recently. I’m thinking of having a bit of a drama year, it’s always good to look at different literary forms…