Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
Robert Boyers – Skidmore College academic and veteran professor – wrote The Tyranny of Virtue to collect his thoughts on social justice movements among college students. I can imagine many of you rolling your eyes. Your worry is clear enough. Is Boyers just an old white man who can’t change with the times, comfortable at his privileged liberal arts college and reluctant to embrace the change that’s reached even his ivory tower?
Maybe.
For whatever reason, left spaces encourage the ‘pied piper’ character. Always enthusiastic, he – and the Pied Piper is almost always he – wants to lead, regardless of expertise or skill. And he wants to lead now. He’s ready to get things done, and he wants to play the hero.
The Pied Piper uniquely combines ambition with enthusiasm and impatience. And he’s uniquely common in places like Iowa City.
The Major League Baseball season was supposed to start early this year: March 26. Obviously COVID-19 stopped that from happening. MLB made the best of it, promoting a big TV marathon for each team it called Opening Day at Home. But we all want a 2020 baseball season. Will there be a 2020 baseball season? Is it safe to have one? If so, what will a 2020 baseball season look like?
We don’t have a state religion in the U.S. But if we did, it would probably be the Protestant Work Ethic. Or so Max Weber would argue. Most Americans think they should work hard to succeed, even if they don’t. And yet there’s an alternative attitude from within the same Christian traditions. We can find it in the Bible, in the Garden of Eden story.
Here’s an experience most of us had during the #MeToo movement: a cherished cultural figure – a favorite musician, filmmaker, author, actor, et al. – did bad things. The victims of those actions came forward. These events provoked in us as many reactions as it did experiences – from revulsion to condemnation to indifference to defensiveness or even apologism. Some of the cultural figures I love were a part of this, including Isaac Asimov.
As Alec Nevala-Lee documents, Asimov had a reputation as a harasser, and the science fiction community knew all about it. Asimov exemplified for Nevala-Lee a certain type of harasser: the awkward, nerdy boy who, through his intellectual efforts and outputs, gained social power with which to lord over women who wouldn’t otherwise attend to him.
Here are some thoughts on Asimov: what his work meant to me, how I see that work now, and how harassment locks people – especially women – out of spaces.
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