Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
I love summers in a college town. From reading on the front porch to visiting one of our local parks, I always have plenty to do.
Most people enjoy novels or light reading in the summer. But lately I’ve been knocking back the non-fiction! So, that’s what most of my list for the month will focus on.
And, as always, let me know what you’ve been reading lately.
Readers know I do a monthly book roundup, where I write briefly about 4 or 5 books I’ve recently read. But every now and then, I find myself wanting to say more about a particular book. Polarized by Degrees by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins is one of those.
For one, it’s timely. Most of us know there’s something wrong with U.S. politics, even at the level of everyday discussion. Things get heated and contentious. Many Americans – particularly members of marginalized groups – feel unwelcome in their own country. And we see rising levels of hate crimes, often with politicians openly egging them on.
This situation leads some of us to look for the source of the unrest. What divides us?
According to the chattering classes, especially pundits, identity forms the dividing force. We see this from both progressive and conservative ends, with the former blaming racism and/or toxic masculinity and the latter blaming the ‘woke mind virus’ or some such. It has gotten to the point where I use the term ‘identitarianism‘ to get at the assumption shared by both progressives and right-wingers that politics and/or political explanation reduce to identity.
After the dust settled from the 2024 election, people combed through the data to see how the vote broke down by demographic groups. And, of course, they brought their identitarian assumptions to the table. They wanted to know how race and gender drove the vote. Because what else could have done it?
And so they brought out the standard playbook of questions. Did Harris lose because ‘ugh, white women again!’? Did she lose because black men ‘abandoned’ her?
In Polarized by Degrees, Grossmann and Hopkins suggest something else matters more than identity.
After the first season of Severance, I blogged a couple of times about the issues it raises for having children and organizing in the white-collar world.
As I watched the second season, I had in mind that I might revisit these topics. Does the second season tell us anything new about organizing, for instance?
In some sense, perhaps it does. It provides more detail in how companies divide workers from one another and from their work. In addition, it gets into details about how workers can overcome these things. The four core workers throw off a ton of corporate bullshit and learn how to trust each other.
But I wanted to hit one new topic.
I know that with climate change, it’s a bit difficult to tell when one season ends and another begins. But by the calendar, this is the first reading list of the summer of 2025.
It’s always nice to start thinking about summer reads. And I hope this year is no different from any other in that regard. I’ve got plenty of things on my list. Let me know about yours!
In the first post of the Epicureanism 101 series, we talked about Epicurus’s division between types of desires. He divides between necessary, unnecessary, and unnatural desires to provide us a guide to focus our behavior.
But focus it toward what? That’s the question we answer in today’s post.
For the Epicurean, we aim for pleasure! That is to say that pleasure, for the Epicurean, is our final end or goal. It’s how we achieve eudaimonia.
So, in this post, I’ll say a bit about pleasure.
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