Numbers, and an open letter to Cory Doctorow regarding Noam Chomsky

The good news first. I finished transcribing Evil Hides in Darkness, the tenth (!) installment of my saga. It clocked in at 15981 words, which brings my total to 222,046 words. I began to transcribe installment eleven, The Limits of Magic, this morning, and realized I had the beginning stored in a Google Drive doc (I'm not doctrinaire about my methods, even if I have my preferences). Um...let's just say, as I suspected, this installment is going to be the longest yet. Hmm...

In other news...

As I've mentioned, I enjoy Cory Doctorow's writings, and I've found him to be clarifying and informative. I not only read his blogs, I've read three of his books--and one of them was on the details around "intellectual property"--in the entertainment industry. I genuinely like this guy, and through him I've since been turned on to The American Prospect, which is providing fantastic coverage of issues I care about. 

So please take that into account when you read what I wrote to him below after reading his latest post. I like Doctorow, but I loathe Noam Chomsky, and damn, am I done with staying silent when I see someone like him promoted in any way.

Doctorow sent a polite reply, which he didn't have to do. Hopefully I'm not blocked now.

Deb in the City

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Hi Cory,

I'm glad to see that Chomsky managed to trip into a useful opinion. Given his toxic, career-ending sexism (at least according to all of the accounts I've heard of women who studied under him at MIT), as well as his callousness (I recall hearing an interview in which he defended keeping monuments to confederate leaders), his misunderstanding of the position on NATO expansion, plus his advocacy for "peace negotiations" to end the war in Ukraine--not to mention that he was, of course, found to be a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's (I'm sure they spent a good deal of time talking about cutting edge science and culture, not indulging in anything unsavory)--it is truly amazing that he could arrive at a common sense opinion about political activity.

We go to the polls to elect someone who will do the best job out of all of the options to advocate for and legislate to our needs. We're not inviting someone into our family or even over for dinner. This is a relatively simple proposition and doesn't require any posturing around labels.

For the record, I was happy to be considered a progressive-left-liberal Democrat until the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. I was disgusted by the shocking lack of compassion by almost everyone on my side of the aisle, especially those who were, like me, Gen X/Baby Busters/Slackers who got an education about the Holocaust and genocide and recognized what they were looking at. As horrified as I am by what's happening in Gaza, I keep looking around for those people to care about what's going on--still!--in Syria. I'll also take as vigorous a demonstration of concern for the trafficked children of Ukraine.

All to say that even while I am contacting my state and federal legislators every week--not to mention regularly bugging the city councilors in Boston, staying active in municipal organizations, and marching to help unionize businesses in my area--Chomsky and other "leftists" can keep their seal of approval. Actually, they can all try a little harder to earn mine.

Thanks,
Deb (She/Her/Hers)

The road to hell

If I'm writing a lot about Slavery and the Culture of Taste, it's because the book covers numerous topics that get at the heart of the intensifying anxiety so many of us experience as we contemplate the current state of our culture.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about is how the internal contradictions were always so obvious to the "founders" of modernity. Instead of addressing those contradictions, they played verbal and mental gymnastics with themselves, then threw on layers of pretension to hide what they couldn't fix.

Did it really never occur to anyone that their circles couldn't be squared? That they needed to strip down to brass tacks and start again? Because it certainly has occurred to a number of people now. Or did they think that there was a moment, some time in a vague future, in which those contradictions could be resolved? Was that moment supposed to be now?

If you value liberty as a fundamental right and believe that your civilization is better when those in it are free, you don't get around that by redefining certain people as inferior or subhuman because it is an economic necessity that those people work under conditions you wouldn't be willing to take on for yourself. You have to redesign your economic system, which will almost inevitably mean redefining the concept of success. 

I feel pretty strongly that the answer isn't to use machines to provide silent servitude; the fact that so many -- in business and fiction -- fantasize about robots that might as well be sentient speaks, to me, of a recognition that a spark of humanity is necessary for, well, the company of other human beings, and we endeavor to escape that at our own peril.

Philip Ball's excellent Modern Myths theorized that one of the fears Frankenstein stokes is that we will become the robots, not so much that they will take us over. After reading Slavery and the Culture of Taste, I have to wonder to what extent Frankenstein was inspired by slavery. I can't help but think that Mary Shelley, like so many around her, had a deep seated recognition that modernity was creating monsters -- more out of those who used other human beings than the misused human beings.

Sunny Auyang's book The Dragon and The Eagle covered these topics as well. Auyang distinguishes between those who use slaves (Han China) from those who depend on them (Imperial Rome). Empires end: ultimately what drives them is conquest, and sooner or later the costs of conquest outweigh the benefits. But while all empires suffer from hypocrisy of one flavor or another -- the prestige of the metropolitan center versus the practical importance of the "creole" borders; philosophies that center on the importance of law and advancement versus those that lean on custom to justify corruption -- those that depend on slavery come to almost neurotically venerate the concepts of freedom and liberty. 

In many cases, concepts do not take shape until their hateful opposite is articulated. This may be normal. What is unhealthy is not only that those contradictions are allowed to co-exist, but that a society allows itself to become or remain dependent on that which they have told themselves is intolerable. This is what twists us and causes us to make compromises that we, ultimately, can't live with; this is what causes us to be people who don't really believe anything except that which is most likely to help us survive. This is what makes us hypocrites who spout ideals that in the final analysis we won't do anything to support them. 

I started writing this post before I came across this article about Israel from The New Republic. My rabbi is quoted there, and his quotes are one of the few bright spots in the piece. The Jewish way is to do the work. (I might add so is the Korean way, so I am doubly obligated; I suspect there are few cultures in the world that valued complacency.) The work needs to be done, but I am under no delusions that doing so will guarantee that Israel will be any kind of safe haven for me or anyone else in my family. Not everyone in my family is straight; no one has been Orthodox since my grandfather; I am a woman of mixed heritage. This Israeli government isn't welcoming to people like me, period.

And even if it were...no, I'm sorry, I can't stomach the trampling of human rights anymore. (Yes, I refer to the Palestinians. No, I don't care that some of them wouldn't like me because I'm Jewish; the vast majority are not that way, which is amazing given their increasing desperation, which by definition leaves people with few good and ethical options.) I've fought with many people on both sides of the issue of Israel since the age of fifteen, and for some reason it's only gotten worse as I've gotten older. It is bad enough that I live now in a settler-colonial country that has made mistreatment of BIPOC and immigrant people a policy; I do not want to flee to another place that does the same thing. I do not want my safety to come at the cost of someone else's. I am not going to be soothed that I am doing the right thing because of a chauvinist notion about my heritage.

Good intentions by themselves aren't the only things that guide us to hell. I submit that the dirt surrounding that path are the compromises, contradictions, and hypocrisies that we try to blind ourselves to, and the end of the road is the point at which those good intentions run out. Of course it's hell. 

I want to survive -- I want my family to survive -- but I don't want any of us to do it in hell, especially while there's still time to avert it. Let's all do the work while we still can.

Deb in the City