The Moral Cost of Capitalism

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

[The following is a talk I gave this afternoon as part of a faculty colloquium on “Radical Futures” at North Central College, part of the Intellectual Community series co-sponsored by the Faculty Development and Recognition Committee (of which I am chair) and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and organized by my colleague Sean Kim Butorac.]

Since I teach in the Shimer Great Books program, I will begin with an experience teaching one of the all-time greats, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In my ethics class this semester, we were discussing Book 1 and came to a passage where Aristotle had isolated three possible human goods that seemed to be good candidates for happiness—by which he means the human good that we pursue for its own sake, with no need for further justification or explanation. The first is pleasure, which is presumably self-explanatory. The second is honor, which we could paraphrase as respect or esteem. The third is contemplation, which we could see as a form of knowledge or understanding. In all three cases, Aristotle believes, it wouldn’t make sense to ask why we are pursuing these goals. Why do you want pleasure? Why do you want people to like and respect you? Why do you want to figure things out? The question doesn’t make sense.

The list feels pretty exhaustive, but Aristotle goes on to introduce a fourth possible candidate: money. Initially it seems to fit the bill—all things being equal, no one will turn down more money. But Aristotle points out that money is not truly an end in itself, but rather a pure means. We only want money because of the things we can do with it. And this, I point out, is an area where Aristotle is out of date. He can’t imagine living a life for the sake of stockpiling as much money as possible, much less orienting an entire society around it. We can.

Continue reading “The Moral Cost of Capitalism” →

Rebuilding the Closet

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 7 Comments

Gender and sexuality are a spectrum. In common discourse, we lose sight of what that means. Very Online approaches to gender and sexuality seem to say that gender and sexuality are a spectrum, but everyone is at a very specific and static spot on that spectrum. That fits with the more everyday discourse that was able to absorb the normalization of homosexuality on the condition that every individual clearly fits into one specific box. But that’s not how it is, and everyone probably understands that. Even among people who are exclusively heterosexual, there is a spectrum of how attracted they are to the opposite sex — how many partners they seek, how much monogamy is a struggle for them, how sexually motivated they are at all, etc. Enough people seem to be able to rest more or less content with monogamy that the whole thing basically “works,” but if we’re being honest, there are some people for whom it was never going to happen and who therefore never should have been expected to get married or have exclusive relationships.

Everything relating to sex and gender is like that. Continue reading “Rebuilding the Closet” →

Identity Politics vs. Identity Office Politics

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 3 Comments

In real life, identity is a structuring principle of human experience, which is by definition neither good or bad. For individuals, it can be constraining or life-enriching — or more likely, some mixture of both. For groups, identity can be the starting point for a broader engagement with the world, an alibi to turn inward, or even a spur to active hostility. Whether its effects appear to be positive or negative in any particular case, though, it is not something we can do without — especially on the political level, which by definition requires the creation or mobilization of an identity group toward some end. Every politics is in that sense an identity politics, even on the Marxist model, which requires the members of the working class to identify with their world-historical role as the proletariat.

Everybody who thinks seriously about identity and politics knows that this is the case. The Combahee River Collective knew that it’s the case, and presumably even Slavoj Žižek knows it’s the case. Why, then, do people so frequently denounce identity politics as a blind alley, a distraction, a cynical ploy, etc., etc.? I would suggest that it’s because there are actually two things that go by the name of “identity politics.” The first, which I have described, we could call “real-world identity politics.” The second, which people mostly hate, would best be designated as “identity office politics” — i.e., how identity functions in neoliberal institutional settings, most notably universities and corporations.

Continue reading “Identity Politics vs. Identity Office Politics” →

Be the navel you want to gaze at in the world

~ Adam Kotsko

It’s time for that oldest of blogging customs: explaining why you haven’t been blogging. This moment is especially fraught since I didn’t declare that I was taking “a hiatus.” My readers are feeling tense, abandoned. Didn’t Adam say he was back? Wasn’t he taking a whole big sabbatical from writing, all so he could blog again? What happened?

A lot has happened. Interesting things have happened in class. I’ve read good books. I’ve had illuminating conversations with friends that sparked my thinking. I’ve watched TV shows and movies and gone to concerts. I even noted with interest that a prominent figure in my field wrote a widely-shared article that divided readers! But not even my appetite for ill-advised controversy could rouse me from my blogological slumber.

It’s not a lack of material that caused this unannounced hiatus. Rather, it is the fact that having a full-time job turns out to be a full-time job. Continue reading “Be the navel you want to gaze at in the world” →

The Impossible Profession

~ Adam Kotsko

The first week of this semester was strange. On the one hand, my classes went awesome, at least from my perspective. My two Shimer seminars have had engaging discussions where everybody talked at least once, every class (which is harder than you’d think, even in a relatively small group of 10-14), and in my Ethics class, I’ve hit a pretty good balance between lecture and discussion in a larger class of 30. More than that, in all my classes I have thought new thoughts and made new connections because of our discussions. I leave the classroom energized and happy. On the other hand, everything outside of class felt like an absolute disaster. I’ve had to adjust my sleep schedule for an early start — the same schedule I had during the year of intense overwork that low-key ruined my life and let to my self-proclaimed sabbatical — and my classes are back-to-back-to-back with only 15-minute breaks between them. My service role also produced more stress and demands on my time than I anticipated this early in the semester. The result was that I felt like I had no time to breathe, much less think — at least outside the classroom.

I’ve never thought of myself primarily as a teacher. When I’m asked to provide a short bio, I often say I’m a writer, teacher, and translator — and I intend it in that order. Like most academics, I viewed writing and research as The Real Thing, with teaching as the way we paid the bills. And like most academics, once I actually set foot in the classroom, I found it exciting and engaging and even addictive. Continue reading “The Impossible Profession” →

The Culture of Therapy: Or, Men will literally write a whole long blog post instead of going to therapy

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

I have only been to therapy one time. But I know a lot about therapy, because we all know a lot about therapy. Our culture is absolutely saturated with the tropes and techniques of therapy — in fact, there’s a case to be made that “therapy” is the only narrative structure with broad legibility in American culture. Whether in the extreme form of recovering from trauma or the more workaday experience of becoming a slightly better person, seemingly every story traces the arc of therapy.

And I hate it. Continue reading “The Culture of Therapy: Or, Men will literally write a whole long blog post instead of going to therapy” →

The truth in literature

~ Adam Kotsko

A turning point in my life came when I enrolled in AP Lit in my senior year of high school. My teacher, Mr. Ricketts, was hands-off to the point of being neglectful. He basically handed us a list of classic works of literature and encouraged us to write sample papers to practice for the AP test — as few or as many as we liked. Every week we did an exercise where people brought in exemplary sentences to try to unravel how they “worked.” Only a couple texts were explicitly assigned as a whole-class read, mainly Greek tragedies. I was in heaven, finally given explicit permission to do what I had been doing throughout junior high and high school in any case — reading and thinking about whatever I wanted.

Continue reading “The truth in literature” →

What is the news for?

~ Adam Kotsko

I’ve always loved newspapers. Growing up, my grandparents had a subscription to the Flint Journal. Though my initial attraction was the Sunday comics, I browsed all the sections and was following favorite columnists — like Flint-area fixture Andrew Heller — from a weirdly young age. When Flint got a Borders, I eagerly dove into the out-of-town newspapers and “serious” magazines like the New Yorker or Harper’s. I’ve been a print magazine subscriber basically continuously since high school, and My Esteemed Partner and I take the Sunday New York Times as our Hegelian weekend liturgy. More recently, I’ve begun to get the daily Financial Times as a way of lessening my reliance on social media.

Since I had an extisting NYT subscription, I also considered simply adding daily delivery. But the first Sunday I read the A-section with that in mind, I realized that having their political coverage as my primary diet would drive me insane. Continue reading “What is the news for?” →

An extremely simple guide to getting started on Mastodon

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 4 Comments

In the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of my most beloved/accursed website, I have joined the trend of trying out Mastodon, the most direct alternative to Twitter. Many people have found tutorials (like this one) for joining Mastodon intimidating, as they spend a lot of time on the decentralized architecture and idiosyncratic terminology. But none of that matters after you initially sign up!

So here’s a stripped-down guide for what to do:

  1. Go directly to zirk.us, a Mastodon server that aims to attract academics and intellectual types.
  2. Sign up for an account using the extremely straightforward form that is like signing up for accounts for almost anything on the internet.
  3. Click on the link in the confirmation email — which is, again, just like basically every other account you’ve ever signed up for.
  4. Sign in and you will see an interface that’s a lot like Twitter! OMG!
  5. Click on your profile and copy the link over to Twitter, so that people know where to find you.
  6. Presumably at least some people will follow you, meaning you can follow them back, see their retweets, and then follow more people. You probably won’t get back up to your same follower levels any time soon, but don’t you want a change of pace? (Note: if you are following people who are on different servers, you may have to do an intermediary step where you copy your handle — your user name with the server appended — into a form. This is not stressful or a big deal.)
  7. In your profile settings, click yes for the thing that asks if you can be recommended — that will help people find you.
  8. Ignore the embarrassing Mastodon terminology and just refer to the parallel functions in the familiar way, because they work exactly the same.

If zirk.us doesn’t appeal, I’ve seen a lot of people going for Mastodon.social, but that one seems more likely to be overwhelmed with traffic. There are also plenty of other servers you can try, but the thing to focus on is: it does not matter. All that matters is that you have a starting point for accessing the network. The only way it can become an issue is if your server is too slow or unresponsive. Then you need to switch servers. Here’s my guide to how to do that:

  1. Ask yourself, “Have I done anything with this account that’s actually worth preserving yet?” The answer is going to be no.
  2. Delete the account on the crappy server.
  3. Choose a different server and go back to step 1 on the list above.

If you want to use it on your phone, I have downloaded Tusky for Android. I don’t have an iPhone, but the above-linked tutorial recommends Tootle. As often happens, the “official” phone app seems to kind of suck. You’ll need to sign in by sharing your server and username. Then you can use it just like you use Twitter, because the technical details of the servers don’t matter for most of the functionality.

Once you’re signed in, come find me and give me a toot!