Saying goodbye to my annus horribilis
Marking a transition
This edition of Dr. Small Talk is going to be a bit personal and reflective. Don’t worry, the next will return us to regularly schedule programming with a post about how the New Right thinks about corporate power. But for readers who wish to indulge me: I recently celebrated a birthday. It felt like a point of transition, the closing of a very difficult year, and I wanted to share a few sentiments and ideas that the occasion inspired.
I don’t usually fuss over birthdays, but last June I had a Big One and kicked it off with a bang. A bunch of girlfriends and I flew to Greece, swam in the turquoise sea, and reenacted whole scenes from Mamma Mia. It was supposed to be the beginning of a wonderful year. I had just applied for a new visa to extend our time in the UK and had made the decision to shift my professional life toward writing (nearly) full-time. But things rarely go as planned, and what I experienced instead was the most trying year of my life so far.
Barely a month after my birthday, I was back in New York saying goodbye to my beloved father. He was an incredibly good man and a singular influence on me, who shaped my interest in history and politics and the workings of power. He defied all kinds of stereotypes that might come to mind when you imagine a 76-year old cowboy from rural South Dakota, and he imparted what I still regard to be the most important lesson for anyone engaged in historical or political analysis: people are people. There are no groups uniquely ethical or depraved, and there are in fact certain universal desires: enough food to eat, a good place to live, smiles on the faces of children, laughter around the table. One can avoid a wide range of analytic follies if you start from the premise that people are people.
It was by his hospital bedside, the day before he coded, that I substantively finished my long essay on National Conservatism for Jewish Currents. He was so excited about the piece, which traces the debts of the National Conservatism movement to a particular right-wing iteration of religious Zionism, and I’m gutted he never got to read it. The war began shortly after it was released last fall, and it returned me both physically and emotionally to the pain I experienced immediately after my father died. I was literally shaking for months, and poured my grief into my writing. “I cry a lot but I am so productive - it’s an art” — as my inner Swiftie says.
It was thus the beginning of a very busy year of writing about my three major interests — Israel/Palestine, the Global Right, and the politics of risk. Beyond the piece for Jewish Currents, I wrote:
An essay for New Statesman on the emergence of risk as a catch-all term for thinking about security + the fundamentally conservative nature of the risk management industry;
A two-part interview about the war in Gaza with
;An essay for Aeon about the actuarial self — aka the idea that we should all function as our own risk assessors, and why that’s actually not a great thing in a democracy;
“Beyond Athens and Jerusalem,” an extended analysis of the economic visions of the New Right, for Strange Matters magazine;
An essay about Israel as the pioneer of illiberal democracy for a special issue of Dissent on the Global Right;
An academic article (forthcoming) called “Technocracy without Society” for International Review of Applied Economics about behavioral economics + why ‘nudging’ is a wholly inadequate approach to managing risk;
A long essay (adapted from this lecture at Brooklyn Public Library) about the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said (forthcoming in Late Light, the journal of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research)
Another forthcoming piece for a major literary review on what’s new about 21st century nationalism;
And of course, Dr. Small Talk! 14 posts and going strong.
I’m really proud of all this writing, but am going to focus more intently on my book manuscript in the year ahead. Those 18 chapters (!!!) won’t write themselves. I will still aim for two posts a month, but must beg your patience if it’s sometimes a bit longer.
As I said to Sam over glass(es) of Proseco, in many ways this was a shit year and it feels good to put it to bed. Coincidentally, a few days after my birthday was also eleven (Hebrew calendar) months since my father’s funeral, which means I have finished saying kaddish. I’ll have more to say about grief, mourning, and ritual at a later date (I am still in the midst of writing a long essay about this annus horribilis), but for now, I am marking this transition and hoping for a better year for myself and for the world as a whole. I am all too aware that things can always get worse instead (that’s my inner Frankfurt School voice). Thanks as always for reading.
In other news, there are still some spots left in my new class on risk for Brooklyn Institute! I’m building the syllabus this week and it’s going to be really “fun” (in the way that people like me mean fun, i.e. excitedly talking about ideas with smart people). Online starting Sunday July 7, running four weeks. See below for more info and to enroll.
Risk Society: Crisis, Power, and Neoliberalism
By the mid-1980s, modernity appeared to have reached a new and dangerous precipice: nuclear standoff characterized the political domain, while the Chernobyl disaster focused global attention on the toxic effects of even ordinary, non-nuclear industrial production. Humanity’s celebrated technical progress had, it seemed, generated novel, potentially catastrophic, risks at the global level. Not only did these new conditions create new challenges for governance and public policy, but they deeply affected the psychic and cultural states of individuals and societies no longer able to blithely count upon an ever brighter future. “Risk society is a catastrophic society,” wrote the late sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1986, one in which “the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.” What does it mean to view the world through the lens of risk, with one eye always fixed on the horizon of possible disaster?
This class offers an introduction to the idea of a risk society and its material, political, and affective consequences. Delving into foundational works by Beck and his contemporary Anthony Giddens, as well as their critics, we will ask: What are the main attributes of the risk society, and to what extent are they truly novel? How should we understand the production and uneven distribution of risks in contemporary life, and to what extent is the idea of a risk society compatible with older critiques of capitalism and the state? What role does ‘individuation’ or ‘responsibilisation’—where individuals are tasked with responsibility to navigate increasingly complex social and economic worlds—play within the risk society? How should we think about risks that are both universal and unequally distributed along lines of race, class, and gender? What coping mechanisms are offered for the management of risk by individuals, institutions? Alongside Beck and Giddens, readings will include works by Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Deborah Lupton, Gerd Gigerenzer, and others.
Course Schedule
Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ET
July 07 — July 28, 2024
4 weeks
Enroll here