A Postscript to the Last Post

Continuing the topic of the most recent post, about AA and liberal religious communities, I almost forgot about this passage, in which DFW makes the analogy for us:

Demographic Trends

 Back when I was a student at a liberal New England divinity school, my classmates and I—at least, those of us who were theoretically on the "ministry track"—were all facing down a shared doom. We talked about it; we analyzed it; we discussed it together every day and sought for ways to evade it. The doom had a name: "Demographic trends."

The idea was that, due to some all-but-inevitable process of secularization and the way people in our age cohort lived their lives, millennials (they were still the only young people at the time) were drifting away from traditional congregation-based-Sunday-morning forms of worship. (Magnifying our terror of this phenomenon was our sense of guilt and complicity—none of us ever went to Sunday morning services either, unless we were tasked with leading them.) 

The question, therefore, was how to either arrest this trend or slow it down enough that it would allow us to have jobs for the duration of our future careers. 

Becoming the Adversary

In innumerable bad 'Nineties action flicks, there will appear a character who evinces superior wisdom by dropping gnomic quotations from East Asian textbooks of martial lore. As I understand it, there was a similar fad in business circles around this same time for applying the lessons of Sun Tzu and his ilk to the art of strategic confrontation in the marketplace (with this penchant for silly exoticism eventually reaching its zenith in a series of books devoted to the leadership lessons to be gleaned from the career of Attila the Hun). 

And as much as I can recognize that all of this is in bad taste, perhaps offensive, I am also not immune to its allure. I too have longed to be the kind of strategic mastermind who could dispense pearls from the Chinese Art of War or the Japanese Way of the Samurai at will, finding them unexpectedly apropos to a host of non-martial situations. Except, of course, that in my case, we would not be talking about either war or business, but would be applying the lessons contained in each to the no-less-conflict-laden worlds of politics and human rights advocacy. (After all, "human rights strategy" has in fact started to come into its own as an ostensible discipline, complete with course syllabi featuring Sun Tzu.) 

DFW and the Zoom Room of Doom

This past week I have been occupying the odd patches of 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM insomnia that seem to afflict me every day—at least when there is a stressful work meeting coming up or I am in the midst of a nerve-rattling mid-winter road trip—by finally getting around to reading David Foster Wallace's mammoth satire Infinite Jest—a tome with which I have had a love-hate relationship ever since I had college associates who outstripped me in readerly ambition by daring to take on this legendarily long and involved novel, written by an author with whom I have had a love-hate relationship ever since I read his books on rap music and infinity and found them both immensely readable and delightful and informed and hip and smart—and also undeniably smug and gloating. 

DFW may of course have reason to gloat, but I am not here to discuss the quality of Infinite Jest, which I am only just over a third of the way through in any event. Suffice to say it is—smugness and all—consumable and entrancing in much the way its subject-matter is purported to be, and it has filled me with desires much like those of its Substance-addicted characters to hole up someplace for days, unplug my phone, and indulge shamelessly in the drug of this book, telling myself this is the last time. The point I want to discuss here is not that the book is delicious and delightful and achingly sad and funny and poignant and smug and annoying and sexist (tending to divide the female fifty percent of the human population into either potential sex partners or a single all-giving mother figure) and many other things...

What We Argue About When We Argue About the Childcare Tax Credit

 The debate happening on Capitol Hill this week about whether or not to include expanded child tax credits in the COVID relief package has given new scope for a very old and supremely bad right-wing take on this issue to rear its head. The classic conservative argument would have us believe that this program, and other safety net benefits like it, would remove the incentive to work. As an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute put it—according to the Washington Post—historical experience allegedly reveals that "greater benefits led to a sizable decline in employment among single mothers, and research on the state and federal welfare reforms of the 1990s found that, on net, less generous benefits led to more work in the population affected."

Empirically, this does not hold up. Christopher Jencks looked into the historic data on this decades ago, in tussling with Charles Murray's Losing Ground, and concluded that there was no evidence of any linkage between the amount of welfare benefits going to single mothers and their propensity to join the labor force—indeed, he found that policy changes in the 1970s lowered the purchasing power of welfare benefits, yet unemployment increased in the aftermath of the change, whereas it had been reduced in a prior period of more generous benefits. 

Errata and Marginalia 017: Althusser

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), Ben Brewster translation, originally published 1971. 

Here it is, at last! The ur-text, the point of origin, whence came all of those annoying people in college who described themselves as "Neo-Lacanian-Marxists." Here, reading this, one finally knows where they were getting this stuff, when they would bring off some strange and ungainly phrase, such as when an article in some specious humanities discipline apologizes to you in its opening sentence for being terribly "schematic" (a word that Althusser for unclear reasons always italicizes). 

Before looking into this book, I knew Althusser only as one of the "theorists" whom E.P. Thompson thought ridiculous. If there was a great division between the humanistic and the structural Marxists, it was clear to me as a teenage Marxist that I should side with the former. Now that I am older and less of a Marxist of any stripe, however, E.P. Thompson seems quite as ridiculous in his own right; so maybe one should not be so hasty to take sides in that particular tussle, and should go back to both authors, or either, and see what can be learned from them, knowing full well that they will be ridiculous for long stretches.