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/340/ How To Grow a Backbone ft. Russell Jacoby
🕑 Added 2023-05-16 16:21:32 +0000 UTCOn utopia and individualism.
Renowned intellectual historian and critic Russell Jacoby joins us to talk about his lifetime of left critique. We discuss his early criticisms of psychology in light of the advance of therapy culture over the past 50 years, before moving on to the question of utopianism.
Will the breakdown of the neoliberal era lead to new utopian thinking? Does enthusiasm for a universal basic income signal serious thinking about the nature of work? Or are we still in a world where only dystopian thinking is permitted?
The episode concludes by discussing how all the talk of diversity today obscures the reality of increasing homogeneity. What does this say about the individual? Is the way children are brought up today killing the capacity for imagination and making us all conformists?
Part two of the interview is available only to subscribers, at patreon.com/bungacast
Selected books by Jacoby:
- Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology (Beacon Press, 1975; Transaction, 1997)
- The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987; new edition with new Introduction, Basic Books 2000)
- The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy (Basic Books, 1999)
- Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005)
- On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era (Seven Stories Press, 2020)
Other recent articles and interviews:
- D’une pensée critique sous emprise – Un entretien avec Russell Jacoby, Comptoir
- A Climate of Fear, Russell Jacoby, Harper's
- The Takeover, Russell Jacoby, Tablet
Comments
jkjkjkj
Jacoby makes an interesting point about the collapsing of white ethnics from individual distinct identity groups (ie: poles, Italians, jews) into a homogenized identity is an interesting one but I think this is to some degree reflective of the desires of a political elite who prefer the refining of individual ethnic voting machines into larger blocs based on a more generic identity (this worked both for republicans but also seems to have Reeped at least a rhetorical tool for the democrats as well in advancing racial divides)
Richard R
I also found this aspect rather disappointing. And Alex moving the interview in the direction of anti-work shows how narrow the thinking is here. Yes, pension reform is a small ask--but not that different from the writers strike in the US, where asking the studios to define writers as humans (rather than AI) caused a huge block--the fact that pension reform faces such intense resistance demonstrates that it is in fact an important issue. To say that pension reform is on a spectrum with anti-work communism is laughable, but maybe not entirely wrong. Sometime last year, anti-work communism was a pipe dream that showed how unserious its proponents were, at least in part, for dreaming too big. If Hagglund (among others) is right that free time is essential to a socialist vision, then what is the right amount? On the account given to us by the Bunga Boys, basically none.
Iro Kalogeropoulou
A bit of an underwhelming interview this one, I felt. I also found his criticism of young people demonstrating against pension reform in France as a sign of lack of vision for the future to be rather tone-deaf. To me, that's rather a sign of intergenerational solidarity foe starters, and in fact a sign that there is a belief for the future, if not a clear vision... It's a sign of the belief that we will actually live to get old, and we should not suffer when that time comes, but rather be relieved of the burden of work. It's a mobilisation completely absent in any other country of central and Northern Europe, where the overwhelming concensus seems to be to just work till death do us apart from our workplace. In Northern Europe the solution to aging is closer to euthanasia...
