Noah Millman is patiently waiting to figure out what might be driving the very dangerous forms of populism which he finds so distasteful and unfortunate. He's obviously a very smart guy so he must have *extremistically* good reasons to completely ignore how obscenely high levels of wealth and income inequality can distort the functioning of the organs of state and the institutions of civil society so that they are blindly and paralytically unresponsive to the needs of huge minorities and amorphous majorities.
I haven't read everything Mr. Millman has ever written, but imagine he MUST perceive certain disquieting parallels between now and the 1930s when popular authoritarian movements surged across the metropolitan centers of world domination leading to some quite regrettable repercussions which still inspire many to firmly intone the phrase "Never Again!" even as the US doubles down on its material support of genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank.
I hope though that Noah Millman will forgive me for further flogging my imagination to conjure up a rationale for ignoring wealth and income inequality and its impact on personal as well as institutional corruption. Perhaps he would say that wealth and income inequality have been a fundamental facet of civilized institutional structures AT LEAST since the dawn of hydraulic agriculture and monumental civilization? That would be true, but then again so have populist resentments and uprisings though the written record tends to reflect only the ideas of those capable of reading and scribing who, with the earliest exception perhaps being certain Hebrew prophets in the period leading up to the first diasporas and the destruction of Solomon's temple (along with the entire surrounding city of Jerusalem).
And, of course, Mr. Millman would correctly argue that obscene levels of wealth and income inequality cannot be the *sole* cause mass resentment, fury, resignation, alienation, hostility, scapegoating, and gullibility. Modernity, like life, politics, calculus, climate change, gender, and making friends is complicated after all. This explains (even justifies?) why it's so easy to blame the victim.
Which brings us to trauma. Those who invest trust and devotion in leaders like Hitler and Trump are surely traumatized in their own special ways. So are those who cynically cast their lots with grifting fanatics in the hopes of syphoning up some spilt gravy. Still it's easier to see why someone might ignore trauma than why they would ignore obscene levels of corrupting wealth and income inequality. After all, trauma is to humanity as water (and predators) is to the little fishies of the sea. Even people who are never tortured, bombed, or have their children stripped out from their arms are shaped, if not scarred, by trauma. It starts with birth trauma and goes on with all kinds of separations, betrayals, deprivations, disillusionments etc whether these are somehow more likely to be considered 'real" or dismissed as "imagined". Humans with our reflective (mimetic) consciousness are "imagining animals" who could probably traumatize ourselves into frenzies or paralysis if others and circumstances weren't so kind as to do it for us. And, by the way, we are not only traumatized by what happens (or could happen) to us, we are also traumatized by what we have done (or might do) to others. Did I say we are "imagining animals"? Did Bobby Dylan say "It's life and life only."?
But scrambling higher to somewhat firmer ground, maybe Mr. Millman has written elsewhere about how the social democratic response to the Great Depression and World War II did institute guard rails against too much obscene wealth and income inequality? In the US this was called the New Deal, and it was always highly resented, if not reviled, by so many. But it changed tax policies, labor policies, and financial regulations to exert profound effects on government, civil society, and culture from 1933 until at least 1965 when it instituted Medicare, Medicaid, and profoundly disruptive Civil Rights and Voting reforms that ended up giving quite a few people the dangerous ideas that being a different color or a female meant you were entitled to seek the protections of the state even as others, playing their own version of the long game, worked to whittle away New Deal reforms and regulations while depriving the state of resources so that wealth might be accumulated and controlled by a shrinking number of mega corporations. One of the skillful techniques used by these well resourced anti-populist masterminds (by the way) involved inciting divisions among the masses and stoking discontent and contempt for institutions of civil society and government.
Thanks for the Points of Interest review. I thought it was really valuable, especially the below quoted paragraph. I've long believed that public discourse and education, both in the US in general and the Jewish community in particular, has been too focused on empathy with the victims, and not enough with understanding the perpetrators. After all, though any given person might end up a victim, when a majority oppresses a minority, by definition most people will be in the class of the perpetrators, and we don't shed enough light on our capacity to rationalize evil. Thanks for articulating this so clearly:
"In Glazer’s film, it turns out that evil itself can be banal, can be embraced wholeheartedly without making the people clasping evil to themselves obviously monstrous in any way, unless we know what they are about. The effect of intimacy with such normal-seeming monsters is to turn our gaze inward—or so it was for me. What am I doing that is monstrous, fully cognizant of its monstrosity but convinced that that monstrousness is justified? How have I grown comfortable with monstrousness? And how badly have I been deformed—how much of a monster have I become—as a result? These are the questions I walked out of the theater asking myself."
The elites and experts have been wrong about everything for the past thirty years. Condescension and browbeating will not earn back any trust.
Noah Millman is patiently waiting to figure out what might be driving the very dangerous forms of populism which he finds so distasteful and unfortunate. He's obviously a very smart guy so he must have *extremistically* good reasons to completely ignore how obscenely high levels of wealth and income inequality can distort the functioning of the organs of state and the institutions of civil society so that they are blindly and paralytically unresponsive to the needs of huge minorities and amorphous majorities.
I haven't read everything Mr. Millman has ever written, but imagine he MUST perceive certain disquieting parallels between now and the 1930s when popular authoritarian movements surged across the metropolitan centers of world domination leading to some quite regrettable repercussions which still inspire many to firmly intone the phrase "Never Again!" even as the US doubles down on its material support of genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank.
I hope though that Noah Millman will forgive me for further flogging my imagination to conjure up a rationale for ignoring wealth and income inequality and its impact on personal as well as institutional corruption. Perhaps he would say that wealth and income inequality have been a fundamental facet of civilized institutional structures AT LEAST since the dawn of hydraulic agriculture and monumental civilization? That would be true, but then again so have populist resentments and uprisings though the written record tends to reflect only the ideas of those capable of reading and scribing who, with the earliest exception perhaps being certain Hebrew prophets in the period leading up to the first diasporas and the destruction of Solomon's temple (along with the entire surrounding city of Jerusalem).
And, of course, Mr. Millman would correctly argue that obscene levels of wealth and income inequality cannot be the *sole* cause mass resentment, fury, resignation, alienation, hostility, scapegoating, and gullibility. Modernity, like life, politics, calculus, climate change, gender, and making friends is complicated after all. This explains (even justifies?) why it's so easy to blame the victim.
Which brings us to trauma. Those who invest trust and devotion in leaders like Hitler and Trump are surely traumatized in their own special ways. So are those who cynically cast their lots with grifting fanatics in the hopes of syphoning up some spilt gravy. Still it's easier to see why someone might ignore trauma than why they would ignore obscene levels of corrupting wealth and income inequality. After all, trauma is to humanity as water (and predators) is to the little fishies of the sea. Even people who are never tortured, bombed, or have their children stripped out from their arms are shaped, if not scarred, by trauma. It starts with birth trauma and goes on with all kinds of separations, betrayals, deprivations, disillusionments etc whether these are somehow more likely to be considered 'real" or dismissed as "imagined". Humans with our reflective (mimetic) consciousness are "imagining animals" who could probably traumatize ourselves into frenzies or paralysis if others and circumstances weren't so kind as to do it for us. And, by the way, we are not only traumatized by what happens (or could happen) to us, we are also traumatized by what we have done (or might do) to others. Did I say we are "imagining animals"? Did Bobby Dylan say "It's life and life only."?
But scrambling higher to somewhat firmer ground, maybe Mr. Millman has written elsewhere about how the social democratic response to the Great Depression and World War II did institute guard rails against too much obscene wealth and income inequality? In the US this was called the New Deal, and it was always highly resented, if not reviled, by so many. But it changed tax policies, labor policies, and financial regulations to exert profound effects on government, civil society, and culture from 1933 until at least 1965 when it instituted Medicare, Medicaid, and profoundly disruptive Civil Rights and Voting reforms that ended up giving quite a few people the dangerous ideas that being a different color or a female meant you were entitled to seek the protections of the state even as others, playing their own version of the long game, worked to whittle away New Deal reforms and regulations while depriving the state of resources so that wealth might be accumulated and controlled by a shrinking number of mega corporations. One of the skillful techniques used by these well resourced anti-populist masterminds (by the way) involved inciting divisions among the masses and stoking discontent and contempt for institutions of civil society and government.
Thanks for the Points of Interest review. I thought it was really valuable, especially the below quoted paragraph. I've long believed that public discourse and education, both in the US in general and the Jewish community in particular, has been too focused on empathy with the victims, and not enough with understanding the perpetrators. After all, though any given person might end up a victim, when a majority oppresses a minority, by definition most people will be in the class of the perpetrators, and we don't shed enough light on our capacity to rationalize evil. Thanks for articulating this so clearly:
"In Glazer’s film, it turns out that evil itself can be banal, can be embraced wholeheartedly without making the people clasping evil to themselves obviously monstrous in any way, unless we know what they are about. The effect of intimacy with such normal-seeming monsters is to turn our gaze inward—or so it was for me. What am I doing that is monstrous, fully cognizant of its monstrosity but convinced that that monstrousness is justified? How have I grown comfortable with monstrousness? And how badly have I been deformed—how much of a monster have I become—as a result? These are the questions I walked out of the theater asking myself."
Thanks! This was really a helpful summary and I look forward to reading both articles.