David Auerbach Profile picture
Aug 20, 2019 8 tweets 5 min read Read on X
This gloomy op-ed from @michelleinbklyn captures well a prevailing sense of stasis and collapse.

My response, though, is that "the culture" to which she refers is only one of many. *That* culture ("our" culture) may be dying. But the world will go on.

nytimes.com/2019/08/19/opi…
@michelleinbklyn There's definitely something to the comparison of the US's informational black hole to Russia. But Russia never had a "hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism."

Russia was never "tuned in" to rationality. It floated on the twin faiths of Eastern Orthodoxy and "Rus."
@michelleinbklyn The US's embrace of rationality has also been tenuous. But it's held on to certain ideals, such as equality under the law and republicanism, better than Russia.

If US law and government become mere husks for patronage and nepotism, then our future probably is Russia's.
@michelleinbklyn Here is Russian philosopher Peter Chaadayev, writing in 1836

"The experience of time is nothing to us; the ages and the generations have passed without any profit for us...Russia’s past is empty, her present insufferable, and there is no future at all."
@michelleinbklyn Chaadayev's quote seems to be the sentiment @michelleinbklyn captures in her article.

I see more of it in our culture these days as well. It's not a good place to be, because the abandonment of our *ideals* removes the incentive to work toward them, or even understand them.
@michelleinbklyn And that's my final point: that "facts" are always constructed around some narrative or ideal. The US wasn't exactly fact-based prior to Trump and Brexit. The US did not have an "evidence-based future."

But it was more optimistic and more rational, and people miss that.
@michelleinbklyn I think @michelleinbklyn is right that Americans need to feel a greater sense of control and purpose, but wrong that this goal requires "objective facts." It only requires different myths & narratives.

The longing for a mythical pre-Trump rationality is its own false nostalgia.
@michelleinbklyn (all right @threadreaderapp, unroll this one, it's a keeper.)

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More from @AuerbachKeller

Dec 10, 2018
Most interesting thing in this @jacobinmag piece on the French yellow vests is that the French press are treating the yellow vests the same way the Anglo press tends to treat Trump supporters & Brexiters...even as the Guardian celebrates the yellow vests.
Here's the Guardian's editorial praising the rural "red states" of France for standing up to the city elites, taxes, and globalization.

I swear I've read these exact paragraphs in the right-wing press about MAGA Trumpites, attacking Hillary Clinton instead of Macron.
[Corrected numbers] 49% of yellow vests voted Le Pen, 22% voted Mélénchon. Nearly half of all yellow vests are National Front.

europe1.fr/societe/la-pop…
Read 6 tweets

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