4 Comments

Ideology is dead. We are in The Matrix.

https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-left

Expand full comment

I read Hopkins. As with all "explanations of everything," it bundles a lot of things together that can readily be seen as separate, and manages to leave stuff out (that would be "something") by simply calling them "nothing." In other words, it's hard to discuss.

I suppose I would begin by saying there are a lot of very powerful and inciteful positions being take by scholars in many fields. I try to read some. David Harvey is an important voice, say "The Enigma of Capitalism," or Pistor, The Code of Capital," or "The Dawn of Everything," by Graeber and Wengrow. I find much of the new writing in economics. I think Modern Monetary Theory deserves more attention, and many older works in political science, sociology and economics (like Keynes) are still relevant, say the works of W D Burnham and Przeworski.

In other words, the intellectual world is alive with insightful critiques of our current global world and the dominant influences on policies. New technologies are making many pretty good consensus formulations obsolete. At least in part. I think many contemporary writings in philosophy are important, particularly in the field of pragmatic naturalism.

Without giving it a lot of thought, or reading more in depth, I suspect that Hopkins is like many of us trying to find a foothold in an intellectual world that doesn't "pack" our preferences together, but leaves our personal political, social, and religious positions in rather uncomfortable imbalance.

In other words I suspect there are many loose strings in his holistic conception that pulled even gently would cause the whole to unravel.

Expand full comment

Very nice, John. I especially liked the Sam Snead quotation. We often grip things too tightly.

Expand full comment

Thanks Brooks. This one was harder than most to write. I wanted to capture the ambiguity. Bill Coffin once said you can be so open-minded your brains fall out. lol

Expand full comment