Engage & Participate

This series he’s been doing has been so good, grappling with things we really should be grappling with. I wonder if anyone from this group would be willing to annotate one of these episodes, basically inserting a 3rd voice to add perspective wherever they see opportunities, even if just a copy/pasted transcript plus added notes.

Ezra Klein has just posted an interview with Anne Applebaum about her new introduction to Hannah Arendt's THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM. I know that there are many Klein & Applebaum fans here (me included). And I suggest Hannah Arendt to anyone interested in our contemporary plight (which, we might say, includes entails the events in this century, the last century, and the whole of the Modern Age). I agree with Sean Illig (who conducted a recent interview with Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge) that Arendt is the most important political thinker of the 20th century. Not easy, sometimes vexing, but always worth the effort. www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anne-applebaum.html

Whoa! Rachel Eryn Kalish scooped me! I thought this post was to his earlier podcast. Not looking carefully! Well, to reinforce Rachel's point.

Intrigued by your idea, Kenneth James Hogan, of annotating the transcript. In the meantime, let me ask a question out loud about this: "And we’ve seen over and over again that’s not really true, but I think it gets to something in Arendt’s thought that once people hit a certain level of cynicism, not only do they not care if their leaders are lying, they think lying is how the game is done...And so to lie well, and to lie effectively, is actually part of proving that you can be the leader of this movement, that you can survive in this dog-eat-dog world, you know, where the institutions are all controlled by a cabal of your enemies." I sense in this quite a bit of warlord/warrior, aka pre-traditional, worldview here. Lying doesn't matter because you want to go with the one with the most unilateral power. This is such a foreign concept to the modern and postmodern worldviews—no wonder so many folks continue to wonder, "How can you support someone who lies and cheats?" Answer: because the folks interpreting the lying and cheating are, at least at that moment, operating from a pre-traditional worldview.

Eh I wouldn’t go that far. So far as I can tell, all they are talking about here is building up a healthy modernism to help young Black people achieve—which is good, of course. But the praise of Norman Vincent Peale…keep in mind that he preached at the church the Trump family attended, and his philosophy obviously finds a garish and cartoonish expression in trump himself, and even trickles into The Secret, New Age power of intention stuff. There’s an important truth in all that, but it often overlooks the macro-forces beyond the individuals control

I'm glad Ezra is having these conversations!

I thought this latest episode was really good, and was hoping we would discuss it here! I don’t really know where to place Ezra Klein “on the spiral”, and that might be exactly why I appreciate him so much. I like that he doesn’t specifically communicate with the language of integral theory or spiral dynamics, though I’m still trying to figure out why I like that. I think he’s one of the wisest millennial voices in journalism, often modeling a rare balance of strong conviction, intellectual humility, and good faith engagement with people of very different mindsets. At the risk of sounding like an ignorant progressive who doesn’t fully understand yellow/developmental/integral paradigms, which may be an accurate description, I will nonetheless try to articulate something I’ve been mulling over. I think S.D. and integral spaces tend to have some generational and cultural blindspots. It seems that most of the influential writers and practitioners are coming from western cultures and older generations. As I’ve listened and learned from them over the past few years, I’ve had a nagging suspicion that this framework is often being held and implemented with a bit too much self-certainty and confidence in its ability to accurately and completely identify and describe human development. And so, I’ve been looking for complimentary knowledge and wisdom outside of integral spaces, in thinkers from younger and older generations, in people from other cultural backgrounds, other pedagogies and social paradigms. Ezra obviously has more overlap than not with most integral thinkers, but I find his insights and angles into conversations very refreshing. Maybe a good analogy to the observation I’m trying to describe would be major world religions. They all have distinct beliefs and practices that differentiate themselves, and yet, they all have some common tendencies, postures, and growth possibilities. Many people within each religion see their own as right, or best, and find it difficult to see the goodness and value in other religions. Thankfully they all have mystical traditions too that find a lot more overlap and harmony with one another. So, maybe what I’m trying to say is that I would hate to see S.D./Integral communities become too evangelistic, feeling the need to teach or convert others into practitioners of this model before we can take them seriously, or before we can believe that they also have “higher” wisdom to offer. I don’t mean to say that anyone here is taking Ezra Klein to be an inferior thinker just because he doesn’t use this model, I don’t think that’s what you mean by, “still needs a developmental framework” Rachel Eryn Kalish, and in fact, I would love to hear your thoughts on that! I perceived Ezra to be trying really hard to challenge the guest on his own level, and appeal to common interests, but his responses did not meet Ezra’s questions face to face. Does that make sense? Did you see something similar, and do you think Ezra could have drawn out better responses if he had asked different questions, or communicated in a different way?

Wow, bravo to Ezra Klein for speaking in such a polite tone with this conservative guy who has a stand morally, but who seems to contradict himself at every turn. Really weird how he sees the conservatives economically promoting what's really the Democratic agenda ... and who cannot see that the conservatives are the ones who oppose any law beneficial to poor people. How can you deal with such people? And that's an extremely learned person. So no wonder the masses are completely lost.

I think that many of the comments heretofore have been prompted by Klein's most recent podcast with Notre Dame political theory prof Patrick Deneen. (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-does-the-post-liberal-right-actually-want/id1548604447?i=10005...). I thought Klein did a masterful job of cross-examining Deneen w/o coming across as hostile (or even as cross-examining him.) I'm taken with Deneen bc I read is book WHY LIBERALISM FAILED and found it vague and not revelatory or persuasive. (And I'm very interested in critiques of liberalism even as I'm liberal-dominant). Although I haven't read Deneen's most recent articles, I perceive him in other pieces I've read as having gone off the rails, close to a full Orban. Here, he doesn't come across as very militant or irrational, but he really does remain vague. And on Klein's part, I give him credit for engaging in fruitful dialogue with those who think and believe very differently from himself. I don't always agree with Klein, but he gets his guests and himself to articulate their positions such that listeners can join the issue.