Weekly Picks – August 4, 2024

Credit (left to right): Katalin Balog/ 3 Quarks Daily; Kamal Kishore/ Reuters; pics721/ Shutterstock; Petra Péterffy

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

“Because they do not represent a single coherent ideology like communism or national socialism, it can be hard to make sense of why such a similar collection of autocrats from such different parts of the world have ascended at the same time. How should we understand the political trend they represent? That’s the question at the heart of the Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein’s new book, The Wannabe Fascists.

While Finchelstein’s casual title may inadvertently downplay the crisis facing global democracy, it does convey that we have reached a tipping point. For years we have debated how much danger Trump and strongmen like him pose. Are they just a collection of populists using grievance-based nationalism to gain power? Or do they represent a new wave of fascism leading to persecution, political violence, dictatorship, and war?

That darker possibility has recently been coming into focus. In countries like India and Hungary, nationalist political parties have used electoral success to advance their domination of the state. In Ukraine and Gaza, brutal wars are being waged by ethno-nationalist leaders, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the United States, Trump is open about returning to power with a far more developed program to hollow out the administrative state, install loyalists across the government, and use the powers of the federal government to serve his personal interests. “We will demolish the deep state,” Trump promised at a rally in Claremont, New Hampshire:

We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake-news media until they become real…. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

These words echo fascist rhetoric from history, but is Trump really a fascist? Finchelstein situates him somewhere along a spectrum. “Wannabe fascism is an incomplete version of fascism,” Finchelstein argues, “characteristic of those who seek to destroy democracy for short-term personal gain but are not fully committed to the fascist cause.” In other words, Trump and many of the autocrats driving global politics have enlisted aspects of fascism when it suits them, without knowing just how far they will go with it. “I see them as a dangerous threat to democracy, extremists who have not (yet) reached the levels of ideological fervor, violence, and lies achieved by historical fascists,” Finchelstein writes. “Wannabe fascists do not openly advocate for fascism, but they gravitate toward fascist political styles and behaviors.””

2. ‘Nobody knows what I know’: how a loyal RSS member abandoned Hindu nationalism

“Running a finger over a row of books in a Delhi library one afternoon, I stopped at a title that promised danger. The stacks were abundant in books like RSS Misunderstood and Is RSS the Enemy?, which often turned out to be self-published polemics that were too long, however short they were. This one was different. On its front was the full title, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP of India, An Insider’s View. I read the first page, and then the next, slowly, with rising giddiness. Not long after, I was beside a Sikh gentleman at his photocopying machine. What pages, he asked. Everything, I said.

In the long hour that followed, I wondered if the book’s presence on these shelves was an oversight. This was the closest that any writer had come to describing the organisation from within. That night I swallowed its contents whole, scanned a copy for myself to store in several places for safekeeping, and wrote to its author. We mailed, and then scheduled a video call, and then arranged to meet two months later, when he travelled to India from the US to alert people to the dangers of the RSS before the 2024 elections began.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s members have long seen themselves as servants to an imaginary Hindu motherland that stretches from the Middle East to the far east. Its members would go to any lengths to protect this ideal from imagined threats. It was an RSS man who murdered Gandhi in January 1948. Forty-five years later, the RSS was one of the key forces behind the demolition of the Babri mosque, an event that triggered riots in which thousands of people were killed. There is no official list of members, but the RSS is usually said to be 4 million strong. The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), the party that rules India at present, is the RSS’s political arm. Since its foundation in 1925, the organisation has existed as a kind of LinkedIn for the rootless, or a talent scout for people of a certain nationalist temperament; Narendra Modi, the prime minister, was a product of the organisation.

On the day we met, I waited for the author, whose name is Partha Banerjee, in a wide lane outside a mall in eastern Kolkata. I noticed him in the distance: a small man in a blue ikat-patterned kurta clutching a shopping bag bulging with vegetables. He had kind eyes behind his glasses, and his hair was short and grey. I followed him down one street and then another to his small flat. A maid brought out mangoes and sweets and placed them on a small table between us.

Partha told me he had left the RSS behind almost 40 years ago, and he said it as if he had firmly closed the door to that chapter of his life. But RSS people like to say that an RSS man will always be an RSS man, and there is a reason for this – it seduces through community and family, exerting a gravitational force on individuals.”

3. Artificial Wombs When?

“What should we expect in the (near) future of reproduction?

Artificial wombs, superbabies, extended fertility?

Should we expect advances in reproductive technology to fundamentally change how we have babies? To raise birth rates? To change the social role of sex and gender?

People like to debate the bioethical and societal implications of reproductive technology, especially as these and other advances start to look increasingly plausible. Just last September, advisors to the FDA met to discuss artificial wombs, which — according to a flurry of news articles — might be available in just a few years. But first it’s helpful to understand what present-day technology and near-future research directions can and can’t do. In my investigation of the field, I found that some technologies seem overhyped relative to their actual capabilities, while others are quietly making huge progress. What does the landscape look like today?”

4. Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy on the Killing of Gaza

“Gideon levy is one of Israel’s leading dissident journalists. His new book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe is perhaps the harshest condemnation of Israel’s war on Gaza from any Israeli. Levy joins us to explain why he believes his fellow Israelis are brainwashed into thinking Palestinians are terroristic and inhuman, and the hideous consequences of that ideology. He also explains that the U.S. could have stopped the war, and is therefore culpable for everything that has happened to Gaza.”

. . .

“Gideon Levy: Gaza went through many phases, and I chose to start the story of the killing of Gaza long before the seventh of October because, like anything else, the attack on the seventh of October had a context, had a background. By saying this, it doesn’t mean that you justify or don’t justify it. But there is a context.

You have to start with 1948. Gaza is the biggest center of Palestinian refugees from ’48, who have lived in the most miserable conditions ever since then in refugee camps. And then came 2006, when Israel made Gaza the biggest cage in the world, the biggest open prison in the world, by withdrawing from Gaza. Gaza has been under siege for the last 18 years. This is the context. It’s the most abnormal reality. You can’t imagine. It’s 2.3 million people just closed in a cage. And you wonder what will come out of this experiment in human beings, and you got it on the seventh of October.”

5. Excavating a Language at the End of the World

“Although archaeologists have long been fascinated by the deep history of this seafaring, nomadic people, many of the physical remains their ancestors left behind have been lost to time. Fortunately, they have also left clues in the Yaghan language.

The Yaghan words for the sea were exhumed from a 19th-century Yaghan-English dictionary compiled in the late 1800s by an Anglican missionary. In a recent paper in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, a team of Norwegian scholars argue that studying this historical snapshot of Yaghan could yield important clues about these people’s lives over the centuries. The same approach could be used for potentially hundreds of other languages, dead, alive, or dormant, across the globe to better understand old ways of life, ancient ecologies, and humans’ connection to the landscape.

Dictionaries, such as the one created for the Yaghan language, it turns out, can be excavated for rich and nuanced information missing from the physical archeological record.

“You could think about language in a similar way as we think about the archaeological sites in a landscape,” says the lead author of the new research, archaeologist Jo Sindre Eidshaug of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Marine Ventures project, an international archaeological research effort. Eidshaug views language as something that “settles” a landscape just like physical artifacts, as people develop knowledge and vocabulary in places where they spent most of their time.”

6. What Is Left of the Mind

“Not so long ago, people had a very different concept of the mind and human nature. Our European heritage is a vision of the body as our mortal coil which we feel and command with our soul. The soul was thought to be immortal and exempt from the laws of nature so that our actions are not determined by anything outside of the boundaries of the soul. Souls of all sorts, of angels and spirits in addition to humans, permeated the universe. The universe was an ordered cosmos with human beings at the center of it with a very special role to play in it. It was commonly held that only the soul can truly exhibit creativity and intelligence which no mere mechanism could replicate. Dreams and visions were considered important messengers. All this is quite intuitive; and its remnants are probably deeply ingrained in the everyday manner in which we still think about ourselves. Descartes – who was also one of the founders of modern science – gave voice to many of these views in his philosophy and his influence on the field remains to this day.

During the last three hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, science has ushered in monumental changes in how we think about ourselves. It has become common knowledge that the mind and the brain are tied together in a systematic way. But what proved most consequential is the tremendous progress of physics, and in particular the idea, generally endorsed by scientists and philosophers, that every physical event can be fully explained in terms of prior physical causes. Since physical events include the movements of our bodies through space, it follows that our actions have purely physical causes. Since this leaves no room for the independent causal agency of the soul, belief in an immaterial, immortal soul not determined by physical reality has steadily declined. Materialism – or, as it has recently been dubbed, physicalism – the view that everything in the universe, including minds, is fundamentally physical, is ascendent. According to physicalism, mental processes – like feeling hungry or believing that most kangaroos are left-handed – happen in virtue of complicated physical processes in the brain. The recent rise of artificial intelligence is calling into question the uniqueness of human creativity, the very idea of distinctly human activities such as storytelling, poetry, art, music. Some predict that artificial intelligence, even perhaps soon, will be able to replicate every aspect of our humanity, except, arguably though controversially, conscious experience. There is not much about the premodern conception that has survived these changes, except the view that we are conscious beings, i.e., that there is, in Thomas Nagel’s expression, something it is like to be us. There is something it is like to hear the waves lapping against the shore or seeing water shimmering in a glass. Being a human being who perceives the world, and who thinks and feels, comes with a phenomenology of which we can be directly aware.”

7. Debt Is a Labor Issue

“Debt is fundamentally a labor issue.

When labor is weak and unionization low, workers are forced to take on debt to offset costs for necessities like healthcare, housing and food. The more debt we have, the more we are compelled to work under the bosses’ conditions — rather than fighting for our own.

Interest-heavy loans act as a regressive kind of pay cut, reaching deep into workers’ take-home earnings. Just to keep up with debt payments and interest, workers take on more hours and multiple low-paying jobs.

And data shows debt can make workers more unlikely to strike.

“The key conclusion is that while inflation indeed induces strike activity, as we’re seeing now, the burden of personal debt offsets that increase,” Giorgos Gouzoulis wrote in Jacobin. “In fact, my research finds that personal debt has been suppressing major strikes over the last five decades.”

. . .

Workers with debt can and do fight back. As Debt Collective co-founder (and my colleague) Hannah Appel has argued, the starting point for debtor organizing is to ask what would happen if we understood the staggering $17.69 trillion in total household debt as a source of collective leverage, rather than aggregate individual liabilities. Organizing for better wages and benefits is to organize against debt. To organize for debt abolition is to strengthen the power of the working class. Given the current historic juncture in which both labor and debtor organizing is on the rise, now is the time to focus on building worker-debtor power.

The more labor wins, the less debt workers have; the less debt workers have, the more labor wins.”