Why are so many on the left able to love "The Lord of the Rings"?
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/tolkien-against-the-grain/
EXCERPTS: Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right.
Science fiction is about the future, about the utopias we might someday build, about science—while fantasy is about looking back toward an imaginary past of kings, empires, war, and magic (which is to say, nonsense). If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about restoration. Or so the Marxist critics who have championed science fiction and decried fantasy for the past half-century would have it.
[...] but even when leftist fantasy is recognized, Tolkien himself nearly always stands as the bad example...
[...] The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male)...
Despite all this, Tolkien has many left-wing fans...
For the leftist critic who seeks to explain their fondness for The Lord of the Rings, however, most justifications come with a caveat... [...] There is likewise a stirring ecological politics and love of nature in Tolkien. Gardeners of varying sorts turn out to be the ultimate key to human thriving. ... But Tolkien’s is a deeply tragic environmentalism...
Finally, there is some beautiful antiwar sentiment in Tolkien’s work, a rejection of war’s glories and a refusal to celebrate its violence—but this goes hand-in-hand with a compromised pacifism... (MORE - details)
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Lessons from philosopher Immanuel Kant in the age of populist gloom
https://theconversation.com/freedom...lessons-from-philosopher-immanuel-kant-254442
INTRO (excerpts): Ten years on, the sentiment regarding such aspirations is skeptical and the mood gloomy. With the rise of autocracies and the influence of libertarian tech-billionaires on politics, goals such as development for all and climate neutrality seem to be relics of the past. [...] In the midst of all this, it’s important to remember ours is not the first generation to face dark times. As my recent research argues, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy can offer us valuable tools for navigating today’s challenges... (MORE - details)
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On the writings of artificial intelligence
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-27/ghosts-and-dolls
EXCERPTS: And there are reasons why human readers should be eager to read literary works composed by large-language generative artificial intelligences. These reasons are properly analogous to those for which people are eager to find and study forms of life that did not evolve on our planet. [...] The formation undergone by artificial intelligences is different, deeply so, from any that a human person can undergo. They have read more than we, they interact with what they have read differently, they compose in ways distinct from our habits of composition, and so on. These differences, if contemplated even for a moment, suggest that their literary works will be unpredictably different from ours—they may show us how to do things with words that would otherwise not have occurred to us... (MORE - details)
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Erik Baker’s history of the entrepreneurial work ethic
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/calvert-work-entrepreneur-ethic-baker-review-job
EXCERPT: In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age.
Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones.
Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.” (MORE - details)
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https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/tolkien-against-the-grain/
EXCERPTS: Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right.
Science fiction is about the future, about the utopias we might someday build, about science—while fantasy is about looking back toward an imaginary past of kings, empires, war, and magic (which is to say, nonsense). If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about restoration. Or so the Marxist critics who have championed science fiction and decried fantasy for the past half-century would have it.
[...] but even when leftist fantasy is recognized, Tolkien himself nearly always stands as the bad example...
[...] The Lord of the Rings seems immersed in racism (the superiority of the fair and noble elves, the inferiority of the brutish, mongrel orcs), colonialism and imperialism (the return of the king means the restoration of empire), and deeply retrograde sexism (with a core cast of characters that is overwhelmingly male)...
Despite all this, Tolkien has many left-wing fans...
For the leftist critic who seeks to explain their fondness for The Lord of the Rings, however, most justifications come with a caveat... [...] There is likewise a stirring ecological politics and love of nature in Tolkien. Gardeners of varying sorts turn out to be the ultimate key to human thriving. ... But Tolkien’s is a deeply tragic environmentalism...
Finally, there is some beautiful antiwar sentiment in Tolkien’s work, a rejection of war’s glories and a refusal to celebrate its violence—but this goes hand-in-hand with a compromised pacifism... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Lessons from philosopher Immanuel Kant in the age of populist gloom
https://theconversation.com/freedom...lessons-from-philosopher-immanuel-kant-254442
INTRO (excerpts): Ten years on, the sentiment regarding such aspirations is skeptical and the mood gloomy. With the rise of autocracies and the influence of libertarian tech-billionaires on politics, goals such as development for all and climate neutrality seem to be relics of the past. [...] In the midst of all this, it’s important to remember ours is not the first generation to face dark times. As my recent research argues, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy can offer us valuable tools for navigating today’s challenges... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On the writings of artificial intelligence
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-27/ghosts-and-dolls
EXCERPTS: And there are reasons why human readers should be eager to read literary works composed by large-language generative artificial intelligences. These reasons are properly analogous to those for which people are eager to find and study forms of life that did not evolve on our planet. [...] The formation undergone by artificial intelligences is different, deeply so, from any that a human person can undergo. They have read more than we, they interact with what they have read differently, they compose in ways distinct from our habits of composition, and so on. These differences, if contemplated even for a moment, suggest that their literary works will be unpredictably different from ours—they may show us how to do things with words that would otherwise not have occurred to us... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Erik Baker’s history of the entrepreneurial work ethic
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/calvert-work-entrepreneur-ethic-baker-review-job
EXCERPT: In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age.
Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones.
Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.” (MORE - details)
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