Know Your Enemy - More Mailbag, More Friends [Teaser]

Matt and Sam answer more listener questions, and hear from more friends, to continue celebrating the show's 100th episode.

Duration: 4m
Broadcast on: 26 Sep 2024
Audio Format: other

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Matt and Sam continue the 100th episode extravaganza by answering more truly excellent listener questions and hear from more friends of the show. Topics include: leftwing politics and orthodox Christianity, how to maintain hope (especially on the socialist left), learning to love Freud, complicated family politics, and more! Plus: Dissent co-editor Tash Lewis sings "Happy Birthday" to Matt in Welsh.

Sources:

Charles Péguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope (1911)

Wesley Hill, "After Boomer Religion," Commonweal, April 29, 2019

Herbert McCabe, "The Class Struggle and Christian Love," in God Matters (2012)

Matthew Sitman, "Against Moral Austerity: On the Need for a Christian Left," Dissent, Summer 2017

Dan Walden, "Gender, Sex, and Other Nonsense," Commonweal, March 1, 2021

Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time(1988)

Pat Blanchfield, "Death Drive Nation," Late Light, Nov 1, 2022

Casey Blake and Christopher Phelps, "History as Social Criticism: Conversations with Christopher Lasch," Journal of American History, Mar 1994

Sam Adler-Bell, "Beautiful Losers," Commonweal, Mar 11, 2020

— "Jews in the diaspora must resist the inhumanity being done by Israel in our name," New Statesman, Nov 29, 2023

— "Good Enough," The Baffler, April 2024

Kim LaCapria & David Mikkelson, "Does This Photograph Show Bernie Sanders at a 1962 Civil Rights Sit-In?" Snopes, Mar 3, 2016

A lot of people ask, and it's not surprising that they did, about how do you continue to be hopeful, how do you continue to feel like there's worthwhile work to be done to change the world, even as defeat does seem to be like one of the common conditions or experiences of being on the political left, how does one remain hopeful, how does one continue to feel like there's useful and necessary work to be done and get up every day and do it. Well, how would you answer the hope question as someone who's not religious? Because my answer does lean on religion some. Well, I mean, I've written about this a few times, including for you, Matt, about how defeat and sort of the melancholy that companies defeat is something that left movements have a kind of intimate and perhaps too intimate familiarity with. Sometimes to the degree that feeling like we're defeated is the most comfortable and common experience, and it's a kind of abdication of responsibility to actually change anything that sometimes the left, the really movement left indulges in when they would prefer to be morally righteous and incapable of instantiating their morality in a world that sustains them. It's better to righteously lose than to win. I have really complicated feelings about this because it is my experience that being on the left does require having some capacity for metabolizing defeat and somehow in many cases sort of transforming it into the will to keep struggling. The classic formulation is Joe Hill saying, "Upon being executed, don't mourn me, organize." I think the left often does kind of turn mourning as a political demonstration into organizing. I think it's remarkable, just as a labor history phenomenon, how often the big general strikes of the 20th century were started when there was a strike in a certain industry, there was violence against the strikers, somebody got killed, and then there was a funeral procession organized the next day or the few days later, which then mobilized all of the working people and all of the organizations in that city to fight against the capitalist powers or the bosses in that city altogether. Turning mourning into organizing, obviously also turning mourning into organizing is what the Black Lives Matter movement was all about. It was about these individual cases of someone getting killed by the police, a protest about that, and a movement building on the basis of shared grief and turning that into the basis for efficacious political pressure and movement building. I think that left movement projects basically cannot be understood, either historically or in the present, outside of the context of mourning, grief, despair, and the ways in which we mobilize or translate or metabolize those emotions into something productive. I think it's just part of it. Miriam Kaba, the abolitionist writer, says that hope is a discipline. I feel that way in the sense that one has to do work to remain hopeful, it's not something that comes naturally, but that also it's a discipline in the sense that it's something that we are called upon to do, and we have to do it actively, because to be hopeless is an abdication of responsibility. Hopelessness is a cure in terms, hopelessness and nihilism is a self-cure for the experience of political defeat that has an appeal, like it has an actual positive, assuaging quality for people. Hopelessness can feel like a comfort. It takes more work to be hopeful, to find a way to be hopeful, and so for me, I find myself trying to resist indulging in despair and cynicism and nihilism, because those things present themselves as sophisticated, but are actually just in indulgence, and it becomes less complicated when I just think about like, well, we just have to win, like there's too many people I care about, and so to indulge in cynicism or to accept the perverse comfort of despair would be a betrayal of my obligations to those people.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam answer more listener questions, and hear from more friends, to continue celebrating the show's 100th episode.