Social Justice Shibboleths, and a Cautionary Tale

I started listening to the Ezra Klein show on someone's recommendation for the episode(s) with Rebecca Traister. My favorite part is the insistence on learning, and reading, that runs through the conversations. My least favorite part is that I will never have time to read a tenth of what the guests have written and recommended!



So I started with Down Girl, by Kate Manne. It seemed like she would cast a little more light, throw off a little less heat than Traister on these topics of which I am still so ignorant. It's great to read such lucid contemporary philosophy. A little like Arendt does with Eichmann, perhaps, Manne builds an argument from a tragic crime, in this case a recent murder spree rooted in loneliness, basically an incel avant la lettre. She dissects the distinction between misogyny as an individual hatred of women and as a structural bulwark of patriarchy, locating in this killer and in the range of responses to him a determined if unconscious effort to put and keep women in subjugation. The treatment of "what is" questions, generally, was just as interesting as the specific applications to misogyny, sexism, and the double binds, pragmatic and rhetorical, they lay on us all.


Browsing at the library once Down Girl had arrived, I picked up these other ones:




Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, would make a great guest for the Ezra Klein show. I've been curious for awhile now about this seeming contradiction: on the one hand, data seems to point to charter schools raising academic expectations and outcomes for kids of color; yet the NAACP and prominent politicians on the left have been turning against charters, more or less vehemently. Partly you might suppose this is just politics, courting the teacher unions' support, who have always cynically rejected the reforms charters represent and focused solely on their admitted complications and outright failures. But Ewing helpfully makes the case that there is a real love for public schools in black communities (those she studies being in Chicago) where, despite the numbers--which clearly don't tell the whole story--people see the schools as theirs, and resent them being taking away as one more betrayal in a long history of racism and white supremacy.




Nostalgia, by Anthony Esolen, runs athwart the liberal intellectual consensus and instead channels the likes of Lewis and Tennyson. The title is misleading, since it turns out to be a very circumscribed sort of nostalgia the author is interested in: conservative Christian, essentially, and this comes through increasingly baldly as you go along. For all his erudite references, Esolen is no Lewis, though. When he starts talking about abortion and homosexuality, or about how ignorant and pitiful his students are, you might start to wonder about the depth of his charity and humility a bit. Useful as a cautionary signpost for what happens if you don't dip into the contemporary, diverse discourse once in a while. And yet his basic argument is probably as sound, or more so, than anything you're likely to hear on Ezra Klein and the other purveyors of liberal prosperity, suitably tempered with serious social justice activism. The man has translated Dante, after all. He knows what's up.