Blogging is a poor tool for political resistance; clicktivism is not activism. Kottke thinks that the problem is that people don’t know what’s going on — which is why he’s blogging about it — but you can tell that that’s not true from the fact that almost everybody he quotes is writing for very widely-read outlets, from the New Yorker to The Verge to Wired. Everything’s readily available; there’s no real value proposition in Kottke’s aggregating it. And Kottke himself has no distinctive political knowledge or expertise. Rather than reading him, you could just put these outlets in an RSS reader and skip the middleman. And even if you did that you wouldn’t be one step closer to engaging in meaningful resistance.
But there’s another reason I won’t be headed in Kottke’s direction: I don’t believe there’s anything more morally corrupting than an utterly single-minded focus on defeating your political enemies, even when those political enemies really deserve to be defeated. To think only in terms of Winning and Losing is dehumanizing, both to your enemies and to yourself. It’s virtually animalistic, and it makes you forget a lot of things you need to remember.
Kottke says, “I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that” — indeed, but why do we need it? I believe that we need “art and beauty and laughter,” and history, but not merely to give us a break from political struggle, but also for political reasons: because only fully human persons, persons formed by wide and generous encounters with the whole of humanity, are able to think and act wisely in the political realm.
That’s why I won’t be posting on our current political moment.
If this resonates, you can support Prof. Jacobs’s writing here.
Etymologies 