Disappointment
Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, wrote in the magazine's newsletter on December 9, 2023:
"The Marxist philosopher Michael Löwy explores doom’s constructive potential in a reflection on the German Jewish theorist Walter Benjamin’s urgent plea for the 'organization of pessimism,' in which that affect is understood not as passive defeatism, but rather as 'an active, practical and ‘organized’' stance 'that is totally dedicated to preventing, by all means possible, the advent of the worst.'"
Angel goes on, pointing out Sara Marcus's recent interview describing, in Angel's words, "the last 2,000 years of Jewish history is a lesson in the creative possibilities of loss." Marcus said in that interview:
"The whole history of Judaism after 70 CE is about having lost the structure of the Temple and ritualistically voicing a desire to get it back, while at the same time building a completely other structure that’s rhizomatic — iterative, decentered — and incredibly durable and flexible. To continue elaborating that structure while never taking our eyes off the fact of loss, and in fact keeping active a longing for the lost object, grounds Jews in a profoundly generative historical experience of disappointment."
What can we generate from this?
People are not things, and it's OK to be angry
A.R. Moxon wrote on October 29, 2023: "All people have an intrinsic and indestructible worth that cannot be measured." We assign value to things, yes, but people "are not things." And so he goes on to say of the U.S. healthcare system:
"It’s very profitable. Some people think this means it is the very best. I’m not kidding! They really think that, and will tell you so without blushing, even though we can all see that it costs us more than any other developed country, and returns worse outcomes, and wipes people out financially every single day. And if you suggest that maybe our healthcare system should not be designed to wipe people out, they ask you how you intend to pay for a system that is designed to heal people instead, which is how you know that deep down, perhaps without telling themselves, they have decided that it is sick people who should have to pay for being sick, have on some level decided that sick people deserve to be wiped out as they are.
This is a very popular belief, I’ve found. It’s one diametrically opposed to the great truth about indestructible and inherent human worth.
And so, I think the appropriate response to this belief is anger."
Resuming the theme: Every life is worthy, and it's OK to be angry
Moxon continued on November 19, 2023:
"The idea here is that all human beings’ lives carry an immeasurable and indestructible worth, but human societies seem increasingly captured by a lie that insists that human beings must be regularly measured to determine if their life is still deserved. One common yardstick used to measure the value of human life is the profit motive, which cares nothing for the good of society; it cares only for growth. Just as unregulated water seeks the most efficient path to its own level, so unregulated profit seeks the most efficient path to the most profit possible, and will run through society the same way a burst water main on the top floor will run through the walls of a house. The most efficient path to profit happens to involve monetizing basic human need — healthcare and water and shelter — which of course ties profit to the immeasurable value of life, upon which an unregulated profit motive can set whatever price it likes, and does, and thus annihilates human beings by the thousands and millions every year, every month, every week.
And so the great lie — that life must be earned — makes products of our lives. It consumes humans for the benefit of wealth, enforces a false insecurity upon us all, divides us into those who deserve life and those who don’t. In this way, the great lie forms the basis of supremacy — the idea that some people matter and the rest do not — which makes our human systems vulnerable to takeover by the most malicious types of supremacist; for example, the white conservative evangelical Christian Nationalists who now are now broadcasting their clear intent to establish a fascist authoritarian rule in my country, the United States."
Anger, he goes on, is an appropriate response — if it's observant, restorative, and expectant. In other words: pay attention to what's really being said, replace these falsehoods with truths, and be hopeful that we can and must make a better world.
Sources
Arielle Angel, Jewish Currents, email newsletter, December 9, 2023
A.R. Moxon in The Reframe (Substack):
"An Appropriate Anger," October 29, 2023
"Channels of Rage," November 19, 2023
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