An Obadiah Slope column
John McWhorter the idiosyncratic columnist of the New York Times is on to something when he describes two movements both obsesssed with “white power”: one wanting to destroy it the other seeking to defend it.
His thinking explains why deaths in Gaza get much more attention than deaths in Sudan.
He describes how a desire to tie many or even most issues to race, led to overreach. “Here was the era that brought the firing of the data analyst David Shor after calling attention to an academic study — by a Black scholar — showing that in the past, violent Black protests in an area tended to make it more Republican. The president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation resigned after the statement they wrote in the wake of the George Floyd murder was judged too brief. And it was normal to read stories like the one about what happened to the University of North Texas musicologist Timothy Jackson, who edited The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, devoted to the work of foundational music theorist Heinrich Schenker. Jackson published one issue critically evaluating a curious claim by the Black musicologist Philip Ewell that because Schenker was openly racist, by extension his music theory, along with modern music theory, was racist, too.”
There is a long standing critique from within the left of people going too far left: “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder” by Lenin is one such warning. (Lenin mounts the arguement that in Britain the left should support Labour, with the eventual aim of having the workers see that a Soviet system works better – in effect calling for the left to be patient in building a movement.) Lenin is critical of those who want to carve out the most left position possible.
McWhorter similarly is critical of those who want to see everything through a racial lens, producing a modern version of “I am more politically correct than you.”
“A sense that the creation of Israel was a ‘white’ imposition upon ‘brown’ people is why protesters are moved so much more by Gaza than Ukraine or South Sudan. In lexical space, the terms “settler colonialism” and “white privilege” circle in intimate orbit,” McWhorter writes. “We see the punitive impulse in claims that Zionists ‘don’t deserve to live.'” And that thinking ignores that half of Israeli Jews are Sephardic.
But of course the right as well as the left want to talk about Gaza rather than Sudan. Only, on that side it is talk about defending “Western Civilisation” that makes that conflict more consequential to some.
There are sadly many uncivilised conflicts on this planet. Obadiah does not pretend to know how to untangle those messes. But weeps for all.
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Gothic Horror: Tech in the form of a tap and pay machine has comes to Obadiah’s church. Obadiah sees i the tech as very compatible. But it does set up a interesting aesthetic contradiction.
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Shakes: the Bondi North Golf Club was packed, jam-packed this week for a celebration of Obadiah’s former colleague, the cartoonist John Shakespeare’s, life. The celebrant said, that word ‘colleague’ was not correct, John simply had a lot of friends, and he was right. There was a live wake a few weeks ago to farewell John, and together with a series of other Fairfax alumni gatherings Obadiah is very mindful of how much community spirit there is among old newsroom comrades. We cling.
“I want to see the world through Shakespeare’s eyes” A farewell video for John Shakespeare with a song by Daniel Fallon https://www.facebook.com/daniel.fallon.9887/videos/746924397724594
But we only gather irregularly. And when we meet we find out what every one is up too, and who still is working for our old masthead.
In the same week there was a piece in The Atlantic, highlighting “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust” by an atheist putting forward the observation the less church means less community. “
“As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”
Just maybe, Obadiah and other long-time churchy types can loose sight of the gift of community the church offers. Maybe we don’t do it as well as we should. But under the urging of the Holy Spirit our transformation into reasonable human beings is happening. So we actually are gently pulled together.
Or as 1 Peter 2:5 we are living stones being built into a spiritual house.
It took a very unreligious gathering this week to make Obadiah value church.