When the cognitive dissonances of our present-day made themselves felt in the aftermath of October 7th, the question of where and how the abysmal hatred leading to this pogrom originated has remained unanswered. This question drew our attention to John Aziz, a British-Palestinian journalist who passionately writes about the events in his father's homeland. His perspective is particularly interesting because he clearly sees the weight of this heritage as the dark shadow of a tragedy imposed on him, but even more on his relatives remaining in Palestine. Because, as a product of the English education system and, as a young musician, he also feels part of the digital world. And it’s in this sense that he personifies the global mission of a digital native who, as a peace activist, wants to share his view of Islam with a wider public.

John Aziz is a musician active in the peace movement and digital economy. As a journalist, he has a Substack blog and has written for Quillette, Foreign Policy and Prospect. His music can be found on Soundcloud.

John Aziz in the media

This is not Late State Capitalism, in: Quillette

The West is Next, in Quilette

The Death of a Deluded Man

Replacing Isreales with Palestne. A Dangerous Delusion

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If there's a great mystery in the history of ideas, it lies in where the blind spots of thought are encountered. However, this raises the question of precisely what conditions lead to such blind thinking. When Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University whose work has delved deeply into the history of political theology, prefaces his book Ignorance and Bliss with the motto of an English Writer: »The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth,« he's highlighting the underlying dilemma: that the love of truth pales in comparison to other passions. And because he’s somewhat surprised this fact has received comparatively little attention in the history of philosophy—with the exception of Nietzsche—in his latest book, Lilla turns to the psychology of the present-day obliviousness, characterizing various paradigms within which the will to ignorance has found expression. Looking around at our present, we're confronted with countless varieties of blissful ignorance, making our conversation with him all the more rewarding as an in-depth exploration of a terrain that's received little attention.

After working as an editor at The Public Interest and holding professorships at New York University and the University of Chicago, Mark Lilla became a professor of humanities at Columbia University in 2007. He regularly writes for the New York Times and New York Review of Books, among many other publications.

Recent Publications

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Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct observation and engagement with a specific situation raises the most complex and, at the same time, the most diverse questions. From this point of view, the experience the young Moriel Bareli recounts in his book When a Jew and a Muslim Talk is of such a dense and unusual nature. Yet his starting point was relatively simple: a young man growing up on Long Island, New York, who came to Israel when he turned eighteen. And since he lived near Jerusalem's Old City, inhabited mainly by Israeli Muslims, he developed a desire to learn Arabic – and in this way, to approach and become closer with his neighbor—the unknown being, as Rilke had named him. In practice, however, this wasn't quite so easy to accomplish because, at the time of the so-called Knife Intifada, Jewish students were only allowed to enter the Old City if accompanied by guards. So, as a digital native, Bareli downloaded an app and arranged to learn the language through various online conversations. Because he soon realized revealing his identity as a Jewish Israeli wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, he decided to focus on his New York background, presenting himself as an American college student who taught English in exchange for Arabic classes. And it was in this way that he was able to strike up conversations with all kinds of people in the Arab world—conversations that would have been impossible in everyday life. This experience, with its unmistakable anthropological significance, drew our attention to him – leading to the following conversation, which, despite the subject's dark and confrontational nature, was characterized by a wonderful sense of humor.

Moriel Bareli lives in Samaria, teaches Arabic and gives lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is disguised as a seductively progressive formula. In this context, Göran Adamson is one of those rare specimens whose awareness of undesirable developments of this kind was sharpened early on – not least because he connected the rise of populist parties to the failure of the political elite. Or, more precisely: their entry into what Adamson calls nationalist masochism. The roots of this peculiar self-hatred go way back to the 1970s – in the meantime, having produced a political class underpinning its political career with performative acts of self-flagellation. Consequently, Sweden's conservative prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt could claim: »Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric. The rest of the development has come from the outside.« If we take the problem of nationalist masochism seriously, we understand both that and how the ideology of multiculturalism has made the deliberate and always consensus-seeking Sweden into a form of mental paralysis in which turning a blind eye could become a form of civic duty. In any case, Adamson, already a sociology professor at the University of Malmö, observed how his colleagues had developed a groupthink—a group pressure that’s spread as a kind of mental mildew over the discourses and threatened to stifle free speech and research. Was this a reason for Adamson to leave the University? As a true citizen of the world, he subsequently spent many years in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Jordan. He currently lives in Berlin, teaches at the University of Europe, and has just submitted a study on the failed Swedish migration policy to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.

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The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept, and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt West.

Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance. She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.

Recent Articles:

The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In Quillette

and Megan Gafford recommends

Samuel Hughes: The Beauty of Concrete

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Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous, mind game. Actually, it is a first-order puzzlement how such a terror of virtue could take hold of our political discourse and institutions. It is precisely this question that cultural theorist Catherine Liu addresses with the rise of the new ruling caste of the Professional Managerial Class—also known as the PMC. This caste is characterized by how it claims social privileges for itself in a sharp demarcation against the lower classes – or the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton referred to them. As an excellent stratagem, this hidden class struggle makes excellent use of symbolic currency as the capital Pierre Bourdieu so aptly described in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. However, as ever-larger sections of the population fight for positions, privileges, and scarce resources, the question of how to succeed in the moral economy is brought into relief. An excellent way out of this dilemma is declaring oneself a victim or behaving as particularly virtuous – a role description that Catherine Liu so aptly analyzes in her Virtue Hoarders. What was so refreshing in our conversation with her was that she never risks losing herself in moral indignation – but instead carries out a class analysis in good Marxist fashion. Thus, she reveals the basic features of the moral economy while also showing the blind spots of this ideology of domination.

Catherine Liu teaches film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she has also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders was widely acclaimed, and she’s currently working on a book exploring the significance of trauma for the moral economy.

Catherine Liu has published

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If you follow the rise of populism and conflicts emerging in post-industrial societies, you see the same picture emerging everywhere: a society lost in the thin air of our moral economy, struggling with very tangible problems that people are reluctant to confront. Brad Evans' perspective can be highly informative when analyzing this landscape, which exhibits some features of what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the ›molecular civil war‹. Born in Rhondda, Wales, at a time when the striking miners were the victims of Thatcherite neoliberalism, his perspective is shaped by that conflict, which plunged the people living there first into unemployment—then into a crisis of meaning even more terrible than exploitation: that of no longer being considered worthy of exploitation, in this sense: being completely invisible. Strangely enough, the young political scientist had to travel to Mexico and experience the Zapatista uprising before he could describe his own homeland with such an alien perspective in his beautifully titled book, „How Black Was My Valley.“ Here, the uninitiated reader isn’t only confronted with the insight that the Welsh are a kind of Indigenous minority confronted with the dark side of colonization through mining – but that Wales was already confronting the effects of globalization even before the great financial crisis in 1929. After the Treaty of Versailles, which obliged the Germans to supply coal in restitution, unemployment in Wales soared to alarming heights. In this sense, the personal alienation of having risen into the world of Academia from the working class gives him an unusual historical perspective of the lived experience while simultaneously allowing him to reach the heights of contemporary thought, the Philosophy of a René Girard or a Giorgio Agamben as he looks back.

Brad Evans is Professor of Political Violence at the University of Bath. He's the author of several highly creative books that transcend the narrow confines of academia. He has also founded the Centre for the Study of Violence.

Brad Event has published

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One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.

Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.

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