Good to see an update on this thread. Thanks, Doug and John.
After a few weeks on backorder, I did finally receive Michael’s book, “Against the Web,” a couple weeks ago and read it over the previous weekend. I have been meaning to return to this topic because I thought it would easily be worth a Café session…even though, personally, I never really felt under the sway or impressed with the IDW movement. I appreciated some of the contrarian POVs and attitudes, questioning dogmas of the left. But IDW arguments always felt reactive and shallow, lacking not only in empathy and but creativity and humor.
Michael’s polemic definitely clarified a critique of these thinkers for me, and could be edifying to review. I would be more interested in exploring the concept of “Cosmopolitan Socialism,” which to me sounds vaguely in the right direction, though it is not quite the open-ended future I feel most attracted to, which I think may require some new political categories.
My time has been squeezed lately by domestic concerns, but it looks like October will offer some openings. It might also be a good time to check in and work on some cultural somatics with respect to the upcoming US election. I did get a chance, too, to review the video on Healing White Body Supremacy — though I may not have the wherewithal to respond deeply on the thread. I am behind on many other things.
My takeaways were the importance of “settling the body” and carefully curating a safe zone to feel and express one’s deeper, subtler layers of experiential resonance. Almost all the time in that meeting was spent creating the conditions for the exercise. How would our politics change if we brought a similar embodied approach to our arguments about values and policies?