I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
My brother, my wife, hierarchy, I get called out, and at long last I weigh in on Israel and Palestine
My Wife Writes about Marriage
My wife is a couples therapist. I’m a writer. Therefore, by the Voltron property of marital combinatory geometry, we are writing a book together about relationships and therapy. The book writing may take some time, for a variety of pragmatic and traumatic reasons, but as part of the process we will occasionally spin off related materials. To wit, this review my wife wrote for the Washington Post of some of the relationship self-help books that she occasionally recommends to clients. She begins:
There are a small number of relationship self-help books I recommend to clients on occasion, when it feels like a text might be helpful. The ones I like are the ones that do, in written form, a version of what good therapists do in the room with clients, which is to iteratively experiment with language to see which formulations resonate best. The idea is to frame and reframe the same basic ideas in different ways, expecting that most will fail to penetrate but a few will lever someone open, an inch or two at a time, creating the space for positive change.
This kind of experimentation is necessary, because the human brain is brilliant at erecting defenses and then holding on to them for dear life. A strong relationship with a good therapist can be the best predictor of therapeutic success, but even with that, we all have a tendency to make the same self-sabotaging mistakes again and again (and again). And even our therapeutic successes are typically subtle and not particularly gratifying. Real change is extraordinarily hard, particularly when the distressed equilibrium is between two imperfect people, as it is in couples therapy. It’s impossible for anyone trying to help us to know in advance what insight, story, analogy or phrase might sneak through to help us grow.
For this reason, there’s not a right relationship book, full stop, for everyone. What can sometimes be the case, however, is that there is a right one for you right now. It might be in the form of a chapter here and there. It might be nothing you can use right now, but a single phrase that lodges in your brain and then silently germinates for months or years before finally blooming when the conditions are right. None are the answer to all your problems, but the best offer ideas, language, metaphors and stories that may be of use.
The whole thing is interesting (and maybe even useful!). You should read it.
My Brother by the Same Mother
My brother Mark recently launched a new podcast, The Syllabus, about campus politics. It's a collaboration between his employer, American Jewish University, and Inside Higher Ed. It's only a few episodes in, but is shaping up to be quite good, which isn't surprising given Mark's particular set of skills.
Of his four extant episodes, my favorite is his interview with Yale professor Evan Morris, in which Mark gently but persistently forces Morris to explain why it makes sense that he and a group of Yale colleagues issued two letters in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas, one that is against institutional statements in principle and another that calls out Yale for insufficiently condemning (by way of institutional statement) Hamas.
Extra Credit
By night I write and record Eminent Americans. By day I'm director of public affairs for the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. From that perch I help produce the Extra Credit newsletter, which we recently launched via Substack. For the inaugural episode of the podcast, I talked to anthropology professor Ward Keeler about his life and work and in particular his scholarly interest in the ways that hierarchy manifests in different cultures.
I found the whole thing pretty fascinating. To give you a taste, here’s a (lightly edited) transcript of Ward and I talking about how hierarchy plays out in cultures, like American culture, where the consensus ideology denies its significance and prevalence:
Ward Keeler: American politics and the constitution are riven with these contradictory attitudes toward status and who deserves to be equal and who doesn't.
Daniel Oppenheimer: You can't wish away hierarchy in human nature. It seems to be just built into it, whether it's built into our biology or just the nature of things interacting with each other. Because it's in the animal kingdom, too. Wherever there's difference, wherever there are inequalities in power—which is to say everywhere—there will inevitably result some form of hierarchy. And I would say implicit and explicit in some of your work is that we get into trouble when we pretend that what's there isn't there.
Keeler: Yes, that's right. At a certain point in my undergraduate course, I always say to the students, “What would you think if I just said, ‘Just call me Ward.’” And the point is that that's actually quite disingenuous, and really quite fake, because I still grade them at the end of the semester. I have not actually given up any power I exercise over them.
Oppenheimer: It’s worse than that. It's not just fake, but to the extent that you actually deprive yourself of some of the charismatic power of the professor, you're actually depriving them of some of the benefit of education, which can involve putting yourself under the sway of the pedagogical charisma of a professor.
Keeler: Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of writing a fellowship application and the title of my proposal is “Hierarchy and the allure of subordination.” In all of our insistence on agency and autonomy and so on, we rather neglect the fact that subordinating yourself can have real appeal. It can be an attractive force.
Oppenheimer: That includes more salacious forms of subordination, but also just being a student and wanting to be able to look up to a teacher. My wife is a psychotherapist, and she will say, “Look, it helps their therapeutic process to invest me with authority. It helps them grow and heal and repair wounds to believe that I'm in possession of wisdom that they don't have or insight that they don't have.” In some cases, this involves projection, but it's a healthy projection. And for that matter it probably helps to heal medically to invest your doctor with a presumption of authority and power.
Keeler: Actually, that's something I bring up with students, which is that Americans tend to say, “Oh yeah, using first names is always a good idea. It's so much more friendly and so on.” But we don't want to do that with our medical professionals. We insist upon calling them doctor so and so. And I have very self-consciously altered my practice. So I say to my doctor, “Hey, Mark, what do you think about this?” Precisely because I need to remind myself that he doesn't know everything. He may not be able to solve this. He’s a person like I am.
Listen to the whole thing. It’s super interesting!
Letters from Friends
A good friend of mine and close listener to the Eminent Americans podcast sent me an email in which he lobbed this (highly scurrilous) allegation:
I’ve noticed some of your episodes have a common format: you identify people with credibility within a certain movement or group, and invite them on to critique a more woke or identity-based ideology within that same movement. Blake and James spoke about trans run amok (my shorthand). Tim talked about the limits of the invisible knapsack. Cedric, a socialist, critiquing black movements that put race before class. Nothing wrong with a common format, but it feels you are threading a narrow needle: you’ve chosen to be pretty elusive on what you believe, and I think you’ve handled this very deftly on an episode-by-episode basis. Except that your curation of guests and the episode’s structure of giving them an open mic to critique that more uncompromising, identity-based wing of their movement says a lot about where you stand. I’m not even sure if this bothers me. It just became a big AHA in this episode and I wonder if this resonates.
I feel both very seen and very called out at the same time. This is probably right, in terms of both my method and my politics, but it makes me uncomfortable to see it articulated so clearly, in part because one doesn't want one's unconscious tendencies made explicit and in part because part of my goal for this endeavor has been to resist the gravitational force of the woke/anti-woke discourse that has swallowed up so much of our politics and media.
I hope to avoid this fate for two main reasons. One is that the binary does a disserve to readers, allowing them to have their biases instantly and soporifically confirmed or infuriatingly disconfirmed. The other is that it ruins writers. The runner up name for this newsletter/podcast was The Best Minds of My Generation, a reference to the famous first line of Allen Ginsberg's great poem "Howl":
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
I've seen so many smart writers get noticeably dumber after they signed up, consciously or unconsciously, with one or the other side of this culture war. I don't want that to happen to me, or to you. All of which is to say that I have no plans to specifically avoid a guest or topic because they may come close to whatever the woke/anti-woke topic du jour is, but I will try to be conscious of not playing too consistently to my own biases. Also, feel free to call me out if you observe anything interesting, either via the comments or at my email.
Why I'm an Anti-Anti-Zionist
I've been staying away, publicly, from saying anything about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza. This is mostly because I have little of interest to say on the topic. It's not my beat. Also, I have yet to be convinced that chiming in on Twitter or Notes or Facebook is ever a consequential enough political act to compensate for the risk that it brings of making anyone, including me, a lesser, cruder version of themselves. I have reached this conclusion as a result of bitter experience, as someone who has gotten into my fair share of arguments on Facebook and Twitter that made me a worse person and ruined my day.
Over the last few weeks, I've made two exceptions to my no-commenting-on-hot-topics-of-the-day rule. On Substack's Notes platform, I linked to a post by Freddie Deboer on the "the systematic silencing of Palestinian and Palestine-supporting voices" in various institutional spaces. I wrote this:
Either we’re for free speech or we’re not. I am. I don’t care if you’re for Hamas or the Israeli far right or anyone in between. Say your piece. We can handle speech we don’t like in our standard liberal democratic pluralistic first amendment ways. No need for exceptions now or ever.
I could try to justify this exception, but I'm not sure I'd believe myself. Sometimes you just get worked up and say shit. At a minimum I had the confidence, in saying the above, of knowing that I was clear on my own perspective. I believe deeply in a culture of free speech and in our capacity as a pluralistic democracy to handle the clash of conflicting views without resorting to the kind of ostracism that cancellers on the left and right engage in whenever they hold sufficient power to do so. I'm also rather annoyed by the various people on the right, center-right, and anti-woke left who were bemoaning cancel culture like ten seconds ago, when they were on the defensive in various institutional spaces, who are now splitting hairs in order to manage the cognitive dissonance of lustily calling for the cancellation of pro-Palestinian groups and people, often in many of the same spaces, particularly university campuses, where very recently they were bemoaning threats to speech. Lots of anti-wokies are sticking to their free speech guns in defending the free speech rights of Palestian advocates, but not as many as I’d hoped or naively expected would do so.
The other exception I’ve made—am making, I should say—to my no comment rule is this post, in which I want to draw your attention to this 2003 essay by the late great Ellen Willis on why she is an "Anti-Anti-Zionist."
It's by far the piece of writing that best captures my sense of things at the moment, which is a combination of profound discomfort with the actually existing anti-Zionist movement and ongoing low-level horror at many of the policies of the increasingly right-wing Israeli government. As Willis puts it (and you can sub in "Benjamin Netanyahu" for "Ariel Sharon" without missing a beat):
My anti-anti-Zionism does not imply support for Ariel Sharon’s efforts to destroy the Palestinians’ physical, political, and social infrastructure while expanding Jewish settlements in occupied territory; or the disastrous policy of permitting such settlements in the first place; or the right-wing nationalism cum religious irredentism that has come to dominate Israeli politics; or, indeed, any and all acts of successive Israeli governments that have in one way or another impeded negotiations for an end to the occupation and an equitable peace. Nor do I condone the American government’s neutrality on the side of Sharon. But I reject the idea that Israel is a colonial state that should not exist. I reject the villainization of Israel as the sole or main source of the mess in the Middle East. And I contend that Israel needs to maintain its “right of return” for Jews around the world.
Read the whole thing. Even if you don't agree with Willis, you can appreciate the writing and the power of her intellect.
I have been trying to put into words why it is I think everything you've done since starting this substack has hit all the right notes, a thoughtful recollection of what has come before and where we are now, written with just the right distance and perspective of someone who was in it but who maybe is no longer in it (or at least not in the same way). It's the kind of ironic distance that I am looking for. As you see, I can't quite put my finger on this retrospective mood I get but keep doing whatever it is you're doing, at least until I can figure out why I like it so much.
Ellen Willis’s essay is fantastic and has long informed my own Zionism.