Erik Baker
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
The Judgment of the Masses
Erik Baker
“Cultures unfortunately can be swept by craziness,” Noam Chomsky wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in December 2018, in response to one of many missives from his friend complaining of mistreatment at the hands of a sensationalist media. “Nazism for example. Or the Great Awakening.” A few weeks earlier, Chomsky had advised Epstein not to reply to the “disgusting” smears against him. “To 99% of people, who will never look into the...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life | Self-Help Gets Philosophical
Erik Baker
Donald Trump’s endeavors in business and politics frequently overshadow his contributions as a philosopher of the futility of human achievement. “We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy, or eighty years and we’re gone,” he reflected to Playboy in a 1990 interview. “You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.” Subsequent winning does not seem to have shaken this conviction. “Nothing matters,”...
The Fortress University | Protesting and Policing on Campus
Erik Baker
On Monday, April 29, hours after students established the Popular University for Gaza on the lawn of the University of Chicago, President Paul Alivisatos sent a campus-wide email expressing his dismay. Alivisatos’s suggestion that the encampment was somehow violent because of the “etymological connections of the word to military origins” drew widespread scorn. But after that tendentious charge came a more revealing — and more ominous — complaint. “Disruption becomes...
Propaganda, Disinformation, Ideology | What the Fog of War Conceals
Erik Baker
The image of the “fog of war,” former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary of the same name, suggests that “war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables.” In this way war resembles the rest of reality — a fact that McNamara perceives dimly but often succeeds in putting out of mind. “Belief and seeing, they’re...
