No new essay this week, sorry! But I'm unlocking an old one that had receded behind the paywall, since some readers might want to compare what I said to a very odd recent "response" to it.

While I am more or less back on track this week being off last week for thoroughly depressing personal reasons, I’ve been catching up on many things and I wasn’t able to write a new essay this week. This does, however, strike me as an excellent time to unlock my essay Missing the Point on Universalism, which has been up long enough to disappear behind the Philosophy for the People paywall.

Last year, Benjamin Balthaser made a pretty well titanically uncharitable attack on my work in a passage early in his book Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left. So, in the “Missing the Point…” essay, I went through that passage point by point. It was a lot more measured and friendly than what my fellow Ben had written about me. The worst I accused him of was being conceptually sloppy in his attack, whereas in the Citizens of the Whole World passage, Balthaser had accused me of wanting to “erase settler-colonial histories” (???).

I did try to go through everything he’d said about me fairly carefully, though, responding in detail to each specific point, arguing that he was running together factual and normative issues in a way that obscured both, and trying to draw out a larger and more interesting issue about socialist values so that the whole thing didn’t just feel like so much pointless he-said/he-said. I was fairly proud of the response, but otherwise thought very little about it until my fellow Ben wrote a very long “response” to my response last month.

In it, he says, for example:

Burgis objects to the idea that one might adopt a socialist universalism - that we are all, indeed one human family and united by far more than separates us - and a politics that is also attuned to histories of displacement, cultural divergence, and uneven forms of oppression and belonging.

News to me!

Even more strangely, Balthaser’s “response” runs to 4,792 words (not including endnotes) and in all that “responding” he only finds time to quote two sentences of what I wrote, and neither of them have anything to do with any new point or argument I made in response to him. He just quotes me recapping the original core point of the article he was objecting to in Citizens of the Whole World.

So, I’m pretty happy to just unlock the original essay, and link Balthaser’s response, so readers can check out both and judge for themselves:

  • Whether anything he says in his very long response actually adds up to a, y’know, response to any new point or argument I’d made in the “Missing the Point…” essay &
  • Whether, now that non-subscribers can once again go back and reread the original essay, anyone can find anything in it where I “object” to be being “attuned” to "histories of displacement, cultural divergence, and uneven forms of oppression and belonging.”

It’s a mystery to me, but perhaps I’m missing something!

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