Today I’m recommending the first episode of the Public Books podcast, featuring a conversation with the always illuminating Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s an instructive listen, even if, like me, you know nothing about the historian Tony Judt, who is the main topic of discussion.
❝ Eyal Press: “Truer today than ever“ as you say in the preface [to the new edition of Ill Fares the Land]. But it’s also a book about how the market has stunted our imaginations and language. And [Tony Judt] says very early on, “why do we experience so much difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Our disability is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore.”
I wonder if you agree with that, and if you think about the role of language in imagining a better world? We’ve talked a lot about not being naive about that, but just there, he’s getting at something different, I think.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: He really is. Somebody says, “I’m going to make government run like a business,” and because of preexisting ideas in the American imagination, you associate that with something good. Why? Why don’t you think about the bailouts? Why don’t you think about the banks circa 2008, 2007? Like why? That’s because dialogue and the imagination have been constricted. ❞ *
https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/05/15/ta-nehisi-coates-on-tony-judt/