Jerusalem Demsas: evaluation

Transcript context

…Then you suggested Reeves. Yes, and I had not thought about these three as having very many connections before I sat down and started reading them again. One of the things that’s very interesting to me all the time is, we’re having the same conversations in so many different contexts over decades, over centuries and in ways that, if you’re in a good mood, can feel very unifying. You’re like, “Wow, I’m just like every other person that’s out there. I’m like Jonathan Swift. We’re all wrestling with the same questions. Le Guin, all these people, Reeves. ” Maybe it’s a knock against moral progress that the same questions are being debated over centuries. It doesn’t matter the format, it doesn’t matter the style, it doesn’t matter the background of the interlocutor. It’s like we’re just forcing this one circular human condition. I was surprised by the amount of overlap in themes, honestly. Along those lines, one of my key lessons would be, everything is much more connected with other things than you think at first. Even now, I keep on revising that upwards as I read more things. The same is true of travel. Going to a lot of different places, you appreciate each one more. You learn something about it by virtue of the fact that you’ve been to other places. Even if it doesn’t make you happy, you get this neat form of knowledge. Travel as a form of knowledge, as a key theme in Le Guin and Swift, comes through to me all the more on these readings. I feel the lack of that a bit in Reeves. I get that he’s writing for — which press? For Brookings. He works at Brookings. I don’t expect him to go off to some distant country and start doing fieldwork, but that’s what feels, to me, is missing. The kind of thing that Alice Evans is doing in her writings on gender, which is going everywhere, trying to learn things in a pretty speculative way that is not exactly a randomized control trial. I think she’s maybe more likely to get somewhere than these smaller investigations. Travel as a mode of knowing has gone up in my eyes, and it’s something I think we should talk about, think about, read about, travel about all the more often.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.