Faculty Writing: the Vice of Nationalism and Self-tracking and Surveillance

In Foreign Policy, Suzanne Schneider dissects Yoram Hazony’s tract The Virtues of Nationalism, an ironically “deeply global” book that “underscores the common underpinnings of the Israeli right, the Trump administration, ethnonationalists, and indeed neofascists the world over.” Hazony’s ahistorical book, which simply bypasses with nothing more than a footnote the serious scholarship of Benedict Anderson and Ernst Gellner, posits an image of the state that’s “patriarchal, blood-based, and remarkably stable over time.” Thus, “like all reactionaries who appeal to some primordial way of the world, Hazony doesn’t so much as argue for a return to what has passed as inaugurate something new.”

In Real Life, Danya Glabau writes, personally, on the temptations of self-tracking. “While digital self-tracking might seem to be the answer to someone like me who seeks to become a parent, using it to record evidence of all the ways that the parent might set the child up for failure could make it easier to revisit the sins of the mother upon the child. … Is the Apple Watch truly a guardian, caring for our well-being — or is it a warden, watching and waiting for us to make a misstep?”