As long-time readers will know, Humanities in Revolt aims to bring the questions, ideas, expressions, and insights of the humanities out of the ivory tower and into the wider public domain. To this end, we make all essay posts available to all subscribers without a paywall. This is a commitment at the heart of our objective, fanning the flames of humanistic biophilia: a compassionate and principled love of life.
Paid subscriptions are, nevertheless, deeply appreciated and vital to our growth. Currently, all funds generated by paid subscriptions are used to increase the audience of this publication. This strategy has helped us defy social media algorithms that award inanely incendiary and polarizing content and suppress content like ours that invites critical dialogue on questions, ideas, and principles and does not always match up with trending news-of-the-day or fit conventional ideological categories. Our subscriber base has more than quadrupled in just one year:
On July 14, 2022, 138 of you had subscribed. Our community of readers has grown to 604 as of July 14, 2023.
To show our gratitude for existing paid subscribers and entice those considering upgrading their subscriptions, Humanities in Revolt will periodically publish audio and/or video of lively talks and lectures. Offering these works exclusively to paid subscribers allows us to add something of value to the paid subscription option while also maintaining our commitment to making all essays available to all readers regardless of subscription status.
Video #1: Lessons of the Iraq War
The first edition of this premium offering to paid subscribers is a talk addressing the underappreciated meaning and significance of the peace movement’s failed efforts to prevent the Iraq War. The talk was delivered Sunday, June 11, 2023 at the invitation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brevard, West Melbourne, Florida. This was a fitting location for the 30-minute talk since Melbourne, Florida was the central site of my own peace activism and the birthplace of my awakening political consciousness, in 2003.
Some in the audience had participated in the supposedly “pointless” efforts to avert the Iraq War. My message to them was that such a judgment, viewed through the deeper lens of the humanities, is mistaken, and that there is much meaning and value in the passionate and morally principled efforts to prevent and then halt the war. I also challenged audience members to consider the significance of the silence of popular culture when it comes to representing the February 15, 2003 global peace protest, the largest in human history.
“For all of the excited cultural gushing over the ‘beauty’ and ‘awesomeness’ of masses of men gathered together to do war—to take life, to destroy, we ought to interrogate the comparative absence of climatic celebrations, of cinematic representations of such astonishing instances of love-potent solidarity.”
