Neiman and Rieff on the land acknowledgment

Deutschlandfunk Kultur

"there are many things short of giving back the continent that could be done to improve the lives of Native Americans.  Solemnly reciting a land acknowledgement is not one of them. . . .  'The performative guilt of today's professional managerial class bears the same relationship to real shame and real guilt as Astro Turf does to grass.'"

     The philosopher Susan Neiman quoting David Rieff's Desire and fate (2024), in her review of that book entitled "Where wokeness went wrong," The New York review of books 72, no. 19 (December 4, 2025), 26 (26-28), an article eminently quotable throughout.  Neiman is, of course, the author of Left is not woke (Polity Press, 2023).

"What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows"

Carlos "Eire’s [weird and wonderful] book [They Flew: A History of the Impossible] raises the question of a culture’s epistemic reality and whether that affects the kinds of events that can occur. . . . What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows. This has nothing to do with the truth of the events; it involves the specific form the miracles took. St. Joseph [of Cupertino] levitated because this was an act expected of the holiest friars and nuns—the physical expression of metaphysical experience, the raptured body suspended between gravity and grace."

     Christian Wiman, "The tune of things:  Is consciousness God?," Harper's magazine (December 2025).