My guest on the show today is writer, activist and retired journalism professor Robert Jensen who has a new book out, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning.
In it, Bob uses his own encounters with different sources of meaning – God, nature, even the idea that we’re free to choose anything at all, rather than just being the mechanistic product of a bunch of subatomic particles interacting with each other in a sequence that gives rise to the illusion of human agency – to make the case for a more down-to-earth, small-m idea of meaning. He also talks, in ways I found quite moving, about his own struggles to patch together an adult life of purpose after a childhood so abusive and chaotic that he genuinely doesn’t remember a lot of it.
Bob spent most of his career as a journalism professor at UT Austin and as a writer of short, plainspoken books advocating for his brand of left-wing politics, including The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; and without question the best titled of his many books: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.
I first heard of Bob, I’m pretty sure, when a lot of people first heard of him, which was when he published an op-ed three days after 9/11 that drew a deliberate moral equivalence between the Al-Qaeda attacks on us and the history of U.S. aggression in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, and Chile. He wasn’t defending Al Qaeda; his point was that we kind of sucked too, and, more importantly, we almost certainly were about to suck quite hard again.
Here he is, for instance, talking about the fear that took hold of him after the attacks, which wasn’t the fear that most people had, of more attacks on what we began to almost immediately call “the homeland,” but rather a fear of how we were going to respond militarily. He writes:
I almost immediately had to face the question: “When will the United States, without regard for civilian casualties, retaliate?” I wish the question were, “Will the United States retaliate?” But if history is a guide, it is a question only of when and where. So, the question is which civilians will be unlucky enough to be in the way of the U.S. bombs and missiles that might be unleashed.
Those are a few sentences that have worn quite well in the now 25 years since he first wrote them. There are others in the piece, as we discuss, that didn’t wear so well. But in both cases, the well- and ill-considered alike, they’re a testament to part of what I’ve always appreciated about Bob, whom I met some years later, first via email and then eventually in person when I moved to Austin, where he taught at UT. He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em. He just me much less fear than most of the rest of us experience, certainly including myself, when what we see doesn’t align with the perspectives and sentiments of the people around us.
Bob also, and you’ll get a rich sense of this from our conversation, is unusually open to evidence that he’s been wrong. He doesn’t seem to fear that either, reflecting on his mistakes and trying to do better, though as he writes about in his new memoir, his conceptual openness to change and growth has rarely meant that the actual process has been smooth or fast. A lot of therapy. A lot of failure and pain. A lot of help from other people who saw more in him than he often saw in himself.
I’m saying all this, about him, because when I try to summarize what stuff we talked about in the conversation, I struggle. We talk about his new book. We talk about his 9/11 essay, his history of left-wing activism, his retreat from that activism. We talk about his pretty nightmarish childhood, and the ways in which he’s tried to repair the damage it’s done. We talk about the wisdom of Ray Wiley Hubbard. We talk about digging ditches in rural New Mexico, where he now lives. And various other things. But really we talk about what it what it means to be alive, man, and how hard and beautiful that can be. I think it’s a special conversation. I hope you agree.
Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and with its offshoot publication, Arc. To learn more about what’s going on at Arc, visit the magazine at arcmag.org.
Peace.
Show notes:
0:00 — Cold open: Dan introduces Robert Jensen and his new semi-memoir, *This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life Without Meaning*, referencing Jensen’s controversial post-9/11 op-ed.
2:02 — Dan reads from Jensen’s 9/11 op-ed, written three days after the attacks, drawing a moral equivalence between Al-Qaeda’s violence and U.S. militarism abroad.
4:46 — Dan on Jensen as a person: someone unusually willing to say what he believes and remarkably open to evidence that he’s been wrong, even when the process of growth is painful.
5:00 — Overview of the conversation: the new book, the 9/11 essay, left-wing activism, a traumatic childhood, therapy, Ray Wylie Hubbard, digging ditches in rural New Mexico, and what it means to be alive.
5:00 — Show credits: produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and its publication, *Arc*.
5:16 — Interview begins. Jensen on never once making the Hook ‘em Horns sign in 26 years at UT Austin, and his biggest scrape with the university administration after 9/11.
6:26 — Jensen on his emeritus title: “a Latin word that means, ‘Thank God that guy finally retired.’”
6:32 — Jensen reflects warmly on his teaching career at UT Austin (1992–2018), his love of teaching first-year students, and academic freedom at the university.
7:52 — Why Jensen preferred teaching 18-year-olds over graduate students: their rawness, curiosity, and the exciting mix of students at UT Austin.
9:32 — Dan proposes Jensen as the ideal professor for first-years — combining strong conviction with a belief that students should argue with him and find their own convictions.
10:41 — Jensen on his teaching philosophy: “Reasonable people can disagree.” Making his own thinking process visible to students, including his confusion.
12:12 — Jensen on a colleague who bragged that his students didn’t know how he voted — and why Jensen disagreed with that approach.
13:04 — Dan on a renewed appreciation for the “view from nowhere” in journalism after the last decade of media chaos; Jensen agrees and discusses monitoring right-wing media in retirement.
15:03 — Jensen on rethinking left-wing critiques: “you can be wrong, your side can be wrong,” and the book as a plea for humility.
16:09 — Jensen on the 9/11 fallout: the fear of the rush to war, publishing the op-ed, the wave of hate mail, and being condemned by name by UT Austin’s president.
20:10 — Jensen on the specific content of the op-ed: pointing out U.S. war crimes in Vietnam and beyond, and how overseas audiences found the analysis routine while Americans were outraged.
21:50 — Dan pivots to the book and Jensen’s childhood. Dan says Jensen has a “questing quality” and “traumatic childhood energy” that he’s spent years in therapy working on.
23:18 — Jensen on David Hume — “Reason is and always will be a slave to the passions” — and his abusive, alcoholic, dysfunctional childhood, dissociation, and struggling to construct an origin story.
25:18 — The four things Jensen doesn’t believe in: God, a spiritual plane, nature mysticism, and free will. Writing the book for himself rather than an audience.
26:44 — Jensen on modeling that men can speak openly about being victims of abuse and survive it.
26:50 — Dan on Jensen’s “ministerial vibe” — a gentleness and attraction to the numinous despite his non-belief. Asks whether Jensen feels an attraction to transcendent experiences.
28:46 — Jensen: “From the time I can remember, I never understood what people were talking about when they talked about God or spirituality.” Finding fulfillment in intellectual work and honest labor instead.
32:20 — Dan asks whether Jensen has understood himself through “child of an alcoholic” narratives. Jensen resists being boxed in but acknowledges the patterns.
34:09 — Dan and Jensen on dissociation, intellectualizing as a defense mechanism, and how that skill helped Jensen as a teacher but hindered him in 17 years of therapy.
37:28 — Jensen on gratitude, luck, and Ray Wylie Hubbard’s line: “Any day where my gratitude exceeds my expectations is a good day.”
40:08 — Dan and Jensen on privilege: Jensen first wrote about white privilege in 1998, but rarely uses the term now because it’s become corrosive. Critique of DEI practices on the left.
44:03 — Jensen on stepping back from left political organizing: “We embrace our irrelevance.”
46:02 — Jensen on navigating feminist spaces as a man — his early fear of speaking, realizing other men need male models, and learning that women wanted him to speak, not hide.
49:06 — Dan asks about masculinity today. Jensen on the need to articulate a positive concept of manhood connected to decency, not patriarchy.
53:29 — Arc Magazine promo: Dan highlights Vineet Chander’s essay “The Man Beside Me,” about working alongside Anwar al-Awlaki as a fellow chaplain post-9/11.
56:28 — Dan asks why Jensen needed to write this book now. Jensen: his 13th book, but the first not aimed at persuading — written for his own mental health and self-reflection.
58:42 — Jensen on being “an incredibly unusual, ordinary person,” communal ditch cleaning in the acequia system of northern New Mexico, and proving himself to his neighbors.
1:01:50 — Dan on Orwell, Harvey Milk, and the power of being both ordinary and gifted — seeing the world as normal people do.
1:04:12 — Jensen reveals his sexuality is more complicated than “heterosexual” — a period of identifying as gay, and not knowing his orientation due to childhood trauma.
1:05:32 — Jensen critiques the term “heteronormative” and academic faddishness, including post-modernist language that alienates ordinary people.
1:06:16 — Dan and Jensen on the fraught intersection of childhood trauma, sexuality, and public discourse — from the priest abuse scandal to bathhouse culture and the AIDS crisis.
1:10:30 — Dan reflects on Jensen’s 9/11 op-ed: the tension between political analysis and communal grieving. Jensen on Ward Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” comment as cruel and strategically stupid.
1:14:34 — Dan on Martin Luther King Jr. as a political genius who could reorient people toward radical politics without violating their sense of community. Jensen agrees the left failed at this after 9/11.
1:19:06 — Dan and Jensen on *The Hidden Injuries of Class*, meaningful vs. “bullshit jobs,” and how the devaluation of manual labor feeds political resentment.
1:21:07 — Jensen on telling neighbors he’s “a teacher” rather than “a university professor,” valuing dignified work, and his pride in manual labor and warehouse work as a young man.
1:25:04 — Dan on making kids work as a path to flourishing — even bourgeois parents miss this within their own success paradigm.
1:26:04 — Jensen on his friend and mentor Jim Koplin: meeting at the University of Minnesota, Koplin’s honest assessment of Jensen’s limitations, and the book *Plain Radical*.
1:29:50 — Koplin as research psychologist, founding faculty at Hampshire College, radical activist since the 1960s, papier-mâché genius, and community member. Jensen: “I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t met Jim Koplin.”
1:31:19 — Dan on the book’s subtitle — *A Fulfilling Life Without Meaning* — and Jensen clarifying that meaning comes from human connections and the living world, not transcendence. Jensen: “I proclaim the beauty of the ordinary.”
1:32:21 — Closing remarks. Jensen calls it the most enjoyable interview he’s done in recent memory and praises Dan’s interviewing style.
1:33:57 — Outro and credits. Produced by David Sugarman; in collaboration with the Danforth Center and *Arc* magazine. Contact: djopps@gmail.com.
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