Marcus
I heard the author on a podcast where he described his career as a journalist, often undercover, in countries like North Korea, Russia, Cambodia, and China. I decided to read his book when he said that after his last trip to China in, I believe it was 2019, would be his last because the surveillance state that had arisen there had become too much even for him. This is a guy who doesn't blink an eye at going to North Korea.
The winter Olympics are going on in Beijing right now and just a couple days ago China used a Uyghur athlete as one of the people chosen to light the Olympic torch. In the context of this book, there's no other way to interpret that than as the Chinese government's condescending arrogance showing the world they can do whatever they want with no repercussions. They're giving apologists for their regime a story to point at to say “see, the condition of the Uyghur's in China is fine!” when the reality is that in 2017 about 20% of the eleven million Uyghur's in China were in concentration camps where they were being re-educated. This re-education, at least some of the time, includes physical torture, forced labor, and sterilization as described in detail in The Perfect Police State. There is no evidence that since 2017 that the conditions of the Uyghur's has changed—quite the contrary in fact. The Uyghur torchbearer from the 2008 Olympics is publicly denouncing China today.
The descriptions of the conditions that the Uyghurs live in in China are frequently compared to George Orwell's 1984. That may seem cliché since 1984 is usually used the same way people use Hitler—hyperbolically. Except that in China today, the comparisons are much more directly analogous.
Cameras with advanced facial and other biometric recognition feed back to systems of social scoring, crime prediction, and surveillance of all types. This, combined with central tracking of all online activities including every purchase, conversation, search engine search, etc. combine to give the state a growing ability to form a complete profile on every person in the country. The Uyghur's are, it seems, where the technologies are first implemented and refined, but there is no indication that China will stop there.
If your social score drops too low the Chinese state can, and often does, restrict travel, deny access to basic services, and eventually it will land you in a concentration camp where, as mentioned before, you'll be subjected to, at minimum, brainwashing. This is happening in China today in 2022 where the world sits idly watching downhill skiing on fake snow in Beijing and pretending like everything is just fine.
The technology China is developing is powerful and, of course, not only capable of being used in China. The Coda to The Perfect Police State discusses its spread outside of China to the US and elsewhere. It's not clear where its growth leads, but it's not implausible that if we don't do anything and allow it to expand and grow, that the concept of freedom as we know it today could very well disappear.
This book was good in that it motivated me to take another long, hard look at how I interact with the Internet. Like the author, I've found my ability to focus for long periods of time has gotten worse and that anytime I'm not doing something, I instinctively reach for my phone. Stolen Focus puts a huge spotlight on that and has some good suggestions for ways to try to regain some of that attention.
Stolen Focus also dedicates quite a few pages to talking about the systemic problems with trying to maintain our ability to think deeply, engage with nature, and slow down in an environment where so many big forces are working against us. Tech companies are incentivized to do one thing—build a profile on you so they can show you things that will keep you engaged with their content as much as possible so they can then try to convince you to buy from their advertisers. The resources they command to constantly improve their ability to do just that are daunting.
Hari proposes some potential solutions to this problem—many of them along the lines of heavy regulation or state takeover of social media platforms. I see where he's coming from but none of his solutioning was very compelling to me. It was either too heavy-handed or too implausible given the reality on the ground, as it were.
I had other minor issues with the book, but on the whole, I enjoyed the it and it's made me much more mindful around my phone use and my screen time stats seem to, for the time being, reflect that as well.
This book is notable for its beautiful, creative, metaphorical descriptions of hummingbirds. The genius title of the book and the gorgeous cover art are just the beginning. Jon Dunn's love for these little birds is evident on every page. Each new species he encounters is a revelation and you can't help but feel enthusiastic along with him. The photography is very good. Also enjoyable were his historical notes about each hummingbird. He often has interesting anecdotes about their “discovery,” along with local lore.
Ridgeline describes the fight between Capt. William Fetterman and the Sioux chief Crazy Horse at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming.
Punke switches between the perspective of the settlers, soldiers, and the Sioux to great effect. I can't stop thinking about what it'd be like on one hand, to live in a small fort surrounded by people who want to kill you, or on the other, to have your entire way of life threatened by that same group of heavily armed people in the small fort.
The plot is good, it could have even been great but the book is ruined by SO MUCH cringe.
There are so many contemporary social agendas scattered throughout the text it's really hard to stay engaged with the plot at all.
Among them:
* whiteness, the great evil (“four great evils: capitalism, whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism.”)
* lotssss of starry-eyed anti-colonialism
* the tourist gaze (lol)
* fetishization of “other ways of knowing”
* lots of anti/post capitalism represented as some type of very late stage Marxian utopia (ie. incompatible with human nature)
* lots of fat studies influence. “Noticing how her potbelly hung over the hem of her spandex” is said with a straight face and supposed to be sexy...
* lots of pro-prostitution in the most naive way imaginable. “I remember what you said in the van,” he said, “that you have many boyfriends.” “Oh sí, soy una puta también,” she said. He was surprised that she referred to herself as such—not as a joke, but with pride”
* lots of “fun” new pronouns and not in the cool Le Guin way.
* and a genderless future utopia that's basically Brave New World, but glorified instead of cautionary
* x endings for Latinos a thousand years in the future (hermanix lol)
* over-emphasis on consent in “romantic” scenes. “She reviewed how many she'd made love to before her ai warned her she was unable to consent. Four!”
* hyper sex positivity. The main focus of the book is sex. Consensual sex is always good and nobody every gets hurt or jealous no matter what. On top of it all, the sex scenes are... embarrassingly bad. I was going to quote some but I can't bring myself to do it.
* strange obsession with justifying and explaining self-cutting
* weird incest that almost felt glorified in a Game of Thrones type way.
It's not even that I necessarily even oppose most of those agendas. I expected to be “challenged” by it and was hoping to learn from something different from my standard fare. The problem is that they're so overt, so omnipresent, and so distracting. For a book with no aliens, the characters all seem to be human adjacent, but not quite human. I was unable to finish it. It was a 19 hour audiobook and I bailed at 17 hours.
I don't know much about bell hooks, I just happened to pull this book off the shelf because I recognized her name as a controversial author. I had no real intention of doing anything other than thumbing through the book to see what it was about. I couldn't put it down.
hooks' writing flows wonderfully. Her honesty and vulnerability is apparent on just about every page. Her own insights on love combined with the quotations from the broad collection of voices she pulls together are beautifully orchestrated. I especially appreciated her discussion of the importance of family and community. I also enjoyed her thoughts on her spirituality and how it's evolved over her lifetime.
I don't think this is necessarily a groundbreaking book, but I certainly feel uplifted after having read it. So, maybe hooks is controversial elsewhere but, by and large, this book exemplifies the ethos of the “Love Song to the Nation” series that it's part of.
I'm probably not in the target audience for this book, but I still found it, especially the first half, to be a sobering look at the direction the US is moving in today. Dreher says we're heading closer to “soft totalitarianism.” A culture-driven (rather than government-driven) version of the same type of totalizing of ideas as the Soviet and Maoist regimes had.
There seemed to be an imbalance in the second half of the book when Dreher starts to recommend solutions. If we really are in such a dire state, is meeting together in discussion groups in passive solidarity really what's called for? It may be part of a solution but it seems... lacking.
I recommend this book, even for non-Christians. It sheds a lot of light on what is going on today with the ever contracting window of what's allowable to think and talk about and offers some good historical frameworks for how to think about it.
This is the first full book I've read in French, so.. yay for that. The plot is insane. I'm glad it was so engaging because otherwise reading it in French would have probably been too difficult and I'd have given up. As it was, I sometimes found myself annoyed that I had to slow down to look words up, but other times it felt like the words were jumping off the page. I'd look up any number of words to make sure I understood exactly what was happening and to keep progressing.
Stylistically though, it's... pretty bad. Normally I might not even comment on that, but for a book with a character that alludes to Nabokov (his Lola is Dicker's Nola) and sometimes even tries to playfully imitate Nabokov (N.O.L.A.), you just can't miss on style. To use a sports metaphor, if you want to play in the big leagues, you better bring your A game. Sometimes the prose had me rolling my eyes. It's not as stock as say, Stephen King, (yes, I did go there), but it can be pretty tough to ignore sometimes.
That said, don't skip it. Don't read it for style, but read it. The story is fantastic.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet
There are mistakes in this book. Andy Ngo probably treats the right more generously than the left. Violence on the extreme right is a big problem in America. Andy Ngo was hit by a milkshake. Antifa means “anti-fascist” and fascism is bad.
All of the above is true. And, hold my beer, it's also true that Antifa is a violent, loosely-organized, nihilistic group that hates America and wants to destroy it and has and will continue use violence, actual violence against both people and property, to accomplish their mission.
See what I did there? More than one thing can be true at the same time! This happens to be a book about the left wing extremists. There are also books about right wing extremists. They both exist and are problems we need to deal with.
If you want to understand Antifa, you won't find a better first-hand source than Unmasked. If you want to know why you should understand Antifa, watch the news and look at the reporters standing in front of burning buildings while the text on the screen says “mostly peaceful.” There's obviously something wrong with that picture, that's a start. Believe your eyes.
Antifa is not about justice, freedom, or equality and it's not the type of group that pushes a country to be better.
In a sense, this is McCarthy's version of Dostoyevsky's existential dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov. The only way this works is if the case for both sides (meaning vs. nihilism) is made equally well. It's a hard and risky thing to do and, Cormac McCarthy being who he is, is the perfect guy to try it.
The Naked and the Dead is less about strategy or tactics than it is about soldiers. It's about the dynamics between commanders and their subordinates. The way men of different backgrounds deal with being placed together and forced to cooperate. The constant affronts to personal morality that war brings, and the way war pushes endurance and courage to their absolute limits. It's also about power dynamics, love and lust , and of course death.
It takes a Tolstoyian effort to sandwich that many themes between the covers of one, huge albeit, book and Mailer manages to... well, not really approach Tolstoy but he manages to weigh in as a Tolstoy-light. In the best possible way. The Naked and the Dead is easier reading than War and Peace . It has far fewer characters, settings, and scope, but it still manages to explore a lot of the same ground in a meaningful and compelling way. It's impressive, especially for a work written when Mailer was essentially just a kid.
The post-pandemic world the story is set in is fairly standard fare. I think this makes the book stronger. Instead of spending a bunch of time setting up the scenario, the focus is on the characters and how they deal with their new world. It does this very well. The pages flew by. Read it.
My only complaint is the sparse punctuation and the way the author often ignores the normal rules of grammar in favor of internal monologue-style sentence fragments. Sometimes this has the effect of making the story wash by cleanly, as if it was a memory. Too often though, it results in re-reading pieces of dialogue to figure out who was talking and what they meant. The Dog Stars would probably be better with grammar and punctuation left in-tact.
In some sense, I'm glad James wrote Cultural Amnesia in the early 2000's. At that time, he was able to end it on an optimistic note. Despite living in a post 9/11 world, he was able to conclude with the feeling that if the end of history wasn't already beginning, that it was imminent.
It's not.
In 2021 Cultural Amnesia feels more like a coda to the greatest hits of Western Civilization as we enter the neo-postmodern era where nothing beautiful is safe from puritanical purges.
Present context aside, this is a beautifully written book. It's an indulgent tour of the stars of modern history who come together to make a constellation in which the imaginative reader can begin to see the shape of human achievement, both for good and for ill.
Unlike other difficult conversations books that cover things like how to give bad news or ask for a promotion, this one is specifically about how to have political, moral, or religious conversations. Despite what some of other reviewers assert, and despite the author's opinions elsewhere, it does not take any specific viewpoint on what the outcomes of the conversations should be. It's a pragmatic, slightly repetitive, guide on how to talk to people that you don't agree with.
Here's a dump of my rather comprehensive notes. Unfortunately the indenting in the outline didn't translate when I pasted it in, maybe I'll work on that later or if you'd like a copy, I'm happy to email it:
Focus first on instilling doubt rather than changing beliefs
Basics
1. Goals - why are you having the conversation?
2. Partnerships - be a partner, not an adversary
3. Rapport - build the relationship
4. Listen - talk less, listen more.
5. Delivering messages does not work. Conversations are exchanges, not debates. Deliver a message only on explicit request.
6. Intentions - Socrates Meno dialog. People don't knowingly desire bad things.
7. Walk Away. If your primary emotion is frustration, it's time to quit. Breathe.
Beginner Level
1. Model the behavior you want to see in others
1. “Should women be stoned to death for adultery” - the person he was debating waffled on giving a direct answer. He then said “ask me that question.” The guy did, then the questioner gave a straight answer—“No, now do you believe women should be stoned?” “Yes.”
2. The unread library effect or “the illusion of explanatory depth”. Do you know how a toilet works? “Yes.” “Explain it.” Modeling ignorance-being willing to admit the limits of your own knowledge allows your conversation partner to lead themselves into doubt rather than feeling pressured. It also exposes the gaps in your own knowledge.
3. Model other traits—listening, honesty, admitting ignorance, sincerity, curiosity, openness, fairness, charity, humility, humor, willingness to change your mind.
2. Define terms up front. Go with their definitions. Does the word have moral implications?
3. Focus on a specific question. Ask open, authentic questions that invite long answers.
1. “Just so I'm clear, the question is...” “Let's get back to...”
2. Don't ask leading questions that carry agendas
4. Point out bad things extremists on your side do. Find areas of moral agreement by pointing out where people on your side go too far. Pointing out extremists can help this happen. Check yourself for extremist views.
5. Don't vent on social media
6. Shift from blame to contribution. “What factors contributed to.”
1. Avoid causal statements.
2. Don't say “both sides do it,” it's defensive.
3. If your side is accused acknowledge and don't deflect. “Yeah, it's true they (we) sometimes do that.”
4. If you can't avoid blame, say “I feel tempted to blame X for Y, can you explain the logic X uses to justify their actions?”
7. Focus on epistemology - figure out how people know what they claim to know. This avoids “talking points” and gets to how they know what they know.
1. Types of epistemologies
1. Personal experience and feelings
2. Culture (everyone believes it)
3. Definition (too much X is bad because too much anything is bad)
4. Religion (appeal to a holy book)
5. Reason
6. Evidence (sufficient evidence to warrant belief)
2. How to engage on an epistemological level
1. What leads you to conclude that?
2. Ask outsider questions. “Why are there so many divergent opinions?” “Would every reasonable person draw the same conclusion?”
3. Start your conversation with genuine wonder as to how your partner arrived at the conclusion they have.
4. “If someone's reasoning makes no sense, there's a good chance they reason that way to justify a (moral) belief that cannot otherwise be justified.” Find examples of using this type of reasoning in other situations and see if it applies. Or, try to derive other conclusions from their reasoning process. E.g. We shouldn't blow up anti-aircraft guns in a civilian area because of collateral damage. Wouldn't this lead to more civilian deaths because the enemy repeats the pattern?
8. Learn. Is it actually me who's the ideologue?
9. Things to avoid
1. Don't display anger
2. Don't punish people for asking help, information, or feedback
3. Don't focus on the belief, focus on how they know it. The epistemology.
Intermediate Level
1. Let friends be wrong. Offer a listening ear “I hear you.” If you don't understand, say it.
2. Build golden bridges. Be graceful when people change their minds. “All good.” “No worries.” “It's a complicated issue.”
1. Build a golden bridge when you feel attacked. “The way my position is stated might lead someone to believe I want X (bad thing) but I really want Y” (good thing).
2. Build a golden bridge to escape anger. “These issues are really frustrating. I know. They get to me too.”
3. Build Golden Bridges by explicitly agreeing.
4. To alleviate pressure to know/understand everything. “No one is expected to know everything, that's why there are experts.”
5. Reference your own ignorance and reasons for doubt. “I used to believe X, when I learned Y, I changed my mind.”
3. Avoid “you” use “we” and “us.”
1. Use the hostage negotiator tactic of “We're all in this together.”
2. Say “that belief” or “that statement” rather than “Your..”
3. Switch from “I disagree” to “I'm skeptical.”
4. Reframe the conversation to keep it going smoothly
1. Focus on commonalities - “ultimately we're both interested in...”
2. Reframe to be less contentious, especially if it becomes contentious. “Maybe we can look at it another way”
3. Figure out how to get someone to say “that's right.” (Not “you're right”)
5. Change your mind on the spot
6. Introduce scales - “On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that X is true”
1. Use this to introduce perspective. “If X is a 9 on a scale of 10 for ‘-ism', where is Y?”
2. “On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that X is true?” At the beginning & end.
3. “How does X compare to Y?” (Now/Then, Here/There, For Him/Her, etc.) E.g. racism today vs in the 1950's
4. How important is X compared to Y? E.g. racism vs. climate change
5. “On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you” then “Why not 6?” “Why not 10?” “What would it take to get to 10?”
7. Turn to outside information to answer the question “how o you know that?”
1. “I'm not sure about that. If I could be shown reliable data, I'm open to changing my mind.”
2. Ask who the strongest experts on both sides of an opinion are.
3. Ask for specific evidence that could persuade “an independent observer” or “every reasonable person.”
4. If someone says no evidence could be provided, there's no point.
5. Don't attempt to use outsourcing on moral questions, it only works for empirical.
Advanced Skills
1. Keep Rapoport's rules. Re-express. List points of agreement. Mention what you learned, only then rebut.
1. Express their opinion so clearly & fairly that they say “thanks, wish I'd put it that way.”
2. Avoid facts
1. Instead ask questions that pose problems and contradictions
2. Focus on epistemology
3. Ask disconfirming questions: “If X couldn't be replicated, would Y be true?”
3. Seek disconfirmation. “How could that belief be incorrect?” This is the best way to instill doubt.
1. There are 3 categories of disconfirmable beliefs:
1. Not disconfirmable. Usually tied to what someone thinks it means to be “a good person.” “Belief in Belief” as Dennett says.
2. Disconfirmable, but only under wildly implausible conditions. (“Aliens” in the beer truck).
3. ‘Ask why those are the conditions and why not something simpler?
4. If that doesn't work, ask about morals, values, or identity concerns under the surface. The goal is to get the person to reflect more deeply on the conditions that anchor the beliefs.
5. Disconfirmable. Don't become the messenger, let the person reflect on their beliefs themselves.
2. Ask on a scale of 1-10 how confident they are.
1. 10-disconfirmable,
2. 9-ask “why didn't you say 10, what would make it 8?”.
3. Middle range-why isn't your confidence higher? Altercasting gets them to focus on their doubt rather than belief.
3. Ask questions:
1. Epistemological questions:
1. “The belief isn't held on the basis of evidence, right?”
2. “Are you as closed to revising other beliefs as this one? What makes this particular belief unique?”
3. “What are examples of beliefs you're not willing to change?”
2. Moral questions:
1. “How it it a virtue not to revise this belief?”
2. “Would you be a good person if you didn't hold this belief?”
3. “Who are examples of good people who don't hold this belief?”
3. Think back 10/20 years ago, have any of your beliefs changed?
1. Y? “How do you know this belief won't change too?”
2. N? Prob time to end the conversation.
4. Yes, and... (no “but”)
1. “Interesting, and what about...” or “ok, I hear you, and” if you'd don't agree.
2. “If you don't mind” rather than “however”
5. Anger.
1. Blinds and derails.
2. Seeks its own justification.
3. Carries a refractory period where information processing is slowed by the nervous system.
4. When you feel anger, pause, reframe, change the subject, listen, acknowledge and apologize.
5. Respect the refractory period
6. Identify your triggers like words that are likely to upset you.
Expert Skills
1. Synthesis—recruit your partner to help refine and synthesize your positions. The goal is to get closer to true beliefs, not produce agreement. It can be a form of collaborative steel-manning. Constructive, controlled disagreement.
1. Five steps
1. Present an idea. Moral beliefs are harder but can reveal epistemological blind spots.
2. Invite and listen to counterarguments. This is difficult because you might feel out matched or your identity may be challenged. The goal is to get your partner to expose at least one clear flaw in your thinking. Don't move on until she confirms your understanding of her criticisms.
3. Employ the counter-argments to generate ways to disconfirm your belief
4. Use these to refine your original position
5. Repeat-start with your refined position and do another round
2. Help vent steam—Talk through emotional roadblocks. Keep listening until they've stated everything. It's impossible to listen too much. Then use Rapoport's rules (re-express, listen, list agreement, but don't rebut). Don't force a conversation.
3. Altercasting-casting your partner in a role that helps her think and behave differently. Can be ethically ambiguous; manipulative. Introduced by Eugene Weinstein and Paul Deutschberger.
1. “You seem like a person that would X...”
2. To avoid ethical concerns, limit altercasting to:
1. taking their favorite solution off the table. E.g. present a hypothetical where their solution wouldn't be an option.
2. encouraging civility, fairness, open-mindedness. “You strike me as a person who is...”
4. Hostage negitations
1. Use “minimal encouragers.” “Yeah.” “I see.” “Okay.”
2. Mirroring - repeat their last few words, possibly as a question. “For their safety?” The goal is to keep them talking and providing info that may be useful in the conversation.
3. Emotional labeling - recognize feelings w/o judging them. Make sure you actually understand before you label.
4. Allow the person to save face. (Golden bridge).
5. Deal with small issues first to create a “climate of success.” Break down big problems to smaller ones.
6. Use specific cases rather than statistical information. It's more vivid and influential than facts.
5. Probe the limits.
1. Use the Unmasking Formula
1. Apply Rapopport's First rule (re-express)
2. Confirm you've understand their belief (giving them an opportunity to back down). “How long have you held this belief?”
3. Try to understand the limits of their belief in practice. “If your surgeon was a straight white male...” “If you were in a dark room and wanted to see would you ask about the race of the electrician..”
4. Ask “is there any circumstance that might lead you to act inconsistently with that belief?”
1. No? Continue with examples like in step 3
2. Yes? Ask for examples
5. At this point you know if the belief is possible to sincerely hold or not
1. No? Ask when to act on the belief and when to make an exception
2. Yes? Either they live in accordance w/ the belief or they're lying.
6. Counter-intervention strategies. (Someone using these techniques on you)
1. Go with it, you'll probably learn something.
2. Refuse to play. If you don't say anything or respond with closed-ended questions, nothing can happen.
3. Use counter-interventions
1. State your confidence level as lower than it is on the 1-10 scale
2. Offer the illusion of success
3. Doubt your doubts. Reverse altercast to get them to help you strengthen your position
4. State that you believe it strongly, but would rather not.
5. Respond to rapid fire questions slowly. “Uh (wait 5 seconds)”
6. Use questions to reverse the intervention. “Why are you asking?”
Master Level
1. How to converse with an ideologue: understand how their “sense of morality relates to their personal identity.” It's about being a good or bad person. It's about emotion. All disagreement will mean you misunderstand or you have a moral failure. Extreme patience is needed. Focus on how they know (epistemology) rather than what they know. Be self-aware enough to know if you're the ideologue.
1. Acknowledge their intention & identity as a good person
2. Change the subject to underlying values
1. “These beliefs seem important to you, how did you derive them?”
2. What values would have to change for your belief to no longer be true? This shifts the conversation away from rehearsed defenses.
3. Invite conversation about values
1. “What makes someone a good person?” “How does someone know that what they're doing is good?” “Do good people think about things in a certain way?” “How would you interpret an example of someone who doesn't believe that but who is good?”
4. Induce doubt about how they derived beliefs by asking sincere questions. Almost everyone has a brittle moral epistemology. This is the gateway to facilitating doubt and humility.
1. “Does a strong feeling that something is true make it more likely to be true?”
2. Potentially switch from to a superordinate identity if a conversation centers on divisive identity politics. “We're both Americans/humans”
5. Allow the tether between the belief and the moral epistemology to sever on its own, later. It's dangerous and difficult to do. It can cause “identity quakes” that can sever trust. It's a slow process. Build golden bridges. Use the five values above.
2. Moral reframing. Recast an idea in moral terms that re less likely to evoke defense and more likely to resonate.
1. Jonathan Haidt's six “moral foundations.” Conservatives respond to all 6, liberals to care, fairness, then liberty. Libertarians (Lt) focus on liberty. Conversations need to be recast to focus on your partner's moral terms.
1. Care vs. harm (C, L)
2. Fairness vs. cheating (C, L)
3. Loyalty vs. betrayal (C)
4. Authority vs. subversion (C)
5. Sanctity vs. degradation (C)
6. Liberty vs. oppression (C, L, Lt)
2. Reframing - learn to speak their language using their terms. Expose yourself to their ideas. Practice with friends.
1. Home in on certain words or terms (ie. equity, faith)
2. Identify your own moral dialect (ie. race, violence). Take opportunities to learn to speak different moral languages.
At this point it's obvious that climate change is as much a political issue as it is an environmental one. If that doesn't sound right, here's some proof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize in Economics winner wrote a review of False Alarm for the New York Times. He's a smart guy who has written a bunch of books himself. Despite this, his review is dishonest and factually incorrect from beginning to end.
Here's Stiglitz's review: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
Here's Lomborg's response: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-york-times-stunningly-false-deceptive-hit-piece-preserve-lomborg/
This isn't petty bickering over decimals between well-intentioned writers with different priorities. It's also not legitimately divergent interpretations of the same data. I get that using an author's own rebuttal to a bad review to show how bad the review is is, by definition, biased. But read them both. There's no way that Stiglitz didn't know what he was doing. He was preaching to the choir, his very specific choir. He knows that most people who read his review will use it to justify not reading False Alarm and write Lomborg off as a climate denier or a quack or worse. Charitably, I suppose you could say that Stiglitz wanted to dismiss Lomborg's book because it could cause people who are already less inclined to worry about climate change to become even more complacent and, as a result, to do less to address the issue. In any case, it's a dishonest and politicized review by a respected economist and it's perfectly illustrative of how the discussion around climate change has devolved into something a non-expert can't possibly be expected to make sense of.
I'm only focusing on Stiglitz's review because of how well it shows why counterpoints like False Alarm are needed. Lomborg's premise is that “global warming is now being used, often explicitly, to advance broader causes in a partisan political environment that shapes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of the world.” Stiglitz is the perfect example of that.
If you've gotten most of what you know about climate change from newspaper and magazine articles, you should read this book. Maybe even read it alongside a more alarmist take on climate change like The Uninhabited Earth. One thing will become clear–while there is a consensus on the reality of climate change and the need to address it, there is nothing even close to a consensus on the scope of the problem or the best way to solve it. False Alarm, if nothing else, puts that fact into perspective.
James Baldwin was one of those rare people that, upon finding himself in the middle of a storm, could see clearly through the darkness. He could understand the cause of the storm, the direction it was headed in, and what it would take to escape it. Fifty seven years ago Baldwin looked and saw that America was morally and spiritually sick.
His description of the inequality experienced by blacks in America and the culpability of whites in their suffering is sharp and lucid. He implicates both overt racists as well as the white liberals who called themselves allies of blacks but whose “profound desire [is] not to be judged by those who are not white.”
Today we are faced with a choice when we read Baldwin. The easy interpretation is to read The Fire Next Time, become even more angry at America and its institutions and conclude that since racism continues to exist today, that nothing has changed—the situation today is just as bad ever. On the other hand, the more difficult, but I believe necessary, way of reading Baldwin is use him as a reference of what America was 57 years ago, then to compare that to America now to determine the actual trajectory we are on.
Baldwin foresaw two possible futures, the first is the one that awaits us If we decide that nothing has changed in the last six decades. In that case his prophetic voice warned us that: “the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance [as described by Malcolm X] inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.'”
This is not what Baldwin wanted for America. Instead, his vision was that:
“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
Baldwin demanded that we “accept ourselves as we are, [so that] we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk.” Baldwin accurately saw that “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”
It is impossible to ignore that progress on the path to radical racial freedom over the last 57 years has been slow, and has not been without major setbacks. What we must ask ourselves now is, have we exhausted all options for moving forward? If all hope is not lost, it's our obligation to keep trying, to do better, to change and improve. The alternative is to abandon hope and leave our fate to the cosmic vengeance Baldwin warned of.
