Author: Quine Atal

Writer, editor, cook, programmer. I've worn a few hats and had a few adventures. Currently writing philosophy and blogging. Transplanted from the New York City to San Francisco back when that was in style. I tried many things, earning a Masters degree in philosophy (SFSU 1980), but learning to program ultimately determined my living. Marriage had its own effect on that direction.

Review: The World and Us by R.M. Unger

The World and Us by R.M. Unger 2024 

A brilliant philosopher. A meticulously crafted argument. An absurd and/or impossible conclusion. How can such a one go so wrong?

The heart of the book is how to live a better and spiritually richer life both as individuals and communities. Better here means more filled with “satisfaction of the spirit,” both for oneself and for those who live around us. The use of the term ‘spirit’ is somewhat ironic. Unger uses it a lot.

Unger tells us he is going to move us through the four core historical concerns of philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics. I don’t know why he left out aesthetics, but in reading the book, I see there was no particular room for it. 

Ontology (what there is) and epistemology (in his view, “how we are to inquire”) are first up and essentially stage settings in the author’s program. We have a physical universe with a history. It has a beginning and in some distant future will have an end. Everything in it changes eventually. Even the cosmological constants, though stable for billions of years, will slowly change. Here’s the important part: there is no constancy anywhere, and there is no God (the reason his frequent use of ‘spirit’ is ironic). This means that in the end, not only are we—as individuals and as a planet—eventually all dead, but there is nothing else to which we move on. The good, the bad, and the ugly are all equalized [dead] by finitude sooner or later.

Nevertheless, during our lifetimes, we may strive to be “richer in spirit” and help those around us to be richer also—good karma for us—or not. We can attempt (not always successfully through no fault of our own) to lead more expansive lives and die only once, or we can not care, not try, lead trivial lives (more often, but again not always through faults of our own), and die many small deaths—I must admit I do not get this metaphor. Unger uses it many times. I’ll come back to it later.

Humans are both fully finite (when you’re dead, you’re dead) and transcendent (we have an inbuilt drive to exceed our limitations). Unger recognizes that the other animals do not share this inbuilt drive, and perhaps (he does not recognize) this is a clue to a reality he denies, but then again, maybe it is not. Possibly this part of us—the very notion that we can transcend our finitude—is an illusion. That some individual lives can be more valued (Mother Theresa) or condemned (Hitler) is undoubtedly not an illusion and not irrelevant to the lives of those humans who are contemporaries of the good or the evil. And so, Unger must focus on the point where the lives of contemporary human beings (and perhaps those of their immediate descendants) intersect. 

And so he moves on to ethics in two broad domains, the “self-fashioned” life, and the life built around obligation to others—an ethics of connection. Throughout the middle of the book, Unger explores these two divergent ethical philosophies. Neither leads to an optimum, transcendent human life by itself, nor can they be fully amalgamated. Always, he says, there will be some tension between them. This tension is beneficial, a dialectic that allows lives to flourish in different ways.

After this, he arrives at his destination, politics, a topic that is never entirely out of the picture throughout the previous chapters of the book. His last chapter is the only part of the book where he makes concrete recommendations, and he makes many. About government, social service, education, and so on. What Unger is after here, reflected throughout the book, is what he calls the “near adjacent.” Near-adjacent refers to structural changes in the institutions of government and the political process that are incremental and not pie-in-the-sky utopian. 

The near adjacent is not the same as changes within the context of the existing system that, otherwise, don’t change very much, for example, increasing (or decreasing) welfare payments, or changes in the tax code. Unger is referring to structural changes, albeit small at first, to the form of government itself. An example might be a direct popular election of the president (without the Electoral College) or some form of proportional representation in the Senate. 

Unger’s goal in all of this is to enhance (what he calls “raising the temperature”) our democracy and deepen our freedom by making both the self-fashioning and connection ethics more supportable and mutually reinforcing. For example, his very first suggestion—getting big private money out of American political campaigns (i.e., overturning Citizens United, among other sensible recommendations)—is something already favored by 75% of the voting population of the United States, yet it does not happen. Why?

Here is why: Despite his “everything changes sooner or later” mantra—which may be technically true—one thing does not change quickly enough to make possible what he calls the “near adjacent,” and that is human nature. Once the rich and greedy have power, they are not going to let it go without a fight. As long as the not-yet-rich but ambitious are allowed to strive for power, they will do so. Once an elite is in control of some relatively stable structure, they will resist any such changes as Unger envisions. 

Unger aims at a political and economic structure that is amenable to change, evolution, and experimentation, without such change having to be precipitated by crisis, which (as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out) is usually “violent and bloody.” But any change, no matter how beneficial to the majority now or in the long run, will always diminish those who now control the levers of power, even if the “diminishment” is merely some incremental reduction in their fabulous wealth.

Since, in the present circumstances, it is that fabulous wealth that secures the present power of the elite, what Unger suggests is, until some crisis brings the whole edifice down in some blood bath, simply utopian dreaming, notwithstanding Unger’s denial of that fact. In short, I applaud almost everything Unger recommends, but I am very skeptical that it can or will ever be possible, short of bloody revolution. 

Up to this point, Unger is brilliant if utopian. When he expands his view from the nation to the world, he goes terribly wrong. What he wants, globally, is to maximize cultural diversity and minimize war, especially war between the “great powers,” whomever they might be at the time. However, he then goes on to say that the latter must not be purchased at the price of a world government, because that would compromise the diversity requirement. Here, his powerful intellect has utterly failed him. It is, perhaps, the one point on which I could debate him and win.

A world of armed states, such as we have now, will never remain without large-scale war for long. Global resources are always limited. No power ever has enough. So long as these states are individually armed, some power will decide that getting what it needs or merely wants is worth the price paid in blood—theirs and their neighbors. Unless the militaries of the world are under the command of a single entity, war is eventually inevitable. Leagues of nations (that he recommends) are never enough. If all or even some of the nations in the league are armed, there will always come a time when withdrawing from the league and waging war will appear to be a viable option.

Unger thinks treaties will do the job. In the absence of a world government, who will enforce the treaty if a powerful armed state elects to violate it? In theory, other nations, acting in concert, could intervene. The Europeans might have intervened to stop Hitler in the mid-1930s, or, for that matter, Russia in the twenty-first century, but that never happened because no one wants to go to war based on what the other side might do until they do it. When Germany invaded Poland, the other Western European powers declared war on Germany. In today’s nuclear age, even Russia’s outright invasion of a European country didn’t trigger that response. Unger offers no suggestion here. Treaties and leagues are never enough.

My second point concerns diversity. Unger does not seem to grasp that what most influences cultural diversity is not politics but geography (I recommend he read Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography to establish and solidify this point in his mind). Geography does not determine the specifics of culture, but it does shape its broad outlines. The people of two different desert lands will have different cultures. Still, those differences will contrast with the cultures of forest peoples, and they, in turn, will differ from the cultures of plains people or sea peoples, and those from the culture of mountain people, and so on. A world government will in no way flatten cultural differences, as Unger believes. How can a philosopher of Unger’s caliber not recognize that geography has more influence on culture than the political arrangements of a territorial State? Geographical differences will inevitably lead to cultural differences.  

Finally, a “world government” does not entail or even imply a literal single political entity throughout the world any more than the United States Federal government means there are no individual (and varying) State governments. They, in turn, devolve power to local governments, and so on. Nor does “world government” imply or entail an autocracy or dictatorship. There is no reason the world government, in the long run, should not be democratic.

The primary role of a world government is to regulate global trade—governing the allocation of resources—and maintain firm control over any significant military power. Eventually, when the local, regional, continental, and provincial governments become accustomed to the situation, the military will, in fact, wither away, as there will be no one left to fight. Each State of the U.S. governs itself in its own way, but none seriously contemplate invading a neighboring State. At the same time, the Federal government has not maintained this peace through the threat of arms since the American Civil War. A global government is the only way to end war, whether global or otherwise, permanently. It will also save and put to productive use trillions of dollars now spent wastefully on national militaries.

There is an aspect of Unger’s economic views to which I’d like to draw attention. Throughout the book, Unger frequently mentions what he refers to as the growing “knowledge economy.” He never gets specific about what this actually means. Obviously, it includes computers, robots, and AI, but nowhere does he specify exactly what this means for the work of the world, except to declare that the future of human “deep freedom” depends on humans not performing tasks that machines can do. The problem is that machines will soon be able to do just about everything, from constructing our dwellings to making our clothes, growing, harvesting, and transporting our food, producing our energy, and so on. Machines can repair other machines when they break down. What are we all to do? 

Unger gives us a few clues in his section on education. Some work will always be better with a human touch, even if machines can assist in it. For example, caregiving for the elderly, the lonely, the sick, and small children should be something everyone learns to do, literally as part of their middle and high school curriculum. Such an education would increase the amount of compassion in the world, and, of course, some will move on to become professional caregivers in the broader medical field—nurses, doctors, counselors, and so on.

Teaching might be another area that benefits from a human touch. We should encourage students to practice what they learn by teaching others. Middle schoolers teach primary schoolers, high schoolers teach middle schoolers, and so on, but always with professional help and supervision. We will surely need many experienced teachers.   

Freed from labor, most humans today choose to consume and not create. A population freed from labor that machines can perform will consume resources even faster than we do today, given the leisure we have. Of course, a new educational regime can make a significant difference. Unger, in his last chapter, makes some good suggestions—see above—perhaps, over generations, humans can be persuaded to create rather than consume. However, on what basis will the creations be valued? 

Finally, I want to address his “many small deaths” metaphor. It makes no sense to me, but Unger does suggest a comparison between a life that is trivial or wasted and one that is not. But who is to judge? Thanks to his ontological stipulations, a person who metaphorically slaves for “the man” all their life, perhaps does nothing else but read trashy novels before bed, and dies childless, has led a trivial life. But according to his ontology, Mother Theresa, Hitler, and the wage slave who makes no additional contribution to humanity are now equally dead. To be sure, some lives do much more good for humanity than others, but doing “more good” cannot be synonymous with “non-trivial.” Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong surely did not live trivial lives. Did they die only once? Are their lives something to which I (or anyone) should aspire?

What about Unger himself? He writes philosophy books. I’ve written philosophy books. If his life is non-trivial, is mine? Of course, Unger is read more than I am, but why should that be a criterion? More people have read Mein Kampf (Hitler) than Unger, and Fannie Hill (Cleland) more than all of us put together. What about matters of opinion where Unger is plainly wrong and I am right, as in the business of “world government” above? Does that make my life non-trivial?

Politics, except during revolutions, changes more slowly than the span of a human life, but geography outlasts both by millennia. How can he have missed the truth that, without God (and not merely institutional religion — imperfect and corrupted like any other human institution) providing an unchanging moral compass, slowly changing human nature will never permit political evolution along the lines he envisions, short of the crises he abjures? Even if there is a God, such a change in human nature as Unger requires might need another few thousand years (we will no longer be around, but that is another matter), but it would mean that Mother Theresa and Hitler, both mortally dead, would no longer be equivalent. Isn’t that how we want our moral judgment to come out?

There is much more in this tome than I have addressed. For example, Unger tells us several times that altruism is not love, but if “Love is the desire to do good to others” (The Urantia Book), then sometimes altruism is love. The World and Us is an excellent piece of writing, possibly a magnum opus. Take it with a grain of salt.

Review: Waste Land by Robert D. Kaplan

Amazon link to Waste Land

My fourth (read) book by Kaplan is the apex of his thesis. What thesis? First, geography matters. Still true, Kaplan says, but in this book, modified by other forces. Second, geography does not determine history but strongly conditions it. This conditioning remains, but a set of global and interlocking destabilizing phenomena skew its impact. Third, individuals make a difference from two directions. On one side are rare individuals, typically members of the political elite, whether democratic or autocratic, whose choices can shift historical momentum in one direction or another. Kaplan refers to these individuals as “hinge persons.” On the other side is the mob (and he means a literal mob), whose actions can constrain, for good or ill, what the elite can do, even having the ability, sometimes, to force them from power.

Waste Land is Kaplan’s most inclusive view of everything, and its overall effect is pessimistic. He considers:

  1. Rising populations are, in most places, becoming poorer by the year. Many populations, including China’s, are rapidly aging and shrinking, deviating from the typical demographic trend. By contrast, Africa, which in 2025 hosts about twenty percent of the world’s population, is expected to grow to forty percent by 2050. India, South America, and much of Southeast Asia are also increasing. Overpopulation exacerbates every other destabilizer.
  1.  The fragile economics of interconnected supply chains rest on a non-existent global political order. An international order only appears to exist when relations between nations are peaceful. However, peace between trading partners can easily collapse: witness Russia versus the EU. As the population expands and, in particular, as expectations rise (see technology below), continuing peace and progress depend on the smooth functioning of these mechanisms.
  1. The technology revolution, and in particular the now globe-spanning Internet. People in poor places now see how people in rich places live, stoking demand for a bigger slice of the pie. Events are reflected across the world almost instantly, but not their more nuanced causes or other details. Partial information can impel political elites to act precipitously before they fully understand what has happened. The lack of detail also opens the door to malicious actors who take such opportunities to flood the Internet with false information, lending strength to counterproductive, precipitous action, sometimes by mobs. AI, for all the good it could do, also enhances this problem. Large Language Model AI can generate such volumes of disinformation and misinformation at the behest of malicious actors that it becomes impossible to discern what is true from what is false.
  1. Pollution and ecological degradation. We are poisoning our biosphere. Carbon and methane foul our atmosphere, the oceans become acidic, and plastic accumulates on our cropland, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Most of the Earth’s populations now live with measurable amounts of plastic in their brains. Microplastics are bad. Nanoplastics—so small that ordinary microscopes cannot see them —are much worse. A disproportionate amount of these (estimates vary from 30 to 70 percent) comes from one source: the daily wearing down of trillions of automobile and truck tires, whose residue is picked up by winds and rain and deposited everywhere. Nor is plastic the only material poisoning us. Industries and large-scale farms have been dumping toxic pollutants into waterways and landfills for two centuries. Many of the coastal dead zones and declines in fish and shellfish populations stem from this. More esoterically, every satellite that burns up in the atmosphere releases toxic metals that slowly settle into the air we breathe. The settling process can take a decade or two, but satellites have been burning up at an increasing rate, year after year, for over sixty years.  Kaplan doesn’t get into these last details. I include them for the edification of my readers.
  1. Resource exhaustion. In the late twentieth century, oil appeared to be a significant constraint. We have figured out how to coax more from the Earth, but there is still only a limited amount in the ground. Today, water is the greater geopolitical issue. Half the world lives with water scarcity. Larger populations demand more water, while the sources of water are shrinking. The glaciers that supply fresh water to much of the world are shrinking faster than anyone thought possible. Upstream countries (China in Tibet, Turkey in the Middle East, and Ethiopia in North East Africa, to name a few) are damming rivers to hold more of the water for themselves while the downriver nations dry up even faster than they otherwise would. If anything immediately exposes the lack of a formal global order, it is this.
  1. Climate change is the bookend to population expansion. The carbon we put into the atmosphere is slowly warming the planet. Warming the planet is akin to pressing down on the accelerator of a car. More energy means faster transitions in our weather, more tornadoes and hurricanes, floods, and wildland fires. More energy means more chaotic behavior. Wind, floods, and fires destroy crops, making it harder to feed growing populations as seasonal cycles (longer droughts, larger floods) become less reliable. Sea levels are rising steadily as glaciers melt away. Even the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting back more rapidly than expected. 

Everything in the above list is a destabilizer of what falsely appears to be a world order based on trade, and it so happens that at this historical moment, what order exists is being deliberately undermined by a hinge person: the presently unhinged president of the United States.

What does a destabilized world look like? We are already experiencing it, and the international state of affairs is on a deteriorating path. More and deadlier wars, mass migration, expanding disease, and starvation of people due to food and water shortages. As resources dwindle, those places that have vital resources will hoard them. More nations will become failed states. More people will be left to their own devices with ever-diminishing resources, along with steadily rising temperatures. There will be no safe place to move tens or even hundreds of millions of starving people. Wars of the have-nots against the haves will become an existential necessity: starvation the only other option. All this Kaplan foresees.

But even Kaplan does not see (yet) how climate change, in combination with ecosystem collapse (to which climate change contributes directly), will gradually grow to overwhelm everything else, possibly precipitating a global nuclear holocaust. Even if hinge people prevent the exchange of H-bombs, conditions everywhere will grow worse at an ever-quickening pace. Year after year, disaster mitigation will consume more of the world’s accumulated capital. The U.S., the world’s wealthiest country, cannot keep up with its annual disaster bill even now. Fragile supply lines will collapse if there is no capital to maintain them. In no place on Earth will there be seasonally reliable weather in which to grow the food needed to feed the planet’s population.

Technology will not save us. Capital, not to mention polluting energy, is required to maintain the technology we have, from the mining and smelting of raw materials to transport and assembly—and maintenance—of finished products. Electricity grids will fail when supply chains break, and there are no parts to maintain them. Our technological way of life will come to an end. With the collapse of industrial capacity, large portions of the Earth will become uninhabitable due to extreme temperatures. With no viable air conditioning or sufficient water, through much of the year, temperatures will exceed the limits of the human body to cool itself.

The severity and frequency of humanitarian crises will grow in inverse proportion to the world’s ability to mitigate them. It will not be possible for parts of the world to assist other parts because disasters will become financially and then physically overwhelming everywhere, and roughly at the same time. 

As energy, food, and water become scarce or vanish, protest mobs seeking the impossible — to recover what has been lost — will grow and become progressively more violent, accelerating the decline of order. Local, national, and international orders will unravel. In the end, anarchy, Kaplan’s most dreaded political outcome, will prevail everywhere. 

Kaplan tells us that even all of the destabilizers taken together do not determine our future. Hinge people may redirect the course of history into stabilizing channels. I believe he knows in his heart that it is too late. Summing up his take on the world situation as a whole, I have to think Kaplan’s message is: we’re fucked! 

Here are some references pertaining to claims I’ve made above. If I have reviewed these in the blog, I will link to my review. The source link is always in there.

On the world’s fresh water problem.

On the plastic problem.

On the economics of disaster mitigation.

On the unraveling of the world order: From Peter Zeihan, and another from Kaplan

The climate problem

Review: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee, 2017

Link: the book

When women are financially independent and have access to reasonably priced (or free) childcare and other supportive services, their romantic relationships, and by extension the sex in those relationships, are given out of desire and not out of the need to return value to the partner (usually a man) for the sake of being supported. Even in capitalist economies, the rich woman can, of course, afford this. But the majority of the middle class, and all of the lower class, cannot.

Dr. Ghodsee’s argument is not deterministic, but a matter of intense psychological and economic pressure. There are those among every class who manage to marry for genuine love, and even in cases where the women are utterly dependent on the man economically, she is never made to feel that way. She is cherished and respected by her partner for her nominally free work as a mother and home builder. But such relationships are rare under capitalism, given the natural inclination of men to use their economic power to extort sex from their partners. 

But in many (not all) of the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, women of the working classes—almost everybody—were freed from dependency thanks to their own salaries, free medical care, liberal maternity leave, and ubiquitous state-sponsored daycare. Freed from their economic dependency, women engaged romantically more out of genuine love for a partner and not merely for his provider potential. This is the sum and substance of Dr. Ghodsee’s book. It isn’t that Capitalism forecloses loving marriages and mutually satisfying sex, but it sets conditions that make them less likely. 

Women in every society are often forced to compromise for the sake of their ability to have and raise children. Most women want children, and become conscious of a ticking biological clock when they hit their mid to late twenties. It may be that they have to trade away decent sex for the sake of a partner who wants children and will contribute—they hope—to raising them. The biological clock remains no matter the economic system. But under Socialism, that is, when the state actively supports women and children, the economic rationale for female subjugation is removed, and the biological clock becomes the only matter about which women might have to compromise.

In her last chapter, Dr. Ghodsee suggests that politically franchised women tend to vote liberal to promote government services like day care, school lunches, generous maternity leave, and stipends for their housework, giving them some economic independence. Women, she claims, mostly vote in line with their true self-interests. I’m not sure that is true, at least in the United States. Ghodsee exhorts women to vote in their interest. Half do, but what about the other half? Why do so many women vote against what would seem to be obvious interests?

Because what is evident for women overall is not obvious for specific women—those who find themselves in economically dependent relationships and not only accept, but choose them for a variety of possible reasons. Dr. Ghodsee might say that these women are less likely to have good sex, and she may be right, but women are not as pointedly driven [as men] by sexual desire in their life decisions. There are many individual circumstances, among both rich and poor communities, where economic dependence in exchange for a bit of nookey can seem like a pretty good deal. Those women vote Republican!


There is ironic humor in Dr. Ghodsee’s book. Female political, social, and economic emancipation is a desideratum for its own sake, something Dr. Ghodsee knows very well. That a woman might have more orgasms as a consequence of her elevation in dignity is a happy side-effect. Dr. Ghodsee cites the impact of many female-empowering socialist programs on the sex lives of those who grew up with them. But none of the programs she cites were explicitly designed to foster more female orgasms. I, for one, am glad Dr. Ghodsee called our attention to this consequence. Five stars! A good read!

Review: Two books on geopolitical potentials by Robert D. Kaplan

I review two books by Robert Kaplan. They are closely related, one being a partial update of the other.

Link to books:

The Revenge of Geography (2012)

The Loom of Time (2023)

The Revenge of Geography (2012) is the first and larger of the two. It examines the interplay between geography, climate, history, and the worldwide influence of technology. Kaplan addresses every inhabited continent, spending most of his time in the “world island” (the eastern hemisphere) but not neglecting the Americas. In The Loom of Time (2023), he updates the earlier book with particular focus on the territory he considers most pivotal for both world history and the present, the swath of the world island we, today, call the Middle East, roughly across the temperate latitudes from the Balkans, Egypt, and the Horn of Africa in the west to Pakistan in the east.

Kaplan is both wise and experienced, having traveled to numerous nations on six continents over a journalistic and consulting career spanning more than fifty years. People thought well of him. In the later book, ministers and ex (retired) ministers, philosophers, and writers both remember and talk to him; the “thick descriptions” he gives of many varied cultures attest to it. 

Kaplan makes similar points in both books. Geography (and climate) don’t determine history, but they do channel it in observable and patternable ways. Democracy, as the west understands it (and it seems increasingly less so in 2025) is not feasible for historical and cultural reasons in much of the world’s geopolitically pivotal areas. Autocracies run along a continuum from relatively benign to horrific, but except in the worst cases—and sometimes even then—the order they bring to whatever territory they govern is always better for the health and welfare of the people living there than is anarchy. 

Concerning the Americas, he points out that Mexico (and, by extension, Central America) holds more labor potential for the United States than any other region in the world, not only through immigration, but also through acculturation (the Southwest third of the U.S. is effectively Hispanic and bilingual), industrialization, and trade. A proper Mexican foreign and economic policy would invigorate both countries. That book was published in 2012. In 2025, that obviously isn’t happening. Kaplan underestimates the political force of the xenophobic river running through the middle of American culture.

Both of these books make me cry. Such a wise man saying so many wise things well expressed, but no one who matters listens!  To understand the foundations of geopolitics, start with geography. There is much food for thought in either of these books for those who want to understand what could be geopolitically speaking, and put into perspective the insanity of what is

Review: Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek 2025

Žižek is my favorite socio-cultural-political critic! This short book does not disappoint (Amazon link).

Žižek gave a speech at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2023. The significance of books was a theme, but so was the war between Ukraine and Russia and the slaughter in Palestine—topics he says he was asked to address by the fair’s organizers.

The ‘zero point’ is some nadir in the economic, cultural, political, or social sphere from which no tinkering with the situation through conventional mechanisms will fix things in the sense of making everybody (or at least most) better off. Only the destruction and rebuilding of what exists can help, a process, he admits, that is usually “violent and bloody.” Žižek comes from the political left. In my humble opinion, he is correct in that, besides the sexual divide (male and female), the class divide (capitalist one percent vs. everyone else) is still the world’s most significant economic and political fault line, but the modern left has abandoned it. I am personally somewhere down in the ninety-nine percent and have watched “progressive identity politics” eviscerate the Democratic Party in the United States.  

The book begins with a half dozen short essays addressing the global situation in broad strokes. The upshot of all this is that we—that is, Western society—lie to ourselves. The international situation is growing worse rapidly now. We cannot “fix” climate change. Wars and economic exploitation around the world (Žižek here covers not only Palestine and Ukraine but also Sudan, Yemen, and the Eastern Congo) have gone beyond the capacity of any power to resolve. Things got this bad because the powers themselves benefited economically from the conflict.

The book’s second half is a series of essays responding to various criticisms of his Frankfurt speech (reproduced in the book’s appendix). Žižek is, of course, attacked from both the left and the right. As he says (taken from Hegel), this is a sign that he is on the right track. 

I’m not going to comment on Žižek’s take on Palestine. He goes out of his way to nuance what he says. I believe he is right about the entire situation going back to before Israel’s founding and now accelerated to a substantial degree by its political turn to the right. Both sides are to blame (and this goes back a long way). Neither side wants peace other than with the annihilation of the other side. That makes the present situation a zero point.

As for Ukraine, Žižek lays the entire blame on Russia, and he is undoubtedly correct as concerns the utterly unprovoked—in a military sense—present war. But Žižek does miss something concerning Ukraine. He fails to account for a Russian strategic military problem. If my reader will permit me I will use a few sentences to explain.

Between Napoleon and Hitler, Russia was invaded three times—always through Ukraine. Russia does not need Ukraine to be a formal part of a union. Still, like Belarus, Russia does need a Ukraine that is not politically and economically in a formal alliance with Western Europe. 

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton promised Russia (Yeltsin) that NATO would not move east—not incorporate countries of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania), Russia’s second-layer buffer beyond Ukraine and Belarus. Yet a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this is precisely what happened (the Baltic nations—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—hard up against the Russian border, are now also NATO nations).

Some might object that, with or without Ukraine, Europe has no intention of invading Russia. That is true now, but what about fifty years from now? From a strategic military viewpoint, a country with Russia’s geographic vulnerability (shorn of an eastward-oriented Ukraine) cannot ignore this calculation. That is the threat Ukraine’s decisive turn towards the West poses for Russia. Does this excuse Russia’s present invasion? No, but Žižek does miss this point.

Žižek must feel like he’s been banging his head against a wall for decades. I’m not a big fan of his psychiatric (Lacanian) and metaphysical turns of phrase—the ‘Other,’ the ‘Real,’ ‘surplus pleasure,’ and so on. Such things might belong to relations between individuals, but they are, at best, metaphors when applied to geopolitics. Metaphor or not, they are in Žižek’s blood. In this little book, Žižek’s grasp of the world’s desperate plight reflects—it seems to me—a personal resignation. In his earlier books, he exhibits hope that things can get better. I sense little hope here.

Review: The Gutenberg Parentheses

Amazon link: The Gutenberg Parentheses by Jeff Jarvis, 2023

This book is a history of mechanical printing from the original Gutenberg invention in 1450 through all the various forms of printing and the institutions to which it gave rise — mass market books, newspapers, pamphlets (political, religious, and otherwise), business forms, not to mention more—if not entirely—standardized written languages, and so on. All of this took time. We became fully emersed in the parentheses when print entirely supplanted scribes—by around 1550—the first institution to be wiped out by the new technology. 

In Mr. Jarvis’ opinion, we are now leaving Gutenberg behind. The parentheses are closing. Why? What has changed? Two things. First, what characterized the Gutenberg era was that word impressions were transferred to paper using ink in one way or another. Second, while there came to be many printers, not everybody could become a printer, and eventually, most (never all) printing became consolidated behind large corporate entities that ultimately controlled content.  Even where electronics became part of the process (sending photos and text stories by telephone, telegraph, and so on), at the end of the line, again, ink met paper. Mr. Jarvis claims that with the invention of the Web (1992-4), we entered a new era in which communication, text or otherwise, is no longer conveyed by ink on paper. Also, everyone (those with Internet connections) can be a producer in the new era. The mass conveyance of authorial output is no longer dependent on controlling institutions like publishers. 

The author believes and advances the argument that the internet age is already eroding what went before (newspapers are being wiped out, for example) while new, emerging institutions—NextDooor?—are beginning to replace it. The reason for replacement is not the same. Printing was much faster than scribes. Except for the loss of some artistic merit to transcribing by hand, Print’s efficiency was what mattered. In the Internet age, newspapers are being wiped out not because the Internet is more efficient but because advertising—which did not exist until 150 years after Gutenberg—has moved over to the Internet, depriving the papers of the income needed to print.

Jarvis believes we are roughly where Guttenberg was thirty years after his invention. He fails to account for technology’s accelerated timelines. We are more like 100 or even 150 years on compared to Gutenberg. That still leaves a long way to go. The institutions that printing spawned did not fully emerge until some 400 years after Gutenberg. New institutions will undoubtedly emerge from the Internet. Some have already been tried and found wanting. The hypertext novel doesn’t work because it is too distracting. The Internet suffers from a problem inverse to the limitations of print: trading limited access to publishing technology for such easy access that the sheer number of voices drowns any one of them out.

Surely, Jarvis is right that there is still more change to come, and we cannot anticipate its details. Printing wiped out the scribe. The Internet will not wipe out the printing business, though it will (and has already) skewed its economics. Ebooks on backlit devices tire the eye faster than paper and ink. Kindles are exceptions, but they also require electricity. Jarvis thinks (implicitly) that electricity will be around forever. Pages printed on cotton rag paper can be read for hundreds (and more) of years. Even quality (wood-based) “acid paper” (not newsprint) will last one hundred years or more. If electricity disappears with modern civilization’s climatological, ecological, and economic unraveling, the Internet and everything written upon it will disappear. More than half of what has been written on the net since 1994 is already gone forever. Technology will not be of much help. Bits can be “permanently” stored on tape or other technologies for ten or even a hundred years. There will soon be “glass storage” technologies that will hold terabytes of data for thousands of years on something about the size of a credit card. Still, access will require electricity (not to mention other advanced technology). Contrastingly, printing the old mechanical way (a la Gutenberg) requires no electricity and only fifteenth-century technology.

Jarvis’ book is a well-written history of printing, often reminding us that books were and are only a part—relatively small—of printing’s products. He is also undoubtedly right that the net will engender new institutions even if it doesn’t entirely eclipse the old, as Gutenberg’s invention did the scribes. Alas, that evolution depends on sustaining our present, highly technological (and for many reasons unsustainable) civilization long enough to serve that gestation.

Review: The Glamor of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark

Amazon link to The Glamor of Grammar

I write this little review for the sake of my #writer friends on X (formerly Twitter) and because it was a nice book pointing to many helpful writing notions. There are a lot of chapters, but they are all brief. The author’s aim seems to be a general overview of the writing forest, beginning with its soil and nutrients (letters and words), progressing to its more significant structures, tree types, and forest ecology (sentences, paragraphs, dialog, metaphor, and theme). How do you like my forest metaphor?

Clark literally begins with the letters A, B, C, etc. In particular, how some letters have come to function in English. He moves to words: simple words, more complex words, some history, and some observations of their impact, hard, soft, ambivalent, etc. He admonishes writers to watch their spelling. From words, we move to punctuation and sentences. Punctuation books are mostly dull, but not this one. Clark taught me nuances in using commas versus semi-colons or M-dash versus parentheses, which I hadn’t considered before. It turns out that setting off an independent clause is not the only possibility for the lowly semi-colon!

Sentences and paragraphs are the center of the business. Many forms serve particular purposes… Chains of short words are dramatic and hurried. Longer words strung together suggest slower moods. He addresses consistent usage of active and passive voice, present and past tense, uses and abuses of alliteration, and a little about authorial point of view. I like his attitude. Rules are general principles of good usage, but when you show that you know them, you can break them when there is a literary purpose for the exception.

Finally, moving from the soil to the treetops, he looks at the forest from the sky and comments on thematic consistency, metaphor, and the application of all that has gone before to a thread that ties the writing together. 

There are a lot of chapters, but as noted above, they are all short, two or three pages. All of Clark’s many subjects are presented on a high level. There are interesting acorns—using my forest metaphor to tie my theme together—everywhere. Whether a writer or an inveterate reader, this little book has insights to be found.

Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways: 

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do. 

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working. 

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms! 

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point. 

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!

Review: Nature’s Mutiny by Philipp Blom

Pure history, 1570 through 1680, mostly of Europe, though Blom touches on the rest of the world from time to time. Why Europe? Because the records are the most extensive. Why those dates? Because they are the coldest (with some exceptional outliers before and after) period of the “Little Ice Age,” and it is that period, and the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that occurred during that century, largely compelled by the cold, that this book is about.

Earth scientists call the five centuries between 1300 to 1800 C.E. the “Little Ice Age.” At the beginning of this period, the Earth began to cool, reaching its lowest temperature, 2C below the 1300 average around 1570, and remaining there until 1680 or so when it began slowly to warm back to pre-1300 levels reaching them in the mid-1850s—Note that this is fifty years after the beginning of the industrial revolution. There have been other coolings in the not-to-distant past. The Earth’s northern hemisphere became unusually cold from 535 to around 545 C.E., but this shorter (10-year) cooling can be traced directly to large Icelandic volcanic eruptions. No one quite knows what factors contributed to the much longer cool period beginning in 1300. 

So what happened? Well, for one thing, the weather changed. More storms, more droughts, much colder summers. Crops could not grow properly in foreshortened growing seasons; fruits would not ripen. In short, people starved. The result, over the first two generations of the coldest period, was a revolution in economics, trade, and agriculture that saw small subsistence farming converted into much larger, more efficient farming that provided for storage of excess product in good years (there were some) and trade in the bad ones. Such changes proceeded at different rates in different parts of Europe. Some of this difference was driven by political and religious ideology (Spain and Italy were more conservative than England or Scandinavia) and partly by climate. Spain was colder than usual but not as cold as Denmark.

There was also a revolution in thinking supported by the availability of books, thanks to Guttenberg. The foundations of “The Enlightenment” were laid in this period. Blom spends much of the book describing the thinking and the thinkers of this period and, in particular, their new-found ability to move around the continent, relocating to places where their thinking was better appreciated. This was the beginning of modern science and political philosophy. Blom asserts that all of these changes were more or less directly (economics and politics) or indirectly (philosophy, nascent science) tied to the cold. 

Ending the book, Blom asks what the Little Ice Age can teach us about our present issues with climate change. Alas, there isn’t much it can teach us except that we should prepare for a long bout with geophysical changes (and their effects like reduction in food production, pandemics, and wars) that will surely cause a complete rearrangement of global civilization, including the likely (Blom doesn’t say this but read between the lines) collapse of the present world order. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was right in the middle of the cold.

Alas, our situation is very different, something Blom mentions but does not elaborate. In the Little Ice Age, sea levels dropped a bit, something easier to deal with than our present situation. Moreover, our present situation is a result of our activity. There were not enough humans on Earth to have greatly impacted the global climate. Lastly, in the past, the climate changed and then changed back. It isn’t going to change back this time. Even should humans, or at least their industrial activity, be extinguished, and the population shrinks to where it was in 1600 or earlier, the climate will not “change back” for possibly thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. See my review of The Uninhabitable Earth.

Book Review: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, 2019 on Amazon

This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.

Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else. 

But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.

But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!

The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.

What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind. 

What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.