This book is an exposé written by two senior journalists at the long-form news entity Forbidden Stories in Paris, France. Thanks to some serious hacking talent, this outfit was apprised—in about 2021—of a list of fifty thousand telephone numbers from all over the world. The list contained telephone numbers and dates of attempted cyber intrusion attacks for purposes of surveillance.
The outfit that created the software and other parts of the architecture to do this work was an Israeli company called NSO, the initials of the three founders. The software was Pegasus. NSO sold their software to governments who were supposed to use it to help apprehend criminals and terrorists—we’ve all heard that before, right—but besides those uses, most of these governments (almost all autocratic), including Israel, used it to monitor political opposition figures, journalists, and others who just happened not to favor the regime in power. The Moroccan government, for example, was keeping a close eye on virtually the entire French executive, including the president.
Surveillance software had been around before Pegasus, but most of it focused on computers. NSO was the first (roughly 2012) to recognize that everything important was shifting to the smartphone. Like other hacks, surveillance by Pegasus would begin with a user clicking on a link that then downloads software, triggering the rest of the infection chain. This process should be familiar to anyone today. However, NSO added another twist in 2017, known as “zero-click intrusion.” That meant the phone only had to be on to be invaded. The user doesn’t need to click on anything.
Once onboard the phone, Pegasus could acquire “root authority” and essentially operate every app on the phone. After offloading the phone’s logs, images, emails, texts, and recordings onto client servers, Pegasus deleted itself to avoid detection. Once zero-click intrusion became available, the Pegasus user could re-access the phone and download its latest data at any time they wished.
Users would not know of the intrusion. The software could also deliver other malware, such as ransomware attacks, or monitor conversations in real-time, among other things. For example, your government might want to imprison you, but you haven’t committed any crime. They could use Pegasus to put some child porn on your phone in a folder they create. They arrest you, confiscate your phone, and voila, discover the criminal evidence.
The book gives few details, but it says enough to understand that zero-click attacks are not trivial. Some app on your phone (we all have dozens) must have an exploitable weakness. It was the job of the NSO programmers to find these exploits and update their customer software when phone manufacturers found and closed any particular loophole.
The target apps with the greatest potential for attack are those that receive data from the telephone network and then perform an action without requiring user intervention. Every app that notifies you of something (such as texts, emails, or alerts of all kinds, including weather applications) can be an infection vector, but they are not alone. How many apps do we run that do not need access to your microphone, camera, or contact list, yet they default—on installation—to having such access.
To make a successful attack, the attacker must have your phone number. What kind of phone you have (every OS has different vulnerabilities) also makes a difference, but Pegasus could look for all of them. Client updates to Pegasus likely contained an extensive library of the various hacks needed for any given vulnerable app on every kind of phone. If, starting with your phone number, one attack fails, Pegasus tries again. Eventually, it finds an app on that target’s phone that lets it in.
All of this revelation about the capabilities of Pegasus are scattered throughout the story which focuses on the the people who figured out how to detect prior infection (Pegasus deletes itself when finished culling your data, but as it happens, it leaves a few illegitimate process names in the phone’s logs), the process of proving prior infections on hundreds of phones in the original list of fifty thousand (mostly journalists and a few political opponents of various regimes), the journalists themselves (a multi-continental collaboration that miraculously maintained its secrecy until their stories were simultaneously released), and the NSO company.
So what happened when all of this got out? As one might easily predict, very little. The NSO company was destroyed, but the talent that created the technology merely scattered to other places—some paid obscene salaries—and duplicated the tech for their new employers. There are now numerous Pegasus clones worldwide.
Supposedly, the Israeli government did not permit Pegasus sales to Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran (they allowed sales to Saudi Arabia). However, China has undoubtedly had this ability (developed in China [see NOTE]) for years now (see We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter, 2019), and there is no reason to believe that, in 2025, the other three do not also possess it. In the U.S., the NSA surely has this ability. They are building (or is it operational?) the world’s largest data center for a reason after all.
NOTE: Unique among nations of the world, China, and likely also North Korea, have no need for zero-click technology based on vulnerabilities. The Chinese and North Korean States have the power to mandate that all phones sold in their respective countries come with a built-in, non-removable app that allows the government to access the phone at any time.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.
Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.
Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.
Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.
My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!
The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”
The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.
Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.
***
Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.
LoveMe Inc. is Matthew Rapaport’s fourth novel, a new story in a new place, with new characters, including the narrator (also Matthew), who is but thirty-eight years old. Ah to be young again… And yet, despite it’s narrative separation from the person of the author, Matthew manages to contrive some marketing for himself and his particular skills.
The story begins ambiguously in the summer/fall of 2027. Matthew, a programmer and statistical analyst, is contacted by a libido-endowed artificial intelligence (AI) and leads him into the employ of Dr. Pamela Parker (who researches psycho-sexual pathologies in women) and her post-grad student Lakshmi Tripathi. When the book opens, Matthew has already seduced and fucked six of Dr. Parker’s patients—I’m drifting into spoiler country here! No sex is portrayed in this part of the narrative, but his “bad boy” behavior comes back to bite him (and not in the good way).
Together the three of them, along with the AI, discover that certain women can be politically liberalized by orgasms. Between them, and soon more characters come into play, plots are hatched to help sway the national election of 2028, which the Republicans—having, as we know, won in 2024 by disinformation-appeal to an undereducated electorate—plan to fix so that electoral politics in America is ended once and for all.
There are multiple twists in this plot. AI is at the center of most of them. To tell you anything would commit major spoilers. Here is a minor one: how does Matthew Rapaport market himself? The full answer has two parts, but I’m only going to reveal one. His three novels (Foreign Agent, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, and Cult of Aten) are the last three novels in the training corpus of the libidinous AI! Of the second, I will only say that it is one of the novel’s tragedies.
Mr. Rapaport is surely honing his craft. This is the most complex of his novels thus far, and except for a limited amount of gratuitous sex—90% of all the sex being softcore—the action all connects up sensibly. Moreover, there are no hanging threads needing resolution in epilogs. Mr. Rapaport ends this one properly!
Liberalism combined with modern democratic government is the only socio-political philosophy that builds and maintains a happy society in the long run. The basic idea is that the locus of cultural and political choice lies with the individual, not the group. Fukuyama makes clear that this freedom of the individual cannot become license. There must be some commonly accepted behavioral boundaries, roughly captured by the notion that I am free to swing my fist until it makes contact with your nose.
Fukuyama uses most of the book to explore alternatives to liberalism: Communism, Fascism, neo-liberalism, pointing at Libertarianism, and identity politics. One by one, he shows how these alternatives (combined with human nature) always lead to political and economic unfairness greater than that of democratic liberalism, democracy–the vote–adding the dimension of political choice.
He then explores criticisms of “true liberalism” itself, for example, its insistence on tolerance of widely diverging cultural norms and possible violation of religious or nationalistic prescriptions or proscriptions. These might help establish cultural norms of behavior but may just as easily discourage tolerance of differences. Without something to be shared—Fukuyama cites nationalism as one, albeit dangerous, possibility—the polity is ultimately pulled in so many directions that policy gridlock ensues.
Of course, all of this is theoretical. The U.S. is no longer entirely “democratic,” and what aspired to be reasonably liberal in the post-WWII generation is now divided, socially, culturally, politically, and even economically, into blocks that see competition between themselves and others as a zero-sum game.
Neither liberalism nor democracy can persist in the face of an insufficiently educated public. If the education system permits a generation to forget the horrors perpetrated by attempts at systems other than liberal democracies, the next generation—dissatisfied with the difficult choices liberalism forces on the individual—will think to attempt them again. Even worse, an education system that leaves basic facts (scientific and historical) in doubt breaks apart the last atoms of common ground the polity possesses.
I have said elsewhere that a fully tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance at the risk of its tolerance being politically undercut. The U.S.’s tolerance of intolerance had led us down the populist path thanks to education’s failure noted above. Fukuyama’s apology for classical liberalism is right on the mark as far as I am concerned, but then, I’m an educated individualist who gets along with his fellow man! Too many now fail at one test or the other.
In the not-to-distant past, we were, perhaps, a bit closer to the educated-liberal polity ideal. Of course, we were never entirely there—the “good old days” were never wholly good. Distortions have always existed—selfish individuals who would leverage the non-liberal to their own political or economic advantage, further distorting the system—and under those conditions, when society tolerates outright intolerance of others for political, racial, or sexual reasons and historical education fails, the liberal order is quickly eroded. We are living the process now.
This is a book about a socio-economic bubble. Like economic bubbles, when they pop, political, financial, and social chaos can ensue. Unlike economic bubbles, which always seem to grow larger than common sense should allow but from which nations usually recover, this bubble often, though not always, results in the collapse of the country or civilization involved. I have briefly covered Turchin’s theory in my Amazon review (attached below).
There are ten “planetary boundaries” which, if crossed—and we have crossed six or seven—will certainly doom our present industrial civilization and possibly human life. Briefly, the ten are:
Ocean acidification — Even now impacting our food chain.
Ocean and freshwater deoxygenation — Occurring at an alarming rate planet-wide.
Atmospheric aerosol loading — particles (smoke from forest fires, anyone?) pumped into the atmosphere. Many sources.
Biochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus) — from farming and other sources. One cause of deoxygenation in bodies of water.
Stratospheric ozone depletion — we beat this one. Now it’s back.
Biosphere integrity – biodiversity loss – collapse of the food chain — already underway.
Fresh water resource stress and loss — Whole nations—India, for example—are running out of water.
Deforestation and other land-use problems contribute to the collapse of the biosphere.
Novel entities – Land and water pollution — heavy metals, plastics, non-biological wastes.
Climate change — the big kahuna! Impinges on all of the above.
What do these ten items have to do with Dr. Turchin’s socio-economic theory? Among other things, Dr. Turchin tells us that external factors like hostile nations, wars, and stresses like the ten listed above—all having economic implications—act to make collapse triggered by the socio-economic cycle he describes more likely.
According to Dr. Turchin, the United States came close to a collapse into populist autocracy following the Depression of 1929 thanks to the same dynamics—stagnant wages leading to the immiseration of the working class, a gigantic wealth gap, and the overproduction of elites. Franklin Roosevelt’s election and policies—taxing the rich and using the money to build real public assets—pulled us back from the brink. Ironically, World War II gave his policies an unexpected lift, and the good they did helped the nation coast through mostly good economic times for over thirty years following the war.
But things began to turn downwards again in the mid-1970s. Working-class wages stagnated, and taxes on the rich were reduced to the extent that overproduction of the elite class and an enormous wealth gap were inevitable. In Roosevelt’s time, the American Congress was not as fully captured by the monied elites as it is today, and perhaps even more significantly, planetary physical systems had not crossed any of the ten planetary boundaries listed above.
In the 1910s, there was, in fact, an interconnected, globalized world, albeit with a lower bandwidth than in our present. An Englishman in Bristol could pick up a telephone and order cigars from India with a reasonable expectation of delivery—though not in two days. World War I put an end to that early version of globalization. Since World War II, it has reassembled itself, this time at a far more frenetic and energy-intensive pace.
There was a crisis of asset prices in the 2007-10 financial meltdown that might have ended us. In the U.S., Obama’s policies ended it, but not like Roosevelt! Roosevelt took money from the rich and built tangible assets—dams, electric grids, highways, etc. Obama didn’t touch the rich, but re-inflated asset prices (mostly homes and the stock market) on internationally borrowed money. See “Ages of American Capitalism” by Johnathan Levy for more. Rather than correcting the excesses, Obama increased them by making room, in Turchin’s terms, for more elite overproduction.
The Trump presidency made matters worse by increasing U.S. debt to over one hundred percent of our gross national product for the first time. The COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the Biden administration to do more borrowing, was—and still is—another stress bearing on Truchin’s thesis. Today, the U.S. is embroiled in two wars (Ukraine and the Middle East), a quasi-war with China, and trying to deal with ever-ballooning bills for weather-related disaster relief. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the election of Donald Trump in 2024 could be the spark that brings to its end four hundred years of “Western civilization” since the Enlightenment. If I read Turchin and the world situation correctly (have I ever? We shall see), and as I’ve said for years now, this time civilization, such as it is, and sooner rather than later, doomed.
A well-written, high-level analysis of why societies—throughout history—cycle between growth and strength and then weakness and [potential] collapse. Often, the heights and depths to which these cyclic ends go are determined by factors like climate, geopolitical environment, institutional resilience, and the character of individual leaders. But the cycles themselves are the result of an impersonal and shifting movement of wealth within any given society, and this seems to be true of every culture the author could study going back to ancient Rome, China, Europe, and the U.S., from roughly 1600 to today is the focus.
Turchin calls his method Cliodynamics (‘clio’ ancient Greek for history). It involves the collection and cataloging of vast troves of historical data and systematic analysis of that collection using models tuned by taking the data of social growth and decay (for example, from 1500 through 1850) and then running the models through to the present to see how well they predict what we already know to have happened.
Three short appendices describe the process in non-mathematical terms. The bulk of the book, its first half, reviews the results of the cliodynamic investigation for our present time. The short of it is that we—the U.S. (Turchin’s main focus) and much of the world—are at a cliff’s edge, and the cliff is unstable and about to crumble, hence the book’s title.
There is the immiseration of the larger—laboring or unemployed—population. This means that wages are falling in real terms from decade to decade. Salaries do not cover the cost of living, often with two working adults in the household. At the other end of the economic pyramid are the economic elite, in today’s terms, the billionaires. Because they control so much of the total capital, they can dictate the economics of the laboring class. Government labor policy is heavily influenced, even outrightly purchased, by their money. To the extent that it controls coercive power, the government itself is a facet of the elite. In between the immiserated and the elite is an educated (in the technical sense) technocratic class and a group (call them the entrepreneurs), even better educated, who aspire to become elites.
Instability arises because there is room economically for only so many elites. Eventually, so much wealth concentrates in elite hands that the immiserated starve, depriving the elites of even low-cost labor. This isn’t good for anyone, so more frequently, some of the elite aspirants become counter-elites. They become the opposition, populists, and revolutionaries. They have the organizational and political skills to utilize starving labor as muscle in the business of overthrowing the system and establishing themselves as the new elite class.
Every culture and every time will vary in detail. How the revolution fares depends on the coordination of the masses, the unity of the elites in response to the challenge, and factors external to all. In the 1920s- 30s (U.S.), the then government was strong enough to force the elites to reduce their numbers (via taxes) and pay to alleviate the impoverishment of the laboring class. From the 1940s through the 1970s, wages grew in real terms. There were fewer of the truly impoverished. A large middle class arose.
So what happened? The middle class invested in the education of its children, resulting in an explosion of elite aspirants! At first, there was room at the top. There was money to be wrung out of the labor pool. Eventually, labor was immiserated again, and the elite ranks became overcrowded. New counter-elites arise, and the cycle begins again.
This is the oscillation Turchin describes. His version is more nuanced and sprinkled with historical examples that mark the various cyclic turnings. I hope I am not being unfair to Turchin. I’ve read and reviewed six or eight books on the theme of why nations fail, or why a particular nation failed, or the present day’s economic predicament, or the roots of Trumpist populism in America, and so on. End Times is consistent with all of them and gives the reader a bird’s eye view of a larger process rooted in economics and human psychology—humans are greedy. They want what is best for their families and class (though, to be sure, sometimes they do not understand what that comes out to in the short term). That leads to an inherently unstable competitive dynamic because the point at which the elite class becomes numerically saturated and the point at which that fact is recognized can be a generation apart.
As I noted above, the details and time frame vary considerably from place to place and age to age. Much depends on factors in both the internal and external environment of the society under study. Turchin gets into all of this, the what, how, and why of the process. An excellent read for anyone interested in the cycles of history and power politics.
Ruminations 