Reading Our Way Forward

Once I reached retirement age I started logging books I read. I started this partly because I’d often forget a title or author, and this would allow me a quick way to retrieve the lost info. I’ve always been fascinated by the kind of determined work that serious scholars do to track their intellectual teachers via references, footnotes or acknowledgements in their books.

So, I suppose it’s no small wonder that I’ve been thinking more and more about people who hold strong opinions, but who rarely endeavor to read a full-length book that dives deep into a subject. I believe this is particularly problematic of elected officials who are so busy chasing campaign dollars and trying to be relatively aware of the multitude of subjects they are asked to vote on that they don’t have time to read and reflect on a 200, 400, or god forbid, a 600 page analysis of any pertinent subject.

While I can’t describe with any certainty why I think exactly like I do about foreign policy or militarism, I do know those views have been shaped and formed in no small part from the following reads in recent years. I had the opportunity recently to moderate a discussion (all of 20 minutes of his time) with one of our U.S.Senators to address just two central issues of concern. That equals 5 minutes for citizens to state their concerns and solutions and 5 minutes for his response per issue. How does one condense tens of thousands of pages of scholarship into that? How does one even begin to address the complexities, the historical, social, cultural, environmental and political aspects in 5 minutes?

It should be no surprise that transforming opinions of legislators that are conditioned by the system they are part of, to follow the dominant cultural myth, especially of their party and their funders (who also have more lobbying access), is a Sisyphean task. Yet the inertia that drives the system, along with the powerful moneyed elite, must be challenged, alternatives offered. It takes persistence, often over decades if not lifetimes. My experience today with a Senator I have spoken with before, confirmed my suspicion that while politely listening, he really isn’t open to reconsidering his positions. I wonder, could his orientation be moved by sitting with any of these books that have absorb my attention over many hours of reading. (an average reader takes two minutes per page, thus a 400 page tome would consume 13-14 hours).  

The list that follows includes books I have read that have in some way affected how I understand our world and the forces that drive it, especially as relates to global issues, foreign policy and militarism. I have left off the fiction and some other titles. The list is in reverse chronological order in which I read them. It does not include fiction I’ve read, save one title so designated, nor does it include articles, reports, or books I only started but never finished.

With so many books having been written, I’m quite certain this particular list is as unique as any readers of this blog own list would be. But shaped me it has. The list here only covers 2019 – 2022. My longer list goes back to 2014. I was tempted to try and rank them in some notion of importance but that felt like splitting hairs. I’m glad I read each one. As I look over this list again here,  there is one title I had forgotten about, but which I remember being moved enough to blog about it, Mark Fleubaey, et. Al., – A Manifesto for Social Progress  that might be a place to start. You likely will not find it in any bookstore. Maybe there is something in the list that will call to some of you.

                                2022

Sara Kreps – Taxing Wars (not finished yet)

Thomas Weiss – Would the World Be Better Without the UN?

David Fitzgerald – Militarization and the American Century

James Gustave Speth – They Knew

Toby Ord – The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

Kelly Denton-Borhaug – And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War Culture

John Dryzek – Politics of the Anthropocene

Paul Nelson – Global Development and Human Rights (not finished)

Thomas Geoghegan – The History of Democracy Has Yet to be Written

Peter Newell – Global Green Politics

George Orwell – Collected Essays (mostly)

                                2021

Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses

Tim Jackson – Post Growth: Life After Capitalism

Anand Giridharandas – Winners Take All

Richad Falk – Public Intellectual

Robert Divine – Sustainable Economy

Steven Klees – Conscience of a Progressive

Andrew Bacevich – After the Apocalypse

Kai Bird – The Outlier

Mary Beth Rogers – Barbara Jordan: American Hero

George McGovern – What it Means to be a Democrat

Ned Dobos – Ethics, Security, and the War Machine

Kate Aronoff – Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet

Roman Krznaric – Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short Term World

George McGovern – A Time for War a Time for Peace

Kim Stanley Robinson – Ministry of the Future (fiction)

Thomas Knock – Rise of the Prairie Statesman: Life and Times of George McGovern

Michael Mann – New Climate Warns

Kathleen Dean Moore – Great Tide Rising

Michael Klare – All Hell Breaking Loose: Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change

Michael Brenes – For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy

Henry Wallace – The Price of Vision: Diaries 1942-46

Daniel Kemmis – Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy (mostly)

 

                                2020

Rebecca Solnit – Recollections of My Disappearance

Stan Cox – Green New Deal

Rutger Bregman – Humankind

Rutger Bregman – Utopia for Realists

Joseph Stiglitz – People, Power and Progress

Eric Alterman – Lying in State

Jeffrey Sachs – A New Foreign Policy

Timothy Snyder – On Tyranny

Andrew Bacecvich – Age of Illusions

Gar Alperovitz – The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

David Orr – Democracy Unchained

Christian Felber – Trading for Good

Michael Nagler – Third Harmony

Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens

Brian Caplan – Open Border

Terry Tempest Williams - Erosion

 

                                2019

Lloyd Dumas – Building the Good Society

Stephen Lesserwich – Living Well at Other’s Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity

Michael Schwalbe – Making a Difference: Using Sociology to Create a Better World

Giorgos Kallis – Degrowth

Emrys Westacott – Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less is More… More or Less

Erik Olin Wright – How to Be and Anti-Capitalist

Chris Armstrong – Why Global Justice Matters

Thomas Hanna – Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership

Russell Muirhead & Nancy Rosenbaum – A Lot of People Are Saying: Conspiracies and the Assault on Democracy

Lloyd Dumas – A Peacekeeping Economy

Gordon Adams – Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy

Sulak Sivaraksa – Wisdom of Sustainability: Buddhist Economics for the 21^st Century

Colin Tudge - Six Steps Back to the Land

Mark Fleubaey – A Manifesto for Social Progress

John Leary – One Shot

 

I am at a loss to share how these and other ideas that have permeated my thick brain might offer as solutions to the challenges we face near and far. Yet, I feel strongly that in the merging of these ideas there are real possibilities that could be created. Clearly, I’ve read only an eyedrop of the ocean’s work published (even of just the English language titles). A different reading list may well have nudged me toward a different destination. Even the order that I read these selected items might have slightly shifted how I now think about things.

At the bottom of all this is a quest I think I share with these authors to truly understand what is a way to make a better world for all on a single finite planet, and to pass that possibility on to those that may follow when we are gone. I can’t be sure that what I think makes sense to me today, will ultimately be judged by history to have been accurate or wise. But it is where I am as we face so many challenges as a human species on this particular spinning sphere. There is something that resides in an author’s willingness to dig down and read and reflect and then write their truth to share that is admirable. Reading has been a gift. I wish our elected officials would delve deeper

 

No Time for Silence

 

The President’s newly announced budget this week ramps up an already bloated military budget. This is the popular and easy thing to do in a war-based culture. While the Russians brutally invade Ukraine, the drumbeats to beat ploughshares into swords intensifies in a war culture. To propose a more peaceable approach is to invite calls of emasculation, for the war culture is male dominant; just ask the myriad women in the military abused by their comrades. In a war culture, the heroes are the ones that destroy the enemy, even if the enemy they destroy is generally like them--young men asked to ”defend” their nation.

One doesn’t need to experience war firsthand to understand its horror. Certainly the impacts on those directly involved, whether soldier or civilian, are of another level entirely. Even the dubious winners of war leave with untold moral injuries that disrupt their lives forever and, for many, cause them to abruptly end it. In a war culture the fixation is on more weapons, more power, more soldiers that we are told will surely bring peace. History tells a different story, should we be willing to escape the glorification of war in film, parades, football halftime shows, recruitment videos and other realms of war culture and examine the data, as Erica Chenowith has.

Many in the peace community have counseled that contesting the growth in military spending during the atrocious Russian war against Ukraine is counterproductive.  If former general, and then President, Eisenhower could state the following during the Korean War (1953)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Why, then, should peace-seeking believers in nonviolence shrink from calling for peace and military spending reductions? We expect ridicule from the pragmatists, realists and war profiteers that we are just so naïve. So be it. It is time to put the brakes on the war machine that is robbing our future in an unending theft of the resources needed to build a just and peaceful world for our children and grandchildren as Eisenhower warned.

Martin Luther King Jr. noted during the height of the Vietnam War, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Fittingly, this speech at the Riverside Church in New York City a year to the day before his death was subtitled “A Time to Break Silence.”

Let us stand with those brave members of Congress unafraid of being called “naïve” or worse – Bernie Sanders, Pramilya Jayapal, Barbara Lee and others--to break our own silence.  

For a better overview of the military spending debacle, read the Quincy Institute’s analysis of the new budget request by William Hartung  here. Or a broader look at the complexity through the eyes of energy expert Richard Heinberg today.

What Are the Chances?

 

What are the chances, that someone else on the planet is simultaneously reading David Gessner’s Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreauin the Age of Crisis and Kelly Denton-Borhaug’s And Then Your Soul  Is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-Culture? Slim to none I would wager.

The why is unclear, but the how was a trip, pre-heart-attack a couple of weeks ago, past the new book shelf. Gessner’s book had acclimations by others I admire – Scott Russell Sanders and Allison Hawthorn Deming. So let’s try it I thought. Denton-Borhaug’s tome’s title is what stirred my interest, perhaps enhanced by recollection of a book similarly found and read last year by Aussie philosopher Ned Dobos on Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of War. The recent invasion of Ukraine and its expansive media coverage (unlike Yemen war) has us hopefully thinking about the folly and ravages of war in a clearer light. 

 

I’d actually be surprised if more than a few hundred people worldwide are currently reading EITHER of these books. Why me? Why am I not sodden with compelling interest in the NCAA basketball tournaments, or upcoming Academy Awards, or even …? I admit to often feeling like a freak, misplaced in time and space, perhaps from another planet or dimension. What is the magnetic force that pulls me towards these authors, these books, these ideas? And they are each compelling.

 

 

Reading Gessner is simply delightful. One of those books I don’t want to end (300 pages read), 75 pages left as of this morning. It’s as if you are sitting with a friend on his front porch sharing a beer or two and talking about the world you share. No pretentions, just honest frank conversation and thinking out loud together. He weaves his rereading of Thoreau with living through the current pandemic and his own journey with nature, writing and living in our times. I suspected Ellen would relish his writing as well, and sure enough, she picks it up when I set it down. He’s become a voice we both want to hear more of.

 

Denton-Borhaug’s work is a deep dive that I’ve only skimmed the surface of thus far. You’d have to want to submerge yourself not only in questions of ethics, but also of psychology, sociology, and ultimately political issues. She is not a newcomer to wrestling with these issues. And she probes deep into not just the individual impacts but, perhaps most importantly, into the social and cultural violence that nurtures the violence and war obsessions of our culture. She doesn’t pull these thoughts out of thin air. With some 500 references that support the 225 pages of text she has poured herself into the subject. Assuming I complete this in the next few weeks, the real question is what will I do with it. I suspect, it may  nudge me to remain, if not re-energize my efforts, however seemingly futile, to abolish war. To turn away from the questions she raises seems a dereliction of duty.

Two more titles got added to the pile yesterday as once again I skimmed the new books at the MSU Library. Toby Ord’s The Precipe: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity and Lily Baum Pollans’ Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities. Too soon to try and discern much from them. Although, I had seen a positive reference to Ord’s book in something recently read. Interesting that the 250 pages of text have 130 pages of notes, which should make for a literal ‘page-turner’. Pollan's title wrestles with my deep involvement in waste reduction. Hoping I learn something useful from both.