Orson Welles reputedly said to filmmaker Henry Jaglom that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitation.” Whether Wells actually said this is up for debate, but nevertheless the statement rings true. John Carpenter, like Stanley Kubrick and Welles himself, epitomizes this maxim as a filmmaker, especially with Christine. He removes so much of the unnecessary fluff of King’s novel to get to the heart of the story, which is that an unhealthy obsession can kill us all. No object of desire, whether it be inanimate or human, makes us whole. Only our own inner life and the meaningful connections we make with others completes our humanity. Arnie represents the perennially broken soul in post-war America, placating his own limitations through an object of adoration. However, in the end, the adored object obliterates him. The world is not full of spiritual phantoms, but human ones— the refuse of unfulfilled dreams. We don’t need ghosts to make the world scary; it’s haunting enough as it is.
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Hope in the Machine: Towards a Humanistic Technology
Today we face a choice, one that Fromm anticipated all those years ago. “We are at the crossroads:,” he wrote, “one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine—if not to destruction by thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope—to a society that puts technique in the service of man's well-being.” I believe that the path of humanism and hope outlined by Fromm is our chance to rebuild the world for human beings, rather than machines. It only takes us imagining a better world and then advocating for it.
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Short Book Reviews: Politics and the American Empire
The United States is an empire, despite its democratic pretensions, and it is up to an informed citizenry to counteract that nefarious trajectory and reassert the values of the republic. The books discussed below provide us with the tools to do just that.
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From left to right: Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Images from the Boston Globe, Smithsonian Institution, Reuters, and Unsplash.
Short Book Reviews: Rick Perlstein’s History of the American Right
Perlstein weaves together varying strands of historical knowledge, such as economics, foreign policy, cultural trends, and even religious transformations. And as a man of the liberal left, Perlstein pulls no punches with the political order that emerged in the era of his study. Goldwater was a political neophyte; Nixon a calculating bully; and finally Reagan, whose outsized presence in history stands as the culmination of the corporate class’s victory over social democracy in America.
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Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev
Short Book Reviews: Science and Society
While many of my book reviews have been longer essays published on my blog or episodes of my podcast, Red Reviews, I also write shorter book reviews for social media. These appear mostly on Instagram, as it is the social media platform I primarily use and it has a longer character limit for captions than, say, Threads or Twitter. Instagram’s 2,200 character limit for captions requires you to be concise and clear, and I enjoy the challenge to keep my posts within that character limit. It’s actually a lot of fun to write a quick review that is informative as well as indicative of my opinion. This blog post will be the first in a series of blog posts where I will share a few reviews that are connected by a common theme, along with photographs of the books as they appeared on Instagram.
This first set of reviews are tied together under the theme of “science and society,” which highlights books that employ science and/or philosophy to expound on social issues. From Bertrand Russell’s argument for a four-hour workday to Christopher Lasch’s conception of a “minimal self,” each of these books provide provocative insights into the human condition.
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In Praise of Idleness for the 21st Century
In all, we need a vision for the praising of idleness for the 21st century— embracing Bertrand Russell’s dedication to less work and more play for all while adapting it to the unique challenges we face today. We must go against the grain of the mindset of overwork and develop a healthy balance between labor and leisure, one that places work in the proper perspective: as a means for us to achieve all the things we want to do and not as the end that we constantly judge ourselves by. One of the only silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it gave us more time to be home with our loved ones, to finally read that book we’ve been wanting to read for forever, or to bake the perfect loaf of sourdough bread. It was a moment for us to radically reevaluate the basic conditions of our overworked, underpaid, and wildly burnt out society. People realized, many for the first time, that there was a world beyond work.
As such, they started to reconsider the basic work arrangements in this country, which have not changed in a major way in nearly 100 years. It is high time we reevaluate this setup and move towards a leisure-oriented society; it will not just help those like me who work in an office, but it will help gig workers and part-time folks to improve their wages and benefits. A better balance between work and leisure won’t only make for better employees, but it will make for better citizens. With workers having more free time and less economic precarity, they will be able to fully participate in our representative democracy. They can devote energies towards improving our societies— from education and healthcare to election workers and candidate canvassers. They can build the social movements and political programs necessary to improve our world. The fight for less work is not merely a slight change in our daily arrangements; it's a revolution that will radically alter our lives and our country for the better.
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Getting at the Root: Revisiting Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great
It is important to remember that polemicists like Hitchens are here to galvanize as much as enlighten; his book is a call to arms as much as it is a lecture. He’s challenging the religious status quo, which for most of human history has not been pretty, and in that task, we should applaud him. While many believers are bothered by his strident critique of religion, they should nevertheless heed his warnings about the deleterious effects of fundamentalism, especially in public life. Hitchens had far less respect for religion than I do, but his commitment to human rights and the defense of an open, free society are something to celebrate. Despite his acerbic, tactless appearance on the surface, Hitchens can be read in the best light as a humanist, dedicated to the Enlightenment project of democracy, liberty, and tolerance. At his worst, Hitchens can be read as a cultural imperialist and elitist whose sniveling disdain for religion displays actual intolerance. Like with most people, I think Hitchens is somewhere in the middle, bolstered by his better angels and hampered by his inner demons. Regardless of your feelings on Hitchens, he’s one of the most profoundly engaging, entertaining, and enlightening public intellectuals of the last half century, and god is not Great might be his most enduring work.
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The Humanism of Star Trek: What We Can Learn from the Final Frontier
In all, I hope you’ve learned a little bit about the philosophy of Humanism and that these episodes from Star Trek have given you much food for thought. For today, humanity is at a crossroads. We can either give into our hatreds and destroy our future, or strive to be our better selves and seek the stars. I, for one, am an optimist, guided by a resolute commitment to the dignity of humanity and our capacity for good. That optimism, that sense of wonder at our collective future, that steadfast belief in our progress— these are values that I gained from Star Trek, and broadly, from humanism. Every day, in how we live our lives, we should cherish diversity, argue for equality, and strive towards making a better world. We will stumble along the way, making mistakes and experiencing setbacks, but as long as we learn from them and grow in our wisdom, we will ultimately lead lives that are full of love, learning, and longing. As Gene Roddenberry said, “It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will not reach our ultimate goal. The effort itself yields its own reward.”
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Rejecting Dogma, Embracing Freedom: Mike Rinder’s Journey Out of Scientology
Cults can take so many things from a person— their money, their dignity, their ability to think critically— but the most powerful thing a cult can take is someone’s freedom. If you can take someone’s freedom, you can take anything else. Rinder learned this firsthand being involved in scientology, a cult that destroys families, degrades its staff, and swindles its members, and has dedicated his life to exposing scientology’s pernicious effect on the world. In rejecting the dogma of scientology, Mike Rinder embraced freedom, the most precious thing one can ever have.
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My grandmother, Martha Clark, in 1953. Background image by VecMes.
The Imperative of Love: What I Learned From My Grandmother
Faith is the binding force of love, for it encourages us to take a leap for someone and embrace their connection. Without faith in ourselves and others, we are lost in a morass of ambiguities that stifle our capacity to live full, loving lives. Faith also implies choice; in a sense, we are who we choose to love. In her choice to love me, my Grandmother changed my life, and in who I choose to love, I hope I can return the favor.
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“Steadfast Even in Persecution”: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Legacy of Thomas Paine
American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre carried the torch of freethought and radicalism exemplified by revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, an iconoclasm infused with deep moral righteousness and an unrepentant sense of individualism. She defined her struggle for a stateless society in many of the same terms that Paine defined the fight for American independence, emphasizing political liberty, individual rights, equality, and mutual cooperation. She also stressed the importance of his character in her work. de Cleyre wrote of Paine that “he stood firm, proclaiming what he believed, not counting the cost. We may not believe as he; most of us do not. But that is the man we love: who has something in him superior to the judgments of men; who holds steadfast—steadfast even in persecution, even to death.” Likewise, we may not always agree with the convictions of Voltairine de Cleyre, but her own steadfastness echoed the legacy of America’s most underappreciated, and perennially misunderstood, founding father.
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The Culture of Survival: Christopher Lasch’s “Minimal Self”
Christopher Lasch’s The Minimal Self is an important, if overlooked, work in the canon of his thought; it articulated more directly his concerns and offered a clearer alternative than his more celebrated work. His crusade to stem the tide of narcissism and politics as cultural affect is something to be celebrated, for he anticipated so much of what came to pass. Our age is also one of crisis and survival, and if we seek to get beyond its confines, Lasch’s ideas represent part of the blueprint to change our collective future.
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Society and Solitude in the Age of COVID
We are living through history, and those of us who survive this crisis will talk about it for decades. It is one of the defining characteristics of our era. With so much going wrong in this world, it is easy to get cynical, to throw up your hands and give up. But that’s not the lesson I wanted to impart today. Each of us has been shaped by this crisis, and the test of our will is in finding out how we respond to it. As such, Emerson’s insights provide us with one voice in a chorus of wisdom that will guide us forward.
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Daniel Dennett’s "Breaking the Spell": 15 Years On
Fifteen years later, do the criticisms of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell hold up? Are Dennett’s concepts of religion off base, or has new scholarship vindicated him? In this re-review of sorts, I will address the main critiques discussed above and evaluate whether they, or the book itself, stand the test of time. We’ll review whether Dennett’s call to “break the spell” is so revolutionary, if religions are “memes,” if people believe in religion because they believe that belief is itself a virtue, what Dennett calls “belief in belief,” and what we should do with religion in the modern age. In the final estimation, we’ll find that each of these conclusions is deeply flawed and the reviewers were right to call out Dennett for his mistakes. In closing, I’ll also challenge the oft-heard notion that Dennett is the “nice” one of the group. While he’s certainly the more level-headed of the bunch when comparing his book to say, The God Delusion or The End of Faith, Dennett still displays all the usual hallmarks of mainstream atheism in our culture: smugness, arrogance, condescension, and intolerance. In short, Breaking the Spell isn’t a bad book, but it isn’t much of a good book, either.
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“Militant Materialism”: V. I. Lenin, Socialism, and Religion
In his writings, Lenin defended traditional secularist values, such as the separation of church and state, liberty of conscience, and free religious association, while also calling for the political separation of religion from political parties and strategically advocating for the atheist/materialist worldview. While it would be too much to say that Lenin was a “humanist” in the general sense of the term, he was nevertheless a secularist whose insights on religion provide left humanists with clear, tactical advice on the interrelationship between faith and politics in the public sphere.
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Michael Brooks: Against the Web
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (2020, zer0 Books) gives us Michael Brooks’ uncompromising, hilarious, and brilliant analysis of the Intellectual Dark Web from a left perspective. He lays out for the reader all the problematic, insidious, and frightening aspects of the IDW and how we as leftists and socialists should respond to them. He ends the book with an optimistic message of humanism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism invigorated with class-conscious politics and a willingness to call to task the regressive tendencies of this new, but in some sense very old, configuration of the right.
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“The Eternal Yea to Life”: The Radical Humanism of Emma Goldman
During her many years of activism, anarchist intellectual Emma Goldman wrote for a variety of publications, including Mother Earth, a magazine she founded in 1906. Her writing championed free speech and expression, free love and open relationships, anarchism, the rights of labor, education, birth control, and criticisms of religion. This essay will explore Goldman’s ideas about atheism and how they fit into her larger ideological framework. As her writings will show, three core themes permeate Goldman’s work: strong advocacy for individual freedom, rejection of Christianity, and the defense of atheism. In all, Emma Goldman’s radical atheism was rooted in her love of humanity, and while the term didn’t exist then, that made her a deeply committed humanist.
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THE FREE WILL DEBATE: MARTIN GARDNER AND THE MYSTERIANS
In considering the philosophical problem of free will, one particular viewpoint keeps tapping the back of my mind, like a reliable friend who is there to remind you of your lapses. What if we’re approaching the free will discussion incorrectly altogether? What if the problem of free will can’t be solved, or at least not yet? What if we don’t have the requisite knowledge to definitively answer the free will problem?
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The Anti-Elitist Intellectualism of Isaac Asimov
The prolific science fiction author Isaac Asimov, best known for books such as I, Robot and the Foundation series, devoted his life to the causes of science, knowledge, and education. He valued the importance of intellect for a healthy democracy, lamenting the United States’ tendency towards anti-intellectualism. Yet, he also criticized the arrogance, foolishness, and elitism of some of the most intellectually-gifted in our society, particularly in his involvement with Mensa, the social organization of high-IQ individuals. His experiences with the group, good and especially bad, fostered his growing distaste for IQ tests, intellectual gamesmanship, and reactionary politics. In this essay, we’ll be exploring these themes and how their interaction cultivated Asimov’s unique position of anti-elitist intellectualism.
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Anxiety, Kierkegaard, and Me: Living and Thriving with Nervousness
Anxiety is a concept that is nearly universally experienced but almost universally misunderstood. It is not plain nervousness, like when you stop abruptly at a stop light or surprisingly run into an ex-partner or an in-law. For me and many others, it is a constant, pervasive dread that permeates our very existence. A couple of years ago I realized that my anxiety was beginning to affect nearly every aspect of my life, from work and relationships to even my ability to sleep at night. It was here that I began my own investigations into anxiety, reading and studying as much as I could on the subject. From learning about Buddhism to Psychoanalysis and everything in between, I really didn’t crack the “anxiety code” until I discovered a nineteenth century philosopher who wrote a pioneering book on the subject in 1844.
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