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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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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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 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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