Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right / Arlie Russell Hochschild -- London: The New Press, 2016

It is common for political commentators to lament the political divide that has become a chasm in our country.  In 2004, the divide was the subject of Barak Obama's breakthrough speech at the Democratic National Nominating Convention, but since then the divide has only become worse.  Among liberals, the main question the divide poses is, "why are so many people in the working class voting against their economic interests?"  This question was made popular by Thomas Frank's 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas?  Frank's explanation was that clever deception by establishment Republicans -- supported by right wing media -- has duped many working class people into betraying their economic interests, and all they get in exchange are empty promises to enact a socially conservative agenda.  Other authors have picked up on this theme.  Upon closer examination, though, this explanation appears too shallow and demeaning to account for the long-standing allegiance to the Republican Party among many working class voters.  Indeed, the explanation seemed too facile to UC-Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, especially as she spent five years in southwest Louisiana getting to know citizens on the other side of the divide.  Her book Strangers in Their Own Land is Hochschild's report on her "journey to the heart of our political divide."  It is an admirable contribution to the attempt to communicate across that divide.

Hochschild's contact with conservatives in and around the town of Lake Charles, Louisiana was facilitated by the liberal mother-in-law of one of her former graduate students.  Hochschild's Louisiana contact was able to introduce her to what was to Hochschild a warm and welcoming community of conservatives with whom she became friendly in the course of numerous formal and informal interviews.  These interviews were conducted over the course of five years.  Hochschild's project might be considered a classic anthropological study in which the anthropologist embeds herself in an alien community in an attempt to understand that community from the inside -- that is, from the perspective of the community members.  This requires a concerted effort to discard as much as possible the previous, external perspective and social assumptions the anthropologist brings to the study.  Hochschild describes this as overcoming "the empathy wall."  In doing so, Hochschild claims to have understood the "deep story" of conservatives living in and around Lake Charles.

By "deep story," she means a perspective that is not necessarily based on simple facts of the world, but on the what seems true emotionally.  Some deep story or another, in this sense, predicates everyone's sense of and explanation of the world.  One's deep story will predispose one to either be credulous or skeptical of the many dubious claims we routinely encounter.  The deep story is critical in constructing our system of beliefs.  By discovering the deep story of the conservatives in Lake Charles, Hochschild believes she is better able to understand the motives the people on the other side of the political divide.  By doing so, she was able to open up avenues of communication heretofore closed to her.  It is clear that her work encourages us not only to appreciate her own effort, but to follow in her footsteps -- to seek a more charitable understanding of those with whom we disagree.  We'll look at the deep story that lies behind the conservative worldview a little later.

To begin to understand the perspective of conservatives, Hochschild investigates what she calls a "keyhole issue:" environmental destruction.  Hochschild seeks to understand why people who have been severely harmed by pollution from Louisiana's the petrochemical industry would be so hostile to government regulation.  She calls this "the great paradox."  Curiously, the solution to the great paradox is one that environmentalists understand all too well.  Hochschilds interviewees recognize the damage done to their communities by industry.  The first portion of her book recounts the horrific effects she heard described.  In one instance, the 700 acres of Bayou d'Inde became so saturated with contaminants from illegal dumping by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company that the property value of the residents crashed and their livelihood from fishing was destroyed.  In another, a subterranean salt dome was punctured by the drill from a mining company, Texas Brine, causing a 37 acre sink hole to form which devoured the entirety of Bayou Corne, home to 350 residents.

While this is not part of the region of Louisiana known as "cancer alley," Hochschild heard story after story of cancer deaths.  Everyone in the area knew or was related to someone who had developed cancer.  In one instance a man recounts eleven people in his family and close neighbors (including himself and his wife) who died from or were fighting cancer.  Hochschild recounts so many tribulations faced by the residents of Lake Charles and its environs that it is bewildering to read of the general hostility to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality; but their hostility is not without some foundation.  These residents see government regulatory bodies failing to protect their land and health.

Indeed, the primary role of these regulatory bodies has been to permit the destruction of people's lives and communities in the interest of the petrochemical industry.  Among environmentalists this is said to be a consequence of "regulatory capture" by industry.  Due to the revolving door between industry and agency executives, regulations designed to protect people and the environment are merely one consideration balanced against business and economic interests.  The role of the regulator is to determine the extent to which exemptions can be made to "balance" these interests.  The agencies are reduced to exemption-granting bureaucracies.  Hochschild reports that "according to [Louisiana's] own website, 89,787 permits to deposit waste or do anything that affected the environment were submitted between 1967 and July 2015.  Of these, only sixty -- or .07 percent -- were denied."  In light of this, it is understandable that the residents would see the regulatory agencies as aiding and abetting their suffering.  (For an excellent examination of how regulatory agencies function and their failure to protect the environment, see Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age by Mary Christina Wood -- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)

This plays directly into the hostility to taxes that is prominent among working class conservatives.  Far from providing value for the cost, government merely appropriates the workers' limited income for useless bureaucracies or for welfare programs that they believe go mostly to people other than themselves, including unproductive government bureaucrats.  Many of Hochschild's interviewees acknowledge that they or their family and neighbors take advantage of some of these programs, but they do so with some embarrassment and with the attitude that as long as its available and necessary, they might as well take advantage of it.  In many cases, they claimed to be willing to forego the assistance, if the entire program were abolished and attendant tax burden were removed.

The deep story behind these and other attitudes that Hochschild believes she has discovered was confirmed by her interviewees.  They imagine themselves in a long line in a open field.  The line is moving slowly toward a distant hill.  Over the hill is the American Dream.  They are patiently waiting their turn, when after a while, people who had been behind them, begin cutting in line in front of them.  They are expected to allow this because of the disadvantages these line-cutters (or their ancestors) experienced.  Of course, they see themselves as responsible and hard working, and that the line-cutters are getting something for nothing.  In this analogy, they are white and Christian, while the line cutters are members of minority groups: black, Latino, immigrants, Muslims, women, and government bureaucrats, often no more disadvantaged than they are.  To add insult to injustice, many in the line in front of them turn around to hurl unkind epithets at them: racist, homophobic, ignorant, cracker, redneck, hick, white trash, etc. and criticize them for a lack of empathy.  Recently, the President of the United States is actively facilitating the line cutting.  He himself is a line cutter.

Given this deep story and the tribulations faced by a clearly marginalized population, it is easy to understand why working class conservatives feel "anger and mourning" over their fallen status and why they might choose different means to rectify their loss than the means chosen by historically marginalized groups.  It is also understandable why they might resent a media that ridicules them, a liberal elite that ignores them in preference to people they see as their competition, and even a Republican establishment that works in tandem with the corporations in a system of crony capitalism.  Their condition, while possibly slightly better than minorities and recent immigrants, is not markedly different when compared to the owners and managers of our society who are clearly beyond their reach.  Consequently, their dignity requires an even playing field, not vis-a-vis the corporate and government elite, but vis-a-vis their ordinary fellow citizens.

While Hochschild does not mention meritocracy, her observations support the idea that working class conservatives ardently support the values implicit in a meritocracy.  They do not want what they have not earned and they find it morally objectionable that anyone would be required to sacrifice (in taxes) their hard earned money for the benefit of others.  Charity must be voluntary or it is little better than theft.  This also provides the basis for excusing the excesses of the most well-off and defending them against high tax rates.  For the conservative working class, work and business is the essence of social life, and those who have become successful deserve admiration and respect, not envy and disdain.  Government intrusion in the market merely interferes with the working of a meritocracy.   It is just another obstacle in their path to someday joining the wealthy class.  One need not have a highly developed defense of laissez faire capitalism to recognize the relative value of hard work and frugality in markets dominated by small business and service sector employment.  In much of the country, particularly in rural areas, this is business environment.  Large corporations, even with their downsides, can be believed to be beneficial engines in an otherwise stagnant economy.  In the words of one of Hochschild's interviewees, "pollution is the price we pay for capitalism."

Perhaps the most admirable features of Strangers in Their Own Land are the effort to overcome the "empathy wall" and the goal of seeing those on the other side not as simple cardboard cut outs described in political polemics, but as real people living difficult lives with a genuine sense of dignity and morality.  In many ways, this morality is different from people on the other side of the wall, but in other ways it is similar.  Indeed, this was the message that Barak Obama attempted to communicate in his 2004 speech before the Democratic National Nominating Convention.

Furthermore, Hochschild is able to distinguish species of thought within the people she interviewed.  In Part 3, Hochschild describes "the team player," "the worshiper," and "the cowboy."  One can see these personalities in wider political discourse.  The team player is a loyal member of the Republican establishment, well-acquainted with the ideology of conservative politics, particularly deregulation and reduced taxation.  The team player places trust in the party and its allied institutions in its contest against the Democrats and their allied institutions.  The worshiper places his or her faith in God and the Church above any other social or political institution and is in common cause with the conservative (read Republican) movement insofar as he or she believes God, the Church, and Christian morality is under attack from a secular (read Democratic) society which has largely dominated government and our main cultural institutions.  Finally, the cowboy is the classic rugged individual, willing to resist social forces larger than himself or herself in defense of his or her dignity.  Team players might be just as familiar to many as Democratic Party team players, differing only in that they are motivated by a different ideology, while worshipers and cowboys cut an honorable figure, if one accepts the values that they accept.  But clearly, liberals must scale the empathy wall before allowing themselves to adopt this point of view.  Hochschild's work should help liberals understand that conservatives must not be treated as a monolith, but that they are as various as any political grouping and as people, they have legitimate interests and are deserving of basic respect.

This, however, introduces one of two criticisms that I have of the work.  Hochschild consciously sought to study "the geographic heart of the right."  For her, this turned out to be Louisiana which cast only 14% of its votes for Obama in 2012, has 50% of its residents supporting the Tea Party, and is second only to South Carolina in Tea Party state and federal legislators.  Furthermore, she studied only people in a particularly, environmentally hard hit parish, Calcasieu Parish.  While this admittedly would provide her a clear picture of people on the other side of the political divide, it is also a rather rare -- perhaps unique -- corner of the other side.  Hochschild wondered if her subjects were "odd-balls," not representative of conservatives in other locales, but she was reassured to find that the same relationship between environmental damage and politic ideology held across the country.  In an appendix she writes, "The Louisiana story is an extreme example of the politics-and-environment paradox seen across the nation."  But this is precisely what should concern her.  An extreme example is by definition an odd-ball.  Working class conservatives, Tea Party supporters, and Trump supporters live in communities all across the country, each with their own local history:  Peoria, Illinois; Manchester, New Hampshire; Grand Junction, Colorado; even Seattle, Washington and New York City.  So her exploration of "the heart of the right" may not tell us as much about the right as she suggests.

My second criticism of her work is its relative neglect of the elephant in the room: race relations.  The deep story that was being told to her studiously avoided discussions of race.  When it did arise, her interviewees reported not being racist.  After all, they rejected David Duke, did not use "the N-word," and did not hate black people; however, the deep story of a lot of other southerners would include a long history of slavery at the hands of white people, followed by apartheid, Jim Crow, and now the incarceration state.   Granted, Hochschild was acting in the fine tradition of anthropology in attempting to understand her subjects from their own perspective, but the family legacies of racism, particularly in the South, and the barely disguised (and sometimes undisguised) racial animosity among Tea Party members, the Alt-right, and Donald Trump's campaign seems to demand that the question of race be seriously dissected.  Hochschild's subjects may not consider themselves racist and they may not be racist on their own understanding of the concept, but they also might be simply disingenuous or in denial about their own subconscious motivations.  It seems that Hochschild was simply too polite to really explore this hot topic, possibly because she might lose access to her subjects.

Nonetheless, Strangers in Their Own Land is a remarkably valuable look into a world that academic authors seldom approach dispassionately, much less with sympathy.  A dispassionate approach is necessary to understand and address the political divide that has paralyzed nearly every attempt to address important social, political, and economic problems.  Additionally, a sympathetic approach is necessary in order to demonstrate respect for a population that objectively speaking has suffered grievous harm from our social, political, and economic order.  Hopefully, Hochschild's work will initiate a new phase of social and political analysis that will bridge the chasm that separates us and bring us greater understanding, peace, harmony, and justice.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions / Edwin A. Abbott -- N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1992

First published in 1884, Abbott's Flatland is a whimsical story about a square (or Mr. A. Square) living in a two dimensional world who is visited by a sphere from a three dimensional world.  Eventually, Mr. A. Square is transported by the sphere into the three dimensional world so that he might understand the limitations of his own experience.  Flatland is at once a lesson in geometry and an allegory on two levels.  The geometry lesson is quite simple.  Abbott provides the reader with a reasonably plausible account of how a two dimensional world might appear to a two dimensional being.  At one point he also provides us with an account of how a one dimensional world might appear to a one dimensional being.  However, it is the allegories that are the most interesting aspects of the book.  One the most obvious level, Mr. A. Square's world is rife with the social and political hierarchies of the late 19th century.  Class is represented by the number of sides the resident polygons have.  Near circles are the highest, nearly priestly class, while on the other end of the hierarchy, women are nearly simple straight lines.  On a less obvious level, the allegory is about how we are limited by the metaphysical contours of our world and our faculties of mind.

Abbott does not explicitly write of this, but his work clearly suggests that our ordinary manner of thinking about the world as being laid out in four dimensions might be a product of our faculties of mind.  Indeed, theories in contemporary physics suggest that we in fact live in a world best described by numerous more dimensions than the four we commonly accept.  For someone not acquainted with these theories, one feels like Mr. A. Square wrestling with the arguments of the sphere that assert unimaginable ideas.

Flatland is utterly charming.

Imagine: How Creativity Works / Jonah Lehrer -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer is an entertaining, though, rudimentary introduction to the psychological and sociological dimensions of creativity. It leaves one with more questions than answers. Furthermore, the answers it provides are not especially Earth shaking and the questions it raises are largely due to a superficial treatment of the topic.

The most significant shortcoming is Lehrer's failure to give a clear definition of creativity. While he occasionally writes about artistic creativity, most of the book focuses on problem solving in the high-tech industry. This is perhaps unsurprising in that Lehrer is first of all a contributing editor at Wired magazine. Not only are his central cases of creativity peculiar, Lehrer gives us no sense of the scope of problem solving. Some problems stand out for us and require significant time and energy to solve. Others are routine and mundane. For example, how to open an unfamiliar cabinet door might count as a problem to be solved, but the solution might also reveal itself after only a moment's examination. To be fair, one could distinguish degrees of creativity that map to the difficulty of the problem, but complex problems could be broken down into numerous smaller problems. Any of these problems might also be more or less obvious depending upon the background knowledge of the person solving the problem. The point here, is that the concept of problem solving is not as simple as it appears in Lehrer's book. To make problem solving the central case of creativity without exploring these complexities provides us with only a superficial insight into creativity.

The specific claims about problem solving that Lehrer does make are few and sometimes contradictory. Certainly, Lehrer is not unaware of these contradictions, but he provides us with little help in understanding how we can resolve them. For example, his first substantive claim is that creativity (in solving a problem) often comes after one has focused on a problem long enough to conclude that it is unsolvable. Then, after taking one's mind off of the problem and relaxing, one is able to see the problem from a broader perspective and possibly connect seemingly unrelated facts or concepts in manner that provides the necessary insight.

In contrast to this, Lehrer also observes that problems are often solved by sheer, dogged concentration. Instead of a relaxing walk in the woods or taking a warm shower, the problem is solved by taking enough Benzedrine to keep one's mind fixed on the problem. All that a reader can conclude from this is that problems get solved in lots of different ways. This is by no means a surprising revelation.

The more interesting portion of his work comes when he discusses the social context of problem solving. Lehrer observes that many problems are solved by "outsiders," i.e., people who are not steeped in the paradigms of the field that contains the problem. They are sometimes capable of pursuing solutions that an insider would discount as implausible from the start. He also observes that difficult problems are more likely to be solved when numerous people with different backgrounds collaborate in seeking a solution. One is reminded of the commonplace maxim, "two heads are better than one."

Again, Lehrer's observations about society and creativity are not terribly enlightening; however, the final chapter begins to make a bit more of the social elements of creativity. Lehrer points out that different times in history, social circumstances have fostered creativity. His chief example is Elizabethan England. According to Lehrer, the liberal attitude toward theatre productions and the availability of written material in 16th and 17th century England made possible a flowering of excellent dramatic productions, including the work of William Shakespeare. According to Lehrer, Shakespeare's success was in large part due to favorable social conditions, though his genius certainly made him stand out from the numerous other talented playwrights of his time.

This emphasis on the social climate for creativity does not, however, reach far enough. Lehrer overlooks (or at least understates) the role that resources play in problem solving. According to Lehrer, venture capital funding "is widely regarded as one of the best measures of innovation; money chases good ideas." While it may be true that venture capitalists constantly are seeking to invest in good ideas, a more likely relationship is that venture capital, along with a lot of unanticipated and coincidental factors make an idea successful. Without these external circumstances, good ideas are apt to come to nothing. We have no way of tracking all those extremely creative, but unlucky ideas. While so many other factors are involved in the success of an idea, one cannot use success alone as a defining characteristic of a good idea. Because Lehrer overlooks these factors, his book tends to reinforce the cult of the entrepreneur.

Among the best aspects of the Imagine is Lehrer's effort to ground his claims about creativity and problem solving on scientific research. Unfortunately, he does not always provide complete citations for these references. While one could track down some of the original research, it would be difficult to get to all of it. This forces the reader to simply accept Lehrer's judgements about the quality and representativeness of much of the research on which he draws.

All in all Imagine is an easy and often entertaining work, aimed at a popular audience, but for anyone genuinely interested in creativity, it's not a good use of time.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era / Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks -- Los Angeles: Litwin Books, 2012

In Prophets of the Fourth Estate, Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks have given us a window on the relationships among money, politics, and the press during the Progressive Era in the U.S. or perhaps their window is really a mirror for our own times. Certainly, the book is first and foremost an excellent account of criticisms of the press in the Progressive Era, but the parallels to today are unmistakable.

The first chapter is a brief history of the politics of the Progressive Era. While it is true that important reforms were won by progressive political forces, regressive forces were not without accomplishments. The Progressive Era in politics was also roughly co-terminus with the regressive Lochner Era in American legal history during which the power of corporations became firmly entrenched for decades. Furthermore, the elections of William McKinley and the rise of the big money politics of Mark Hanna permanently transformed politics. Overall, the era saw a bitter political struggle between more or less equally powerful political factions that broke apart during the four-candidate presidential election of 1912. One aspect was largely progressive, though: the prominence of muckraking journalism, especially between 1903 and 1912. Reynolds and Hicks recall the work of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Upton Sinclair, but also provides us with a more in depth account of the earlier work of Jacob Riis.

The primary focus of the work, however, is on the effect that advertising and other "controlling interests" have on newspapers, the lecture circuit, and their role in forming public opinion. The final chapter directly addresses propaganda and the rise of the public relations industry. Their analysis is based on a careful study of both secondary and primary material. Indeed, the most noteworthy feature of the book is the republication of media criticisms published during the Progressive Era. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides us with the full text of articles by Charles Edward Russell, Robert L. Duffus, Morefield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard, Donald Wilhelm, and Roscoe C. E. Brown.

The relevance of these articles to late 20th century media criticism is astonishing. One might think that the objects of the Progressive Era critics were Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Talk Radio, the major city daily newspapers and most of our popular news magazines. This is both a strength and a weakness of the work, though. Prophets of the Fourth Estate provides valuable insight into a one hundred year period of the press in the U.S. How relevant the analysis is to "new media" is questionable. The basic principles that it exposes are likely, however, to be relevant to a new, contemporary analysis.

The finest analysis of the press in the 20th century is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In it they describe a propaganda model that is a natural creation of the private ownership of media and the commodification of information. Herman and Chomsky point out that the imperatives of the market require media corporations to present information or programing (including news) that is not dysfunctional to their profitability. To do this, publishing executives must accept a moral and economic world view that will not compromise the interests of stockholders. They must hire editors who will do the same, who in turn hire reporters of a like mind. Whatever information that results from these institutions can be thoroughly critical of any organization or sector of society except those upon which the media corporation is dependent.

Advertisers are particularly important. For a media corporation to succeed, it must attract advertising dollars. Consequently, presenting programing that will be attractive to businesses with a lot of money is critical. Finally, a well-heeled audience is the bedrock of the entire system. The product of media corporations are not newspaper copy or programing, it is the audience which they sell to advertisers. A large audience is important, but more important is the amount of disposable income that the audience commands. A large but impoverished audience can be less valuable to an advertiser than a smaller but much richer audience. Every element of the system works toward skewing the media's message toward what is compatible with consumer capitalism. Prophets of the Fourth Estate makes it clear that most of this was very well understood by a number of journalists in the Progressive Era. This may be the most significant difference between the late twentieth century and the Progressive Era: decades of institutional pressure have selected for journalist who are largely unaware of their conformity to the dictates of power.

Extending the analysis into the 21st century is, however, problematic. New media have created avenues through which critical voices can speak. Just as Facebook and Twitter have facilitated communication from and among democratic movements in the Middle East, they have helped coordinate actions of the Occupy movement and exposed brutal police responses. It has become commonplace to suggest that new media is and will become a leveling technology that will democratize political discourse. This may well be true, but it remains to be seen.

Two factors suggest that new media will be less destabilizing than is thought. First, while social media permits communication from and to countless people, the channels through which they communicate are increasingly narrow. The vast majority of messages sent over the internet are carried by Verizon, AT&T, and cable companies that have little competition, and of course Google dominates internet searches. The movement to guarantee "Net neutrality" is critical to keeping these corporations from obstructing free expression, but as internet communication will always be controlled by major corporations, it is likely that corporate America will be able to legislate "exceptions" to unrestricted speech, probably in the name of national security, cybersecurity, or the "war on terror," systematically eliminating threats to corporate power.

Second, while the internet may permit the proliferation of voices and an increase in the sheer amount of information available to the public, the time that the public has to assimilate this information will not expand. "Data smog" and on line distractions are an increasingly significant obstacle to gaining a deep understanding of the political world and the role of corporations in our lives and government. Under these conditions, organizations will need significant resources to mount effective communication campaigns, be they corporate or anti-corporate, giving clear advantage to plutocratic messages.

Prophets of the Fourth Estate is an extremely valuable analysis of the press of the 20th century. Whether we can glean from the last century the principles that allowed corporations to control the press and apply them to the 21st century is an open question.

Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth about the "Real" America / Dante Chinni and James Gimpel -- N.Y.: Gotham Books, 2010

During the past ten or twelve years, political pundits often have repeated that the U.S. is "deeply divided" between "red" and "blue" states. It is, of course, an easy and dramatic shorthand that belies the real state of our society. I suspect that most of those same pundits would recognize this, but few people have offered any alternative description of the natural breaks in the body politic, except perhaps to describe congressional districts or counties as "red" or "blue." While offering a more fine grained analysis of the red-blue divide, these descriptions still fall prey to the deficiency of the basic distinction: geographic regions in the U.S. are categorized merely on the outcomes of a two-party, plurality-take-all electoral system. This system ignores nonvoters and voters who vote for losing candidates; furthermore, it lumps heterogeneous local voting coalitions into two heterogeneous national coalitions. Indeed, most often the only fact revealed by the distinction on a national scale is which party won a majority of electoral college votes.

In Our Patchwork Nation, journalist Dante Chinni and political scientist James Gimpel provide a more nuanced portrait of the country. Chinni and Gimpel analysed data for each of the 3,141 counties that make up the country and postulate that the country can be understood to be composed of twelve distinct kinds of communities, calling them boom towns, campus and careers, emptying nests, evangelical epicenters, immigration nation, industrial metropolis, military bastions, minority central, monied burbs, Morman outposts, service worker centers, and tractor country.

Some of these communities fit squarely into "red America" or "blue America," but others are up for grabs and it isn't always clear why this is. In some instances, the economic interests of the community and/or its dominant social values are directly supported by one or another party, but in other instances, the population of the community is not so homogeneous as to place it squarely in the Democratic or Republican column. For example, the hallmark of minority central is a large African American (or Native American) population; however, in most of these counties European Americans still make up a majority of the population. Moreover, any particular county can and will fit more or less well into one or more community categories, sometimes making it difficult to know what the dominant political motive is for that community on election day.

Dividing the country into twelve categories is, no doubt, an improvement over the simple red-blue distinction, but whether Chinni and Gimpel's twelve categories are a good reflection of the population is questionable. Their method for creating these categories is revealed in the book's appendix. The authors collected a large body of data describing specific "socioeconomic and religious indicators" applicable to every U.S. county. By comparing them, the authors discovered common intersections among the indicators that allowed them to reduce these indicators to an underlying structure of twelve "basic factors." These factors defined the twelve communities. Each county could then be scored for how well it embodied each of the twelve basic factors and histograms were created to show which counties scored highest in those twelve factors. Finally, the authors sorted the counties based upon which basic factor a county most embodied. Some counties scored similarly high on more than one basic factor. In those cases, the authors made judgement calls to complete the sorting.

The results of their work is not particularly surprising, if one has a general understanding of the human geography of the country. Mormons live in Utah, the Great Plains are sparsely populated and dominated by agribusiness, major cities are diverse and densely populated, there are large populations of African Americans in the South living very close to European American who are Evangelical Christians, many people retire to Florida, etc. To get a deeper understanding of these communities, one needs to expose their less dominant characteristics and understand how they qualify the dominant character. Unfortunately Our Patchwork Nation does not do this. Presumably because it is meant for a popular audience, the appendix does not give detailed descriptions of the actual data used in sorting the communities.

The validity of the twelve-fold division is said to have been tested against additional data sets, but it's hard to know how valid it really is. The mere fact that the total population of Mormon outposts is less than two million people makes one wonder if this is worthy of a category at all or if it should be folded into evangelical epicenters or divided among the other eleven communities. The answer depends on one's views about comparative religion. Emptying nests poses a different problem: are the Florida retirees sufficiently like the retirees who remain in the Upper Midwest to consider them part of the same community? It is an open question as to how the various socioeconomic and religious indicators should be weighted in determining the basic factors. If one's economic condition is weighted heavily and one's age is weighted less heavily, the retirees in Florida would make up a separate group from those in the Upper Midwest. Chinni and Gimpel give no indication as to how they choose to weight their indicators.

As vexing as these problems are, Our Patchwork Nation invites the reader to consider the variegated character of our nation and its communities. One conclusion that easily might be drawn from this is that our two-party system cannot possibly be sufficient to represent the interests of such varied communities and their numerous shadings. A more adequate political system would allow these communities (or more precisely, voters) to gather together in numerous politic parties that could express clearly the voter's primary interests and not be subsumed (and often lost) within a heterogeneous big-tent party. Our "patchwork nation," no matter how you slice it, cries out for a multi-party democracy in which our legislatures represent us proportionally. Were we to adopt such a system, many political question that are currently held hostage to our two party gridlock could be separated from the bi-polar power struggle and resolved to the satisfaction of an issue-specific majority.

Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate / George Lakoff -- White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2004

In 1996, linguist George Lakoff published Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think in which he presented his theory that American politics is driven by two models of the family: the Strict Father Model and the Nurturing Parent Model. These models serve as frames for how conservatives and liberals respectively think, not just about family life, but also politics and other spheres of life. Lakoff argues that conservatives have implicitly recognized that emphasizing the values inherent in the Strict Father Model reinforces voters' tendency to employ these values when thinking about politics. After following this strategy for four decades, conservatives have established in the electorate a way of thinking about politics that prevents voters from accepting (and sometimes even understanding) the policies advanced by liberals.

Following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, a number of liberal activists began taking Lakoff seriously, helping him travel the country to talk about "framing" issues inside a liberal value system. By 2004, Lakoff published Don't Think of an Elephant to serve as "short and informal...practical guide both for citizen activists and for anyone with a serious interest in politics." Lakeoff hoped to equip liberals with an understanding of how to change the way in which political discourse is framed and thereby create a resurgent progressive movement. His book quickly showed up on best seller lists around the country.

On the surface, the basic thesis seems interesting and perhaps reasonable. Furthermore, Lakoff's ability to connect the values he identifies in the two family models to politics and public policy issues deepens his thesis. The values residing in the two family models have strong affinity to values that can be identified in various policy positions and they seem to bring together exactly those issues that constitute the constellations of conservative and liberal views. Finally, it is quite reasonable to think that our upbringing is central to our way of thinking and that specific values about families -- learned at an early age -- will play a dominant role in our thinking. No doubt there is very much to Lakoff's thesis; however, closer examination indicates that he is likely overstating the causative role that the family model plays in determining how Americans vote.

Lakoff's thesis could be tested were we able to replace our two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Currently, our political system nearly ensures that voters will only have two choices on the ballot, particularly because which ever candidate wins a plurality usually is elected to office. Moreover, restrictive ballot access laws frequently prevent independents and third parties from appearing on the ballot at all. This makes voting for anyone but a member of one of two major parties seem fruitless. Under these circumstances, voters, motivated by very different values and ideologies, are forced to join into a heterogeneous coalition to elect the candidate they find least objectionable. If there were more candidates on the ballot and if we had proportional representation in our legislatures, then these forced coalitions would quickly break up and the real factors motivating various voters would be more apparent.

Lakoff does not test his theory with this thought experiment. Instead, he looks at the two political coalitions and constructs a theory that best connects their various ideological elements and then declares that his theory explains the driving force behind the coalitions. It is more likely that the values making up the two family models are a rhetorical intersection views -- a least common denominator that appeals to a large percentage of the disparate members of the conservative or liberal coalitions. Without the need to motivate the disparate elements of the coalitions, these values would not stand out and many of them would be disregarded, if not openly attacked, by the various partners in the coalition as they go their separate ways.

Perhaps the most significant divide within the Republican Party is, of course, between social conservatives and libertarians. The idea that their views grow out of the same set of values is almost preposterous. Within the Democratic Party, the labor elements and the environmentalist elements would hardly seem to be natural partners, except that they both oppose capitalist drive to make large profits for shareholders at the expense of all else. It is much easier to explain the motives of the elements in the two major political coalitions by appealing to more obvious interests that they do not share.

To be fair, the foregoing criticism perhaps assumes that Lakoff's thesis is more ambitious than it is. A more charitable reading of his thesis is not that the values of the two model families explain the current political coalitions, but that given the legal framework ensuring two parties, appealing to values of the model families are the most effective way of mobilizing the coalitions. Certainly Lakoff has recognized a powerful rhetorical tool used by the Republican coalition. The values described in Strict Father Model of the family clearly resonate across many segments of the political right and Lakoff explicitly is calling on liberals to employ similar countervailing tactics. The "guidebook" features of Lakoff's work show striking similarities to memos by Republican framing strategist Frank Luntz.

The material in Don't Think of an Elephant appears in a more expanded form on the Web site of Lakoff's think tank, the Rockridge Institute; however, while still maintaining the Web site, Rockridge has folded for lack of funding. This is very telling. Lakoff's argues that framing issues in a progressive way is essential to a liberal renaissance in politics and while he recognizes the advantage that rich funding sources give to conservatives, he doesn't seem to acknowledge their overwhelming importance. This, along with is failure to recognize the true motivating forces behind the conservative and liberal agendas shows that his perspective on politics is overly ideological. A more accurate analysis will explore the material and economic forces at work in American politics.

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America / Thomas Frank -- N.Y.: Henry Holt, 2004

It's been seven years since Thomas Frank published What's the Matter with Kansas?, so the media frenzy -- if you can call it that -- is over, but the basic political relations described in the book remain; indeed, they may have become more pronounced. Frank provides us with a careful examination of conservative politics in Kansas and he suggests that it reflects -- in an exaggerated way -- conservative politics throughout the U.S. Roughly stated, Frank's thesis is that the working class population of Kansas has become hopelessly distracted by hot button social issues and have been fooled into voting for politicians who are undermining their economic interests. The thesis is not without merit; however, Frank's working class Kansans may not be so unaware as he suggests.

What's the Matter with Kansas describes the peculiarities of the state's politics starting from its founding in the 1850s up through the progressive era, but only as background for a description of how it changed from the 1970s to the present. According to Frank the critical juncture was in the early 1990s, when the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) took over the national Democratic Party. The DLC abandoned any pretense of acting on behalf of the working class and openly sought support from business. At the same time, conservatives pundits began a relentless attack on liberals through print and radio broadcasts, portraying them as effete snobs who hated the working class and sought to destroy everything that is good about America. Furthermore, capitalizing on a population already disposed in favor of the pro-life movement, Operation Rescue selected Wichita as the epicenter of its protests against legal abortions. Operation Rescue mounted an extremely effective grassroots organizing campaign in Wichita and through out the state. All of this sparked a massive wave of political activity inside the Kansas Republican party, sweeping out the more moderate business class Republicans and installing a new generation of conservative Republicans in political posts from Senator on down to the lowest Republican party offices.

The political struggle, however, was not really between conservative Republicans and Democrats, but between conservative Republicans (the "Cons") and more moderate republics (the "Mods"). Frank describes at length the hostility that the Cons had toward the Mods, but is amazed by the Cons' inability to recognize that the policies that they were endorsing increased the economic strength of the Mods and were economically disastrous for the Cons. Frank's amazement is the weakest element of his analysis. While he makes occasional gestures toward explaining the Cons' disregard for their economic situation, he more often simply finds the Cons' behavior foolish and irrational. Despite growing up in Kansas, Frank seems unable to genuinely think about politics from within the world view of the Cons. This may be due to his own upbringing in a Mod suburb of Kansas City or simply to his inability to think sympathetically about with the people he is describing. He makes very little effort to consider the Cons as rational people acting on principles that he does not share.

Republican doctrine has long opposed taxes and regulation. They are seen as alien impositions on the main business of America which is, of course, business. Taxes and regulations are merely ways by which the productive elements of society are made to support and defend the politically powerful, but unproductive, elements. If one sees the main activity of life as making a living within the constraints of a system of fair rules, then such a point of view is reasonable. Surely, many if not most working class people in Kansas find making a living an all consuming activity, this is particularly true of people who are self-employed or sell their labor job to job. For them, taxes (no matter how progressive) are an obstacle to getting ahead and regulations limit the kind of economic activity that they find necessary to remain employed or in business.

In addition to this, the ideology of individualism and fair play trump any appeal that government assistance for the disadvantaged might hold. Material well-being may certainly be an important value for the conservative working class, but if earning what you acquire is a greater value, then taxation, regulation, and social programs are likely to be seen as undermining that more important value. What may be missing in this analysis is the importance of equal opportunity and in the case of Kansas working class, they may feel that the degree of inequality of opportunity is not so great as to justify liberal programs like affirmative action, housing assistance, and food stamps.

There is quite a lot in What's the Matter with Kansas that deserves careful attention, but working class Kansans deserve a more sympathetic and deeper analysis of their behavior.

Conservative Thought / Karl Mannheim in From Karl Mannheim -- London: Transaction Publishers, 1993

Political labels get thrown around as though they mean something, but when pressed, it's not particularly easy to say what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative." Add to that "neoliberal," "neoconservative," "progressive," "socialist," "libertarian, "communist," "green," "leftist," "right-winger," and any number of other labels, and defining any of them seems pointless. Still, the political landscape is not without some noticeable groupings. In 1925, the sociologist Karl Mannheim published an essay entitled, "Conservative Thought" in which he argued that political groupings of this sort can be distinguished by specific "styles of thought" (though a style of thought will not be limited to politics). Styles of thought characterize more than just the subjective thinking of individuals. At the same time, they are not entirely objective. Individuals participate in a style of thought which will survive their coming and going, but it does not exist apart from the individuals.

To illustrate this theory, he examines conservatism during the first half of the 19th century in Germany. As he believes that styles of thought are highly nuanced, it is necessary to limit his claims to a small temporal and geographic range; however, he acknowledges that some similarities exist between temporally and spatially related populations. It may be more accurate to say that similarities exist between styles of thought in population that are in significant communication with each other or descend from the same ancestal style of thought.

In general, early 19th century German conservativism was a reaction to enlightenment rationalism, the central elements of which were constructed deductively from logical principles and embraced a theory of natural law in moral and political philosophy. This theory included the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the inalienable rights of man expressed in terms of negative freedom, and the justification of the state based on a social contract emerging from the state of nature. Enlightenment rationalism extolled constitutions and contracts and was prevalent among the new capitalist bourgeoisie and to some extent the proletariat. Above all, the enlightenment saw existing social arrangements as defective -- to be rectified by bringing about more just arrangements. This required enlightenment thinkers to step away from what is actual and image abstract, non-existing states of society that would be preferable to the present.

In contrast, German conservativism was firmly rooted in the actual world and saw the present as a culmination and continuation of the past which evolved as it did for good reason. Any change would need to be gradual. Conservativism employed a number of ideas or methods that are found in Hegel: dialectical, historicist logic; property, not as an alienable commodity, but as necessarily bound to its owner; and a positive concept of freedom. Persons where essentially unequal and their liberty was vested in their estate, not in themselves as individuals. In many respects, German conservativism romanticized medieval relations and employed the writers of the romantic movement to articulate their style of thinking.

Mannheim's effort to capture the essence of a socio-political movement in its style of thought is quite valuable. It goes beyond thinking of the social group as a collection of people adhering to a set of public policy positions, and provides some understanding of why those policy positions hang together. However, any effort to distill a complex socio-political phenomenon into a crisp, coherent theory is surely going to miss much of what is really happening in the world. Anomalies and counter-examples are sure to be readily found, but insofar as they can be incorporated into the social theory, one can conclude that a consistent socio-political current has been discovered at a specific time and place. Without knowing more about the place, period, and people that Mannheim studies, it is difficult to know how accurately he has captured the essentials of 19th century German conservatives, but no doubt he is not completely off the mark, and from my perspective, quite close to the mark.

Only a little of Mannheim's picture of 19th century German conservativism has survived to to become contemporary conservativism in Germany and elsewhere. Today, ethnic, religious, educational, and linguistic diversity, along with gender and sexual orientation differences complicate any analysis based on the early 19th century style of thought. One also wonders if Mannheim's analysis sufficiently includes class interests in understanding socio-political groupings. In many respects, contemporary conservativism is a descendant of the bourgeois capitalism of the enlightenment and only opportunistically inherits some of the attachment to the past that the older form of conservativism manifested. This suggests that was really motivates the style of thought that is conservativism, is a commitment to the interests of the dominant class, just as the 19th century's conservativism was a motivated by a commitment to the fading dominant class of the 18th century.

The Politics of Climate Change / Anthony Giddens -- Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2009

The evidence is now quite clear: the global climate is changing rapidly and the consequences will be dire for vulnerable populations around the world. The younger members of our society may even live to see the complete collapse of civilization if the worst case scenarios pan out. In light of this, it is amazing that the political will to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change is so weak. According to Anthony Giddens, this is because the dangers of climate change remain a "back of the mind" issue, easily displaced by other more immediate concerns. Consequently, in The Politics of Climate Change, Giddens hopes to present a blueprint for creating "a politics of climate change" which will be capable of addressing the dangers we face.

Broadly speaking, Giddens's political programme relies on mobilizing existing social, political, and economic institutions. He is critical of the "Green movement" as exemplified by various Green Parties. Giddens complains that they have adopted an oppositional stance which will merely alienate the leaders of the institutions that need to be brought around to mitigate and adapt to climate change. This criticism makes the reasonable assumption that existing institutions will remain the governing force through the next century and will need to be brought into our efforts to address climate change.

Giddens's dismissal of the Green movement, however, gives too little weight to the view that the Green movement is the only social force that will consistently recognize the full dangers of climate change and keep the issue on the public agenda. This highlights the greatest weakness in The Politics of Climate Change: Giddens's politics of climate change are too divorced from a sociology of climate change which is the contribution that the Green movement makes to the discussion.

Giddens's work is nonetheless an important element in the discussion. Reading his work in conjunction with John Urry's Climate Change and Society and Pat Murphy's Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change provides a more holistic picture of how we might be able to address the dangers of climate change. Oppositional politics and the creation of low carbon alternative communities that model new, more benign institutions, have an important place in the politics of climate change; but Gidden's is correct that these new political and social institutions would do well not to completely alienate existing power structures. Opposition politics must still create ways that existing institutions can participate in the effort to move to a low carbon society.

Giddens's main prescription for building acceptance within existing institutions is to seek "political and economic convergence" between climate change mitigation and adaptation goals and other values held by the existing sources of political power. A prime example of this is energy independence. Giddens recognizes that it behooves the environmentalist movement to emphasize the importance of generating renewable (low carbon) domestic energy, not simple for the purpose of mitigating climate change, but to free the country from dependence of foreign oil. Institutions unconcerned about climate change can then be enlisted in the effort for reasons other than mitigating climate change.

The strongest element of Giddens's work is his treatment of economic strategies for reducing carbon emissions. Beginning with the principle that the polluter should pay for the costs of pollution, he makes a case for implementing a carbon tax. This is, according to Giddens, preferable to a cap and trade system or carbon rationing. These other methods are not without merit, but Giddens finds that cap and trade systems have not really achieved their purpose. A more rigorous system will be required to reduce emissions. Carbon rationing, while more rigorous, is, in Giddens's view, "impractical and unfeasible."

Giddens's attempt to directly address the requirements for creating a political consensus in favor of addressing climate change is most admirable and most of his observations and arguments are weighty and cogent. It is especially important that voices like his, which are firmly within the social and political establishment, be heard. He gives great legitimacy to positions and policies that otherwise would be dismissed as coming from the fringe. At the same time, his call to work with and from within existing institutions needlessly narrows the sphere of action. There will always be a tension between forces for change from within and from without existing institutions, but limiting the political programme to one or the other is not likely to yield the urgent and drastic change that is now required.

Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand / Haydn Washington and John Cook -- London: Earthscan, 2011

In recent years, a number of books have been published exposing the corporate-sponsored cottage industry that is challenging the conclusions of climate science. See, for example, James Hoggan's Climate Cover Up and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt. Haydn Washington and John Cook's Climate Change Denial is clearly within this genre. Indeed, much of its research relies on the work of these other books. It does, however, take an important step beyond the critiques of the denial industry by inquiring into the psychology of denial and by noting the extent to which our entire culture is in denial about the consequences of climate change.

The first chapter distinguishes denial from skepticism and attributes the former to those who reject the fact or significance of climate change. It attributes the latter to the scientific community which increasingly is warning us about the dangers of climate change. The second chapter provides the mandatory outline of the conclusions of climate science. Chapters three and four recount various forms of denial and the history of the denial industry. The work is fine, but the two books mentioned above provide greater detail. A great deal of space is devoted to criticizing Ian Plimer's 2009 book Heaven and Earth. Washington and Cook begin by noting that it is tempting to dismiss Plimer's book out of hand, and after a cursory examination of it, this option does not seem unreasonable; however, Washington and Cook believe the work has become too important within the denial industry to ignore. Their critique is trenchant, without becoming mired in detail.

Chapters five through seven are, however, the most important of the book, though not necessarily the most well-written. In these chapters, Washington and Cook take up the social, political, and psychological questions as to why the denial industry's public relations efforts have been so successful in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. The answers, roughly put, are that we have allowed the denial industry to get away with too many distortions and falsehoods and that we ourselves have fallen prey to a form of denial they call "implicatory denial."

The necessary response is to recognize that we are all -- to some extent -- in denial about the consequences of climate change. Washington and Cook exhort us to "Accept reality!" and begin acting to transform our lifestyles in ways that will reduce our carbon footprint. Furthermore, we need to acknowledge that our politicians will do nothing about the pending catastrophe until we force them to act. We must not be content with nice sounding policy statements and instead demand concrete actions that will reduce the world's carbon emissions. In particular, we must find a way to put a price on carbon so that there is an incentive to conserve and so that alternative energies can become more competitive.

In chapter seven, Washington and Cook discuss six alternative energy sources that don't emit significant amounts of carbon. They make valuable references to other books that discuss these alternatives in greater detail. They go on to discuss two more very controversial non-carbon alternatives: nuclear power and the technology to capture and sequester the carbon that results from coal fired power plants. Washington and Cook are critical of both, claiming that they will not quickly and significantly reduce carbon emissions. They also note the dangers that these technologies pose. In the same vein, they warn against geoengineering.

If we take Washington and Cook's advice and accept that the pending climate catastrophe requires action, we still need to be careful about assessing the extent of the danger and the consequences of our actions to address the problems of climate change. It is here that the environmentalist community must come to terms with the role of nuclear power, carbon capture and sequestration, and geoengineering projects. A number of writers concerned about climate change, particularly, James Hansen and George Monbiot, look favorably on some of these options which probably reflects their concerns about reaching a "tipping point" with regard to climate change. As such a future is not at all impossible, it seems prudent not to summarily reject options for reducing carbon emissions; however, Washington and Cook correctly recognize that the dangers these options pose are extreme. If it is prudent not to rule out extremely dangerous measures, then it is even more prudent to re-double our efforts to bring about not just a low carbon society, but a low energy society. Much can be gained by returning to lifestyles where the quality of life is not dependent upon the profligate energy consumption of the last one hundred years.

Climate Change and Society / John Urry -- Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2011

The discussion of climate change has largely been carried on among Earth scientists, economists, and political activists. John Urry, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, believes that as long as our discourse is limited to these domains, we will not be able to adequately address the threats of climate change. Instead, we must make sociology central to the discussion and we must understand the social forces and institutions behind our "high carbon lives." Climate Change and Society is his attempt to do just this.

Early on, Urry describes three major "discourses" contesting how people commonly think about climate change: skepticism, gradualism, and catastrophism. There are three main strands within the skeptical discourse: one denies that the planet is warming, one denies that human beings are significantly responsible for the warming, and one asserts that the effects of climate change will be either beneficial, benign, or mild enough that we can adapt to the changes. Over the past twenty years, the first two strands have become less prominent. As the evidence for anthropogenic climate change has mounted, it has become harder and harder to persuade anyone that we are not changing our climate.

The third strand of skepticism, however, still manages to maintain some support. Bjorn Lomborg is among its most prominent proponents. Lomborg has argued that resources invested now in economic growth will accumulate value faster than the harms of climate change will develop. Consequently, future generations will be better protected from climate change if we do nothing about it now and instead concentrate on economic growth. Urry does not bother to refute this claim. The recent uncertainty about the future of economic growth, the peaking of world oil production, and the mounting evidence that climate change will cause significant problems makes doing nothing seem irresponsible.

The gradualist view of climate change argues that a dire future lies ahead if we continue with business as usual, but it will come about in a smooth, incremental transformation. This is the view expressed in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Two facts about these reports make Urry believe they may be too conservative. First, the reports are the product of numerous scientists, many of whom are reluctant to accept anything but the most clearly established claims. Furthermore, the reports must be approved by political delegations from numerous countries around the world, including nations that are reluctant to accept the facts and dangers of climate change, e.g., OPEC countries, China, and the United States among others. These structural forces within the IPCC mean that the reports will understate the facts and dangers.

Second, feedback loops are not considered in the conclusions coming out of the IPCC. Since the feedback loops that exacerbate climate change are more numerous and significant than the feedback loops that mitigate climate change, reports that don't include feedback loops will likely show less warming and fewer bad consequences.

As opposed to the gradualist view, the catastrophic view holds that changes to the climate can occur suddenly and drastically when a "tipping point" is reached, causing the climate to shift to a new stable condition. As life has become adapted to current condition over eon's of evolution, a sudden dramatic shift in climate conditions will threaten the fabric of the ecosystem. The result will be significant and irreversible changes that will wipe out species and make civilization as we know it difficult, if not impossible. A number of prominent scientists accept this view. James Hansen, in particular, warns that a "Venus syndrome" might be our future, where greenhouse gases create an entirely uninhabitable planet.

Urry takes both the gradualist and catastrophic views seriously and argues that to escape our fate we first must understand that we live "high carbon lives" and understand how our social institutions lock us into these lives. Second, we must seek ways to transform our social institutions to relieve us from our dependency on fossil fuels. This is Urry's most important observation. Many authors write about how we must abandon "business as usual" if we are to avoid disaster, but while this is certainly a metaphor for many things other than business, it unintentionally implicates our economic institutions. Much more needs to be changed than business and commerce. We must abandon not "business as usual," but "life as usual." This is a far taller order. Without doing so, no legal regulation likely will be sufficient to make the profound changes that are needed. In a chapter on politics, Urry warns that without quickly changing our social institutions, only an authoritarian state may be capable of mitigating disaster. Urry calls on us to find numerous ways to lead "low carbon lives," which could create opportunities to transform fundamentally our suicidal institutions.

Urry's book ends by projecting four different possible futures. The first is the "Star Trek" future in which technological developments make it possible find low carbon energy sources in time to avoid disaster and continue and expand our current lifestyles. The second is the "warlords" future in which global and national community breaks down and regions are dominated by petty warlords competing for the remnants of a collapsing society. The third is the "local sustainability" future in which a transition takes place from a neo-liberal global society to self-sufficient local economies that establish sustainable social institutions. The fourth is the "Futurama III" future in which social needs are met virtually. Urry makes no unambiguous prediction about which of these futures will come about, but argues that the more preferable future is the local sustainability future and that we ought to examine how we can transform our current institutions to support a transition to it.

The primary value of Climate Change and Society is that it underscores how, over the course of the twentieth century, we have "locked in" a high carbon lifestyle. Everything from our energy production systems, housing patterns, HVAC infrastructure, transportation systems, food production systems, etc., relies on fossil fuels. "Addiction" is probably not the right word to describe our relationship to oil in that addiction is a pathology that usually deviates from the norm. A more apt metaphor might be that we have constructed a skyscraper on a faulty foundation and we must rebuild it in place.

You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto / Jaron Lanier -- NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Jaron Lanier was among a handful of virtual reality pioneers, and so you would think that he would be excited about the prospect that a global network of computers, programs, and computer users might allow us to transcend the limits of our pre-internet understanding of the world through the development of a transcendent silicon-based intelligence, but such is not the case. In You Are Not a Gadget Lanier expresses his discomfort, even horror, at the de-humanizing effects of what he calls "cybernetic totalism," i.e., the "ideology" that intelligence, even consciousness, can be explained through computationalism and that the developing global network of computer connections will eventually evolve into a super-intelligence or conscious being.

Lanier offers little argument against this view, except that it is based on the romantic hopes of cybernetic totalists. In the meantime, the popularity of cybernetic totalism has meant that computer engineers are designing hardware and software that dismisses the contributions of human individuals and "locking in" a computer infrastructure that requires devaluing their contributions. Lanier suggests that the computer industry has and is turning its back on many more creative and valuable lines of development in pursuit of cybernetic totalism.

Early in the book, he criticizes Web 2.0 technologies as doing to people what MIDI did to music, i.e., identifying aspects of music that are useful in defining notes, without succeeding in capturing the whole of musical experience. For Lanier, MIDI has homogenized music, forcing it into the constraints of a computer program. Simialry, Web 2.0 technologies have led us to represent ourselves in pre-packaged ways, chopping up our selves into smaller and smaller encodeable fragments that can be captured in cloud computing for the benefit of the "Lords of the Cloud," or those who can mine the collective data made available on the Web by the "Peasants of the Cloud."

The benefits that might accrue to the Lords of the Cloud depend on the truth of a hypothesis advanced by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. (See this blog for a review of The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki claims that very often the aggregated (or averaged) opinions of a large number of lay people will be more accurate than highly educated expert opinion. If this is true, then the Lords of the Cloud can employ "crowd sourcing" to generate a more accurate understanding of the world than was possible prior to the advent of the Web. Lanier's response to this is nuanced. While he recognize that a collective opinion is more valuable in many instances, a small group of people organized around an individual's vision or inspiration often can produce a much superior outcome. Lanier's case is surprisingly strong here.

Lanier's colorful language makes You Are Not a Gadget an entertaining read, but his book is strong on assertions and weak on arguments. In his introduction to the final chapter he tellingly writes, "This is about aesthetics and emotions, not rational argument. All I can do is tell you how it has been true for me, and hope that you might also find it to be true." Unfortunately, much of what he asserts is amenable to rational argumentation. Hopefully, his provocative presentation will prompt others to provide it.

Lanier also skips from subject to subject at astonishing speed. Sometimes the work appears to be more a collection of blog posts than a coherent, extended book-length argument. He appears to have been affected by the very atomization of discourse that he laments. He takes up metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, psychology, sociology, language, and music among other topics. Clearly, he recognizes how his work in computer science has important ties to all of these fields, but it is difficult to know how grounded his conclusions are. Certainly his treatment of metaphysics and political philosophy is at best extremely superficial and at worse sophomoric. Nonetheless, he bravely advances views on issues that deserve more serious consideration than they have received.

Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change / Pat Murphy -- Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2008.

Briefly stated "Plan C" is Pat Murphy's proposal for how we can respond to the "triple threats of peak oil, climate change and increasing inequity" in the standard of living of the planet's population. Murphy suggest we must curtail our use of fossil fuels and strengthen the bonds of community. I had expected a bit more practical advice about how to do this, particulary building community, but that's not the book that Murphy wrote. Instead, he mainly describes the the activities and institutions that have promoted our current problems. Along with the "triple threats," Murphy discusses U.S. militarism and imperialism and the corporate control of the mass media.

There is very little in the book with which I would disagree, but then very little that has not been described better elsewhere. The value of the book is in how Murphy brings together under one cover brief explanations of the most pressing problems of our time; however, I more than a few times wanted more complete arguments for his assertions (as willing as I was to accept them.)

Among the more interesting points was Murphy's criticism of various green technologies as inadequate to resolve our environmental problems. Instead, Murphy has the courage to conclude that our only hope is to drastically "curtail" our greenhouse gas emissions. The term "conservation" is too moderate for Murphy as it does not seem to imply returning to a virtually pre-industrial lifestyle.

Murphy argues that we, as pioneer individuals, must transform our lifestyles before a wider political commitment can form to make wholesale societal changes and it is the role of small, ecologically aware communities to support these pioneer members.

The notions are compelling for me. For several years I have worked to create and strengthen the Maryland Green Party, thinking that having a political institution that could champion a radical political and ecological agenda would be an important avenue for change. I have, however, come to the conclusion that such a political institution can not flourish without more or less permanent social groupings that will sustain the connections between people while they are politically active, and for such social groupings to succeed, they must be based in geographically compact communities. Murphy does not write about the extension of his vision of lifestyle and community into politics, but such and extension seems natural and beneficial.

I would recommend Plan C to anyone with a curiousity about and slight knowledge of Climate Change and Peak Oil for its concise summary of these problems. However, Murphy's "curtailment" response to these problems may be more than anyone who is not already convinced of the depth of the problem can handle.

The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place / Judith Adler Hellman

Hellman's book The World of Mexican Migrants is built out of countless interviews with Mexican migrants and their families. The interviews were conducted in the US and Mexico and reveal a complex set of conditions and motivations for migrations. Most interestingly, it emphasizes that the common understanding of Mexican migrants as escaping poverty and "seeking the American Dream" misunderstand Mexican migration. More commonly, migrants intend to accumulate enough capital to build houses or start businesses at home in Mexico.

The Greening of America / Charles Reich

The Greening of America was a blockbuster bestseller in 1971-72 heralding, according the Reich, the coming of a new consciousness that would result in a revolutionary social transformation away from the destructive, dehumanizing institutions of Corporate America. Time has proven Reich's predictions too optimistic, but his critique of Corporate America remains trenchent and accurate.

The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life / Richard Florida

I would not have finished this book but that my book club will be discussing it. The most interesting theses are trivial at best. Most of the work is a description of the the life preferences of "the Creative Class," a flattering term for what one would otherwise call the bourgeoisie, particularly the high tech bourgeoisie. Florida's quantitative support for his theses goes no deeper than the comparison of various "indexes" that mostly are mere rank-order lists of cities. He provides no data on the strength of the correlations that he asserts and often the relata are not independent. He generally disregards the contributions of the working class by, for example, generally attributing the value of high tech products to the work done by software engineers. He advocates city planning that intentionally caters to the wants of the wealthy and privileged. All of this in the pursuit of the sacred goal of "economic growth" regardless of disparities of wealth and the ecological limits of the planet. It's nothing more than euphemistic boosterism for some of the worst tendencies of the global economy.