the Prophetic Imagination

This book is one that I have read before since the start of this blog, hence the link above leading back to my prior post. I've been re-reading this in chunks with my dad, and frankly have to say I found this an incredibly edifying procedure, as not only was I re-treated to Brueggemann's incisive theological points but also the rich and often surprising conversations with my dad after each chapter or so. I said before in my original post that this book is challenging but well worth a dive, and off the back of this more recent experience I will add that I particularly recommend this book as something to go through as part of a small-group study, as it has plenty of practical provocative material from both Old and New testaments that should get a cluster of Christians thinking prophetically, and that can hardly be a bad thing.

Just Living

This book by Ruth Valerio is a brilliant resource for furnishing a Christianity-shaped thought train about social, economic and environmental justice. Its ideas are presented with ample but not suffocating explanation, and plenty of pragmatic but not exhaustive pointers for further consideration or praxis.

   The first third of the book explores the fields of the issues at hand; the nature and complexities of both globalisation and consumerism, and then the specific economic-cultural context the modern Church finds itself in when relating to these - hegemonic as they are.

   The middle third is the meaty theory section, where we really dig into theological and philosophical groundings for the origin and trajectory of applicable ethics: Valerio first looks at how simply neglecting the Church's relationship to socioeconomic justice leads to a Christianity that is merely therapeutic and basically capitulates to consumer capitalism; next we consider how the Church should relate to money and property, with a look at the ascetic monastic traditions (with St Benedict and St Francis especially focused on); then finally how Aristotle conceived and Thomas Aquinas developed notions of the interrelation of justice and temperance as virtues, and how these uphold human flourishing when rightly understood and practiced.

   The final third of the book is given over to practical exhortation - prompting the reader to think of what they can do to put these ideas into practice, and making the case for doing so. This includes: reorienting our perspectives to be more cognizant of socioeconomic and environmental injustice; aligning our attitudes toward money and material goods to Biblical ethics, and following on from that seeking to consume as ethically as we plausibly can; engaging fruitfully with our local communities; stepping into activism to provoke change in unsustainable & unjust structures; and lastly making prayerful & fruitful use of the time that is given to us.

   I have to say, as someone who has already put a great deal of thought into the nature & necessity of Christian work for ethical, justice-oriented living, I didn't personally learn a lot from this book. However I did find it edifying & encouraging, and it helped strengthen & deepen my understanding of the shared space my faith & my social/political inclinations occupy. Valerio's credentials as a theologian are just as valid as her credentials as an activist and from reading this book you will be left with an indelible sense of engaging with the wisdom & insight of someone who really does their best to walk the walk they talk. It is also highly readable, and though dealing with some relatively complex topics (especially in chapter six) it skilfully explains everything with minimal jargon, of both the theological & the socio-political kinds. I'd highly recommend this as a book to give to Christians who take following Jesus seriously but don't seem all that fussed about justice; it might serve to tip them over the fence.

Stage Invasion

This book by Pete Bearder is a multi-disciplinary investigation in poetry and "the spoken word Renaissance" that has been taking place in the west in recent years. I've actually met the author* (stage name Pete the Temp) at a fracking site a few years ago, where he performed some radical poetry - but his scholarship shown here is just as fine as his capacity for crowd-rousing verse.

   The book itself drives a complex path across its many disciplines to explicate the nature and trajectory of spoken word. After an introduction setting up the intent of the book, we are first given a glimpse into the world of slam poetry, its origins, popularity, and benefits and drawbacks.** We then dive into a definitional chapter discussing exactly what spoken word is and isn't - from the ancient concept of oral tradition to "live literature"; reflections on style, and then finally a consideration of the social format itself in which this art form generally takes place and its uniquenesses. Then there's a history chapter, starting with the Romantics through the Beat generation up to contemporary hip-hop, and how all of these have left their mark on the art form as it's evolved. The next chapter digs into DIY renewal culture; how the grassroots nature of poetic space necessarily creates room for creators to create, interact and share in innovative ways. Following this are three chapters building on the same idea - first how a poem inhabits and leaves the body of the performer during performance; second how this inhabits and shapes the experience of bodies in the crowd listening to said performance,*** and thirdly how if done well this can all lead to spoken word performances bringing out transcendent states of shared consciousness between audience and performer. The final chapter is about how this can be, and often is, utilized to great effect in harmonising sympathies in crowds for transformative political ends - poetry can be remarkably effective propaganda if written and shared correctly, as long as recognition and empathy are at its heart.

   The blurb quote on the front of this book claims it is the book "we have all been waiting for", and as a member of the many spoken word communities in the UK today, I couldn't agree more; Bearder's scholarship is deep and wide and his love of the craft evident on every page. The poetry he samples for quotes to make his points is eclectic and wondrous, and his core argument that spoken word is a social force of uniting and driving emotional communal activity toward understanding and the forging of better worlds is tangible throughout. If you're a spoken word artist craving to know more about the artistic world you inhabit, this is absolutely the book for you - if you're skeptical about it as an art form, this would be a challenging but wholesome read that will make you think twice about what you do or don't seek out and listen to. A fantastic book.

* And again [edit December 2024] as he was performing at The Shakespeares, and I got my copy signed; he says "this book - in your hands - a powerful weapon". I hope I live to prove him right.

** As the host of a spoken word night myself which is very much in its culture antithetical to slam, I found much to disagree with in this chapter, but much worth bearing in mind too.

*** This chapter has a section which delves into the role of the MC of a spoken word event, a role which I myself have held for Guerrilla since 2019, and so this was of much encouraging inspiration to me.

God in Creation

This book is the second (after this one) in Jürgen Moltmann's systematic theology series; as you can tell from the title, this one deals with creation doctrines. Though Moltmann approaches the topic quite innovatively from an ecological perspective - placing God and creation in relation to each other within their own spiritual and natural ecologies. This book took me a long time to read - if I must admit, I started reading it way back in late 2017 when I was still working at Church Army, but found it too difficult; but since getting nudged back onto Moltmann in more recent years, and having found his first book of systematic theology relatively manageable, I decided to embark upon the rest of his series, and found it somewhat workable, though it was a real mental test compared to most of the other Christian literature I read.* In any case, I have now finished it, and found it profoundly enlightening on a number of half-baked questions I've always had about creation but had never articulated, as well as a number more of things I'd never even wondered but now having been made to think about them am astounded that most Christians seem to be able to slide along without deep doubts in their cognizance about such things. Moltmann is that kind of theologian; he thinks into the weird corners and flushes them out with ecumenical sources, biblical wisdom, and fat old logic.

   It would be completely disingenuous of me to say I can summarise what Moltmann says in this book. I hope the introductory paragraph is enough to entice you as to the aim and style of his book in his overall systematic theology project, and following from here I will give a very brief list of the chapter subjects covered in this volume.

1. The idea of God being in creation as an introductory chapter
2. Specific considerations of the significance of this in the ecological crisis**
3. How God, and we, know creation
4. God as the creator
5. How time relates to the act of God's creation
6. How space relates to the act of God's creation
7. The duality/unity of heaven and earth
8. Evolution in creation
9. Human beings as God's image
10. Embodiment and the soul as the end of created works
11. The Sabbath as the feast of creation
12. An appendix comprising various symbols of creation

   Many of these might seem quite dry, or even irrelevant, to what you might consider core themes or issues in creation doctrine; but trust me, once Moltmann gets his teeth into one of these things, it becomes interesting as anything. And illuminating in ways you had probably never imagined. But anyway. So that's it for Moltmann on creation - merely volume two in his systematic theology series. Since finishing this one, I have acquired volumes three, four and five - Christology, pneumatology, and eschatology respectively - so I suppose I'll see you again soon for breakdowns of those.

* Maybe that says more about most Christian literature than it does me or Moltmann... you make your mind up.

** I have to say, it is fucking affirming to have such an adept theologian tackling creation issues through the lens of the "ecological crisis" way back in the 1980's, when that kind of language has only just barely entered the mainstream consciousness now in the 2020's.

The Conquest of Bread

This book by Peter Kropotkin is one of the seminal founding texts in our modern understanding of anarcho-socialism. I had previously read it as an impressionable sixteen-year-old - but now with a much deeper education of politics, economics, and philosophy - I genuinely hold to the ideas herein far stronger than I had then.

   This book is a masterfully mathematically inarguable treatise on how anarcho-socialism can be the most efficient and humane means of organising a political economy along egalitarian lines. I  realise that given the age of the book the numbers comprising its core arguments are in sheer need of an update for the 21st-century, which given how much things are changing these days may again need another update every two or three years to come - but the underlying principles remain solid. Kropotkin's assessment of industrial here is timeless; the ideas about social organisation, to the workers as to their capabilities and to the citizens as to their needs is a core tenet of "small c" communism; this is a model of how a political-economic body could function sustainably for the best of its members with no impingement on those around it can flourish.

   This book was a key text in my rational radicalisation as a teenager - and having re-read it so many years later it seems it still makes a great deal of sense. Capitalism is worse than a virus; it is simply unnecessary. Once the means of production are consolidated, for the workers not to be in democratic control of them implies an undue influence that is not in the best interests of the surrounding society. We, the proletariat, must demand control in such manner - or industrialised societies will never get over their "hill" of liberalism and embrace the truth of political and economic equality.

   There are many more ruminations on this great book that I could lay forth but I think the key points have been made. Revolution, whether democratic or sectarian-violent - are inevitable - but they best way to guard against that is to issue such structures to the workers in the first place. In 2023 it seems like a silly argument to make, when "artificial intelligence" is already starting to cannibalize the jobs of artists, writers, translators, coders, and so many more - but does not that simply drive home the urgency of such a revolution?

Laudato Si'

This book - or rather, papal encyclical (you can read the whole thing from that link) - is the 2015 statement by Pope Francis about the responsibility of all humanity, and especially Catholic Christians, to care for God's creation, particularly in the face of the industrial horrors it is facing in this day and age. I am by no measure a Catholic, but I have quite a lot of respect for Pope Francis, and with the release of this that went up some degree - some degree more now that a few years later I've actually read the thing. Pope-man knows the issues. He knows what's up with the economic supply chains,  the product design cycles, the advertising consumer drive. He is not an ignorant old fart on a gold chair. This is a dude who spent most of his life in a run-down little church in Argentina cleaning graffiti off his parish walls and playing kickabout with local youths. He is not beholden to "the system" simply because he happens to be the head of the Catholic Church - ecclesiology can be politically weird like that, which I love. Francis is quite well cognizant in the key ways that humanity is fucking up our environment and the necessary actions that individuals, corporations, and governments must take to start minimising and then halting those impacts on our embedded ecology. If every Catholic in the world had read this and taken it to heart in a practical and immediate way, it would have been revolutionary. But obviously that hasn't happened. They just don't respect the Pope like they used to in the medieval era. Shame. But still - for this to have been written at all with the authority it was, as a Papal Encyclical - is immensely significant, and I hope it means that there are strong undercurrents of ecologically-revolutionary intent within the Catholic church, and hopefully ecumenically too, as I know there are too in every faith; it is only together as all humanity under One God one One World that we will see our way through the turbulence that is to come from the outputs of our historic wastefulnesses.

    If you're a Catholic who takes the word of the Pope seriously and you've not read this, then get the fuck off your arse and click on the link at the top, it's all online for free. It'll take you maybe an hour or two and it will reshape your brain. If you're a non-Catholic Christian who has less respect for the Pope but maybe doesn't take creation-care too seriously - I would also recommend reading the whole thing. It is not grounded in Catholicism but in Christian and biblical thinking with a pragmatic and compassionate bent for what is best for us and our future descendants in the world. And if you're no kind of Christian but you care about the environment - you might get a kick out of reading it, you probably won't learn any new scientific realities but you'll get a fun insight into what Mr Gold-throne White-hat thinks about the necessity of your activist struggles.

Guerrilla Warfare

This book - well, closer to a textbook really - by Ernesto Che Guevara, is the book about how to do guerrilla warfare. I mean, it's in the title. And its credentials are borne out by the reputation of its author, I would hope. Unlike the last book I read about how to do war well, this one is less full of mystical apothegms and more full of profoundly practical advice - stuff along the lines of:

• How to build a windproof bivouac shield for a campfire: here's a diagram
• Ideal places to take cover in an open bushy field
• Ideal places to take cover in a wooded hillside
• Ideal places for fireteams to cover each other moving through town streets
• Make sure you're kind to the local peasants; never steal from them, always pay them back for food and shelter when you can - and obviously never sexually abuse them or we will execute you as a traitor to the revolution
• Ensure you are familiar with revolutionary dogma in simple language so you can share it with any disenchanted locals we might befriend
• Steal every single bit of ammo from every single enemy that we kill, they have more of it than us
• Don't try and fight that tank you moron
• See that dug-in bunker? This (see diagram) is the angle you need to throw a grenade
• Develop simplistic hand-signals for silent communications when on covert action
• If you're a sniper move after every shot - obviously
• A disarmed and disoriented enemy is better for us than a dead enemy if we're behind their lines
• Get used to sleeping in mad, horrible places
• Keep moving
• Keep believing
• Keep your shoes empty, there are spiders
• Etc

   All sounds rather helpful if you're a minority force trying to overthrow an incumbent government, doesn't it? I will admit I currently have no violent revolutionary intentions - I was reading this to see if I could metaphorically derive any sociocultural tactics for making my spoken-word night (which is literally called Guerrilla) more impactful and authentic. Which is probably one of the faffiest reasons for reading this book anyone's ever had. But I still enjoyed it and learned a lot, and feel a tad more prepared if I ever do need to take up arms against the Tories some day. Which, you never know. But seriously - my list above may have taken a bit of a light-hearted slant towards the end, but I can't summate all the practical wisdom contained in this book in one blogpost - even though it's a short book, Che packs a lot in. As you would expect, from someone who took over Cuba with nothing but two notepads and an AK47.

Project Öcalan

This isn't really a book, it was my Masters dissertation. But it's as long as some books! And more scholarly, if I may say so myself, than many others! And I've reread it, so it gets a post! Not a long one though as I've already done one (see previous link).

If you'd be interested in reading an examination of whether & how post-nationalist ideologies are reshaping the Kurdish question in the contemporary Middle-East, then I've left a .pdf of it open to all on my Google Docs folder. So click here. By the way, the reason it's called Project Öcalan on here is that the founder of the PKK and key thinker behind the recent ideological shifts I talk about is that very same Abdullah.

There's a Hair in my Dirt!

This book, written and illustrated by the inimitable The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, is another of the old kids' books left at my parents' house that I've binge-read out of pure unfettered nostalgia, and of the three so far thusly describable it is by far the best on a number of levels.*

   It features a family of anthropomorphized earthworms, the child of whom promptly sets off the story by making its eponymous complaint. The father worm responds by telling him a fable about the true nature of nature, in which animals don't always understand what other animals are doing, trying to do, or even for, and the anarchic cycles of ecology roll ever onwards, illustrated through myriad amusing examples with rich visual humour (the main character of this story is a nature-loving maiden called Harriet, whose final attempt to save a mouse from a snake results in her [SPOILER ALERT] getting a virus from the mouse, dying, and rotting, hence the hair in the dirt). The young worm finishes his reception of the tale with an emboldened sense of a worm's place in the world, then finishes his dinner.

   Very very very funny, surprisingly educational, and you can spend longer looking for all the detail-jokes in the drawings than it would take you to read the text. Certainly a book to crack out for kids who say they like nature, but aren't nearly morbid enough in their worldview yet to display that they properly understand its workings.

* Larson being a favourite humourist of the scientific community, this even features a celebratory foreword from esteemed ecologist Edward O. Wilson, which must be a first for a kids' book.

A Call for Revolution

This book is a short, impassioned and timely reflection from His Holiness the Dalai Lama - as the title suggests, calling for a global insurgency - albeit one of empathy, of deep love for all beings and our shared world, for compassion, forgiveness, listening, breaking down the walls of the mental prisons we have traumatized ourselves into inhabiting across our history and creating spaces for new, urgent possibilities. It is a call I very much endorse.

No-one is too small to make a difference

This book is a collection of speeches made over this past few months by Greta Thunberg - whom you've probably heard of by now, unless you've been living under Boomer Snowflake Rock - since pretty much all of these speeches are available online or were covered in the news media, the only real reason I can envision buying a copy of this book might be for someone a necessarily recommendable act is as a present for people living under that aforementioned rock. Not that they'd probably read it, because hey, who's going to listen to an autistic Swedish teenager if you're already not going to listen to a united consensus among our planet's most dedicated minds on questions of ecological action?

A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality

This book by Rob Frost was one of those I read with a classic almost-ex-evangelical mixture of cynical apprehension of heresy and roiling curiosity. I've borrowed it from the communal research & training library at work, and if the subtitle is anything to go by, it will live up to this mixture of expectations - as holism and psychotherapy I have no doubt Christianity is fully compatible with the ultimate findings of, but - ley lines? astrology?

   It's interesting from the offset to note that this book's author was in the same position as me when he began researching it. He wanted to debunk all the 'New Age nonsense', as is so much the trend in contemporary christian circles, but as he dug he found more and more commonality, potential insight into things like our relationship with nature and our own minds and bodies (which Christendom-form christianity often wasn't very good at talking about in healthily educational ways), and challenges of basic phenomenology that New Age mysticism is, in many ways, better-equipped to deal with than 'correct-theology' obsessed forms of modern church thinking, and therefore better able to connect with any persons or ideas outside of these modes and communities.

   There's a lot in this book and I won't pretend to bother summarizing it. I'm still on the whole retaining a broad sense of caution in approaching new ideas, but I've never been a shirker from them, and this has been no different - in many ways from reading this book I feel much more affirmed in the core sturdy reality of Christianity to respond to things we may perceive to be alien, but - do we really need to then perceive them as hostile? Or - is this going too far? - incompatible? At root, New Age thinking believes in the possibility of a set of practices and attitudes which can unite humanity and bring about a superior form of human civilisation. This potted summary, were it to contain a mention of Jesus, would also pretty perfectly describe Christianity's God-intended secular impacts. So whatever you may think about it all (assuming here that most of the readers of my blogposts about Christian books are Christian, sorry if you're not, God loves you btw), I'd recommend this book to any persons of faith who suspect grains of truth may exist anywhere else, to be discovered and brought into the larger whole which the gospel forms the core to. Because I certainly believe they do.

the Prophetic Imagination

This book by Walter Brueggemann was one of the most holistically profound, affirming, challenging, enlightening and generally energising-of-the-spirit books I've read in a while. It explores through radical and faithful analysis of Biblical themes and narratives the lens of sociopolitical critique common in the prophetic traditions, which with deep relevance touch on everything from economics to personal virtue to cultural memory in both their original contexts (as cries lobbied against Israel as an ancient people and state, trying and failing to live in collective relationship with their creator and liberator God) and you-don't-need-to-dig-too-far-down-to-find poignant assessment of the world's ongoing broken mode of being; the theological thrusts found here are characteristically recognisable in the human condition and so universal enough to have a pertinence that fully transcends historical context, speaking to us as persons in a much broader sense. Brueggemann tracks these themes through God's covenant with Israel, as Moses and the Law-based society was intended as a developmental (and flawed/incomplete) model of how humankind could live in relationship with God - and this formed an alternative form of community which was fundamentally at odds with those mainstream form of community prevalent among the species, termed the 'royal consciousness', which prioritises individual gain and power such that everyone is trying to be the king of their own little worlds (which is lucky enough for the tiny minority who actually are kings, or royalty, or whatever, but obviously then leads to entrenchment of inequality and alienation of people from each other which compounds the breakdown of a society of sinners); this is particularly stark reading in our current vein of history, where never before has the average human had so much sheer abundance of resources to consume, concretely or abstractly, in lives of competitively-dulled-to-its-own-spectacularity blasé luxurious discontent. The countercultural forms this alternative community takes are discussed in broad scriptural strokes, as are the forms of counter-countercultual suppression launched in response by the royal consciousness. Next, from closer analysis of prophetic writings, we look at how particuarly gifted members of the alternative consciousness/community are able to stir up remembrance of the betterness of that alternative through: exercising sympathetic and empathetic action as a critique of the lovelessness of the mainstream order; and energising the collective imagination of the alternative community's members to provoke amazement at, and thereby realign social consciousness toward, the God who liberated and established such a community at all. Further chapters then explore how Jesus took these aspects of prophetic function to their extreme in his teachings, life and death etcetera. Finally, there is a chapter and also a postscript considering how these ideas may be applied in practical ministry.
   This is not a book for everyone. It will unsettle many conservative and liberal Christian readers alike, at its clarity of argument and yet the seemingly-radical nature of working through its implications. But Brueggemann is a well-rooted scholar of God's word, and this book is a hugely potent systematic examination of one of the most intangible concepts in theology (relative to the current hegemony of materialistic positivism anyway) in ways that shed great light of insight into recurrent Biblical themes and narratives, while being inarguably of immense and urgent necessity in our world today. As a global civilisation, we are careening slowly across the wilderness without even clear voices to be heard more than few far between shouting in it; I believe as believers the truths of faith are as brilliantly and deeply relevant as ever yet we have lost our capacity for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue in societies poisoned by secular anxiety and corporate blinkers - thus it is even more imperative that Christians with a capacity for communication, for engaging their sociocultural contexts in ways that are as pragmatic, flexible and sensitive as they are conscious of the primary, holistic, eternal context, to do so with such things in mind as they speak, write, create and relate.

Jesus and the Earth

This book by the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, is a powerful short little tract on the implications for Christian environmentalism that can be derived directly from the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament accounts. Long-term readers will probably be aware that Christianity and environmentalism are both very much up my street - and I'd like to devote a longer post to some relatively in-depth discussion of how these two things overlap and converge, but I'm gonna do this in a later post as there's another book I'm reading at the moment that will empower a much juicier wodge of reflection. James Jones here has provided an extremely accessible text both strongly grounded in biblical text and mainstream theology as well as capable of discussing ecological issues without risking confusion or alienation of the average Christian reader (times are changing, but I still often get the impression that many in the church are almost hostile to environmental concerns, or at best actively passive - on numerous occasions my voiced concerns about climate change or whatever have been brushed aside with a deft 'oh well, it won't matter if Jesus comes back before then!'). In the years since this was published, the urgency of environmental matters facing humankind has rocketed, and the church could be doing so much more to pursue a renewed and beneficent stewardship of this one planet God has given us to live on; but such change is always a gradual process, with different persons or parts progressing at different rates - with that in mind, this book is one I'd recommend (as a text to recommend to or give to) to Christian readers who are for want of a nicer word ignorant about environmental issues: Jones' faithful and scriptural approach makes this book probably a good one to nudge those who love Jesus closer to practical up-to-date realisations about what that means for lovingly living in Jesus' creation.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

On Anarchism

This book, an edited selection* of title-fitting work by esteemed intellectual (as well-known for his radical political activism as for his revolutionary work in the field of linguistics) Noam Chomsky, serves as an accessible, engaging, and surprisingly broad (for such a slim volume - Noam knows how to pack his sentences) introduction to its titular family of sociopolitical viewpoints - anarchism. Now, anarchism has an unfair baggage of connotations in the modern industrialised world, largely as a result of intensive efforts by established elites to discredit and marginalise those who align themselves with it to clip the wings of any movement of the masses that may take on board its core, which is truly dangerous to those established elites: underlying anarchism is a radical skepticism to all authority structures. If relationships entailing power inequalities** cannot be morally justified, which in most cases they cannot, they should be dismantled and replaced by structures in which all participants have equal stakes. Anarchy is the fullest and truest expression of democracy. This book is one I would recommend for any progressive leftist types - even if you don't identify yourself as an anarchist, there is definitely much in there you'll be sympathetic to, and engaging with a thinker as heavy-hitting yet accessible as Noam on the topic will leave you both with a revitalised spirit for activism and some new thought-provoking angles from which to consider yourself, your communities, your society, and the unjust power structures we struggle against.

* The selected bits include:

• Some introductory notes discussing anarchism's place in modern politics
• Excerpts from Understanding Power, discussing in more detail how anarchism challenges and demands participatory change in existing political structures
• Part of a book called Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, in which Noam reviews mainstream academic assessments of the Spanish civil war's revolutionary anarchist movement, cross-referencing the earwax out of it to demonstrate how mainstream accounts all-too-often airbrush over/out the positive popular role played by this movement, and what this implies about political-economic elite power over academia that anarchism should be sidelined so
• Extracts from an interview with Harry Kreisler about how Noam came to develop his political consciousness
• An incredibly juicy little essay on Language and Freedom

** Edit - April 28th: I've just watched Noam Chomsky's documentary Requiem for the American Dream. It's on Netflix and is definitely worth a watch - he walks us through how over the last century these elite forces have shifted the blame, indeed even the public attention, away from themselves, and following the onset of neoliberalism continue to ever-further secure their stranglehold on wealth and power, with ruinous consequences for the rest of society. It's like watching an enormous conspiracy theory play out, backed up by What Actually Happened In, Like, History.

the Revenge of Gaia

This book by James Lovelock is, hands-down, the scariest book I've read since I started this blog. Long-time readers will be familiar with my concerns about the environment: human societies have lost our relationship with the natural world, to the point that our entire economic systems as they currently stand are functionally incompatible with sustainable ecosystems (see this and this), and the only political movements calling out these issues on the scale they need to be called out on are marginal at best.

   Lovelock, as a climate scientist, has been one of the most prominent voices in the public sphere since the 1960s on environmentalism, and is still profoundly influenatial today, despite several notable areas of disagreement with 'mainstream' green types. His main claim-to-fame is for the 'Gaia' hypothesis, that planetary biological and geological systems (like Earth) are inextricably interconnected and self-regulating over extremely long time periods. He overviews this theory in this book, as well as the life-history of Earth within the scope of the theory, though other books by him focusing purely on the Gaia hypothesis and Earth-science will be more thorough on this topic.

   This book is concerned with the rapid destabilisation of Gaia's natural self-regulation: human civilisation has, to put it crudely, shat out so much waste that the typical means of carbon absorbtion are overwhelmed, so the planet (in the very short-term, geologically-speaking, but still long enough for a mass extinction of plants and animals and the probable deaths of billions of humans - mainly the poorer ones) is overheating. The scientific projections for the twenty-first century are downright chilling. James offers some generalistic overviews of how we need to reshape our food and energy industries, our entire societal use of technology, our entire economic systems - nothing too dissimilar from other environmentalists' Last-Prophet-Before-The-Flood pleas for large-scale social change and political action, which are still going largely unheeded.

   I don't know why I read this book. I already knew how utterly and completely our species has, as they say in Alabama (probably), "gone done fucked up." The only people who are likely to read this book will be dedicated environmentalists like myself who already know that massive radical change is needed, twenty years ago. It's probably too late to prevent a mass extinction (I mean, heck, it's already happening). It's probably too late to prevent dangerously runaway global warming that will force mass migration on scales never seen before in human history, runaway inflation on food, wars over water.

   If the contents of this book are interesting to you, don't read it. It'll just depress you without really telling you anything action-oriented that you probably don't already know. (Except that nuclear power doesn't deserve its demonised status.) Instead, go out and take direct action against the corporate-governmental schemes that are perpetuating the human destruction of our life support system, Gaia.

   That, or stock up on tinned goods and bottled water for a post-apocalyptic bunker.

   I'm doing both.

Prosperity Without Growth

This book, an explosive and compelling case for the possibility, nay, necessity, of post-growth economic development by Tim Jackson, should be compulsory reading for every Western economic policymaker. Along with this book on de-growth, it was one of my core texts for an incredibly bleak essay I just finished writing yesterday. My last essay of the year, probably the best and also the most depressing thing I've ever written. In light of this, disproportionately to how excellent this book is, this post will be really short (actually, this time).
   Tim argues that global capitalism has been historically given free rein by an economics that's sorely out-of-touch with real life on a physical planet to the extent that our world economy now threatens natural boundaries and limits. Some of these are obvious depletion issues - we're using up non-renewable resources without establishing sustainable replacements for when they run out, and we're exploiting renewable flows of energy and resources at a pace that far outweighs nature's capacity to regenerate them. In short, a crunch is coming, and the best hope we have of meeting this challenge is to abandon our structural enslavement to consumerism, which only perpetuates inequality and injustice and doesn't even substantively improve subjective human wellbeing in these prosperity-by-growth societies. Instead, we must look to localism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and contentment with a life less dependent on material attainments, as pillars of a new direction for the world's political and economic systems. Obviously this is an enormous shift, but Tim outlines along with the arguments in favour of such a huge redirection various policies that could help accelerate changes toward such a transition being possible.
   Overall - an absolutely superb and essential book, if you're interested in or have even a scrap of influence in the realms of politics, economics, ecology, human society's future stability, and individual wellbeing, (and especially the tight nexus where all these topics overlap at ideas about post-growth development), give this a read.

Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

This book, a collection of fifty-one short essays (written by fifty-six different people) edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (who as a threesome also wrote a longish introduction and shortish epilogue), is way overdue at the library and I've just finished it in a mad reading-rush and am going to bash out this post as quickly as my conscience will allow before returning it. 'Degrowth' as an idea is a radical response to the fact that our economies have, in the richer nations at least, attained a state of affluence far beyond what is necessary to sustain human wellbeing at an equitable and sustainable and satisfactory level, but persist in pursuing growth, further widening social inequalities, deepening structural problems, and putting enormous strain on the global ecosystem (which fortunately our economy has nothing to do with).* Economic growth, despite the obviousness of its posing a serious range of problems to global human/natural welfare, is simply not questioned by the vast majority of thinkers and policymakers! However, some people do question it, and these ideas are rapidly gaining traction in the left, as the explanatory frameworks employed by 'degrowthers' are nicely congruent with several others on the left, so issues and policy solutions broadly supported in a plethora of progressive groups are represented where they all converge - upon the need for degrowth.

   The essays are split into four chunks, and in lieu of wanting to go through properly summarising themes I'm basically just going to list them.** The first section looks at lines of thought by which arguments for degrowth can be made: anti-utilitarianism, bioeconomics (a.k.a. ecological economics), critiques of development, social-environmental justice, currents of environmentalism, societal metabolism, political ecology, and steady-state economics.

   The second section looks at core concepts needed to be understood widely in a degrown society (or, more pressingly, in order to transition to one): autonomy, capitalism, care, commodification, commodity frontiers, the commons, conviviality, dematerialisation, dépense, depoliticisation, pedagogy of disaster, entropy, emergy, GDP, growth, happiness, decolonisation of the imaginary, Jevons' paradox, neo-Malthusianism, peak oil (etc), social limits to growth, and simplicity.

   The third section looks at grassroots- and policy-level actions (or spheres of action) that may help spur degrowth and hence the transition to a sustainable economy: going back-to-the-land, eco-communities, urban gardening, 'nowtopianism', basic income & maximum income, job guarantees, work-sharing, unions, co-operatives, community currencies, debt audits, the digital commons, public money creation, post-normal science, and civil disobedience (with another chapter specifically looking at how Spanish indignados and the Occupy movement were good in this respect). Also in this section is a frankly disappointingly vague chapter by Tim Jackson about the 'New Economy', but given how specific and well-aimed all the other chapters were, and given that Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth is a landmark work in this field (which I'm also reading for the same essay for which I devoured this one, so -) it's only fair that his chapter could be a general-summary-kind-of-useless one.

   The fourth section looks at socio-cultural, philosophical and political ideas that have arisen around the world that overlap considerably with the aims of degrowthers: from feminist economics, to South America's buen vivir, to Gandhi-inspired economics of permanence, to the Bantu peoples' traditional worldview of Ubuntu.

   Anyway. I'm dropping this book in the Returns tub and leaving the library. This book is extremely interesting: anyone concerned about economic and/or environmental justice would find a lot of thought-provoking stuff in here, presented in an easily accessible bitesize chapter format, which is actually a really nice way of navigating through a large pile of smaller issues gathered around a holistic polemic.

   Reduce, reuse, recycle! And break neoliberal hegemony's stranglehold on economic institutions and political society, where it is redirecting all social efforts to the maximisation of productivity which in turn perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices and perilous damage to ecological systems - break it, and restructure almost everything about our world in a way that promotes sustainability, equity, community, and human flourishing!***

* Irony. Everything that happens in the global economy is 100% dependent, in so many ways that I couldn't even start listing them because I'm not a scientist but you can probably think of a few yourself, on the biosphere functioning healthily.

** Some of these concepts are extremely interesting, but there are fifty-one of them and no way am I going to try to briefly describe each, so if your curiosity has been piqued... you're a citizen of the internet, you should know what to do.

*** This is the problem with progressivism; the more holistic and system-based your analysis of problems gets, yes, the more you can claim to see the bigger picture and thus you can more accurately propose individual-, community-, and government-level solutions, but past a certain stage it gets very hard to reduce to a catchy mantra. Perhaps the best I've ever heard was at the COP21 protests in Paris last December, where there was a crowd of over fifty Spaniards carrying huge red banners shouting "¡AAA- AH! ANTI! ¡ANTICAPITALISTA!" over & over again, as we marched down the main streets from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - where a procession of several thousand peaceful protesters formed a Spoon Chain under a giant long red carpetcloth/rope. (Needless sentimental fact - I had this in my jacket pocket at the time).

Status Anxiety

This book. the internationally bestselling guide to a vaguely-but-not-too-vaguely-defined conception of social angst about one's position and perception by acclaimed pseudo-philosopher* Alain de Botton,** is pretty good. I got it in a second-hand English bookshop in Amsterdam, of all places. My thoughts on this book are quite straightforward ("HA" thinks the discerning reader, wise to my promises of 'shortish posts', "here we go again, it's guaranteed to be an absurd thousand-or-two-word barely-structured mental drippages, one which I will not read" - yeh well shut up, discerning reader) but I really enjoy writing unplanned spurts of thoughtful text so I'm gonna have a bit more fun with this one.***

   It's deeply ironic that that should've been the last sentence of the only paragraph (asterisked sub-bits, thankfully, included) to have been autorecovered; I am actually now going to have entirely no fun with this blogpost, since my laptop just crashed unceremoniously and I lost about eight hundred words. Sucks. I'd done pretty interesting and wittily-written sections on the lack of diversity represented in de Botton's encouraging pages (despite drawing on economics, philosophy, history, art, literature, politics, psychology, and whatnot, probably (no joke) 95% of who he cites or references are either educated white men who lived in Europe between 1650 and 1950, or Ancient Bloody Greeks) and on the extensive overlaps status anxiety seems to have with politico-economic systems (which lended some interesting ammunition to the psychological-emotional elements in my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of capitalism). But these sections were lost, like tears in the oven, because for some reason even though Google Docs has an autosave feature powerful enough to actually bring a medium-to-large moth**** back to life and even Microsoft Word has an emergency unsaved-document auto-capture function if your computer crashes, but Blogger for some reason allowed me to blithely tap away hundreds of words without once thinking to itself that it should autosave. There is a 'Save' button on the post composition page, but who uses that!? (I did, just now, in sheer terror of my laptop and Blogger taking joint revenge against this lengthy complaint.) So anyway, rather than rewrite all this lost gold (it's shockingly hard to remember exactly what paragraphs you've just witnessed sucked into digital oblivion before your very eyes) I'm just gonna blast through a quick summary of the book and briefly state my largest thought-reaction to it.
   The book opens with a definition of status anxiety, which is essentially just when people worry about their place in the world relative to other people and feel sad about it when they perceive themselves to be doing worse than they'd like. The book is then split into two parts, firstly looking at five possible causes of status anxiety:

• Lovelessness: (general loneliness & lack of social acceptance)
• Snobbery: (overvaluing sociocultural status markers)
• Expectation: (holding unrealistic ones)
• Meritocracy: (personal failure is possible despite skills & hard work)
• Dependence: (we're inextricable from our socioeconomic contexts)

   No, I didn't summarise those in much detail, did I? Read the book if you're bothered. And then of course part two, looking at five possible solutions to status anxiety:

• Philosophy: (dissecting ideas to enlighten ourselves)
• Art: (engaging with culture to enlighten ourselves)
• Politics: (engaging with socioeconomic structures for change)
• Christianity: (warm fuzzy feelings of acceptance through church community, supporting an earnest vision of human equality through all their creation in God's image and thus any social factors affecting their 'status' are bunk in the eyes of the almighty and not something to get too bummed-out about)
• Bohemia: (hiding in a community of like-minded enlightened aesthetes, hippies, pot-smoking book-reading sandal-wearing meat-eschewing lefty scum. I'm joking but this chapter should be pretty self-explanatory if you grasp the basic definition of 'bohemian', which entails a flagrant disregard for social norms)

   Each of these ten chapters (each varying massively in length and number of pictures) is well-written, topically relevant, and explains well how each them may cause or solve to some degree our burdens of status anxiety. Overall, it's a very easily-readable and warmly enlightening book, one which, as the rest of Alain de Botton's work, goes a long way to demystifying (if not de-pretentiousnessifying) elements of intellectualism, in a goodwilled attempt to help people understand themselves and their lives better, and so have better ones. And this book fulfils that function pretty well. It's educational in an engaging, pleasant, and cheers-you-up kind of way, the details of complex thinkers' works brought to life in application to common problems. I'd absolutely recommend anyone read this.
   But for one complaint I have with it (and not just it, all of Alain de Botton's work that I've read or watched-on-YouTube so far) - it completely guts Christianity, guts it like a fish that Alain's not going to eat anyway because it upsets his stomach but he found it lying on the beach and he's always wanted to gut a fish out of a curious itching for the performance of minor masculine tasks. I was surprised he did a chapter about it at all, but having read the chapter, it may as well have been a chapter in which he similarly gutted the fishes of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism; or just not done any fish-gutting and written a straight-up chapter about 'supportive communities gathered around more-or-less transcendental ideals' (admittedly, he did write a chapter about this too, the Bohemia one).***** What I mean by all of this, is in his discussion of religion, he detaches it from the part that means anything substantive at all - theology, and the possible truth thereof. Like, philosophy and art and politics are all excellent and diverse fields in which one can explore one's place in the world and find and create and actively work for meaning in multifarious ways; and bohemian lifestyles are the perfect space in which to do that. But religions are not in this same category, they're not a 'pick-and-choose-until-you-find-what-you-like' type of deal: religions make objective claims about what the universe is, what we are, what life is, what God is (if one's inluded), and what this implies about how we should think and act. Alain's discussion of how God making humanity in God's image renders us absolutely equal is pretty sound, and here an excellent blow to any attempt to manipulate social status in any way other than the egalitarianism supported by Christianity. Likewise, I can't disagree that church is an excellent form of community support and encouragement - it is, of course it is, it's designed for that purpose, humans are designed for that purpose. But the whole chapter on Christianity focuses on these two aspects: which is fairenough in a sense, because they form a wholesome case for how Christianity can be a solution to status anxiety. But while true, it's shortsighted, it's mischaracterisation; Christianity is more than that, it's not a field like art or politics or philosophy where nothing is fixed and argument or experiment drives development forever, nor a lifestyle like bohemia where anything goes in a liberal cooperative inclusive sense: Christianity proposes objective truths about the world that demand an answer. Objective truths stretching far beyond our being made-in-God's-image or being suited-for-community-for-which-the-church-is-the-archetype; truths that ultimately lead to, yes, a complete eradication of status anxiety, if only through a complete rebirth of creation in Jesus, and I'm not gonna explain the whole of it because there's a load of books on Christian theology that I've written posts about before and you can access the list of these through the labels boxes on the right, and also I've over-run my intended wordcount again, and I'm terrified my laptop might crash a third time.
   Isaac Stovell.
   Out.

* Just kidding, Alain, if you're reading this - I love School of Life: and while there are occasionally certain issues I feel you don't explore with enough critically nuanced vim and/or vinegar, I can easily look past this in realising that making such compromises is regrettably a necessary part writing books and short animated videos with the aim of popularising discussion of Big Ideas - an endeavour which I wholeheartedly support . Also there are a fair few of your views which I disagree with (especially strongly on theology - hey Alain, if you made it past that last sentence why not read the rest of this post?) but for the most part you seem to be on the same page as me so hey, whatevs, let's go for an erudite conversation over toasted sandwiches and herbal tea sometime. Or something.

** Also author of The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists, Art as Therapy, Cats Are Basically People Too Penélope Damn Your Non-Inclusive Allergies, and the Waterstones'-holiday-bargain-table-second-best-selling autobiographical My Quite Nice Life as a Pretend French Intellectual.
(sorry Alain sorry sorry sorry read previous asterisk!!!!1)

*** There are several blog-writing gimmicks that I just get a huge kick out of using: the pointless asides relegated to asterisked paragraphs (one of which this entire bit will be), totally-unnecessarily-long-hyphenated-construction-of-a-concept-that-could-just-be-explained-normally, the well-chosen random (but pleasant!) link for a random phrase (oh yeh now that was a well-chosen link - just to point out that the previous usage of the word 'that' was also a hyperlink, something that shouldn't normally warrant pointing out, but I've italicised it to help the sentence flow and the link's default boldness on a skinnier font might be harder to spot; also I wanted an excuse to embark upon a tortuous run-on sentence inside parentheses, which was the next on my list of gimmicks), the self-deprecating reflexive addresses to an enthusiastic audience that largely (I've seen my own blog's viewing statistics - hrmph) doesn't exist, and finally the self-indulgent meta-commentary, of which this entire bit has also been a part.

**** I promised I was going to have no more fun with the remainder of this post: hence why I purposefully wrote this but, knowing full well that it was a lie, and that dead moths can only remain as such until their consumption or decomposition. It's a harrowing and bleak thought. Especially since I quite like moths.

***** I shit you not, my laptop literally just crashed again. Fortunately I'm deeply paranoid now about the whole charade of blogwriting, and have been mashing the 'Save' button every few sentences. Perhaps the great Alain de Botton is more powerful than we had previously conceived, and is using his populist powers of pseudo-philosophy (SEE FIRST ASTERISK) to junk up my computer cos he can sense I'm respectfully disagreeing with him on the point of his neglect of theology in discussing religion? Or many he's angry that I keep insulting-him-but-not-really? Or maybe it's upsetting him how many metaphorical fish I've gutted? Hm.