A book and a few of the articles I’ve been reading lately.
The book I’ve been reading lately is Maria Ressa’s How To Stand Up To A Dictator. Ressa was the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, and the book is a memoir of a career spent holding power to account. She is a renowned international journalists who for decades challenged corruption in her native country, the Philippines, which she helped transform from an authoritarian state to a democracy.
The book tells the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Philippines and around the world, has been aided by the social media companies which have allowed their platforms to spread the lies that infect us all, pitting us against one another, igniting and creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. This network of disinformation has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America’s Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.
The salient point is that democracy is fragil and that Western readers must recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late.
Just a very few recent noteworthy articles I’ve read
“GOP plans to win this election — in court, if not at the ballot box” by David Daley. He is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count.” He is the former editor-in-chief of Salon. (I still encourage my readers to vote for the Democratic party and not the Nazi (Republican) party. And this isn’t hyperbole.)
“Moral progress is annoying” by Daniel Kelly who is a professor in the philosophy department at Purdue University in Indiana. This is a great essay belieing the claim that our “norm psychology” is a good guide to moral truth. Our moral intuitions don’t discern moral truth. Moreover, the fact that something is new or different or unsettling—something that may make you feel yuchy—is not an argument against that thing.
“Why psychedelics produce some of the most meaningful experiences in people’s lives” by
Oshan Jarow who is a staff writer with Vox’s Future Perfect. I think the title explains what this piece is about.
“The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel” byAdam Frank and Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College. Again I’ll let the title be the guide and if interested you can read more about this topic in the essay “How to understand all the talk about a “crisis in cosmology.” Perhaps the standard model needs to be seriously revised; or perhaps just slightly modified.
“Whither philosophy?” by Siobhan Lyons, a scholar in media and cultural studies based in Sydney, Australia. It’s main theme is that philosophy today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help. I always wanted to exist in the space between these two extremes as a philosopher. Whether I succeeded I do not know.
That’s it for now. So much to learn, so little time.
We now live in the ‘Age of the Narrative’, and as such, our personal reality is a reflection of the conversation that is happening in our conscious mind, although we are not always really conscious of what our consciousness is thinking about, the supra narrative supports the idea that if you believe it it is real, it is accepted as real, within the boundaries of what is acceptable, outside that perimeter, we are taught, lies the world of dangerous and false disinformation.
When we were urged to temper our thoughts to the precepts of Christianity, as explained by the expert Christians, there were thoughts that a good Christian shouldn’t ever think, and should you ever verbalize any of them and depending on who you were, censure, perhaps harsh censure could befall you!
Humans of a certain class, caste?, seem to have an innate need to be important and powerful and if they are born into the right families they are taught to see themselves as the rightful heirs to importance and power, they accept their roles as their right and feel importance and meaning in their lives and in themselves. Our lives are the roles we play on the stage of life, the more and better props we have, the more meaningful and important our roles are perceived to be by the audience in the seats, and the audience in our mind.
One important way we seek comfort in the face of the unknowable, is through Rituals and Incantations.
An important ritual ‘The Federal Election’ is happening now, and every eligible person has the right to vote for whom they please, The Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, and The Constitution are important props in this process, yet learned voices are now warning that the Constitution maybe a danger to Democracy because, by making claim on it’s wording a purveyor of disinformation might actually be elected. ‘These are dangerous Times’.
Who are we really, we sophisticates of 2024? William Manchester wrote a book titled ‘A World Lit only by fire, and he described the folks at that time as they faced the unknown and unknowable future;
Excerpt from, A World lit only by fire
The mighty storm was swiftly approaching, but Europeans were not only unaware of it,
they were convinced that such a phenomena could not exist, shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the Sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon toed gait of rickets’s victims, their vacant faces, pocked by Small pox, turned towards a future they thought they knew — gullible, pitiful, innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning for a thousand years before.
William James Manchester (1991)
A quick comment with neither reflection nor investigation beyond reading your essay.
Pleased to see that Maria Ressa has a book out, and that you are reading and championing her work.
My first exposure to her work, and the area of disinformation/false realities came from the book “This is not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality” by Peter Pomerantsev.
A brave woman shining just a bit of light in a dark, not so brave new world.
Thank you for the reading tips, and regards to all!
thanks Lyle.