Books That Make Sense Of The Culture Wars Pt.1
Books That Make Sense Of The Culture Wars Pt.1
Book Recommendations 1 - 10
Making Sense Of The Culture Wars Book Recommendation 1 to 10.
These are the first ten books I recommend reading to help gain insight into the ever-evolving complexities of the culture wars. Some are less obvious choices than others so will require some explanation. But needless to say I have my reasons for recommending these ten volumes as a collection.
My comments on each of these fascinating books is below. I had put together “mini book reports” originally posted serially to Facebook over a number of months. Some are quick descriptions and others have a little more commentary. I have reassembled the order into the sequence I recommend reading them in. I hope you enjoy these works as much as I did.
Written by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay
Impeccably researched and written. An extremely thorough examination of the history of social justice issues and the critical theories which define the modern day Social Justice Warrior.
This book is dense, technical and comprehensive in tracing the history of the rise of wokeism. One of the tougher to get through but very worth the time and effort. When you finish this book I promise the next one, having the clever and sardonic prose of Douglas Murray, will both entertain and inform.
The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race And Identity
Written by Douglas Murray
The Madness Of Crowds makes the argument that - “the rights fights of our time,” centering around race, gender and issues between the sexes, - “have moved from being a product of a system to being the foundations of a new one.”
In the passage below you get a glimpse of Douglas Murray’s wisdom:
“In an era without purpose, and in a universe without clear meaning, this call to politicize everything and then fight for it has undoubted attraction. It fills life with meaning, of a kind. But of all the ways in which people can find meaning in their lives, politics - let alone politics on such a scale -is one of the unhappiest.”
By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
This book was published in 2018. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were quick to identify the problem. Ahead of the curve you could say. Maybe I should have recommended this book first. It probably does the best job at illustrating the origin of our culture war issues; University campuses.
Jonathan Haidt is a Phd in Social Psychology. He is also the author of the best selling book “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Greg Lukianoff, a graduate of Stanford Law, and a specialist in First Amendment issues in higher education, is the president of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).
Greg Lukianoff had a life-long struggle with depression until he found Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. A trans-formative therapeutic process that retrains a person’s thinking towards more productive and positive types. It’s fascinating that Greg noticed the same destructive thought patterns in activist university students he encountered, that CBT had trained him to overcome.
The video above is a lecture regarding the book, by co-author Jonathan Haidt.
Tracing the sources of the division in North America - Helicopter parenting leading later to the need for “trigger warnings” and ideological “safe spaces” on university campuses is merely the tip of the iceberg. A quote invoked by the authors “prepare the children for the road, not the road for the children,” is a great take away.
The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
By Gad Saad
Dr. Gad Saad exposes the “idea pathogens” that are killing common sense and rational debate.
Incubated in our Universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms - including freedom of thought and speech.
It’s kind of important we like…fight back!
Dr. Saad writes about “an extraordinarily powerful epistemological tool” called “nomological networks of cumulative evidence.”
From the book:
“Replication studies, literature reviews, meta-analyses are means by which scientists amass cumulative evidence for a given phenomenon typically within rigidly defined methodologies, paradigms, and disciplines. But beyond this, there is a way to generate and organize knowledge so that it becomes difficult even for one’s staunchest detractors, wallowing in ideological biases, to deny your conclusions.”
The nomological network of cumulative evidence is the way to achieve this.
“This approach epitomizes the gift of the human intellect. It is akin to building a jig-saw puzzle. No single piece is sufficient to see the full image but once all the pieces are placed in their rightful positions, the final pattern emerges clearly.”
If you can’t visualize or imagine this, read the book for Dr. Saad’s examples. One, hilariously makes the point when Dr. Saad generates a nomological network of cumulative evidence on men’s preference for the “hour glass” shape in woman.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
By Abigail Shrier
Activists throw temper tantrums. Loud ones. At first we are shocked and shaken and rush to remove from shelves the book(s) that “threaten their safety.”
Apparently, and for a short time, the coddled triggered minority succeeded in the suppression of Abigail Shrier’s (author of Irreversible Damage) freedom of speech.
But cooler heads prevailed and her book has so far survived censorship. Decisions to not offer the book for sale by both Amazon and Target were reversed. Even Canadian libraries from Ottawa to Halifax, appealing to the importance of intellectual freedom, pushed back against activists.
In May of 2021 the Halifax Public Library released a statement explaining the reinstatement decision of Abigail Shrier’s book was based on an assessment against the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ Statement on Intellectual Freedom.
Halifax Pride has since broken ties with the library.
Chris Cochrane, vice-chair of Halifax Pride's board of directors and transgender and non-binary committee lead, said “As a trans person, I'm not going to debate my existence, and this book is definitely debating the existence of trans people.”
Debating the existence of trans people? I’m going to guess she didn’t read it.
Banning books? Really?. Silencing and suppressing intellectual freedom, and conversations around important gender issues, especially as they relate to children is the goal of transgender activists.
There is more to every story than the version told by one side. Discussions around the data and science of gender are not transphobic and do not “commit violence” against anyone.
All sides of the story need to be told. Be fairly represented. Adults need to then sift through the details and try to figure out the best way forward without doing Irreversible Damage.
Immediately caving to the demands of activists, without discussion and analysis of facts (and culling of the pseudo-facts) is not the way we do things in liberal society. We don’t ban books and we don’t suppress speech.
Get off my lawn.
PS - I got my copy of Irreversible Damage before they could reinstate the ban, and I suggest you don’t wait to get yours.
Discrimination and Disparities
By Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an economist, social theorist and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
While often described as a black conservative, he states, "I prefer not to have labels, but I suspect that 'libertarian' would suit me better than many others, although I disagree with the libertarian movement on a number of things."
Sowell thinks that systemic racism is an untested, questionable hypothesis that is a piece of propaganda pushed on the American people. In “Discrimination and Disparities” he covers the fallacy that statistical disparities in socioeconomic outcomes imply either biased treatment or genetic deficiencies.
Sowell also addresses the non sequitur that says that if individual economic benefits are not because of individual merit, there is justification for the government to redistribute those benefits.
Fascinating but highly accessible writing, and from an economist too! Thomas Sowell is an original who, like other brave intellectuals, is committed to confronting the truth found in methods of empirical data collection/analysis. The truth is out there. The X-files won’t help you make sense of the world, but Thomas Sowell will.
Are you brave enough to take this red pill? It is exceedingly difficult to be “the one,” among a group of West-hating friends, to hear the messages of the scholars calling b.s. On wokeness. You don’t need to download Kung-fu abilities to join this fight, just open your mind, and this book, and start reading.
By Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is a renowned psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow is stunning! A book of study after study after study (my favorite kind), demonstrating both the fast intuitive reflex thinking (which basically runs as a bias machine), and the slower more contemplative thinking (guided largely by heuristic).
This book is probably the most unlikely on this list to be grouped with other books more directly related to culture issues. I included it after Thomas Sowell because of what Discrimination & Disparities teaches about false assumptions and people’s stubborn adherence to a social vision based on fallacies.
Anyone who believes that the West is systemically racist needs to examine some of the rich, empirically generated, literature on cognitive bias. Start with this book.
The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. Could cases of perceived “micro-aggression” (often assumed to be acts of discrimination) in fact be attributed to the negativity bias?
Here are two heuristics that look a lot like racism on the surface:
1) The Availability Heuristic - which basically says whatever the most repeated story is, the one most “available,” is the one you will most likely go with. Even if the story is about imagined rampant societal racism.
2) The Familiarity Heuristic - is the internal bias that all people have that makes them favor things that are familiar to them.
Both of these, and other, common heuristics are often mistaken for discrimination. It would be great if people had more knowledge about the mechanism of human behavior instead of so often making such cynical assumptions.
In The Neuroscience of Racial Bias, published on Psychology Today, Joshua Gowan phd., suggesting readers acquaint themselves with Kahneman’s book, states “Negative thoughts crop up automatically, before we’re consciously aware of them, so tamping them down requires extra mental effort.” Bizarrely a study is discussed in which an anti-anxiety drug was shown to reduce implicit negative racial bias.
If anything, considering discrimination through the lens of intuitive thinking and the implicit bias’s attached, a more nuanced and perhaps complex picture of discrimination emerges. One that is not fully consistent with the prevailing social attitude that the West is systemically racist, sexist and terrible as a lingering residue of our colonial past.
Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
By Matt Taibbi
Hate Inc argues "that what most people think of as 'the news' is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business." It contains an interview with Noam Chomsky, whose 1988 book Manufacturing Consent heavily influenced Taibbi's writings. In Hate Inc, Taibbi inverts the phrase to "manufacturing discontent.”
From the book:
“So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.”
Good News! - Hate Inc. is being made into a documentary!
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media
By Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
If the Overton Window defines the spectrum of “acceptable” governmental policies - then it is Herman and Chomky’s Propaganda Model that defines the spectrum of “acceptable” media discourse permitted by our masters.
Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. This was a little before the polarized and divisive mainstream news organs of today (CNN vs. Fox). In the book Hate Inc, Matt Taibbi pays homage by explaining the insane media circus that was the Trump years through the format of a somewhat unofficial sequel to Manufacturing Consent. Hate Inc also includes an interview with Noam Chomsky where he reflects on the impact of the book.
Below is the amazing documentary Manufacturing Consent Co-produced by Canada’s National Film Board.
Below is a quote relevant today referring to how the media’s selection process - involving facts included, or not included in news stories where the context and premise is often manipulated - functions to ensure that it be rare for “news and commentary to find their way into the mass media if they failed to conform to the framework of the established dogma.”
From the book:
“Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power.”
The books of dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn used to be the inspiration by which anti-oppression activists understood the world and oriented their efforts towards social justice.
Today’s activists have become hyper-focused on exaggerating domestic culture issues and see domestic oppression, harm and violence at fictitiously high levels. Books by these classic dissident authors can fill in the global context woke activists are missing by teaching, among other things, about the aggressive, hegemonic, and oppressive tactics the United States and their western partners employ unjustly, outside of western borders, all over the world.
The same corporate and governmental powers that sponsor activist efforts to achieve a social justice utopia domestically, are often involved (either directly or indirectly) in terrible acts of oppression elsewhere in the world. It’s the ultimate bait-and-switch and speaks to, among other things, the gullibility of the “Social Justice Warrior.”
Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom
By Michael Rectenwald
The idea in Google Archipelago (a play on Gulag Archipelago - the title of the great book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the cruel communist prison system in the Soviet Union) is that Google is a “governmentality.” Meaning, in most respects Google routinely deploys the power of a government in the societies you find it (which at this point is almost all societies around the globe?...anyone know how many exactly?).
The method is monopoly (like in communism), or control through a small group of partnering monopolies (like in fascism). But the end goal is totalitarianism. It might be a “soft totalitarianism,” we might all love it (don’t count on it though).
While woke Antifa types think everyone is a fascist they misunderstand that the marxian (communist) principles they advocate for are simply more tools for tyrants to gain monopolistic control. Monopolies arise from capitalism or socialism - totalitarians don’t care which.
Google has a monopoly on internet search, essentially controlling by proxy both the production and flow of knowledge throughout society. Google’s search results (on Youtube as well, since Google owns them) are skewed to Leftist ideologies. Facebook shadow-bans right leaning views (as exposed by Project Veritas).
All the main social media platforms routinely “cancel” or “unperson” people (mostly those with views deemed problematic by the woke) by both suspending and cancelling accounts. Conservative voices are actively being silenced through shadow-banning and various other censorship algorithms and discourse controlling methods (the Overton window seems to be closing for right leaning views).
What I have in-adequately outlined above is an alarm that has more effectively been sounded by countless other keen observers (I’ll provide sources in the comments to back up this claim if anyone feels this is not obvious stuff I’m saying).
I’m not a conservative (although I am voting conservative this time...due to the rampant leftist authoritarianism engulfing society), I’ve always been liberal. I believe, as do others, that a healthy societal discourse, and intellectual class, requires the presence of both left and right views and opinions. As a classical liberal, I feel it is important to defend conservatives (they are essentially being bullied), because everyone benefits when Left and Right come together and reach, through productive discourse, compromises bolstered by the best of both sides.
Google operates in partnership with other big tech monopolies, Legacy Media, and established corporate brands (Gillette and Nike to name two), as well as sponsoring (using) the leftist activists of today trying to convince us all that corporate monopolists are somehow on the side of social justice. Since when?
The term social justice, having been thoroughly hi-jacked, now refers to Wokeism. Wokeism, in a nutshell, is Leftist Authoritarianism (a neo marxian-style revolution aimed at dividing everyone and dismantling capitalism). The governments of the West are actively collaborating with big businesses (some so big they are functional “governmentalities”) and out-of-control activists hell bent on tearing down the structures of society.
Clearly Google, Facebook, Gillett, Nike et al and their government/governmentality partners (sometimes even the Chinese Communist Party), are not going to tear down anything that doesn’t end with their totalitarian aspirations. So yeah...we should try to stop that.
