“I am forty-nine years old. I know this because I checked with my mother.”
For fifteen years, Rick Mercer, an ebullient, very funny, intelligent an“I am forty-nine years old. I know this because I checked with my mother.”
For fifteen years, Rick Mercer, an ebullient, very funny, intelligent and sarcastic to a fault, gay, firmly left-leaning television journalist, regaled a rapt TV audience with a weekly “rant”. You wouldn’t win any prizes for guessing that his primary targets were politics and politicians and their decisions (Trump and Trudeau heading up the lengthy list) but, that said, you have to give credit to Mercer for spreading his venom across the whole of Canadian society. Curling; the bottomless money pit that was the Prime Minister’s former residence; Tim Horton’s, the Canadian coffee icon; payday money lenders (aka loan sharks); i-phones and modern technology; university censorship; homophobia (no big surprise there!); gridlock; the Post Office; false advertising; Quebec separation; … well, as you can see, the list is lengthy and spectacularly varied!
FINAL REPORT is simply a collection of the best of those rants with a small handful of short, new essays, (“reflection, recollections and revelations”) added in for good measure. If you’re a Canadian, you need to read this collection. You’ll find yourself, on more than one occasion, nodding your head in vociferous agreement or laughing out loud. If you’re from foreign parts (particularly if you’re an American) reading this may give you a heightened insight into the thinking of left-wing Canadians in a modern world.
“A bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.”
Naomi Klein characterized Donald Trump’s 2016 dubious electoral college ena“A bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.”
Naomi Klein characterized Donald Trump’s 2016 dubious electoral college enabled takeover of the presidency as a “dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises.” In 2017, in the immediate afternmath of the election, she suggested that “his reckless agenda – including a corporate takeover of government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy – will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.” In short, not to put too fine a point on it, she saw his election as an existential threat to the USA and to mankind’s very existence on the planet.
Her title choice, NO IS NOT ENOUGH, exemplified her conviction that ensuring Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was a necessary condition to the continued existence of the USA as a democratic country ruled by the rule of law. BUT it also clearly pointed out that Trump was not the problem per se. He was nothing more than a symptom of an underlying disease in American culture.
As the USA, in its never ending state of electioneering and campaigning, approaches the 2022 mid-term elections, the NO in Naomi Klein’s title can now arguably be expanded to a more comprehensive list of mandatory rock-bottom achievements necessary for Americans to give themselves a fighting chance to step back from the brink of self-destruction:
1) retention of the Democrat majority in the House 2) increase the Democrat majority in the Senate to AT LEAST 52-48 to eliminate the perennial obstruction of Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema 3) eliminate the filibuster PERMANENTLY 4) impeach and convict Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch for perjury and remove them from the Supreme Court 5) increase SCOTUS to 13 judges to recognize the overwhelming workload and to accommodate the increase in the number of federal circuits 6) appoint Democrat judges to SCOTUS to fill the new seats in spite of the anticipated negativity and obstruction from Republican senators 7) indict, charge, try, convict and imprison Trump for the remainder of his life
And, make no mistake! These events if they come to pass only allow the USA to BEGIN the process of recognizing and defining their underlying diseases and to attempt to repair them. They are necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions. The failure to complete even a single one of these conditions will be the death knell of the USA, its probable dissolution, and the devolution of whatever remains into a neo-Nazi oligarchic theocratic authoritarian dictatorship that threatens the entire world.
NO IS NOT ENOUGH is an informative, gripping, shocking, compulsively readable, scholarly book-length essay explaining how the basic elements of society around the world “– race, gender, class, economics, history, culture – have intersected with one another to produce the current crisis.” It is cautiously optimistic (and why wouldn’t it be? The alternative is ultimately the failure of mankind as a species on the planet … that is to say, common sense, rationality and optimism are the only choices in which we allow ourselves the opportunity to see the results of our own work). “Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”
To those who suggest that Naomi Klein’s optimistic prognostications are impossible, she responds, “If what is considered politically possible today consigns us to a future of [] chaos the day after tomorrow, then we have to change what’s politically possible.” I agree. The USA needs to face the reality that nothing less than an awesome paradigm shift and a complete rewrite of its society and cultural values will save it from itself.
NO IS NOT ENOUGH is a book that everyone needs to read.
Aldus was born in 2010 and had the great fortune to live in a 21st century in which the world had found the wisdom, tDystopian sci-fi is so last year!
Aldus was born in 2010 and had the great fortune to live in a 21st century in which the world had found the wisdom, the strength, the will, and, for the most part at least, the political courage to do almost everything right. The world wasn’t perfect but might be described as a reasonable approximation to a utopia. Aldus, a robotics technician, is living in the year 2084 in which the existential threat posed by accelerating global warming has been defeated and exponential population growth has been reversed. But, at the “tender” age of 74 (a far cry from the expected current life spans of 120 to 130 years), Aldus, who was infected with Covid as a child during the pandemic of the 2020s, is suffering from a long Covid ailment that will likely lead to a debilitating form of dementia and an untimely and early demise. Accordingly, he has decided to deal with that slow burn long-delayed infection by writing a history of the 21st century. EMAIL FROM THE FUTURE is that history which anonymously appeared in a current day blogger’s e-mail in-box via a 2084 quantum time-shifting technology that allows the transmittal of information through time.
While the back cover marketing blurb described EMAIL FROM THE FUTURE as a “utopian novel in the truest sense” that was “heartfelt, hopeful, and often humorous”, I would go much further and add the adjectives evocative, provocative, cautiously optimistic, entertaining, instructive, and thought-provoking. Some of the topics that would be considered in a series of futurist essays are obvious – global climate change, education, taxation, and organized religion, for example. But the actual list of topics that Rogers examined through his imaginative yet well-considered crystal ball was much more extensive than that – robotics, death and aging, the internet, transportation, crime, racism, homophobia, women’s rights, sentience and consciousness, space exploration, food, automation, employment and universal income, genetic engineering, sex, gaming, virtual reality and much, much more.
From front cover to back, EMAIL FROM THE FUTURE is jammed pack with quotable quotes, each one of which considered on its own would be quite capable of generating research, careful consideration, debate, and hours of thought between friends or book club members. Just a handful of examples to illustrate:
On wealth and consumerism:
“Today to die with excessive wealth reflects a life poorly lived. One leaves one’s children skills, values and a network of friends. These are true legacies. … Today to be called a “consumer” is an insult”
“If you eliminate the fear of losing one’s income, as we have with Living Income, and ensure that every citizen has physical and mental wellness, and that most people are not grossly dissimilar in actual wealth, the incidence of pathologic greed drops precipitously.”
On science and health care:
“…my [digital] double saved my life when I was 60; it signaled an aortal wall weakness that would have caused an aneurysm and stroke within a few years. Dr Leah sent me to a surgeon who injected a nanostent that resurfaced the interior of the aorta with stem cells. I came back in the next day, she triggered autodissolve on the stent, and announced that I was good for at least another 60 years.”
On politics in a modern America threatened by right-wing neo-fascism and evangelical Christian theocracy:
A “shift in the voting population made the official Second Constitutional Convention possible. Convened in Philadelphia in the late 2030s, there were four Amendments: a guarantee of all-gender rights, fully public election funding, shelter and healthcare as rights, and a legal framework for digital voting to replace the electoral college.
“The establishment of fully public election funding was perhaps the single greatest defeat for the ultrarich and the corporate powers in the US. … ideas, not money, should be the fuel of elections.”
If you’re a Trumpian in the USA or a hard-core nationalist conservative from some other country plagued by the growth of right-wing hatred, then EMAIL FROM THE FUTURE will almost certainly stick in your craw and bring you to the point of gagging. On the other hand, if your thinking is already leaning to the left or if your are a centrist or marginal right-winger open to new ideas that might prompt you to re-consider where the world is headed, then I can’t recommend EMAIL FROM THE FUTURE strongly enough. You need to read this. You need to read it now!
An introduction to Critical Race Theory vis-à-vis North American Aboriginals
There’s simply no way that you read Thomas King’s THE INCONVENIENT INDIANAn introduction to Critical Race Theory vis-à-vis North American Aboriginals
There’s simply no way that you read Thomas King’s THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN and come out the other side with a single reaction. If you are a rational reader with any sense of fairness, tolerance, or compassion, you’re going to be shocked, disgusted, dismayed, embarrassed, disappointed, enlightened, amused, and angry … simultaneously. Thomas King characterizes the white man’s grouping of North America’s aboriginal population into three populations – dead Indians, live Indians, and legal Indians. And sadly, he accurately and succinctly summarizes the white man’s reaction to each group – the white man loves dead Indians; can’t see, ignores, and forgets live Indians; and hates legal Indians.
While the entire history of the red man’s treatment in North America at the hands of the white man is and has been atrocious since Europe’s first 16th century intrusions on this side of the Atlantic, King is quick to acknowledge that grand maxim, “You can’t judge the past by the present.” But he’s equally quick to point out that dodging the guilt for past conduct by trotting out that maxim is simply too convenient and, indeed, specious. “Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.”
And to be a compassionate 21st century informed Canadian, reading Thomas King’s THE INCONVIENT INDIAN is also necessary. One can but hope that a book like this is put into the high school history curriculum. Perhaps then, a future partnership can be forged that will make something of the historical mess that North American has handed its first inhabitants.
The back cover marketing blurb describes it very simply.
“THE TIPPING POINT is that magic moment when an idea, trenThe biography of a very simple idea
The back cover marketing blurb describes it very simply.
“THE TIPPING POINT is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
The introduction covers that summary in slightly greater detail,
“It is the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, … Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”
Teachers, advertising executives, business owners, politicians, social workers, authors and the like would do very well to read Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant musings concerning the characteristics of “epidemic” style societal change – contagiousness; little causes can have enormous effects; and change happens, not gradually, but a single dramatic moments. I’m not sure that I learned anything that would affect my personal life or cause me to change my behaviour in any way but there is no question that I did learn stuff and I also enjoyed the ride.
Indeed, there is every likelihood that if I had read THE TIPPING POINT as a young man, I would almost certainly have added Psychology as an elective to my university course list. It’s compelling, convincing and astonishingly interesting. BLINK, another of Malcolm Gladwell’s work, was just as amazing and I’ll look forward eagerly to trying more. OUTLIERS and TALKING TO STRANGERS come to mind as top of the list candidates.
(On a related note, I'm wondering, given the world's current overwhelming concern with Coronavirus pandemic, if any public health officials have given thought to applying Gladwell's ideas to the intractable problem of persuading blockheaded American anti-vaxxers to change their minds??)
“Imagine spending a lifetime creating an entire body of knowledge about your imaginary friend. That’s theology!”
I should have realized that the su“Imagine spending a lifetime creating an entire body of knowledge about your imaginary friend. That’s theology!”
I should have realized that the sub-title was a giveaway, “Discord in the After-Life: A Bishop and an Atheist Deny Their Culpability for Abuse and War”.
Let me put my belief simply. Atheism is simply an unwillingness to believe in the existence of a god of any kind when there is no testable, verifiable, repeatable evidence to support that belief. And when atheism is defined in that way, the only correct way I might add, there is no possible world in which atheism can be considered as a sufficient or necessary condition for violence and war-mongering, right wing politics, or fascism. On the other hand, I’ll give full marks to the author who, despite his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, comes down hard, unrelentingly, firmly, solidly, smash-your-fist-down hard, on the Roman Catholic administration for its continuing crimes and cover-ups of the clergy child abuse sex scandal. Although why that criminality isn’t sufficient to cause the author to repudiate his adherence to a disgusting religion and theology escapes me completely.
CRIMES AGAINST CHILDREN was clearly written by an unswerving theist, a Christian one at that, who assumed the veracity of the Christian version of a deity from first page to last and simply assumed that the typical atheist’s questions were risible in the face of a god whose love should be unquestioned and who ultimately would demand our love as a prerequisite for entry into heaven. Here is a direct quote from Rosser’s version of god meeting the titular deceased atheist at the pearly gates, what an atheist would call a narcissistic god whose desire for adulation must be characterized as psychopathic:
“GOD: There is nothing that I have created that I do not love. The fact that some of my creatures do not love me in return, and have chosen to live in eternity beyond my presence, grieves me. But I gave each of them a choice. The same choice that I give to you.”
In other words, “Love me or leave me”. Rosser “presents a vision of God” that the back cover marketing blurb would suggest portrays “the ultimate conveyor of restorative justice”. I think not. I have found nothing in Rosser's theistic Christian ramblings to persuade me that Roman Catholicism is not evil. Nor am I persuaded in even the slightest to reconsider my position that atheism is a just, moral, and perfectly reasonable and eminently justified approach to the world until explicitly proven otherwise.
“Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of the Google search.”
In SAPIENS, Yuval Noah Harari offered his distinctly left-wing interpretat“Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of the Google search.”
In SAPIENS, Yuval Noah Harari offered his distinctly left-wing interpretation of the history of mankind’s cultural evolution, of the possible reasons for its xenophobia, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, greed and capitalism, its consumerism, its imperialism, its wars, and its creation of gods, religion and shamanism. As a reader with a definite left-wing bent to my beliefs and my thinking, I found myself nodding in agreement at Harari’s narrative and his conclusions. But I’ll admit that I found myself wondering whether his left-wing thinking led him to the book’s conclusions or whether his academic research led him to conclusions that appeared to be left-wing in nature.
And now, 21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY continues that thread of consciousness, if you will. Noah Harari moves from the distant past of mankind's entire history to the very recent past, to today and to a very, very small number of years in a possible future. In twenty-one loosely connected essays on a variety of topics, he posits how that seventy millennia of evolution has affected our short-term thinking, how we have evolved (devolved?) in the microcosm of the high speed historical microburst of two decades of the 21st century, and how we might position ourselves for a chance at continued life on this beleaguered planet. He celebrates “human wisdom” but decries the ubiquitous effects of “human stupidity”.
He asks,
“What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming? Which civilization dominates the world – the West, China, Islam? Should Europe keep its doors open to immigrants? Can nationalism solve the problems of inequality and climate change? What should we do about terrorism?”
Consider the following tidbits of his thinking:
On social media and community: “people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet.”
On human-caused global climate warming: “… as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict”.”
On shamanism and the outright fraud of a religious patriarchy: “The true expertise of priests and gurus has never really been rainmaking, healing, prophecy, or magic. Rather, it has always been interpretation. A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.”
On nationalism and the necessity for humility and a more modest outlook toward our true place in the world: “One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world – and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole.”
On bigotry, xenophobia and religious zealotry: “From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history”
or “When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath)”. (Omigod, I couldn’t agree more!!)
And, if you are of a secular, atheist bent (as I am), you will positively howl with delight when you read the etymological history of the phrase “Hocus Pocus!” I had NO idea!
21 LESSONS is an absolutely first-rate, mind-expanding, evocative, provocative, thrilling, intellectual joy ride. Take your time and savor Harari’s thoughts one bite at a time. Although there is a clear flow to the set of ideas in the total book, each essay can stand on its own merits so you might also choose to read it slowly alongside your favourite bit of easy-going fiction. That will work too.
Definitely recommended. And on that note, I have definitely added HOMO DEUS to my TBR list.
“Asking what came before the Big Bang is … like asking what is south of the South Pole?”
If he isn’t the greatest intellect of the last century, I’“Asking what came before the Big Bang is … like asking what is south of the South Pole?”
If he isn’t the greatest intellect of the last century, I’m certainly not certain who I’d put in front of him. In any event, his thoughts on some of the most pressing, most confusing, most challenging, and most urgent philosophical, scientific and cultural questions are certainly worth reading. Is there a God? What is inside a black hole and can we travel in time? Should we be pursing colonization of space? What is the future of artificial intelligence? How did the universe begin?
Eminently readable, compelling, provocative and informative, BRIEF ANSWERS TO THE BIG QUESTIONS belongs on the reading list of any well-informed and concerned citizen of planet Earth.
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