An intensely intriguing if seemingly unreachable vision of a new future for the world.
A complex, multipart agenda for a future in which humans retain their humanity.
Harvey kicks off his latest book, a follow-up to 2019’s impressive Utopia in the Anthropocene, with a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be a human on planet Earth? The question, which every society in human history has faced, has become incredibly complicated in the present era by both an ever-worsening climate crisis and the hyperaccelerated technological development that Harvey describes as “the biggest psychological experiment in human history…unregulated, unsupervised and unfolding before our very eyes.” He naturally sees these two vectors as inherently opposed to each other, with climate change leading to large portions of the global South soon becoming uninhabitable for humans, and the technological change leading to a merging of human and machine (“humachination”) that will usher in a new dystopian era the author refers to as the Technocene. Harvey draws on his own background as both an entrepreneur and an organizational psychologist (“the technology of being human, so to speak”) in order to provide alternatives to what he describes as the “fusion of lightly regulated technology and free market capitalism.” In a series of topic-oriented and well-researched chapters, he puts forward a practical vision for steps we can take to avoid the Technocene, from implementing antimonopoly legislation and reforestation policies to restructuring livestock farming, which uses three-quarters of the world’s farmland while providing less than 20% of the world’s caloric consumption (and a sixth of its carbon emissions).
The main strength of Harvey’s book is its comparative lack of naïveté. He’s aware of both the seeming outlandishness of his propositions and the essentially unbeatable corporate, governmental, and social forces arrayed against their implementation. This renders his book far more of a thought-provoking treatise than an actual plan for action. His suggestion of the one solution to the threats of humachination, for instance, is a “permanent moratorium on all advanced AI,” which he readily concedes may require that “all computer programming will have to be confined to relatively simple, highly transparent usages.” Since this kind of adaptation could only be brought about by the physical destruction of all human civilization in something like a catastrophic asteroid strike, and since societies will absolutely never adopt it willingly under any circumstances imaginable, this change and the bulk of Harvey’s other projections quickly begin to feel very utopian indeed. “Egalitarianism can be a tough discipline,” he writes in the understatement of the century, “in that it involves the constant containment of selfish desires.” And it’s in his stout opposition to those selfish desires that Harvey achieves his book’s most stirring narrative thread. At its heart, this book is less about the mechanics of reimagining political, social, scientific, and organizational institutions and more about reimagining “the psychology of the Ecocene, a state in which ecological and egalitarian values become the bedrock of everyday lived experience.” Quite apart from his book’s formidable research grounding, it’s Harvey’s faith in the improvability of humankind, particularly at this dark moment in history, that feels both quixotic and inspiring. Like any good utopian dream.
An intensely intriguing if seemingly unreachable vision of a new future for the world.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990015616
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Steady State Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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