Necessary reading for those who wish to foster civil discourse and societal cooperation.
A constitutional scholar offers insights into why she believes that laws have become untenable “substitutes for our own judgement and collective action.”
The law has long been considered the backbone of a “healthy, stable [social] order,” but Skach argues its rigidity has also been detrimental to the development of a fully engaged citizenry. As she writes, order in the modern world must come from “spontaneous, self-enforcing cooperation,” which “calls for multiple leaps of faith and trust.” At the same time, this implies that citizens are less subjects of law and more community members that enjoy “rights but also [owe] obedience to [themselves] and other humans” as they respect the rights of the planet and all living things. To work toward that end, Skach makes suggestions to help people become better citizens in the absence of a governing state and its laws. One approach is to become more open to decentralized social processes and movements and cultivate skepticism of centralized leadership hierarchies. Another is to embrace the idea of congregating with others in physical spaces that are neither fully public nor private to help foster trust—the kind of gatherings that have been lost in the virtual age of social media—and “provide the basis for social interaction at the macro level.” Growing and sharing food is also essential to the ethic of empathy the author believes is crucial to creating citizens who can both work and live together in a democratic, cooperative fashion. Utopian as her ideas seem, the book’s premise—that “it is with human nature…that we must begin and do the hard work”—is an important one to remember in divisive times, when the law has become meaningless at best or equated with violence at worst.
Necessary reading for those who wish to foster civil discourse and societal cooperation.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781541605534
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
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A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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