Five books that made me think this year

At least as a publicly shared memory, it’s not too much of a stretch to say 2009 stacks up as one of the more terrible news-worthy years. I don’t feel the need to rehash the op-ed cacophony decrying this decade over the past few weeks, or the desire to reiterate numerals tied to economic woes or war-ful body counts. Without the inauguration of the first black president, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the TV show Jersey Shore, this year would have been a complete disaster.

Thanks to my new-found love of news-aggregating websites, I am among the millions exposed to an excess of information on a daily basis. As a response to over-stimulation and the need for idealist delusion, I refined the mind through some books by chance and intent this year. Here is a list of the top five that changed my thoughts for 2009; I recommend them to everyone and anyone:

5) Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama. Yeah, I know, this is a very political book. I mean, he is the president, and he wrote it as an emerging politician. Still, I could hardly believe this thinker came to be the most powerful person in the world. His understanding of deeper concepts like ‘power’ and ‘justice’ never felt cliched or deceitful. His narrative, unlike most other political memoirs, was honest, his self-awareness professorial, not presidential. Rather than opening with blanket statements about race relations in the United States, he traces his own path through thought and time to emerge as one who has a very passionate idea of an America that can be rehabilitated. It is also an untarnished mirror to his current decision-making.

4) Pluralism, by William Connolly. This is a very academic text from the renowned political theorist so I won’t pretend to have read it cover to cover. But several essays help untangle religion and politics. First, Connolly addresses what he calls the ‘double constitution’ of religions and existential faiths: the universalizing content of beliefs, and their parochial reality in public life. After skillfully illuminating this dilemma, he asks: how do we make sense of this unavoidable contradiction and what does it mean for politics? Ultimately, Connolly makes a distinction between pluralism and relativism. Whereas relativism tolerates absolute ambiguity in terms of what is or can be a good, pluralism is a political system that protects against any total or universalizing claim that seeks to displace other competing beliefs. Basically he puts pluralism and politics before any singular belief. Also, Connolly points out that secularism has the effect of strengthening reactionary religious fervor: the more religion feels threatened or excluded as a legitimate form of existential beliefs, the more it will continue to rear its head politically. A great book for anyone looking to interrogate the contemporary concept of ‘secularism.’

3) Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell. This book is really devastating for optimists, so I recommend reading this when it is sunny outside. As the subtitle ‘The Permanence of Racism’ suggests, the famous founder of critical race theory walks back and forth between abandoning absolute emancipation for African Americans, and still being slightly optimistic about what small steps can be taken for racial equity. After all, if he really felt all was lost, he probably would not continue to publish books. Still, this forced me to reconsider my thoughts on race and class in contemporary America and the never-ending legacy that history continues to leave. I consider Bell’s book an important read in this last regard because it highlights how the alleged end of racial history serves to justify the status quo. As Bell makes quite clear, this is simply not the case; no one on the receiving end has the luxury of a clean slate.

2.5) Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, by Zygmunt Bauman. I loved this guy’s earlier book, Liquid Modernity, and his latest fails to disappoint. A social theorist/philosopher/phenomenologist, his arguments are unconventional, cutting-edge, and eloquent. If you’ve read my earlier entries, this book details his concept of ‘pointillist time,’ a nice little metaphor for how consumer life operates. Yeah, I still buy shit that I don’t need. But, I like this idea because the point is to understand what, if any, metaphysical assumption are made in the act of living for objects and against people. While my critical sensibilities have no doubt dulled post-college, I don’t think I will be shaking Bauman’s beliefs from my system anytime soon. My only comment is that he comes off as really preacher-y and overly speculative, likely due to his old age and ability to publish pretty much anytime he puts pen to paper.

2) Regulating Aversion, by Wendy Brown. I am a bit partial to this book because she signed my copy, but her chapter on the discourse of ‘tolerance’ explodes mainstream politics and foreign policy in a way that makes Noam Chomsky look like a toddler. Her framework allows for an effective way to call out states and agents for moralistic bullshit; she says one cannot divorce the language of tolerance from its political deployment, which often facilitates a way to control and smother cultural differences. She also talks about the increasing ‘culturalization of politics, ‘ whereby an individual is lumped in with an ethnic/cultural identity, regardless of other dimensions to his or her constitution; groups deemed ‘more cultural’ are immediately classified as inferior to the ‘less cultural’ mainstream. What I liked the most is her urge for a greater degree of self-awareness towards our own, American politics. Definitely pomo, but not too much.

1) Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor. Not to be confused with the genocidaire, Canada’s foremost political theorist and father of ‘communitarianism’ is a damn impressive writer. It’s a history of ethical thought through a very specific lens. I can’t quite tell if it is Aristotelian, mostly because I don’t know what that term truly entails. But, he takes the reader on a historical journey through the notion of the ‘self’ as a moral agent. While not always explicit, he makes the point that the West has refined and inherited moral language through a long series of debating philosophers, atheist and religious. The upshot is that lots of the contemporary moral debates come from these competing claims to the ‘good.’ So, instead of bickering about what is the right way to justify morals (religion, science, etc.) we (my community) should take stock of what we understand to be ‘goods,’ even ‘hyper-goods.’ Laying waste to procedural ethics, he actually envisions a multicultural society where different goods can coexist alongside one another, where any hypergood like human rights can be realized through intuitions already embedded in language. It is long, and this blog is short. But very worthwhile.