DIGITAL MANAGERIALISM: OUR BRAVE NEW WORLD

Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (New York: Basic Books, 2014) ("As its title suggests, this book will look at the role of information technology (IT) as a driver of this inequality. By making us dumber, smart machines also diminish our earning power. But the machines that do this are not the automating, stand-alone machine tools of the 1950s, or even the stand-alone mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s, but the vast networks of computers joined by software systems and the Internet, with the power to manage the affairs of giant global corporations and to drill down and micromanage the work of their single employees or teams of employees. There now exist in the US economy of the new century these very power agents of industrialization, known as Computer Business Systems (CBSs), that bring the disciplines of industrialization to an economic space that extends far beyond the factories and  construction sites of the industrial economy of the machine age: to wholesale  and retail, financial services, secondary and higher education, health care, 'customer relations management' and 'human resource management (HRM)', public administration, corporate management at all levels save the highest, and even the fighting of America's wars." Id. at 3. "Behind the langue de bois of digital managerialsm  lurks something truly transformative. The objects of management are no longer flesh-and-blood humans but their electronic representations. We have become the numbers, coded words, cones, squares, and triangles that represent us on digital screens. The human-contact side of management--the tasks of explanation, persuasion, and justification--fades away as workplace rules and procedures become texts showing up on employees' computer screens, with the whole apparatus of monitoring and control instantly recalibrated to accommodate the new metrics." Id. at 16-17. I experience the dehumanizing dumbing down everyday, as teaching loses its creative aspects and become rational-routines directed by administrators. Students are product, revenue streams, and teachers are simply costly inputs, to be reduced wherever, whenever, and however possible. In short order, college and university teachers will lose autonomy in the classroom, being told what to teach, how to teach, what texts to use, what texts and evaluations to give, what grades distributions to give, etc., all from a managerial elite more concerned with the financial bottom line than with the educational bottom line. We are just starting to realize that many colleges and university are merely the new Walmarts and Amazons, this notwithstanding their "nonprofit" status.).

RECALLING A MORE CIVILIZED TIME, AT LEAST FOR SOME

George F. Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola (New York: Norton, 2014) (December 20, 1927: "Reading Die Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann), this Forsyte Saga of old Lubeck, I cannot help but regret that I did not live fifty or a hundred years sooner. Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into an of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches, for they are too common. Similarly, we have too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them," "I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called 'liberal' and 'conservative,' when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshiping." Id. at 46-47. Reread this diary entry but place it in the context of our goolge-ized, youtube-ized, twitter-ized, facebook-ized, global media-ized, etc., twenty-first-century lives. Are we living lives, or merely existing, merely occupying time, space? It takes time to be and act civilized. And, in an age on instant gratification, obsessive self-love, and gross consumerism, we have no time to take time to be and act civilized. Also, see Fareed Zakaria, "'A Guest of My Time'," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/23/2014.).

IS IT IMMORAL TO EAT A CHOCOLATE BAR?

The original intent for today's blog posting was "Spring Quarter Suggested Readings For Law Students,"where ten or so books were to be listed. In reading Stephen Emmott's book (see below), however, I have concluded there is one, and only one, problem that renders all other problems minor. If we don't address and solve the problem of climate change there is no need to address other social, political and legal problems. Why, because, as Emmott notes, we will have fucked ourselves already. Thus, instead of a list of books to read for the spring quarter, might I suggest reading just one book . . . and, then, thinking long and hard about what you are going do, how you are going to change, how you are going to consume far, far, far less, thinking about what the rules, regulations, and laws would have to be, etc., so as not to fuck future generations. That is, if it is not too late already.

Stephen Emmott, Ten Billion (New York: Vantage Books, 2013) ("We are now almost certainly losing species at a rate up to one thousand times faster than we would expect form ordinary 'background' (natural) processes. This means than human activity is almost certainly now set to cause the greatest mass extinction of life on Earth since the event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. When newspapers, TV, and green campaigns want to highlight loss of species, they often do so by showing a picture of a lonely looking polar bear on a minuscule ice floe, looking as though 'this is it.' But losing polar bears is just the tip of the iceberg, no pun intended. What we need to be a lot more concerned about is the loss of biodiversity itself." Id. at 60-61. "It takes about 7,000 gallons of water to produce one kilogram of chocolate. that's roughly 304 gallons of water per Hershey bar. This should surely be something to think about while you're curled up on the sofa eating it in your pajama. Id. at 82. "We urgently need to do--and I mean actually do--something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will. I think we're fucked." Id, at 216.).

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RAPE?

Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Today rape remains a word in flux, and how we understand sexual violence continues to influence American politics. Contemporary debates over what constitutes sexual violence resembles conflicts that have recurred for almost two centuries. Women and their allies are still trying to expand the legal definition of rape to make it easier to prosecute men, whether or not they were strangers and whether or not the assault was physically violent. They continue to meet opposition from those who believe that only a narrower construction will protect men, whether from the fear of false accusations or from the loss of sexual privilege. African American and other ethnic minorities maintain their challenges to racial differentials in the prosecution of rape and to the heightened sexual vulnerabilities of women of color. As in the past much more than the legal definition of rape is at stake. The history of repeated struggles over the meaning of sexual violence reveals that the way we understand rape helps determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty and who may exercise fully the rights of American citizenship." Id. at 10-11.).

THE DEEP SPANISH ROOTS OF AMERICA

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2014) ("The  purpose of this book, in short, is to show that there are other US histories than the standard Anglo narrative: in particular, a Spanish history, rolling from south to north and intersecting with the story of the Anglo frontier, provides me with  a narrative yarn, and I thread other histories across and through it. I rotate the usual picture, so that instead or looking at the making of the United Stats from the east, we see what it looks like form the south, with Anglo-America injected or intruded into a Hispanic-accented account. The effect, I hope, is that, instead of the history of blacks, Native Americans, and later migrants becoming add-ons to an anglocentric story, they become equipollent strands in a complex fabric." Id. at xviii. "In consequence of their equivocal recall of British's influence on the western hemisphere, Americans do not like--or, for the most of the recent past, have not liked--to think of the United States as originating in imperialism. The standard myth has sidelined not only the role of Spaniards in founding America but also of English imperialists." Id. at 81."Myths are the motor of history. Facts that happen are often powerless to affect behavior. People act on the basis of falsehoods they believe." Id. at 84. "An old Spanish gypsy curse is, 'May you have lawsuits and win them,' because the costs of victory in litigation are morally and, often, financially ruinous." Id. at 128. "Historically well-educated people in the United States--admittedly, a very small minority--can remember the Alamo with respect for the victors and the Maine with sympathy for the vanquished." Id. at 241. Also, see Julio Ortega, Remapping the Territory," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/19/2014.).

GENUINE CHARACTER

Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014 ) ("If she possessed a genius--a growing number of us think she did--it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well an an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed." Id. at 156-157.  Also, see Andrew Sean Greer, "Diving Into The Wreck," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/5/2014.).

EASTERN SPIRITUALITY(?) AS CREATED BY WESTERN, COLONIAL IMPERIALISM

Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("This book examines India and China and the ways in which they have been transformed by Western imperial modernity. In my understanding the onset of modernity is located in the nineteenth century and is characterized politically by the emergence of the nation-state, economically by industrialization, and ideologically by the emphasis on progress and liberalism. What I call 'imperial modernity' is the formation of modernity under conditions of imperialism. This is a study in comparative historical sociology, informed by anthropological theory." Id. at 1. "The term 'spirituality' vaguely alludes to German Geist ('Spirit') and to mysticism. It is a modern Western concept, like 'religion,' 'magic,' and 'secularity.' There is no equivalent term either in Sanskrit or in Chinese. . . .  I am not able to present a genealogy of Indian and Chinese concepts, but instead I would merely point out that despite the ubiquitous reference to India and China (and indeed Asia) as 'spiritual,' spirituality is a modern, Western term." Id. at 35. "In most  places in the world one can follow courses in yoga and qi gong . . .  These forms of Indian and Chinese spirituality have gone global, but they are still connected to national identities. . . . However transcendent they claim to be as as forms of spirituality, they are deeply embedded in political and economic history.  Historically, yoga is an ancient system of breathing and body exercises that was reformulated at the end of the ninetieth century as part of Hindu nationalism, but simultaneously as a form of Eastern spirituality that was alternative to Western, colonial materialism. Today it is embedded in global ideas of health and good living, but also in modern management practices and corporate cultures." Id. at 168.).

GLOBAL POWER

Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: A History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the Preface: "This book braids two histories: a little and a grand one. The little history is local, tracing the career of the English East India Company's fortified settlement in Bengal from the eighteenth century. In the the nineteenth century, Fort William and the city of Calcutta that surrounds it became the capital of the British Empire in India. In the twentieth century, Calcutta also became a major place where nationalist modernity was fashioned and mass politics was organized. The conspiracies, ambitions, alliances, resistances, and confrontations that mark this local history of Fort William and its environs constitutes one strand within this book. The grand history, on the other hand, is about the global phenomenon of modern empire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. This history, I claim, was fundamentally shaped by the unprecedented problems posed by the fact of modern Europeans states ruling over Asiatic and African peoples, shaping in turn the norms and practices of the modern state itself. Modern empire was not an aberrant supplement to the history of modernity but rather its constituent part. It will continue to thrive as long as the practices of the modern state-form remain unchanged, The continuing global history of the norms and practices of empire constitutes the second strand of the narrative." Id. at xi.).

SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM

Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, introduced by Jon Canter, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2014) ("The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on  people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to see, weren't expecting or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there." Id. at 36-37.).

IF ONE IS TALKING ALL THE TIME, WHEN DOES ONE HAVE TIME TO THINK?

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, introduced by Adam Roberts, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2011) ("It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day,' or 'You're very tall,' or 'So this is it, we're going to die.' His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seized up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working." Id. at 137.).

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., edited by Andrew Schlesinger & Stephen Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 2013) ("These letters from the inside of the movement provide a quasi history of American liberalism and its struggles through the crucial decades from 1945 to 2005, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush." Id. at xii. From a letter to Averell Harriman, 12/12/1949: "The presence of a college president indifferent to educational values or problems has, as you would well imagine, seriously demoralizing consequences for the total intellectual life of the university. It is most improbable that universities under such leadership, or lack of it, will become vital intellectual centers." Id. at 28, 28. From a letter to Ernest Daniels, 8/1/1988: "... Of course, democracy is a most unsatisfactory form of government. The argument for it, as Churchill famously pointed out, is that it is less unsatisfactory than all the other forms. Despite the ignorance and infirmities of a mass electorate, the democratic form contains more possibilities of intelligent self-correction than any other form--or so it seems to me. But I have never supposed democracy to be a self-executing process. 'Perhaps no form of government,' as Bryce said, 'needs greater leaders so much as democracy.' You may be interested in some of the reflections in 'Democracy and Leadership,' the last chapter in The Cycles of American History." "I doubt, by the way, that those whom you call the 'plebeians' really constitute 'democracy's ruling class.' Power in the American democracy resides elsewhere." Id. at 501, 501. Also, see George Packer, "A Historian in Camelot," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/22/2013.).

INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH?

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, introduced by Terry Jones, illustrated by Jonathan Burton (London: The Folio Society, 2010) (" 'My white mice have escaped!' she said. . . . It is possible that her remark would have commanded greater attention has it been generally realized that human beings were only the third most intelligent life form present on the planet Earth, instead of (as was generally thought by most independent observers) the second." Id. at 112-113.).

NOT EASY BEING A SAINT IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY

Nicola Griffith, Hild: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("She wandered away from Fursey, following the voice with the lopsided words, trying to make sense of them, and found herself in a ring of buyers watching an auction for a naked slave." Id. at 143.).

DINOSAURS SINGING

Neil Gaiman, Fortunately, The Milk, illustrated by Skottie Young (New York: Harper, 2013) ("There is nothing in the whole whole of creation as beautiful as dinosaurs singing in harmony." Id. at 101.).

A MEDITATION ON MUSIC COMPOSITION

Richard Powers, Orfeo: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2014) (See Jim Holt,"The Music Gene," NYT Book Review, Sunday1/12/2014.).

CONSERVATION OF EVERYTHING, INCLUDING HEIGHT . . . COMPASSION? FORGIVENESS?

Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2012) (From "Camp Sundown": "Every summer, the old people grow smaller as the children grow big. Josh has decided that there is only so much height in the world and the inches must change hands." Id. at 131, 143.).

CONSCIOUSNESS' PRISON

E. L. Doctorow, Andrew's Brain: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2014) (See Terrence Rafferty, "The Mind's Jailer," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/12/2014.).

LOVE CAN MAKE US ETERNAL

Julie Maroh, Blue Is the Warmest Color, translated from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger (Vancouver, BC, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013) ("Love catches fire, it trespasses, it breaks, we break, it comes back to life. Love may not be eternal but, it can make us eternal..." Id. at 155.).

AN AMERICAN AFRICAN'S MEDITATION ON RACE (AND BLACKNESS) IN AMERICA

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("In America , racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folks who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn't. Or maybe it's time to just scrap the word 'Racisits.' Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for suffers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute." Id. at 316. [A]cademics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them." Id. at 325.).

OUR SUFFERING HAS LITTLE OR NO MEANING

Robert Stone, Death of the Black-Haired Girl (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) (" 'History . . . history is poisoned by claims on underlying truth. . . .' 'Because people always want their suffering to mean something.' " Id. at 281.).

BUDDHIST TANTRIC

F. D. Lessing & Alex Wayman, trans., Introduction to the Buddhist Tantric System, 2d. ed. (Buddhist Tradition Series) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1978, 2008).