Media Things: Social Science

Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam

2006-09-08T18:22:48-08:00

A history of militant fundamentalism in Islam: We hear more about Muslim extremists than ever before, but Kepel argues that the terrorism seen today throughout the world results from the failure of Islamic fundamentalism and not its success. Beginning his history with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Kepel details the rise of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalist visions of the postcolonial Islamic world. Although the growth of this new kind of Islam among poor and bourgeois alike was indeed astounding for a time, these groups met with little political success. Covering the entire Islamic world, from Malaysian extremists to bin Laden and the Taliban, Kepel exposes a pattern of failure. The inability of Islamic militancy to sustain popular support and implant its impractical ideology (which failed spectacularly in Afghanistan) resulted in increased militancy and the tolerance of terrorism. Fascinating despite its copious detail, Kepel's history has a wider focus than Ahmed Rashid's Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia and more analytical depth than Robin Wright's Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (1986). The first in-depth history of political Islam appropriate for newcomers to Islamic history. -- Booklist

Gilles Kepel, Anthony Roberts (Translator)

The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001

2006-09-08T17:59:05-08:00

The news behind the events; the news mainstream media isn't reporting: The most complete book I know of, summarizing the relevant background and foreground intersecting upon the events of September 11... -- Barry Zwicker, Vision TV Insight

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination

2005-12-21T09:20:53-08:00

One of my site visitors bought this book today. Looks interesting. It's a bit of a perk for being an Amazon.com affiliate: monitoring my site's Amazon sales and clicks stats is constantly expanding my reading list.

Denise Winn

The Fever

2005-01-07T01:16:59-08:00

This little play, Wallace Shawn's monologue of 112 pages, rocked me when I first encountered it at the Vancouver Fringe Festival sometime in the mid '90s. Perhaps I'll add some commentary later, but for now, try these links: A reading by the author, Wallace Shawn Analysis/Review Review: performance at the fritz theatre, san diego, CA, 19 April 99 which provides the most erudite observation of the meaning underlying this play: "Shawn's theater is not of didacticism, but of dialectic, of disturbing questions posited to provoke us rather than simple answers to soothe." Keep that in mind when reading the reviews by Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly on Amazon.com, which are in stark contrast to those by readers.

Wallace Shawn

The Human Zoo

2004-11-20T10:39:43-08:00

Desmond Morris

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

2004-11-20T10:00:55-08:00

Doris Lessing's 1986 Massey Lectures expose many aspects of being human that are agonisingly familiar to our social scientists and psychologists but which have not risen to public consciousness. These include traits used against us as individuals and groups to coerce behaviour counter to our general moral and ethical sensibilities. I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this--that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past. But that very little of it has been put into effect... The sciences in question are sometimes called the behavioural sciences and are about how we function in groups and as individuals, not about how we like to think we behave and function which is often very flattering. But about how we can be observed to be behaving when observed as dispassionately as when we observe the behaviour of other species. There is a great mass of new information from universities, research institutions and gifted amateurs, but our ways of governing ourselves haven't changed. Our left hand does not know--does not want to know--what our right hand does. This is what I think is the most extraordinary thing there is to be seen about us, as a species, now. And people to come will marvel at it, as we marvel at the blindness and inflexibility of our ancestors. -- Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Development as Freedom

2004-10-14T04:24:16-08:00

According to reviews I've read, be prepared to question your understanding of "freedom." Consider which freedom is the most valuable: to speak freely or to feed your family. For example, in dealing with enemies (say, Pol Pot, or Maoist China), we properly attribute to them deaths caused by starvation, disease, overwork, etc., insofar as these result from institutional structures and political choices. That's quite independent of intention. Thus in the Black Book of Communism, compiled to demonstrate the evil of our enemies and very highly praised in the West (here too), they estimate 100 million deaths from 1917 to the end of the century, the largest component being the famine in China in the late 1950s, maybe 25 million. No one claims that it was intended or planned. The most serious studies do regard it as criminal, attributing it to the sociopolitical system that prevented information from reaching the center in time to do anything -- studies by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, notably. The very same studies, in the same books, conclude that democratic capitalist India alone was responsible for 100 million deaths that were avoided in China from independence in 1947 to 1979, attributing the difference to sociopolitical structures. That half of the studies is ignored in the West. -- Noam Chomsky Chomsky further observes that if a Black Book of Capitalism were compiled, "the death toll would be colossal." And here's a review from Publisher's Weekly: When Sen, an Indian-born Cambridge economist, won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, he was praised by the Nobel Committee for bringing an "ethical dimension" to a field recently dominated by technical specialists. Sen here argues that open dialogue, civil freedoms and political liberties are prerequisites for sustainable development. He tests his theory with examples ranging from the former Soviet bloc to Africa, but he puts special emphasis on China and India. How does one explain the recent gulf in economic progress between authoritarian yet fast-growing China and democratic, economically laggard India? For Sen, the answer is clear: India, with its massive neglect of public education, basic health care and literacy, was poorly prepared for a widely shared economic expansion; China, on the other hand, having made substantial advances in those areas, was able to capitalize on its market reforms. Yet Sen demolishes the notion that a specific set of "Asian values" exists that might provide a justification for authoritarian regimes. He observes that China's coercive system has contributed to massive famine and that Beijing's compulsory birth control policyAonly one child per familyAhas led to fatal neglect of female children. Though not always easy reading for the layperson, Sen's book is an admirable and persuasive effort to define development not in terms of GDP but in terms of "the real freedoms that people enjoy." Economic theory is something I need to understand more, particularly regarding the ethics which are typically implicit in the implementations of both governments and world bodies such as the WTO and agreements such as the GATT.

Amartya Sen

The Humbled Anthropologist: Tales from the Pacific

2004-09-21T16:08:36-08:00

I found the following in a ZNet newsgroup: This is an excellent book for anyone who would like to understand economics from the anthropological perspective, that is, that the market principle isn't operative in many cultures. In today's capitalist economy market principle dominates and governs the distribution of the means of production, where the buyer and seller strive to maximise to get their money's worth. In many other societies, the Western Australian aboriginal culture to be specific, reciprocity is the general rule, which is social exchange between kin or another close personal tie. There are three degrees of reciprocity: generalised, balanced, and negative. 1) How closely related are the parties to the exchange? 2) How quickly and unselfishly are gifts reciprocated. The Humbled Anthropologist goes into stories from Pacific islands where reciprocity is the main form of economic exchange. Polany also stimulated the comparative study of exchange and several anthropologists followed his lead. Marcia Hewitt

Philip R. Devita

The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram

2004-02-23T18:08:12-08:00

As of this writing, this book is not yet on the shelves.

Thomas Blass

Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm

2004-02-23T17:35:08-08:00

I've just put this on my reading list. Here's an excerpt from a review on Amazon.com The essays and studies making this book treasurable (beyond their research value) can get one very emotional at times, especially when reading about some of the most disturbing accounts (as is the case with Chapter 11, dealing with the Stanford Prison Experiment). The topic of 'obedience' is obviously still a very sensitive one, almost making one want to plunge in denial. The potential shock comes as no surprise, though, if we think that the entire scaffolding of civilization rests on just that: people doing things for each other. The way from 'mutual help' to 'mutual exclusion' is very short, and Milgram perceived (and demonstrated) how people can become at some point expendable, human sacrifices on the altar of human becoming!

Thomas Blass