Street roots., December 06, 2013, Page 7, Image 7

Street roots
Dec. 6, 2013
A good read
Books to ponder and pore over
this holiday season — and beyond
o you think you know your own
mind? Do you imagine yourself able
to make decisions and interact with
others in a fair and balanced manner,
unfettered by personal bias?
Think again.
Authors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony
Greenwald contend that almost all of us
base our daily interactions on personal
biases, many of which we don’t even realize
we have. Like the dead zone in a car that
the rearview mirror
“8 ßflittlfllß BOOK" flHRHB Hfitt IHDRfi
doesn’t cover, these
biases exist behind our
conscious thought in a
personal “blindspot.”
For more than 30
years, the authors
have researched and
studied how the mind
operates in social
I O c o n t e x t s . As
OF G O O D PÉÒFL
I collaborators — Banaji
at Harvard University
Blindspot:
and Greenwald at the
Hidden biases of
University of
Good People, By Washington — the pair
Mahzarin R. Banaji have been working to
and Anthony G.
find ways to identify
Greenwald
people’s true biases.
By helping people
identify hidden biases,
they hope to allow others to make decisions
in a more ratio n al, th o u g h tfu l m a n n e r
instead of the haphazard way most of us go
about it. Many of the revelations in
“Blindspot” are both surprising and
profound.
“Blindspot” is a well-researched and well
written book. If you are looking for a
provocative exploration into the science of
human behavior — one that’s chock full of
insights that will make you question how you
think — I highly recommend this book. If,
however, you have no desire to explore your
own behavior or that of others, if you are
happy believing that you are totally impartial
and unbiased, then by all means give it a
pass. That’s the thing about people, I guess.
Some are content to go on believing that
their rearview mirror gives them an
adequate picture of life. While others turn
their heads and look behind them ... just in
case. - Thomas Vincent
D
ANTHONY
C, G RSENW ALO
duardo Galeano, a Uruguayan poet,
historian and master of the short
anecdote, isn’t about to let himself be
constrained by the vagaries or
indefiniteness of when or if something
actually happened or by the issue of
whether a story is history or myth. Instead,
he sets out to open windows — one each day
— as a way of seeing and using history and
myth to understand the world we live in.
Books of days originated in religious
practice as a way of lifting a believer out of
ordinary time into an experience of the
sacred. Historical books of days have a
E
somewhat different purpose, generally to
commemorate important events and people.
This book, though, falls somewhere in
between. Galeano has something subversive
in mind: to lift us out of our ordinary
understanding of
history as a series of
important events and
people to the
recognition that
history happens in
every moment, is
carried forward by
every person and is
found as much in the
stories we tell as in
the real event.
Galeano’s humor
Children of the
can be pointed and
Days: A Calendar sometimes ribald. I’ll
of Human History leave it to the reader
by Eduardo
to discover the punch
line for “World
Galeano,
Science Day,” which
Translated by
reports that “the
Mark Fried
world invests five
times as much in male
sex stimulants and female silicone implants
as in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s.” In
another joke, reported from the Dominican
Republic, he lampoons the cult of the
“international expert” with his electronic
equipment and his assumption that he can
often finds that his is a lonely voice. Instead
of entertaining weirdly intoxicating visions
of a post-human future, he argues that
scientists and their techie brethren should
focus on enhancing human life and bettering
society. They should not compound the
miserable lot of the global multitudes mired
in abominable poverty. Human beings are
worthy of a decent future. No genuine
economy has any concrete meaning without
people.
But could the waves of homeless people
rising in the United States and elsewhere in
the world be the first inkling of a widening
sociopolitical rupture exacerbated by refined
technologies? Is the globalization of poverty
the inevitable product of technological
evolution rampant within hyper-capitalism?
Without fundamental changes we are
heading toward such a future.
Lanier is repelled by this dystopian
prospect. In “Who Owns the Future?” he
offers remedies that could establish a
humane information economy capable of
sustaining democracy and a vibrant middle
class. Lanier hopes for a humane digital
economy inclusive of people. He is a
fascinating technophile whose passion for
science and technology has not displaced his
deep appreciation for the richness of
humanity. A new world wrought by fantastic
technological change is coming. If it is to
have existential meaning, Lanier contends
that human beings must be at the very
center of the emerging cybertopia. — Joe
passionate historian, dedicated
teacher and activist, the late Howard
Zinn declared repeatedly that the
study of history should never be a placid
exploration of the past, and it should never
be confined to academia. Indeed, a thorough
grasp of history is an indispensible key to
understanding urgent political and economic
issues of the present. It is vital that this
historical perspective incorporate the
vantage of the poor,
the outcast, the
marginalized and the
working class.
Historical
awareness ensures
that the bombast and
platitudes of elected
politicians and media
pundits are never
taken at face value.
Howard Zinn
M artin
Too often such
Speaks:
pronouncements are
Collected
slick deviations from
Speeches,
truth intended to
herman Alexie has to rank as the
1963-2009,
premier writer of the Pacific
Edited by Anthony mask ulterior motives
Northwest. This might be an odd
of the upper class,
Amove
statement to make about someone whose
the military or the
literary work is almost entirely populated by
corporate elite. A
Native Americans — most of them from his
compliant populace can be persuaded to
own Spokane tribe — but the tension
g iv e c o n s e n t to p o lic ie s th a t s e r v e th e
b etw een th e west-of-
th e-m o u n ta in s cities
is unwanted and get paid for it. One ironic
entry reports that after years of claiming
that poverty was declining worldwide,
experts found a flaw in their model and
realized there were half a billion more poor
people than they had thought. “The poor,”
Galeano writes, “already knew.”
A
A
S
a rriv e w ith o u t b ein g ask ed , give advice th a t
uthor Jaron Lanier — the
accomplished scientist, technologist,
virtual reality pioneer and musician -
wants people who aren’t techies to
understand the concept of singularity, which
has mesmerized many
of his Silicon Valley
colleagues. In his new
book “Who Owns the
Future?” he writes,
“One day in the not so
distant future, the
Internet will suddenly
coalesce into a
superintelligent AI
(Artificial
Intelligence), infinitely
smarter than any of us
Who Owns the
Future? By Jaron individually and all of
us combined; it will
Lanier
come alive in the blink
of an eye, and take
over the world before humans even realize
what’s happening.”
As a down-to-earth humanist on the outer
reaches of what graphic novelist Douglas
Rushkoff referred to as “Cyberia,” Lanier
stories, “Cry Cry Cry,” the narrator’s cousin
takes revenge on an abusive white man by
shooting him. The narrator turns his cousin
in to the police, but then he takes on the
cousin’s role doing war dances. “But I
wasn’t dancing for war. I was dancing for my
soul and for the soul of my tribe. I was
dancing for what we Indians used to be and
who we might become again.” - Mike Wold
Blasphemy: New
and Selected
Stories by
Sherman Alexie
and the east-of-the-
mountains country,
and between poor and
working-class people
and affluent high-tech
professionals, is a
theme that plays out
in Alexie’s stories and
novels.
His stories almost
always have to do with
what is authentic,
about whether the
truth that hurts is
preferable to the lie
that sustains you.
“Blasphemy,” Alexie’s latest collection of
stories, embodies these contradictions. It’s
a mixture of 15 previously published and 16
new stories, almost all having to do with
how to be authentic in an inauthentic world:
“Indians were obsessed with authenticity.
Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians
formed their identity by questioning the
identities of other Indians. Self-hating, self-
doubting.” He continues, “We are people
exiled by other exiles.... We who were once
indigenous to this land must immigrate into
its culture.”
With the new stories, Alexie seems to be
moving deeper into his meditation on being
Indian - and human - in a society that has
lost its connection with nature. Thus, tje
story hits hard with its evocation of a wind-
powered future that, however green, still
doesn’t respect all life. In one of the longer
in te re s ts o f th e w ealth y a n d p o w e r fu l a t th e
expense of everyone else. However, an
informed citizenry capable of critical
thought is not easily lulled. Says Zinn,
“Without history, anybody in authority can
get up before a microphone and say, ‘We’ve
got to go into this country for that reason
and this reason, for liberty, for democracy,
the threat.’ Anybody can get up before a
microphone and tell you anything. And if
you have no history, you have no way of
checking up on that.”
Zinn wanted Americans to know that our
nation’s founders had more than noble
ideals on their minds when they drew up
the Constitution. That document is distinct
from the Declaration of Independence,
which preceded it. The ringing phrase “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
enshrined in the Declaration was altered
slightly in 1787 to read “life, liberty and
property.” Drawn up by elite bond holders
and slave holders at the Constitutional
Convention, the document ensures that
their economic interests were paramount.
On the other hand, the Declaration is fired
by a revolutionary fervor. Says Zinn, “The
Declaration of Independence is a manifesto
for civil disobedience.”
Zinn died three years ago. His voice and
message of peace live on in these vibrant
pages. — Joe M artin
Excerpts reprinted from Street Roots’ sister
paper, Real Change, in Seattle, Wash.
Poverty
LIU I — d iTTIi