Book Review: "It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism" by Bernie Sanders

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (2023)
Bernie Sanders (1941)
with John Nichols
305 pages

I’ve heard so many declarations over the years – both publicly and privately – about Senator Bernie Sanders’ apparently extreme positions. Even among those whose opinions I tend to have confidence in, their negative comments often seem difficult to square with what I’ve heard from Sanders himself, for example in the presidential debates some years ago. So, when I by chance came across his book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (shout out to The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC), I decided it was time to explore where the truth lies.

Dive into the text, co-written by John Nichols, a journalist for The Nation, and it quickly becomes clear that the attacks on Sanders in too much of the media – and parroted by those in the public inflamed by such reporting – tend to be hyperbolic exaggerations, if not outright mischaracterizations of his positions and proposed policies. The media criticisms of him seem driven not by facts, but rather by a fear that Americans hearing his actual proposals might begin to question what has been a carefully inculcated, dogmatic belief in unfettered capitalism and free market fundamentalism.

This deliberate indoctrination of the American mind creates a challenging deterrent to any nuanced conversation around Sanders’ proposals; historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway provide a comprehensive and engaging exploration of its origins and development in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free market (my review linked to at right), in which they argue that:

By promoting a false dichotomy between laissez-faire capitalism and communist regimentation, market fundamentalists [have made] it difficult for Americans to have conversations about crucial issues, such as appropriate levels of taxation or the balance between federal and state authority, or even how to appraise the size of the federal government objectively. (118, Oreskes and Conway) 

As Oreskes and Conway conclude, anything that violates the free market fundamentalist ideology becomes characterized as a threat to our country.

Take, for example, Sanders’ comment “I don’t think that billionaires should exist,” (96) which some in the media have trumpeted as proof he’s anti-capitalist. In fact, as he notes regarding his proposals just a few pages later: “This isn’t about creating a rigid system that discourages creativity and innovation. There’s nothing wrong with a business or an entrepreneur making a profit.” (100) His actual concern lies with the corrosive effects of the extreme wealth inequality now experienced in the US.

In particular, Sanders argues that “the rich [have been] consolidating their influence over American Government and political life,” (102) controlling not only the economy but also the political system, and then using that control to change the rules in ways that allow them to further increase their wealth and so power. And Sanders’ position on this is hardly extreme: Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf has described, in his trenchant book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (my review linked to at right), the critical role that democracy and capitalism play in each other’s success, arguing that if independence between them is not maintained, the

delicate balance between politics and market can be destroyed, [through either] state control over the economy [or] capitalist control over the state. (29, Wolf) 

Wolf goes on to point out that rising inequality in recent decades has fueled populism in high-income democracies, including the US, which autocrats are exploiting to dismantle democratic institutions, and so tip democratic capitalism over into authoritarian capitalism. In essence, then, the same concerns Sanders expresses.

The inequality Sanders describes, as well as the reduction in social support that has accompanied it and the adjustments in taxation that could address it, have been well-documented, perhaps most thoroughly by economist Thomas Piketty in his comprehensive study Capital in the Twenty-First Century (my review linked to at right).  And even a recent Fox News poll has shown that 73% of American voters “favor the government increasing taxes on the wealthy [to] strengthen the country’s social programs.”  Certainly, even if one disagrees with Sanders, it’s clear that his concerns about the social and political impacts of increasing inequality and his proposals for dealing with them through increased taxation on the wealthy lie well within the mainstream of democratic capitalism.

While major media outlets in the US can simply avoid engaging deeply with journalists and economists who propose such policies, when a politician does so, the hyperbole machine cranks up to protect the status quo for the wealthy. And, as Sanders points out elsewhere in the book, increasing media consolidation into the hands of a handful of wealthy businessmen in the US has given them ever more control over that narrative. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that his

point is not to demonize oligarchs. … They tend to work hard and take risks; they’re often innovative. … Inequality isn’t about individuals; this is a systemic crisis. (105) 

His solutions are intended not as penalties against individuals, but rather as correctives to a system that has become increasingly out of balance.

Sanders makes a similar case for the need to fix our health care system, noting that “in America, we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as the people of any other country,” and yet our health care system in the US “rank[s] close to the bottom of major industrialized nations in outcomes.” He goes on to detail the variety of crises facing health care in the US, including “85 million Americans … underinsured or uninsured.” (124-126)

Sanders points out, however, that “the current American health care system is working exactly the way it was designed to operate – for the people who own it.” (123) This quite obvious, yet pointed conclusion parallels a similar observation by biologist and science writer Colin Tudge in his excellent book The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact, in which he notes that “the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.” For both our agricultural and our health care systems, the focus is on profit; in any trade-off between increasing profits and improving health outcomes, it’s clear how our economic system requires the decision to fall.

Generally, when the issues with the US health care system have been reported, they often seem to be treated as an unavoidable reality, instead of a pressing issue that needs resolved. Sanders, however, makes a straightforward proposal: build on what already works, by expanding Medicare over a five year period to cover the entire US population. He notes that, beyond giving everyone health coverage, it would benefit businesses by ending their need to provide employee health care coverage, it would remove the for-profit system that currently perverts health care outcomes, and it would mean that the under- and uninsured would no longer be left with only a last-resort, extremely expensive (for taxpayers) visit to the emergency room to address what could have been dealt with earlier at much less cost. He cites a Congressional Budget Office report as concluding that, depending on the approach, “a single-payer program would save the American people between $42 billion and $743 billion every year.” (151)

Here, again, the media and political pushback to his health care proposals, and similar ones from Elizabeth Warren, has less to do with the facts of the issue than with the deep pockets the health care industry has – due to the profits they make off the existing system – to propagate stories creating irrational fears over any change that threatens those profits. The result only reinforces Sanders’ concern about how wealth translates into the ability to craft public and political opinion in a way that increases that wealth, to the detriment of democracy.

Sanders notes that his proposals for dealing with both the social and political impacts of inequality and the health impacts of the for-profit health system are neither radical nor untested – variations of them have been in place and effective in many other major industrialized countries for decades. The US itself had significantly higher top end marginal tax rates in the middle of the 20th century, including during the economically strong 1950’s; and the majority of industrialized countries have universal health care coverage.

Similarly, practical solutions have been implemented globally (including in the past in the US) for other issues he addresses in his book, such as the high cost of education and dramatically increasing media consolidation. In each case, the facts of the situation are beyond dispute, while Sanders’ proposed policy solutions, even if one has disagreements with them, are hardly radical, untested or extreme.

Along with policy prescriptions to address particular issues, Sanders also describes the more systemic challenges we face, in an economy based on free market fundamentalism. He argues that

Our struggle is to end a system that evaluates “worth” as a measure of market profitability, a system in which we are asked to believe – based on salaries paid – that the star athlete who helps a billionaire team owner increase his bottom line is “worth” more than a thousand teachers who help children escape poverty. (106) 

Philosopher Michael J. Sandel makes this same argument in his excellent book The Tyranny of Merit (my review linked to at right), in which he notes that our idolization of merit has led to a false belief among the successful that what they have achieved is only due to their own actions – that they have merited their success – and an equally damaging and false sense among those who have not succeeded that it is due to their own failings. Sandel describes how

In market-driven societies, interpreting material success as a sign of moral desert is a persisting temptation. It is a temptation we need repeatedly to resist. One way of doing so is to debate and enact measures that prompt us to reflect, deliberately and democratically, on what counts as truly valuable contributions to the common good and where market verdicts miss the mark. (213, Sandel) 

By re-orienting our understanding of where value lies, we can begin to adapt our economic system in ways that address the negative impacts of ballooning wealth inequality.

Beyond Sanders’ examination of the current social, economic and political situation in the US and his proposals for addressing his concerns, an appealing moment in the book for me was his nuanced characterization of the significant number of those who voted for Trump. Because so many Democrats don’t seem to get it, I’ll take the liberty of an extended quote here, from early in his book: 

[Trump] did especially well in white, rural, economically depressed parts of the country. Why? Why did working-class people, many of them struggling economically, vote for Trump? Why was he able to hold rallies in the middle nowhere that drew tens of thousands of enthusiastic followers?

I know some pundits and politicians respond to those questions by suggesting that all of Trump’s supporters are racists, sexists, and homophobes; that they really are “deplorable” and there is nothing to be done. Sorry, I don’t agree. And I should know. I have been to almost every state in this country and, unlike corporate pundits, have actually talked with Trump supporters. Are some of them racists and sexist who vote for bigotry? Absolutely. But many are not.

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the “beautiful people.”

These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can’t afford health care, they can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctor’s call “diseases of despair,” their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

Many of these voters have spent their lives playing by the rules. They worked hard, very hard, and did heir best for their kids and their communities. During the worst of the pandemic, they didn’t have the luxury of sitting behind a computer at home doing “virtual” work. They were putting their lives on the line at jobs in hospitals, factories, warehouses, public transportation, meatpacking plants, and grocery stores. They kept the economy going, and many thousands of them died as a result.

Many of these so-called racist Americans voted for Barack Obama, our first Black president, and for “hope” and “change” and “Yes We Can.” And they voted to reelect him. But their lives did not get better.

After almost fifty years of stagnation, Democrats were in charge – but we did not raise wages for workers. After a massive amount of illegal corporate anti-union activity, we did not make it easier for workers to join unions. We did not improve job security. We didn not address corporate greed for the massive levels fo income and wealth inequality. We did not provide health care fo all or lower the cost of prescription drugs. We did not make childcare and higher education affordable. We did not address homelessness or the high cost of housing. We did not make it easier for working people to retire with security and dignity. We did not reform a corrupt campaign finance system.

Today, tens of millions of Americans feel deep anger toward the political, economic, and media establishment. They look at Washington and corporate media and see rejection and contempt. They see not only a government that is ignoring their needs but politicians busy attending fundraising events with the rich, who have no clue as to what the lives of the great majority of Americans are about.

The absurdity of the current-day situation is that Trump – a phony, a pillar of the establishment, a billionaire, and an anti-worker businessman – has been able to fill that political vacuum and tap into that anger. (8-10) 

If the extent of this anger remains unrecognized and so unaddressed by Democrats, it does not bode will for their success in upcoming election cycles.

It’s disappointing that those who disagree with the kinds of policy proposals Sanders makes in It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism too often resort to hyperbole and mischaracterizations about them, as opposed to debating them on the merits. One can interpret this, however, as a sign of the weakness of their counterarguments. By fearmongering about his proposals, his opponents don’t have to acknowledge that most if not all of them have been successfully implemented elsewhere, nor must they present coherent arguments for why these same prescriptions couldn’t benefit the American people also. Unfortunate, finally, that he was denied the opportunity to make his case as the Democratic candidate for president in the 2016 election.

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Other notes and information:

This video of Sanders at a rally presents a condensed version of his concerns, his proposals, and their success elsewhere.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Tomás Nevinson" by Javier Marías

Tomás Nevinson (2023)
Javier Marías (1951-2022)
Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
643 pages

In his final novel, Tomás Nevinson, the late Spanish author Javier Marías explores questions of identity and morality, including the profound connections between them and the ways in which they guide our decisions and actions.

He writes in the book’s Acknowledgements that the story represents “not so much a continuation as a ‘companion piece’” to his 2017 novel Berta Isla (my review linked to at right), in which the eponymous title character struggles to deal with the repeated disappearances for long periods of time of her husband, Tomás – only slowly coming to realize that he works as a spy. When he finally retires, she cannot bring herself to allow him back into the family, to rebuild the connections that have been broken.

The new novel opens some years later, at which point Tomás, now the protagonist, has settled back full-time into the embassy position in Madrid that had been his cover when active as a spy. Living just a short distance from his family, his relationship with them remains tenuous at best, and he has settled into an unassuming routine, one far more prosaic than his previous adventures.

When his former handler, Tupra, asks to meet him, Tomás warily agrees. His hesitation proves warranted, as Tupra asks him for a favor: take on one more job using his talents as a spy. The assignment involves going undercover to identify from among three women living in a small city in northwest Spain the one who had been involved in bombings a decade earlier and has since gone into hiding under an assumed identity. Though he half-heartedly resists agreeing to Tupra’s request, the pull to reenter his old career becomes difficult to ignore in the face of the mix of boredom and melancholy he has felt since leaving behind his former work.

Once he accepts the assignment, however, he faces an unexpected twist: if he can’t find sufficient evidence to incontestably convict the woman he identifies as the terrorist, he will have to kill her to make sure she does not go on to potentially commit another such act. While accepting in principle that secret service work can involve such extra-judicial killings – he himself had killed two people during his earlier career – he has never killed a woman and struggles with the idea of doing so now. As the mission proceeds, with his handler ramping up pressure on him to identify the terrorist and eliminate her, will Tomás bring himself to carry through on the actions to which he’s committed himself?

As has been the case throughout Marías’s many novels, however, the plotline here acts as a simple scaffolding upon which he layers ruminations about myriad aspects of the human condition. The action, such as it is, proceeds slowly, any particular event interspersed with Tomás’ introspection about his life and the lives of those around him. And, as always in his novels, it’s hard not to take these internal monologues as Marías using his protagonist as a conduit for his own thoughts.

I recently read a description of Marías’s writing as prolix. Although I understood the gist of the meaning from context, I looked up the word, which Merriam-Webster defines as “unduly prolonged or drawn out: too long” and “marked by or using an excess of words.” It’s not hard to see why those put off by Marías’ writing might characterize it this way. In any given scene, even in his short stories, the action and dialogue are accompanied by long stretches of the protagonist’s or narrator’s thoughts – which can be driven by that action or dialogue, but can just as likely be stream of conscious digressions triggered by events often tangential to the plot.

So it is in the present novel as, after a couple of dozen opening pages that set the moral stage for the novel’s climax, the meeting of Tomás and his handler that kicks off the action lasts nearly a hundred pages. Their exchanges are interspersed with long stretches of Tomás’ thoughts of his past life with Tupra as his handler and contemplations about his current situation as a retired spy unable to fully reconnect with his family – and, throughout, running commentary on the anonymous public around them.

Even for me, having read a fair number of Marías’s works and come to enjoy his style and his observations, this latest – last – novel took things to a challenging extreme. During the conversation referred to above, for example, I gradually came to feel that it was never going to end. And then, deeper into the novel, the climax that had already been set-up in the opening pages seemed a long time coming, only finally occurring at nearly the end of the story. Unlike every other of Marías’s novels I’ve read, in which I’ve generally found myself hoping they wouldn’t end, I have to admit that I found myself grinding it out a bit to finish this one.

When I combine that with what seemed to be bits of repeated text (or, at least, I had this feeling at various points – I didn’t go back to try and check, I admit, but I tend to have an overdeveloped antenna for such things), it opens the possibility that perhaps Marías didn’t have a chance to polish this work, which came right at the end of his life. (As the Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday, “in my work as a writer, the most useful for me is actually the act of leaving things out.”)

But all that aside, I lament the loss of this great writer, and I certainly look forward to going back and finally reading those of his books that I haven’t gotten to yet.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein (1818)
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
326 pages

Many years ago, I watched the 1931 movie of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At some point later, I heard that the novel differed significantly from that version, which left me curious; only now, however, have I finally gotten around to reading it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, given its fame, the story is much more engaging and intriguing than I had expected from what I had seen.

While I (vaguely) recall the movie featuring a monster – Frankenstein’ monster – chased by mobs of fearful and angry townspeople, the novel presents a much more intimate struggle of deadly sparring between Dr. Frankenstein and the being (as Shelley refers to him) he has created. Shelley’s full title – Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus – points toward her main theme here: a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who becomes so fixated on his quest of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (64) that only after he succeeds in his work do its implications finally, too late, become clear to him.

The story opens with a series of letters another scientist, Robert Walton, writes to his sister, seeking to alleviate her concern for his safety as he pursues his dream of discovery. Walton describes his desire to sail north from Europe to the still unknown North Pole, where he believes the long days have created a land in which

snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? … I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. (8) 

Given that most readers will come to the novel familiar with its broad outlines, it’s hard not to see in these opening letters from Walton the dangerous hubris of Frankenstein – well ahead of the point in the story at which Shelley makes it evident.

As Walton’s ship flounders in increasingly thick ice and his crew begin begging him to turn around, they spot “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, [who] sat in [a] sledge and guided the dogs, [and] we watched … until he was lost among the distant inequalities of ice.” (22) Shortly after, a second sled comes along, driven by a traveler struggling with the cold who introduces himself as Victor Frankenstein. The balance of the novel consists of Frankenstein – having recognized in Walton a fellow soul in the dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream – telling his tale, the heartrending, cautionary story of his own obsession.

Frankenstein relates the events that led to his creation of the being, lamenting the passions that overtook him and that prevented him from considering the potential ramifications of achieving his goal. Then, telling of his revulsion at the appearance of what he had created, he goes on to describe the increasingly bitter conflict between them that results and the traumas he has experienced.

As Prometheus suffers for having provided fire to humankind by being chained to a rock and having an eagle arrive each day to eat his immortal liver, Frankenstein’s story reveals how he has been chained, figuratively if no less irrevocably, to the being he created. Yet, Shelley does not settle for a simple story of good versus evil. Frankenstein feels he’s brought forth a monster, but at the same time comes to recognize the humanity underneath the exterior that he finds so revolting, and his own responsibility for the suffering his creation faces.

The being himself in fact reveals, toward the end of the story, sentiments not so distant from those of so many who have travelled to foreign places and been met as the other: 

'Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honor and devotion …

I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?' (320-1) 

Far from the movie’s presentation of a lumbering, unwitting brute scarcely aware of its own strength, readers encounter in Frankenstein’s creation someone self-educated and full of feeling, but also profoundly traumatized by the repeatedly hostile reactions of everyone he encounters.

Ultimately, however, Shelley’s novel revolves around its title character and the seemingly bottomless depths of his passion for discovering the unknown. Frankenstein spends long days describing to his newfound companion Walton the “great and unparalleled misfortunes” (29) he has suffered from the moment he completed his creation, including the family and friends who have died because of him, because of his actions. And, hearing Walton’s own plans, he repeatedly implores him to not make the same mistake he has: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught/ Hear me – let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” (27)

And yet, toward the end of the story, Shelley makes evident the full extent of the obsession that drove Frankenstein to create the being. Despite all he has experienced and suffered, despite lamenting his own audacity, and despite all his repeated cautions to Walton, when the ship’s crew again agitates for turning back, seemingly on the point of mutiny, Frankenstein browbeats them, saying 

'What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you, then, so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surround it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honor and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! Be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as our hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.' (311-2)

There lies a thin line between the passion needed to achieve new discoveries and understandings, and what Shelley lays bare in Frankenstein: the blindness of obsession and the destructive consequences that can result. If you’ve only ever seen that old black and white movie version of her novel, please do crack open the book.

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Other notes and information:

Thomas Piketty, in his amazing work Capital in the 21st Century, describes how, in order to compensate for the lack of hard economic data from earlier centuries, he uses literature of different periods to interpret how people lived and worked, and what they could afford. 

 

The description Frankenstein’s being gives of the many months he secretly observed the lives of a family in a cottage in the woods with their garden and their daily routines gives just such a glimpse into life in Europe around 1800, on the eve of the industrial revolution.

It validates the description Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blaine give in their excellent World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis, of the dramatically different – really, unrecognizably different – lives people led before the abundance introduced by the significant energies from fossil fuels changed, and continues to change, our world. (My reviews of both books linked to at right.) 

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "El abismo del olvido" ("The Abyss of Oblivion") by Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa

El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Oblivion) (2023)
Paco Roca (1969)
Rodrigo Terrasa (1978)
295 pages

Along with grisly pitched battles and destructive city-sieges, the Spanish Civil War (July 1936 – April 1939) also included wide-spread violence far from the frontlines. Although the two sides – supporters of the elected Republican government and of the rebel nationalist military junta that rose up against it – quickly established control over particular regions of the country, many cities, towns and villages behind the lines experienced what often became a kind of vigilante violence. This included killings not only to eliminate partisans of the side not in power in that area, but also, under the cover of the general political and social disruption, to settle old scores.

During the war, both sides perpetrated such violence. But, after the war, the fascist dictatorship continued summary executions of those accused of clandestinely supporting the Republic, and some townspeople took advantage of the opportunity to incriminate and have executed those who had sided with the Republic during the war and against whom they harbored a grudge.

Estimates of the numbers killed during and after the war remain the subject of significant scholarly disagreement. Many people disappeared, with some executed while others fled for their lives. Those killed had their bodies unceremoniously dumped into common graves – the records of their death often deliberately destroyed in an attempt to hide the extent of these transgressions.

Post-dictatorship Spain has experienced a long running debate about how to deal with these mass graves – fosa in Spanish; things came to a head with the passage in 2007, by the then ruling left-wing party, of the The Law of Historical Memory, authorizing government funds for families who sought to exhume the remains of family members. Although families of the victims welcomed the opportunity to get closure through a proper identification and burial of their loved ones’ remains, many on the right decried the law as unnecessarily opening old wounds.

Although the topic has remained a political football, with right-wing governments in Spain eliminating funding and left-wing government’s reinstating it, some graves have been exhumed. In the graphic novel The Abyss of Oblivion (El abismo del olvido ) Spanish cartoonist Paco Roca and journalist Rodrigo Terrasa tell the story of the exhumation of one such mass grave, fosa 126 in the town cemetery of Paterna, in Valencia, as a way of illustrating the past horrors and present-day opportunities for dignity and reckoning such exhumations represent for Spanish families who had a loved one executed.

By using the graphic novel format, the pair transform what could have been a dry chronicle of history into a powerful, visual story, one that brings to life people who so long ago disappeared into the anonymity of a mass grave. It reveals, too, their relatives’ long years of suffering, as well as their tireless efforts to bring closure to their decades of trauma.

The story opens with the execution of 15 men in September 1940, more than a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and their burial in fosa 126, one of 180 such mass graves in the cemetery in Paterna alone. The scene then shifts to some sixty years later, as archeologists begin their exhumation of the grave; as one archaeologist notes, they approach their work with dual goals:

'The first is to recover and identify the bodies for those family members who want to obtain them…. The second function of the excavation [is to] document it as the archeologists we are, with engagement and scientific rigor … as if this was a crime scene.'

‘Which it is,’ [points out a colleague]. (40)

 Shifting smoothly between past and present, Roca and Tarrasa explore the histories of several of the men in the grave site, and in parallel the lives of their descendants. They build their narrative around one family in particular – exploring the life of one of the men executed and his daughter’s long struggle to get permission to have the fosa in which he is thought to have been buried exhumed. She seeks to have her father’s remains recovered and identified, so she can bury them next to her mother.

And, like the dual goals of the archeologists, the story Roca and Tarrasa illustrate serves two purposes. On the one hand, they tell a powerful history of the evils of the fascist regime as it continued to seek out and persecute anyone thought to be an enemy, as well as the depravity of those among its flunkies who leveraged their positions to have those they disliked arrested and executed. The story pointedly demonstrates the pervasive environment of fear created – which was, of course, the regime’s intent.

By tying the narrative to particular families, however, the pair manage to rescue at least some few of the vast number of the executed, and their families, from the abyss of oblivion that had engulfed them. By telling their history, both in the text but also through illustrations of their home life and the events they experienced, the story gives voice to the lives they lived. And it reveals how much the victims and their families lost, from the moment of arrest up to execution, and through the long decades that followed. It also explores the courage of those who quietly found ways to undermine the regime’s attempts to cow people into submission as well as the enduring strength of the families who for so many years kept the memory of their loved ones alive.

The events of the civil war now lie more than eight decades in the past, and the subsequent dictatorship fell over half a century ago; the why and the what and the how have been extensively covered in numerous tomes of history, perhaps none more famous than Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War (my review linked to at right). While historians continue to debate many of the details, one of the enduring legacies of the war has been the disagreement between those who want to leave the history buried and those who feel it is important – for themselves and for the country – to remember. In that sense, unlike histories of the war and the dictatorship, this graphic novel provides a window into a tension that continues to exist in Spain, especially in rural communities, where people often have intimate knowledge of who did what.

While at times heartrending, Roca and Tarrasa also tell a story of hope and strength. Of how so many people caught in the violence and destruction of autocracies and dictatorships managed to persevere. And of how, to adapt a quote attributed to Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe though long, does indeed sometimes bend toward closure, if not necessarily justice.

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Other notes and information:

As an epilogue, a short prose essay, with a sprinkling of photographs, details the facts of the case of the main characters in the story.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael J. Sandel

The Tyranny of Merit (2020)
Michael J. Sandel (1953)
272 pages

In the United States, the mantra that if you’re talented and work hard, you too can succeed has taken on the force of dogma. How could one possibly disagree with the idea that a tight link exists between effort, talent and success?

For philosopher Michael J. Sandel, however, this unquestioned belief hides a complex reality, one which includes significant negative impacts for American society. In The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, he explores how the concept of merit became so deeply ingrained as a guiding principle in the US, describes the negative implications this has had for both those who succeed as well as those who fail, and proposes alternate, healthier ways to view success and failure.

He opens by arguing that one significant consequence of meritocracy’s consummate hold on the US psyche has been the growth of populism over the past decade:

It is a mistake to see only the bigotry in populist protest, or to view it only as an economic complaint. … The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone-deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind. (17) 

Trump’s reelection in 2024 only reinforces Sandel’s conclusion.

As an example of such resentments, he notes the continued decrease in mobility in the US over the past several decades that has accompanied the dramatic increase in inequality. American’s have long viewed mobility as core to their understanding of their country as the land of opportunity, and yet as journalist Edward Luce pointedly notes in The Retreat of Western Liberalism (my review linked to at right)

today it is rarer for a poor American to become rich than a poor Briton which means the American dream is less likely to be realized in America. (41, Luce). 

 When a significant portion of a society discovers that one of the fundamental stories it believes about itself has become defunct – and particularly when it impacts their children’s future – it can’t be surprising that they eventually rise up in anger.

Sandel makes clear that the idea of “hiring people based on merit … is generally the right thing to do” (33) – most everyone desires the best possible plumber, electrician or airplane pilot. The difficulty comes when one transforms one’s success or failure into an indication of one’s moral status. He argues that exactly this has occurred, however, as an outcome of how deeply meritocratic thinking has instilled itself into American consciousness, expressed as a

rhetoric of opportunity … summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise ‘as far as their talents will take them.’

 He notes that “politicians of both parties have reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation.” (23) And this has led to psychologically unhealthy effects that now haunt our society and politics.

Those who haven’t elsewhere encountered arguments describing the difficulties with meritocratic thinking will likely approach this book imagining Sandel will have a hard time convincing them to view merit negatively. As it happens, however, his principal critique of it in the essay makes an extremely convincing case. Perhaps most surprising is his demonstration of the ways in which it perverts the thinking and lives of not only those who are successful, but also those who aren’t.

Those who succeed, Sandel notes, come to believe in their success as a justified reward for their hard work, as a reflection of their personal effort and ability – that they deserve what they have in terms of wealth and power. The dark side of this belief reveals itself in their feeling about those who have not succeeded: it becomes too easy to reverse the logic of success and conclude that those who fail do so because of lack of effort and ability – that they, too, deserve what they, in this case, don’t have. This can become evident not only in how those who have failed are treated, but also, in a tendency to reject social and political policies for supporting the broader community.

A similar dynamic plays out among those who fail, as they have also fully internalized the idea of merit as an appropriate measure of a person. They feel deeply the humiliation of their failure, Sandel argues, believing that they have failed because they, personally, somehow did not put in the necessary effort or have the necessary ability to succeed. And yet, they too will reject proposals for broad-based social or political support, considering it to undermine personal responsibility.

Sandel traces American meritocratic thinking back to Christian theology, as early church leaders attempted to make sense of the presence of suffering in the world and understand what would lead to salvation for a given person. To answer this question, they invoked the idea of merit, based on one’s behavior before God. In more recent times, however, a more aggressive religious view of merit has set in, as “American Christianity has produced a buoyant new variant of providentialist faith called the prosperity gospel.” (46) In this view, health and wealth indicate who is being rewarded by God, and who punished. It was a short step for such a belief to carry over into secular society:

The tyranny of merit arises, at least in part from this impulse. Today’s secular meritocratic order moralizes success [as] the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. (42)

What has been lost, Sandel argues, is an “ethic of fortune [that] appreciates the dimensions of life that exceed human understanding and control. [Which] sees that the cosmos does not necessarily match merit with reward. [Which] leaves room for mystery, tragedy, and humility.” (43) (The group Dead Can Dance has a musical piece that turns on this idea, in Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book.) Both people who have experienced success as well as those who have suffered failure ignore the role of such outside forces; they need to recognize that 

a lively sense of the contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” [Even] a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind tyranny, or unjust rule. (25) 

To paraphrase an extreme version of this argument that Sam Harris has made on his podcast Making Sense: we, none of us, had any say, whether through effort or talent, in our not having been born in the middle of the civil war in Sudan. Sandel puts forward a variety of less dramatic examples of consequential circumstances that people too often ignore or discount in their success – or failure.

Sandel goes on to describe how the ethic of the deserving versus the undeserving propagated through US society and, particularly political rhetoric, over the last century. A shift has occurred, he argues, from an early 20th century focus on solidarity and the country as a common project, to one of expectations on the individual, characterized by phrases such as personal responsibility, in which people’s “success would be the measure of their merit.” He notes the debates since the 1980’s over welfare, that “have been less about solidarity than about the extent to which the disadvantaged are responsible for their misfortune.” (64-65)

Although President Reagan first made this critique of welfare mainstream, President Clinton and politicians on both sides of the aisle have continued such rhetoric into the 21st century. It has crystalized around a concept that Sandel refers to as a “rhetoric of rising,” the idea that the government’s focus needs to be on giving everyone the opportunity to get as far as their hard work and talent can take them.

By 2016, however, such language no longer inspired, as people experienced dramatically increasing inequality and ever shrinking mobility, both for themselves and, perhaps more dispiritingly, for their children.

When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow. (73) 

Hardly surprising, then, that anger with Democrats as well as traditional Republicans for perpetrating this system, if each side in its own ways, caused a shift of a sufficient number of voters to Trump.

What these voters rejected, argues Sandel, is what he refers to as the technocratic approach to politics that has dominated over the past several decades. That approach includes a focus on education, with an emphasis on the need for a college degree. Here again, individual responsibility does the heavy lifting, with “low educational achievement [considered] to represent a failure of individual effort.” (96) Sandel finds technocratic thinking to be driven by “credentialism” – a belief by those with college degrees that they not only should, but in fact, deserve to arbitrate social and economic policy.

Referencing the debate over climate change, he provides a pointed example of the pitfalls of the classic claim of a technocrat:

The idea that we should all agree on the facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions, is a technocratic conceit. Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question. Whoever succeeds in framing the facts is already a long way to winning the argument. (110) 

In fact, he suggests, the arguments over climate change

are not scientific questions to be answered by experts. They are questions about power, morality, authority, and trust, which is to say they are questions for democratic citizens. (112)

Toward the end of the book, Sandel offers potential directions toward solutions to shift away from the worst consequences of meritocracy. His take-off point is that compensating people with money "will do little to address the anger and resentment that now run deep, … because the anger is about loss of recognition and esteem … [more than] diminished purchasing power.” Instead, he proposes that we re-define the common good from our current focus on consumer welfare, to one based on what he refers to as a “civic conception [in which] the most important role we play in the economy is not as consumers but as producers.” In such a viewpoint, the value of our contribution is not “simply a matter of satisfying consumer preferences, [which leads to a view of] market wages [as] a good measure of who has contributed what.” Instead, the focus becomes on “the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve.” In such a social and economic structure, for example, the common refrain that teachers should be better paid would likely be translated into reality, as opposed to simply lamented as not possible due to market forces. (208-9)

He does concede that “the notion that economic policy is ultimately for the sake of consumption is today so familiar that it is hard to think our way behind it.” (209) He’s essentially asking Americans to give up the belief in market fundamentalism that, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway lay out in their compelling work The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review linked to at right), business spent much of the 20th century inculcating Americans in.

Market fundamentalism … has blinded its adherents to the realities around them, while making it hard for all of us to see the range of [economic] options that have worked in the past and could work again in the future. (424, Oreskes)

An implication of Sandel’s conclusions is that while the distribution of a universal basic income (UBI) might seem like a viable solution for people not earning enough to survive, given stagnant wages and now increasing automation, it will not alone solve the fundamental issue of returning a feeling of self-esteem to people’s lives that currently comes from their work. Although he does not address UBI directly, based on his arguments pursuing it would require an extensive project of decoupling this present-day connection between how much one is paid for one’s work and one’s self-esteem from doing the work. He notes that

In market-driven societies, interpreting material success as a sign of moral desert is a persisting temptation. It is a temptation we need repeatedly to resist. One way of doing so is to debate and enact measures that prompt us to reflect, deliberately and democratically, on what counts as truly valuable contributions to the common good and where market verdicts miss the mark. (213-4)

He does acknowledge that such a debate would not be easy or lead to universally agreed upon answers; market fundamentalists have, in that sense, the easier argument, because they have allowed themselves to – and convinced all of us to allow them to – ignore a whole range of socially, politically and environmentally damaging externalities. Make enough simplifying assumptions, and a problem can seem to have an easy solution, one that, however, fails at some point in the implementation. Ultimately, the key is to shift from a simplistic vision that markets can solve all problems, to a recognition that our present approach, whatever benefits it has provided in the past, is leading to an increasingly unsustainable and dangerous social and political volatility in the present.

In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel makes a persuasive case that while the idea of merit in hiring for particular positions can seem natural and appropriate, the real-world consequences of a culture of meritocracy have had a corrosive and damaging effect on the cultural and social fabric of the US. It has destroyed the concept of the US as a communal project of its people, by over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ignoring the range of sometimes intangible but often simply ignored accidents, fortunes and contingencies that play a profound role in any individual’s success or failure.

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Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book

Although Sandel shows how Christian belief led us to the current culture of deserving, it could be interesting to consider whether a shift in religious belief away from the prosperity gospel could transform into a shift in secular thinking away from meritocracy and toward support for a new conception of our economy.

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 In their book mentioned above, The Big Myth, Oreskes and Conway include a fascinating history of the real story behind the novels in the series that includes The Little House on the Prairie, and the associated television series. The novels and show present a very individualistic story, of the family making it largely on their own. Oreskes and Conway report this to have been a significant re-write of the actual history – by the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a libertarian:

The stories [in the Little House books] were not true, not in their details and not in their overall framework. In the Ingallses’ real lives, hard work didn’t bring success. Nor were they rugged individuals: they relied on neighbors and community for their very survival, and their presence on the frontier was predicated on the federal government’s removal of native Osage peoples and distribution of their land to white settles. Yet in the books, the state scarcely appears, save in a negative light.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis" by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain

World Without End (2023)
Jean-Marc Jancovici (1962)
Christophe Blain (1970)
193 pages

The basic facts of the causes of the climate crisis can be fairly easily understood. Even without a technical background, one can grasp the fundamentals of the greenhouse effect and how increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution have led to rapidly rising global average temperatures; understand plots comparing recent such temperature increases to historical values and associated climates; and make connections to current changes in our climate and environment. While complexities and uncertainties introduce variability into forecasts of future impacts, one can understand enough to accept the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community of dire implications for our civilization.

It’s the other side of the issue, however, where the true challenge to our understanding lies: deciding what we can do as a global society to improve our chances of avoiding this bleak future – or at least minimizing the damage. Instead of a single, relatively straightforward physical cause and effect, such as greenhouse gas emissions leading to increasing global mean temperature, determining the most appropriate approach to reducing CO2 emissions requires one to understand complex systems of systems involving the limitations of current technologies and the physical world, as well of our global economic and social structures.

Not recognizing and taking these realities into account, and so acknowledging the full ramifications of the various paths available to address the climate change crisis, can mean being beguiled into supporting or promoting solutions that at first glance seem obvious, but on a deeper level reveal fundamental limitations. Worse, those with a vested interest for or against particular solutions can take information out of context and so – unintentionally or intentionally – mislead the public.

Given the inherent complexities, arriving at a sufficient understanding of what one needs to know about potential approaches for dealing with the situation can seem daunting. Into that breach step Christophe Blain and Jean-Mark Jancovici, with their engaging and timely book World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis.

Blain, a graphic novelist, begins by describing how he first became interested in learning more about the climate crisis, including its potential impacts and solutions, eventually leading him to reach out to Jancovici, an engineer who has been working on climate issues since the late 1990’s. Blain presents their discussions in graphic novel format, and through his clear and engaging illustrations and graphics relays what he learned from Jancovici about how humankind has become so profoundly reliant on energy, why this has led to the climate crisis we face, and what constitute the challenges of potential solutions for trying to address it.

In the opening section, Jancovici makes evident through both data and clarifying examples the ubiquitousness of energy consumption in our lives. He notes that we tend to be most sensitive to the direct cost of the energy we get billed for – to heat our homes or fuel our cars – although that generally represents only a small fraction of our income, “in France … between 5 and 7%.” (14) Meanwhile, we too easily overlook the vast and growing set of products and services in our lives that each require the input of energy for their realization – from mining, transporting and refining raw materials, to designing, producing, selling and using the final product. In order to make the full extent of this energy consumption more concrete, he demonstrates to Blain the trail of energy in just our morning routine, from the clothes we put on, to the food we eat, and the products involved in brushing our teeth, as shown below (pages 24 and 25).

 

Jancovici points out that much (if not nearly all) of what we now take for granted in our lives first became possible only roughly two centuries ago, with the shift from primarily human and animal energy (and some windmills and water wheels) to fossil fuels. These fuels have dramatically increased the amount of energy available to do work, and he demonstrates their significant advantage in producing goods and services by noting that “a worker can produce between 10 and 100 kWh [kilowatt-hours] of mechanical energy per year … [while] just a liter of gas yields the same capacity to transform the environment as 10 to 100 days of hard work for a human.” (28) Again seeking to provide physical insight into these numbers, he illustrates for readers the amount of human effort that would be required to use different everyday devices powered by electricity, as shown in the image shown below, from page 29.

This shift to cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels – coal in the 1800’s, then eventually also oil and natural gas – enabled the industrial revolution, which fundamentally changed our civilization in ways that have resulted in dramatic “population growth … more hyperbolic than exponential” (49) over the past two hundred years. During that time, the average per-person energy use of this growing population has quadrupled, from about 5,000 kWh of energy per year in the mid-1800’s to now around 22,000 kWh per year and continuing to increase. (This is a global average; in the West it’s significantly higher.)

And such growth in energy use (and population for that matter) is, in fact, an inherent part of our economic system; Jancovici points back to economic theorists of the early 1800’s, who argued that “Natural resources are inexhaustible, because otherwise we would not get them for free. As they cannot be multiplied nor exhausted, they are not the province of economic sciences.” (84) At the time, not only resources but also the available space for production and for disposing of the wastes of production appeared limitless; the primary constraint was the amount of labor available to operate machinery. These assumptions enabled an economic system based on the idea of, and really the demand for, persistent growth. And such thinking continues today – the need for economic growth driving ever more consumption and so ever higher per-person energy use.

In recent decades, however, challenges have appeared to the assumptions supporting such growth. These include, for example, the increasing costs associated with oil production, as the extraction of cheap conventional oil has peaked and so pushed the industry to pursue more expensive options, such as shale oil. And while sources of coal remain plentiful, Jancovici argues that

Scarcity isn’t the most worrisome thing about coal. The real worry here is its potential, as the most carbon-intensive energy, to destroy the climate. We’ll be burnt to a cinder before we have to worry about running out of coal. (102)

With this pointed comment, he shifts to a discussion of the climate crisis, describing the greenhouse gas effect and its implications. His explanation concludes by tying together the ideas in the first half of the book, relating the generation of carbon dioxide to the emissions from our energy sources, the fundamental expectations of our economic system, and the size of the world population. This, then, sets the stage for the central question Blain and Jancovici explore over the remainder of the text: the challenge of deciding how best to address the present climate crisis.

Efficiency has been one commonly championed approach, and Jancovici, while not dismissing its benefits, points out that although machines have become more efficient over the past century, we have dramatically increased the number of them as the population has grown, swamping the improvements. And, as noted earlier, per-person energy use continues to grow, in part due to the spread of modern conveniences to an ever-larger share of the global population. The end effect is that, at this point, 

making significant energy savings has nothing to do with turning off the lights or using recyclable coffee cups. All the things we buy during the year, how we get around, what we eat, the size of the house we live in and its heating … that’s what counts. (47)

A key element to addressing the climate crisis involves how we generate energy, for all of these items in our lives, which leads to a discussion about the potential for renewable energy solutions to help reduce future carbon dioxide emissions. For readers who view the deployment of renewable sources such as solar and wind as the best possible path to addressing climate change, Jancovici counters with several concerning realities.

The first, and most basic, touches on the widely reported growth in the number of renewable energy installations over the past several years. Though the increases seem significant, and a basis for hope, the devil is in the details, as Jancovici demonstrates in the chart at right (from page 42). First, while the growth rates for renewables have been high recently, the actual magnitude remains small, providing as yet a tiny percentage of total energy consumption. More disheartening, the growth in renewables has only slowed the overall growth in energy use – the amount of fossil fuel use has also continued to grow larger. Thus, the increase in renewable energy installations has only displaced a portion of the increase in fossil fuel use.

Even ignoring the fact that all the increase in renewables so far has come on top of continued increases in fossil fuel use, one could argue that civilization must simply shift more aggressively to renewable energy sources. Jancovici describes, however, several issues with such a plan.

One is the space required – significant tracts of surface area would need to be covered in some combination of solar panels and wind turbines. Another is that these systems currently require significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce and install.

And finally, and perhaps most critically, since energy from solar and wind won’t be continuously available, a huge amount of dispatchable energy – that is, always instantaneously available – would be required to back them up. Potential options for dispatchable energy are problematic, he notes, especially when considering the need on a national scale: batteries remain unviable at this scale for technical reasons; the amount of hydro that would be required boggles the mind; fossil fuels are effectively the current solution to dispatchable energy but keeping them running doesn’t help the greenhouse gas situation.

In the text, Jancovici effectively walks Blain – and readers – to a particular solution: nuclear energy. He describes his own journey through the science of climate change and exploring the potential solutions among energy sources that do not emit CO2, and his initially reluctant conclusion that only nuclear power can make a significant impact on the drive to reduce CO2 emissions: “it took me years to wrap my head around it and really understand it.” He finds nuclear to ultimately be the most advantageous (or, perhaps, least disadvantageous) solution, based on the complex realities that need considered.

Aside from being a power source that is, unlike solar and wind, always on (‘dispatchable’), other advantages include a lower amount of CO2 emitted in the materials for and construction of the plant compared to a comparable amount of solar or wind, a much higher load factor (the amount of power producible relative to the potential possible), a much smaller footprint, and a much better return in energy for the amount of energy invested to extract the necessary materials from the environment.

Those against nuclear power may acknowledge some or all of these advantages, yet raise concerns about the dangers of a nuclear power plant exploding or of the waste material that results. Jancovici meticulously dispels such concerns, explaining the reality of how nuclear power plants work, especially newer generation designs now used. And these newer designs use significantly less uranium – he estimates that, along with generating much less waste, the world has enough uranium to last “thousands of years.” (149)

The primary impediment to nuclear power remains, of course, having the political will to pursue it in the face of the combined resistance of environmental groups aligned (if unintentionally) with oil and gas interests focused on preventing it. Jancovici describes these challenges for Europe, where France has built a significant number of nuclear power plants (providing ~65-70% of their total energy supply) but faces stiff resistance to nuclear energy from the broader European Community and its regulations.

For me, perhaps the most startling conclusion in the book, dramatically highlighting the importance of considering the entire energy infrastructure as a system, relates to the interaction between nuclear and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Recall Jancovici’s emphasis on the need to match wind and solar with a significant amount of dispatchable power, and his conclusion that the dispatchable source must be nuclear power (to avoid the carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants). Given limited funds to invest, he concludes that it doesn’t even make sense to deploy significant solar and wind energy, as any installed wind and solar will require an equivalent amount of dispatchable nuclear power. Since nuclear power plants require significant capital investment to install and cost to operate, it makes more sense to simply shift to nuclear energy, using wind and solar only to a limited extent where appropriate.

Nuclear power is not, however, a silver bullet:

it can’t replace all fossil fuels. It’s like a reserve parachute. It’ll let us hold on to part of what we have today, but just a part. And it’ll keep the fall from being too brutal. (162) 

For, aside from power generation, there exist other significant carbon dioxide sources, from machinery such as mining equipment and heavy trucking that require fossil fuels, to cattle burping methane. As a result, he argues, we cannot avoid rethinking our lifestyles – learning to get by with less. Not giving up everything, he makes clear, or even all of any one thing – just moderating our consumption of goods: “the climate problem is a matter of quantity [and] the solution is also a matter of quantity.” (166)

In World Without End, a graphic novelist and an engineer have come together to collaborate on an engaging and thought-provoking introduction to the challenging and polemical topic of climate change. In a format radically different from other (often excellent) works on the topic, Blain and Jancovici cover the origins, implications and potential solutions to our present climate crisis by combining illustrations and text that communicate the technical details in a clear and readable way. And, while not sugarcoating the decisions that have precipitated the crisis and the challenges we face, their exchange manages to present the daunting reality of our present situation with a bit of humor – softening their message without diluting it.

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Other notes and information:

In his discussion about European reaction to nuclear power to this point, Jancovici notes that influential Germany has been shutting down nuclear power plants and so has had to ramp up the use lignite, a relatively dirty form of coal.

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One sometimes hears the argument that renewable energy sources have become cheaper than fossil fuel energy, and that this will therefore drive the shift to renewable energy sources. But this comes with a challenge pointed out by, for example, Andreas Malm in his book Fossil Capital (my review linked to at right):

It would be foolhardy … to trust in demand and supply as the mechanisms of the transition. If solar and wind were to become radically cheaper than fossil fuels, demand for the latter might fall – only to induce a corresponding fall in their prices, reviving demand and reestablishing an equilibrium of profligacy. (382, Malm)

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead (2022)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
548 pages

My mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back. (97)

At just eleven years old, the title character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead has had his childhood stripped away from him. And he has clear and painful awareness of what’s been lost. 

Not that his life to that point had been easy, his father having died before he was born and his mother ever struggling to stay sober and hold down a job. His birth name was Damon Fields, but it didn’t take long for those around him to switch it to Demon and, having inherited his dead father’s red hair, his dad’s nickname Copperhead. The kindness of a neighboring family toward him and his mom somewhat eased his early years, allowing a boyhood spent exploring the mountain forests around his rural home. Sheltered for a time from the worst of the world, he could at least imagine the possibility of a decent future.

Events conspire, however, to crush any such hopes, culminating in a moment that definitively destroys the life he has known, forcing him to recognize that his childhood has been left irrevocably behind. It causes a profound scar, with consequences that he contends with every day that follows. He struggles to ever again generate enough faith in himself – or the world – to take a risk on a good option when it arises, as opposed to assuming that the worst path is inevitable and so might just as well be chosen upfront.

The setting both in time and place plays a core role in Kingsolver’s story. Demon grows up in the Appalachian hill country of western Virginia, near the borders with Kentucky and Tennessee. And he enters his teenage years around the turn of the 21st century, as drug use spreads like wildfire through rural communities such as his.

With mining jobs disappearing and little else besides farming and some service work for job prospects, all too many people around him are unemployed or underemployed. Underfunded social services unable to fill the huge gaps that result, people sink into poverty, leading to frustration and hopelessness. Narcotics like OxyContin come to fill the breach.

Compared to the view of OxyContin abuse one typically gets in news stories, Kingsolver gives a far more complex picture of the insidious ways that such drugs create an ecosystem of dependency.

Not surprisingly, her characters include a drug rep who wheedles and bribes doctors into prescribing increasing amounts of the painkiller to patients by providing kickbacks such as exotic vacation getaways, and doctors who freely prescribe the drugs in response. But at the heart of her story lies the impact of OxyContin availability on the community.

Users abound, of course, attempting to deaden their suffering; but some end up selling a part of what they get to other users to make money – whether to eat, pay rent or buy yet other drugs. It’s a kind of underground economy, one able to grow in the absence of other opportunities, but that only further undermines the community’s future. Demon resists this siren song of OxyContin use for a time, but finally slips into its dark embrace, hesitantly at first, then more fully, any reticence he feels overwhelmed by his desperate needs and the pit of hopelessness he’s fallen into. 

And yet, Kingsolver brings sensitivity and complexity to her description of the lives of Demon and, through his experiences, his community. She distinguishes the misery and poverty weighing down the people in this region bypassed by our present-day economy, from the love of place that coexists with it. At a distance, it can be all too easy to assume that those who leave such places must think “good riddance,” while those who stay are only waiting for the opportunity to leave. The reality, Kingsolver reveals, can rather be that while those who leave simply follow a path of survival, those who elect to stay fight to do so despite the long and tough odds.

We observe this love of place through Demon’s eyes, when he ventures beyond his rural home. Early in the story he makes his first trip to a large city, traveling with family friends to Knoxville, to visit relatives. He struggles to make sense of what he sees in the city, his shock palpable. He can scarcely imagine why anyone would want to live there, describing the apartment building of the aunt they visit as a

doom castle. A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. … Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people and people. There was no outside anywhere … no running wild here like we did at home … [a child] not on [their] own for one second, due to all the unknown people and murder potential. (23) 

Much later, when he has to live in a city for an extended period, he comes to realize how

Up home, it’s different. … you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by. … Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. … Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. (516) 

Demon, however different he may wish his life to have been, recognizes the goodness that accompanies the many challenges that weigh upon his community.

And, although not something Kingsolver explores directly in the story, there is a tragic dilemma for such communities. Bringing the present-day economy to the area – companies and so jobs – would increase people’s standard of living, but likely at the cost of much of what those who’ve grown up there love about their region. Not that one cannot imagine that a business could come in and attempt to fit within the existing lifestyle, but it all too often seems to take a low priority. Wendell Berry makes that point about agriculture, forestry, and mining in particular, in his powerful collection of essays, Our Only World (my review linked to at right), though his point applies broadly to businesses in a profit-focused economy:

Once they have been industrialized, they no longer recognized landscape as whole, let alone as homes of people and other creatures. (6, Berry) 

Threading that needle – not losing what they have in order to gain the temptations of the modern world they see on TV – is challenging in a broader social and economic system that prizes scale and commonality and profit. As one of Demon’s friends tells him in describing what their community has been up against:

It’s the ones in charge…. They were always on the side of the money-earning [city] people, and down on the land people…. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par … to turn [us] into wage labor. … [The result has been our] two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. (522-4)

This threat is pointedly captured by William Kauffman, quoted in an article in Utne Reader in 2000: 

For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. What we have is class war – though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments; nothings, really; everythings, in fact – waged by the mobile against the immobile, by the cosmopolitan against the rooted, and the winners are he professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.

Another, more psychological challenge haunts the story for readers. While some of the pain Demon experiences results from the actions of people that he, as a child, must simply submit to, in other cases he reaches a decision point conscious of the correct, or at least better, option, but unable to choose it. With Demon as a sympathetic protagonist, it can be frustrating to watch him again and again choose the more destructive path, and to do so with full self-awareness. Through Demon, Kingsolver forces readers to recognize how someone beaten down long enough can come to imagine that pain and misery are their due, and for that reason pick the worse choice at any given moment, seeing it as what they deserved in a life that has cut them no breaks.

In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver provides readers a clear-eyed yet sympathetic portrait of rural America. Communities gutted by job losses and cajoled by drug companies into burying their frustration and disappointment in painkillers, struggling to keep and get by on what little they have left. An eye-opening and disturbing revelation for those readers on the other side of the resulting social and political chasm. Giving Demon the last word for his world:

If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight. (103)

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Other notes and information:

This book is one of three that journalist Nicholas Kristof recommended in an article entitled Join My Bewildered Liberals Book Club.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf