Books of 2018: Race and Leftist studies

In my last reading update, I said of my tour of black studies that I was "kinda finished." Except then I kept reading. Since that post, I read the following:

• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Y Davis
• The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
• The Racial Contract - Charles W Mills
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition - Cedric Robinson
• Racism: A Short History - George Fredrickson

In addition to these, I have one last book I plan to read as a part of this project (which is not to say that I won't read more black and race literature — I certainly will): Rethinking Racial Justice, by Andrew Valls. And yes, the caucasity of letting two white dudes have the last words on race theory is not lost on me. See my previous reading update for my assessment of black/race studies.

To break that project up a little, I also started my long overdue course on socialism and leftism, including finally reading Marx (the hate-read of the Communist Manifesto I did during the Randian haze of my freshman year of university doesn't really count, I think). Not a big total, but the Marx book was huge, and I consider Davis, Fanon, and Robinson from above to be part of this project as well.

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan (ed.)
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya

And I'm about 10% into the massive Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski. My thoughts on Marxism so far are mostly that Marx got a lot wrong, and he really didn't deserve the world-historical level of influence he attained. That said, the humanistic elements of Marxian thought — as discussed in the Dunayevskaya — are interesting and valuable. I tend to think that liberalism needs to be socialized (in that the social context is insufficiently attended to in a lot of liberal theory), socialism could do itself massive favors by adopting suitably altered liberal institutions, and that there is an attractive no man's land between the blurry frontiers of liberalism and (democratic) socialism.

The rest of my nonfiction reading for the year didn't conform to a theme. I finally read the Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, an excellent, timely book about the reforms we should be making to our political economy. And I read A Turn to Empire, by Jennifer Pitts. Pitts reviews the patterns of liberal thought on imperialism from the late 18th century through the 19th century, showing how the later thinkers in this period rejected an earlier liberal anti-imperialism. My yearly fix of Nussbaum was her Therapy of Desire. I had expected to like it more than the Fragility of Goodness, as the books have similar themes, but the former involves an explicit comparison of her Aristotelian ethics with other Hellenistic approaches, but Fragility managed to be less tedious, more engaging. That said, Therapy had some very interesting discussions on diverse topics. Finally, Dear Ijeawelle, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was a delightful little feminist manifesto, highly recommended especially as a jargon-free introduction to feminism.

I read more fiction than I reckoned I would. Two Star Wars books, one pretty good and one horrendous. Revan was an utter violation of the promise and philosophical sophistication of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I read one Black Panther graphic novel when I was hyped up about the film. I read the Wheel of Time prequel, which I'm certain I'd read many years ago, but I'd forgotten all the details. And the greatest new find was the Expanse series, the first book of which was wildly entertaining.

• Revan - Drew Karpyshyn
• Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• New Spring - Robert Jordan
• Black Panther, Book 1 - Ta-Nehisi Coates

A feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time

And now for something completely different: a feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time!

If Jordan Peterson is right that the symbolism of chaos as feminine and order as masculine is deeply rooted in the human psyche or collective consciousness or whatever, then the feminism of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is even more subversive than I'd previously thought. [Editor's note: Of course Jordan Peterson is a clown show, but when this was originally written, Peterson was all over the place. No respect for Peterson is intended.]

SPOILERS to follow.

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The protagonist is, of course, the Lord of Chaos. He is the breaker of bonds, meaning social relations would be torn asunder in his wake. He brought conquest and war. The White Tower, the most powerful institution, broke into civil war over how to deal with him. And of course the chaos of his actions corroded the seals on the Dark One's prison.

Rand is thus easily seen as a male representation of chaos. Importantly, it's not just that the protagonist happened to be a man. An obvious feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time is that toxic masculinity is literally a kind of madness, and it's a madness that threatens to destroy the world.

There are different ideas about what toxic masculinity means, but a common one is that masculinity becomes toxic when vulnerability becomes anathema. When vulnerability must be avoided at all costs, then men cannot share emotions like fear or grief, and these emotions are suppressed and left unexamined. Even love and affection are avoided because love opens one to the threat of loss. Basic human connection is strained and mental (and spiritual) health suffers. Anger, however, is conceived as an emotion coming from strength.

Rand fits this description quite well. He still feels love, but he struggles against this. He feels as if he must suppress all weakness in order to defeat the Dark One, be impervious to the threat of losing loved ones lest they be used against him. As the series (and his madness) progresses he lashes out in anger more and more. Cadsuane's project to make Rand once again cry and laugh is pivotal. We come to understand that Rand's toxic masculinity was the form the saidin madness took with him. When he finally learns at the peak of Dragonmount how to keep the madness at bay, he does so by once again learning how to laugh, cry, love, and fear. Post-Dragonmount Rand not only can talk about his feelings, but he can trust again, and his presence begins to heal the blighted world around him.

Chaos in the Wheel of Time is not just masculine, it is toxic masculinity.

Rand's foil is neither the Dark One nor any of the Forsaken or other darkfriends, but Egwene al'Vere, who symbolizes order.

As Rand is the breaker of bonds, Egwene is just as much a forger of bonds, and a healer of broken institutions. She forges connections between the Tower and other groups of female channelers, thus shining a light on a history of cover-ups and deceit while creating new relationships, alliances, and opportunities for fruitful exchange.

One of her primary arcs in the story is the campaign to reunite the White Tower and to heal the political rot within. She resists the temptation to accomplish this with open warfare, though she likely could have succeeded. It's hard to see such a strategy coming from Rand, who, for example, broke the Aiel in twain and hurled them against the wetlanders.

Instead, she nurtures back to health trust between the Aes Sedai factions and faith in the White Tower itself, the lack of which were the ultimate causes of the rot. She does this from within the Tower during her captivity by nonviolent protest in the vein of Gandhi and MLK. Her conspicuous vulnerability was her greatest strength. This contrasts vividly with Rand, whose own time of captivity only accelerated his paranoid madness.

Even her Talents with the One Power symbolize order. She has a knack for Earth (rare for saidar), suggesting solidity. She independently rediscovers how to create cuendillar, a material that becomes stronger with every attempt to destroy it (antifragility is a kind of order). And in an unfortunate bit of goofy writing, she's even depicted as inventing an anti-balefire. Balefire is a weapon of pure chaos that burns threads directly from the Pattern. It's fitting that Rand goes a little nuts with balefire, and it's equally fitting that it is Egwene who finds a way to directly patch the Pattern back together.

Egwene's representation of order is feminine in a traditional sense, featuring vulnerability, nurture, and an orientation toward relationships. But it's important to acknowledge that Egwene isn't a sexist caricature of femininity. She is also presented as brave (she has the heart of an Aiel, with whose Wise Ones she trained), adventurous, sharp (she's not only inventive with the Power, but a ferociously savvy politician), and possessing a strength of will rivaling any other character in the series (in one contest of wills she straight up breaks the mind of one of the Forsaken).

Summing up, the Wheel of Time inverts Jordan Peterson's symbolism of feminine chaos and masculine order. Rand consistently represents not just chaos but a particularly toxic-masculine form of chaos. And the most pivotal moment of the series is when Rand reengages his "feminine" aspects and becomes thereby a truly human, whole being. Meanwhile Rand's foil doesn't just happen to be a woman, but a woman who represents a particularly "feminine" order of nurture, vulnerability, and human connection.

Reading update: libertarianism, democracy, black studies, and Marxism

So long libertarianism

It's been over a year since my last reading update! In my last post I summarized both my feminism and libertarianism reading projects. One interesting development of the libertarianism reading project plus marinating in the Trump era is that I've determined I can no longer call myself a libertarian. One thing I gleaned from my reading is that there's a useful distinction to be drawn between libertarianism and classical liberalism, based roughly on the property rights absolutism/monism and anti-institutional tendencies of libertarianism versus the more comprehensive value pluralism and sensitivity to institutional context of classical liberalism. That's the theory. In recent practice, most libertarians have also just proven to be exceptionally useless in understanding Trump. Trump, to most libertarians, is just another politician, and not any kind of special threat. I wrote a rather long critique of libertarian anarchism, and most of the arguments therein apply to minarchist libertarianism as well.

Democracy

In my last post I also hinted at a miniature reading project inspired by Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, and I did read a few such books:

• The Difference - Scott Page
• Democratic Reason - Hélène Landemore
• Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance - Ryan Muldoon
• Against Democracy - Jason Brennan

I recommend Page and Muldoon, even though I somehow failed to review Muldoon's book. The common theme within all the books except Brennan's is that a pluralistic society leverages epistemic advantages by the very fact of pluralism. People from different walks of life, regardless of their raw intelligence, bring different perspectives, or different ways of organizing information about the world. These different perspectives each can make certain problems more readily soluble. I read Against Democracy as a sanity check on my enthusiasm for this idea. As I make clear in the link, I was unimpressed.

And all that other stuff

I took a break from major reading projects after this mini-project just to read a few things I'd been meaning to get to. I read Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments and Wolff & de-Shalit's Disadvantage, from the capabilities literature, back to back. I have a long simmering idea of writing an essay connecting these two works. Namely, I want to argue that access to effective, growth oriented institutions (Cowen) is a powerful example of a fertile functioning (Wolff & de-Shalit), or a capability/functioning that naturally tends to enable the development of further valuable capabilities/functionings.

In my hodgepodge between-projects reading, I also read Liz Anderson's wonderful book, Private Government. Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order and Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan both helped me write my critique of anarchism. And I finally got around to reading a couple classics: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and Seneca's On Anger. After finally serendipitously spotting it at Powell's after years of looking, I read Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness. All of Nussbaum is really an ongoing project of mine. I've loosely set a goal to read one Nussbaum book per year, which should keep me busy for the rest of my life at her rate of publication. Next up in this effort will be the Therapy of Desire. I read Capitalism: For and Against, by Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom after seeing it referenced by Charles Mills (see below) in his Occupy Liberalism essay (incidentally one of my favorite essays since my last update here). Ann Cudd is amazing and I'm looking forward to reading more by her. Finally, Jacob T Levy did not disappoint with Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (which, inexcusably, I neglected to review).

Black studies

That brings me to my tour of black studies, which I have kinda finished, though I'm still reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and I'm planning to read more Angela Davis for my next project (see below).

• The Making of Black Lives Matter - Christopher Lebron
• Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis
• The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
• The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
• The Imperative of Integration - Elizabeth Anderson
• Black Rights / White Wrongs - Charles Mills
• Stamped from the Beginning - Ibram Kendi
• The Killing Rage - bell hooks
• The Future of Whiteness - Linda Martín Alcoff

And I watched Black Panther. Only half kidding about this, given the amount of commentary I read both before and after the film's release and the discussion groups I participated in.

This was an incredibly productive reading project, significantly nudging my perspective, albeit in a direction I was already trending. Concretely, I was skeptical of affirmative action before embarking on this tour, and I thought reparations were a clearly bad idea, both for political reasons and problems with targeting. Anderson convinced me of the merits of affirmative action as an instrument for integration even while she criticized other more common defenses of affirmative action that I was familiar with (as compensation, for example). By the time I got through Kendi, even though he doesn't focus on this, I came around to the idea of reparations (details matter, obviously) and the principle of black power generally. Blacks and other marginalized or oppressed peoples have to seize what power (economic, social, political) they can when they can (though not by "any means necessary"). Waiting for those things to come from the grace of the powerful is getting the cart before the horse. Power and privilege is jealously guarded, and this seems to be just a feature of humanity. Interestingly, my thoughts on black power resonate with some of the things I've learned from, e.g., Fukuyama and Acemoglu/Robinson on how equality and inclusive institutions typically depend on historical contingencies that happen to empower some groups relative to the existing elites. This is also in line with Jacob Levy's sort of agonistic view of politics and pluralism, from which I've learned a lot.

I'm also enchanted with the idea of "black radical liberalism" as is being developed by Charles Mills. Mills accepts what I view as the most challenging critiques of liberalism in both theory and practice without trying to claim these aren't "real liberalism." He argues that liberalism can survive these critiques but only if it turns away from ideal theory and embraces instead a non-ideal and rectificatory approach. Specifically, racialization and sex/gender oppression seen in actual non-ideal societies should be the focus of corrective justice, rather than being seen as deviations from liberalism (see paragraph above). I'm itching to write about this, especially since I think there are potentially very fruitful alternative directions to the one Mills has chosen. He's working from a theoretical tripod of liberalism (Kant and Rawls), radical theory (Marx), and black critical theory. A black radical capabilities liberalism could, at least in some ways, replace both the Kant/Rawls and the Marx legs, with the additional advantage that the capabilities approach is already well-suited to non-ideal theory and liberal practices.

Marxism/socialism

I've just started the Selected Writings of Karl Marx, edited by David McLellan. I've only read one book on socialism thus far (Socialism after Hayek), and this seems like a clear gap in my knowledge, especially since some kind of Marxian analysis is often implicit in some of the other topics I've become at least peripherally interested in, like radical feminism and black radicalism (see above). I'm ... not exactly in danger of becoming a Marxist. Or a socialist, except insofar as democratic socialists blend into social democrats blend into social justice-oriented (neo!)liberals. But I do have the impression that Marx has a far more humanistic perspective than some of the more economistic classical liberals. Marx was also inspired to some degree by Aristotle. Whatever the failures are of the labor theory of value and like, actual communism in the world (understatement), I'm pretty open-minded that Marxian class analysis might have useful resources. Anyway, at this point I don't even know enough to know what to read, but here are a few I'm intending to read so far:

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis
• I dunno some other stuff open to suggestions
• Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski