An intensely intriguing if seemingly unreachable vision of a new future for the world.
A complex, multipart agenda for a future in which humans retain their humanity.
Harvey kicks off his latest book, a follow-up to 2019’s impressive Utopia in the Anthropocene, with a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be a human on planet Earth? The question, which every society in human history has faced, has become incredibly complicated in the present era by both an ever-worsening climate crisis and the hyperaccelerated technological development that Harvey describes as “the biggest psychological experiment in human history…unregulated, unsupervised and unfolding before our very eyes.” He naturally sees these two vectors as inherently opposed to each other, with climate change leading to large portions of the global South soon becoming uninhabitable for humans, and the technological change leading to a merging of human and machine (“humachination”) that will usher in a new dystopian era the author refers to as the Technocene. Harvey draws on his own background as both an entrepreneur and an organizational psychologist (“the technology of being human, so to speak”) in order to provide alternatives to what he describes as the “fusion of lightly regulated technology and free market capitalism.” In a series of topic-oriented and well-researched chapters, he puts forward a practical vision for steps we can take to avoid the Technocene, from implementing antimonopoly legislation and reforestation policies to restructuring livestock farming, which uses three-quarters of the world’s farmland while providing less than 20% of the world’s caloric consumption (and a sixth of its carbon emissions).
The main strength of Harvey’s book is its comparative lack of naïveté. He’s aware of both the seeming outlandishness of his propositions and the essentially unbeatable corporate, governmental, and social forces arrayed against their implementation. This renders his book far more of a thought-provoking treatise than an actual plan for action. His suggestion of the one solution to the threats of humachination, for instance, is a “permanent moratorium on all advanced AI,” which he readily concedes may require that “all computer programming will have to be confined to relatively simple, highly transparent usages.” Since this kind of adaptation could only be brought about by the physical destruction of all human civilization in something like a catastrophic asteroid strike, and since societies will absolutely never adopt it willingly under any circumstances imaginable, this change and the bulk of Harvey’s other projections quickly begin to feel very utopian indeed. “Egalitarianism can be a tough discipline,” he writes in the understatement of the century, “in that it involves the constant containment of selfish desires.” And it’s in his stout opposition to those selfish desires that Harvey achieves his book’s most stirring narrative thread. At its heart, this book is less about the mechanics of reimagining political, social, scientific, and organizational institutions and more about reimagining “the psychology of the Ecocene, a state in which ecological and egalitarian values become the bedrock of everyday lived experience.” Quite apart from his book’s formidable research grounding, it’s Harvey’s faith in the improvability of humankind, particularly at this dark moment in history, that feels both quixotic and inspiring. Like any good utopian dream.
An intensely intriguing if seemingly unreachable vision of a new future for the world.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990015616
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Steady State Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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