How to Save the World reading list
Also from Eliot Gelwan today is a link to a 2004 item on Dave Pollard’s weblog that lists 56 books and articles Pollard says ” forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living.” It’s a good list. I’ve even read some of the books.
What I’m most glad to see is Pollard’s short first section: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History. Modern misconceptions about what “human nature” is all about and what human society was like before civilization’s agriculture, cities, governments, law, organized religion, corporate personhood, and other so-called necessities affect what we think we need today and what we’re willing to put up with to get it.
Of the six authors in this section, I’m glad to see anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. His article on The Original Affluent Society is basic. As Pollard says about it, “If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn’t you try to portray the alternative life as ’short, nasty and brutish’?” (Sahlins’ related book Stone Age Economics is listed on my own old long list of “Reading Suggestions for the Curious Social Psychology Student (and others)” in the section on Human Nature, Human Origins, & Personality. Someday I’ll update that list, maybe…).
Further down Pollard’s list is the category Radical Analyses, Radical Solutions. Pollard says these three books “are the most important readings, but you probably won’t ‘buy’ their arguments unless you’ve first read much of the material above. One of these books is A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. I haven’t read it, but Pollard says this is “a profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won’t work.” That suits my own long-standing view that moderation and compromise are often exactly the wrong approach. No doubt Jensen’s book is more developed than my own short article on the subject.
All in all, a good list.