BOOKS: US geostrategists differ on everything except that US will & must remain supreme

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Thomas Meaney is a promising Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University's Department of History who has already published a considerable number of pieces on U.S. and European intellectual and political history.  --  In the Jul. 14 number of the London Review of Books, Meaney reviews John A. Thompson's A Sense of Power (Cornell UP, 2015).  --  According to Thompson, the reason the United States chose to become a world power in the 1940s was because it could:  "its leaders realized that it would cost them relatively little to bend the world in the political direction they wanted."[1]  --  Franklin Roosevelt, rejecting the traditional concept of "spheres of influence," told Joseph Stalin that "There is literally no question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested."  --  Superior American military power backed up this view.  --  "By war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana."  --  Similarly, another book under review, Perry Anderson's American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (Verso, 2014), holds that it was the sheer fact of American economic dominance that led a once modest historical particularism ('American exceptionalism') to merge with universalism (the exporting of 'American democracy') and become a form of "messianic activism."  --  William Appleman Williams, Chalmers Johnson, and Andrew Bacevich may cherish the view that the U.S. can return to "a truer version of American republican principles," but Anderson's view is dark:  "There’s no better republic to go back to, no way to roll back the messianism."  --  Even the optimism of Williams, Johnson, and Bacevich can be seen as a form of this messianism, since "[w]hat strikes Anderson about the collection of American strategists he’s assembled is how -- despite their radically different worldviews -- they all agree that the U.S. will and must remain the supreme world power." ...

BOOKS: NYT reviewer cheers proposal to expand US military, bring back draft

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If you thought because the New York Times chose on Thursday to review a book entitled How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything it was going to acknowledge that the United States has become a militaristic nation, guess again.  --  No, its review ends with the reviewer cheering a proposal to expand the military budget still further:  "Expanding the Army worked for FDR (and the world)," opines Jennifer Senior.  --  "Why not again?"[1]  --  Chances are the book was only reviewed because its author, Rosa Brooks, 45, is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, 74, who over the past thirty-four years has published in the Times some seventy-one articles, not counting the reviews of her many books that have appeared regularly over the years.  --  Incidentally, searching for the expression "American militarism" on the New York Times website is an edifying experience.  --  The more militaristic the United States has become, the more dubious and dismissive the Times has become about the phrase....

REVIEW: Digital life has become 'a closed cycle of anxiety creation and alleviation'

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Shelley Turkle of MIT has been studying the digital revolution for some time, and her new book, Reclaiming Conversation (2015), "presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships -- with family and friends, as well as colleagues and romantic partners," Jacob Weisberg reports in a New York Review of Books review.[1]  --  The root of the problem, she thinks, is that "young people absorbed in their devices" are "failing . . . to develop fully independent selves."  --  "Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, she contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize."  --  "The thing young people never do on their smartphones is actually speak to one another."  --  Weisberg concludes his review of this and three other books on a pessimistic note.  --  There might be solutions to mitigate the effects Turkle and others describe, Weisberg suggests, but "Aspirations for humanistic digital design have been overwhelmed so far by the imperatives of the startup economy.  --  As long as software engineers are able to deliver free, addictive products directly to children, parents who are themselves compulsive users have little hope of asserting control.  --  We can’t defend ourselves against the disciples of captology by asking nicely for less enticing slot machines."  --  COMMENT:  As is usual in the New York Review Books, this review never considers the deeper insights of radical theory.  --  The current mutation of culture began not with digital machines, but with the supremacy of the image that came first through advertising, film, and television.  --  Information technology is but an intensification and extension of the process.  --  The best analysis of this is still Guy Debord's classic The Society of the Spectacle (1967).  --  According to Debord (1931-1994), "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."  --  He argued that the history of social life should be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into appearing."  --  The problems these books address will not be remedied, because they are, in fact, desired outcomes.  --  This is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."  --  In other words, social media are achieving the commodification of private life....

  1. ESSAY: 'When death becomes a game, it's imperative to leave the arena' (Agnès Desarthe)
  2. BACKGROUND: Culture wars politics roil Hugo Awards
  3. BOOK REVIEW: The sources of violent jihadism
  4. BOOKS: In WWII, Europe was 'on trial' and 'did badly'
  5. BOOKS: How much should historians 'think'?
  6. BOOK REVIEW: 'Worse than a defeat' -- the British fiasco in Afghanistan
  7. TRANSLATION: New book sees capitalism conquering last frontier, sleep
  8. IDEAS: Disruption craze 'well outside anything resembling plausible historical analysis'
  9. BOOKS: History of nuclear accidents illustrates absurdity & irresponsibility of nuclear weapons
  10. BACKGROUND: Kubrick's description of dangers of nuclear control systems more accurate than US government's or media's