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Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag review – can William James save your life? [07 May 2020|06:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/sick-souls-healthy-minds-by-john-kaag-review-can-william-james-save-your-life The pragmatist philosopher becomes exemplary of the power of positive thinking in this flawed study, full of cracker-barrel wisdom From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have taken a dim view of the common people. That, however, began to change when the common people turned into a mass-reading public hungry for a little philosophy, under the delusion that the subject has something interesting to say about the meaning of life. A number of pop philosophers emerged to meet this demand, some of them admirable such as Simon Blackburn, others more like the slightly sozzled character you bump into in a bar who thinks the stars spell out some momentous statement. The line between the pop and the pub philosopher is easy to cross. One way of making things easier on your audience is to avoid a philosopher’s ideas and talk about his or her life instead. Very few readers understand the synthetic a priori or the law of the excluded middle, but a lot of them know about falling in love or what it feels like to be miserable. It helps, however, if the life of the thinker in question is reasonably exciting. This was certainly the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who fought in the first world war, had a number of illegal gay relationships, lived in a hut on a Norwegian fiord and had to do a runner as a village schoolmaster when he struck a pupil across the face. Continue reading... post comment

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi review – conquest and resistance [07 May 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-by-rashid-khalidi-review-conquest-and-resistance A passionate history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... does the political will exist to bring about meaningful dialogue? Rashid Khalidi’s account of Jewish settlers’ conquest of Palestine is informed and passionate. It pulls no punches in its critique of Jewish-Israeli policies (policies that have had wholehearted US support after 1967), but it also lays out the failings of the Palestinian leadership. Khalidi participated in this history as an activist scion of a leading Palestinian family: in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and as part of the Palestinian negotiating team prior to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. He slams Israel but his is also an elegy for the Palestinians, for their dispossession, for their failure to resist conquest. It is a relentless story of Jewish-Israeli bad faith, alongside one of Palestinian corruption and political short-sightedness. Khalidi sets out his stall early on: the Palestine-Israel war was never one between two national movements contesting equally over the same land but was always a “settler colonial conquest” by Europe-based Zionists whose founding father, Theodor Herzl, laid bare the project to Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle in 1899: Palestine’s indigenous population did not matter and would anyway benefit from the modernising effects of Jewish “pioneers”, such as America with its westward Manifest Destiny. For Khalidi, Jewish settlers, aided by Britain from 1917, and by the US later on, colonised Palestine, creating and securing Israel through six “wars”: the Balfour declaration of 1917; the 1947 UN partition plan; the 1967 UN security council resolution 242; the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the 1993 Oslo peace accords; and Israeli leader Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit in 2000. Palestinian leaders from elite notables in the 1930s to Yasser Arafat and PLO-Fatah in the 60s to Hamas never successfully channelled the people’s passion to resist. This is not to “blame the victim”. Khalidi points to the huge obstacles in the way: in Britain and later the US, Protestant Christians bought into this “colonial war” to “civilise” the native population. There is a useful tension here between colonial superstructure and the patriarchal hierarchy and cronyism underpinning Palestinian elite leadership. Jewish-Israeli perfidy is central to Khalidi’s study but bubbling up through the text are key moments of resistance that demanded the insurgent organisation and charisma of a Michael Collins, a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Ho Chi Minh. This never happened. Instead, the well-organised Zionist movement (and Israel) instinctively divided disunited opposition. Continue reading... post comment

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi review – conquest and resistance [07 May 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/the-hundred-years-war-on-palestine-by-rashid-khalidi-review-conquest-and-resistance A passionate history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... does the political will exist to bring about meaningful dialogue? Rashid Khalidi’s account of Jewish settlers’ conquest of Palestine is informed and passionate. It pulls no punches in its critique of Jewish-Israeli policies (policies that have had wholehearted US support after 1967), but it also lays out the failings of the Palestinian leadership. Khalidi participated in this history as an activist scion of a leading Palestinian family: in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and as part of the Palestinian negotiating team prior to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. He slams Israel but his is also an elegy for the Palestinians, for their dispossession, for their failure to resist conquest. It is a relentless story of Jewish-Israeli bad faith, alongside one of Palestinian corruption and political short-sightedness. Khalidi sets out his stall early on: the Palestine-Israel war was never one between two national movements contesting equally over the same land but was always a “settler colonial conquest” by Europe-based Zionists whose founding father, Theodor Herzl, laid bare the project to Khalidi’s great-great-great uncle in 1899: Palestine’s indigenous population did not matter and would anyway benefit from the modernising effects of Jewish “pioneers”, such as America with its westward Manifest Destiny. For Khalidi, Jewish settlers, aided by Britain from 1917, and by the US later on, colonised Palestine, creating and securing Israel through six “wars”: the Balfour declaration of 1917; the 1947 UN partition plan; the 1967 UN security council resolution 242; the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon; the 1993 Oslo peace accords; and Israeli leader Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit in 2000. Palestinian leaders from elite notables in the 1930s to Yasser Arafat and PLO-Fatah in the 60s to Hamas never successfully channelled the people’s passion to resist. This is not to “blame the victim”. Khalidi points to the huge obstacles in the way: in Britain and later the US, Protestant Christians bought into this “colonial war” to “civilise” the native population. There is a useful tension here between colonial superstructure and the patriarchal hierarchy and cronyism underpinning Palestinian elite leadership. Central to Khalidi’s study are the deceits of the Zionist/Israeli leadership but bubbling up through the text are key moments of resistance that demanded the insurgent organisation and charisma of a Michael Collins, a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Ho Chi Minh. This never happened. Instead, the well-organised Zionist movement (and Israel) instinctively divided disunited opposition. Continue reading... post comment

'We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene' [07 May 2020|11:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene Forget the butterfly effect, this is the bat effect – our stranglehold on nature has unleashed the coronavirus outbreak. And the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how to run our networked world Every April, Washington DC plays host to the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank. But last month, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva addressed her colleagues on video. The world was facing, she declared, a “crisis like no other”. For the first time since records began, the entire world economy is contracting, rich and poor countries alike. But it is not just the immediate impact that makes this economic crisis unprecedented. It is its genesis. This isn’t 2008, which was triggered by a meltdown of North Atlantic banking. And it isn’t the 1930s; an earthquake that originated in the fault lines left by the first world war. The Covid-19 economic emergency of 2020 is the result of a massive global effort to contain an unknown and lethal disease. It is both a surprising demonstration of our collective power to stop the economy and a shocking reminder that our control of nature, on which modern life rests, is more fragile than we like to think. What we are living through is the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene. Continue reading... post comment

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