Successful Societies : How Institutions and Culture Affect Health

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2327192/?site_locale=en_GB

• Edited by : Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts
• Edited by : Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts

Why are some societies more successful than others at promoting individual and collective well-being? This book integrates recent research in social epidemiology with broader perspectives in social science to explore why some societies are more successful than others at securing population health. It explores the social roots of health inequalities, arguing that inequalities in health are based not only on economic inequalities, but on the structure of social relations. It develops sophisticated perspectives on social relations, which emphasize the ways in which cultural frameworks as well as institutions condition people's health. It reports on research into health inequalities in the developed and developing worlds, covering a wide range of national case studies, and into the ways in which social relations condition the effectiveness of public policies aimed at improving health.

Jack M. Balkin - Constitutional Redemption : Political Faith in an Unjust World

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674058743

Political constitutions, hammered out by imperfect human beings in periods of intense political controversy, are always compromises with injustice. What makes the U.S. Constitution legitimate, argues this daring book, is Americans’ enduring faith that the Constitution’s promises can someday be redeemed, and the constitutional system be made “a more perfect union.”

A leading constitutional theorist, Balkin argues eloquently that the American constitutional project is based in faith, hope, and a narrative of shared redemption. Our belief that the Constitution will deliver us from evil shows in the stories we tell one another about where our country came from and where it is headed, and in the way we use these historical touchstones to justify our fervent (and opposed) political creeds. Because Americans have believed in a story of constitutional redemption, we have assumed the right to decide for ourselves what the Constitution means, and have worked to persuade others to set it on the right path. As a result, constitutional principles have often shifted dramatically over time. They are, in fact, often political compromises in disguise.

What will such a Constitution become? We cannot know. But our belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution requires a leap of faith—a gamble on the ultimate vindication of a political project that has already survived many follies and near-catastrophes, and whose destiny is still over the horizon.

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Professor Balkin received his Ph.D in philosophy from Cambridge University, and his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn D. King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced as an attorney at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York City before entering the legal academy.

Cultural Software : A Theory of Ideology - A New Theory of Memetics and Ideology

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/cs.htm

Cultural Software explains ideology as a result of the cultural evolution of bits of cultural knowhow, or memes. It is the first book to apply theories of cultural evolution to the problem of ideology and justice.

Download an online version of Cultural Software under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license.

Cultural Software offers a new theory about how ideologies and beliefs grow, spread, and develop-- a theory of cultural evolution, which explains both shared understandings and disagreement and diversity within cultures.

Cultural evolution occurs through transmission and spread of cultural information and know-how-- or "cultural software "-- in human minds. Individuals embody cultural software: they are literally information made flesh. They spread it to others through communication and social learning. Human minds and institutions provide the ecology in which cultural software grows, thrives, and develops. Human cultural software is created out of the diverse elements of cultural transmission, also known as "memes."

Ideology is not a special or deviant pathology of thinking but arises from the ordinary mechanisms of human thought. Because cultural understanding is the product of evolution, it is always a patchwork quilt of older imperfect tools of understanding continually readapted to solve new problems. As a result human understanding is always partly adequate and partly inadequate to understanding and to the pursuit of justice. Cultural Software offers examples drawn from many different disciplines showing how ideological effects arise and how they contribute to injustice.

The book also tackles the problem of mutual understanding between different world views. It shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible and argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals. These arguments should be especially relevant to current debates over multiculturalism, and to philosophers and political theorists who worry that different cultures have incommensurable normative conceptions.

Cultural Software draws upon many different areas of study, including anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology and law. The book's explanation of how shared understandings arise, how cultures grow and spread, and how people of different cultures can understand and critique each other's views should be relevant to work in many different areas of the human sciences.

Herman Daly : Renewable Ignorance

We are all born pig-ignorant. Upon having accumulated a lifetime of knowledge we all promptly die. Ignorant babies replace learned elders. Knowledge is a depleting resource; ignorance is renewable. Yes, libraries and data banks grow, but knowledge finally has to exist in the minds of living people to be effective and evolve — unread books, unseen videos, and un-accessed hard drives are inert.

Like Sisyphus we push the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down again. Progress is not completely illusory. However, it is 3 steps up followed by 2.5 steps backward. Successive generations repeat earlier mistakes. They also invent new ones. Any solution to a given mistake is usually forgotten within 2 or 3 generations and we have to learn it again. But it is not all bad — after all, babies are delightful and happy while old people are grumpy — ignorance is bliss. Life consists of more than knowledge. Life expectancy has increased, so the old know more when they die, leaving the babies with still more to learn.

A massive transfer of knowledge each generation is an unavoidable necessity. This transfer is not automatic. It requires two decisions. The old must decide what knowledge is worth their effort to teach, and the young must decide what is worth their effort to learn. Some knowledge passes both filters and becomes the basis for guiding the future and for discovering new knowledge. Other knowledge fails to pass one or both filters and is lost. Just as the world is always only one failed harvest away from mass hunger, so it is always only one failed generational transfer away from mass ignorance.

What do we know about these two generational knowledge filters? What do they let pass and what do they filter out? I really don’t know the answer, but I have one speculation, taken from E. F. Schumacher’s reflections on Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes. Aquinas said that even uncertain knowledge of the highest things is worth more than certain knowledge of the lowest things. Descartes believed otherwise, that only knowledge that had the certainty of geometry was worth retaining, and uncertain knowledge should be abandoned even if it pertained to higher things. These two filters have very different selection biases. In their extreme forms they represent opposite errors of judgment about what knowledge to keep and what to jettison.

Which error are we most likely to commit today? I believe we overemphasize Descartes and pay too little attention to Aquinas. I take Aquinas’s “higher things” to mean purposes, knowledge about right purposes. Lower things I take to refer to techniques — how to efficiently do something, assuming it should be done in the first place. We have overdeveloped our relatively certain knowledge of technique, and left underdeveloped our less certain but more important knowledge of right purpose. The old seem more interested in teaching technique than purpose, and the young obligingly seem more interested in learning technique than purpose. So we develop more and more power, subject to less and less purpose. As physicist Steven Weinberg says, the more science makes the universe comprehensible and subject to our control, the more it also seems to render it pointless, and the less our control is guided by purpose.

These thoughts remind me of a public debate I participated in at LSU in the 1970s regarding the construction of the River Bend Nuclear Power Plant near Baton Rouge. I presented economic and safety reasons for believing that the plant should not be built, that there were cheaper and safer alternative sources of electricity, etc. After my presentation a nuclear engineering consultant from MIT made his rebuttal on behalf of Gulf States Utilities. It consisted entirely of presenting a scale model of the reactor core and explaining how it worked. He never replied to any of my arguments or said a word about why the reactor should be built. But his exposition of technique easily won the public debate. Afterwards everyone crowded around his model pointing to this and that, asking how it worked. “How to” questions of technique totally displaced “what for” questions of purpose. Maybe I needed a scale model meltdown of a reactor core! Maybe I needed a course in public relations. I might as well have been whistling Dixie.

Also I am reminded of a conversation with a friend who was the film curator for the Library of Congress. He told me that digital recording techniques were now so advanced and cheap that the Library would soon be recording and preserving everything that appeared on TV, or YouTube, or the radio, or Twitter, etc. Historians and scholars could then decide what was important and valuable. Librarians would avoid this difficult qualitative decision, and at the same time feel good about themselves for not imposing their value judgments on future historians. While I understand this point of view I cannot share it because it seems to me yet another example of “how to” questions displacing “what for” questions — a displacement likely to be continued by the “value–free” future scholars for whose benefit this almost infinite attic of junk is to be saved.

Knowledge is offered as a panacea these days. Young people are urged to go deeply into debt to “get a degree,” and are assured that the growth economy will allow them to pay it back with interest and still come out ahead. Many have been disappointed. As one who has spent over forty years in universities I am doubtful about this exaltation of knowledge, even though in arguing for a steady-state economy I have appealed to physical limits, not knowledge limits, leaving open the question of how much qualitative development could be supported within a biophysical steady state without quantitative growth. Also the “knowledge limits” I have appealed to are themselves knowledge — knowledge of physical limits, mainly the laws of thermodynamics, rather than any inherent limits to knowledge itself.

Although I am eager for knowledge to substitute physical growth to the extent possible, the basic renewability of ignorance makes me doubt that knowledge can save the growth economy. Furthermore, knowledge, even when it increases, does not grow exponentially like money in the bank. Some old knowledge is disproved or cancelled out by new knowledge, and some new knowledge is discovery of new biophysical or social limits to growth. New knowledge must always be something of a surprise — if we could predict its content then we would have to know it already and it would not really be new. Contrary to common expectation, new knowledge is not always a pleasant surprise for the growth economy — frequently it is bad news. For example, climate change from greenhouse gasses was recently new knowledge, as was discovery of the ozone hole.

One thing I have learned about universities is that much of what is taught in them today is based on the labor theory of value — “It was hard for me to learn this, so it must be worth teaching it to you.” This is a poor generational filter, and is even found in economics, which of all disciplines should know better! Also, much abandoned knowledge should have made the cut but did not. Indeed the whole field of history of economic thought has been cut from the curriculum to make room for more econometrics — the art of pretending to measure ephemeral and tenuous correlations among ill-defined variables in a world where the relationships to be measured change faster than the data for estimating them accumulates. The classical economists’ concept of the stationary state economy did not totally disappear, but almost.

Is just trying to save everything a solution? No. Do I have a solution? No. So I will stop here and simply ask that we all, young and old, pause, and calmly consider the proper balance between the “what for” and the “how to” questions as filters for the generational transfer of knowledge. Let’s help the babies deal better with the perennial problem of renewable ignorance.

Source : http://steadystate.org/renewable-ignorance/

Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man : Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415289771/

One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and experiencing life. Published in 1964, it fast became an ideological bible for the emergent New Left. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction, Marcuse's greatest work was a 'damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.' Yet it also expressed the hopes of a radical philosopher that human freedom and happiness could be greatly expanded beyond the regimented thought and behaviour prevalent in established society. For those who held the reigns of power Marcuse's call to arms threatened civilization to its very core. For many others however, it represented a freedom hitherto unimaginable.

Herbert Marcuse (1989-1979). Born in Berlin but forced to flee Germany in 1933; gained world renown during the 1960s as a philosopher, social theorist and political activist.

Iain McGilchrist: The Master and His Emissary - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300148787

Why is the brain divided? The difference between right and left hemispheres has been puzzled over for centuries. In a book of unprecedented scope, Iain McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent brain research, illustrated with case histories, to reveal that the difference is profound—not just this or that function, but two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere is detail oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity. This division helps explain the origins of music and language, and casts new light on the history of philosophy, as well as on some mental illnesses.

In the second part of the book, McGilchrist takes the reader on a journey through the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought and belief of thinkers and artists, from Aeschylus to Magritte. He argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences. This is truly a tour de force that should excite interest in a wide readership.

Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he taught literature before training in medicine. He was Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London, and has researched in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He now works privately in London and otherwise lives on the Isle of Skye.

Helga Dittmar: Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-Being

The Search for the 'Good Life' and the 'Body Perfect'

Series Edited by Professor Rupert Brown.

Series: European Monographs in Social Psychology series.

Advertising, materialism and consumption are central aspects of contemporary Western culture. We are bombarded with idealised images of the perfect body, desirable consumer goods, and affluent lifestyles, yet psychology is only just beginning to take account of the profound influence these consumer culture ideals have on individuals’ sense of identity and worth.

Consumer Culture, Identity, and Well-Being documents the negative psychological impact consumer culture can have on how individuals view themselves and on their emotional welfare. It looks at the social psychological dimensions of having, buying and wanting material goods, as well as the pursuit of media-hyped appearance ideals. In particular, it focuses on:

• The purchasing of material goods as a means of expressing and seeking identity, and the negative consequences of this
• Psychological buying motivations in conventional buying environments and on the Internet
• The unrealistic socio-cultural beauty ideals embodied by idealized models.

Throughout, different approaches from social psychology are integrated, such as self-completion, self-discrepancy and value theory, to create a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the impact of internalising core consumer culture ideals on how individuals see themselves and the implications this has for their psychological and physical health.

Consumer Culture, Identity, and Well-Being is of interest to anybody who wants to find out more about the psychological effects of living in modern consumer societies on children, adolescents, and adults. More specifically, it will be of interest to students and researchers in social psychology, sociology, media studies, communication and other social sciences, as well as to psychologists, health workers, and practitioners interested in the topics of identity, consumption pathologies, body image, and body-related behaviours.

El gobierno de las palabras. Política para tiempos de confusión

http://www.juancarlosmonedero.com/2011/06/gobiernodelaspalabras/

Segunda edición aumentada y corregida. Madrid. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009 y 2011.

Descargar prefacio del libro (PDF)

Este libro destaca que nunca tan pocos engañaron a tantos. En nombre de la democracia y la soberanía el Estado moderno cede a la dictadura de los mercados. El pensamiento moderno, exhausto, cede las soluciones racionales a supercherías y sectarismos, remedos de espiritualismo de consumo rápido y libros de autoayuda. Época de transición y confusión. ¿Y si la reinvención de la política fuera un antídoto?

Frente a soluciones individuales, ésta es una propuesta de “autoayuda colectiva”. La que convierte la resignación y el cansancio en combustible para la democracia. Para la vida buena. Para recuperar la alegría de la política.

En las revoluciones en el mundo árabe, la diferencia entre un contratista o un mercenario la marcaba el bando en el que se peleaba. En la Roma clásica, a los esclavos se les llamaba instrumenti vocali; en la Alemania nazi, no se gaseaban personas sino unmenschen. En las barriadas pobres de América Latina, los niños de la calle ya han sido condenados a muerte cuando se les dice desechables.

El lenguaje que creemos hablar, en realidad nos habla. Si el tiempo es oro ¿cómo encontrar cuándo escucharnos? Biendecir es dialogar; maldecir, monologar. Sólo el diálogo construye la felicidad. En su soliloquio, Hamlet enloquecía. Don Quijote, cuerdo, hablaba con Sancho Panza. Tiempo de despensar las palabras que la política convirtió en callejones sin salida.

Enlaces relacionados: Entrevista en ATTAC TV

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

Sheldon S. Wolin, born in 1922, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He taught political theory for 40 years at Oberlin College, the Universities of California, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Oxford University.

Democracy is struggling in America—by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive—and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.
Source: http://universitypressaudiobooks.com/detail.php/24

Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations

http://www.ted.com

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.

Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet

http://deepgreenresistance.org/

Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet Part 2 of 7
http://youtu.be/Xru_O51Ccg4

Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet Part 3 of 7
http://youtu.be/rqWoICL-2GQ

Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet Part 4 of 7
http://youtu.be/9ZxBg1CbmG8

Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet Part 5 of 7
http://youtu.be/LXvDj-FNPiU

Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11232

By Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger

What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.

Denise Winn - The Manipulated Mind

Pierre Tevanian & Sylvie Tissot: Les mots sont importants

« L’euphémisation consiste, étymologiquement, à positiver du négatif. Dans la sphère politique, elle consiste essentiellement à occulter, minimiser, relativiser et justifier une violence. L’armée bombarde toute une population : c’est « une simple incursion », ou « une frappe ». Un policier abat un jeune homme en fuite d’une balle dans le dos : c’est une « bavure ». Une entreprise – souvent bénéficiaire – organise un licenciement collectif : c’est un plan social ou mieux encore un plan de sauvegarde de l’emploi. Le droit du travail, la protection sociale et les services publics sont démantelés : on ne parle que de réforme, de modernisation ou d’assouplissement. À cette occultation de la violence des dominants s’oppose comme en miroir une hyperbolisation de la violence des dominé-e-s, ayant pour effet d’une part de disqualifier leur parole, d’autre part de donner à l’oppression le visage plus acceptable de la légitime défense.  »

L’éditorial et le sondage d’opinion ? Des exercices ventriloques. La mixité sociale et la diversité ? Les faux-semblants de la lutte contre la ségrégation. La rhétorique féministe et laïcarde ? Les nouvelles métaphores du racisme républicain. Le sarkozysme ? Un pétainisme light… Telles sont quelques-unes des analyses que proposent Pierre Tevanian et Sylvie Tissot dans ce livre où l’on croise, entre autres, Dominique de Villepin et Ségolène Royal, Fadela Amara et Julien Dray, Dieudonné et Max Gallo, Alain Soral, Éric Zemmour et Philippe Val… Les trente et un textes retenus dans ce recueil résument dix années de critique sociale au sein d’un collectif : Les mots sont importants. Dix années et trente textes de combat contre les mauvaises langues et les mauvais traitements, les grands auteurs et les grandes questions, les gros concepts et les grosses bites qui font l’air du temps. Trente contributions à une contre-culture anticapitaliste, antiraciste et antisexiste.

Pierre Tevanian, professeur de philosophie, a publié notamment Le Ministère de la peur (L’Esprit frappeur, 2004), La République du mépris (La Découverte, 2007) et La Mécanique raciste (Dilecta, 2008). Il a coordonné avec Ismahane Chouder et Malika Latrèche le recueil Les Filles voilées parlent (La Fabrique, 2008).

Sylvie Tissot, enseignante-chercheuse en sociologie et militante féministe, a publié L’État et les quartiers (Seuil, 2007) et coécrit le Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits (L’Esprit frappeur, 2002). Elle anime avec Pierre Tevanian le collectif Les mots sont importants.

Source: http://editionslibertalia.com/Les-mots-sont-importants.html

Divertir pour dominer: La culture de masse contre les peuples

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2011/01/STROUK/20092

Offensive, comme son nom l’indique, est là pour bousculer. « Libertaire et sociale », cette revue anticapitaliste donne le ton dès le titre de l’ouvrage, qui s’organise autour de quatre domaines : télévision, publicité, sport et tourisme. Ici, tout est passé au crible d’une critique sans concessions, voire alarmiste. Les membres d’Offensive prennent la parole, ou la donnent à des acteurs du milieu culturel, pour déconstruire les apparents bienfaits de la culture dite de masse. Les textes (interviews, entretiens, extraits d’articles ou de livres) dressent le portrait d’une société ravagée. Où le spectacle télévisuel « simule le monde, nous piège et nous emprisonne » ; où les publicités « standardisent nos regards et anesthésient nos vies » ; où l’idéologie sportive véhicule « un système hétérosexiste » ; où le tourisme « sert une vision hygiéniste du monde » ; et où l’humanitaire incarne « la dernière frontière de la colonisation ». En somme, la culture de masse participerait à l’édification d’un « hypercapitalisme », mais surtout à l’anéantissement de toute liberté.

Éditions L’Echappée http://www.lechappee.org/

Passing: David F. Noble

written by Denis G. Rancourt

Arguably the greatest critical historian of science and technology died on Monday December 27, 2010, suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes and within a few days of being admitted to hospital.

His family was by his side. David Noble is survived by his wife, three daughters, two brothers and his sister.

David’s seminal books include America by Design, Forces of Production, A World Without Women and The Religion of Technology.

In Forces of Production he established that corporations are obsessed with control over the workforce, even at the expense of profit, thereby dissolving the popular economics myth of the free hand of the market.

He wrote Digital Diploma Mills and toured campuses to single-handedly stop the North American plan to web-commodify university courses via institutional course-copyright predation.

His last book Beyond the Promised Land was meant to accompany the new anti-globalization movement, much like Marcuse theorized [in] the 1960s but Noble avoided the academic cover. He argued in plain terms that the history of resistance was not repeating itself and that the new movement was defined by anarchism, without a need for the promised destinies of religion or econo-political systems such as capitalism and socialism. The book contains the most vibrant description of the 1968 events I have ever read and an unparalleled account of the contributions of the anarchists that led to today’s First World radicalism.

David Noble has been the single most powerful force in Canada resisting the corporatization of universities, including the erosion of collegial governance and disregard for academic freedom. He was tireless in this project. In a 2008 precedent-setting labor arbitration award, David Noble was the first professor in Canada to be paid cash reparation ($2,500) for a violation to his academic freedom, when York University put out a press release critical of his “tail that wags the dog” pamphlet exposing Israel Lobby influence at the university.

David Noble was the Canadian Israel Lobby's worst nightmare. He and others won the battle in terms of public opinion but now we must determine if public opinion will be able to constrain the workings of backroom power politics as Canada continues to distinguish itself as Israel’s strongest uncritical supporter and enthusiastically participates in Israel’s international image branding project.

David was fired from MIT because he was “too radical” for the school, according to Noam Chomsky. For a year or more he was the curator of a major collection about technology at the Smithsonian Institution but was fired before the critical collection was made public and the collection was canned. York University in Toronto (Canada’s third largest university) hired him with tenure on the basis of the stature of his work. He was planning to retire from York University this summer.

In more than thirty years of teaching university classes David Noble never graded his students. They learned because learning is natural and he did not want to interfere with that. He did not want to collaborate with the forces of production.

David and I were best buddies.

I first saw David Noble in 2004 when he participated with Ralph Nader and Leonard Minsky in the keynote event of an annual conference organized by the graduate student union at the University of Ottawa where I was a tenured physics professor. It was a major event and the university president presented Nader. After Nader explained the problem of corporatization, Minsky appealed to students to stand and fight, and then David simply shredded the president and the university executives like I had never seen before. It was powerful and inspiring.

It catalyzed my anti-corruption intra-institutional activism that eventually got me fired. The university administration cut its funding to the conference for the following years.

Later, when David returned to my campus to speak in 2006 I gave him a draft copy of my 2007 critical essay about global warming. He took it home and then called me and we became instant friends. He used the essay in his classes every year and invited me to join. But more importantly, we became co-combatants against institutional corruption, education insanity, and illegitimate power.

David was very isolated by our colleagues’ refusal to take on the institution and their false rationalizations that zero-risk posturing was effective activism. He would say to me “there are only two of us but we have them surrounded.” We used our voices, the courts, access to information requests, and our academic freedoms, in an all-out attempt to out collaborators and to awaken our dead colleagues.

We shared Foucault’s view:

"One knows … that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. … It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them."
-- Foucault, debating Chomsky, 1971.

In the present suffocating climate of progressive “service” to the underprivileged and “ablest language” self-censorship, David felt like he lived on another planet while immersed in First World managerial madness. But he lived every moment. David lived!

From the free-style guitar that he played, to the meals he made for guests, to gardening and roughing it at the cabin, to his explanations about man’s inadequacy before woman’s capacity to make life, to his ever deepening explorations in social analysis, to his accompaniment of friends and students on picket lines and at court hearings, to his unparalleled ability to expose power, to his pleasure in disrupting protocol and convention, to his love for freedom, to his creative refusal to comply… David lived!

I never had a fight with David. But I wish he were here now so I could thoroughly bawl him out for dying! The First World has lost one of its rare beacons of truth.

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is expected to go to court in the next year or so. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca] He can be reached at denis.rancourt@gmail.com

Source:  http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/7685-passing-david-f-noble.html

Rodney Barker : Making Enemies

http://us.macmillan.com/makingenemies/RodneyBarker

About the Book
Whom a prime minister or president will not shake hands with is still more noticed than with whom they will. Public identity can afford to be ambiguous about friends, but not about enemies. Rodney Barker examines the available accounts of how enmity functions in the cultivation of identity, how essential or avoidable it is, and what the consequences are for the contemporary world.

About the Author
Rodney Barker is Professor of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. He broadcasts frequently, and has been opera critic of Tribune. Recent publications include Legitimating Identities: The Self-presentations of Rulers and Subjects and Political Ideas in Modern Britain In and After the Twentieth Century.

Table of Contents
Accounts of Enmity in Politics and Government * Competition, Antagonism and Enmity * Patterns of Enmity: Varieties of Narrative * Contexts of Enmity Narratives * The Language and Imagery of Enmity * Telling the Enmity Narrative * Enemies of the People * Demonization: The Frenzy of Enmity * Narratives of Contention * Enmity Narratives, Politics and Peacefulness