One ambitious book and two really good ones
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: If you can stand evolutionary psychology, this is a very interesting book arguing that violence, while still a huge problem, has declined substantially across many categories of behaviors, from wars to intimate violence to animal cruelty. Pinker argues that literacy and rationality have contributed to the decline: both lead us to put ourselves in other people’s positions, and make it harder for us to explain why I should be able to hurt you just because I am me and you are not. He also suggests that cleanliness/health may have something to do with it too: it’s very easy to make the fundamental attribution error of concluding that people who live in bad conditions are therefore bad. I wish I could write the essay about this book’s perspective on human nature versus that of David Graeber’s Debt, because Pinker seems to believe that money/market capitalism is the natural form of mutually beneficial exchange, when Graeber makes a strong case that reciprocal indebtedness without measurement is more firmly rooted in human history.
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History: How smallpox shaped the American public health system, both by accustoming public health authorities to mandatory vaccination, sometimes at gunpoint, and often convincing groups of Americans to resist it, sometimes even violently. (One thing reading this very near to finishing the Pinker book made me think is how much less violent today’s vaccinators and antivaccinators are.) Some things don’t change: like today’s legislators voting not to acknowledge sea level rise, a county worried about the economic impact of quarantine/vaccination voted that there was no smallpox in the county. Also, as with health care reform, there was always great capitalist involvement: mandatory vaccination turned out to bolster the bottom line of drug companies, something that made opponents suspicious; government production was barely tried even as government regulation came to seem more and more important given the dangers of bad vaccine.
Any topic in US history has its racial component: Immigrants arriving in New York were required to be vaccinated-except if they came over in first or second class; the same thing happened at the Mexican border, where all second- and third-class passengers needed recent vaccination scars to get through, but Pullman passengers could swear to their immunity. Likewise, whites in the South often discounted the risks of smallpox because they thought that only blacks would get it; Willrich points out that this speaks to greater physical segregation in the late 19th-century South than is often imagined, but also notes that white Southerners were routinely disappointed in their imaginings that whites were more resistant.
A chapter on vaccination in the Phillippines situates vaccination within the imperial project, and draws out the connections between progressivism and imperialism. It also contains the great line “Forget the Maine.” (He continues: “In Hoff’s [one of the public health officials important in the book] decidedly contrarian view, the Spanish-American War was decidedly a police action, taken against a delinquent neighbor that had allowed its properties to overflow with yellow fever and smallpox.”) Willrich also argues that vaccination lawsuits gave the Supreme Court the language of “clear and present danger” later used in First Amendment doctrine, as well as providing a rationale for later eugenic projects. Overall, the book is an engaging account of an important episode in American progressivism.
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity: This is an amazing book about how people respond to poverty and corruption: the compromises they make, the indignities they bear, the battles they lose, the small victories they win and how the precariousness of those victories often makes it harder for them to plan or share any success. It reminded me of Random Family, a book about people surviving (and not surviving) poverty in New York. Corruption played a much larger role here, because the state was more dysfunctional (though give the US time): Boo points out that, for some people, corruption was the only path to opportunity, given that all the others were closed. But that meant that lots of poor people had a stake in keeping other, often poorer, people in worse circumstances. Boo doesn’t offer solutions, only a clear-eyed journey through several individual stories that start to present a picture of a community both more and less vulnerable than its members.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History: How smallpox shaped the American public health system, both by accustoming public health authorities to mandatory vaccination, sometimes at gunpoint, and often convincing groups of Americans to resist it, sometimes even violently. (One thing reading this very near to finishing the Pinker book made me think is how much less violent today’s vaccinators and antivaccinators are.) Some things don’t change: like today’s legislators voting not to acknowledge sea level rise, a county worried about the economic impact of quarantine/vaccination voted that there was no smallpox in the county. Also, as with health care reform, there was always great capitalist involvement: mandatory vaccination turned out to bolster the bottom line of drug companies, something that made opponents suspicious; government production was barely tried even as government regulation came to seem more and more important given the dangers of bad vaccine.
Any topic in US history has its racial component: Immigrants arriving in New York were required to be vaccinated-except if they came over in first or second class; the same thing happened at the Mexican border, where all second- and third-class passengers needed recent vaccination scars to get through, but Pullman passengers could swear to their immunity. Likewise, whites in the South often discounted the risks of smallpox because they thought that only blacks would get it; Willrich points out that this speaks to greater physical segregation in the late 19th-century South than is often imagined, but also notes that white Southerners were routinely disappointed in their imaginings that whites were more resistant.
A chapter on vaccination in the Phillippines situates vaccination within the imperial project, and draws out the connections between progressivism and imperialism. It also contains the great line “Forget the Maine.” (He continues: “In Hoff’s [one of the public health officials important in the book] decidedly contrarian view, the Spanish-American War was decidedly a police action, taken against a delinquent neighbor that had allowed its properties to overflow with yellow fever and smallpox.”) Willrich also argues that vaccination lawsuits gave the Supreme Court the language of “clear and present danger” later used in First Amendment doctrine, as well as providing a rationale for later eugenic projects. Overall, the book is an engaging account of an important episode in American progressivism.
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity: This is an amazing book about how people respond to poverty and corruption: the compromises they make, the indignities they bear, the battles they lose, the small victories they win and how the precariousness of those victories often makes it harder for them to plan or share any success. It reminded me of Random Family, a book about people surviving (and not surviving) poverty in New York. Corruption played a much larger role here, because the state was more dysfunctional (though give the US time): Boo points out that, for some people, corruption was the only path to opportunity, given that all the others were closed. But that meant that lots of poor people had a stake in keeping other, often poorer, people in worse circumstances. Boo doesn’t offer solutions, only a clear-eyed journey through several individual stories that start to present a picture of a community both more and less vulnerable than its members.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.