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Age of discovery : navigating the storms of our second renaissance
Now is humanity's best moment. And our most fragile. Global health, wealth and education are booming. Scientific discovery is flourishing. But the same forces that make big gains possible for some of us deliver big losses to others-and tangle us together in ways that make everyone vulnerable. We've been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, redrew all maps of the world, liberated information and shifted Western civilization from the medieval to the early modern era. Such change came at a price: social division, political extremism, economic shocks, pandemics and other unintended consequences of human endeavour. Now is our second Renaissance. In the face of terrorism, Brexit, refugee crises and the global impact of a Trump presidency, we can flourish-if we heed the urgent lessons of history. Age of Discovery, revised and updated for this paperback edition, shows us how.
BOOK
Satisfaction Not Guaranteed
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, modern urban, industrial, affluent societies have made great strides towards fixing some of the problems that plagued other societies for centuries: food shortages are nearly eliminated, infant and maternal mortality has fallen dramatically, birth control is both readily available and effective, education levels are higher, and internal violence is significantly reduced. Modernity's blessings are many and bountiful - but has modernity really made us happy? SatisfactionNotGuaranteedis a book about the modern condition, and why the gains of living in modern urban, industrial, affluent societies have not proved more satisfying than they have. It examines why real results that paralleled earlier anticipations of progress have not generated the ease and contentment that the same forecasters assumed would apply to modern life. Employing his trademark inquiry of emotions in American history, Peter N. Stearns asks why, if modern life has been generally characterized by measurable themes of progress, abundance, and improvement, are people not happier or more content with their lot in life? Why is there an increased incidence of psychological depression, anxiety, and the sense that no one has ever reached a pinnacle of happiness or contentment? It's not so much that modernity went wrong, but rather that it has not gone as swimmingly as was anticipated. SatisfactionNot Guaranteeduses concrete examples from both history and the present, such as happiness surveys, to discuss how as a society we might better juggle the demands of modern life with the pursuit of happiness.
eBook
The Disarticulate
Language is integral to our social being. But what is the status
of those who stand outside of language? The mentally disabled,
\"wild\" children, people with autism and other neurological
disorders, as well as animals, infants, angels, and artificial
intelligences, have all engaged with language from a position at
its borders. In the intricate verbal constructions of modern
literature, the 'disarticulate'-those at the edges of
language-have, paradoxically, played essential, defining roles.
Drawing on the disarticulate figures in modern fictional works such
as Billy Budd, The Sound and the Fury, Nightwood, White Noise, and
The Echo Maker, among others, James Berger shows in this
intellectually bracing study how these characters mark sites at
which aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, political, medical, and
scientific discourses converge. It is also the place of the
greatest ethical tension, as society confronts the needs and
desires of \"the least of its brothers.\" Berger argues that the
disarticulate is that which is unaccountable in the discourses of
modernity and thus stands as an alternative to the prevailing
social order. Using literary history and theory, as well as
disability and trauma theory, he examines how these disarticulate
figures reveal modernity's anxieties in terms of how it constructs
its others.
eBook
Essays from the Edge
Over his distinguished career as a European intellectual historian and cultural critic, Martin Jay has explored a variety of major themes: the Frankfurt School, the exile of German intellectuals in America during the Nazi era, Western Marxism, the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, the discourse of experience in modern Europe and America, and lying in politics.Essays from the Edgeassembles Jay's writings from the intersections of this intellectual journey. Several essays focus on methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences: the limits of interdisciplinarity, the issue of national or universal philosophy, cultural relativism and visuality, and the implications of periodization in historical narrative. Others examine the concept of \"scopic regime\" and the metaphors of revolution and the gardening impulse. Among the theorists treated at length are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The essays also include several of Jay'sSalmagundicolumns, dealing with subjects as varied as the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, the impact of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, and the demise of thePartisan Review.
All of these efforts can be considered what Arthur Schopenhauer called, to borrow the title of one of his most celebrated collections, \"parerga and paralipomena.\" As essays from the edges of major projects, they illuminate Jay's major arguments, elaborate points made only in passing in the larger texts, and explore ideas farther than would have been possible, given the focus of the larger works themselves. The result is a lively, diverse offering from an extraordinary intellect.
eBook
Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions
In Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions, Kwai-Cheung Lo explores the excesses associated with the phenomenal economic growth in East Asia, including surplus capital, environmental waste, and the unbalanced ratio of men to women in the region, connecting the production of capitalist \"excess\" to the production of new forms of transnational Asian masculinity. Lo draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist ideas as well as gender theory in his examination of East Asian cultural products such as religious and parenting books, transgender literary fantasies, travel writing, gangster movies, female action heroes, and online games. Through this analysis, Lo argues that the excess of Asia's \"masculine\" modernization throws into relief the internal inconsistencies of capitalism itself, posing new challenges to the order of global capitalism and suggesting new possible configurations of global modernity.
eBook
Love and Other Technologies
Can love really be considered another form of technology?Dominic Pettman says it can-although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the humanin the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the techtonicmovements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire-love, in other words-always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a self among others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together.Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage-the stirrings of the soul-have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues, is not eternal, but external.
eBook