WFHB

Let’s begin with Emerson’s 1870 lecture “The Natural History of the Intellect.” What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the …

Let’s begin with Emerson’s 1870 lecture “The Natural History of the Intellect.”

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

The laws and powers of the Intellect have, however, a stupendous peculiarity, of being at once observers and observed. So that it is difficult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the science of Intellect is that the substance with which we deal is of that subtle and active quality that it intoxicates all who approach it.

About that angle of vision...50 years on from Emerson’s lecture we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mouthpiece Nick Carraway offering that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.” It is the “looking” that is in question.

But about that scientific “intoxication”: When I think about the overweening ambition of some who practice science, distinct from those who observe and describe nature, I can’t help but think of the folktales of the golem; a creature formed of clay and animated, often, by writing a word of power on its forehead or writing the word on paper and then placing that paper in its mough. The creature is made to serve by the word. The existence of a golem is at best a mixed blessing. While in many depictions, Golems are inherently perfectly obedient, in its earliest known modern telling, sometime in the 17th century, the Golem of Chełm became enormous and, well, let’s say, uncooperative.

Today’s show focuses on biology’s metaphors of control and how these are deployed to describe processes that are laughably uncontrollable.

Our music throughout is from The Flaming Lips’ June 1999 US release, The Soft Bulletin. We’ll open with "What Is the Light?," subtitled ("An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the "Big Bang" That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe").

My GUEST is Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. She’s the author or editor of more than 15 books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, and The Ethics of Invention. Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. Her most recent book is Can Science Make Sense of Life? just out from Polity.

Though Jasanoff focuses on biology in her book, she begins with the renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his classic work What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, a book based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943.

RELATED

Reining in the hubris of science and scientists (book review, Washington Post)

MUSIC

The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

"What Is the Light?"

"Race for the Prize"

"The Spark that Bled"

"Spoonful Weighs a Ton"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

We fight over beliefs because we truly do not believe, or are not certain. And this is one tenet of the so-called enlightenment, when industrial age philosophers taught us that we cannot be certain of anything, specifically the cause of an effect. And that observable repetition is not proof of continued repetition…because the sun shines …

We fight over beliefs because we truly do not believe, or are not certain. And this is one tenet of the so-called enlightenment, when industrial age philosophers taught us that we cannot be certain of anything, specifically the cause of an effect. And that observable repetition is not proof of continued repetition...because the sun shines today and yesterday and every past day of our lives does not mean it will shine tomorrow.

But these are arguments more about how we know what we think we know, what we think we cannot know, and what is even unthinkable.

The peculiar joke about the certainty of death and taxes is instructive as it is one of the clearest lessons of subservience: we should resign ourselves to the whims of unanswerable forces.

But there is a trick in that...one of those forces is unanswerable, the other is not. Humans can affect the world we make even while we may not be able to control the consequences of these interventions.

Taxes are an element in the story of governed living that need not exist; death is the absolute governor of human life. It is a gross error to conflate these two. We must acknowledge we have the power to alter human systems of living even as we lament our unavoidable deaths.

And there’s the saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But we must imagine this end if we are to come near to avoiding the other. Which is to say, we must end a human fiction if we are to survive the fact of climate warming.

Today we must confront a certainty, an apocalyptic without a moral, a reckoning without a judge. Our planet has been warming and will continue to warm at a rate that guarantees mass suffering and catastrophe as quotidian, which in fact they already are. And we must confront the certainty of human agency in this fact; burning fossil fuels has brought this into existence. Worse is the fact that over the last several decades we have burned our world with full knowledge of that fact and the likely outcome.

We are aboard a black ship to Hell - which is the title Brigid Brophy’s 1962 treatise on humanity’s self-destructive instincts, illustrating what Freud had called the death drive.

Joining us today is David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor and climate columnist for New York Magazine, and author of the new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, an expansion on his clarion call essay of the same name in the July 2017 New York Magazine.

Wallace-Wells begins his book this way: "It is worse, much worse, than you think."

RELATED by David Wallace-Wells

"The Uninhabitable Earth"

"Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End"

"The Cautious Case for Climate Optimism"

INTERCHANGE: Don’t Pull No Punches: Dahr Jamail on the End of Ice

MUSIC

"Waiting for the End of the World," Elvis Costello and The Attractions

"Kyoto Now," Bad Religion

"Monkey Gone to Heaven," Pixies

"Down to the Wire," Son Volt

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Carol Gilligan is very well-known for having authored the influential feminist classic In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development published in 1982. This centered on a critique of the then current theories of moral development which literally excluded the study of girls and women and simply assumed studying boys and men would suffice …

Today’s show, “Radicals and Reactionaries,” is a 90-minute special with journalist and novelist Tony McKenna. Tony McKenna’s new book is Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives, published by Zero Books. In it he offers a series of essays about historical figures using a Marxist analysis, showing with each of the figures examined …

Today’s show, “Radicals and Reactionaries,” is a 90-minute special with journalist and novelist Tony McKenna.

Tony McKenna’s new book is Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives, published by Zero Books.

In it he offers a series of essays about historical figures using a Marxist analysis, showing with each of the figures examined how the art, politics and creativity of their lives is infused by the rhythm and contradictions of the broader historical backdrop.

Here’s the list of the people he profiles...Where would they appear on your list of Angels and Demons, Radicals and Reactionaries? William Blake, Hugo Chavez, Hillary Clinton, Jeremy Corbyn, Andrea Dworkin, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Hugo, Rembrandt, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Donald Trump (that one’s too easy, I know).

The truth is, as usual, more complex than these binary designations. And the key to understanding the ways of people in the world is to recognize that complexity. McKenna’s work uses the Marxist lens of historical materialism to give the proper scope to these political lives. What have they DONE in and to our world?

I’ll confess that it seems to me that the angels are often as demonic as those we might see more clearly as demons. Perhaps it’s best to say that certain qualities are in the ascendant in each figure that push them into the light or subsume them in darkness.

Today we’ll focus on only a handful of McKenna’s cast of players while also casting back into some highlights from his previous book, notably essays on Vincent Van Gogh and The Hunger Games which McKenna holds in high regard for revealing the realities of class hierarchies in its dystopia.

We begin with Victor Hugo’s good CEO, Jean Valjean...a kind of romantic superhero...surely an angel if there ever was one, but is a character in a novel our best model to try to emulate...perhaps you’ll recall we asked this question of John McCain’s love for Hemingway’s hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan?

GUEST

Tony McKenna is a philosopher and journalist whose work has been featured on websites and in magazines and journals across the world. In addition to Angels and Demons, McKenna is the author of a previous collection of essays titled Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective, as well as The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin, and the novel, The Dying Light. He joined us via Skype from his home in Kent, England.

RELATED

Trump, Obama and the Nature of Fascism by Tony McKenna

Angels and Demons: one must subdue the other (review)

Art, Literature and Culture From a Marxist Perspective (review by Louis Proyect)

MUSIC

"Way Down in the Hole" Tom Waits

"And the Angels Swing" Stan Getz

"Friend of the Devil" performed by Counting Crows

"Trip Through Your Wires" U2

"Old Devil Moon" performed by The Miles Davis Quartet

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Production Assistance: Jim Thrasher

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Recently a criminal investigation into fraud in the testing regimes for college entry revealed that wealthy people buy advantages; many of us surely simply shrugged. What’s new? Folks with money look to buy the path they and their children tread. We seem to accept this even if we are, on occasion, outraged. And it can’t …

Recently a criminal investigation into fraud in the testing regimes for college entry revealed that wealthy people buy advantages; many of us surely simply shrugged. What’s new? Folks with money look to buy the path they and their children tread. We seem to accept this even if we are, on occasion, outraged.

And it can’t surprise you if I say that the middle class has advantages that the working class does not enjoy - that’s the whole “story” of class hierarchies in the first place. But perhaps it is surprising that these advantages are mobilized in our public schools on a daily basis.

Our Public Education system is the institution that has been sold to us as the great levelizer of social and economic opportunity. Well, here’s another study that demonstrates how much that really isn’t true. Call it another myth of democracy in America. Instead, class rules in the classroom.

In her book Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school.

Beginning in the home, working-class students learn to follow rules, to respect authority, and work through problems independently...and in this way they learn that they earn their failure.

But middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. The institution is there to serve them.

And their teachers, also on the whole from the middle-class, typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students.

While the middle class mobilizes strategies of influence the working class bows low to offer strategies of deference. Here is another way our schools are separate and unequal. What is to be done?

And listen up purveyors of the Grit Grift, the poor and working classes are already gritting it out. It’s the middle-class that’s always leaning on the system for help.

GUEST

Jessica McCrory Calarco is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and author of Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School, published by Oxford University Press.

RELATED

Review of Negotiating Opportunities (Harvard Education Review)

Interchange episodes

No Excuses Schools

Subverting Democracy Through Education Reform

MUSIC

"Educated Fool" Hoobastank

"Expectations" Belle & Sebastian

"Measuring Cups" Andrew Bird

"Don’t Call Us" 10,000 Maniacs

"Raise Your Hand" Bruce Springsteen

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Board Engineer: Wes Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue. “Lucky Day” became a theme song for the 1940s NBC radio show Your Hit Parade which was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sponsoring …