WFHB

We begin with "My Old Kentucky Home" by 19th century songwriter Stephen Foster, performed by Paul Robeson. Sung like a love song to the state of Kentucky by the Derby crowd at Churchill Downs, its real historical meaning is bleaker. The lyrics portray heartbreak: A man, sold down the river to work at a sugar plantation in the deep south, takes his last look at home. The man is of course, an enslaved black man, or in Foster’s lyrics a so-called "darkie." This racist descriptor was changed to “people” as the song moved out of its time. But this erases essential history.

That history is given full voice in The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, by Constance and Ned Sublette.

It’s an extensive accounting of American slavery, documenting the ways the brutal institution thrived in spite, or rather because, of the end of America’s involvement in the African slave trade in the early 19th century.

SEGMENT ONE

With the federal prohibition of new “imports”—people brought from Africa to subjugate—the domestic interstate slave trade boomed. It soon became an essential part of the financial economy, and human captivity: a generational affair.

If a slave was an investment in a productive commodity, then a family of slaves functioned like a human savings account, one that accrued interest in the form of newborns, whose only birthright was a cash value.

SEGMENT TWO

If it’s even possible to wrap our heads around the pervasive culture and economics of Antebellum slavery, what do we do with that awareness in our current context? The authors coincidentally finished writing their book right on the cusp of the black lives matter movement.

And our conversation took place just as Donald Trump was in the final stretch of his regressive candidacy for president: a fitting through-line that traces back to America’s history of generational subjugation and a totalitarian culture -- a police state in other words -- that the slave south instituted to protect their institution.

SEGMENT THREE

By the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, generation after generation of total oppression had already created accumulations of wealth that built upon themselves for whites -- and in the same way, generationally recursive accumulations of disadvantage for African Americans: an algorithm for repression that’s still running two centuries later.

GUESTS

Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and Its Music, The World that Made New Orleans, and The Year Before the Flood. Constance Sublette has published, as Constance Ash, three novels and edited the anthology Not of Woman Born.

MUSIC

"My Old Kentucky Home" performed by Paul Robeson

"I Be So Glad When the Sun Goes Down" by Ed Lewis

"Wade in the Water" by Sweet Honey in the Rock

"Slavery Days" by Burning Spear

UP NEXT

Reimagining Activism:

As we head into the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, a local group says NO. No to the erosion of civil liberties and the end of any semblance of a democratic society. We welcome organizers of Inaugurate the Revolution, a group seeking to transfer power into the hands of the disenfranchised, and to dismantle the systems of oppression that silence and make invisible so many of the country’s citizens. To reimagine activism is to define revolution as a radical act of love.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer & Editor: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

"Protest or Pose" begins a series of programs under the heading The Sound of Resistance. Joining me in the studio is Rasul Mowatt, associate professor in The School of Public Health and the American Studies Department at Indiana University.

We’ll look at three songs: "Strange Fruit" sung by Billie Holiday (and recently sampled by Kanye West); "We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gill Scott Heron; and "Warzone" by T.I.

As our title suggests, we’ll discuss how we come to designate some songs as legitimate forms of protest, and how some songs might be better described as commercially opportunistic. So, songs as instruments of protest--or products of protest--or if they’re sometimes just products.

SEGMENT ONE: "Strange Fruit"

"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. Written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem and published in 1937, it protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans.

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

SEGMENT TWO: "We Almost Lost Detroit"

The song "We Almost Lost Detroit", written by Gil Scott Heron and on the 1977 album Bridges, recounts the story of the nuclear meltdown at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station near Monroe, MI, in 1966. It was performed at the No Nukes concert in September 1979 at Madison Square Garden.

SEGMENT THREE: "Warzone" (2016)

T.I. has said the video is in response to the "All Lives Matter" slogan: "We wanted to give 'the other side' -- and when I say the 'other side' I don't mean police, I don't mean white people, I mean people who think we're just overreacting, the 'All Lives Matter' people -- we wanted to give them the least amount of ammunition to oppose our message. (Rapper T.I. Presents Counterpoint to 'All Lives Matter' Crowd)

GUEST

Rasul Mowatt is Associate Professor of American Studies and Associate Chair and Associate Professor in Recreation, Park and Tourism Studies with the School of Public Health at Indiana University.

RELATED

DJ Rasul talks lynching in popular music

DJ Rasul

Lynchings on Loop (an Interchange interview with Courtney Baker)

MUSIC

"Rumble" by Link Wray

"Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday

"Blood On the Leaves" Kanye West

"Strange Fruit" by Rokia Traoré

"We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gil Scott Heron

"We Almost Lost Detroit" by Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr

"Warzone" by T. I.

"We Almost Lost Detroit" by Ron Holloway (featuring Gil Scott Heron)

NEXT TIME

The Capitalized Womb...We’re joined by Constance and Ned Sublette, authors of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. This is the brutal story of how the slavery industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as "breeding women" essential to the young country's expansion. The book’s narrative is driven by the power struggle betwe...

Have feminists always been pro-prostitution? Since when has supporting pornography been considered a pro-sex feminist position? And why has feminism seemingly become a catch-all for any and all gender equality issues?

Meghan Murphy, the founder and editor of the online feminist media outlet Feminist Current, leads us through the re-radicalizing of feminism: starting with a tour through the individualized, all-inclusive, pro-capitalism, 3rd wave (or "liberal") feminism that came up in the 90s (along with neoliberalism’s rise in the Left), and the fights against patriarchy that this feminism won’t take on, including pornography and prostitution.

SEGMENT ONE

Murphy supports 2nd wave, or radical feminism which she prefers to simply call Feminism, because it's about supporting women's rights and their struggle against the specific forces that disempower, abuse, and marginalize females.

SEGMENT TWO

We look at the uniquely coercive and violent nature of that particular transaction, and the difference between decriminalizing prostitutes as a feminist position; and legalization of the practice in general, the capitalist position. We'll close the segment with an example from our own backyard of the particularly un-just still-criminalized system we have in the U.S.

SEGMENT THREE

Pornography: ubiquitous in our modern internet-dominated world, and thus normalized. Murphy talks us through how anti-pornography feminists have been tarred with supposedly being "anti-sex," as their critics unaccountably conflate pornography with masturbation and argue for its health benefits. Murphy charges that the individualized, faux-progressive feel-good politics of liberal 3rd wave feminists essentially gives a fundamentally misogynist industry a pass.

GUEST

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist, and is the founder and editor of Feminist Current. She completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012. Murphy has been blogging about feminism since 2010. She is known for going against the grain and was the first to publish a critique of Slutwalk, back in 2011, and was one of the few popular feminist writers to publicly articulate both a radical feminist and socialist position against the sex industry, early on.

MUSIC

"Sex Kills" by Joni Mitchell

"#1 Must Have" by Sleater-Kinney

"She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina" by Buffy Sainte-Marie

"Don't Put Her Down (You Helped Put Her There) by Hazel Dickens

NEXT UP

“Protest or Pose: The Sound of Resistance” - I’m joined by American Studies professor and DJ Rasul Mowatt to discuss the ways certain songs are actually a part of specific social initiatives, think Billy Holiday’s "Strange Fruit," born of specific issues like Gil Scott Heron’s "We Almost Lost Detroit," or perhaps, like T.I.’s "Warzone," can best be described as commercially viable market opportunities.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

With President-elect Trump soon to take office, America is faced with a grim irony: many voters with economic grievances about a “rigged system” helped Trump win office, and yet given his major appointments so far, it seems unlikely that our next president will do anything to fundamentally address those problems -- and it seems likely he’ll make them worse.

Assuming the next president has no ability, vision, or desire to combat the staggering inequality of our new "gilded age," we’re left with the question of how to move forward without the help of government.

In conversation with two people interested in solutions to inequality, we’ll look at two models for economic change:

The first, with Chuck Collins, inequality activist, author of Born on Third Base, and former one-percenter: an heir of the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave away his wealth -- Collins advocates reaching out to the amenable millionaires and billionaires to form a cross-class coalition for change. Patriotic wealthy people concerned about the health of our economic system exist -- insists Collins -- in a spectrum of awareness, much like everyone else. And for those wealthy people who aren’t already fully allied with the shrinking middle and grinding lower classes of America, Collins argues for consciousness raising… teaching the 1% about the ways in which they owe the system, and its inhabitants of all classes, for their privileged lives.

In the second half of the show, we’ll look to Scandinavia for other ideas on how to advance equality. Author of Viking Economics George Lakey will show us how 100 years ago Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and others experienced their own gilded age and stultifying inequality, and how they threw off the economic elite, rethought how real democracy should shape the economy, and over the last century, have grown into some of the most productive, free, and equal societies in the industrialized world.

GUESTS

Chuck Collins, author of Born on Third Base, is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and directs IPS's Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and author of several books, including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, co-authored with Felice Yeskel. (New Press, 2005). He co-authored with Bill Gates Sr. Wealth and Our Commonwealth, (Beacon Press, 2003), a case for taxing inherited fortunes.

George Lakey, author of Viking Economics, is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

RELATED

Articles by Chuck Collins on Inequality.org

Resource Generation

"Living Revolution" column by George Lakey at Waging NonViolence

1974 Nobel Prize in Economics Press Release

MUSIC

"Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" performed by Tom Waits

"Hunter" by Björk

"The New Improved Hypocrisy" by The Radio Dept.

NEXT UP

Prostitution and Pornography. I’m joined by Meghan Murphy,

Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus, seems to me to clang like a hammer blow against a bell that tolls our self-inflicted doom.

To quote Victor Frankenstein--

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder…

This is the very path that leads to our present orientation, adrift among the chemists and cognitive scientists proclaiming the drive to glory and victory over death is but the neutral path all the enlightened among us must tread. We are destined to be the maker of ourselves. Shelley disabuses us of this notion as have many who have come after her. But one lesson perhaps not often learned is that the novel is a treatise on being a parent. The microcosm of our social future in the world begins with the circumstances of childhood.

All of our music tonight will be from trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas and Keystone, his electric group. Our opening track is “Vitalism” and comes from the Burst section of his 2010 trilogy, Spark of Being. The music was inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel and emerged from a collaboration with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison who produced a kind of adaptation of the novel, also called Spark of Being.

GUEST

Monique Morgan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is concerned with the ways literary form influences readers’ intellectual, ethical, and emotional responses, and with the interactions of different kinds of forms across genres, media, and disciplines. She is the author of Narrative Means, Lyric Ends (2009), an investigation of the narrative strategies of four nineteenth-century long poems. She is currently at work on her next book, Narrative and Epistemology in Victorian Science Fiction, which argues that many nineteenth-century science fiction novels expose and defamiliarize the patterns of rational inquiry that underpin both narrative form and scientific investigation.

RELATED

"Vitalism"--an 18th and 19th century quest for the spark of life, on In Our Time (BBC)

Frankenstein returns to life in 'Spark of Being'

Dave Douglas

Trailer to the film Spark of Being

"The science of life and death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein" by Sharon Ruston

MUSIC

All songs by Dave Douglas and Keystone from the trilogy of albums, Spark of Being.

"Vitalism"

"Spark of Being"

"Creature Code"

"Split Personality"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Even elementary schools are now teaching what was always factual about the conquest of this land mass--Northern Europeans came and murdered as many indigenous people as possible. Treaties were made to be broken. Herded onto desolate reservations, dying by the thousands en route, the native people of this land were treated as one race of lesser beings--portrayed as devils and barbarians. What is the legacy of this history? We are witnessing this dismissive denigration and abuse of people right now, it’s not 1616 or 1816 but 2016...and the confrontation at Standing Rock in North Dakota which pits a corporate energy company and their state police force collaborators against native people protecting sacred lands and water supplies is one as old as imperial conquest.

GUESTS

Davina Two Bears is a member of the Navajo Nation from northern Arizona who worked for 14 years as an archaeologist and a program manager for the Navajo Nation archaeology Department at Northern Arizona University. She’s currently a PhD Candidate at Indiana University- Bloomington in the Department of Anthropology's archaeology of the social context PhD program researching a Navajo Indian Boarding in Arizona. And Davina is a volunteer DJ here at WFHB for "Native Spirit" - Indiana's only Native American/First Nations music radio show.

Terri Miles is a Muscogee (Creek) citizen, Sac & Fox family member, and Seminole descendant. Born and raised in Chicago, she moved to Bloomington in 2006 to pursue a Ph.D. in criminal justice. She currently works for a social service agency in Bloomington.

Kelly Tudor is the Indiana Representative for the American Indian Movement (AIM) Chapter of Indiana and Kentucky. She is a Lipan Apache, who’s been an activist for 15 years. She works as an EMT.

RELATED

Kite Line: December 2, 2016- Dignity in Detention, from Standing Rock to the Spanish State

"Facing the Black Snake" by Terri Miles

"Police Violence Against Native Americans Goes Far Beyond Standing Rock"

Treaty of Fort Laramie with Sioux, Etc., 1851

MUSIC

All songs by Neil Young

"Who's Gonna Stand Up"

"Pocahontas"

"Indian Givers"

"Cortez the Killer"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Think of it this way, W. E. B. Du Bois, born in February 1868, that’s 3 years after the end of the American Civil War, two years after Melville's volume of Civil War poetry, Battle Pieces, died in August 1963, at 95, the year John F. Kennedy is assassinated, the year Medgar Evers is assassinated, and the day before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers possibly the most famous speech in American history at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ("I Have a Dream").

He straddles the more essential American Century, not demarcated by round numbers and whited school textbooks.  Du Bois's life and work is the American history we absolutely relegate to a minor strand as befits the country’s relationship with African-Americans.

SEGMENT ONE

We confront the enormity of Du Bois's life, spanning from the post-Civil War return of Jim Crow to his death in 1963 the day before MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech" at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

SEGMENT TWO

We look at how Du Bois turned from sociologist to activist, and how his research in the South during the end of Reconstruction was the impetus that led to the founding of the NAACP. Then we move to the major turn in Du Bois's thought--the second half of his life that gets less attention in the history books: socialism.

SEGMENT THREE

In our last segment, we'll look at the work Du Bois did in anti-nuclear proliferation and advocacy for the Soviet Union and against the unfolding Cold War in the 1950's, which attracted the attention of the powers-that-be in America. This eventually led to his de facto exile, with publishers blacklisting him and his passport being revoked. Finally we'll turn to the lighter side of Du Bois - his fiction - and how he still speaks to our times from a half-century ago, in his advocacy for universal healthcare and his disaffection for the so-called right to vote between two corporate-captured political parties.

GUEST

Bill V. Mullen is Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue. His books include W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (Pluto Press, 2016), a political biography of W.E.B. Du Bois entitled Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Temple University Press, 2015), Afro-Orientalism (Minnesota, 2004) a study of interethnic anti-racist alliance between Asian and African Americans, and Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics 1935-1946 (University of Illinois, 1999). He is faculty adviser to Students for Justice in Palestine at Purdue.

RELATED

The Life of W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Lives Matter by Bill Mullen

Audio of "Socialism and the American Negro" by Du Bois (1960 speech sponsored by the Wisconsin Socialist Club): Part One and Part Two

We Charge Genocide (1951)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘Darkwater’: Two Stories (produced by WFHB's Books Unbound)

MUSIC

Tracks from Randy Weston's 1963 Highlife

"Zulu"

"Congolese Children"

"Cabana Bamboo Highlife"

"Blues to Africa"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer & Editor: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Blue dots in a sea of red. The electoral map presents a distorted picture belying where most of the country's population lives, and where the most privation occurs. A survey of the landscape in the wake of Donald Trump's election reveals that America's urban/rural drift has cemented into a chasm.

Though commonly conflated with only economic elites, those blue dots contain within them more divisions and real socio-economic hardship -- cities abused or ignored by governments at all levels, often including the suburbs directly surrounding them.

SEGMENT ONE

While "red" America took to Trump's occasional rants against a "rigged economy", author Bill Goldsmith illustrates the ways in which cities have been hemmed in by unfair policies, emaciated by budget cuts, and so disparaged and stigmatized that the word "urban,” simply meaning “city life,” began in the 1950s to assume a racist cast. He argues that to "make america great again" is to make cities -- where most Americans actually live -- healthy again.

SEGMENT TWO

We look at some specific school, fiscal, and tax policies as avenues for abuse by state, federal and suburban governments. And the ways in which politicians moralize their actions by painting cities as irredeemable problems responsible for their own mistreatment. Taking center stage is Detroit, crumbling to ruin under 3 decades of economic hostility from the state of Michigan.

SEGMENT THREE

We continue our discussion of how America tightened the noose around cities through policies built on inequality, especially regarding schools. Goldsmith leads us through the gloom to a few hopeful examples of reform, and the concept of the "Brandeis Tipping Point," which is where a real reform movement could - maybe - begin.

GUEST

Bill Goldsmith is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He is coauthor of Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities.

MUSIC

"Inner City Blues" by Marvin Gaye

"My City Was Gone" by The Pretenders

"Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!" by Sufjan Stevens

"Living for the City" by Stevie Wonder

NEXT UP

The Wages of Whiteness: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Color Line

Du Bois used the phrase "wages of whiteness" in his 1935 masterpiece of sociology, Black Reconstruction, to describe the bad deal made between the Southern Plantocracy and white workers--social benefits and political access--in exchange for allegiance to the white ruling class in the aftermath of the US Civil War and official Emancipation. He reminds us that for a brief moment in the sun, African-Americans began their climb to freedom, only to be pushed back by the forces of capitalism and racism toward slavery. Bill Mullen, Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University, joins us to talk about this extraordinarily prolific Revolutionary Across the Color Line, W. E. B. Du Bois.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer & Editor: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Happiness. We all want it. But what can that word mean? What do we imagine we’re seeking as we spend much of our time and effort in pursuit of happiness?

Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. Political economist Will Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Get out your hip high bootstraps, because the science of happiness is less a science than a narrative extension of hyper-capitalism.

SEGMENT ONE

We begin with historical definitions: specifically, Aristotle’s “science of happiness” as a kind of active fulfillment that comes through one’s participation in ethical, public life -- which he termed politics. Neoliberalism, in stark contrast, operates towards the disenchantment of politics, its replacement being the pursuit of a personal, economic definition of what’s good or bad. Davies finds the beginnings of this version of happiness with the English father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham.

SEGMENT TWO

With the focus on quantifiable objective measurement, happiness morphs from an unorthodox aspirational idea into a mainstream science of human management. Spawning an industry guiding individuals to take responsibility for, and cope with, an unhappy life, rather than paying attention to -- much less taking action to change -- social, economic, and institutional circumstances contributing to their unhappiness.

SEGMENT THREE

We’ll begin with 20th century psychotherapist Jacob Moreno and his theory of sociometry - a quantitative method of measuring the social world that treats complicated human spaces as fragmented, purely egocentric transactions: What does relating to this person do for me? Welcome to the age of Facebook, where you judge your life and self-worth in an addictive, competitive environment based on the metrics chosen by the titans of Silicon Valley.

GUEST

Will Davies is a political economist with particular interests in neoliberalism, history of economics and economic sociology. His work explores the way in which economics influences our understanding of politics, society and ourselves, themes which he has addressed in two books, The Happiness Industry: How the government & big business sold us wellbeing (Verso, 2015) and The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty & the logic of competition (Sage, 2014).

MUSIC

"Happy Alone" by Saintseneca

"Make It Happy" by Lyle Lovett

"Whip It" by Devo

"Motorcycle Emptiness" by the Manic Street Preachers

RELATED

The White Coats Are Coming: Explanation and Power in Psychology and Neuroscience

THE WAY OF NEOLIBERALISM

Selling Censorship: Part Four of The Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Me, Inc.: Part Three of The Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Ignorance: Part Two of the Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism

NEXT UP

Scapegoating Our Cities

Free speech is not the norm, and even in a country that explicitly protects speech in its foundational documents, censorship can still creep into our lives in unexpected ways.

On this election night, “Selling Censorship,” another episode in our series The Way of Neoliberalism, about our current cultural environment that dominates our society, politics, and our interactions with each other.

Tonight we’re speaking with David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and author of a recent article in the London Review of Books called “What are we allowed to say?” In it, he reminds readers that a society without censorship is not the historical norm, and cautions us to watch for the new ways in which open dialogue is being cut down, and self-censorship promoted.

SEGMENT ONE

Definitions - John Stuart Mill and the concept of free speech as simply a proscription against censorship - and ideas about how a “society of manners” can disapprove of undesirable speech, while still allowing it to be free. One paradox of note is that built into the 1st amendment of the US Constitution is an inherent tension in protecting one’s right to be dogmatic and censorious in one’s religious beliefs, and the enshrinement of the right be critical of those very institutions and beliefs, and in a way creating the foundation for the Orwellian concept of doublethink.

SEGMENT TWO

What are we allowed to say if we may accidentally offend someone at any moment -- and through the bureaucratization of manners in ‘Microaggressions’-- that momentary offence is enough to end any dialogue? And what is worth saying, if all the voices in our personal little algorithmically-chosen virtual communities are all saying the same thing?

SEGMENT THREE

From our national nightmare of an election, through the story of UC Berkeley’s anti-speech changes in the 50 years since the impassioned speech of Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964, to the recent controversy in Bloomington North High School (Indiana) over students brandishing the confederate flag, and its ‘resolution,’ the banning of all such displays, which Bromwich feels will only result in more self-righteous isolation on both sides (and probably litigation) -- we see the consequences of choosing comfort over genuine, albeit sometimes discordant, dialogue.

GUEST

David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), and Moral Imagination: Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

RELATED

"What Are We Allowed to Say?" by David Bromwich

THE WAY OF NEOLIBERALISM

Selling Me, Inc.: Part Three of The Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Ignorance: Part Two of the Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism

MUSIC

"Free Speech" by Eddie Harris

"Not Ready to Make Nice" by The Dixie Chicks

"Freedom of Choice" by Devo

"Freedom Sound" by The Jazz Contenders

NEXT UP

Selling Happiness: Part Five of The Way of Neoliberalism

Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. Political economist Will Davies shows how this philosophy,