This was an interesting and readable summary of a subject near to my heart, and I appreciated the author's passion, commitment to social justice and rThis was an interesting and readable summary of a subject near to my heart, and I appreciated the author's passion, commitment to social justice and recognition of the implications of social inequity on how this works, and compassion for traumatized people.
Unfortunately, while the book presents itself as useful for all people working through trauma, C-PTSD or childhood trauma is not only really not addressed, but the book could be actively triggering. The author's efforts to encourage standard trauma sufferers backfire against those with developmental trauma. She, for instance, spends some time discussing protective factors against trauma, such as positive relationships with family and community, or a good attachment model, which clearly don't apply to those with abusive families. Even the concept of post-traumatic growth is hard to parse or understand from the perspective of childhood trauma -- what am I measuring my growth from? When I was a fetus?
It's an interesting model and a concept I take seriously and work towards, but I am coming to think that PTSD and C-PTSD are so different in terms of populations and recovery principles that there is difficulty, and the potential for damage in some cases, when PTSD resources are applied to those with childhood trauma.
I'm a fan of both authors and their work, and I'm actively interested in anti-hierarchical perspectives of all kinds. I can't say I encountered a lot I'm a fan of both authors and their work, and I'm actively interested in anti-hierarchical perspectives of all kinds. I can't say I encountered a lot genuinely new to me in this small book, but I found the conversational format readable and engaging, and I enjoyed their back-and-forth. If you aren't familiar with their work or perspectives, this is a decent introduction, although you may want to refer to their previous works to fully flesh out the arguments. ...more
This was lovely. A short, beautiful exploration of the benefits and harms of community in all its forms and sizes.
Community is built as much by who isThis was lovely. A short, beautiful exploration of the benefits and harms of community in all its forms and sizes.
Community is built as much by who is excluded as who is let in. A community that allows in anyone is not a community; it's the human race. A community that allows in no one is a person, and not a community at all. Plett investigates this and other conundrums from a variety of perspectives informed by her experiences as a trans mennonite woman from prairie Canada who has also lived in urban Canada, Oregon, and NYC. She comes to no hard and fast conclusions, except the unavoidable one that we have no alternatives to community, as damaging as it sometimes is; so build community we must even as we work to make it better.
I wish I could believe that making it better was firmly within our species' capacity. The book brought to mine the concept of schismogenesis that I learned from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (the one really great takeaway from that for me), which is that communities in proximity will define themselves in opposition to other nearby communities, thus increasing their differences over time. You could see this as a fine template for political polarization pretty much everywhere, but the Davids also described a lot of older civilizations the same way: two neighbouring cultures, one with an ethic of thrift and hard work and the other based on excess enabled by slave-holding, would diverge, each making itself more itself by being less like its neighbour. Even speciation (not from The Dawn of Everything) has features of this, with part of what drove the evolution of, say, zebra stripes or giraffe necks, is that the members with the most stripey spits or longest necks were perceived as being more zebra-y or giraffe-y, thus more attractive, and so the traits were reinforced.
I mean, if this isn't the tidiest explanation for infighting in radical or progressive movements, I'm not sure what is.
Anyway: community: can't live with it, can't live without it. That's the general thesis, and you might think it doesn't need a 170 page essay to explore, but the exploration was the pleasure of it. ...more
I read this less because of the book's stated subject matter than because I was interested in a hypothesis of my own: that all relational violence, frI read this less because of the book's stated subject matter than because I was interested in a hypothesis of my own: that all relational violence, from the family to the state, is based on presumed hierarchies of value and the entitlement that these hierarchies create. And I think, not only that this is correct and that Hill's evidence is in support of it, but that Hill herself would agree.
Like most women I know, I have had relationships (short and long) with men who were entitled, selfish, controlling, exploitative and verbally abusive. It is truly spectacular luck to be a straight woman whose had more than one dating relationship with a man of any length where not one of them ever assumed that you owed them something because they brought a penis to the table, and you didn't. So I found very little in this book and the stories it covers surprising.
However, in my life, it was a woman who was most abusive -- who abused both my father and me (and he was not innocent in this; he enabled her thoroughly). My father's mother was also abusive. I am a feminist to the roots and I do not believe there is any evidence of a conspiracy of silence around women's violence towards men; I do not believe it is equal in severity or frequency: my father was not in danger of his life until he got sick, and he almost always earned more money than mom. He could have left at any time.
Hill flags entitlement as the key ingredient to abusive relationships of all kinds and scales, and she's right, I think; usually we're socialized into our entitlements along traditional value hierarchies of race, gender, income, etc.; but you can have a family where someone's entitlement is not in line with 'normal' patterns of discrimination and turns it upside down.
The unifying trait among abusers is a radioactive sense of entitlement. The animating force behind their violence is the belief that their feelings are more important than those of their partners and children. Confronted with feelings of discomfort or shame, abusive men [ed: or women, bosses, organizations, nation-states, companies, etc.] will do whatever it takes to avoid those emotions and move to a feeling of power.
It was the same in my family, but backwards: it was never safe and never ok at any time to make my mother feel uncomfortable about anything. Disagreeing with her, having different thoughts and emotions than she had, wanting something else, were all not allowed. Expressing these would be punished. She should get everything she wanted and everyone else should feel lucky for whatever they got.
(Worth pointing out here is that the size and strength differential in adult intimate relationships that makes men's violence so much more threatening does not exist in relationships between parents of any gender and their children; all adults are much bigger and stronger than kids, and those kids are extremely vulnerable in exactly the way but to a much greater degree than adult women are to adult men.)
And it's the same general pattern with discrimination and social and environmental issues. It is not ok for black people to make white people "ashamed" about racism, and if they do, they can expect violence and abuse for it. It is not ok for houseless people to exist in public where housed and wealthy people might see them and feel uncomfortable or ashamed, and if they do, they might be arrested for it. It is not ok for anyone to make first worlders feel bad about climate catastrophe. You see my point. At the root is a sense of entitlement, of the privileged to continue enjoying those privileges without shame or discomfort, and for those they dominate to shut up about it already, because for privileged people to feel bad is somehow the worst possible thing that can ever happen to anyone.
All that said, if you are reading the book for a straightforward treatment of its actual subject matter, it's well-written, well-reasoned, convincing, and devastating....more
In this, Lewis takes aim at a few ideas: 1) that the family is a good thing that 2) can and should be based on biological relatedness 3) without recouIn this, Lewis takes aim at a few ideas: 1) that the family is a good thing that 2) can and should be based on biological relatedness 3) without recourse or exception, and that 4) surrogacy is a perversion of family that needs to be carefully managed or banned. Instead, she would like to see what she calls "full surrogacy" -- mutual aid, family without relatedness, and a world in which children are not the property of their parents, but beings with rights, including the right to 'transfer out' if and when needed. Forced surrogacy is, as she says, as old as slavery; freely chosen surrogacy is perhaps rare but not new, though the addition of technology may be novel; and alternative family arrangements outside what we perceive of as the nuclear norm is also not new.
There were some factual gaffes and logical slips; for example, it seemed to me that the very arguments against surrogacy that she vehemently criticized when the sources of those arguments were anti-surrogacy feminist organizations she then repeated against a woman running a surrogacy clinic because, I think, the clinic exemplifies capitalism and the woman in question is very rich. This made no sense to me. So the book didn't clarify much to me on the question of what we usually call surrogacy. But the chapters on family were very interesting and I'll be thinking about them for some time....more
It's a mostly solid book looking at the implications of rising uncertainty across many domains, and how we might help people be se3.5 rounded up to 4.
It's a mostly solid book looking at the implications of rising uncertainty across many domains, and how we might help people be secure so that we can pursue worthwhile collective ends, like climate stability and democracy.
There are some gaps I wasn't able to look past:
1. She introduces the book with two kinds of insecurity: existential (being a mortal in a vulnerable physical body) and manufactured (income insecurity and other kinds of policies that keep people feeling off balance, or unable to meet their material needs in a predictable way). This is true, and a good distinction. The problem is that the first kind is then ignored unless it's rhetorically convenient (I noticed this because it was the kind of insecurity I was most interested in), and in between those times, it's treated as if resolving manufactured insecurity was a) possible and b) would also resolve existential insecurity. As if, in other words, it is possible for people to truly be fundamentally safe and secure.
2. She wants us to consider ourselves commoners rather than barons, and pursue the kinds of policies that benefit commoners. But, while Canadians/westerners are largely commoners within the borders of their own countries, globally, we are barons; and I think some of the disconnects Taylor writes about result from a split class consciousness where we know what we would risk losing if we expanded the policies she's talking about beyond our national borders. Don't get me wrong -- we should expand them. This equality should be global. But I think the reason people see themselves as barons isn't just a false consciousness, it's looking at the work and income and social support options in non-industrialized nations and feeling scared.
Otherwise it's well-written and solidly argued. I'd recommend both the book and the largely identical Massey lectures it was based on, available online or via podcast from CBC....more
This book was not entirely what I wanted or expected (outside of one chapter), but I enjoyed it. 3.5* rounded up.
What I had hoped for was a more philoThis book was not entirely what I wanted or expected (outside of one chapter), but I enjoyed it. 3.5* rounded up.
What I had hoped for was a more philosophical or even scientific exploration of the kind of uncertainty most people experience: not knowing what is coming next, not feeling able to control or predict one's future. Instead it was a collection, largely, of scientific and business uncertainty: how much do I know about subject x or how to make money in market y?
And it's not that this is uninteresting, it's just not what I wanted to know.
Just over 20 years ago, I had a kid with an undiagnosed genetic condition. It remained undiagnosed and presumably undiagnosable for about 15 years. The odds of this condition are now, given current case numbers, about one in five hundred million, so even with the diagnosis we don't know much.
There has been a lot of uncertainty and precarity in our family life; and what I have learned is that this uncertainty is pretty well universal, only if you have a fair bit of privilege, you can ignore that. You can believe in the stability and known-ness of your life and your future, until some fluke or gene quirk or accident or betrayal pulls the rug out. Then maybe you spend a lot of time flailing around trying to restore that feeling of stability (I did). I also learned that accepting and daily confronting the actual uncertainty led to a better understanding of one's actual scope of influence and a whole skill set for making plans that can be upended on a dime, among other lessons.
Our culture and its various medical branches act on the assumption that a way of being learned in safety, stability and predictability is "normal" and "healthy," but I've increasingly questioned that. In what sense could one look at human history or prehistory and think that same-ness was what we evolved to maximize our response to? Doesn't it make more sense that we evolved adaptations to both chaos and stability, and that both have strengths and weaknesses? And given the century we're facing down, don't we *want* more people who can cope and flourish in uncertainty?
I was hoping for a discussion more on those lines. Mostly, what I got was a discussion of the value of uncertainty in scientific predictions and experiments, the brain's prediction algorithms, memory, and remaining open to different political perspectives via deep canvassing. (I have read so many reviews of deep canvassing now from so many adherents that I am full up and have met my lifetime quota. Seriously, no more.) It was interesting, but it felt a little flat. I mean, yes, it's cool, but not where most people are living uncertainty in their actual lives. We are not mostly business leaders, politicians and scientists. Most of us are confronting uncertainty in our jobs, paycheques, wallets, weather, and health status.
There was one chapter that dug into this a bit via the research into the strengths and capacities of those who have dealt with adversity and precarity by growing up poor. Here she does make a strong case against the "deficit model" of assuming that people who grow up without money (which is most people!) are in some way, or definite ways, less-than people who grow up with money.
... question the assumption that low self-control was an innate flaw or always irrational. 'For a child accustomed to stolen possessions and broken promises, the only guaranteed treats are the ones you have already swallowed' .... the deficit model, the prevalent assumption in his field that children from challenged backgrounds are cognitively damaged and in need of 'fixing' ... failed to account for people's capacity to adjust to the demands of their current environments. ... many social workers, resilience researchers, and psychologists viewed impoverished children's wariness and opportunism as a kind of excusable frailty. They saw such reactivity as a mismatch with the safe, predictable world that everyone should inhabit. What mattered for people in lower-socioeconomic strata were the future skills that they would need in order to fit into the mainstream one day, or so the common thinking went. ... What do kids growing up in a world where threat can come without warning have to learn to do well? ... What do they do as well as or better than kids across town who have order, resources, and sometimes surfeits of adult attention? ... Youths raised in upheaval pick up on subtle changes in a fast-evolving situation, such as faint signs of anger or deceit ... When coaxed to feel that the world was growing more unpredictable via a newspaper article, participants raised in chaos excelled on tests of working memory updating... And increasingly, policymakers, scientists, foundations and activists are heeding his calls to question the overly clean-cut story of poverty's deficits and rehumanize people whose skills have been denigrated by a society deeply fearful of unpredictability.
That was the kind of data I was hoping to find, and that chapter (the second-last) was worth the price of the book to me....more
On the one hand, one has the 1960s language and assumptions around stigma of various kinds, the perspective -- "A heartbreaking and disorienting read.
On the one hand, one has the 1960s language and assumptions around stigma of various kinds, the perspective -- "we normals" -- and the ways in which one can see we've made some progress in the last sixty years.
And then on the other, every description of how stigma operates and how people operate within it, and every way in which that has remained exactly the same.
Worth reading. I'll be referring to it often. I just need to recover from the whiplash....more
Andrea Weber has a bone to pick with the Anthropocene. Not that terrible things aren't happening and humans aren't responsible (~~174th climate book~~
Andrea Weber has a bone to pick with the Anthropocene. Not that terrible things aren't happening and humans aren't responsible (they are and we are), but its insistence that humans are now controlling nature, which still places us outside of and above the rest of the world. This is nonsense, he argues; we are in it and of it as much as anything else is, and our modern predicament is a result of this separation -- what Timothy Morton calls the Severing. It deadens us. It governs what kinds of thoughts and feelings we are able to have, what kinds of relationships we can have with other people and the world, what kinds of experiences count and can be admitted as reasonable and true.
Weber never put it this way, but the belief we are all born with that relationships with animals and nature are possible and real, and that everything has feelings and is important, which we are then educated out of to become rational adults -- he argues that children have the right of it. We are trained in a kind of dissociation in order to participate in the mutilation of the world, taught that only our own feelings and thoughts and needs count and that everything else is there for us. And look where that's got us. Weber's argument is that the anthropocene is a continuation of that concept rather than a refutation of it, and so it and the solutions it proposes won't work.
What is needed involves making feelings and needs the centre of society and economy (for ourselves and other species), recognizing what he calls "poetic objectivity" which is, so far as I can tell, how we learn about ourselves through our relationships with others and how we learn about others through our own experiences, making metaphor the engine of growth and relatedness. Enlivenment (proposed in contrast to the Enlightenment) means recognizing that what we all have in common is being alive, and that an economics and society that does not prioritize aliveness will (and is) kill(ing) us.
His language is not what I would have chosen, not being a professional philosopher myself, but his thinking is in line with my own on many counts after my own decades of work and reflection on how we got into this mess and how we get out of it. I still have to show up in a workplace on Monday based very much on techne where I will need to come up with a program based on evidence for how to reduce emissions a.nd adapt to climate change, and I'm struggling with how to incorporate these ideas in a pragmatic sense, but I greatly enjoyed reading the book. ...more
Zoe was working a regular beat as a climate reporter when fascinating stories about emerging plant behaviour and neurobiology started crossing her desZoe was working a regular beat as a climate reporter when fascinating stories about emerging plant behaviour and neurobiology started crossing her desk. When she burnt out on covering disasters, she quit her job and dedicated the next few years of her life to writing a book on that plant science, and this is it. And it is fantastic.
Plants that behave like animals. Animals that photosynthesize like plants. Plants that remember, schedule, count, make decisions, protect their offspring, take care of their siblings, mimic their neighbours, talk to each other, call for rescue by animals when attacked. All peer-reviewed science.
Citizens of western countries these days are called "plant blind": most can only identify three native plant species at most in their own region, and tend to walk through their days seeing plants as undifferentiated green stuff. It isn't just a cause of our environmental problems. It's also a massive loss, a whole world you've been unaware of, because you were told it wasn't special enough to pay attention to. It's the flip side of denial; instead of the ugly stuff we're told to look away from, the beauty we're told isn't really there or doesn't somehow count.
If you want a book to make the world around you look brand new again -- this is it....more
It is exactly what it sounds like: a Jewish perspective on how repentance and repair works, what forgiveness is, when it's owed and when it's not.
In sIt is exactly what it sounds like: a Jewish perspective on how repentance and repair works, what forgiveness is, when it's owed and when it's not.
In short form:
1. Repentance means a genuine apology that names and understands the harm done 2. One must commit to changing and becoming someone who would not do that harm again 3. Apologies must be offered more than once 4. Forgiveness is never owed or required
I like it. It's a huge improvement over the "let the poor abuser off the hook and get over the anger for your own good" junk that's so common out there nowadays. Highly recommended....more
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