War and Prejudice

A slew of books has moved beyond the turn-of-the-century focus on inequality to spotlight instead the moral imperative for equality. But asking the question of where the ideal of equality came from leads to “an even more pressing one: whether equality is the most important thing to begin with,” writes historian Moyn in his review of both recent scholarship by political theorists Darrin McMahon, Paul Sagar, and David Lay Williams and the historical and philosophical origins of the concept of equality.

“… What really matters, as Marx said, is eliminating the inequalities that matter. Equality both of status and distribution were breakthroughs, and anger when they are reversed is one of the most promising developments of late. This doesn’t mean that society can or should reach full equality along all dimensions, whatever that might mean. But, as Marx concluded, it must involve getting clear about when and in what forms inequality is an eradicable injustice, something to mobilize against in the name of emancipation and freedom.”

The climate movement’s focus on combating disinformation fails to address real concerns about a green transition and could diminish opportunities for effective climate action. Instead of treating skepticism about climate policies as misinformation, the movement should listen to people’s practical worries about energy systems, affordability, and the local impacts of climate action, and it should work toward meaningful dialogue and tangible progress.

“The pandemic showed us the dangers of making everything into a battleground of information and truth claims. Instead of having a real conversation about science, uncertainty, and trade-offs, accusations about disinformation closed down deliberations on how to best respond. The bitter polarization over COVID-19 response measures has made it more difficult to be prepared for the next pandemic, whether that be through conducting rigorous research on the efficacy of measures like school closures or reconsidering biosafety protocols and funding for gain-of-function research. … There is an important lesson here for climate progress. When conflicts over values and distrust of elites arise, we should bring them to light and work through them, rather than simply code them as misinformation and write off the people with these concerns as disinformation victims.”

The Brazilian military’s profoundly ideological view of the Amazon, which is deeply rooted in the country’s dictatorship era, has an important influence on the government’s approach to development in the rainforest and Indigenous territories. Military alliances with illegal miners and the armed forces’ conspiratorial view of foreign greed for Amazon resources undergird resistance to Indigenous land rights and environmental protection efforts.

The essay quotes Adriana Marques, a professor at the International Relations and Defense Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro: “The military discourse sees its action in the Amazon as a continuation of the role played by Portuguese colonizers in the region. This shows that members of Brazil’s military do not identify the Portuguese colonizer as being diametrically opposed to them, (…) rather this colonizer is reverenced as their predecessor.”

Ideologies are falsely naturalized when we mistake a cultural tradition for a state of nature, according to Blakely; he argues instead for approaching them with an interpretive anthropology. The concept builds on the theory of the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who defined ideologies as cultural maps that orient us within social and political space. But, says Blakely in this podcast, we have come to mistake the map with reality itself.

“And a lot of my book is an effort to do two things at once, both give a charitable, full-blown account of the different ideological traditions as cultures, but also criticize each of them insofar as they fall into false naturalizations. And so it’s kind of negative work, where then you’re left with what I think are the stronger versions philosophically of ideologies, which are the versions that can say, we’re cultural, we’re a tradition, yes, we’re a map, now let’s have the debate, as opposed to, well, we’re just science, or we’re just common sense.”

C.L.R. James’s 1950 American Civilization has been largely misunderstood as romantically admiring. In reality, the Trinidadian thinker warned of the potential for U.S. liberal democracy to descend into totalitarianism, largely driven by cultural forces like the entertainment industry. James argued that the glamorized portrayals of gangsters and heroes in popular culture reveal a societal readiness to embrace authoritarian figures, reflecting the failure of liberal democracy to fulfill its promise to protect individual freedom.

“If this piece of writing was praise, we can only wonder what condemnation would sound like. Here was a terrifying critique of U.S. society through its mass culture, containing an analysis resonant with the views of Frankfurt School critics like Theodor Adorno, with whom James met in New York in the 1940s. Indeed, American Civilization reminds us that James’s geopolitics presumed a humbling historical regard for the republic. He wrote unimpressed by the Cold War triadic view of the planet, imagining the North American nation as part of not the First World but the New World. In James’s historical imagination, the U.S. was an unexceptional product of European colonialism … This effectively postcolonial view, lost on commentators who encountered the document in the wake of the Cold War, is essential to the argument in American Civilization.”