Net Smarties

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
By Howard Rheingold
The MIT Press

Howard Rheingold has a white moustache. He dresses like the prototype of an aging hippie, but he’s been involved in personal computer theory and practice for 30 years. His social network experience goes back to one of the earliest example, San Francisco’s legendary The Well. Younger readers may know him as the author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. So he’s positioned to speak to several generations on “how to thrive online,” including boomers.

  But this is not a simple how-to book, full of bullet points and illustrations (though it does include some cartoons reminiscent of R. Crumb.) Rheingold writes about how to use the net “mindfully,” which includes critically. Two of his five web literacies (along with attention, participation and collaboration) are net smarts and crap detection. Still, his stance is mainly positive on the benefits and the social change inherent in what he calls the shift from group to network.

  His approach is historical as well as theoretical, philosophical and practical. He pays attention to how adventures in cyberspace change individuals as well as society, and he considers several sides of those questions. He can be acerbic as well as inspirational.

  One of his main assertions is that “the emerging digital divide is between those who know how to use social media for individual advantage and collective action, and those who do not.” Originally the “digital divide” meant the distance between the individuals and communities who could financially afford to fully participate in cyberspace and those who couldn’t. That divide still exists, especially as full participation seems to require frequent new purchases of the latest devices.

  The author’s personal experience—as well as from his students and children—provides rare perspective on cyberspace. This is also a kind of guidebook to future practice, as Rheingold emphasizes the ethics of good networking and social collaboration. So part of his advice, in addition to how to manage information overload and survive on Facebook, is how to be a good participator and network citizen. Plus his emphasis on the skills of attention and critical thinking are useful beyond cyberspace.

    The book is pretty clearly written but it’s not a fast read because there is at least one interesting idea on every page, and depending on individual net experience, a number of challenging topics. It’s also meant to be read beginning to end, which is not exactly the Internet way. It’s about 250 pages of text plus lots of notes and a mediocre index, but what’s missing is a sorely needed glossary of terms as they are used in the book. Overall it’s that paradox of the instant-obsolescence computer age: a keeper.
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There are a few other books about these technologies and the real world for the computer literate on your shopping list this year.  Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi (MIT) is exactly that: a clearly written history of computing, complete with names and places--and this one does have a glossary.  At 150 plus pages it's very handy, but still a solid and serious work.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson (Riverhead Books) is breezily written, with a point of view that's basically similar to Rheingold's, but of course it's a different book, with different perspectives, examples and elaborations. 

The Technology of Nonviolence: Social Media and Violence Prevention by Joseph G. Bock (MIT Press) is even more specific.  It is cutting-edge and global, with chapters on Countering Ethnoreligious Violence in Sri Lanka, Interrupting Gang Violence in Chicago and Crowdsourcing during Post-election Violence in Kenya.  It begins with theoretical frameworks and ends with evaluations and recommendations.  This is a thoughtful, sometimes provocative but well-presented and serious work, especially for those grappling with such issues in government, NGOs and even the corporate world, and for students interested in these fields. 
 

 

Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
By R.M. Douglas
Yale University Press

1940s movies and domestic propaganda put an understandably noble face on Allied efforts in World War II. It was only in the decades afterwards that some of the morally questionable and transparently brutal counter-evidence emerged: not just the Holocaust and Japanese Army atrocities but the British firebombing of undefended Dresden, the American saturation terror bombing of Tokyo, the deadly irradiating of Nagasaki, to name the most prominent . By the 1960s, war novels by American veterans were revealing unflattering memories.  Revelations continue--in the novel By Blood, the previous book reviewed here, for instance, the reality that even after the war, even after some German concentration camps were liberated, Jews continued to live in them, because no other country would take them.   

But in today’s soundbite history, World War II has reverted to the purity of The Last Good War fought by The Greatest Generation. The truth as it still emerges is a great deal more complicated for what one historian calls the number one “multicide” in human history, with a minimum of 66 million dead, at least half of them civilians. 

And the death toll did not end with the end of the war. Historian R.M. Douglas writes in compelling detail about a little known set of events: at war’s end the Allies ran “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Some 12 to 14 million German-speaking civilians, most of them women and children, were extracted from their homes in eastern Europe and sent to Germany “amidst the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could.”

Some were transported in locked train freight cars, scenes that we know from Nazi treatment of Jews, and some were held in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Starvation, disease and abuse resulted in half a million to a million deaths. Douglas explicitly states there is no legitimate comparison or equivalence to the Holocaust, but some of the Holocaust’s victims saw a moral parallel. An Auschwitz survivor viewed with shame the silence that surrounded these events. “We used to console ourselves by saying ‘only the Germans are capable of such things.’”

German speakers were expelled and their property confiscated largely at the behest of host countries (Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland) because they wouldn’t be tolerated by their majority populations, though no evidence was offered for this claim. The massive transfers—or what more recently would be called ethnic cleansings--quickly turned into bureaucratic and international nightmares.

 Douglas relies on verifiable sources to describe these expulsions within the context of the relevant and tangled history of Europe, especially the legacies of World War I. They bear directly on the 1990s ethnic violence in the Balkans, and aspects of this story are way too reminiscent of the recent Iraq occupation. This is an absorbing and eye-opening account, an educational astringent and an antidote to the oversimplified and self-satisfied cliches about World War II that constitute the current conventional wisdom.

A Terrible Love of War
by James Hillman

reviewed by William S. Kowinski in the San Francisco Chronicle
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004

Now in his 80s, James Hillman notes in the first of his interpolated personal commentaries in this volume: "Strange indeed that what I'm assuming to be my last book should land on the shores of this theme..." Strange but perhaps fated, for this uncompromising examination of war arrives as portraits of flag-draped coffins and images of young Americans abusing captives in Saddam's torture prison hover over its pages. They illustrate the gripping mythic power of war that Hillman insists we recognize and acknowledge.

"James Hillman is an artist of psychology," Thomas Moore writes in his still indispensable Prologue to A Blue Fire, his 1989 selection of Hillman's early writings. " He turns upside down many ideas people hold dear and unreflected. After an hour with Hillman's writing, a reader might feel himself twisting and turning in the wind." In the cruel spring of 2004, this reader certainly did.

James Hillman studied with Carl Jung in the 1950s, and wrote prominently on Jungian themes while deconstructing psychoanalysis in the 1970s in such landmark books as The Myth of Analysis and Re-Visioning Psychology. His "archetypal psychology" and re-imagined concept of soul, soon resonated with artists and others outside his first audiences of professional therapists.

By the 1980s, Hillman engaged in book-length dialogues with Italian journalist Laura Pozzo (Inter/Views) and Los Angeles writer Michael Ventura (We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.) After A Blue Fire and a collaboration on men's poetry with Robert Bly and Michael Meade (The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart), he went public in a big way beginning in the 1990s with Kinds of Power (addressing the psychology of business) and his best-sellers, The Soul's Code and The Force of Character.

This book is perhaps his most accessible, and therefore his most devastating. Hillman has never been one for therapeutic bromides or blanket comfort. He has counterbalanced the usual emphasis on spiritual growth, hope and happiness with a call to experience the soul's depths of complexity, limitation, loss, patience and relationship with death. Soul confronts what ego would like to deny.

For instance, the reality---and normality---of war. It is with us every hour now, but even in the supposedly placid 1990s, something like 6 million people died in at least 14 wars. More than 60 million were killed in the 20th century's wars. For every year of recorded human history there have been at least two wars. This is not a pretty picture of humanity but to avoid it entirely leads to such products of denial as neglecting to confront the damage that ruins the lives of many returning soldiers. The "failure of imagination" we heard about concerning 9-11 (and have heard long enough to be noted in this book) is a failure to painfully apply imagination to the nature of war, so our stupidity masked as innocence leads us into avoidable repetitions of mass killing.

But reader beware: there is nothing pacifist about Hillman's approach. He says war is normal, not just usual. He says it is inhuman, but not just for its horrors---it is inhuman as are the gods, even if their autonomy resides in our psyches. War is not just the province of Mars but of Venus, so war has its sublime beauty and love. This book's title is not rhetorical-the subject is the terrible love of war. "Because war reveals our being, we are brutal and insane in action," he writes, "and we are ethical and loving in essence."

Hillman agrees with political philosophers who say war is inherent in the existence of states. His most aggressively presented theme is that war is a result of the either/or of monotheistic religions. Polytheism (not as literal belief but as a way of exploring the human soul and the soul of the world) shows us the complexity of shadings, relationships and contained contraries. One of his more startling illustrations is a Homeric Hymn to the Greek god of war that ends, "give me courage,/let me linger/in the safe laws of peace..."

Our task, he writes, is to dig "below the blanket of hypocrisies" and stop blaming the beliefs of others, especially when the inflammatory clerics and history of religious warfare we decry are mirrored in our own. "Psychoanalysis has moved civilization to where it must do what its patients do: take back easy blame from out there in search of the more difficult blame in here."

At times Hillman's concluding pages sound as bleak as the despairing H.G. Wells in his last book, Mind At the End of Its Tether. But he dares to make a case for beauty and the complexities of culture as a necessary counterbalance even more strongly than the case for consciousness that Jungian Anthony Stevens shapes in his new book on war and terrorism. And while Hillman states starkly that "There is no practical solution to war because war is not a problem for the practical mind..." he also says that recognizing "War belongs to our souls as an archetypal truth of the cosmos" may help us focus more effectively on preventing war's bloody enactment in the world. "We may understand it better, delay it longer, and work to wean war from its support in hypocritical religion."

Hillman can be a seductive writer. Living now in Wallace Stevens' Connecticut, Hillman's voice on a recent audiobook sounds eerily like Stevens', and there are lines of his prose that could easily be slipped into certain Stevens' poems, and vice versa. But this book presents more of his provocative side, and much more of his intriguing personal history than he's shown before. Its' a skillfully constructed tour de force with more virtues than omissions. It took a warrior courage to publish it, and it will take warrior courage to absorb it. But without either endorsing or denying all its conclusions, this reader can recommend it as important reading for our time, as we try to make sense of its terrors.

A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman (The Penguin Press; 256 pages, $23.95.)

Maxine Hong Kingston's "Fifth Book of Peace" reviewed
by William Severini Kowinski

An edited version of this review was published on p.1 of the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review on 9/7/03. You can find it here. What follows is the Director's Cut. It preserves my actual lead, which expresses more clearly my admiration for this book. And it keeps in some of the nuances, like the double meaning of "vibrance" which links color to life, as in the paragraph in which it appears, the absense of color is linked to death. It retains the expression "talk story" which Kingston readers will recognize. Plus, as they say, so much more...



The Fifth Book of Peace
By Maxine Hong Kingston
KNOPF; 416 PAGES; $26

Maxine Hong Kingston's long-awaited new book combines fiction and memoir in a "tour de force"--or more appropriately, a "tour de paix"--- that's full of thought and feeling, with interweaving themes and literary layers to keep her Berkeley students busy, and wonderful reading for us all.

As far back as her late 1980s interview with Bill Moyers, Kingston talked about re-imagining the contents of ancient China's three Books of Peace, instructions on how to avoid war and induce tranquility, which according to legend were all deliberately burned by incoming emperors. She also planned to follow the further adventures of Wittman Ah Sing, protagonist of her novel, "Tripmaster Monkey," during the Viet Nam war. She combined these intentions in 156 pages she spent two years writing, the beginning of a fourth Book of Peace. But then in 1991 came the devastating fire in the Berkeley-Oakland hills that destroyed her home and turned her manuscript to ashes: the fourth book of peace had suffered the fate of the first three. And so her new book, "The Fifth Book of Peace," begins with a section called "Fire."

She was returning from "the red ceremony," a family memorial for her recently deceased father, in which the living fend off the temptation to join the black and white world of the dead by wearing red; by displaying vibrance. Then she was walking in the ash-blackened and heat-scorched white landscape that had been her neighborhood, where the only color left was the red of flame.

Starting with a fiery disaster is a dramatic way to begin a book, and by documenting her sense impressions, thoughts, feelings and encounters with others in the fire zone, Kingston produces a mesmerizing description of an event creating its own fatal landscape, both stark and hallucinatory. But it is also a thematic initiation: before they get to peace, many have gone through fire. The devastation is itself an object lesson. Kingston quotes an Oakland fire captain and Viet Nam vet who looked down from a helicopter on the melted phantoms of beloved neighborhoods and cautioned, "When we decide to send our military and our bombs into a country, this is what we're deciding to do." [p14](He's quoted again, applying this observation to 9/11 in the book's epilogue.)

The next section, "Paper," is about the Books of Peace, and about books, writing, words and storytelling; paper is the human element. These sections are memoir as in "The Woman Warrior" and "China Men," though more weighted to contemporary America. "Water" is the re-written remnant of the intended earlier book, a fiction following Wittman, his wife and young son to Hawaii where he hides from the Vietnam era draft. If "Tripmaster Monkey" is discursive, hermetic and Whitmanesque in its frenetic energies, this tale is more descriptive, economical and open, imbued with the magic of discovery, of first times. In its depiction of young war resisters from within the military, it is both generous and accurate to the era. If asked for prose that reflects the realities of the Viet Nam 60s in America, I'd have no hesitation in recommending these pages. There's also memorable writing, like the description of two men walking: "The small soldier and the tall soldier walked the same way; they made their shoulders big, and moved shoulders and feet in rhythm, one side of the body at a step." [234-5]

The last section, "Earth," is a reportorial and collaborative account of writing and meditation workshops Kingston held in the mid 90s with war veterans---mostly Viet Nam vets (including civilian women), but also World War II Americans and veterans of other armies and wars. Again she brings her considerable skills to describing the emotionally ragged process that leads to a series of dramatic and revelatory moments, including several of reconciliation and even peace. The war veterans find their way back to community through honest saying and story. There are countless little jewels to admire glittering on the path throughout this book, such as a different ending for the woman warrior tale, and the true account of how Thich Nhat Hanh invented the Hugging Meditation.

The relevance of all this to our current moment, as we revisit in Iraq the slowly unfolding horrors of quagmire, gives these journeys a particular resonance. But the issues and emotions of war and peace are always with us, and this book does a service for all seasons. The author doesn't back off from uncomfortable observations, such as the vets' willingness to forgive Vietnamese enemies but not American war protestors. Liberation through self-expression turns out to be not enough; some shadow work is also indicated. But others must write more books of peace to follow this inspirational example. For now, we have this marvelous opus to talk story to us on all our roads to peace.