From this moment to the 1830s, when slavery was ended in almost all British colonies, Hochschild describes a sort of relay race, with that central, ethical insight passed like a baton from one actor to another. He begins with a small group of men meeting in a London print shop in 1787 to discuss what they had come to understand as a moral abomination: humans owning other humans. But in Bury the Chains, he tells another human-rights story, about how the movement to abolish slavery grew in Britain-a movement that, Hochschild points out, would have seemed as economically impossible at the time as a push to ban all cars would today. Hochschild is better known for King Leopold’s Ghost, his harrowing history of Belgium’s brutal control of the Congo and how it was eventually relinquished. Even a scientific insight now everywhere understood as objective truth-that killing bacteria as a way to avoid illness is an achievable and good practice-needed to first conquer accepted reality.īury the Chains : Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, by Adam Hochschild How did people come to “see” germs and take steps to combat invisible enemies? It was a painstaking, grinding process, almost a political campaign, in which the scientific establishment and then farmers and industrialists had to be won over to Pasteur’s prescriptions. In this 1984 book, translated into English in 1988, he went back to the 19th century and Louis Pasteur’s then-revolutionary notion that microbes cause infection and disease. Spreading an idea is more like war than a revelation, with the slow vanquishing of mental territory. Instead, Latour looks to the various networks and interests that mold these dramatic changes. But he never formulates these shifts as the result of one great thinker exposing a truth to the world. His particular interest for the past four decades has been understanding the way science continually reshapes our sense of reality. Latour is one of the most influential French social theorists of the second half of the 20th century. The Pasteurization of France, by Bruno Latour The eight books below each focus on how a status quo crumbles, and they tell the most rewarding sort of story: about a dissatisfaction shared by a small group of people that grows and grows until it alters our relationship to society, to one another, to nature itself. Luckily, some books have explored how change actually works, describing a longer range of time and a wider cast of characters. We fixate on the moments: policemen on horseback chasing down protesters, or a man standing up to a tank. Instead we zero in on the charismatic leaders’ big speeches. Many of those narratives, whether about women’s suffrage or the civil-rights movement, feel foreshortened, cutting out the years of struggle, or the need for debate and patience, for trial and error. If our movements today can devalue that slow, unseen incubation, the stories we tell about how social or political change unfolded in the past tend to leave out this part as well. The problem with the activists Alinsky was observing was that they sprinted to that third act, taking shortcuts that led, he wrote, only to “confrontation for confrontation’s sake-a flare-up and back to darkness.” It’s a dynamic that seems particularly true today, when social media provides us with extremely effective bullhorns that can call people to the streets with enormous speed and scale, or allow for the most clickable version of a radical idea to race around the internet before being fully developed. In other words, a movement needs a period of incubation-of conjuring, planning, debating, and convincing. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.” A successful revolution, he insisted, must follow the three-act structure of a play: “The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience’s attention. Saul Alinsky, the community organizer best known for his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, had a useful metaphor for explaining why some social movements tend to burn bright and then burn out before making the change they seek.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |