Unruly Voices
Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher ... His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
Meet the “fast zombie" citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style ‘likes’ replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here.
Since the publication of A Civil Tongue (1995), philosopher Mark Kingwell has been urging us to consider how monstrous, self-serving public behaviour can make it harder to imagine and achieve the society we want. Now, with Unruly Voices, Kingwell returns to the subjects of democracy, civility, and political action, in an attempt to revitalize an intellectual culture too-often deadened by its assumptions of personal advantage and economic value. These 17 new essays, where zombies share pages with cultural theorists, poets, and presidents, together argue for a return to the imagination—and from their own unruly voices rises a sympathetic democracy to counter the strangeness of the postmodern political landscape.
Mark Kingwell is the author of sixteen books and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most of these 17 essays focus on the degradation of contemporary political discourse, urban life, and culture. University of Toronto philosopher and Harper's contributor Kingwell (The World We Want) notes that in lieu of "political literacy," political conversation today is too often characterized by "insult-swapping and bogus claims," so that "we can no longer hear, let alone appreciate... a just idea." In a fascinating essay entitled "The American Gigantic," he argues that the American dream has been transformed into a kind of "zombie virus, consuming resources and citizens alike in an endless round of renewed desire... obscuring the realities of class and race." Examining such social and existential issues as the role of luck in accumulating political or other power and the way that "desirable objects" reinforce a sense of "class superiority," Kingwell ranges far and wide. He cites not only to such philosophers as Plato, Heidegger, and Rawls, but also to such writers as Melville and literary critics such as Northrop Frye, not to mention such cinematic cult classics as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (part of a discussion on the "uncanny" in film). Though Kingwell's prose can be elusively associative and his intellectual allusions sometimes esoteric (Francis Fukuyama's thought is marked by "Hegelian dialectics filtered through Alexandre Koj ve"), he is a perceptive and imaginative social critic.
