Return of the Jedi: The Cutting Room Floor Strikes Back
Part 2 of what didn't make it into Dangerous Words
Despite a semester seeming like an infinite amount of time, it is rather short. So like all college professors before me, I had to limit which books I was going to teach this spring. Because of the way my mind works, I was making constant connections between the books that I chose and others.
In a previous installment, I covered the first half of the books that related to both the themes of my Dangerous Words course as well as my chosen texts. The post with my final course texts is here, and the post with the first half of the books is here. The two course books that inspired this list were The Misinformation Age and Brave New World.
Without further ado, let’s get right to it. Once again, I have read all of these books, so can vouch for them.
Books that complement The Misinformation Age
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely.
In college, I was introduced to a subset of economics called behavioral economics. The point of behavioral economics is to study human behavior when humans aren’t acting rationally. You know, rationality, the single tenet that underlies the entire field of economics. It baffled me then, as it does now, that an entire field of study can be based off of humans behaving rationally when they constantly, continuously, prove otherwise.1 Anyways, behavioral economics seeks to understand why people make the decisions they do, combining economics and psychology. Dan Ariely is one of the foremost scholars, and this book was one of the first that really solidified the field of study. Ariely himself has an interesting story: as a teenager, he suffered third-degree burns over 70% of his body.
Nudge, Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein.
See above note on behavioral economics. Why pick the above books for a course on Dangerous Words? Book banning in and of itself is not a rational thing to do: especially nowadays, people have access to information and banning books often brings more attention to them. Just look at what happened with Maus last year.2 Point being, it occurred to me that examining why humans make decisions, even when they seem dumb, might be a useful focus. Especially when we might be able to nudge them (ha, see what I did there?) to behave otherwise. Unfortunately, I did not have nearly enough time so these got relegated to the side.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier.
Nobody panic, I’m not about to go on some moral diatribe about why you should delete your social media. I certainly still use it. But! This book does make a few very convincing arguments that social media is ruining everything. The author, Jaron Lanier, worked with Atari in the 80s and was part of the project that ended up building The Actual Internet™️, so we can trust his opinions here.
Among his many arguments, social media helps spread disinformation. Think of it this way: when you watched TV and there was an ad, the ad didn’t update in real time to suit your preferences. The physical newspaper couldn’t suddenly change if you weren’t interacting with an ad. Advertising companies just had to hope that their marketing was working on you. Now, we have algorithms. Algorithms that vie for our attention. Algorithms that can understand when you’re interacting with content and when you’re not, and then feed you MORE of the stuff you like. It’s actually pretty dystopian stuff, when you think about it. It should be obvious now why I thought this might be a useful book to include in a course that covers misinformation, but since it was solely focused on that and nothing else, it got the axe. It’s still a useful book to read and consider, though.
Cultish, Amanda Montell
The title does most of the work for me here, but Cultish is about how the languages used in cults has infiltrated our daily lives. Given the level of misinformation around cults themselves, this is a good one to read if you’re looking to understand how this language has seeped into the mainstream. A little too niche for my class, but definitely still covers the misinformation and disinformation angle well.
Books that complement Brave New World
1984, George Orwell
I don’t think I need to explain why this is here, but 1984 is the seminal dystopian novel. The main reason I went with Brave New World over 1984 is that I figured most of my students had read 1984 already. Indeed, 3 of them are doing their research papers on aspects of the book.
V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
Since my course is supposed to be about how to write, I considered including a graphic novel into the mix. If nothing else, that we’d be working with some other kind of book than the standard fiction one. Like Brave New World, V for Vendetta takes place in a futuristic/dystopian England. This graphic novel hits all of my themes, and is quite on point for what I wanted to teach. What ultimately dissuaded me from using V for Vendetta was the fact that it’s long. It’s 288 pages, which is a pretty standard book length, but the graphic novel in and of itself is larger than your average book. And each page has between 6-12 panels. It was just going to be a lot of reading, and I didn’t think I’d have enough time to do the material justice. So alas, another one bites the dust.
Candide, Voltaire
Funny story. Once in college, a friend and fellow sailing teammate got us tickets to go see Candide. We got to the theater, and the minute the production started, we turned to each other like deer in the headlights. “Did you know this was going to be a musical?!” we whispered furiously to each other. Anyways, that’s the story of how I saw Candide in person in musical format.
Much like our protagonist John in Brave New World, Candide in Candide is faced with a bunch of mortifying, upsetting, completely ridiculous and nonsensical experiences. He’s encountering the world much like a newborn baby, pointing out everything ridiculous we do along the way and asking the questions that no one wants to voice out loud. Very similar vibes to Brave New World, however, this is a classic of French Literature, and it just felt wrong for me to be teaching this 1) in English and 2) not in a French class. Besides, Brave New World was funnier and wasn’t going to require as much historical context on my end.The Social Contract, Rousseau
The main reason I didn’t choose this book is that only part of the Social Contract reminded me of Brave New World. So it’d be a companion piece more than anything. Specifically what I thought of was Rousseau’s conception of positive versus negative freedom. If you’ve never heard of this before, don’t worry, your Sparknotes are ahead. I took a seminar my senior year in college on Rousseau, and we read all of his major works, including On the Social Contract, which is where this idea of positive versus negative freedom gets discussed.3
Most societies are based on the idea of negative freedom, i.e., you can do anything except xyz. Using America, you can say whatever you want, but you can’t shout fire in a theater. You can live your life as you wish, as long as you don’t do these specific things. (Murder, assault, etc.) Oftentimes, negative freedom is associated with individual action.
Positive freedom, on the other hand, is more collectivist. It was explained to me this way: if I was living in utopia, per Rousseau’s arguments, and stepped outside of the rules of society, it would be society’s responsibility to reimpose freedom to me. Basically, I’ve gone astray, and I need to be corrected. This is basically the foundation for Rousseau’s Social Contract, and it’s a stone’s throw from that to the utopia in Brave New World. When John does not want to adhere to the standards and social mores that have been set, everyone around him is baffled and tries to get him to comply. Why would he want to live any other way than in this perfectly utopian state where everything is prescribed? I’m being a bit facetious here, but Brave New World’s entire worldbuilding and plot reminded me of this distinction constantly.
Books that complement the themes of Dangerous Words
Le Silence de la Mer / The Silence of the Sea, Vercors
Once again, I would have felt weird teaching this in English since it’s an important French text and I learned it in French, but I digress.
Vercors, the pen name of Jean Butler, was a Resistance fighter in France during World War II. What makes Le Silence de la Mer impressive is that he published this under Nazi occupation in 1942. The entire book is about resisting Naziism in all of its forms. There’s three characters, and it’s a character study but also a comparison between French and German societies at the time. It became a symbol of French resistance, and while I don’t recall anything explicit about it being banned, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say if you were caught with a text published by the French Resistance, you weren’t going to have a great time. I thought it would be a great example of what literature looks like in the midst of conflict, especially when it’s published in secret, but that was getting a bit away from the original topic of the class.
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
This one was never going to happen. This was never going to happen because I hate Madame Bovary with a blinding passion. It’s the only book that I can remember not finishing. I hate it so much. But Madame Bovary was suggested to me because when it was initially published in 18574, Flaubert and the publishers were put on trial for obscenity. Flaubert was eventually acquitted, but Dangerous Words indeed. I considered it for all of 5 minutes. Aside from my own personal hatred, this book is too long to use in anything other than a literature course. So once again, no thank you and good riddance Flaubert.
Phew! We did it. Thanks for sticking with me through the winding peregrinations of my mind. Hopefully you’ve got at least one new book recommendation to add to your list. I’ll be back Friday with another installment of my Artist Interview series! Until then, happy reading.
Another book that was cursorily considered, but if I decided if I was going to go with a graphic novel it would be V for Vendetta.
If you go looking for more on this, I’ve also seen it referred to as positive vs. negative liberties, freedoms, and rights. It’s all basically the same thing, but I distinctly remember it being taught to me as positive versus negative freedom.
It was initially serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856, and the trial itself occurred in January 1857. The book was then published in 2 volumes in April 1857, hence why I am using the 1857 publication date.