Harvard University Press Blog

From the Protestant Reformation to the Failure of Modernity

Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are large, sweeping books that change the way we understand modernity and the world in which we live. For Gregory, that new understanding comes from looking all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, and connecting all that’s come since in ways that scholars have thus far resisted.

He discussed the book with us in a recent episode of the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear or download via the player below.

During that conversation, he explained the ways in which he understands modern Western life as stemming from developments of the 16th and 17th centuries:

I don’t think anyone who’s self-reflective about it would deny the rather banal claim that the world that we’re living in today is the product of the past. The issue is what aspects of the past help us to understand and to explain the character of the situation in which we find ourselves. What’s unusual about my book is that it parts ways from the normal methods and the normal assumptions by which even professional historians tend to explain the present. That is, it tends to be assumed that we can account for the world in which we’re living today in the West—North America and Europe—this side, as it were, of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. And, one of the central arguments I’m making in The Unintended Reformation is that that is not the case, and that all of those developments indeed are critical to understanding where we are today, but what we really need to understand are the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, and the unintended processes that they set in motion, without which we will not understand the character of the problems that we’re facing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s Gregory’s claim that the Western world today is “an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity.” Our failure to understand that lineage, he argues, prevents us from fully recognizing the disaggregation that our society has experienced. From The Unintended Reformation:

On the eve of the Reformation, Latin Christianity comprised for good or ill the far from homogeneous yet institutionalized worldview within which the overwhelming majority of Europeans lived and made sense of their lives. Diversely, early twenty-first-century Westerners live in and think with and even feel through the historical results of its variegated rejections and appropriations in such knotted ways that it is difficult even to see, much less to analyze, them. In getting from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century, this study develops the claim from my first book that “incompatible, deeply held, concretely expressed religious convictions paved a path to a secular society.”

Feather-Capped and Back-Patted

We’ve begun this year with a number of nice honors for books we published in the last. Seems that 2011 was a particularly nice year for HUP biographies. One of them, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing. The winner will be announced at a party given at the French Embassy in London on Wednesday, February 29th. This welcome accolade joins many others for Douglas-Fairhurst’s unconventional look at Dickens, which was recognized as a favorite of 2011 by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Telegraph.

We’re also proud to see another biography, Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, earning wide praise. Having already been named a highlight of 2011 by The Economist, Washington Post, and others, Vogel’s masterful look at China’s boldest strategist has also been named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. In what was an exceptional year for the category, Vogel’s book keeps great company among co-Finalists such as Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and John Lewis Gaddis’s take on George F. Kennan.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China has also been longlisted for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction book on foreign affairs published in English. And joining Vogel on the Gelber longlist is Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War, which boldly upends the conventional understanding of Russia’s part in the Great War. The Gelber list will be shortened in early February, and the winner of the $15,000 Prize will be announced on March 12th.

We’re also honored to note that Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide was named Co-Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, for which 2011 was the inaugural year. The Book Prize Committee praised The Death Marches as “an important, path breaking new study on a well-known yet largely unstudied part of the Holocaust,” and described the book as “masterly, a veritable tour de force, and truly a pioneering study and an example of outstanding scholarship.”

And we’d also like to note the awarding of the American Historical Association’s 2011 George Louis Beer Prize to David Ciarlo, for Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. The award, given in recognition of outstanding historical writing on any phase of European international history since 1895, is open to any scholar who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Ciarlo recently discussed his innovative visual history of the German colonial worldview with the folks at New Books in History, where you can listen to the conversation.

On our website, you can scroll through other recent awards for HUP books, and we’ve also collected the Book of the Year citations given to over two dozen HUP works released in 2011. We’re continually honored to be working with such talented scholars, and we’re very proud to see their wonderful work recognized so widely.

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

Someday All This Will Be Yours

In a piece published this weekend, Hendrik Hartog, author of Someday All This Will Be Yours, explained that the predominant view of the history of elder care in America isn’t actually very accurate. When thinking of the time before social security, senior homes, and assisted living, people too often imagine families in which children cared for aging parents out of familial love and filial duty, routinely piling three generations into houses together.

But, as Hartog writes, “this portrait is too rosy”:

If we confront what old-age support once looked like — what actually happened when care was almost fully privatized, when the old depended on their families, without the bureaucratic structures and the (under)paid caregivers we take for granted — a different picture emerges.

For the past decade I have been researching cases of family conflict over old-age care in the decades before Social Security. I have found extraordinary testimony about the intimate management of family care: how the old negotiated with the young for what they called retirement, and the exertions of caregiving at a time when support by relatives was the only sustenance available for the old.

In that world, older people could not rely on habit or culture or nature if they wanted their children to support them when they became frail. In an America strongly identified with economic and physical mobility, parents had to offer inducements. Usually, the bait they used was the promise of an inheritance: stay and take care of me and your mother, and someday you will get the house and the farm or the store or the bank account.

But of course what was at stake was never just an economic bargain between rational actors. Older people negotiated with the young to receive love, to be cared for with affection, not just self-interest.

Someday All This Will Be Yours presents the decade of research Hartog conducted, a project he first undertook during an extended stay near his own elderly mother. He eventually assembled a database of more than 200 cases in which a caretaker brought suit, alleging that the deceased had failed to make good on a promise of quid pro quo. In each case, the plaintiff claimed to have been promised, either implicitly or explicitly, that, in exchange for late-life care of their relative, employer, neighbor, or friend, they’d been promised some later recompense such as money or land. As Hartog explains, in order to win the case the aggrieved would have to prove both that a bargain existed and that they’d upheld their half. More often than not, they were unable to do so and were left with nothing.

Such cases, Hartog found, were essentially standard legal business; run-of-the-mill trials evidencing a social dynamic that we’ve somehow largely forgotten in our age of social services. Hartog’s goal for the project was to better understand this history of intimate transaction:

Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

Influential British philosopher Sir Michael Dummett died at 86 in the last days of 2011. Over the years we’ve been the publisher of many of Dummett’s books, including his classic studies of the 19th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the importance of Dummett’s work on Frege:

Dummett has argued that analytical philosophy is based on Frege’s insight that the correct way to study thought is to study language. He holds that Frege advocated a realist semantic theory. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it is.

Perhaps Dummett’s own most significant work was the development of “anti-realism,” a way of thinking that took issue with Frege’s realist theory. From The Guardian’s obituary of Dummett:

Dummett believed that Frege made certain assumptions concerning truth and falsehood that could be called into question. Frege allowed for the possibility of a thought that was neither true nor false. An example would be the thought that Father Christmas smokes. Given that there is no such person as Father Christmas, then neither is there anything to make this thought true or false. But Frege was not in the least reluctant to admit that a thought could be true or false without our having any way of telling which. An example might be the thought that Plato would have enjoyed smoking. This is what caused Dummett to pause.

He did not see how we could understand a sentence without having some way of manifesting our understanding. And he did not see how we could manifest this without being able to tell whether the thought expressed was true or false. So the assumption that a given thought could be true or false even though we had no way of telling which – an assumption that Dummett called "realism" concerning the thought – was immediately problematical.

In another of his influential works, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Dummett sought to help bridge the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy by revisiting the moment when the traditions diverged. Simon Critchley quotes the following passage from Origins in a recent appreciation:

I do not mean to pretend that one should pretend that philosophy in the two traditions is basically the same; obviously that would be ridiculous. We can re-establish communication only by going back to the point of divergence. It’s no use now shouting across the gulf. It is obvious that philosophers will never reach agreement. It is a pity, however, if they can no longer talk to one another or understand one another. It is difficult to achieve such understanding, because if you think people are on the wrong track, you may have no great desire to talk with them or to take the trouble to criticize their views. But we have reached a point at which it is as if we’re working in different subjects.

At the NYT Opinionator, you can read reflections on Dummett from over two dozen fellow philosophers, including Timothy Williamson, Dorothy Edgington, and Hilary Putnam, who notes of Dummett that he “cared about ideas, he cared about people, he cared about society, and he rightly connected caring about any one of the three and caring about the other two.”

The Murty Classical Library of India Has Its Design

Designer Andrea Stranger observes that “most designers have a book fetish.”

She came by hers honestly: while a student at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, she worked “less than part time” at the venerable Alexander Book Company. This past fall, her former employer there emailed to alert her to the contest we were holding to design the Murty Classical Library of India. Stranger took up the challenge, and you can see more of her elegant winning design over at the MCLI site. 

Stranger, who has done design work for clients as diverse as Kate Spade, financial services companies, and internet startups, has a broad interest in design—she says, “I’ll take pretty much any project you throw at me”—and relishes the creativity required to work in different arenas. Her primary objective is identifying a client’s needs.

In the case of the MCLI, which will present up-to-date English translations of classical works in languages ranging from Bengali and Kannada and Marathi to Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with the text in the appropriate regional script provided on the facing page, Stranger realized that the most important criteria were flexibility—MCLI required a design that could adequately represent diverse texts—and a look that honored both Western and Indian traditions.

She started by doing research on Indian visual culture, and shared some images from those and other inspirations with us to talk about how the design developed. 

 

 

Stranger saw the galley pictured at right while working at the Alexander Book Company. She was so struck by the text-driven cover that she read the book, and hung onto the galley, which she dug out from her parents’ basement for this photo. She says, “The simplicity of the design and materials stuck with me—and influenced the type-driven approach of the Murty design.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stranger says, “I looked at a lot of Indian architecture and found inspiration in the recurring shapes, color and intense use of pattern.” She passed along the image at right as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

When Stranger began researching Indian cultures for the project, she noticed that “the elephant is everywhere,” and realized that powerful cross-cultural associations with the animal, a symbol of wisdom, longevity, and strength in the West, made it “a worthy subject for logo exploration.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Textiles, like architecture, offered a lot of fodder for color usage and patterning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Kannada language,” she told us, “served as inspiration for a concept that did not move forward, but the letterforms (like all Indian languages) reinforced the idea of an organic beauty that seemed present in every aspect of my research of Indian design.”

 

 

 

You can see elements of each of these images in Stranger’s final design:

At the MCLI website you can view a slideshow of additional images of the design, and also read thoughts on Stranger’s work from MCLI General Editor Sheldon Pollock, design contest judges such as Peter Mendelsund, and Rohan Narayana Murty, whose endowment gift to Harvard funded the library’s creation.

We’re looking forward to seeing Stranger’s design in print on the first volumes of the Murty Classical Library of India in 2013, and we’re extremely grateful to her and to all of the other talented designers who submitted their work to the contest.

The Year We Blogged

Time again for the university to shut off the lights and turn down the heat, forcing us all to our homes for a bit of rest and reading. As blogging will be light for a spell, we thought we’d leave you with a look back at just some of what we’ve been up to this year; maybe you’ll see something you missed the first time through.

Way back in January, we shared an excerpt from our volume of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, in which the Nobel Laureate considered what takes place in our minds when we read novels.

Also in January, amidst the controversy of a publisher’s plan to release a censored version of Huck Finn, we posted the full text of Ishmael Reed’s New Literary History of America essay on Twain’s classic.

And we closed out the month with a trio of short videos featuring David Blight, who spoke with us about the enduring significance of the American Civil War, just as the nation began to mark the conflict’s sesquicentennial.

We heard from two long-time HUP Editors after the death of Daniel Bell, the pioneering social scientist who for years helped to oversee the Press. Michael Aronson wrote of his memories of Bell, and Lindsay Waters remembered Bell’s impact on the direction of HUP.

In February, as the world watched events unfold in Egypt, we looked back at a book by Timur Kuran titled Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran, currently a professor of Economics and Islamic Studies at Duke, presented in the book a model for understanding the seemingly sudden process of social and political breakthrough. It’s a book we’ve thought back on many times throughout this year of global political uprising.

Also in February, as we began our celebration of the Loeb Classical Library’s 100th anniversary, we asked you to show us your Loebs. And you did! In May, and then again this week, we shared your pictures from all over the world.

We also heard from Nicholas Frankel, editor of our beautiful new annotated, uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, about the history of Wilde’s novel, and why it’s taken so long for this original version to finally see publication.

In March, we presented the Interlude from one of our best-titled books of the year, Seo-Young Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.

Also in March, after the entire Harvard community was saddened by the passing of Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz, HUP Editor Elizabeth Knoll wrote about Stuntz’s work to finish The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, a book we proudly published in September.

In April, we shared an excerpt from Umerto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, in which the not-actually-so-young Eco pondered why we weep for fictional characters.

Later in the month, HUP Editor Sharmila Sen marked the publication of The Essential Tagore with a story about the collection of Tagore’s poems that she carried with her as a child when her family moved to the United States.

May was busy! We looked at the Keynes-Hayek rap battle, noted the creation by Pitzer College of the nation’s first department of secular studies (and recommended some books for them), and marked the paperback publication of Paul Gilroy’s Darker than Blue by sharing a song that’s been on heavy rotation in these halls all this year and last.

And we rounded out May by posting our video of Martha Nussbaum discussing the Capabilities Approach to Human Development.

Of Color in America

In January, we’ll publish Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. The book examines a hidden history of transnational cooperation towards the freedom of the “colored world.” Below, Slate considers the role of that sort of solidarity within America’s evolving racial composition.

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Fifty years from now, the United States will no longer have a “white” majority. The significance of this demographic change will hinge on what it means to be non-white or, in an oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase, a “person of color.”

Take the case of Nikki Haley, the Indian American governor of South Carolina. In January 2011, Benjamin Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged Haley to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the state capitol. Jealous appealed to Haley as South Carolina’s “first governor of color,” referenced the history of linkages between the civil rights movement and the Indian freedom struggle, and challenged Haley to consider, “What would Gandhi do?” His historical references might have been different if Jealous had known that Haley, when asked to identify her race on South Carolina’s official voter registration card, had checked the box for “white.”

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, for much of American history, immigrants from India had to claim legal whiteness if they wished to become citizens. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, naturalization was expanded to those of African descent. All other ethnic groups were relegated to a gray zone in which citizenship rights depended on proof of whiteness.

Between 1908 and 1922, at least sixty-nine Indians gained United States citizenship by successfully claiming to be white. In Savannah, Georgia in 1910, Abba Dolla, a native of Calcutta, arranged for a doctor to testify to his “pure Caucasian blood.” The presiding judge described Dolla as follows: “The applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft.” Uncertain about Dolla’s racial identity, the judge asked him to pull up his shirt sleeves. Fortunately for Dolla, the judge concluded, “The skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly.” Impressed, the judge granted citizenship.

The ability of Indians to gain legal whiteness ended in 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled against granting citizenship to a U.S. Army veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh American like Nikki Haley. After 1923, many Indian Americans came to connect their persecution as a racial minority to the struggles of other non-white Americans. Jagjit (J.J.) Singh, an influential Sikh businessman and the leader of the most prominent Indian American organization in the 1930s and 1940s, established close links with Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP. While Mahatma Gandhi inspired opponents of American racism, African American struggles attracted sympathy throughout India. Many Indians came to see themselves as part of a global struggle for the rights of “colored people.”

When, in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he globalized the color line, referring not only to the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea” but also to “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Over the course of the twentieth century, immigration rendered Du Bois’s inclusive conception of color vital to understanding race within as well as beyond the borders of the United States. While the ethnic diversity of the United States has always exceeded the black/white dichotomy, rapid increases in the population of Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and other non-black people of color has made it especially important to understand the long history of relationships between minority groups. That history can help us understand the origin of tensions between ethnic groups. It can also remind us that inter-ethnic relations have been marked by cooperation as well as tension, cooperation inspired for many by a colored cosmopolitanism.

The racial ambiguity that marks the history of South Asian Americans also colors the history of other ethnic groups. For decades, immigrants from throughout the world struggled to prove their whiteness. Americans from as far afield as the Middle East, Mexico, and Japan marshaled notions of Caucasian identity or pointed to the bare fact of white skin. While immigrants no longer need to prove their whiteness in order to become citizens, the racial ambiguity of many immigrant communities complicates their relationships with each other and with an America struggling with persistent racial inequality and ongoing debates concerning the proper role of race in the public sphere. Will Barack Obama win the Latino vote? Should Korean Americans and Cambodian Americans be lumped together as “Asian Americans” for the purposes of affirmative action? Many of the most pressing issues regarding race in contemporary America relate to the vexed question of what it means to be a “person of color,” a question that hinges on how non-white Americans view each other. The history of colored cosmopolitanism offers hope for a solidarity between non-white Americans that is neither anti-white nor blind to racial inequality. It matters how Nikki Haley understands her racial identity. It matters what she thinks when she walks by that Confederate flag.

More Loebs!

Earlier this year we asked for you to help us celebrate the 100th anniversary year of the Loeb Classical Library by sending us pictures of your Loeb collections. We shared a batch of your pictures in the spring, and we’re back today with another bunch. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has sent in photos.

First up, a man we were thrilled to hear from, Mr. Charles Montgomery Burns, of Springfield. He keeps his Loeb volumes right by the hearth in his library. Here he is, pondering the classics with a nice snifter of something warm:

From Burns to the basement, for this shot from Seminary Co-op in Chicago:

And here, top to bottom, are the personal collections of Ralph Aulenta, Maddy Bowman, and Alan Steele, a British Army Chaplain, who says he normally takes a couple of Loebs with him when deployed to hot and dusty places.

Here’s the collection at P. Tombolini and Co. in Rome. Loebs in Rome!

Slow Violence and Our Better Angels

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?