I agree with Berry when it comes to his ideas about marriage, but found his take on technology incredibly frustrating.
To take the good first. He’s riI agree with Berry when it comes to his ideas about marriage, but found his take on technology incredibly frustrating.
To take the good first. He’s right that there’s a certain mode of right-on-ness that seeks to reduce feminism and gender politics to sticky labels, convenient to slap on anyone and anything that vaguely resembles something that was once objectionable. It’s moral superiority by checklist, the illusion of thought.
But his views on technology are wilfully blind. Of course change does not always mean improvement, and undoubtedly advances in technology have created problems. But Berry’s view is ignorant by choice, he asserts and does not question. Technology is equivalent to consumption and not a thought is given to anyone outside the comfortable developed world. Rich CEOs can live longer and in iller health, boo! Overlooking the fact that the latter part is not so very true as you might imagine, what about the child from a poor family who no longer has to put up with preventable blindness? Or those in remote communities with access to resources and education they’d never have encountered before? What about the clean energy solutions that’ll (hopefully) do away with the strip mining he so hates? What about the glasses on my face or the hearing aid in my grandmother’s ear? What about the exposure of war crimes, or the dissemination of knowledge?
Berry doesn’t answer any of these questions. While he is keen to call out what he sees as everybody else’s corporate-decreed mania for consumption, he’s blind to his own 19th century ruralist dogma. It wasn’t a surprise when he started quoting Thoreau. ...more
NB. I was given a free ARC of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Sounds like an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, is actually a shoNB. I was given a free ARC of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Sounds like an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, is actually a short collection of essays on race, feeling and feminism by Audre Lorde – and number 23 in the new Penguin Moderns series.
Lorde does not speak directly to my lived experience, but there is a universality to what she describes (and describes beautifully in clear but lyrical prose). The whitest, cisest, able-bodiest straight man will recognise something in her statement "We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves".
That's not to say that I, a white middle-class straight bloke, read the work of a black feminist lesbian and took from it: "Gosh her struggle is just like mine!" But understanding my own recognition as a white middle-class straight bloke as an echo of what the black feminist lesbian describes is important to achieving some form of wider societal reconciliation.
It hurts the ex-Etonian (that's not me) when he's ribbed for being posh – and fair enough, no one likes being mocked. But it's nothing like the black woman being beaten by the police. However, for a moment, he got the vaguest, most distant sense of what it might be like to be excluded and derided by those around you for some part of his identity.
Identity politics is divisive, built on the lines it ostensibly wants to wipe away. Our experiences of the world are different, but they are also recognisable to one another on some level if we are clear-sighted. And recognition of each other is the key to some better harmony.
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