Justin Pack - Böcker

There is too much. Too much to read, too much to watch, too much to try, too much to buy. For the modern consumer, it’s hard to hear and hard to think amid all of this noise.This book argues such that cacophony is a nihilistic abundance, threatening not only the physical environment that we live in, but also the coherence of our spiritual and cultural worlds. While we wrestle with the economic, political and environmental impact of too much, we do so in the midst of a crisis in the culture of thinking and feeling.Understanding that contemporary philosophy often fail to engage with these challenges, Justin Pack turns to thinkers including Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Charles Taylor to explore the various threats of overproduction. Drawing together what are often seen as separate problems requiring different solutions – material abundance, environmental crisis, the decline of thoughtfulness – Consumer Cacophony’s case studies are drawn from across society and culture, but particularly the phenomena of academic overproduction and social media. This is a thoughtful, incisive account of that global overproduction and its devastating consequences.

There is too much. Too much to read, too much to watch, too much to try, too much to buy. For the modern consumer, it’s hard to hear and hard to think amid all of this noise.This book argues such that cacophony is a nihilistic abundance, threatening not only the physical environment that we live in, but also the coherence of our spiritual and cultural worlds. While we wrestle with the economic, political and environmental impact of too much, we do so in the midst of a crisis in the culture of thinking and feeling.Understanding that contemporary philosophy often fail to engage with these challenges, Justin Pack turns to thinkers including Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Charles Taylor to explore the various threats of overproduction. Drawing together what are often seen as separate problems requiring different solutions – material abundance, environmental crisis, the decline of thoughtfulness – Consumer Cacophony’s case studies are drawn from across society and culture, but particularly the phenomena of academic overproduction and social media. This is a thoughtful, incisive account of that global overproduction and its devastating consequences.

Prehistoric Philosophy challenges the narrative of progress and other civilizational myths by looking at their origins in the neolithic revolution. Once we reject the simplistic and often racist stereotyping of hunter-gatherers, the agricultural revolution no longer appears as the first step of human progress, but rather as a messy, brutal shift that unleashed a host of evils into the world: inequality, hierarchy, disease, empire, warfare, patriarchy, slavery, and environmental destruction.Building on the success of Graeber and Wengrow’s ground-breaking The Dawn of Everything, Justin Pack reads the neolithic revolution together with indigenous critiques, using each to strengthen our understanding of the other. In doing so, he helps us to understand the concerns of many indigenous communities, and forces us to recognize our role in the death of the cosmos. Building on this, the book illuminates the rise of the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions in the axial age as different attempts to make sense of, justify, or escape the evils of inequality, disease, empire, and the loss of cosmic civility. By advancing the notion of a ‘prehistoric philosophy,’ this volume simultaneously interrogates the colonialism inherent in the Western philosophy canon.

Universities across the US have committed to a process of neoliberalization that is radically altering higher education: academia is increasingly being run like a business. As a result, the university is becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead is becoming more and more a place to specialize, strategize, produce and profit. Students race through coursework to bolster job prospects while facing massive debt. Faculty scramble for the biggest grants and angle for the most prestigious journals. Sink or swim, publish or perish, triumph and win: there is no longer time to think and to wonder.This undermines the opportunity for students to develop into good citizens that can truly think critically and judge carefully. Thinking and judgment are, according to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the only things that can save us if the powerful machines of science or capitalism begin to work in ways they should not. Arendt saw Nazi Germany use the newest science and the best economic management to systematically kill six million Jews. She saw the disturbing inability of the populace and the intellectuals to capably resist the Nazi machine once it got rolling. Applying Arendt’s insights to modern academia, Pack argues that unless checked, neoliberalization threatens to turn the university into a place that discourages thinking and the development of judgment in favor of hyper-specialization and strategic action.

Love in many premodern cultures extended to and permeated the world or even the cosmos, but love in contemporary consumerist society tends to be sexualized, romanticized, and individualized. As a result, ancient visions of ethical love are difficult for moderns to comprehend, especially those rooted in premodern Western thought, or Native American thinkers that describe a love of the natural world that would help us live more responsibly on the Earth.This volume retrieves the significant narratives of love of the world and the concomitant ethical ramifications of those visions and argues that our age of science and technology has destroyed the ancient, living cosmos of previous visions and replaced it with a mechanical universe. This shift has resulted in various forms of destruction, diminishment, and forgetfulness. Overcoming modern world alienation requires recovering a sense of what it means to love the world and changing our practices to reflect our interconnection with it and our interdependency on it.

In this book, Justin Pack proposes a genealogy of the traditional suspicion of money and merchants. This genealogy is framed both by how money itself has changed and how different traditions responded to money.