Evolutionary Psychology

Emotional Intelligence:  Daniel Goleman  (Bantam)  How emotion and emotional communication affect our perceptions of the world.

How the Mind Works:  Steven Pinker  (Norton)  A very thorough nuts-and-bolts introduction to evolutionary psychology.

Human Natures—Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect:  Paul Erlich (Penguin)  An evolutionary history of the human race, showing how the series of environmental conditions our species faced made human intellect evolve.

Human Universals: Donald E. Brown (McGraw-Hill)  This is the complete list of universal constants of humanity.

Non-Zero—The Logic of Human Destiny:  Robert Wright (Vintage)  A story of genetic and cultural evolution from the perspective of the accumulation of benefits among genes, among organisms, and among people.  This is the broadest perspective on evolutionary psychology and memetic evolution of any book in this list.

Social Evolution:  Robert Trivers (Benjamin Cummings)  This is a zoological foundation of evolutionary psychology, from the days it was still called sociobiology.  This book was written after the Selfish Gene was discovered, but before human evolutionary psychology began as its own field of study.

The Age of Spiritual Machines—When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence:  Ray Kurzweil (Penguin)  A perspective on the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence by a leading expert in the field.  His grasp of biology is weak, because he’s obviously never heard of the Selfish Gene, the Limits to Growth, or evolutionary psychology, and the philosophical conclusions he draws about the nature of human consciousness are misguided, but his perspectives on the evolution of intelligence from the Big Bang to the primordial soup to the human species to the computer industry are insightful.  Evolution has always been the increase of order in information, which makes genetic and memetic evolution two parts of the same process.

The Blank Slate—The Modern Denial of Human Nature:  Steven Pinker  (Viking)  A big general reference book to evolutionary psychology. It compares it to the former approach to psychology which claims that the human brain is empty until people are taught what to think, and shows how the blank slate isn’t science, it’s political propaganda.

The Electric Meme—A New Theory of How We Think:  Robert Aunger (Free Press)  A follow-up to The Meme Machine, in which Dr. Aunger builds upon Dr. Blackmore’s work to trace memetic evolution down to neurology.

The Language Instinct—How the Mind Creates Language:  Steven Pinker (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)  This is an in-depth study of the evolutionary psychology of language.

The Laughing Genes—A Scientific Perspective on Ethics and Morality:  Evan Louis Sheehan (Author House)  This pseudonoynous author is a doctor of electrical engineering involved in developing computer software for gene sequencing.  In his book he takes a daring approach to the idea of an evolutionary foundation for morality.  His engineering background gives him a hands-on perspective that academic scientists don’t share.  But his background in human behavior consists of a master’s degree in business administration and a position on the board of directors of a high-tech company.  He’s attempting to help pioneer evolutionary psychology, but he has completely overlooked the fact that his conservative American upper-middle class values are founded on the faulty assumption that the European conquest of the world was the result of genetic or cultural superiority wrought by divine intervention.  He grasps better than most writers how simple the evolutionary origins of life and ideas are, but he grossly overestimates his ability to grasp how much complexity such simple origins have led to.  When read in conjunction with other books on evolutionary psychology, it is an insightful perspective.  If read all by itself, it looks like a training manual for the next Chairman Mao.

The Meme Machine:  Susan Blackmore  (Oxford)  This is an introductory book that founds the field of memetic evolution—the study of the evolution of ideas.

The Mocking Memes—A Basis for Automated Intelligence:  Evan Louis Sheehan (Author House)  An engineering perspective on the evolution of the neural structures that create intelligence in animals, humans, and computers, of the evolution of the ideas those intelligent structures create, and how ideas evolve among societies and cultures.

The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are—The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology:  Robert Wright (Vintage Press)  Another introdction to evolutionary psychology, which is less of a science textbook than How the Mind Works.  Mr. Wright includes a biography of Charles Darwin and his cultural background in Victorian England, and shows how evolutionary psychology affects people in their everyday lives.  Mr. Wright also compares discoveries in evolutionary psychology to philosophical questions people have asked throughout history and are currently asking about the future.

The Politics of Experience:  R.D. Laing (Random House)  This is the one technical book in this list.  This was a pioneering work of the late ‘60s into psychology and sociology on an intercultural scale, and applied to Western cultural values many people had taken for granted.  The Beatles paraphrase part of the book in the opening lines of I Am the Walrus.

The Stuff of Thought—Language as a Window into Human Nature:  Steven Pinker (Penguin)  This is the third book of each of two trilogies, one of which began with Human Natures and The Blank Slate, the other of which began with The Language Instinct and Words and Rules.  In this book, Dr. Pinker traces patterns that are universal among all languages to show how they are created by universal patterns of thought, which means components of the universal human brain structure.

Virus of The Mind—The New Science of the Meme:  Richard Brodie (Integral Press)  A conceptual introduction to evolutionary psychology and memetic evolution by a former computer scientist for Microsoft.  He doesn’t pioneer any new discoveries, but he does show how memetic evolution plays out in artificial intelligence, business, and marketing, and how people can get in better control of their lives by learning how evolutionary psychology and memetic evolution affect their thoughts and perspectives.

Vital Lies, Simple Truths—The Psychology of Self-Deception:  Daniel Goleman (Simon & Shuster) How information and anti-information packages work and how they affect us.

Why God Won’t Go Away—Brain Science and the Biology of Belief:  Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D’Aquili, M.D., PhD, Vince Rause  (Ballantine Books)  The evolutionary origins of religion.

Why We Believe What We Believe—Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth: Andrew Newberg, Mark Robert Waldman (Free Press)  The evolutionary origins and functions of the psychological components of belief.

Words and Rules—The Ingredients of Language:  Steven Pinker (Perennial)  An even more indepth study of the evolutionary psychology, focusing on the differences between regular and irregular nouns and verbs to discover patterns of memory and reasoning.

General Evolution

Climbing Mount Improbable:  Richard Dawkins (Penguin) How evolution takes place in gradual steps to produce complex organs.

DNA Interactive: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Windfall Films)  This is a documentary of interviews with over 50 biologists and medical doctors and scientists from related fields, about the Human Genome Project, the history of molecular biology, and how biology works at the molecular level.  It also includes lots of computer animations of the action of genes, chromosomes, and other biolomolecular processes.  The interviews and animations aren’t presented as a single film, but as hundreds of different clips that are arranged by theme and by interviewee, so that you can watch them in any order.  There isn’t much introduction to the topics and the documentary is full of technical terms, so this isn’t introductory level biology, but it is a good reference if you have some background in biology already.  Simultaneously, although the filmmakers didn’t intend this, it’s a good example of the danger of keeping science compartmentalized.  These 50 sceintific geniuses who work in biology keep talking about the future as if it’s going to be bright and shiny and technology is going to solve everything.  Obviously these scientific geniuses are assuming that history, not science, is the best way to determine what will happen in the future, and assume that the fact that technology has progressed to this point proves it will continue to progress pretty much the same way.  They seem completely unaware of the environmental crisis, the Gaia Theory, the effects of exponential growth in a finite system, the effects of thermodynamics on economics, or the application of the Selfish Gene Theory and evolutionary psychology to politics.  In order for technology to proceed as they predict, economics and humanity’s economic relationship to the environment would have to proceed as they have since the beginning of the industrial age.  It’s almost tragic to see that so many intelligent people don’t understand that all their high-tech industrialized laboratory equipment depends on non-renewable energy to make it work, and that the economics of non-renewable energy, and therefore the technology non-renewable energy makes possible, are quickly reaching their end.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful—The New Science of Evo Devo:  Sean B. Carroll (Norton)  The effects of evolution on embryonic development.

Ghost in Your Genes:  Nova series (WGBH Boston) This PBS documentary is a critical new insight on the effects of environment on people’s development.  Biologists discovered what they call the epigenome, which are chemical effects that environmental conditions have on genes, which affect the activity of the genes.  The new discovery was that the epigenome can be passed from generation to generation, so that environmental effects on gene activity can be hereditary.  That means environment can affect people’s personalities and health for generations afterward.  If watched in conjunction with a lot of other references on evolution, this is an insightful documentary.  If watched alone, its emphasis on the epigenome seems to disprove genetic evolution, just because the amount of screen time devoted to the epigenome versus genetic evolution doesn’t correspond to the biological effects of the epigenome versus genetic evolution—which wasn’t the point of the documentary.

River Out of Eden—A Darwinian View of Life: Richard Dawkins (Basic Books)  A short and easy to read overview of evolution.

The Blind Watchmaker:  Richard Dawkins (Norton)  Evolution as a chemical reaction, producing the effects of an incomprehensibly complicated engineering project, without the need of divine intervention.

The Descent of Man:  Charles Darwin (Penguin Classics)  This is a very long, and very dense book, but it’s a good point of reference as the book that began the study of human evolution.

The Extended Phenotype:  Richard Dawkins (Oxford)  This is a very thorough, very dense, academic book on evolution at the biomolecular level—how the evolution of organisms’ characteristics is caused by natural selection among their individual genes.

The Selfish Gene:  Richard Dawkins (Oxford Press)  The book that established the Selfish Gene Theory and connected genetic evolution to chemistry, and also established the Theory of Memetic Evolution.

Why Darwin Matters—The Case Against Intelligent Design:  Michael Shermer (Holt)  This book is an introduction to evolution that compares it to the arguments for intelligent design and shows why evolution explains the facts and intelligent design doesn’t.  This is a god introduction to the idea of evolution for anyone who believes in creationism or who is trying to explain evolution to people who believe in creationism.

Human-Environmental Economics

A Global Warning?:  Written and directed by Alex Hearie (History Channel)  This documentary on global warming is a rather crude but effective introduction to basic concepts of global warming that other people have written books about.  That includes the geological study of the history of climate change, its causes, and the mass extinctions that resulted, which Mark Lynas focused on in Six Degrees, and tipping points causing chain reactions, in which greenhouse gas emissions from one source raise the world’s temperature to the point that greenhouse gasses start being emitted from another source, which Fred Pearce focuses on in With Speed and Violence. 

An Inconvenient Truth:  Al Gore, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Lawrence Bender Productions)  A DVD documentary on global warming.  Al Gore doesn’t talk about the discrepancy between Capitalism and Thermodynamics, so the real truth is even more inconvenient than he seems willing to admit.  But it is a good introduction to the idea and the basic science behind it.

Betrayl of Science and Reason—How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens our Future:  Paul and Anne Erlich (Island Press)  A guide to the campaign of misinformation that has been waged against environmental science by politicians, businesspeople, and religious leaders, by one of the founders of the planetary biology movement.

Blessed Unrest—How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming:  Paul Hawken (Viking)  A history of the global environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights movement, from its origins to the present.  Mr. Hawken is the founder of the WiserEarth network, the biggest online reference source to environmental, social, and indigenous activist groups.

Capitalism and Other Kid’s Stuff:  Paddy Joe Shannon  (World Socialist Movement)  A DVD documentary on Socialism, Capitalism, politics, and the effects of Capitalism on society, the Third World, and children.

Collapse—How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:  Jared Diamond  (Penguin)  An archeological and historical study of societies whose people destroyed themselves with environmental unsustainability, and how those same patterns are affecting various countries and the global environment today.

Entropy—A New World View:  Jeremy Rifkin (Bantam New Age)  The first two Laws of Thermodynamics and their effects on our economy and environment.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe—Man, Nature, and Climate Change:  Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury)  An easy-to-read introduction to the science and effects of global warming, by a science writer who travelled the world interviewing scientists and seeing their discoveries first-hand.

Gaia—A New Look at Life on Earth:  James Lovelock (Oxford Press)  The book that first established the Gaia Hypothesis (now the Gaia Theory) and gave planetary biology its truly planetary scope.

Gaia—An Atlas of Planet Management:  Norman Myers, General Editor (Anchor Books)  The Gaia Theory applied to society and its effects on economics, politics, and the environment.  This book has large colorful illustrations on every page and is written at an easy high school or advanced junior high level.

Green Psychology—Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth:  Ralph Metzer (Park Street Press)  A study by a pioneer of the relation between psychology and the environment, into different ways people of different cultures have found to use religion, spirituality, philosophy, and natural drugs to develop environmental perspectives on the world.  Unfortunately, he used an approach to psychology that pre-dated the evolutionary psychology movement, which means his version of psychology consists of a lot of observations that have been made about people, with no reliable principles to unify the observations.

Guns, Germs, and Steel—The Fates of Human Societies:  Jared Diamond (Norton)  The agricultural history of the world.

Guns, Germs, and Steel:  Directed by Cassian Harrison, with Jared Diamond (National Geographic)  This is a documentary of Guns, Germs, and Steel.  It covers the basic points in three hours, which makes it a good introduction if you don’t want to read the whole book.  The filmmakers followed Dr. Diamond around the world to Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa, where he made his main discoveries.  It combines interviews with Dr. Diamond with interviews with other scientists and reenactments of historical events.  Also, since the documentary was filmed 8 years after the book was published, it updates the story to new information that has come in, including the effects of climate change on the food productivity of Mesopotamia 12,000 years ago.

Heat—A Global Investigation:  Written and reported by Martin Smith (WGBH Boston) This Frontline documentary is an investigation into global warming and America’s technological and political reactions to it.  This is a good introduction to the problem that lots of people are writing books about.

Hell and High Water—Global Warming, the Solution and the Politics, and What We Should Do:  Joseph Romm (William Morrow)   Dr. Romm is a physicist who worked for the federal Department of Energy, who has been working on plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  We have enough science to understand why the greenhouse effect is happening, and we have the technology we need to make it stop happening.  The one thing we don’t have is the political motivation.  Dr. Romm walks you though how the Kyoto protocol was supposed to work, what we can do with the technology we have now or can develop quickly to reduce the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and how the United States’ refusal to cooperate is condemning the world to a thousand years of inland drought and coastal flooding.

I Am an Animal—The story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA:  Directed by Matthew Galkin (HBO) This is a documentary about the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and its leader.  They’re the biggest animal rights group in the world, they’ve conducted dozens of investigations into animal cruelty cases and done a lot to draw public attention to humanity’s relationship to animals.  Its members are generally motivated by empathy towrd animals.  Unforunately, by focusing on animal rights specifically without the broader context of the environment or evolutionary psychology, they have taken their idealism to the point that their enemies can easily make them look like lunatics.  The result is two groups of trying to prove their own side is right unconditionally, without realizing the other side had valid reasons for their own arguments.  On the other hand, PETA making powerful arguments, some of which are wrong, is better than their not making any arguments.  Humanity’s relationship to the environment is changing, and with it our relationship to animals is changing, especially in regard to food animals.  That means that far from being lunatics they have a highly developed perspective that can be refined with a broader understanding of the situation.  It remains to be seen however whether they will adapt to see their struggle as one part of a much bigger struggle or they will adhere dogmatically to their traditional goals and refuse to cooperate with the broader struggle.

One With Nineveh—Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future:  Paul and Anne Erlich (Island Press)  An overview of the political and economic entanglements that are hampering the environmental movement.

Pickaxe:  Tim Lewis and Tim Ream  (CrimeThInc.)  A DVD documentary about the protests against logging practices in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s.

Plan B 3.0—Mobilizing to Save Civilization:  Lester Brown (Norton)  This is an overview of the causes of environmental crisis and a conceptual discussion of what we will need to do differently to solve the crisis, followed by an depth technical discussion to a combination of specific changes we can make right now.  His solution is different from Dr. Romm’s in Hell and High Water because Mr. Brown focuses on the most effective solutions rather than on the politically eaisiest solutions.  Mr. Brown focuses on strictly technical solutions to show how we can solve all of our problems using technology that exists right now.   That is, provided someone else could figure out how to solve the political and psychological factors involved in the environmental crisis.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring:  Directed by (WGBH Boston) This documentary is a biography of Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring and pioneered the combination of science with environmentalism.  Silent Spring was her fourth book, and was focused on the effects of pesticides on the environment as of the early 1960s, so it’s not directly applicable to anything of today.  However, her biography is still a story of an activist who cared about the environment and did what she knew how to do to help protect it, in spite of how hard a lot of people tried to stop her.

Radical Ecology—The Search for a Livable World: Carolyn Merchant (Routledge)  This is an overview of different environmental ideologies and movements, which compares their various values, objectives, and strategies.  From the outlines she gives it’s easy to compare them to planetary biology to see where the strengths and weaknesses of each group lie, how strengths can be combined, and how flaws in reasoning can be corrected.

Six Degrees—Our Future on a Hotter Planet:  Mark Lynas (National Geographic)   A compilation of predictions of environmental effects of global warming that have been made recently by environmental scientists.  This includes destruction of environments, extinctions of species, changing weather patterns, sea level rise, food production, water supplies, habitability of cities, coasts, and regions, and environmental tipping points that initiate unstoppable changes, degree by degree for six degrees of global warming.

The 11^th Hour:  Produced and Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, Directed by Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners (Warner Brothers)  This is a documentary about the environmental crisis, which focuses on interviews with scientists, engineers, and activists who have found the scientific and technological solutions that can solve the problem.  They agree that the only remaining problem is the fact that the U.S. Consitution gives corporations more effective decision making power than citizens.

The Big Energy Gamble:  Written and Produced by Larry Klein (WGBH Boston)  This is a NOVA documentary about California’s transition from carbon to renewable energy.  They are making a lot of progress but face some substantial obstacles.  They are depending mainly on new developments in industrial technology, without regard to the fact that industrial technology is ultimately non-renewable, and they aren’t talking about evolutionary psychology and the political effects of who controls the technology.  Their long term success depends an environmental education system to prepare people for the broader effects of the transition.  But for what they have so far, it’s a practical application of the transition that the pioneers of environmental science have been saying from the very beginning needs to be made from unsustainable to sustainable.

The Cultural Creatives—How 50 million people are changing the world:  Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson (Harmony Books)  A psychological and sociological study of changing cultural values and attitudes in America.  About 25% of Americans are cultural progressives, but are largely unaware of each other’s existence.

The Ecology of Commerce—A Declaration of Sustainability:  Paul Hawken (Harper Collins) A relatively simplistic and overly optimistic approach to environmental sustainability, but a valuable starting point for seeing how our economy would need to work differently to make it sustainable.

The End of Suburbia—Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream:  Gregory Greene (The Electric Wallpaper)  A DVD documentary about peak oil production and its effects on our economy.

The Future in Plain Sight—The Rise of the “True Believers” and Other Clues to the Coming Instability:  Eugene Linden (Plume)  A study of how financial systems, urbanization, overpopulation, economic inequality, global warming, environmental destruction, environmental limitations on food productivity and other natural resources, the spread and evolution of diseases, and religious fundamentalism are all  destabilizing society on a global scale.

The Future of Life:  Edward O. Wilson  (Vintage)  A pespective on humanity’s relationship to the environment in the broader context of any organism’s relationship to its environment, to show the differences and similarities.  This is a poetic and philosophical approach to science by a biologist, science activist, and the original pioneer of evolutionary psychology, in the attempt to overcome ideological obstacles that are fragmenting people’s efforts to adjust to global environmental sustainability.  Unfortunately, in the final chapter, on how the transition can be made, he devotes 39 pages to governments, Capitalism, and big environmental organizations, and only 1 very vague page to all those people who protest outside giant Capitalist meetings.  All I can say to that is that a biased perspective is a subjective perspective, and subjectivity isn’t science.

The Inefficiency of Capitalism—An Anarchist Perspective:  Brian Oliver Shepard (See Sharp Press)  An overview of various ways Capitalists have found to profit by the systemic wastefulness of resources.

The Limits to Growth:  Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Joergen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (Universe)  The original mass-distribution publication of The Club of Rome, and one of the founding documents of the field of planetary biology.  It’s short and nearly 40 years old, but it’s a good historical reference.  As a founding document of the planetary biology movement, it’s written in very easy to read terms, which makes it a good starting point for anyone who doesn’t have much scientific background.

The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update: Donella Meadows, Joergen Randers, Dennis Meadows (Chelsea Green)  The Club of Rome’s original experiment repeated at the turn of the century, with much more numbers, science, and computing power now.  Much longer than the original book, includes more history of the environmental crisis, and more specific effects of the environmental crisis on society.

The Population Bomb:  Paul Ehrlich (Ballantine)  Another important founding document of planetary biology, which focuses on the effects of population growth on the environmental crisis.  It’s also 40 years old and short, but also easy to read and a good starting point for anyone who doesn’t have much scientific background.

The Population Explosion: Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich (Simon & Schuster)  An update on The Population Bomb, from the early ‘90s.  How our global population is growing at an ever-increasing rate, how it’s contributing to the global environmental crisis, and how it could cause inescapable disaster before most people even notice the problem.

The Revenge of Gaia:  James Lovelock (Penguin)  The state of the global environment today, and how the global environmental crisis is turning against us.

The Story of Stuff:  Annie Leonard (Free Range Studios)  A 20-minute internet video about the economics of environmental unsustainability and environmental sustainability.

The Unforeseen: Directed by Laura Dunn (Cinema Guild)  A documentary about urban sprawl and its social, political, economic, and environmental effects in Austin, Texas.  On the side of the land developers were frontier cultural values reinforced by humanocentric Christian fundamentalism.  On the side of the environmentalists were science, New Age religious values, and farmers who realized that more people moving into the area would lower the water table.  The struggle between the groups led to George W. Bush’s election to governor of Texas.  The environmentalists lost in the end, but their predictions of the degredation of the environment proved to be true.

The Weather Makers—How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth:  Tim Flannery (Grove Press)  A thorough study of the greenhouse crisis, focusing on how climate works, how humanity is changing how the climate works, the changing climate’s impacts on individual species, food cycles, and local, regional, and global environmental levels, and the political, economic, and technological history, present, and possible futures of the greenhouse effect.

The Winds of Change—Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilization:  Eugene Linden (Simon and Schuster)  An overview of civilizations that have been destroyed by changes in climate through famine caused by changes of the food productivity of the land, the spread of diseases, revolutions, and invasions, how all of those things are affecting countries and the global community now, and what they predict for the future.

Who Killed the Electric Car?:  Chris Paine (Papercut Films)  A documentary DVD about the environmental birth, brief life, and political death of GM’s rechargeable electric car.   A good study of how scientifically sound ideas can be politically assassinated for short-term profits.

With Speed and Violence—Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change:  Fred Pearce (Beacon)  Another book about global warming by another world-travelling science writer.  This book focuses on several immanent environmental tipping points, why we’re approaching them, and what will happen if we cross them.

General Science and Mathematics

A Brief History of Time:  Stephen Hawking (Bantam)  A good background on how the Big Bang created the universe and eventually the Earth, as well as the future development of the universe.

Chaos—Making a New Science:  James Gleick (Penguin)  The origins, history, and uses of systems theory.  This is a good background to how mathematics are used in planetary biology.

Consilience—The Unity of Knowledge:  Edward O. Wilson (Vintage)  This is an attempt at a founding document for a new Reneisannce in thought by finding connections among all bodies of knowledge to make them build upon each other, easier to learn.

Fractals—Hunting the Hidden Dimension: Produced and Directed by Michael Shwarz and Bill Jersey (WGBH Boston)  This is a documentary about the study of fractal geometry, and its applications in physics and biology.  Using fractals, mathematicians have discovered a lot of patterns in what otherwise appear to be chaotic systems.  Geology creates mountains with an underlying structure because those are the most stable patterns.  Evolution has likewise created underlying structures in organisms through natural selection because they are the most stable patterns.

Science to the Rescue:  Edited by Benjamin Radford (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) This book is a collection of articles from Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which are all about various ways people search for truth by testing against facts, as the foundation of science, in medicine, to demystify myths, and to expose frauds.

Steven Hawking’s Universe:  Directed by Philip Martin (Thirteen/WNET New York)  This is a documentary about the development of cosmology, which covers the main content of A Brief History of Time in a 2-hour video.  By walking through the history of how discoveries about the universe were made and how our understanding of it was refined, you start with what you can see with the naked eye and step by step learn how contradictions in theories were discovered and then resolved with more powerful telescopes and more advanced math.

The End of Science—Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twighlight of the Scientific Age:  John Horgan (Broadway Books)  A series of interviews of scientific pioneers by a senior writer of Scientific American, about the future prospects of science.  He poses the question to physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers:  Is there a limit to how much we can discover about the universe?  If so, is it a limit to our intellectual capability to understand, a technological limit to our ability to gather information, or an economic limit to the cost of gathering information?

Globalization

A Global Parliament—Principles of World Federation:  Christopher Hamer (Oyster Bay Books, also online)  A background of attempts at world government and alliances, including the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union, and a look at principles of organization that have worked so far that could be expanded upon to create some future form of world political unification.

A Place Called Chiapas:  Directed by Nettie Wild (Zeitgeist Films)  This is a documentary about the revolution in southern Mexico.  The filmmakers spent 4 months in the area, interviewing farmers, priests who have been trying to negotiate peace, people on the side of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, people from the pro-government paramilitary opposed to the Zapatistas, and Subcommandante Marcos.  It covers a lot of material, including some of the background and several important events that Marcos talks about in ¡Ya Basta!, from a different perspective.  This 90 minute film is a much easier introduction to the revolution than Marcos’s 680 page book.

Another World Is Possible—Globalization and Anti-Capitalism:  David McNally (ARP)  A general anti-Capitalist perspective of globalization.

Breaking the Spell:  Tim Lewis (CrimeThInc.)  A DVD documentary of the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting, from behind the Anarchist lines.

Colonization to Decolonization: Adrian Hendricks  (Self-produced)   Adrian is a Native American historian who gives a four-hour lecture on the psychological warfare tactics Colonial Americans have used, and still use, against Native Americans, particularly his own Pima/O’Odham nation.    The second half of is lecture is about ways Native Americans have found to counteract the effects.  As he says, “You can’t decolonize your land until you decolonize your mind.” 

Commanding Heights—The Battle of Ideas,

Commanding Heights—The Agony of Reform, and

Commanding Heights—The New Rules of the Game:  Directed by Greg Barker, based on the book by Daniel Yergin and William Cran (WGBH Boston)  This 3-part PBS documentary series is a good example of how learning science lets you recognize propaganda crap.  This documentary supposedly shows the development of globalization and covers the same time frame as Naomi Kleins’ The Shock Doctrine.  This documentary consists almost entirely of interviews with politicians and businesspeople, with only token interviews with anyone with opposing views. Nowhere in the documentary do they mention the fact that the economic philosophy they’re praising has always had to be forced upon the public by the state, or at the very least for the state to take advantage of national catastrophes to push their new laws through while no one was paying attention.  Nor do they mention the fact that the use of this economic strategy began with Pinochet’s revolution in Chile, followed by numerous other revolutions, which were waged against democratically elected governments and were supported by the CIA.  Nor do they mention generally the results of inherently self-interested people taking advantage of huge inequalities in effective decision making power.  Nor do they mention the fact that Soviet Communism isn’t the only form of socialism.  They certainly don’t mention the fact that Capitalist globalization is founded on the faulty assumption that the fact that certain people have been most successful at acquiring decision making power in the short term proves those people are the most competent to make decisions with long term results.  They don’t mention the Laws of Thermodynamics, evolutionary psychology, the effects of exponential growth in a finite system, the Gaia Theory, the fact that all human behavior is inherently self interested, the fact that the centralization of wealth results in a centralization of decision making power, the fact that non-zero relationships aren’t automatically cooperative, or the fact that the pioneers of global environmental science have been saying for 40 years that the economic system we have can’t continue. They do talk about the Shock Doctrine strategy directly in the second installment, but they completely gloss over the fact that economic strategies exist because they’re enforced by governmental laws.  The failures of Capitalist globalization are blamed on everyone except the Capitalists, with the implication that the Capitalists know everything and nobody else knows anything.  The entire premise of this video presupposes that a historic perpective, rather than a scientific perspective, is sufficient to determine that the future of our economic relationship to the world will be the same as its past.  This video does nothing to enlighten anyone to the fact that Capitalism has resulted in a growing economy because we’ve been cutting into our environmental safety margin this whole time, or that our environmental safety margin is now gone.

Darwin’s Nightmare:  Directed by Hubert Sauper (Image Entertainment)  A documentary about a fishing town on the shore of Lake Victoria, in Tanzania.  The fish are cut up in the fish packing plant, and the fillets are flown out in cargo planes to Europe.  The Africans are left with the fish heads to eat, all of them know people who are dying of AIDS, there’s a famine in Angola, people die of treatable diseases because they don’t have doctors, homeless boys fight each other over handfuls of rice and cook their own glue to sniff to help them sleep at night, parents hope their children get drafted to fight wars because it pays well, and White pilots murder prostitutes just for fun. This is definitely a movie about people doing what they can to try to make the best of their situations in conditions very different from America.

Flow—How Did a Handful of Corporations Steal our Water?:  Irena Salina (Oscilloscope)  The documentary investigates the privitaization of water worldwide and the effects it has on the environment and people.  People all over the world depend on water to live, and environments depend on consistent amounts of water flowing through rivers and into aquifers.  Contrary to what the people who are privatizing water say, the privitization of water doesn’t make water use more efficient.  The privitization of water turns water from a right into the delivery of a service.  The privitization of water gives the people who control it the right to deny it to anyone who can’t pay for it, and to remove it from environments at will.  Opposing those people is a growing global movement against the privitaization of water.

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?:  Directed by Rick Young (WGBH Boston)  This is a documentary about big-box retail economics pioneered by Wal-Mart.  It talks about them in abstract terms of how people react to their situations, as opposed to focusing on specific decisions made by individual people, like the documentary Wal-Mart:  The High Cost of Low Prices.  From this abstract perspective you can see the situation in broader terms, but with a sufficient background in science you can see that the Wal-Mart representatives interviewed aren’t accepting a level of responsibility to match their level of decision making power.  The Wal-Mart people obviously have figured out a way to be very successful in the Capitalist economy, and have even turned economic decision making around in one sense, by focusing on what customers want to buy and then ordering those products from manufacturers, as opposed to looking for the best deals they could make selling whatever the manufacturers were producing.  To that extent, this documentary supports Tom Friedman’s position that the globalization of Capitalism lets people buy what they want.  But all of that pre-supposes that for them to supply for the short-term demands of scientifically illiterate Americans will result in the best long-term use of resources.

Profit Over People—Neoliberalism and Global Order:  Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories)  A general critical perspective of globalization.

Reflections on Socialism—Sam Webb (Communist Party USA)  A modern analysis of the past, present, and potential future of Socialism by the chairman of the Communist Party USA.

Teaching Rebellion—Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca:  Edited by Diana Denham & C.A.S.A Collective (PM Press)  Personal accounts by Mexican citizens who drove the government out of the city of Oaxaca for six months in 2006 following the repression of the teacher’s union protest.

The European Dream—How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream:  Jeremy Rifkin (Tarcher Penguin)  A comparison of the developments of cultural values between Europe and the United States and how they are reflected in the United States and European Union’s political and economic systems.

The Fourth World War:  Rick Rowley  (Big Noise Films)  A DVD documentary on the effects of globalization on Third-World countries and on the ongoing protests against it.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree—Understanding Globalization:  Thomas L. Friedman  (Anchor Books)  A Capitalist perspective on Globalization, from the final years of the 20^th century.  It is a good tour behind enemy lines.  It illustrates why a lot of people feel that globalization is a good idea, and why it’s causing a lot of clashes of cultures.

The Miami Model:  Miami IndyMedia Collective (CrimeThInc.)  A DVD documentary of the Miami Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting, from the activsts’ side.

The Power of Choice—The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman:  Written by Katherine Anderson and Thomas Sinner (Free to Choose Media)  This documentary is a biography of Milton Friedman and the development and spread of his economic theories.  It has a coherent internal logic and in his interviews Dr. Friedman seems authentic and compassionate, but with a sufficient background in science you can see this video is propaganda.  This video focuses on him as a person and on the successes of his ideas, while Naomi Klein focuses on the implementation and overall results of his ideas in her book The Shock Doctrine.  This documentary agrees with her on some points and disagrees on others.  With a sufficient background in science, you can see who wins without needing to know whether or not either of them is misrepresenting anything.  The things they disagree on are the part that’s open to debate.  This video takes a completely humanocentric approach to economics in many ways.  By focusing on what a nice guy Dr. Friedman was, it draws attention away from the fact that a person’s personality and intentions have no effect on the actual implementation of their ideas by other people.  This documentary refers to Dr. Freidman as a scientist of economics, but nowhere in this video is any reference made to evolutionary psychology, the environment, the effects of exponential growth in a finite system, or the Laws of Thermodynamics.  If your version of science depends on ignoring relevant first principles of science, it’s not science.  This video and Dr. Friedman continually take the position that economics consists merely of people making money and buying the stuff they need, and that the history of economics gives a sufficient pattern to show how the future will unfold.  People who had used that approach to build their economic systems found his work very helpful in expanding their economic systems, but that still doesn’t prove his economic theories were right or that they’re going to be beneficial to humanity in the long run.  Ms. Klein doesn’t talk about those first principles either, but at least you can recognize them in action in the story she tells with her thorough journalistic investigation.

The Shock Doctrine—The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:  Naomi Klein (Picador)  A history of neoliberalism/neoconservativism—which are just two different words for economic imperialism—from Augusto Pinocet’s overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973 to September 11^th, the war in Iraq, the flood in New Orleans, and the tsunami in 2004.  Capitalists have developed  new strategy for colonizing countries by taking advantages of catastrophic situations to make drastic reforms to their economies by privatizing industries, cutting back government services, and deregulating the economy.  From South America to Eastern Europe to Russia to China to the Middle East to Southern Asia to the United States, this economic strategy has consistently resulted in huge profits for the wealthy and huge losses for everyone else.  That makes this book an application of the Selfish Gene Theory to globalization, a study in inherently self interested human organisms adapting to their environments and using their control of resources to get what they want.

The World Is Flat—A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century:  Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Stratus, and Giroux)  An updated Capitalist perspective on globalization.   Globalization as an economic system passed through an important transition in the six years between The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World Is Flat, as global telecommunications and cheap labor are breaking down hierarchies and forcing Capitalists to adapt.  Indirectly, it’s also a good case study in how a complete lack of understanding of planetary biology creates information and anti-information packages in people’s minds that make Capitalism seem like a good idea.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices:  Robert Greenwald (Brave New Films)   A DVD documentary about how the owners of the world’s largest corporation are colonizing the United States as well as foreign countries—and how activists are fighting back.

¡Ya Basta!—Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising: Subcomandante Marcos (AK Press)  The writings of the military leader of the revolution in Mexico that sparked the modern anti-Capitalist movement. In his own words, revolutions are won with reason, not with bullets.

Current Events

Alive Day Memories—Home from Iraq:  Directed by John Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent (Attaboy Films)  An documentary of interviews with 10 U.S. veterans of the Iraq war who have lost a leg, lost both legs, lost an arm, lost both legs and an arm, been blinded, been brain damaged, or been affected by PTSD, about their adjustments to their new situation.

America:  Freedom to Fascism:   Aaron Russo (Cinema Libre) A DVD documentary about the past, present, and future of income tax in America, in which Mr.  Shows that income tax was invented by bankers and that there is no actual law that says anyone has to pay income tax.  His analysis of global warming is a joke, but that does nothing to change the fact that the politics of global warming are becoming the next step along the path to the creation of global government by people whose goal is world conquest.

Beyond Belief:  Written and Directed by Beth Murphy (Balive Mind Media)  This is a documentary about two American women whose husbands were killed aboard one of the airlines that hit the World Trade Center, who founded Beyond the 11^th, an activist group that assists widows in Afghanistan with education and economic independence.  Then they travelled to Afghanistan to meet the women they were helping, and they all talked to each other about their husbands, losing their husbands in the war, their children, and life in their countries.  This is a very powerful clue that a global political system run by educated women would put an end to war.

Bowling for Columbine:  Written and directed by Michael Moore (VIF2 Films, Salter Street Films Dog Eat Dog Films)  A DVD documentary about the culture of fear and violence in America.

Bush’s War:  Directed by Michael Kirk (WGBH Boston)  This is a documentary about the Bush administration after September 11^th and its management of the war in Iraq.  At 4 1/2 hours in length this is a very ambitious piece of journalism.  Unfortunately, by focusing on the emotions and personal relations of the people in President Bush’s inner circle, it’s little more than a condensed version of the political soap opera that was reported in the mainstream media.  The filmmakers interview lots of government officials who served under the people in the inner circle, lots of retired military officers, and lots of authors of books on the politics of the war, but they never interview any members of the inner circle itself.  Without identifying a unifying pattern behind the events, this film is 4 1/2 hours of people disagreeing with each other and making plans that don’t work. There are so many people involved that even by condensing 8 years into 4 1/2 hours, it’s still hard to keep track of them all.  In contrast, in Crossing the Rubicon Michael Ruppert starts with The Limits to Growth and shows how politicians making what appear to be a series of stupid mistakes has resulted in the U.S. military occupying the Middle East and the largest supply of oil in the world.  This film does show how President Bush used September 11^th as a pretext for invading Iraq.  If you watch this documentary having read Crossing the Rubicon, you can see that by invading Iraq without a well developed plan for how to win and restore order President Bush created a situation where the American military can’t be withdrawn without seeming to abandon the country to social collapse.

Change We Can Believe In—Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise:  Barack Obama and his presidential campaign PR staff (Three Rivers Press)  President Obama’s political plans for how to rebuild the economy, end the war in Iraq, defeat terrorism, and escape the greenhouse effect.  A lot of his social plans are taken from Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, and his environmental plans are taken from Dr. Romm’s Hell and High Water.

Crossing the Rubicon—The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil:  Michael Ruppert  (New Society Publishers)   A very thorough and detailed body of evidence that shows that the simplest—and therefore, most realistic—explanation for how world events since the end of the Cold War led from the warnings of the early pioneers of planetary biology to American economic imperialism through globalization, to the War on Terror, to the United States military occupying the Middle East and the world’s remaining oil supply.   Mr. Ruppert is a former detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.  When it comes to finding clues and bringing criminals to justice, he plays to win.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room:  Written and directed by Alex Gibney (Magnolia) This is a documentary about the rise and fall of Enron.  It’s a good lesson in how phyiscs and psychology combine to create a conspiracy, and in how the same conspiracy could’ve been carried out consciously, subconsciously, or with varying combinations of the two.  Overall it’s a story about how some people used the corporate business structure to profiteer on the energy crisis in ways that were too complicated for anyone else to recognize at the time.  Whether any individual person involved made any individual decision consciously or subconsciously, the result was that they adapted to their decision making environment and maximized their profits in a situation where they believed themselves to be completely beyond the reach of the people whose lives they were affecting.  Where they saw an opportunity to profit with no risk, they had no reason not to take it, even though the people who were affected by it thought it was unethical business.  But as long as the only thing preventing them from taking everyone they could for everything they could was some abstract morality, they could get away with making decisions no one expected.  One guy’s favorite book was even The Selfish Gene, which he assumed justified exploiting every opportunity he could.  He didn’t seem to understand that interpreted that way, The Selfish Gene justifies every decision anyone ever makes, including the decision to throw people like him in prison for cheating people out of their money.  Considering the close ties between the Bush family and Enron, it’s reasonable to believe there might be even more to the story than the documentary shows.  Also, the fact that one of them committed suicide after the company collapsed doesn’t prove he was the one who decided to do it—someone even more powerful than he could’ve been covering their tracks and coerced him into suicide by making him understand that it was the bet option he had left in life.  Michael Ruppert has a much bigger conspiracy theory that has Enron as one part of a much bigger energy crisis profiteering scheme.  But once you understand the Selfish Gene and the Limits to Growth, who exactly is pulling what kind of conspiracy are really superfluous details.  The conspiracy according to this documentary is bad enough: some people saw an opportunity to profiteer on the energy crisis, so they did.  Ultimately the problem is not that indivudual people made individual decisions, the problem is that structural flaws in our political and economic systems created the opportunity for anyone to make those decisions.  As long as the opportunity exists, someone will take it.

Farenheit 9/11:  Michael Moore (Weinstein Company)  In this DVD documentary Michael Moore examines the connections between the Bush family’s oil business and the 9/11 justification of the invasion of Iraq.  It’s hardly the most profound 9/11 investigative reporting (that would be Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert) but it is a good introduction to the idea—if one is still needed—that America’s reaction to 9/11 wasn’t all that the Bush administration claimed it to be.

Give Me Liberty—A Handbook for American Revolutionaries:  Naomi Wolf (Simon and Schuster)  A declaration of the need for a new American Revolution, in which Ms. Wolf compares the founding principles of the United States to current events to show how far off course we have been pushed, and instructions in how to carry out various functions of our political system, in both their legal and social dimensions, such as organizing effective protests and running for political office—which the public is currently being kept out of by lack of access to understandable and complete information.  This also includes a very helpful summary of the Constitution written in modern English.

Hacking Democracy:  Directed by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels (HBO)  A DVD documentary about election fraud in America.  The software that operates Diebold voting machines is protected by intellectual property laws that allow only Diebold employees to read—not the public, nor election officials.  Some activists and computer programmers working together discovered that the software in the machines could be hacked to make the software count the votes differently from what the voters voted for.  This is yet another manifestation of the Selfish Gene in politics, because it’s yet another way that inherently self-interested people use their control of resources to get what they want.  As long as we depend on computer programs to count our ballots, we don’t live in a democracy, because computer programmers, not voters, decide the outcomes of the elections.

Iraq for Sale—The War Profiteers:  Directed by Robert Greenwald (Brave New Films)  This is a documentary about the war profiteers in the Iraq war, and their effects on their workers.  This is a lot of interviews with workers and military personnel and various other footage of events in Iraq, because all the defense contractors declined to be interviewed.  This is yet another Selfish Gene perspective on current events, because the private companies are motivated by profits, not patriotism.  That leads to behavior that nobody expects to see on a battlefield and that isn’t consistent with trying to win the war.  Guards, truckdrivers, translators, food service, and water treatment workers all testify to wasting taxpayer money, being put in danger unnecessarily, and being prevented from giving military personnel adequate support.

Jesus Camp:  Heidi Ewin and Rachel Grady (Magnolia Pictures) A horrifying investigation into a summer camp run by fundamentalist Christians to indoctrinate children into taking political leadership roles in America to prepare the country for the return of Christ.

La Sierra:  Directed by Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez (First Run Films)  This is a documentary about the gang wars in a neighborhood in Columbia.  It’s a real-life experiment in evolutionary psychology, that combines modern technology with an absence of effective government.  It tells the story of three kids who try to weave their way through a world of sex and violence to find peaceful, stable lives.  Edison is the leader of the gang, who owns a gun and a motorcycle and has killed several people and can’t get away from all the girls who are attracted to his alpha male status.  By the age of 22 he has eight children with eight different teenage girls.  Jesus is a 19 year old gnag member who blew one of his hands off while building a grenade, but he’s still in the war because he doesn’t see any alternative.  Neither of them plan on living very long, because they’re fighting to keep their neighborhood from being taken over by the drug lord-backed guerillas.  Cielo is a 17 year old mother who was widowed at age 15 when her husband was murdered.  She tried to make a living but doesn’t want to resort to prostitution like some of her friends do and keep trying to talk her into.  If these kids had been living in an American neighborhood and speaking English while they talked about gang war, murder, teenage pregnancy, prostitution, and cocaine in such casual terms, they would’ve seemed like criminal scum, but living in another country and speaking a different language it’s easier to see they’re just people who have adapted to a situation they didn’t want and are doing whatever they can think of to make the best of the lives they have.

Letters from a Fort Lewis Brig—A Matter of Conscience: Kevin & Monica Benderman (Lyons Press)  The tale of an Army sargeant who tried to apply for conscientious objector status, and who spoke up for the interests of enlisted military personnel after serving a tour of duty in Iraq, and was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Letters from Iran:  Written and directed by Nezam Manoucheri (Choices Video)  This is a documentary by an Iranian filmmaker who had lived in America and then returned to Iran, about life in Iran, how it compares to the U.S. how life there has changed since the revolution that put the Shah in power, and how it’s changing now with globalization and the War on Terror.  The traditional values of the revolution are giving way to consumer values now, and the two come into conflict in a lot of ways.  Playing chess and pool were outlawed after the revolution but have since been re-legalized, but he still has to rent movies through the blackmarket.  His teenage daughter wears a veil in public so no one will see the illegal America-style makeup she wears.    His pre-teen son has to chant nationalistic slogans at school, but then comes home and plays American video games.  A lot of talented young people, including his daughter after the film was made, leave the country for better educations and opportunities elsewhere.  The orchards around the house where his grandmother lived are being cut down and replaced with condominums.  The people who live in those condominums figured out how to get rich on the revolution for traditional values and now use their money to import Western consumer goods. He doesn’t think that religious dogma is benefiting the country, but he doesn’t think consumerism is the solution either.

Loose Change: Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe,  Jason Bermas  (Louder Than Words)  This is a DVD documentary about a lot of inconsistencies in the official 9/11 reports.  They may have made some mistakes, but they do at least establish that there were a lot of inconsistencies.  It makes a good conceptual introduction to Detective Ruppert’s gigantic professional criminal investigation of 9/11.  Loose Change is available for free on the internet.

Mission Rejected—U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq: Peter Laufer (Chelsea Green)  Biographical tales of several U.S. military personnel who have chosen to escape combat duty in Iraq by filing Conscientious Objector status, going Absent Without Leave, going to jail, getting kicked out of the military, or fleeing to Canada. 

Motherland Afghanistan:  Directed by Sedika Mojadidi (First Run Features)  This is a documentary made by an Afghan filmmaker who emigrated to America as a girl, who went back with her father, a doctor, after the U.S. invasion.  He worked in several women’s hospitals, and they found very different conditions depending on who was in charge of rebuilding the area.  Since the film is a tour of Afghanistan by an Afghan filmmaker, it shows the people and their living conditions in different parts of the country.  Of the many problems they had with their health care system, the biggest was the lack of medical training anyone had been able to get there in the past 30 years, during the Soviet invasion, the civil war, and then the Taliban rule.  Now with the American occupation the best hospitals were the ones being run by the Afghans and the worst were the ones being run by Americans.  This is consistent with the Selfish Gene Theory and American imperialism, because the goal of the Americans obviously was not the health of the Afghans, but to make them dependent on Americans for their health care.

News War: Raney Aronson-Rath, Lowell Bergman, Stephan Talbot, Greg Barker, and Sheila Coronel (WGBH Boston) This is a documentary about the role of journalism in politics.  That includes how TV journalism has changed over the past 50 years, how the internet is affecting journalism, and how journalism is developing in the Middle East and around the world.  In every case it’s a struggle among people who want to control the flow of information through society in different ways and for different reasons.  In the U.S. the concept of TV news started out as a public service, which TV stations provided but didn’t make money on.  Then 60 Minutes was a new approach to journalism that went into more depth on certain stories, and its producers proved that journalism could make a profit.  But then business people started investing in TV journalism to make profits.  That essentially turned the TV news into a religion, because the investors discovered they didn’t need to inform people anymore, because people were more willing to pay for the feeling of being informed.  The demand in the new business relation was to sell people ideas they already agreed with—telling them what they wanted to hear.  That meant the business people who invested in that made more money, and were able to buy more media outlets, than people who continued with the traditional role of journalism.  Other people have found other ways to take advantage of that new relationship specifically to keep Americans mentally sedated, which includes various ways the Bush administration tried both overtly and covertly to control news reporting, by prosecuting journalists for printing what the administration claimed to be secrets that threatened national security and intentionally leaking false information to reporters.  But if the government has the power to keep the public ignorant of what it’s doing, that’s a threat to national security in its own way.  In other countries, reporters have been murdered, imprisoned, and exiled for doing precisely that.  The struggle for control of the flow of information is especially intense in the Middle East, where unbiased reporting in the middle of a war is impossible both for reporters from the invading countries and for those from the invaded countries.  The internet has made citizen reporting possible now, which is a new opportunity different news agencies are taking advantage in various ways.  It’s also a new threat to politicians.  Here in America journalists are now being punished, and especially independent journalists who don’t have big media corporations to back them up, for refusing to turn over anonymous sources or information about illegal activity.  But that would destroy a reporter’s reputation for protecting his sources, and therefore destroy his careers as a result of no one trusting them to protect them as sources in the future.  So threatening to punish reporters for not revealing their sources is another way for the government to control the flow of information, by making reporters not dare to report certain information in the first place.

Noam Chomsky: Rebel without a Pause:  Directed by Will Pascoe (Docurama)  This is a biography of Noam Chomsky’s life between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, with interviews with people who know him and clips of his talks on current events, like terroism, war, the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, the manipulation of mass media, activism, fear, and organization.  He seems to a lot of people like he’s a lunatic conspiracy theorist attracting attention to himself because unlike most college professors, he researches topics outside his field, and he uses his talents and education to learn stuff and tell other people about it.  In fact, in academic papers in America he’s the most widely quoted person alive, and the eighth most widely quoted person in history.

North Korea A Day in the Life:  Directed by Pieter Fleruy (Facets Video) This is a documentary about life in North Korea.  It’s an unusual documentary because there are no interviews, history, or background included.  It follows a family of North Koreans through a day at work in a textile factory, a day at school, and English classes.  Even so, the North Korean government strictly limited what the filmmakers were allowed to film. On the one hand, the more you know about ordinary people from another country, the harder it is to hate them, and despite the government regulations, this film does manage to show North Koreans as real people.  On the other hand, what you see of North Korea in the film looks like 1984 in real life.  The entire country is an ideological assembly line.  Guards are stationed everywhere to watch people doing the most mundane things.  Some women are assigned to wave flags to inspire people on their way to work.  School children and factory workers all wear uniforms, stand in formation at various times throughout the day to receive their orders, and are led in exercises.  The factory workers have to listen to national anthems all day, the children sing songs and are told legends about how great Kim Jong Il is and how evil Americans are.  Jesus Christ is less of a central figure in most sects of Christianity than King Jong Il is in North Korean Communism.  Of course the government controls the media.  Children are taught from the age of four to be prepared to kill as many Americans as they can, and school children are taught to shoot rifles before they reach high school.  But everyone is acting within the limitations of their understanding of the situation.  We have every single one of those things in America too, with the exception of the daily physical fitness training:  Surviellance, symbolism, nationalism, propaganda, regulations on the media, dress codes, religion, xenophobia, and an education system that trains us to believe that our political and economic systems are the best in the world.  It is obvious that the North Koreans are intelligent, and that the development of their ideas is limited by the psychological boundaries that people have placed around them, but that’s true of Americans also.

Obeying or Resisting Authority:  A Psychological Retrospective  (ABC News)  This documentary recreates the infamous Milgram psychology experiment, compares it with the original, and compares it with the Stanford prison experiement, the Abu Graib prisoner abuse, and a hoax someone pulled at a McDonald’s in 2004 by calling the manager on the phone, telling her he was a police officer, and ordering her to strip search an employee.  The same discovery was made in all five cases, that a lot of people yield responsibility for their actions when ordered by an authority figure to inflict suffering on someone else.

Our Constitution:  A Conversation:  Sunnyland Seminars (The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands)

Our Constitution:  Judicial Independence:  Sunnyland Seminars (The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands)  This actually titled A Conversation on the Constitution.  It is the second in the series that began with Our Constitution:  A Conversation, but the title doesn’t reflect that.

Our Constitution:  Key Constitutional Concepts:  Sunnyland Seminars (The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands)  This is actually titled simply Key Constitutional Concepts.  It’s the third in the series, but the title doesn’t reflect that.  The first disc in the series is an interview with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer by a room full of high school students from Philidelphia. The second disc is an interview with Justices O’Connor, Breyer, and Anthony Kennedy and a room full of high school students from Philidelphia.  The third is three stories about the constitution:  The creation of the Constitution, the case of Gideon vs. Wainwright, in which a guy who’d stolen from a pool hall in Georgia got the Supreme Court to give the right to an attorney to all accused criminals, and the case of Youngstown vs. Sawyer, in which the presidential powers that Franklin Roosevelt had been given during the Great Depression and World War II were taken away when Harry Truman invaded North Korea without a declaration of war from congress, and then tried to use that as an excuse to take over the steel industry and outlaw union organizing because steel was needed for the war effort. While I’m sure all the information related in this series is true, if you watch it with a background in theatrical art and evolutionary psychology, you can see that it’s really U.S. political propaganda.  U.S. Supreme Court Justices meeting with high school students seems like a very noble thing for them to do, but they go into the meetings with the preconceived idea that the structure of the U.S. government laid out in the Constitution is infallible, and high school students hardly have an educational background that lets them compete at critical thought against Supreme Court Justices.  What looks on the surface to be wise old people responding rationally to the questions of a younger generation is really a complete mismatch in information levels combined with the people who have the advantage already having decided that their own point of view is right.  Also, both audience seemed to be made up of students from middle class neighborhoods, which leads me to wonder why Supreme Court Justices didn’t dare to test their critical thought against kids from inner city high schools.  Likewise, the three stories that follow are heartwarming stories about America that are founded on the preconceived idea that the Constitution is infallible.  Throughout this series, people, including three Justices of the Supreme Court, talk about the importance of evidence in the court system and political system, but they never talk about evolutionary psychology or any other field of science.  If we really have a secular government, why don’t our Supreme Court Justices give any indication of scientific literacy?

Our Times…: Written and Directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (79 Cinema Organization) This is a documentary about the Iranian presidential elections of 2004, by an Iranian filmmaker whose daughter helped campaign for Mohammed Khatami’s re-election.  People were very excited to be able to vote, and run for office, including women, after the Shah and the theocracy were overthrown.  There were over 700 presidential candidates in that election, including 48 women.  But women don’t have the same rights as men otherwise.  One of the presidential candidates was a single mother who had been divorced twice, who lived with her blind mother and her daughter, worked two full time jobs, and is trying to get an education.  She got evicted from the apartment she was renting, which happens to her about once a year, and couldn’t find anyone in Tehran who would rent an apartment to a single mother with her income.  Everyone she talked to treated her as if not having a man living in her household must mean she was a prostitute.  Obviously there’s more to the right to self determination than being allowed to vote and run for president.

Power and Terror in Our Times:  Noam Chomsky, directed by John Junkerman (First Run Features)  A DVD documentary of interviews and lectures of Noam Chomsky about the U.S.’s post 9/11 war in the context of U.S. foreign policy since World War II and imperialistic wars in general.

Sick Around the World (Frontline):  Jon Palfreman and T.R. Reid (PBS)  This documentary compares the health care systems of Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Taiwan to that of the United States, and shows five different systems that are used in industrialized countries to provide health care for everyone. 

Sicko:  Michael Moore (The Weinstein Company)  In this documentary, Micheal Moore compares the for-profit medical care system in America to the free health care systems in Canada, Britain, France, and then Cuba.  In America medical bills drive people to bankruptcy, decades of non-treatment for treatable conditions, and death by rejection for health insurance.  In the other countries, people walk into hospitals any time they want and get good treatments for free.  As if that wasn’t insane enough, Mike presents this as an absurdist comedy.  In Cuba he even interviews Che Guevara’s daughter.

Soldiers Speak Out:  David Caspar and Barbara Trent (Empowerment Project)  A DVD documentary of interviews with Iraq vets opposed to the war.

Support the Truth:  Dennis Kyne (self published)  A tour of the front by a veteran of the First Gulf War. There is a lot you are not being told about the war…

Terrorizing Dissent: Glass Bead Collective (Twin Cities Indymedia) A video documentary about the eight organizers of the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee who were arrested and charged with conspiring to incite riots in the furtherance of terrorism.

The Audacity of Hope—Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream:  Barack Obama  (Vintage)  President Obama’s perspectives on politics, values, religion, race, globalization, the environment, and family in America, prior to his election as president, and his plans on how to solve root causes of problems.  He certainly is worldly and thoughtful, but as a graduate of Harvard Law School, the legal system, not science, makes up the foundation of his strategy.

The End of America—Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot:  Naomi Wolf (Chelsea Green Publishing)  A comparison between historical political trends that have led to totalitarian states and political trends that have been happening in America since 9/11.  If Homo sapiens in other countries can make that mistake, Homo sapiens in America can make it too.

The Ground Truth:  Patricia Foulkrod (Universal Pictures)  A DVD documentary of interviews with Iraq and Afghanistan vets opposed to the war, telling about their experiences during and after the war.

The Journalist and the Jihadi—The Murder of Daniel Pearl:  Directed by Ahmed A. Jamal and Ramesh Sharma (HBO)  This is a documentary of the life of the journalist Daniel Pearl, his work in the Middle East, his capture and murder plotted by the jihadi Omar Sheikh, Mr. Sheik’s capture, and Mr. Pearl’s family and friends dealing with the aftermath.  Mr. Pearl’s whole reason for reporting on events in the Middle East was to try to show the Arabs’ side of the story to Americans and bring people together to talk to each other.

The Obama Deception—The Mask Comes Off:  Alex Jones (Infowars.com)   This DVD documentary picks up where Crossing the Rubicon left off, showing how the people who controlled the government in 2008 still control it in 2009, but the public’s distrust of the government has been quelled by the fact that we now have a Black president.

The War Briefing:  Written by Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith (WGBH Boston)  This documentary was a look at the state of the war in Afghanistan in 2008, and what the next president would inherit.  The documentary focuses on lots of reasons the U.S. strategy isn’t working.  This is yet another reference that supports Michael Ruppert’s premise that U.S. presidents and other members of the government and military intentionally provoked the anti-Soviet fighters the U.S. military had trained to justify invading a country in the Middle East near the world’s largest supply of oil.  By invading Afghanistan without a strategy that could work, the U.S. has destabilized the country in a way that has made them dependent on our continued military presence.  If we evacuate now the Taliban would retake control of the country which would be a humanitarian crisis, but if we win we’ll no longer have any reason to be there.  No one in the documentary suggested this, but a lot of experts talked about a lot of signs that revolve around this central point:  What if the U.S. strategy there isn’t to win and turn over control of the country to a stable government?

This Divided State:  Directed by Steven Greenstreet (Disinformation)  This is a documentary about Michael Moore’s visit to Utah Valley State College in the fall of 2004.  The lengths that conservatives went to to prevent him from talking serve as a good warning about just how much America is up against.  In the city of Orem, where UVSC is located, Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 12 to 1.  The argument against him being allowed to talk basically consisted of conservatives believing their political might proved they were the Chosen Ones.  They obviously weren’t interested in discussing anything with people they had already decided were less intelligent and generally inferior to them.  But there were Mormons on both sides of the argument, which proves that no religion can guarantee everyone will think in a certain way or will be prevented from thinking in certain ways.  So if it wasn’t even their religion that made them the Chosen Ones, what else could it have been but their own egocentricism?

Uncounted—The New Math of American Elections:  Directed by David Earnhardt (Disinformation)  This is another documentary about election fraud in America since 2000, on a broader scale than Hacking Democracy.  This film looks at a wider range of ways that election mistakes favored Republicans, such as a variety of ways of hacking software to make it count votes differently than the way people cast their votes, voting machine malfunctions, not enough voting machines being available, polling stations opening late, and power outages resulting in long lines at inner city and college campus voting stations, and others in heavily Democratic voting precincts resulting in a lot of voters having to leave without voting to go to work or school, and absentee ballots not being counted.  Once again, a lot of Americans don’t want to believe it because they wouldn’t believe in a political system where something like this could happen and they do believe in America, therefore this can’t really be happening in America.  And once again, this derives directly from the Selfish Gene Theory, because this is just one more way that organisms are using their control of resources to get what they want.  As Stalin said, the people who vote decide nothing; the people who count the votes decide everything.

US Troops’ Anger on Iraq Duty: Sean Smith (BBC News)  An online video of U.S. troops serving in Iraq, which tells a different story from what we’re being told about the war by commercial media in America.

Wall:  Directed by Simone Bitton (Cine Sud & Ama Productions)  This is a French documentary about the wall between Israel and Palestine.  They interview people on both sides about how the wall affects them, and an Israeli general about how the wall is being built.  They also show the building of the wall, different designs of the wall in different areas, and different ways people get around, over, or through the wall.

What America Needs—From Sea to Shining Sea:  Mark Wojahn (New Kinomatagraphic Union)  A documentary filmed by the director traveling across the country alone, beginning a month after the September 11^th attacks, and asking over 500 people what they think America needs.  This proved to be an excericise in universal human values because he kept getting the same answers everywhere he went and whoever he asked:  A better president, better leadeship, peace, love, respect, friendship, religion, spirituality, art, better education, strength, accountability, unity, compassion, cooperation, jobs, helath care, less division among classes, races, sexes, and nations, and safety.  He didn’t realize it, but every answer he got was a reference to structure that better served the needs of people in their living conditions.

Why We Fight: Directed by Eugene Jarecki (Charlotte Street Films)  This is a documentary about U.S. foreign policy since September 11^th, the use of the War on Terror as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, the role of the military industrial complex in making profits on war, the dependence of the U.S. military superiority on oil, the role of the media in shaping public opinion, and how the government, media, oil, and military industrial complex have become so intertwined they’re basically inseparable.

Will They Ever Trust Us Again?—Letters from the War Zone:  Michael Moore (Simon & Schuster)  A collection of e-mails Micheal Moore has received from over 100 U.S. military personnel, their families, and veterans of previous wars, criticizing the war in Iraq, military recruitment, the U.S. political system, and president Bush.

Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan—Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations:  Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz  (Haymarket Books)  Testimonies of U.S. combat veterans and Iraqi civilians about physical, psychological, and medical conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the military at large.

Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality

Bhagavad-Gita—The Song of God: Translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Chistopher Isherwood  (Signet Classics)  This is the founding document of Hinduism.  The lessons are told as a story of a conversation between a mortal man and Krishna, the messanger of their god.  Even here, in this ancient tale of two mythical characters discussing their observations on creation, destruction, and the inherent structure of the universe, you can see the outlines of evolution and thermodynamics in the background.

Bob Smith, USA:  Neil Abramson (Winghead Films)  A DVD documentary about seven men named Bob Smith in the United States and their relationships to religion.

Chicanery Absolved: Jane Joyce (Publish America)  Jane’s a friend of mine, and in addition to being a novelist, she’s also a poet, a model, a painter, and the bassist for Womb Warriors of Make Believe.  I’m including her book here because she’s one of a number of people I’ve met who believe that there isn’t any existing political, religious, or philosophical ideology in the world that can get us out of the mess we’re in, so she’s searching for ways to bring art, science, and spirituality together, to help bring humanity into balance with itself.  Also, Homo sapiens, their minds, and their thoughts are all an inherent part of planetary biology.  I found this book to be a good reminder of how much complexity 46 chromosomes, two instincts, three mental abilities, and eight motivations can create.  All the people you knowintimately, you’ve known long enough that you’re accustomed to their complexity.  All the people you only know in passing, you only know a small number of things about.  Philosophical fiction is an intimate tour of the mind of a stranger.  Finally, as someone who was born sometime in the ‘80s, Jane has more at stake in the future of the world that anyone else on this list.

Consciousness Explained:  Daniel Dennett (Little & Brown)  A pioneering work into evolutionary psychology, from a philosophical perspective.

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—Evolution and the Meaning of Life:  Daniel Dennett (Simon and Schuster)  A philosophical analysis of the Theory of Evolution—how it has changed the way people think about the world, how it is changing the way people think now, and how it could change the way people think in the future.

Days of War, Nights of Love—Crimethink for Beginners:  CrimethInc. (CrimethInc.)   An Anarchisttraining manual.  Radical social change can’t begin until people radically alter their perspectives on the world.  It’s a highly developed critique of various ways people are controlled subconsciously by cultural values, emotional manipulation,  and manipulation of people’s access to information.  The writers have an amateur grasp of biology and psychology, but they do at least recognize that biology and psychology are connected.

Derrida:  Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (Zeitgeist)  This is a documentary about the life and work of Jaques Derrida, a French philosopher of the latter 20^th century.  He was the pioneer of deconstruction, which is a prerequisite to science, by breaking up things people take for granted into component parts, and rejecting the idea that anything that isn’t natural is absolute.  Monsieur Derrida applies his own philosophy to the documentary in his interviews, remarking on how the fillmakers create the conditions for filming the interviews to create a certain impression on the audience.  The filmmakers even apply his philosophy to the documentary, by using extra camera operators to film the camera operators who are filming him.

Ethics and the World Crisis: Directed by Steven Lawrence and Stephen Olsson (Link TV) This is a meeting in front of a live audience between the Dalai Lama and 12 renowned activists, journalists, authors, philosophers, economists, and politicians, including Dr. Helen Caldicott (Founder of the Nuclear Policy Reseach Institute), Reverend Al Sharpton, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich, Paul Hawken (author of The Ecology of Commerce and Blessed Unrest), Amy Goodman (of Democracy Now), David Crow (author), Amy Domini (CEO of Domini Social Investments), Randall Hayes (President of the Rainforest Action Network), Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor of The Nation), Russell Simmons (businessman and social activist), Ben Cohen (founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Susan Sarandon (who starred in The Rocky Horror Picture Show).  They talked about current events, especially war and global warming, and agreed from their various backgrounds that humanity’s interests are converging on certain goals and that a solution will depend on a transformation in people’s worldviews.

Ethics for the New Millenium: the Dalai Lama, Directed by Morgan Harris (Wellspring)  This is a video of a talk the Dalai Lama gave at the Albert Hall in London.  His ethics for the new millennium are the same as his ethics for the old millennium.  His ethics are humanistic primarily, and religious as a backup plan for dealing with really complicated questions that have no straightforward answer.  First, if we don’t all recognize each other as equals, peace isn’t possible.  Second, we should resolve conflict through dialogue instead of violence.  Third, instead of trying to prove whose religion is right, we should recognize that we have all figured out a lot of important things and by talking to each other as equals we can trade ideas, connect with each other, and build upon what we have figured out so far.

Expect Resistance—A Field Manual:  CrimethInc. Collective (CrimethInc.)  A tale of some  Anarchist revolutionaries based on true stories, interspersed with revolutionary poetry and philosophy.  CrimethInc. is aware that politics are a product of psychology and that psychology is a product of biology, but beyond that their grasp of evolutionary psychology is laughable and their perspective on science is amateur.  But that’s still more than the Democrat or Republican parties understand about evolutionary psychology.

Freedom Evolves: Dan Dennett (Viking) A philosophical study of the evolution of free will.

Gift of Power— Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man:  Archie Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes (Bear & Company)   Biography and spirituality of a 20^th century Lakota (“Sioux”) spiritual leader.  

His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Peace and Prospertity:  The Dalai Lama (National Geographic) This is a DVD of the Dalai Lama’s talk at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in 2007.  He talks about universal humanistic values and compassion in the modern world.

Idiocracy:  Directed by Mike Judge (20^th Century Fox)  This science fiction comedy addresses one simple fact that a lot of people misunderstand about evolution:  Genetic evolution isn’t making us smarter.  With computers, safety equipment, and all the other inventions that make our lives easier, we have eliminated intelligence as a requirement for survival and reproduction, which means the average intelligence of our species is being dragged down.

Kinds of Minds—Toward an Understanding of Consciousness:  Dan Dennett (Basic Books)  A shorter, and somewhat-less-dense philosophical introduction to evolutionary psychology, focusing on how different species’ brains create different forms of consciousness.

Letter to a Christian Nation:  Sam Harris (Knopf)  Mr. Harris’s public response to all the Christian hate mail he got for The End Of Faith. 

Muhammed: Legacy of a Prophet:  Directed by Omar Al-Qattan (Kikim Media)  This documentary tells the legend of the life of Mohammed and shows how Islam is supposed to be an extrapolation of his life.  It includes interviews with a number of Muslims, many of whom are Americans, and one of whom is a firefighter in the New York fire department who worked in the resuce efforts at the World Trade Center.  Islam, like any other religion, is a bunch of ideas people have thought of, which can be interpreted humanistically as a path to respect for everyone.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four:  George Orwell (Signet Classics)   A study of the political and social prospects of world domination by a single political ideology, and the control of society through the manipulation of information, emotions, cultural values, and the use of technology and coersion.  Its presented as a work of fiction, but Mr. Orwell’s fictional futuristic worldwide totalitarian Communist regime bears many parallels to real-life globalization.

On the Road:  Jack Kerouac (Penguin)  This founding document of American beatnik philosophy introduces one critical idea that was absent from America at the time, which is that the search for a life you want is part of the inherent structure of life.  This story of life as a journey, not a destination, is easy to conceptualize because it’s played out in three dimensional space by two companions physically traveling from one place to another multiple times in search of a life they want.  Soon enough they realize that the search for a life they want is the life they want, and that all life is a process and not an endpoint.

Religiulous:  Larry Charles And Bill Maher (Lions Gate)  A DVD documentary about conflicts that religion causes in world politics and the environment.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—Adventures of a Curious Character:  Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton (Norton)  An autobiography and perspectives on life by a great physicist.  A good example of the fact that scientists are people too, and how exceptional perceptive abilities give people unusual perspectives on the world.

The Analects:  Confucius (Dover Thrift Editions)  This is a collection of teachings compiled by Confucius’s followers about 2,500 years ago.  Unlike the Buddha or Lao Tzu, Confucius focused on problems specific to China in his own day.  A lot of this book makes references to specific events or conditions in China at the time, which are lost on anyone who doesn’t know the related history.  However, all by itself this book is still a good lesson in how to work backwards and use philosophy to get a sense of what conditions must’ve been like at a certain time and place.  Confucius’s work was new, which meant no one had thought of it before, and it spread quickly, which meant people must’ve found it useful for something.  By seeing how new ideas solved problems, you can see how those problems must not have been getting solved with older, simpler, more obvious ideas. Like many philosophies that increase social stability, this teaches people to think of the long term effects of their actions before acting upon their immediate feelings.  Also, this book can be considered an ancestor of evolutionary psychology, in that a big part of Confucius’s approach to teaching people how not to act upon their immediate feelings is made up of observations that some feelings are made up of interactions among simpler feelings.  We know that now because philosophers and poets have figured it out and other people have learned it from those insightful people.  To see how Confucius wrote about ideas that are simple today but were revolutionary at the time, you get to see part of that process happening.

The Celestine Prophecy (DVD) Directed by Armand Mastroiani, book by James Redfield (Celestine Films)  This is a movie based on a philosophical novel about a new level of spirituality people all over the world are discovering.  This story is told from a Chrsitian/New Age perspective, but the real accomplishment of this story is that it could just as easily be told from a Taoist perspective or from any of a number of other religions.  This proves the whole point of the story better than the author seems to have intended, which is that as people broaden their perspectives both by learning about each other and learning more facts (meaning science) the differences between religions fall away.

The Devil’s Chaplain—Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love: Richard Dawkins (Mariner Books)  An anthology of articles, lectures, debates, book reviews and forewards, tributes, eulogies, and advice on different topics by Richard Dawkins.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: Tom Wolfe (Bantam Books)  This beatnik biography of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters tells the story of the pioneers of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll revolution who invented the rave.    They showed people in real life, and Mr. Wolfe shows in his telling of their story, how much people’s perspectives on life shape the lives they lead and the worlds they create for themselves, how people can find many ways to change their perspectives, and how they can lead different lives as a result. 

The End of Faith—Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:  Sam Harris  (Norton)   An Atheist perspective on religion and the problems it’s causing in the modern world, among groups of people and between people and the environment.  Illustrates how belief (meaning information packages) creates action, and how belief in imaginary ideas leads to actions that don’t produce the intended results in the real world.

The Fountainhead:  Ayn Rand (Signet)  This is philosophy illustrated in a work of fiction.  Ironically, Ayn was a devout Capitalist, but considering she lived in Russia during the Russian Revolution, fled to America, and wrote her book decades before the idea of planetary biology was conceived, it’s understandable.  Environmental crises and corrupted economic systems aside, the events of the story itself show how a society of cooperative greatness depends on personal empowerment, and how a society that isn’t built on personal empowerment can’t lead to cooperative greatness.

The God Delusion:  Richard Dawkins  (Mariner Books)  A study of the personal, cultural, political, and economic effects that beliefs in religious superstitions have on the world, by the world’s most outspoken Atheist and biologist.

The God that Wasn’t There:  Brian Flemming (Beyond Belief Media)  A DVD documentary giving an Atheist perspective on Christianity specifically.  The evidence of Jesus’s life overwhelmingly indicates that Jesus is a completely mythical—meaning fictional—character who embodies idealized qualities.   I told you how it’s possible to factor Jesus out of the religion equation altogether.  Mr. Flemming takes that to a much higher level.

The Motorcycle Diaries—A Journey around South America:  Ché Guevara (Verso)  This is Ché Guevara’s account of his travels around South America at the age of 23, which opened his eyes to the economic, political, and social inequality of the world, and which set him on his path to become one of the two main leaders of the Communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere.

The Phoenix Affirmations—A New Vision of the Future of Christianity:  Eric Elnes (Jossey-Bass)  An activist’s reference book to progressive Christianity.  Dr. Elnes found that many Christians in America don’t approve of the fundamentalist Christians’ claiming a monopoly of Christian values and trying to take over America.  This book is a roadmap to how another group of people are trying to build upon their set of ideas to adapt to the changing world.

The Story of B:  Daniel Quinn (Bantam)  This philosophical novel introduces the concept of evolutionary psychology, the concept that we cause a lot of problems by attempting to apply instincts that evolved in hunter gatherer life to life in agrarian society without realizing it, and the role of organized religion as a human creation to solve that discrepency through the promise of reward and threat of punishment in the afterlife.  Unfortunately, beyond that the conclusions he draws are New Age superstitions that have no connection to the Selfish Gene or evolutionary psychology.

The Tao of Physics—An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism:  Fritjof Capra  (Shambhala Publications)  A good reference book for general connections between philosophical beliefs and scientific principles.

The Tao te Ching:  Lao Tzu (available in multiple places online) Lao Tzu was the messiah-figure of Taoism.  His life is more legendary than historical also, but unlike Jesus’s lessons in the Bible, Lao Tzu wrote the Tao te Ching personally.  It’s a series of lessons in how people can live, and relate to each other and the rest of the world, not by telling people what to do but by illuminating choices people have that they don’t naturally perceive.  A few of the lessons don’t apply as well to life in modern America as they did to life in northern China 2,500 years ago, but the great majority of them do.

The Unabomber Manifesto: Ted Kaczynski (online)  Another good example of what happens when amateurs try to apply science selectively to advance their political goals.  But it is worth noting that the Unabomber, unlike the Democratic or Republican parties, understood that evolutionary psychology is the foundation of all political systems.

The World According to Mr. Rogers—Important Things to Remember:  Fred Rogers  (Hyperion)  This is a great reference book also, because environmental sustainability is really just Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood applied to the global environment.

Traveling America Broke—The Life and Crimes of Joey Grether:  Joey Grether (Self published)  An Anarchist version of On the Road—self-education through the quest for life experience and new perspectives on the world.  Joey (my cover artist) funded his travels around America mainly by shoplifting from big corporations.

Unweaving the Rainbow—Science, Delusion, and the Apetite for Wonder:  Richard Dawkins (Mariner)  Richard Dawkin’s observations on connections among science, art, and philosophy, in an attempt to inspire more interdisciplinary perspectives on science.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?—Further Adventures of a Curious Character:  Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (Norton) More perspectives on life by a great physicist.

What the #%*! Do We Know? Directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, Screenplay by William Arntz and Betsy Chasse (Free Flow Media)  This DVD is another good general reference that shows connections between spiritual beliefs and scientific principles.  Some of the science is legitimate.  Some of what the directors present as science isn’t really science, but are collections of observations that do have science to support them, but are grossly misrepresented in the movie.

Wisdom of the Buddha—The Unabridged Dhammapada:  Translated and edited by F. Max Muller (Dover Thrift Editions)  This collection of teachings the Buddha encompasses the foundation of Buddhist ideology.  This yet another poetic philosophy about how to interpret the world in a way that will create structure in your life.  Unfortunately, as with any ancient religious text, people’s interpretations of the words the Buddha wrote have changed.  Following his instructions literally could’ve worked when he wrote them, but the world has changed since then.  His central tenent, that contentment depends on people learning to abandon passion and emotion, would solve the problem of unhappiness caused by the difference between what people have and what they wished they had, if the world was still a simple enough place that people could still get what they needed with the decision making power they have.  Now, however, to believe that contentment depends on the abandonment of passion and emotion is to yield control of your life in a situation where someone else is guaranteed to want to take control of your life.  A literal interpretation of this book could be, and probably was, used by Chairman Mao to tell Chinese citizens that if they weren’t happy with their lives it was their own fault for not learning to abandon their emotions.  Today in America a literal interpretation of this book could be used to try to prove that it was everyone’s responsibility to be an emotionless corporate robot.

Witch—A Magickal Journey:  Fiona Horne (Thorsons)  A guide to Witchcraft, and Paganism in general, as it applies to the modern world.  This is a good example of how it’s possible to structure religious beliefs around all existing objective information, practice religion as a source of personal empowerment, situate all unprovable beliefs beyond the realm of observable evidence, and practice a religion in a way that doesn’t conflict with science, by recognizing that science and religion are two means of studying the world that are specialized for discovering different things.  Fiona doesn’t have nearly the scientific background I do, but she has enough of a modern perspective of the world to not feel the need to disprove reality just to keep it from interfering with her religion.  And I mean a very modern perspective of the world—she was the lead singer of my favorite band, and she wrote the book when she was in her early 30s.

Art

Amandla!—A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony:  Directed by Lee Hirsch (Kwela Productions)  This is a documentary about the role of music in South Africa during apartheid and the revolution.  People used it to unite their communities by communicating to each other that they all shared the same strong feelings and goals.  That communication resulted in stong communities of people cooperating with each other.  This is another demonstration of the amc = v equation, in which one group of people who had a lot less resources to work with than another made up the difference in cultural development.  In the end, military superiority didn’t save the White South Africans’ domination of the country, because no matter what they tried they couldn’t make the Blacks stop singing, and therefore, couldn’t destroy their unification. When 100,000 people are marching down the street at you singing the same song as loud as they can, how much good are 30 bullets going to do you?

American’s Mexican:  George Lopez (HBO)  This is a video of George Lopez’s stand up comedy, in which he makes a lot of comparisons between Mexican and White culture and talks about his perspective as a Mexican-American on immigration and labor.

Anatomy of a Screenplay:  Dan Decker  (Self-Published, as far as I can tell)  Hollywood movies are written according to a very well established formula.  This book outlines all the critical elements of story telling.

Battlestar Galactica (The New Series): Directed by Edward James Olmos ()  This science fiction series deals with major real-life topics that are real-life possibilities for us, in a fictiousous context.  That includes the human race being almost completely exterminated by their technology, how the few survivors adapt, how people adapting to situations they never believed possible leads to behavior they never believed themselves capable of, and how decisions that seem best to people in their situations produce unexpected long-term results.  You can see the Stanislavski method spread out over a four-season TV show, how decisions made by multiple people step by step lead from one situation to another over a four-year period, leading to results none of them could’ve imagined in the beginning.  This show was an exceptional approach to storytelling because the entire series is one continuous story.

East Side Story:  Directed by Dana Ranga (Kino on Video)  A documentary on musical films in the Soviet block.  Political censorship, no economic incentive for success, and no economic investment created an artistic environment where talent wasn’t attracted and skill wasn’t developed.  Even so, the genre continued to attract artists who were willing to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles just for the sake of creating.  The genre was continually being pioneered as it was continually readapted to changing political situations.  Through it all, people kept using art to communicate ideas.  That so many people would keep struggling for a dream that wasn’t coming true is a metaphor for the perpetual decline of the Soviet system.  At the same time, it’s a valuable lesson that a political ideology whose success depends on suppressing the artistic expression of human interests is doomed to fail. 

I Know I’m Not Alone:  Directed by Michael Franti (Stay Human Films) This is a documentary by an American musician who decided to get some friends of his together and go visit the Middle East.  First he went to Iraq and then to Israel and Palastine.  He met lots of local people, who were teachers, farmers, soldiers, taxi drivers, activists, poets, and musicians, and even some U.S. military personnel.  He discovered that he could make a lot of friends just by walking down a street playing his acoustic guitar.  Everyone he met, on every side of every conflict, said they didn’t want to be in the conflict, but they didn’t know how to get out of it.  He even interviewed one Iraqi taxi driver who hit my Selfish Gene perspective of the invasion on the head:  The U.S. military was intentionally sent into Iraq without a strategy for winning, in order to manufacture a humanitarian crisis that would get worse if they left, and still doesn’t have a strategy for resolving the crisis, thereby justifying the U.S. military’s continued occupation of the world’s second largest oil supply.

Inspirations:  Directed by Michael Apted (Clear Blue Sky Productions)  A documentary of interviews with seven accomplished artists—a musician, a dancer, a choreographer, a painter, an architect, and two sculptors—about how they create.

September 11^th:  Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, Youssef Chahine, Danis Tanovic, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Ken Loach, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Amos Gitai, Mira Nair, Sean Penn, and Shohei Imamura (Empire Pictures)  This is an artistic interpretation of September 11^th, told by 11 directors from different countries in 11 films 11 minutes in length each.   This is a story of September 11^th from the perspective of people from Iran, France, Egypt, Bosnia-Herzgovinia, Burkina Faso (in Africa), the United Kingdom, Mexico, Isreal, India, the United States, and Japan.  These are all perspectives that are different from those reported in the U.S. mainstream media.  All of the films tell their stories by compressing a lot of conflicting emotions into 11 minutes. The film from India is based on a true story of a Muslim Indian whose family had immigrated to the U.S., who was training to be an EMT, who disappeared on September 11^th, who was suspected of being a terrorist, and whose body was later discovered under the World Trade Center where he died helping to save people.  The stories from Iran, Egypt, Bosnia, Burkino Faso, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Japan are all stories about various ways that people sympathize with Americans but their sympathy is tempered by the fact that their countries have already lived through worse.  The film from Iran is about Afghan refugees who understand death raining upon them from the skies but have never seen a skyscraper.  The films from Egypt, Bosnia, and Isreal are about people who know what it’s like to have their buildings get blown up, because their buildings get blown up all the time.  The film from Burkino Faso tells the story of a junior highschool boy and four of his friends who hear about the attack and are excited about it, but to them it’s just another war, and the main character is preoccupied with dropping out of school to get a job so he can pay for his mother’s AIDS medications.  The film from the U.K. is about a Chilean refugee who fled the U.S. backed overthrow of his democratically elected government by Augusto Pinochet on September 11^th 1973, writing an open letter to U.S. citizens sympathizing with the feeling of planes destroying buildings and lots of his friends getting killed, hoping that Americans and Chileans will be better able to see eye to eye now.  The film from Japan is set in World War II, which was a holy war to them, and it turned men into animals anyway.  The films from France and the United States focus on the effects of conflicting emotions on individual people, and it was a big artistic challenge to compress the long-term emotional conflict into such a short-term and emotionally one-sided event.  The French film tells the story of a deaf French woman living in New York with an American who works as a tour guide for deaf tourists.  Their relationship is getting into trouble, he goes off in the morning to guide a tour at the World Trade Center, and she e-mails him a letter saying she thinks they should probably break up, unable to hear the TV in the next room showing the World Trade Center collapsing.  The American film tells a story of an old man whose wife has died long ago and who keeps talking and living his life as if she’s there anyway.   As the World Trade Center collapses in the background without his noticing, he realizes he’s been fooling himself… but the film leaves unanswered the question of whether he has finally realized it or he goes through cycles of realizing and forgetting.   The film from Mexico is basically a psychological rock video made up of video and audio clips from mainstream U.S. media, interspersed with silence and darkness, illustrating how the decisions people make are limited by their perception of the situation.  He ends it with a question:  Does God’s light show us the way, or blind us?

Television under the Swastika:  Written and directed by Michael Kloft (First Run Features)  This is a documentary about the first nine years of television broadcasting in the world—which took place in Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1944.  This documentary show the an unusual mixture of development of television as a technology and artistic medium and simultaneously its development an implement of Nazi propaganda.

That’s My Face: Directed by Thomas Allen Harris (Wellspring)  This is a cross between a documentary and a music video, about an African-American photographer’s search for his identity in the U.S. and the Civil Rights Movement, to Tanzania, and Brazil.  In the U.S. he’s a minority, in Tanzania he was the majority, and in Brazil he was part of the majority of the population but tied tot he bottom of the racialized economic system.  In the U.S. and Brazil, it’s hard for people to develop identities as Blacks when earning their way out of poverty depends on proving they’re White—meaning, being accepted into the White identity.  This movie revolves around images of Black people’s faces in the three countries, where the people are all searching for identity, and are all doing it in different situations.  Is African a race, or is it also a culture?  Is it only one culture, or is it more than one?  Ultimately, Mr. Harris concludes, it’s an identity of a lot of people who have some basic things in common, and who have adapted to different conditions.

The Media Crisis:  Peter Watkins (Les Editions Omnispheres, also online)  A critique of the Mass Audio Visual Media’s role in politics, education, culture, economics, and the environmental crisis, by the director of La Commune.  He shows how the film industry has settled into a directing style that controls the audience’s reaction to the art by leaving no room for independent thought, how that style creates cultural values, and how the control of the media and those cultural values affect things like education and U.S. foreign policy.  His films have been blacklisted from commercial media because his goal in his films is to develop new directing styles that engage his audience’s critical thought on his work and generally educate people by arousing their curiosity and debate.

The Singing Revolution:  Written and directed by Maureen Castle Tusty, James Tusty, and Mike Majoros (Mountain View Productions)  This documentary is a test of the amc = v equation and proof of how to win a revolution democratically.  Estonia is a small country and extremely valuable coastal real estate between Russia and the Baltic Sea.  Since they don’t have the economic power to defend themselves against Russian invasion, they depend on cultural development instead.  They fight by singing.  They built up their culture around a music festival they have every five years, with 30,000 people on the stage at the same time—which is approximately 3% of the population of their country.  That gives them an excuse to come together and communicate on a regular basis—which lets them organize politically outside their official political structure, and show each other, their enemies, and everyone else that they are united by common interests.  During World War II they were invaded by the Nazis and by the Soviets twice.  But in the 1980s, with over a century of practice at peaceful unity this way, they agreed to seceed from the Soviet Union.   Leaders of different factions had conflicting strategies in how to do it, but in the end the reason any strategies succeeded was because the people supported them.  They kept making one reasonable demand after another, which Mikail Gorbechev couldn’t reasonably oppose, until they all registered themselves as Estonian citizens, elected an unofficial government, and voted to recognize Soviet law as secondary to Estonian law.  By the time they officially seceded from the Soviet Union, they had already seceded from it in practice anyway.  In the end, crowds of people singing in the streets won a show down against the Soviet army that had been sent to crush the rebellion.  Revolution is the art of turning a society into a better society.  Ultimately, there was no ideology to the revolution, just an agreement among the people to cooperate with each other.

The Yes Men:  Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, and Sarah Price (United Artists)  This is a documentary about absurdist performance art as protest.  Andy Bichelbaum and Mike Bonanno, two anti-globalization activists set up a website satirizing the WTO.  Representatives of several groups mistook them for the actual WTO and invited them to various parts of the world to give talks on behalf of the WTO.  So these guys went, and impersonated representatives of the WTO.  They parodied the WTO by building their speeches around information from anti-WTO activists, acknowledging the human costs of making profits, trying to act more outrageously cold blooded than the real WTO representatives, but it took them several attempts to figure out how to do it.

Everything else I’ve had to say about art I’ve learned over the course of my career.

History

1491—New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:  Charles C. Mann (Knopf)  This is an archeological history of the pre-Colonial Americas, which dispels a lot of myths about Native Americans.  Rather than being sub-human savages or perfectly enlightened philosophers, as various people typically portray them, Native Americans were equal Homo sapiens who lived in much different living conditions than the Europeans did.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Directed by Francoise Wolff (Kultur)  This is a documentary about the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a great Russian writer who was a critic of Communism, who spent eight years as a political prisoner during the Stalin era, who was later exiled from the Soviet Union, who returned after its fall, and now is critical of the Russian free market, seeing a lot of new manifestations to the same problems—it’s still just a few rich people writing laws everyone else has to follow and making their money by exploiting other people’s labor.  His books are about fictitious people but tell the stories of real things that happened, including his book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was based on his own life in the Sibberian labor camp.

A Little Matter of Genocide—Holocaust Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present:  Ward Churchill (City Lights)  A history of the European conquest of the Americas and the Native American genocide and its continuation in the present day by more subtle means.  Also an examination of the many strategies that have been used to erase it from our history, including academics philosophizing it to the point of meaninglessness, politicians defining it out of existence by writing laws against genocide that don’t include their own countries’ histories of genocide, and some Jewish historians trying to claim a monopoly on the word and the idea of genocide as something that only happened to their own people.

Alive:  Directed by Frank Marshall (Touchstone)  This is a fiction based on the true story of a Uruguyan rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes.  It illustrates how people, and organisms and species more generally, who have breadth of abilities and who aren’t specialized to particular living conditions, are the best able to adapt when the living conditions change drastically.  The rugby team starts out with a well definied social hierarchy that’s based on who’s best at playing rugby.  But when they’re stranded in the mountains, a couple of troublemakers from the bottom of the hierarchy adapt best and end up saving the others.

Anne Frank (DVD) Directed by Robert Dornhelm (Touchstone) This dramatization is based on Anne Frank: the Biography by Mellissa Mueller, original research and interviews by Kirk Ellis, and Anne’s diary.  Anne’s three friends in the story who were still living when the movie was made were consultants for the movie.  Wherever artistic licensce was taken to fill in details that no one could research, like, her life in the concentration camp, they were filled in with details that are known to have happened to other people in her situation.  The Diary of Anne Frank is the most widely read non-fiction book in the world after the Bible (meaning the most widely read non-fiction book in the world).  Anne died two weeks before her concentration camp was liberated, at the age of 15.  If nothing else, this movie is a good reminder of both the good and evil Homo sapiens are capable of in certain situations.

A People’s History of the United States:  Howard Zinn (Perennial Classics)  Dr. Zinn intended this as a history of the abuse of political power and grassroots political struggles in the United States, to show that politicians are the heros history books make them out to be, they only seem that way because they make their historical political decisions in response to people struggling to accomplish goals.  What Dr. Zinn didn’t realize was that by writing a history of the pusuit of self-interest in America he was writing a Selfish Gene perspective on history.

Cold War Blues—The Operation Dismantle Story: Jim Stark (Voyageur Publishing, also available online)  This is the story of the Canadian nuclear disarmament movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, as told by the head of the foremost disarmament group.  Mr. Stark didn’t intend it this way, but this is a Selfish Gene perspective on history, telling in painful detail how politicians and war profiteers, like all other organisms, always use their available resources to advance their own interests.  The goal of nuclear disarmement was supported by 80% of Canadians, a majority of Members of Parliament, and the Prime Minister.  For 9 years Operation Dismantle consistently won public support and was consistently prevented from changing anything by U.S. politicians, until the organization was infiltrated by the CIA and destroyed.

Darwin’s Secret Notebooks: Directed by Geoff Luck (National Geographic)  This documentary tells the story of Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, his stops along the east and west coasts of South America, in the Galapagos Islands, and on islands across the Pacific.  He studied fossils, geology, distributions of plants and animals, and differences and similarities between plants and animals through time and across distances, and little by little he pieced together the ideas that the Earth was a lot older than humanity, that species change over time, and finally, at the age of 29, the natural selection of characteristics.  This documentary builds up to the idea of evolution little by little by showing how Darwin built up to it little by little.

Declassified: Human Experimentation:  Directed by Avner Tavori (History Channel)  This is a documentary from the History channel about nuclear, chemical, and biological experimentation on humans in America.  It doesn’t live up to Ward Churchill’s standards, because it focuses on experimentation on White people, leaving out the fact that a lot of experimentation on Native Americans on remote reservations took place leading up to the experimentation on White people.  But it is at least a video that confirms his claim that human experimentation has taken place.

DNA Secret of Photo 51:  Directed by Gary Glassman, Narrated by Sigouney Weaver (WGBH Boston)  This documentary tells the story of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, whose work in X-ray photography made James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix possible.  She faced a lot of sexism as a woman working in science in the 1950s, and her contribution was almost completely swept under the rug at the time.  She died of cancer in 1958 at age 37, so she’s not here to tell her own story now.

Forgotten Ellis Island:  Witten and directed by Lorie Conway () This is a documentary about the hospital complex on Ellis Island, which immigrants to America had to pass through in the early 20^th century to prevent outbreaks of plagues on the mainland.  The story of the hospitlal’s 30 year operation is a story of European immigration for that time, which includes politics, different attitudes, changing rules, ethocentricism, and the selective use of science to supposedly prove that people from eastern and southern Europe were genetically inferior to people from northern and western Europe.  Also, the idea of preventing immigrants from bringing plagues into the U.S. was a gigantic goal, so the hospital pioneered a lot of new approaches to medicine and medical ethics that are in use today.

Forgotten Founders— How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy: Bruce Johansen (Harvard Press, also available online at www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.html#TOC)  This is an important example of memetic evolution that took place in American history.  About half of the United States Constitution overlaps almost perfectly with half of the Constitution of the Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”) Nation, who were the dominant military power in the northeastern United States in the 1700s, whose alliance tipped the balance of power between the British and French colonies, and whose assistance proved critical to the British victory in the French and Indian War.  When the Founding Fathers founded their new government on their new continent, they had their choice among two sets of ideas for governments, and they picked all the new ideas they found that seemed like solutions to the old problems they were rebelling against.  Most of the new political developments that the U.S. government made over the European monarchies had been in use in the Haudenosaunee Nation for centuries.

From Ike to Mao and Beyond—My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist:  Bob Avakian (Insight Press)  This is the autobiography of the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party.  He was heavily involved with the Civil Rights Movement and peace movement from a radical standpoint, and travelled to China twice, so it’s a unique perspective on recent history and politics.

Genocide:  Directed by Arnold Schwartzman, Narrated by Orson Wells and Elizabeth Taylor (Moriah Films)  This is a documentary of the history of the genocide of European Jews during the Third Reich.  It’s made up of film footage from the time, letters, poetry, memoirs, and journals of Jews who were there, and written orders from the Nazi command.   It’s a somewhat Jewish-centric account of the Holocaust, but no less powerful for it.  It’s a first hand account of how economic desperation led to political desperation led to political leaders ordering categories of people to be eliminated from the economy, and eliminated in general.

Great Speeches of Abraham Lincoln:  Abraham Lincoln, edited by Stanely Appelbaum (Dover)  This is a first-hand account of the social, political, and economic factors that led up to the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Reconstruction.  Abraham Lincoln was involved in the conflict between slavery and democracy from the beginning of his political career. The Confederate States were already preparing to seceed when he took office, they fired the first shots a month later, and he was assassinated five days after their surrender.  Through it all, he kept the public informed of his philosophical reasoning for how to best preserve the founding principles of the United States even in the midst of an all-out Civil War.  He followed those principles all the way up to fully restoring the senators and representatives of the Confederate States to Congress immediately after their surrender, because any other choice would’ve been antithetical to the United States the Union had fought so hard to preserve.

Heir to an Execution:  Directed by Ivy Meeropol (Cinemax) This is a documentary about Ethel and Julius Rosenthal, made by one of their granddaughters.  The Roesnthals were Commuists who worked in the defense industry and who were executed in 1953 for turning over U.S. military secrets to the Soviets, including plans for the atom bomb.  Part of Ms. Meeropol’s goal was to find out who her grandparents were, and part was to try to find out the true story of what they had done.  One possibility that a lot of people have talked about was that they were targets of McCarthyism and were used as an example of what would happen to anyone who traded U.S. military secrets to the Soviets.  There are many aspects of their trial that make it look like it was rigged to convict them.  One is that while technically they were giving files from the atom bomb to the Soviets, the plans they were passing were so simple they were basically worthless.  Now that the FBI files have been opened, they show that Julius was a Soviet agent but Ethel wasn’t.  So this is a very complicated story about two people who did what they thought was right, for reasons and in ways most Americans don’t.  They were offered life in prison if they would’ve informed on 25 other suspected spies, but they didn’t take it.  To some people that makes them heroes.

Home of the Brave:  Written and directed by Paola di Florio (Home Vision Entertainment) This is a documentary about Viola Liuzzo, the only White woman to be murdered in the Civil Rights Movement.  She Was 39 years old, a nurse, and a mother of five, and she travelled down to Selma, Alabama from Michigan.  The mishandling of the evidence by the local law enforcement, like forgetting to dust the gun for fingerprints, was obviously done to keep the people who were fighting against the Civil Rights Movement from being punished, and the evidence wasn’t sufficient to convince the jury of 12 White men that the defendants were guilty. The FBI had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, one of their agents was involved in the murder, and he had been authorized to participate in violent crime.  On the surface that seems to mean that the FBI was determined to go to any length necessary to win the trust of criminals and then bring them to justice.  But as the Selfish Gene Theory predicts, the FBI is made up of inherently self-interested people who act to to advance their own goals.  If it was proven that a White woman was killed by the KKK, the Civil Rights Movement would’ve attracted a lot of support from other White women, many of whom already had experience in the feminist movement.  But if the KKK murdered a White woman and got away with it, that would scare a lot of White feminists away from the Civil Rights Movement in the south.  The Selfish Gene perspective says that the FBI’s real goal for infiltrating the KKK was to help ensure that violence would be used against the Civil Rights Movement in ways that would result in the Civil Rights Movement proceeding in a manner the FBI approved of, namely, winning enough to keep the protestors from resorting to violence out of desperation like the Black Panthers were advocating, but not winning so much peacefully that they destabilized the government and threatened the livelihoods of the ruling class.  Hence, as the evidence showed, J. Edgar Hoover slandered Ms. Luzzio within the FBI and then some of that was leaked to the press. The result was that White women all over America believed she was a failure as a mother who had deserted her five children, instead of remembering her as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement.

Huey P. Newton: Prelude to Revolution: Directed by John Evans (Xenon Pictures)  This is an interview with Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, while he was in prison.  He talks about war, racism, economics, the history of race relations in America, and the Black Panthers’ goals of Black liberation in American on the Blacks’ terms.

Image Before My Eyes—A History of Jewish Life in Poland before the Holocaust: Directed by Josh Waletsky (Docurama)  This is a documentary about the Jews living in Poland before 1939 and their culture.  There were about 3.5 million Jews living there before the Nazi invasion, and only 250,000 survived, many of whom had fled the area.  This documentary is a modern archeological reconstruction of that lost culture, using old photographs and film and interviews with some of those survivors.

Into the Fire: Directed by Julia Newman (First Run Films)  This is a documentary about American women who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War to help the governmental forces who were fighting against the Fascists who had the support of German and Italian troops.  The women volunteered because they believed that a Fascist overthrow of the Spanish government would be the beginning of a second World War, which they didn’t want.  Sure enough, five months after the Spanish government fell, the Germans invaded Poland.

King Rat:  James Clavell (Dell)  This novel is historical fiction about British soldiers held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II.  It illustrates how people, and organisms and species more generally, adapt to changing situations according to their abilities.  King Rat is a corporal who adapts better than anyone else to the conditions in the prison camp.  With his entrepreneurial talents and perceptiveness to human behavior, he takes over the blackmarket in the camp.  In the end he effectively takes over the camp altogether, because he lures the Japanese guards and officers into depending on him to get what they want.  But then the war ends, the prisoners are released, everyone goes back to their regular military duties, and his blackmarket empire is instantly swept away.

Kinsey:  Directed by Barak Goodman and John Maggio (WGBH Boston) This is a documentary about the life and work of Alfred Kinsey, the scientific rebel who began the study of sexuality in America.  Before his work, there was no scientific data in America about sexuality that wasn’t overshadowed by Christian morality.  His work wasn’t perfect, but his main accomplishment was to pioneer new scientific territory that other people people have since refined.  Like all scientific pioneers he was a hero to many people and a villain to many others.

Labor Stories:  Directed by Judy Hoffman, Sharon Karp, Gordon Quinn, Jerry Bulmenthal, and Peter Kuttner (Kartequin Films)  This an anthology of three short documentaries on the labor movement in the Chicago area in the 1970s:  The House Staff Association at Cook County Hospital, an unemployment office, and the United Electical Workers at a Wells Manufacturing cast iron foundary.

La Commune:  Directed by Peter Watkins (First Run Icarus Films)  A French film about the Paris Commune, which is nearly 6 hours long.  It’s a low budget flim shot on a set built in a warehouse, where 200 actors played parts of real-life people they had resesearched. It’s part documentary, part historical reenactment, partly scripted, and partly improvised.  To expedite the story telling, they used TV and TV reporters as modern anachronisms to interview characters and also to show characters’ reactions to learning news as it developed.  That also let them blur the time setting toward the end of the movie, to create a really creepy perspective on history:  At various points you realize the actors have started talking about their own views on the present day anti-Capitalist revolution, but if you rewind to the beginning of the scene and watch it over you can see there is no specific point at which they stopped talking about the anti-Capitalist revolution of the 19^th century and started talking about the anti-Capitalist revolution of the 21^st century.  That makes the film simultaneously a comparison between the past and the present and a story of the ongoing struggle.

Nazi America: Written by Greg De Hart (History Channel)  This is a documentary about the history of Nazism in America.  German immigrants brought it here in the 1930s, as part of Hitler’s plan to help destabilize America.  White supremacism was resurrected in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and continues today.  Now it’s a few old men who philosophize about hate and some younger men who try to impress them by committing acts of terrorism against their enemies.  It’s been combined with a sort of Christian fundamentalism that dictates that people don’t question White supremacism.  They’re depending on divine intervention to make their politicial strategy succeed, because they obviously have no idea how to make it succeed themselves.  It’s bad news if you’re one of their victims, but it’s hardly a threat to the country.  Still, it’s a good warning about what people are still capable of believing in.

On the Justice of Roosting Chickens—Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality:  Ward Churchill (AK Press)  A History of U.S. military intervention in other countries, violations of international law, and voting record in the United Nations. 220 years of military history and 60 years of activity in the U.N. show yet another a consistent pattern of self interest that indicates that U.S. political decisions are motivated by Selfish Genes rather than inherent goodness.

Prince among Slaves: Written and directed by Andrea Kalin, narrated by Mos Def (WGBH Boston) This is a documentary about Abdul Rahman, an African prince who was captured in 1788 and sold into slavery in America.  After 40 years he was released, bought his wife out of slavery, moved to the north, and was a voice for abolition for a while.  Finally he got back to Africa, but died soon after.  With the money they’d saved, his wife was able to buy two of their sons and their families out of slavery, who moved to Liberia to live with her.  In 2006 their descendants from both sides of the Atlantic were finally reunited.

Sacco and Vanzetti:  Peter Miller (First Run Features)  This is a documentary about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were convicted of murders in Boston in 1920, and executed in 1927.  The were Anarchists, and it was obvious that they weren’t on trial for murder, they were on trial for being Anarchists.  Not even the man who actually committed the murder coming forward and admitting to it was enough to get them released.  Their case drew world-wide attention then, and is a lesson in how the so-called justice system is still being used against activists, immigrants, people of ideologies that differ from mainstream America, and anyone else whose existence threatens powerful people.

Sir, No Sir!—The Suppressed Story of the G.I. Movement to End the War in Vietnam:  David Zeiger (Docurama)  A documentary about the anti-war movement in the military during the Vietnam War.

Slaver Catchers, Slave Resisters:  Directed by Judy Richardson (History Channel)  This is a documentary about the slave system in America, how slave owners enforced it and how slaves fought against it.  This covers part of the content of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and of Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy.

The Abolition of White Democracy:  Joel Olson (University of Minnesota Press)  A political, economic, and social, history of Black and White race relations in the United States.

The Celts—A Journey Back in Time:  Written by David Manson (Cromwell Productions)  This is a documentary about the pre-Christian, pre-Roman, and preliterate people of France, who spread into the British Isles and much of the rest of Europe.  There’s nothing controversial about the documentary, but it is a story that depends on archeology and other indirect methods to tell, because the Celts didn’t write down their own history and it wasn’t recorded objectively by the Romans or Christians.

The Great Inca Rebellion:  Directed by Alan Ritsko (WGBH Boston)  This is a documentary about an Incan graveyard that was discovered outside of Lima, Peru.  The last people to be buried there died violent deaths, which was consistent with the official history of the Inca’s siege of Lima that the Spaniards fought off.  But most of the injuries were inflicted with Native American weapons.  Together, archeologists and historians construct a different history of the Spaniards’ conquest of the Inca, which involved the Spaniards making alliances with Native Americans who were rebelling against the Incan empire.  By leaving the assistance of the rebels out of the historical accounts, the Spaniards wrote a version of history in which groups of a few hundred Spaniards regularly defeated armies of tens of thousands of Inca.  The numbers of the Spaniards and Inca were true, and the Spaniards did win, but the Spaniards didn’t win single handedly.

The Great Law of Peace:  Dekanawidah (available in multiple places online)  This is the Constitution of the Haudenosaunee Nation, which is the one nation of Native Americans who never surrendered and are still a sovereign nation to this day.  Dekanawidah was their messiah figure and taught them the set of laws they used to unite their five nations.

The Greeks—Crucible of Civilization:  Narrated by Liam Neeson, Directed by Cassian Harrison (WGBH Boston) This is a documentary about the rise and fall of the Athenian empire in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., during which they developed ideas that became the foundation of democracy, art, literature, theatre, architecture, science, and philosophy in the western world, as well as the Olympics and the marathon.  There is a distinct parallel between the rise and fall of the Athenian empire and America today, because they started out with some ideas that worked out well for them, built up their political power, economy, and culture, and then over-extended themselves, believing themselves to be capable of more than they were, and their empire collapsing when their great plans ended in disaster.  But in the midst of the collapse of the Athenian empire, Socrates developed the idea of learning by applying critical thought to everything. Athenian ideas kept spreading even after their empire disintegrated, which means their empire shifted from the physical to the memetic.

The Unfinished Revolution—An Essay on the Sources of Influence of Marxism and Communism:  Adam B. Ulam (Vintage)  This book is about 40 years old and not terribly exciting to read.  But it is a mid-Cold War perspective on why Communism seemed like such a good idea to a lot of people and why it was competing against Capitalism for world dominance.  It also outlines weaknesses of Communism, which led to be its downfall 20 years later.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon:  Written and Directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld (Paramount) This is a documentary of John Lennon’s political activism and his struggle against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration.  It has lots of interview footage of him at the time and new interviews with historians, activists, friends, and government officials who tried to stop him.  The movie is obviously biased in John’s favor in a sense, but in another sense the events themselves were biased in his favor, so this could be an objective documentary of someone who won fair and square.  It is a fact that Richard Nixon resigned and John Lennon didn’t, so he won on that count, it’s a fact that the Dalai Lama and people all over the world are still struggling for social justice and world peace, and and it’s a fact that people who are serious about world peace are still the enemies of governments.

War Letters: Written and directed by Paul Kenner (WGBH Boston) This is a documentary about letters that military personnel have written home from combat duty, from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and First Iraq War.  This is a good look at perspectives of people who have lived through things very different from anything most Americans of today have done.

Winter Soldier (DVD):  Vietnam Veterans Against the War  (New Yorker Video)  Video footage of the original Winter Soldier hearing by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, about war crimes and atrocities committed by Americans as part of the American strategy.

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train—A Personal History of Our Times:  Howard Zinn  (Beacon Press)  This is Howard Zinn’s autobiography.  He is the son of immigrant parents, he worked in a shipyard at the beginning of World War II, then served in the airforce aboard a B17 bomber, was a laborer after the war, then got a Ph.D. in history, then moved to Alabama to teach at an all-Black women’s college, and there got caught up in the Civil Rights Movement, feminist movement, and peace movement.  His perspectives as a historian, veteran, child of an immigrant family, and Socialist make this another unique perspective on recent history.

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (DVD):  Howard Zinn, Deb Ellis, and Denis Mueller (First Run Features)  The documentary of Howard Zinn’s biography.

Feminism

Not for Ourselves Alone—The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Directed by Ken Burns (Paramount) This is a documentary of the lives of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who started the struggle for voting rights for women, who championed it for 50 years, and were best friends through it all. They devoted their lives to a struggle that wasn’t won until after their deaths, and won official political voice—citizenship in our democracy, in other words—for over half the population of the U.S..  But even today most Americans don’t think of their work as very important because they were “just women”.  Few people today even know who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was because she’s been practically written out of history for trying to take the struggle to the next level in the last years of her life by writing her own interpretation of the Bible with an androgenous god that created both man and woman in his/her image.

Promiscuities—The Secret Struggle for Womanhood: Naomi Wolf (Fawcett Columbine/Ballantine Publishing)  As a feminist who came of age in San Francisco in the 1970s, Ms. Wolf lived on the cutting edge of the post sexual revolution feminist movement.  She realized that for a girl to grow up to be a self-empowered woman she has to learn a lot of information. A big source of feminine disempowerment is the fact America has no cultural body of information that women can learn.  Our masculine dominated culture has destroyed the female culture that is integral to structure of other societies.  That forces girls to grow up in secret, forcing them to learn how to be women by whispering rumors to each other, and that results in a lot of women not getting critical pieces of information.  So this book is a combination of Ms. Wolf’s personal experiences growing up and of stories told to her by other women, to serve as a foundation for a new female culture.

The Beauty Myth—How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women:  Naomi Wolf (Harper Perennial)  This is an exhaustive study of ways male-dominated media has created a male definition of female beauty, and how that definition is used by men to cripple the feminist movement.  Each of the many ways that women struggle for acceptance by men is a way for men to distract women from struggling for anything that will do women any good.  As long as men decide whether or not to accept women, no matter how hard women struggle, the men will keep raising their standards.  This book identifies many complicated patterns of repression of women and uses a strong female perspective to counteract the myth of Barbie doll beauty.  Unfortunately, Ms. Wolf has a lot of serious misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology, so she completely misinterprets the biological foundation of beauty.  Without understanding the source of the problem, she can’t solve it.  If you read this book in conjunction with How the Mind Works you can see how the biological origins of beauty do lead to the complicated patterns Ms. Wolf identifies, and then you can understand the problem well enough to solve it.

The Ethical Slut:  Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt (Greenery Press)  There are a lot of books that have been written about feminism.  The points raised in some of them can be fairly easily traced to evolutionary psychology, while the points raised in many of them are propaganda written by women who’ve made the mistake of assuming that men and women must think the same way, or must be forced to think the same way in order to make women equal to men.  I thought this book was worth pointing out because rather than being a stereotypical book about stereotypical female empowerment, it’s a book about different ways women have found to have sexual relationships with more than one man simultaneously, in an empowering manner rather than in a degrading manner.  This is a perfect example of what I mean by women who don’t seem to have all the standard woman characteristics simply finding different ways to express some of them.

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