Having finished a number of good books this summer, I’m starting in on reading the well-received, if depressing, The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen. Jensen, a writer of strong passions and incredible stamina, paints a very large picture of atrocity and death in the 20th century — mostly driven by racial hatred and prejudice.
In 700 pages, Jensen argues that Western culture and globalization has made us immune to the ravages we have ourselves hefted on others. I disagree with some of his assumptions (particularly around capitalism and its discontents), but the book is a powerful read about how our social structures have blinded us to our extravagances. The book seems to me a kind of historical continuation of Guy Debord’s important little book The Society of the Spectacle, albeit less theoretical and aesthetically oriented.