Democracy and Independent Publishing

"Sadly, now, publishing is almost entirely a matter of profitability, meaning that if you want to publish something that is immediately profitable, it’s very rare that it will turn out to be predicated on strong ideas, or dissident ideas.”

“That’s a big problem. It has considerably reduced the amount of good books published”.

… “without a free publishing industry, there can be no democracy.”

“Books today have become mere adjuncts to the world of mass media, offering light entertainment and reassurances that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds … The resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have thought possible in a free society.”

Sources:

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-andre-schiffrin/

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/books-must-stop-beingasideshowtomassmedia.html

Stop arguing, start reading

We can't get along because "People who belong to different communities —with different ideas, experiences, and values— will hold different standards of reason." However, reading has the power to unite us:

"The political divide in America can be seen as a geographical problem: Red and Blue Americans disagree deeply ... when you don’t share experiences with someone — when you lack a common perspective — it’s easy to think of their opinions as arbitrary and wrong. ...

Reading fiction has the power to change it...

"To create a more inclusive society you need to expand community boundaries; you can’t use reason to expand those boundaries because reason itself is parochial; fiction, however, has the power to cross communities and make strangers intelligible to each other; and once a community has been enlarged, it becomes possible for the members of the expanded community to practice politics together using shared standards of reason.

The power that Rorty ascribed to fiction led him to conclude that the novel is "the characteristic genre of democracy.”

And indeed, if there’s an opening in the literary fiction market right now, it might be for a novel that translates across the partisan gap.

That may seem like a lot to ask of a story, but Rorty, who admired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would have said that fiction has moved bigger mountains before."

More: http://mobile.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2013/01/the_political_d



SpyWriter Jack King, the author of:
Agents of Change, WikiJustice, The Black Vault, and The Fifth Internationale.
Coming soon:


www.SpyWriter.com

Necessary Sacrifices

"We have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. A government which lacks authority will have little ability short of cataclysmic crisis to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary."

Samuel P Huntington