Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2021

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on criticism of cultural criticism, the sociology and demography of race in America, the political philosophy of doing something about climate change, or Afrocentric historiography.

Jen Williams, A Dark and Secret Place, a.k.a. Dog Rose Dirt

Mind candy mystery: in which a young journalist dealing with her deceased mother's effects discovers just how messed up parts of the 1970s counter-culture could get. This is the same Williams who wrote some excellent fantasy novels [1, 2], and some of the same skills for the uncanny are deployed here, but in the end everything is definitely this-worldly (I think). I enjoyed this a lot and hope it does well, but not so well that Williams gives up fantasy for mystery entirely.

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture a.k.a. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed

A scorched-earth attack on the theory and practice of the counter-culture, especially as we knew it in the period from, let us say, the end of the Cold War to Occupy Wall Street. There are places where I want to quibble with them [*], but over-all my reaction is "preach! preach!".

ObLinkage 1: A paper by Heath from 2001, summarizing the argument (and making explicit both, on the one hand, Heath's debts to both Habermas and game theory**, and on the other the affinity between Heath and Potter and the1990s Baffler crew.)

ObLinkage 2: the authors interviewed on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the book.

[*]: Simplifying, they attribute a lot of counter-cultural themes to a specific historical experience, viz., reacting against anything that seemed to lead to, or to resemble, Nazism. But (i) why should this remain persuasive for later generations? and (ii) lots of that reaction seems continuous with older patterns of disgust with mediocrity and conformity, which you can find in the 19th century easily enough. (I guess they might reply that the themes were old, but it took the 1940s to make them widely persuasive.) But their historical explanations are separate from their substantive criticisms.

[**]: More exactly, ">Habermas (partially) de-mystified through game theory. This fusion of actual (2nd wave) Frankfurt School critical theory and game theory is, I believe, unique to Heath, but I could wish it was more widespread among critical theorists.

Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream

This is a very detailed and thorough treatment of how the end of white America has been greatly, greatly exaggerated. One important contributor to this, in Alba's telling, was a decision on the part of the Census Bureau to produce summary statistics, and demographic projections, which count anyone with mixed white and non-white ancestry as non-white, i.e., to implement the old "one drop rule". (One of the ironies of Alba's account is that this was done to harmonize with decisions made by other parts of the federal government trying to enforce civil rights laws, and rather more defensibly on their part.) As Alba documents at some length, however, people of mixed white-Asian and white-Hispanic ancestry look and act very, very much like the children of unmixed non-Hispanic-white ancestry. In general, he shows, Asian and Hispanic groups are, in many ways, on a trajectory similar to those of immigrant groups from southern and eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th century, being rapidly assimilated into a "mainstream" that is broadening its definition of what counts as, in some sense, fully American.

You will notice that this optimistic part of the story does not apply to black people or even to children of mixed black and white parentage.

I have only sketched a few of the highlights here. (If you want a few more details, the review in Dissent which lead me to the book is pretty good.) Alba is a careful if un-exciting writer who builds a