“Mark Kingwell is a beautiful writer, a lucid thinker and a patient teacher ... His insights are intellectual anchors in a fast-changing world.”—Naomi Klein, author of
No Logo
Meet the “fast zombie" citizen of the current world. He is a rapid, brainless carrier of preference-driven consumption. His Facebook-style ‘likes’ replace complex notions of personhood. Legacy college admissions and status-seekers gobble up his idea of public education, and positional market reductions hollow out his sense of shared goods. Meanwhile, the political debates of his 24-hour-a-day newscycle are picked clean by pundits, tortured by tweets. Forget the TV shows and doomsday scenarios; when it comes to democracy, the zombie apocalypse may already be here.
Since the publication of
A Civil Tongue
(1995), philosopher Mark Kingwell has been urging us to consider how monstrous, self-serving public behaviour can make it harder to imagine and achieve the society we want. Now, with
Unruly Voices
, Kingwell returns to the subjects of democracy, civility, and political action, in an attempt to revitalize an intellectual culture too-often deadened by its assumptions of personal advantage and economic value. These 17 new essays, where zombies share pages with cultural theorists, poets, and presidents, together argue for a return to the imagination—and from their own unruly voices rises a sympathetic democracy to counter the strangeness of the postmodern political landscape.
Mark Kingwell
is the author of sixteen books and a contributing editor for
Harper's Magazine
.