Walter Truett Anderson is one of those writers who seems to come along just when you most need him. I was halfway through writing Sewer, Gas & Electric, trying to nail down the point of the story, when I happened across Anderson's Reality Isn't What It Used to Be on the shelves of the South Portland Bookland. The book helped crystalize many of the half-formed ideas I'd been grappling with in Sewer, and set me off in search of Anderson's other works.
Another political spectrum is now becoming visible—so visible, in fact, that you would have a hard time not noticing its presence. We commonly identify it also as a conservative-to-liberal spectrum, but it is not quite the same. The new spectrum has at one extreme those who hold firmly to a set of truths that they declare to be the cosmic reality. These enviably sure-minded citizens may be religious fundamentalists or hard-nosed scientists, Marxist ideologues or true believers in Gaia—epistemology makes its own strange bedfellows. All kinds of positions occupy the middle ground; some of them are moderate and most of them merely confused. Near the other extreme are the relativists and constructivists who hold all truth to be human invention. Whatever is out there, they say, remains for all time out there, and all our systems of thought are stories we tell ourselves about something that remains essentially unknowable.
And there is yet another position. The rush of postmodern reaction from the old certainties has swept some people headlong into a worldview even more radical than that of the constructivists. Many voices can now be heard declaring that what is out there is only what we put out there. More precisely, what I put there—just little me, euphorically creating my own universe. We used to call this solipsism; now we call it New Age spirituality. It is the world according to Shirley MacLaine, who apparently created us all.
— from Reality Isn't What it Used to Be
To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal — The central thesis of this book is that, like it or not, the process of natural selection has been largely superceded by human decision-making: "Evolution no longer follows the Darwinian rules that provided, for over a century, our best understanding of it. It is no longer an impersonal and mechanistic process...That vision is as obsolete as its first cousin, Newton's clockwork cosmos. Today the driving force in evolution is human intelligence. Species survive or perish because of what people do to them and to their environments. The land and air and water systems are massively altered by humankind which has become, as one scientist put it, 'a new geological force.' Even our own genetic future is in our hands, guided not by Darwinian abstractions but by science and medical technology and public policy." Anderson rejects as fantasy the notion, advocated by some radical environmentalists, that the human race should adopt a "hands-off" attitude towards nature. The question as he sees it is not whether we should govern evolution—we do—but how much intelligence we choose to bring to the task. A thought-provoking, even-handed look at biopolitics. Currently out of print.
Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World — If you ever wondered, as I did, what the hell "postmodernism" is, this gem of a book will go a long way towards enlightening you. As clear and engaging as the works of Jacques Derrida are not—I can think of no higher recommendation.
Evolution Isn't What It Used to Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World — This ultimately disappointing volume sets out to examine high tech as a facet of human evolution, but ends up being little more than a survey of current trends in biotechnology. What small profundity there is here is mostly a rehash of ideas expressed far more effectively in To Govern Evolution—if you can't find that book, this may give you a hint of what you missed.
The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person — A nice companion piece to Reality Isn't What It Used to Be, Anderson's latest explores the ways in which human self-concept has changed over the course of history, and speculates about how it will continue to change in the future.