Aside from The Outsider and Tropic of Cancer, the other life-changing book I read this year (yes, it’s been a big year of reading discoveries) was Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. I actually heard about it last fall, when I bought a large book on Stanley Kubrick as a Christmas present for my brother. The author of the Kubrick book was semi-obsessed with Brown’s work, and he would reference it when writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Given my semi-obsession with those films, I had no choice but to get Life.

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)

It’s time that I got into more modern publications and topics. Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford Law professor and a popular blogger. He helped found Creative Commons, which affords creators partial protection on their work in a way that will encourage further creativity and progress. He wrote a book entitled Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, which outlines the way that our society no longer gives adequate protection to sharing, collaborating, and remixing culture. His work inspired the academic organization Students for Free Culture, a national group based at Swarthmore College that offers students a chance to make their needs heard. His ideas were even an indirect foundation for this website, and I plan to transfer most content on the site over to a Creative Commons license very soon.

Naturally, his claims are a bit scary to those who think that it’s okay for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue someone who downloads MP3s from a peer-to-peer network. Lessig suggests that copyright law was established to protect the creative process, and has always included the right of “Fair Use.” This means you should be allowed to use copyrighted material in a transformative way that furthers creativity and cultural growth. Lessig claims that our society favors corporate interests over individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we should steal any digital property we come across. But we have to fight to protect our freedom to interact with the culture around us.

Many of Lessig’s books are even available for free PDF download under a Creative Commons license. (What a way to convince people that you follow your own advice!) In other words, I can share, modify, or remix those books and not only avoid legal prosecution, but, as long as I credit Lessig, perhaps even get praised by the author himself. I think I’ll let Lessig explain:

“For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture” (p. 8).

“Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending on a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today” (p. 9).

“We are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been. [...] We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law” (p. 13).

Another presence on the rebel side of the fight is the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), who works to protect individual rights in the digital world. Of course, all of these sites (and more) are on our Links page. Is this all starting to make sense?