Andrew Daddio
Salman Rushdie
groups entering the country with lethal intentions,” he said of his years living under protective custody. Rushdie added that those who criticized what he emphasized is a work of fiction had never read it — a common problem, he said, with many books that have been banned throughout history. Earlier in the day, Rushdie attended the Living Writers course, which brings 10 authors to campus each fall for personalized classroom sessions and public readings. The 60 students in the English class were joined by participants of the LW Online program. The e-students (alumni, parents, and friends) took an online version of the class co-taught by professors Jane Pinchin and Jennifer Brice, who led interactive webcasts on the course material throughout the semester, complemented with a blog for continued discussion. As an alumnus, the online course was “a fantastic opportunity,” said Geoffrey Gold ’86. “It really opened a new world to writers writing about places and things that I didn’t have much familiarity with, which is one of the primary reasons this course in particular interested me.” Pinchin and Brice agreed that this year’s program and its international theme were a great success. “These offerings asked us all to move beyond boundaries and to look through lenses we were not accustomed to wearing,” Pinchin noted.
Chris Hedges brings Destruction to Colgate
If you believe that the outcome of the 2012 elections could have changed anything fundamental about Ameri-
ca, Chris Hedges ’79, P’12 thinks you’re wrong. As a journalist and writer, Hedges spent two decades living and working in war zones. He has seen combat in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, Turkey, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Retired from a long career as a war correspondent, he has turned his focus on a kind of domestic violence. Hedges’s book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt tells the story of what he calls America’s sacrifice zones — locations where industry has destroyed the environment and ruined lives while harvesting the resources it needs to build profit. He asserts that elected officials from both parties are either complicit or feckless, and that there is currently no popular movement that can stand in the way of powerful corporations. For his book, Hedges selected several sites where the consequences of exploitation are in the highest relief — including Gary, W. Va., where coal companies use explosives to remove mountain peaks that separate miners from the seam. After layers of earth have been blasted away, machines can easily scoop out coal, but the damage to the environment can be read in the scarred terrain, local cancer rates, and an alarming trend of climate change that scientists trace back to the burning of fossil fuels. “There’s a kind of insanity to it where, as the planet begins to disintegrate, you use more violent methods to extract profit from it,” Hedges said when he visited campus October 22. Astronomy professor Jeff Bary, who teaches Core Scientific Perspectives:
Galileo, the Church, and the Scientific Endeavor, began reading Days of Destruction when he heard that it included a profile of Gary, just down the road from his hometown of Welch, W. Va. When Bary saw Hedges’s description and correlated the coal industry’s condemnation of climate science with the Vatican’s treatment of Galileo, he knew that he had to bring the alumnus to campus to speak to students. “It has a political bent to it that I hadn’t imagined for this class,” Bary said, “until I started to think hard about how the arguments I’ve seen trotted out — both for and against mountaintop removal — play into what I’m trying to get at in the Galileo course.” Bary reached out to a colleague, anthropology professor Nancy Ries of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, to cosponsor Hedges’s visit. “There’s an interesting parallel process,” Ries explained. “In recent years, PCON has focused more attention on the conflicts inherent in resource and energy extraction, both locally and transnationally.” During his talk, Hedges traced the political and corporate antecedents of America’s environmental crisis, then he talked about the present state of affairs and the future, should these shadows remain unaltered. In addition to mountaintop removal in West Virginia, he spoke about other “sacrifice zones,” like South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where he said the victims of America’s internal colonization have the secondlowest life expectancy in the Western
hemisphere — just 47 years for males. And Camden, N.J., once the home of RCA and Campbell Soup Co., is being recycled from the inside out — barges stand ready to take scrap metal, gutted from the city’s dilapidated buildings, to China and India. “I wanted to go into these sacrifice zones,” Hedges said, “because what happens to them becomes the template for what’s going to happen to the rest of us.” The only answer Hedges can see is massive civil disobedience. Elections are not going to change anything, he said; the people must pour into the streets.
Unpacking Nietzsche
Two members of Colgate’s philosophy department, Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, have collaborated to publish an important book about one of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s most difficult writings, Beyond Good and Evil. Their chosen title, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, captures exactly their scholarly purpose: to show it as a work of philosophical morality and anthropology. Clark and Dudrick’s book, explicating what is possibly Nietzsche’s most important work, has been long awaited among philosophers as a follow-up to Clark’s highly influential Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, also published by Cambridge University Press. That earlier text sought to dispel certain mistaken ideas about Nietzsche’s concept of truth; for one, it rejected with exacting argument the claims of relativism as the correct understanding of Nietzsche’s doctrine of “perspectivism.” Similarly, this new book critically examines and explains a difficult and complex work, while relating its insights both to a broader understanding of Nietzsche’s other work as well as to philosophical thought and self-understanding more generally. The authors’ meticulous care and respect for the reader (and the writer) are reflected throughout the book’s many arguments and thoughts. Most notably, their principal purpose is to understand and explain Nietzsche’s central metaphor: “the magnificent tension of the spirit” as relating the soul’s “will to truth” to its “will to value.” They explore how Nietzsche uses the notion of the “soul” to explain a person’s “political” ordering and control of diverse, often incompatible, physical and psychological drives, thus
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