Latest news with #Manichean
The Intercept
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Intercept
Tucker Carlson Outdid the Mainstream Media — But Still Missed This Crucial Point
The Tucker Carlson Live Tour, featuring Donald Trump, in Glendale, Ariz., on Oct. 31, 2024. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images 'Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.' Has there ever been a more perfect moment for this old meme? On Tuesday, talk show host and worst person Tucker Carlson challenged fellow worst person Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the latter's dangerous support for further U.S. military action against Iran. In a now-viral video clip, Carlson asked Cruz the simple question of how many people live in Iran. Cruz could not answer. 'You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?' Carlson asked. 'How could you not know that?' Cruz responded, 'I don't sit around memorizing population tables.' After a couple more questions, whereupon Cruz began visibly squirming, Carlson delivered his coup de grâce. 'You don't know anything about Iran!' Carlson said, both men raising their voices. 'You're a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don't know anything about the country!' It was a thing to behold, but also evokes another classic meme: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson, the host of arguably the most racist show in cable news history. He was simply doing what so many establishment reporters have failed to do: He asked whether a top U.S. politician pushing for an unprovoked Manichean forever war knew basically anything about the people he was seeking to subject to American hellfire. This is not a credit to Carlson. It's a failure of the mainstream media. You would think news organizations would have learned their lessons long ago — but that doesn't mean this is a precise replay of past media failures in matters of imperial war waging. Comparisons to the Iraq War are everywhere, but hawkish mainstream media coverage didn't play out the same way in 2003. Then, mainstream U.S. news outlets settled on a near-total consensus affirming the likely existence of nonexistent 'weapons of mass destruction' to justify an illegal war. Mainstream coverage today has at the very least reiterated the statements of the United States' own intelligence agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, among others, that, despite their concerns about Iran's amassing of enriched uranium, there is no compelling evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. Any responsible news story would stress that, under international law, Israel's strikes were almost certainly illegal. Claims of self-defense to warrant a so-called 'preemptive strike' are extremely narrow. There must be proof of 'imminence,' of which there is not. It was 'The Daily Show,' of all places, that bothered to pull together a supercut showing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning of Iran's 'imminent' militarization of their nuclear supplies for 30 years. 'Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995,' the comedy news show posted on X. 'Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, Israel does,' said Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan in a recent social media video, lambasting the media's continued insistence on treating Israel's acts of aggression as a victim's attempts at defense. 'It's a nuclear double standard.' The only country in the Middle East with a militarized nuclear arsenal is Israel, which has an estimated 90 to 400 warheads that it refuses to publicly acknowledge. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, some of the very same media hawks who most vociferously pushed lies to license the Iraq War are bolstering another illegal war of aggression against Iran, and using the same racist clash-of-civilizations logic. Popular historian Niall Ferguson, an apologist for colonialism who declared himself 'a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang' after the launch of Iraq War in 2003, wrote with two co-authors in the Free Press this week that Israel's attacks on Iran were a 'blow for the good guys in Cold War II.' One of the the New York Times' prominent resident hawks, Bret Stephens, wrote a column last week praising Israel's 'courage' for doing 'what needed to be done,' given, of course, 'the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran's theocratic leaders.' Looking at the media ecosystem as a whole, though, one might get the impression that the debate is pretty evenly split over whether Trump should escalate to U.S.-led strikes on Iran. But this, too, is a distortion: The majority of Americans don't want the U.S. to conduct its own military strikes. An Economist/YouGov survey from last week found that 60 percent of all respondents oppose U.S. involvement in the war, while just 16 percent supported military action. Broken down by party affiliation, the margins largely hold even among Republicans — 53 percent of whom said they opposed military action, while 23 percent want further U.S. involvement. Of course, even the poll questions are misleading. They ask whether the U.S. should join Israel in military action, as if the two countries' military–industrial complexes are not wholly entwined already. The question should instead be about whether respondents think there should be any further involvement or U.S.-led strikes. As Cruz put it to Carlson, 'we are carrying out military strikes today.' Carlson, rightly, jumped in by reminding him of the official U.S. line that Israel is conducting strikes on its own, pushing Cruz to clarify if he was breaking the news that 'the United States government is at war with Iran right now.' While Cruz attempted to correct by saying that the U.S. is merely 'supporting' Israel, the slip revealed the undeniable U.S. complicity in all Israel's warmongering, regardless of whether Trump formally declares a U.S. military intervention. Read our complete coverage
LeMonde
13-06-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
The Islamic Republic of Iran, Netanyahu's favorite enemy for 30 years
It has long been his obsession. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the "existential threat" that looms over Israel is neither Palestinian nor Arab. It comes from Iran and its nuclear program. This obsession, which he has railed against since he first broke out on the political scene, is rooted in his ideological convictions, strategic analyses, personal history and, as always with Israel's longest-serving prime minister, his political maneuvers. To such an extent that one of his political rivals, former chief of the general staff Shaul Mofaz, who was born in Iran, said, in 2012, that Netanyahu was driven by "a messianic conviction to bomb Iran." Meir Dagan, the head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency between 2002 and 2010, argued, in 2015, that attacking Iran would risk inflicting harm on Israel's security strategy and accelerating Iran's race for nuclear weapons, given its persistent sense of being under threat. Yet such a pragmatic perspective on Iran has never interested Netanyahu. In his Manichean worldview, one characterized by a "clash of civilizations" between so-called "barbaric" radical Islamist regimes and the "Judeo-Christian civilization," with Israel as its spearhead, Iran has always represented the ideal enemy.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘The Kindling Is a Lot Drier Than It Used to Be'
How does political violence come to an end? It's been a lingering question the last few years in the wake of shocking episodes like the Jan. 6 Capitol riot or the assassination attempts on Donald Trump. And it's become newly pressing following the antisemitic fallout of the Israel-Hamas war on American soil. In the last two weeks, we've seentwo Israeli embassy workers fatally shot in Washington, D.C. andeight members of the Jewish community burned in an attack in Boulder, Colorado. There has also beenviolence against Muslims andpeople of Palestinian descent since the war began. William J. Bernstein, a neurologist and the author ofThe Delusions of Crowds, a book about the consequences of mass hysteria in history, expects the waves of political violence to eventually stop — but perhaps not until we reach a terrible episode that serves as a tipping point. 'Eventually, they burn themselves out because it's so awful,' he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. It's a cycle that's been repeated throughout history, Bernstein says: After that extreme moment of violence, the attacks fizzle out — from exhaustion, or even just the lack of novelty. Getting to that end point, however, will be a painful one, and our political system isn't built to soften the blow. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some people believe we are seeing an increase in political violence in our country, most recently as a surge in antisemitic attacks in response to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. What is causing this? I think it's a combination of the Manichean mindset and group dynamics and confirmation bias. The Manichean mindset — this in-group, out-group kind of behavior — you can see historically, and you can also demonstrate experimentally in psychology labs. It's extremely widespread, and it's extremely pervasive. The other thing, which we're just starting to get a handle on, is how genetically determined it is. So if you look, for example, at twin studies, and you look at the psychological characteristics of twins, they're highly concordant. And one of the things that's been looked at is the tendency toward binary thinking; that is Manichean thinking. The sort of online communities and social media communities that form around these issues, I think, attract those kinds of people. But that's not a new phenomenon. We probably would have seen the same thing in anarchist groups 100 years ago. Online communities are more accessible though, right? Yeah, I think that the kindling is a lot drier than it used to be. What drives political violence? Is it beliefs, grievances, or something else? It's like any complex sociological, sociopolitical phenomenon. It's multifactorial. There's the genetic component toward binary thinking. There's the thing that we've already talked about, which is the increased herding of people that's been brought by social media. But there are genuine grievances. There's always a genuine grievance involved. And it's easy enough to see what those grievances are. I mean, what's a good life? A good life is being able to afford a house and being able to afford medical care and education for your children and being able to afford retirement and not being crept with debt up to your ears while doing all those things. Most people feel at least two or three of those things, if not all four of those things. I think one thing that the political right in this country understands to a devastating effect is that identity trumps self-interest. How many times a day does someone remark to you, 'I just don't understand the political right. They're going to lose their Social Security, they're going to lose their Medicaid. Their kids aren't going to be getting preschool paid for. They can't afford medical care. Why are they voting for Republicans?' And the answer is because Donald Trump knows how to push the identity — the us versus them — button. A few years ago, there was a lot of concern about violence coming from the political right, but the attacks of the past few weeks seem to be coming more from the political left. Is some kind of shift taking place? I don't think so. I think there is some epidemiological and even functional [brain] imaging evidence that the right is a little more prone toward conspiracy thinking and Manichean thinking. But there are plenty of Manichean people on the left, too. I mean, a lot of Manichean behavior, most of it was located on the left 60 years ago. I would even say it's just noise in an oscillating system. You've written about the consequences of mass mania in your book The Delusions of Crowds. How does mass mania contribute to the political violence we're seeing in the U.S. right now? If you put a bunch of people in a room, and let's say you're talking about abortion. Let's say there's a median position on abortion, it's exactly right in the middle. So there's a zero, which is people who are absolute anti-abortion opponents. And then you have a 10, which is people who are rabidly pro-abortion. Well, if you put a bunch of people together who are a six, what you see happening is that they slide off to that side because they want to seek the approval of the group, and they find that by making more and more extreme statements, they can garner more approval. So when you put people together like that, their opinions tend toward the extremes, either one or the other. And eventually, you get to the point where you're advocating violence. I think it's just a natural progression of that sociological phenomenon. The classic type where you saw this happen was with people who were concerned about the Covid-19 vaccine. And it started out with the moms' groups: 'Should I get my kids vaccinated? I have some concerns. I want to talk about this and be better informed.' You put a bunch of people like that together, and pretty soon, that morphs into political violence. Is there anything that U.S. politicians — on the left or right — could do to tamp down on anti-Israel or antisemitic political violence in the United States? I'm pretty cynical. The answer I would give you is nothing that will improve their vote count. The name of the game these days is to energize your base, particularly with our primary-based system. Do you think our existing system rewards political violence? I think so, yeah. I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a lot of ideological difference between Democrats and Republicans. If you did a Venn diagram of their policy positions, there was a lot of overlap. Now there's almost no overlap. With the primary-based system, what's going to happen is that it favors extremism on both sides. Now what's the solution to that? It would be nice if we had an open primary system. It would be nice if we had more objectively and rationally drawn congressional districts. Those two things would help, but to depend upon the goodwill of ordinary politicians in the public interest of our political class these days, and particularly, the way that elections are funded, I think that's a very, very big ask. A year ago, you told an Atlantic reporter that you don't think political violence 'ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm.' Can you expand on what that means? What does a 'cathartic cataclysm' look like? Well, I think a cathartic cataclysm is when you see law enforcement officers in masks, snatching people into vans and shipping them abroad, or at least to Louisiana, because they have a political opinion. I mean, that's state violence. And let's call a spade a spade: The assassination attempt on Donald Trump during the election campaign was probably politically motivated as well. But what's a cathartic turning point look like? Well, a cathartic turning point looks like an awful piece of mass violence. It would have to be an episode of mass violence that is directly attributable to an easily identifiable political player. I thought Jan. 6 was that, but I guess Jan. 6 wasn't cataclysmic enough. What comes after the 'cathartic cataclysm?' Can there be a moment of reckoning that means less political violence for a while? Well, people just get sick of the violence. It's what happened in all major civil wars. Eventually, they burn themselves out because it's so awful. It's what happened in Northern Ireland. It hasn't happened in the Middle East yet, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but eventually it does happen. I can remember back in the '60s, early '70s, it felt like the political violence was never going to end. I mean, if you were an Italian in the '60s or the '70s, major political and judicial figures, including prime ministers, were getting bumped off on a regular basis. And it seemed like it was never going to end, but it did. It seemed like the anarchist violence of the early 20th century — it lasted for a couple of decades, killed the U.S. president — it seemed that was never going to end either, but it does. These things burn themselves out. I guess the best way of putting it is that human beings seek novelty, and after a while, political violence gets to be old hat and uncool. What's an example of cathartic violence from history? Well, I think that the political violence of the late 1960s was cathartic. You had the assassination of the U.S. president, of Martin Luther King, of Bobby Kennedy. And then it stopped. People shied away from political violence. Exactly why it stopped, I don't know, but it did. It wasn't just assassinations, it was also street violence. And then things calmed down. If I had to come up with a reason why, it's that people get bored. Initially, politically posturing and making violent threats gets you admiration and psychological support from other people, but eventually it gets old, and people stop doing it. Do you see the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol or last year's attempted assassination of Donald Trump as having contributed to the political violence we're seeing today? Is all of this building up in our society? Yeah. And unfortunately, a big part of that is institutional. I mean, what does it say when you commit violent crimes en masse and then the president of the United States pardons you? It basically tells people, 'Yeah, you've got a free pass the next time.' In that previous interview, you suggested that the Jan. 6 riot wasn't a turning point for political violence in our nation, because it didn't end up worse — there wasn't a 'cathartic cataclysm' with the killing of a politician, for instance. Is there any way to subdue violence without having to embrace that kind of extreme ending? How do we lower the temperature in America? If you're lucky, it burns itself out without a cataclysmic event. And I stand by what I said, which is that, had they actually killed Mike Pence, I think that would have ended it right there.
Politico
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Politico
How Political Violence Finally Ends
How does political violence come to an end? It's been a lingering question the last few years in the wake of shocking episodes like the Jan. 6 Capitol riot or the assassination attempts on Donald Trump. And it's become newly pressing following the antisemitic fallout of the Israel-Hamas war on American soil. In the last two weeks, we've seen two Israeli embassy workers fatally shot in Washington, D.C. and eight members of the Jewish community burned in an attack in Boulder, Colorado. There has also been violence against Muslims and people of Palestinian descent since the war began. William J. Bernstein, a neurologist and the author of The Delusions of Crowds, a book about the consequences of mass hysteria in history, expects the waves of political violence to eventually stop — but perhaps not until we reach a terrible episode that serves as a tipping point. 'Eventually, they burn themselves out because it's so awful,' he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. It's a cycle that's been repeated throughout history, Bernstein says: After that extreme moment of violence, the attacks fizzle out — from exhaustion, or even just the lack of novelty. Getting to that end point, however, will be a painful one, and our political system isn't built to soften the blow. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some people believe we are seeing an increase in political violence in our country, most recently as a surge in antisemitic attacks in response to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. What is causing this? I think it's a combination of the Manichean mindset and group dynamics and confirmation bias. The Manichean mindset — this in-group, out-group kind of behavior — you can see historically, and you can also demonstrate experimentally in psychology labs. It's extremely widespread, and it's extremely pervasive. The other thing, which we're just starting to get a handle on, is how genetically determined it is. So if you look, for example, at twin studies, and you look at the psychological characteristics of twins, they're highly concordant. And one of the things that's been looked at is the tendency toward binary thinking; that is Manichean thinking. The sort of online communities and social media communities that form around these issues, I think, attract those kinds of people. But that's not a new phenomenon. We probably would have seen the same thing in anarchist groups 100 years ago. Online communities are more accessible though, right? Yeah, I think that the kindling is a lot drier than it used to be. What drives political violence? Is it beliefs, grievances, or something else? It's like any complex sociological, sociopolitical phenomenon. It's multifactorial. There's the genetic component toward binary thinking. There's the thing that we've already talked about, which is the increased herding of people that's been brought by social media. But there are genuine grievances. There's always a genuine grievance involved. And it's easy enough to see what those grievances are. I mean, what's a good life? A good life is being able to afford a house and being able to afford medical care and education for your children and being able to afford retirement and not being crept with debt up to your ears while doing all those things. Most people feel at least two or three of those things, if not all four of those things. I think one thing that the political right in this country understands to a devastating effect is that identity trumps self-interest. How many times a day does someone remark to you, 'I just don't understand the political right. They're going to lose their Social Security, they're going to lose their Medicaid. Their kids aren't going to be getting preschool paid for. They can't afford medical care. Why are they voting for Republicans?' And the answer is because Donald Trump knows how to push the identity — the us versus them — button. A few years ago, there was a lot of concern about violence coming from the political right, but the attacks of the past few weeks seem to be coming more from the political left. Is some kind of shift taking place? I don't think so. I think there is some epidemiological and even functional [brain] imaging evidence that the right is a little more prone toward conspiracy thinking and Manichean thinking. But there are plenty of Manichean people on the left, too. I mean, a lot of Manichean behavior, most of it was located on the left 60 years ago. I would even say it's just noise in an oscillating system. You've written about the consequences of mass mania in your book The Delusions of Crowds. How does mass mania contribute to the political violence we're seeing in the U.S. right now? If you put a bunch of people in a room, and let's say you're talking about abortion. Let's say there's a median position on abortion, it's exactly right in the middle. So there's a zero, which is people who are absolute anti-abortion opponents. And then you have a 10, which is people who are rabidly pro-abortion. Well, if you put a bunch of people together who are a six, what you see happening is that they slide off to that side because they want to seek the approval of the group, and they find that by making more and more extreme statements, they can garner more approval. So when you put people together like that, their opinions tend toward the extremes, either one or the other. And eventually, you get to the point where you're advocating violence. I think it's just a natural progression of that sociological phenomenon. The classic type where you saw this happen was with people who were concerned about the Covid-19 vaccine. And it started out with the moms' groups: 'Should I get my kids vaccinated? I have some concerns. I want to talk about this and be better informed.' You put a bunch of people like that together, and pretty soon, that morphs into political violence. Is there anything that U.S. politicians — on the left or right — could do to tamp down on anti-Israel or antisemitic political violence in the United States? I'm pretty cynical. The answer I would give you is nothing that will improve their vote count. The name of the game these days is to energize your base, particularly with our primary-based system. Do you think our existing system rewards political violence? I think so, yeah. I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a lot of ideological difference between Democrats and Republicans. If you did a Venn diagram of their policy positions, there was a lot of overlap. Now there's almost no overlap. With the primary-based system, what's going to happen is that it favors extremism on both sides. Now what's the solution to that? It would be nice if we had an open primary system. It would be nice if we had more objectively and rationally drawn congressional districts. Those two things would help, but to depend upon the goodwill of ordinary politicians in the public interest of our political class these days, and particularly, the way that elections are funded, I think that's a very, very big ask. A year ago, you told an Atlantic reporter that you don't think political violence 'ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm.' Can you expand on what that means? What does a 'cathartic cataclysm' look like? Well, I think a cathartic cataclysm is when you see law enforcement officers in masks, snatching people into vans and shipping them abroad, or at least to Louisiana, because they have a political opinion. I mean, that's state violence. And let's call a spade a spade: The assassination attempt on Donald Trump during the election campaign was probably politically motivated as well. But what's a cathartic turning point look like? Well, a cathartic turning point looks like an awful piece of mass violence. It would have to be an episode of mass violence that is directly attributable to an easily identifiable political player. I thought Jan. 6 was that, but I guess Jan. 6 wasn't cataclysmic enough. What comes after the 'cathartic cataclysm?' Can there be a moment of reckoning that means less political violence for a while? Well, people just get sick of the violence. It's what happened in all major civil wars. Eventually, they burn themselves out because it's so awful. It's what happened in Northern Ireland. It hasn't happened in the Middle East yet, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but eventually it does happen. I can remember back in the '60s, early '70s, it felt like the political violence was never going to end. I mean, if you were an Italian in the '60s or the '70s, major political and judicial figures, including prime ministers, were getting bumped off on a regular basis. And it seemed like it was never going to end, but it did. It seemed like the anarchist violence of the early 20th century — it lasted for a couple of decades, killed the U.S. president — it seemed that was never going to end either, but it does. These things burn themselves out. I guess the best way of putting it is that human beings seek novelty, and after a while, political violence gets to be old hat and uncool. What's an example of cathartic violence from history? Well, I think that the political violence of the late 1960s was cathartic. You had the assassination of the U.S. president, of Martin Luther King, of Bobby Kennedy. And then it stopped. People shied away from political violence. Exactly why it stopped, I don't know, but it did. It wasn't just assassinations, it was also street violence. And then things calmed down. If I had to come up with a reason why, it's that people get bored. Initially, politically posturing and making violent threats gets you admiration and psychological support from other people, but eventually it gets old, and people stop doing it. Do you see the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol or last year's attempted assassination of Donald Trump as having contributed to the political violence we're seeing today? Is all of this building up in our society? Yeah. And unfortunately, a big part of that is institutional. I mean, what does it say when you commit violent crimes en masse and then the president of the United States pardons you? It basically tells people, 'Yeah, you've got a free pass the next time.' In that previous interview, you suggested that the Jan. 6 riot wasn't a turning point for political violence in our nation, because it didn't end up worse — there wasn't a 'cathartic cataclysm' with the killing of a politician, for instance. Is there any way to subdue violence without having to embrace that kind of extreme ending? How do we lower the temperature in America? If you're lucky, it burns itself out without a cataclysmic event. And I stand by what I said, which is that, had they actually killed Mike Pence, I think that would have ended it right there.
Telegraph
27-04-2025
- General
- Telegraph
The stories behind some of the world's weirdest motorways
In the first half of the 20th century, motorways – also known as expressways or, more generally, controlled-access highways – were heralded as utopian. They were the embodiment of progress, launched with huge parades, decked in Art Deco ornament and applauded by a jubilant press. The optimism would not last long. All too soon, around the world, such gigantic roads would become symbols of dystopian urban planning from above, wounds inflicted upon cities, mechanised floods tearing communities apart: as Richard J Williams puts it, they were seen as 'an everyday form of devastation'. The Expressway World challenges this binary. Williams, professor of contemporary visual culture at the University of Edinburgh, points out the self-deception and absolutism in this Manichean way of seeing the built environment. Instead, he views these roads more soberly, as attempts to solve a traffic crisis, the evolution of which branched off into divergent paths. In doing so, he makes a compelling case for truths that lie beyond exaltation or condemnation. Each chapter focuses on a different place, approach and outcome: the West Side Highway in New York, the Samil Elevated Highway in Seoul, the Minhocão in São Paulo and so on. (The last of these is named after a worm-like folkloric beast.) While his book is notionally centred on automobile infrastructure, Williams effectively creates a portrait of the rise and fall of modernist urbanism. A great deal of its charm lies in returning to the delusionally halcyon days when architectural critics, in this case Reyner Banham, could herald an interchange as a 'work of art'. Still, given the architectural torpidity and piety of our contemporary age, the megalomania on display here has a certain villainous charisma. For instance, in celebrating the elevated panoramic view over the Hudson that New York motorists would enjoy, the notorious urban planner Robert Moses claimed that 'by comparison, the castled Rhine with its Lorelei is a mere trickle.' Moses's egocentric ambition was exceeded only by Paul Rudolph's gargantuan proposal for Lomex (Lower Manhattan Expressway), which Williams dubs 'Futurism meets the Death Star'; it's still a stunning vision and, if it falls absurdly short of its inspirations, which included the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, the audacity is easy to admire. Thankfully, given it would have involved mass evictions and bulldozing swathes of SoHo and Little Italy, Rudolph's Bladerunner-esque design remained a series of unbuilt renderings. The car was both an object of desire and a tool of democratisation, and the motorway was its apotheosis. Even now, hit one at the right speed and hour and you can still feel, in Banham's words, it's 'the nearest thing to flight on four wheels'. But as these monumental roads spread via government planning, from Fascist autostrada and Autobahn to the American post-war building boom, 'autogeddon' followed. Expressways went from panacea to poison. All the initial hyperbole flipped to denunciations. They were a no-man's-land, embedded with structural violence, so grievous that their very existence put 'civilised life at stake'. Today, they're seen by critics as a necessary evil at best, though the photogenic brutalist retrofuturism of their bridges and service stations continue to attract admirers. Williams is a scholarly guide: literary, artistic and cinematic references abound. But his strength is his aversion to histrionics. He acknowledges the 'severed neighbourhood[s]', displaced citizenry, race and class issues, pollution and noise that many controlled-access highways caused in urban areas. He quotes from jeremiads, and charts various 'occupations', including the artistic festivals that flourished on the Minhocão. Yet he resists easy partisan positions, and his resolute critical eye makes him something of a gadfly. This is why The Expressway World, which could have been arid or marginal, has a zing to it. For instance, rather than settling for the monstrous caricature of popular lore (The Spectator labelled him 'the psychopath who wrecked New York'), William argues that Robert Moses was motivated by his own admittedly twisted conception of progress; and while admiring Jane Jacobs's ardent work in opposing the New York expressways and preserving neighbourhoods, Williams rejects her latter-day sainthood, contending that the clashes were, partly, 'one set of privileged actors battling another'. Though he is by no means contrarian, Williams can be commendably sacrilegious. His scepticism towards artwashing and performative politics is timely, especially on how both can reinforce the social inequalities they feign to oppose. At the same time, he acts as a Devil's advocate for London's Ballardian Westway, which has had few defenders from the beginning (there were over 20,000 objections filed to the Greater London Council at the time regarding their motorway plans): he claims that, for all its ills, it 'brought new possibilities the old city lacked'. Formerly the site of slum tenements, he argues 'the Westway became a carnivalesque space […] in which a certain amount of bounded disorder was possible'. Whether this ideal of 'bounded disorder' can survive either gentrification or deprivation remains to be seen. William's strongest argument comes in the chapter on the Cheonggyecheon redevelopment in Seoul, where a seven-mile-long elevated motorway, running through downtown Seoul since 1976, was replaced with a riverine space that is, if its global press coverage to be believed, the best thing since Arcadia. 'It's hard to imagine,' Williams retorts, 'a more controlled space outside of an airport or prison.' As he points out, Cheonggyecheon has simply exchanged one form of authority for another, one that has greenery instead of concrete and tarmac, while continuing to consist of 'constant exhortations to behave in approved ways', predicated on 'surveillance and the pressure to spend money'. The Expressway World is a discerning study of fantasy and erasure. Twenty-first-century urbanism, after all, has become a realm dominated by mythic or near-Biblical thinking, in which the automobile is sinful, the environment (or rather 'simulated nature') is Edenic, and the expressway a convenient scapegoat for modernity's ills. In truth, these roads are just another arena for competing centres of power, their visions and blindnesses. Until that is recognised, we'll be vulnerable to the comforts and temptations of ancient fantasies and those selling them; and for all the talk of the future, society will be hurtling forwards with its eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror.
