What’s Left of the World is a play on words, left having two meanings here. It turns out to be a counter Ayn Rand book. People need to belong, David Blacker says. They need a narrative, they need to be part of something greater, and their lives need meaning. Pretty much the opposite of the message in Atlas Shrugged. This mirror image still has the endless monologues, the full page paragraphs that show no mercy to the reader. Blacker does go on, seemingly trying to outrand Rand.

By far the best chapter in the book is the first one, where Blacker shows how useless we are making ourselves. We are automating everything, lowering wages, laying off workers and removing benefits and security. We are subverting our own built up structures. Even the elite are beginning to worry. Living in the right community and sending their kids to the right schools is no longer a prescription for success. Importantly, he says “The ‘less’ that can be done more with is less of us.”

From a left perspective, the abuse and exploitation of labor has always been the paramount target. But now, we face a new enemy – lack of abuse. Economic abuse becomes economic neglect, and having no career at all is worse than being taken advantage of. He says the expensive race for higher education is not about education but credentials, which are cheapened by so many having them. When everyone has a PhD, Blacker says, PhDs will drive Ubers.

Human society itself has changed dramatically, he says. Being cast out is no longer fatal – not even noticed. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks any more. In the age of neoliberalism and libertarianism, everyone is only about themselves. They have their own “brands” and create their own exaggerated narratives – about themselves. Never trust anyone over 30 has become never trust anyone, period. The liquid modernity condition means everyone must be a life-learner, constantly ready to change as jobs vaporize. Precarity should be building solidarity, but it is only promoting solitude.

The chapters that follow don’t have nearly the same punch. The chapter on education shows how dysfunctional higher education has become, but we know this. Issues of free speech, tenure, and treating kids like customers and education like an investment that must pay dividends is old hat now. He says faculty meetings used to raise cheers when research results were offered. Now, the loudest cheers are for research grants received, and the bigger the grant, the louder the cheers. Universities have become marketing machines, each one the dramatically innovative choice for the best careers. They all seem to employ the word impact. When he asked if it was good impact or bad impact, silence ensued. How the left figures in all this goes untreated.

He looks at religion (modern and ancient), spirituality and the Earth as a single system (Gaia), also with no important new insight. There are diversions into multiple sexes, currently all the rage, and fusions among worldviews, such as Afrocentrism + futurism = Afrofuturism. But none of this is within the exclusive purview of the left, either.

About the only memorable direction for what’s left of the left is that it must educate and prove its points, not simply sermonize, berate and dismiss other stances. Basically, the left needs to re-earn the respect of the populace.

Is this book the first step in regaining that respect? Blacker says the book’s objective is to “look at big picture issues that are being underdiscussed in, specifically, the moral underpinnings of political motivation.” By that standard, the book does not succeed.

David Wineberg ( )