More on the Search for a Nonviolent Future

More reading of The Search for a Nonviolent Future by Michael Nagel.

Overall since I started reading it I’d say the quality has held up. There are a couple details I’d quibble with.

For example, he has almost nothing good to say about the media, and he completely buys the “violent media make us (especially kids) violent” idea. However, I think that the book Killing Monsters makes a good case that this is simply not true — that what people get out of a particular kind of media is not always what you think, and that the “overwhelming evidence” that, e.g., TV and video games make kids violent, tends to evaporate when you try to nail it down to actual studies rather than proclamations by terribly concerned authorities.

That’s an example of the sort of thing that I find a little dubious in some parts of the book. But on the whole it is excellent and I would highly recommend it.

I’m going to try to start to put nonviolence into practice where I can.