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Part One:
We talk with John Nichols, reporter for The Nation, about his book explaining socialism as “An American Tradition.” Our great hero, Abraham Lincoln, read a lot of Karl Marx’s writings and may even have maintained a correspondence with Marx. Many American values have their basis in the same principles as socialism: the propriety of rewarding both our workers and capital fairly; the recognition that labor is the engine of our economy and capital is “only the fruit of labor.”
We also discuss various responses to the recent mass murders in El Paso and Dayton. Beto O’Rourke exemplifies a compassion-based analysis — rooted in a strong sense of place and a cooperative, “we’re-all-in-this-together” approach. He appears, at the moment, to offer the best antidote for Pres. Trump’s self-centered, hateful, and “blame-the-Other” mindset.
Part Two:
We speak with Steven Allison, Professor of Ecology & Earth System Science, and Tyrus Miller, Dean of the School of Humanities at Univ. of California, Irvine. After collaborating on research, the two scholars wrote an article entitled “Why Science Needs the Humanities to Solve Climate Change.”
They concluded that combining a scientific and a humanities point-of-view gives us a more complete picture of what really causes and results from climate change. At the same time, their work sheds light on the benefits of an inter-disciplinary approach to analyzing and finding solutions for complex problems in general.
