Sten Rynning's "NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance"

Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.

Rynning applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for NATO. It captures a key event in the history of the alliance still of great relevance today. But it comes out of a discussion of the fine grains of 1960s alliance politics that for the browser of the book may come across as a bit of ‘inside baseball.’

The fine grains are important, though, because for the reader of the book—as opposed to the browser—they tell the story of why the political seams of the alliance were coming undone. The allies lacked trust, and they were pursuing incompatible national approaches to East-West relations. France had decided to kick NATO headquarters off its territory, and NATO was in addition approaching its twentieth anniversary (in 1969), which by its treaty allowed individual allies to leave the alliance at a one-year notice. Might France be tempted to leave? Might West Germany leave to pursue German unification? The one sure thing was the Soviet desire to stoke trouble.

Into all this—and on page 99 of the book—stepped Pierre Harmel, Belgium’s foreign minister, and undertook a study of NATO’s “future tasks.” This proved a crucial moment for the alliance. Pierre Harmel succeeded in establishing principles that brought allies together and which resonate to this day—that NATO must be able to do both collective defense and East-West diplomacy, and, critically, that defense must come first.

“Defense first” was NATO’s Cold War recipe for countering the threat of political fragmentation. NATO leaders have since invoked this recipe multiple times, also in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, NATO allies diverge in their level of support to Ukraine and in their willingness to stand up to Russia. In essence, allies disagree on what “defense first” today means. Page 99 of NATO will help the browser—and especially the reader—understand why this present-day rerun of the Harmel debate is so momentous for the alliance.

Learn more about NATO at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum's "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists"

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is an award-winning author whose research explores how individuals navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. Her books include Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995 (2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (2015).

Kirschenbaum applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, and reported the following:

If you opened Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists to page 99, you would find the first page of the chapter on what I call “complex hybrids.” In 1935, these “hybrids,” mostly Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, helped the Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov pull off an epic 10,000-mile road trip across America. The chapter begins with the observation that the writers’ “dream of seeing and understanding America faced two daunting obstacles: Neither spoke much English and neither knew how to drive.” To overcome these difficulties, they relied on “immigrants from the Russian empire to show them around.” However, the authors omitted most of these mediators from their published travelogue, One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika). Page 99 emphasizes that the chapter recovers the stories of the individuals who facilitated Ilf and Petrov’s discovery of America and “reveals a central and incompletely suppressed paradox of their quest: their impressions of ‘real’ America came filtered through the eyes and mouths of outsiders or immigrants.”

The Page 99 Test works well to give readers a sense of the book’s methods and arguments. My interest in retracing Ilf and Petrov’s road trip grew out of a desire to locate the people who worked to construct friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Page 99 introduces a critical, but publicly unacknowledged subset of these individuals – immigrants from the Russian empire, who served as the writers’ guides and translators. Citing Ilf’s notebook, page 99 suggests that clues in the pair’s unpublished writing allowed me to track down many of their contacts. The page also hints at the importance of highways in Ilf and Petrov’s account of America; their early adventures convinced them that to really understand the country, they had to travel by car, not train.

Focused on Ilf and Petrov’s omissions, page 99 sheds little light on how I learned the stories of the pair’s American interlocutors. In the case of the complex hybrids, I relied on personal papers and FBI files. The most challenging problem I faced was finding the more ordinary people with whom Ilf and Petrov interacted. In these cases, I had to generate creative sourcing solutions such as the remarkable series of life history interviews collected in 1935-1936 as part of a survey of San Francisco’s foreign-born population.

Finally, this single page may give readers the mistaken impression that I retraced Ilf and Petrov’s journey primarily as a means of judging their accuracy. While page 99 highlights the writers’ dependence on immigrants, it has little to say about why immigrants wanted to help. Nor does it address the book’s larger goal of understanding the process of cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. By reading Ilf and Petrov’s notes and narratives against the American sources, the book aims to illuminate the shared concerns as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions that guided and sometimes limited efforts to bridge cultural, linguistic, and political divides.

Learn more about Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

David Alff is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where he researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

Alff applied the Page 99 Test to his new book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, and reported the following:

My book is a cultural history of the northeast corridor: both the railroad that runs between Boston and Washington, and the seaboard metropolitan region it helped build. This history begins several hundred million years ago, in the Ordovician period, when the microcontinent of Avalonia smashed against proto North America. It ends on New Year’s morning 2021 when Moynihan Train Hall first opened to the public.

Page 99 picks up at a crucial moment in the corridor’s development. It describes Thomas Edison’s construction of an experimental electrical railway in what is today Metropark, New Jersey. I show how Edison’s track drew direct current from his laboratory’s steam generators, and how tourists flocked to Menlo Park for the chance to snag a ride on one of his trains. One journalist recounted how the silent train “shot off like a bullet,” in sharp contrast to the slow percussive build of steam locomotives.

Of my book’s two-hundred-and-eighty-odd pages, 99 is a great place to land. It features one of many passages that describe technological change through story. Drawing on archival research and secondary reading, I try to immerse readers in the details of the past: the crackle of current coursing through iron rails; Edison’s comical indifference to his railway’s frequent wrecks; and the incongruity of the fact that the line terminated beside what is now the fifteenth hole of the Metuchen Golf and Country Club. Such minutiae, I hope, can help us share the wonder that a nation of train passengers felt at dawn of electric railroading.

Beyond my own narrative strategies, page 99 happens to depict a momentous turning point in the history of transportation engineering, as people realized that steam traction was bumping up against physical limits, and faster trains would require remote power generation. Though Edison’s railway was long ago abandoned, reclaimed by forest, and finally buried under suburban tract housing, the technology it tested continues to propel the world’s rapid transit systems and all high-speed passenger trains. The northeast corridor is the busiest and fast inter-city passenger line in North America because its trains receive current from overhead wires (instead of generating it themselves from igniting diesel fuel).

While no single historical anecdote could encompass an infrastructure as wide-ranging and diversely-experienced as the northeast corridor, page 99 offers an unusually representative glimpse into innovations that made the rail line and region what they are today.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Webster's "Materializing the Middle Passage"

Jane Webster is Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the University of Newcastle (UK).

She applied the Page 99 Test to her book Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping 1680-1807, and reported the following:

Page 99 comprises endnotes from Chapter 3 (‘Voices from the Sea: Documentary Narratives of Middle Passage Voyages’). This is unsurprising, indeed characteristic—this is a lengthy book, with more than 1500 notes supporting its 12 Chapters—but is not, for present purposes, illuminating. So, I have turned back to page 90, the last full page of Chapter 3. This contains an extract from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789): one of very few accounts of the voyage on a slave ship written by an African (though see below), and by far the longest. In fact, I make little use of this famous narrative between Chapters 3 and 11, but the reasons for that are a central discussion point in Chapter 12 (‘The Middle Passage Re-Membered: A Conclusion in Three Objects’), where one of the three objects in question is Equiano’s book. By the time readers reach Chapter 12 they have become very familiar with accounts of eighteenth-century slave ships made by British sailors who had crewed them, and who were questioned in Parliament about their experiences (1788-1792). Crew narratives are at the heart of my book: I draw on them repeatedly in exploring the design of British slave ships (Chapter 5), African understandings of these vessels (Chapter 6), the trade goods they carried (Chapter 7), the African goods they transported home to Britain (Chapter 8), and the Middle Passage as experienced by both captives and crews (Chapters 9-11). Equiano’s account appears rarely in these chapters; not because of a fractious, ongoing scholarly debate concerning his birthplace, and questioning whether his account is a fiction, but because virtually everything he had to say about the Middle Passage had been said before, by someone else. As I argue in Chapter 12, I do consider that Equiano’s account is a fiction; but I make that argument whilst asking why so few detailed African accounts of the voyage into slavery exist. My conclusion is that those Africans who endured the slave ship did not want to remember it; or not, at least, in writing. Their Middle Passage was with them forever but, caught somewhere between the imperative to recall and the need to forget, it was remembered in ways that challenge scholarship today.

Learn more about Materializing the Middle Passage at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Bernstein's "Freeman’s Challenge"

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.

Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and reported the following:

The 99th page of the book is the first page of Chapter Five, the chapter that narrates the murder at the heart of Freeman’s Challenge. The murder is the challenge, because it threatens the Auburn State Prison, America’s original profit-driven prison. The chapter is called “Work” because that’s the word William Freeman later used to describe the murder. He had been forced to labor in factories inside the Auburn State Prison, and now his “work” of murder would turn the prison inside-out. The 99th page—and the chapter—opens with the full moon rising on a snowy March evening in 1846. Freeman hides his weapons in the folds of his clothes and starts walking south. He walks almost five miles from his home in Auburn toward the neighboring town of Fleming, where his “work” will begin.

This page gives you a great idea of the whole book! Freeman’s Challenge is a work of history, and every word is based on historical sources—but I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted to write the kind of book someone would read in one sitting because they couldn’t put it down (and the book is short, so that’s possible!). To manage that balance, I did massive research to recover William Freeman’s experience. The road from Auburn to Fleming is a great example: historical sources told me what that road was like. I knew the road was narrow and slick with mud and slush; I knew that a nearby lake pulsed against the shore. I knew that owls and wolves lived in the woods alongside the road. These truths enabled me to reconstruct Freeman’s experience.

William Freeman’s voice is very important to the book—and to this page. Freeman never wrote or dictated his own story, but people who knew him reported his words. I wove these quotes into Freeman’s Challenge for two reasons: to do justice to Freeman and to make the book enjoyable for the reader. You can hear Freeman’s distinctive voice on this page: as he’s deciding to start out toward Fleming, he regards the sky. “Just at dark,” he calls it, “edge of evening.” I love how William Freeman used language, and his eloquence shines on this page.

This page is also representative of the book because it describes the everyday racism that affected Freeman and every other Black person in New York State (and beyond). As Freeman walks southward, a white man in a cutter—a small sleigh— comes up behind him on the same road. As the man passes Freeman, he looks suspiciously at him. The truth is that Freeman did plan to commit a crime, but the white man had no access to that information. The white man was suspicious simply because a Black man was walking at night—“walking while Black,” we might call it now.

Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Brian M. Ingrassia is an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University and the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a typical page of Speed Capital, but not necessarily an exceptional one. It discusses the 300-mile sweepstakes race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1916. That was the only time, from May 1911 to the present, when the big race was shorter than 500 miles. (It was not held 1917-1918 or 1942-1945.) That page also discusses how Indianapolis became a place for testing automotive technologies, including some that never materialized: in this case, a fuel substitute called "Zoline," which was really a con-man's clever scheme!

Page 99 imparts the book's flavor, but not the full range of courses. Speed Capital uses the story of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's early years to illustrate connections between modern transportation technologies, popular culture, capitalism, and geography. The title is a double entendre: Indianapolis was the capital of speed, but its history conveys how people devised rituals to facilitate and exhibit the speedy movement of capital. The book starts with the idea of "space annihilation": automotive speedways utilized and popularized technologies that elided the tyranny of space and time. Early on, Indianapolis's speedway was a place for both automobility and aviation. But after World War I it narrowed, becoming a place mainly for motor sport. The track also became a site for traditions and nostalgia—for looking back with fondness to earlier eras of technological transformation and popular spectacle. The speedway and its museum, which opened in the 1950s, soon became a site for a different kind of space annihilation: eliminating distance between present and past.

Page 99 briefly mentions Carl Graham Fisher, the primary founder of the speedway. Fisher is a significant yet somewhat overlooked figure in American history, and his life story is a narrative thread running through Speed Capital. Other pages more successfully invoke Fisher and Indianapolis's connections to farther-off places, including Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New York. Many people traveled from these and other places—from all over the nation and the world—to see the famous races. The book also discusses how Fisher spearheaded important transcontinental routes, namely the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, and even famously transformed a South Florida sandbar into the popular resort town of Miami Beach. Basically, I argue, Fisher taught Americans how to enjoy cars as well as how to use them to consume geographical space.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, and reported the following:

Readers who open at page 99 of this book will be met with two young journalists, Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund, who became radio celebrities in postwar Czechoslovakia. This page explores the reasons for their fame, suggesting that it hinged upon their youth, desirability, and ultimately their appeal to socialist politicians and listeners both.

I am delighted that these two are foregrounded by the Page 99 Test: they were in fact the first journalists I wrote about for this book and, as such, set the framework for the rest of Red Tape. They helped me answer the question I posed throughout which was: why might people genuinely like and look forward to censored and propaganda-tinged socialist radio? And they form part of the answer, which I found to be on account of the relationships that listeners fostered with reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund through the medium of radio (hearing their voices at a regular time several times a week, writing to them with feedback about their work, and then finding their letters in some ways incorporated into the fabric of the pair’s reports). Hanzelka and Zikmund were broadcasting during Stalinism, and their example shows the responsiveness of radio to listeners’ concerns at that time. They also show that there was more to Stalinist radio than the murderous show-trials (which I write about in other chapters, but which I am delighted are not front and center here).

I was not always able to take a biographical approach to the history of radio in socialist Czechoslovakia—sometimes it made more sense to think about technologies (such as the tape in the title, for example) and how these served to reconfigure listeners’ expectations of the medium. But I always felt the most at home being led through the period by reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund and the fan-mail that was addressed to them. In this sense, this page represents some of my favorite lines of inquiry and sources used in this book. Here, I am specifically writing about the generation to which Hanzelka and Zikmund belonged, which, I argue throughout, shaped postwar radio and the rhetorical environment of socialism’s first two decades in Czechoslovakia. When they and their peers (all by now middle-aged) were pushed out of Czechoslovak Radio in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968—events captured in the final chapter of this book—then, I argue, radio finally ceded its “dominance” to television.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David W. Congdon's "Who Is a True Christian?"

David W. Congdon is a Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas, where he acquires new titles in political science, and an Instructor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His books include The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology (2015, which won the Rudolf Bultmann Prize in Hermeneutics from the Philipps University of Marburg), and he is the editor of Varieties of Christian Universalism: Exploring Four Views (2023).

Congdon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, and reported the following:

Here is what I found on page 99 of my book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture:

Newman provides seven tests to determine whether a development is the continuation or the corruption of the idea of Christianity, and the rest of the book applies these tests to particular points of doctrinal controversy. But as David Bentley Hart acknowledges, “these criteria amount to little more than a transparently forced ideological reconstruction of the historical narrative,” requiring both “willful narrative creativity” and “selective ignorance regarding those historical data that the preferred narrative cannot assimilate.” Reducing the complexity of history to the adaptability of an idea made it all too easy for Newman to reconstruct an account of Christian history that supported his argument, and any reconstruction under these presuppositions is “self-evidently specious,” an exercise in “saving the appearances.” Newman’s Essay is a stunning work of historical eisegesis, a retrospective reading of the past that already knows where history leads – namely, to his own position. His failure is thus an instructive one, serving as a cautionary tale for all those people, whether church leaders or Supreme Court justices, who wish to use history to prove the rightness of their beliefs.

To my surprise, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Who Is a True Christian? This page is my analysis of John Henry Newman’s effort to establish historical continuity between the origins of Christianity and Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. Newman was a prominent figure at the time, but he has become especially important in the last several decades, not only as an inspiration for many converts to Rome but also as an intellectual lodestar for Protestants seeking to prove their fidelity to the ancient rule of faith (regula fidei).

The problem, as I show (with some help from David Bentley Hart), is that Newman’s reconstruction of this history is a convenient just-so story that all too easily leads directly to his own position, as if his account of Christianity were foreordained from the beginning. Newman failed to consider that he could have constructed such a narrative for any version of Christianity. It is always possible to trace how later developments emerge from earlier ones, and if you already know how history ends, the path to get there can seem inevitable.

This passage is particularly fitting as a summary of my book, since I connect Newman’s misuse of history to church leaders and Supreme Court justices—highlighting the way my book joins theological and political history. The quest for “true Christianity” has a political counterpart in the quest for the “true America.” Theologians pursue “historic Christianity” while justices and politicians pursue the “original America.” I suggest in my book that both quests are best abandoned. With respect to religion, I propose replacing the exclusionary pursuit of true Christianity with the open-ended, pluralistic search for new Christianities. Perhaps the same might apply in politics.

The Page 99 Test highlights whether a book remains focused on a clear thesis, and I made an effort to keep the material in my book tethered to my central argument. While not every page in my book would succeed as well as this one, I am pleasantly surprised with how well this page captured a central theme of my work.

Visit David W. Congdon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna S. Mueller & Seth Abrutyn's "Life under Pressure"

Anna S. Mueller is Luther Dana Waterman Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a leading expert on youth suicide and suicide prevention in schools, and her work has helped families, schools, and communities understand how social environments generate risk of suicide and why youth suicide clusters emerge and persist. Her work on youth suicide has received numerous awards for its contributions to knowledge, including the Edwin Shneidman Early Career Award from the American Association of Suicidology. In 2020, she was named one of Science News's "Top 10 Early Career Scientists to Watch."

Seth Abrutyn is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.

Mueller and Abrutyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Life under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them, and reported the following:

Page 99:

level, so I must be doing terribly with my life.’ So, I think that’s something that happened a lot.”

That must have been hard to hear for kids who were struggling to get by, more so because so many of the youth who died by suicide had been among those high achievers— the kids who embodied Poplar Grove’s ideals. Krista said her friend Michelle had been “trying to find worth in things that she felt, like, she could never do perfectly.” Poignantly, she concluded, “I guess she felt like there was no reason to keep living, because nothing was giving her the worth that she wanted.” Perfectionism in a tight- knit community where everybody knows your business, the ideal youth is visible and known, and yet the standards of perfection are a moving target, is a dangerous cultural directive: anything short of an always- out- of- reach “perfect” may feel like a shameful failure.

3.4 THE PAIN OF FAILURE
Thus far, we have looked at the stories of young women who struggled with the painful mismatch between who they thought they were and who they thought they should be. We also found, more prevalent among the young men we got to know through interviews with families and friends, that youth suicides coincided with instances in which youth had more concrete evidence of their “failure,” such as tangles with the law. Young men, however, were not immune to the agony of measuring themselves against perfection and believing they came up short. Meet Brian. Brian was dreamy. Handsome. Artistic. Smart. Sociable. “He was really cool,” shared his friend Chloe. “Kind of introverted. Super- hot, you know? Blond hair, blue eyes, really artsy. . . . And he was a really nice sensitive sweet guy.” Brian’s father Bruce made less of the young man’s looks, perhaps, but said much the same: “He always had girlfriends and he was pretty sensitive with those relationships . . . he took things to heart and— but he was also happy- go- lucky, damn the torpedoes, did stuff he shouldn’t do, [tried to] get away with it.” Bruce laughed, maybe remembering some

The Page 99 Test works well for introducing our book to a reader.

This passage is a small window into one of the central reasons we found for youth suicide clusters and their perpetuation. As the preceding section concludes, the pressure youth were under – in short, to achieve academically, athletically, and socially – stands out in the story of Michelle, one of the more popular suicide victims in Poplar Grove. The nuance also stands out: perfection is not something that is actually achieved, but an on going project whose standards are perceived to be always moving. Not hitting those standards, not just for Michelle, robs youth of a sense of value despite the rich, rewarding (from the outside) lives they live. The dilemma youth face, then, is that perfection in achievement is not a black or white attribute. Rather, it requires one to be in perpetual motion, but, as other research in sociology has demonstrated, this motion must appear—on the outside at least—as easy and routine. Kids in Poplar Grove, both the ideal youth and those who fell outside of the cream of the crop, all felt the endless push of an achievement hamster wheel.

Consequently, as the second half of the passage illuminates: youth feared failure more than anything else. They lived in a heightened state of awareness most of the time, irrationally (from the outside) sensing failure was imminent; and that one B would ruin their lives. That many youth were struggling with mental health issues made things worse, because showing any signs of imperfection would violate the goal of achievement and represent failure. So, the truth was many kids felt like they were failing even when their school record, parent’s social media accounts, and standing among their peers reflected a successful youth. In the end, shame, or the emotional response to the belief that one is not meeting others’ expectations and that they are a contemptuous person as a result, was a pervasive response that only amplified the challenges of adolescence, leading to greater emotional distress.

Ultimately, youth suicide clusters because kids get trapped in these perfection-failure-shame cycles. They see a friend or classmate die by suicide, and they explain it through this lens of “pressure-to-be-perfect can cause suicide.” They can identify with that person’s pain, even if their own pain or situation isn’t identical. Suicide becomes a cultural script for expressing emotional distress instead of the sort of help-seeking behaviors that might alleviate this distress.

Visit Anna S. Mueller's website and Seth Abrutyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Human Motives"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he has worked since 2001. He previously held appointments at a number of universities in the UK. He has published widely across many areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including work on cognitive architecture, the role of language in thought, self-knowledge, consciousness, the mentality of animals, and meta-cognition. His most recent books are The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought (2015) and Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (2019).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect, and reported the following:

Page 99 advances a particular theory of what pleasure and displeasure really are. Rather than being intrinsic felt qualities of experience, or a sort of “hedonic gloss” that attaches to experience (as many philosophers and others assume), they are better understood as perception-like representations of value. Pleasure attaching to the taste of a ripe strawberry, for example, represents it in a fine-grained perception-like way as good (to some degree), and in consequence makes continued eating seem choice-worthy. But what are these values and disvalues that are represented by degrees of pleasure and displeasure? Page 99 suggests that they are best understood in evolutionary terms, as adaptive values and disvalues (to be cashed out in terms of inclusive fitness). This answers a problem that had been raised previously in the chapter, that since values don’t really exist as part of the natural world, they can’t be represented correctly or incorrectly. Page 99 points out this problem evaporates if the values in question are cashed out in terms of biological inclusive fitness.

A reader who opens the book to read just page 99 won’t get a good idea of what the book as a whole is about, I’m afraid. But he or she will have landed on a crucial node in the overall argument. The book aims to refute a new and powerful, scientifically grounded, form of motivational hedonism. (This is the view that all human actions are really taken to secure pleasure and avoid displeasure.) The new hedonism argues on very good grounds that pleasure and displeasure are the common-currency of all human and animal decision making, enabling seemingly incommensurable things to be traded off against one another. (Is it worth getting stung by the bees to extract the honey from the hive? Here pain is pitted against pleasure.) As a result, it seems that genuine altruism is impossible. When I act to save someone’s life, I am really acting because I anticipate that saving the life will make me feel good, or because not acting will make me feel bad, or both. While accepting the common-currency idea, I argue that because pleasure and displeasure are really representations of value, altruism is possible after all (and frequently actual). When acting to save the life, I act because doing so strikes me as an intrinsically valuable thing to do (this is what the anticipated pleasure really is), not because I think it will make me feel good. The goal of the book is to flesh out this account in detail, to defend it against alternatives, and to show how it provides the best interpretation of the underlying affective science.

Learn more about Human Motives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue