Cotten Seiler's "White Care"

Cotten Seiler is professor of American studies at Dickinson College. He is the author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America.

Seiler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… [P]rimary and secondary school grounds would come to feature an ever more encompassing built environment, adding “assembly rooms, gymnasiums, swimming pools, playgrounds, athletic fields, laboratories, shops, kitchens, clinics, cafeterias, and lounges.” Such an abundant surround testified, as Briggs wrote, to “constantly increasing public support, evidence of an enthusiasm that amounts to a fetish.” Indeed, funding for primary and secondary educational facilities, personnel, and curricula would see a nearly hundredfold increase over the century. The school was the key site at which the state displayed its commitment to “cohesion and equality of resources for children considered ethnically white.” This elevation of schools to the status of infrastructure was underwritten by scientists’ judgments of what white children required for their development and could become for the species and the nation. Conversely, the belief that the education of children racialized as nonwhite would pay few to no such dividends would thwart the public schooling of Americans of color—and later, of white Americans too.

Wow, Ford Madox Ford was spot-on in my case. Reading page 99 of White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure, one can grab hold of the book’s central argument: in the United States, theories of race have driven the political will to provide—and withhold and neglect—public infrastructure.

In the pages surrounding the quotation above I’m writing about something pretty freaky and obscure, but absolutely central to the building and expansion of public schools and playgrounds in the early twentieth century: the theory of recapitulation. Put forth by evolutionary scientists and progressive thinkers in the late 1800s, this theory held that as each individual organism develops, it repeats all the phases of its species’ evolutionary journey. This meant that homo sapiens’ development amounted to a process of losing the traces of our fish, amphibian, mammalian, and primate ancestry. As scientists, political speech, and popular culture judged racialized whiteness to be the pinnacle of human evolution, it was posited that humans racialized as white would also advance beyond the so-called “savage races” in intelligence and capacity for self-government.

Recapitulation profoundly affected how American thinkers viewed childhood, suffusing the professionalized sciences of child psychology, education, and “play theory,” all of which emerged around the turn of the century. My book emphasizes that it also put its imprint on the built environment, as experts prevailed on the state to provide infrastructures through which children could be shepherded to the fulfillment of their potential. The public school and the playground were the most crucial of these spaces, for they were where the (implicitly white) child could be drawn through the phases of development, “repeat[ing] the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Hence the need for “monkey bars,” “jungle gyms,” and the experiential, active pedagogy advocated by John Dewey and other reformers.

Learn more about White Care at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl P. Borick's "Backcountry Resistance"

Carl P. Borick is Director of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the author of Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780-1782 (2011) and A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (2003).

Borick applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina's Militia and the Fight for American Independence, with the following results:

For those readers who make it all the way to page 99, thank you! For those opening to page 99, you will find a description of the experiences and character of South Carolina's militiamen, who opposed the British in the backcountry, or interior, of South Carolina in the Revolutionary War. The book itself is an exposition of how these men were raised, armed, and supplied, their experience in fighting the British, and what motivated them to turn out even after the most important city in South Carolina, Charleston, fell to the enemy, so this page definitely alludes to this concept.

Growing up on the frontiers of South Carolina, they were adept with firearms, particularly rifles, and had little choice but to conserve their shot and powder since they were difficult to replace, especially after the fall of Charleston when supplies became irregular. Many, as Charles Woodmason described, had grown up in austere circumstances and were accustomed to hard living.

Surprisingly, the Page 99 Test works for the book as readers will find themselves in the midst of a discussion of the effectiveness of South Carolina militiamen against the British despite fewer supplies after the fall of Charleston and their resilience amidst adverse conditions. The book premise is how South Carolina's militia was able to put up a strong resistance against the British based on a look at the experiences of individual soldiers. Page 99 certainly gives a flavor of that. Among the militiamen discussed here are John Fletcher and Thomas Ramsey who hid out in the swamps to avoid the British and their loyalist allies and Michael Burtz, who in his service, underwent "many wants and privations."

Although the book may appeal to fans of Revolutionary War history, and specifically to those interested in the war in the South, general readers will appreciate the ability of relatively untrained farmers and tradesmen to staunchly resist the British army. They will also be intrigued by discussions of their diet, clothing, weapons, and motivations, particularly as the country commemorates the 250th anniversary of its founding, during the Revolutionary War. The experience of the conventional British army fighting against an enemy who operated somewhat unconventionally mirrors that of the American military in more recent conflicts such as Vietnam in the 1960s and Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, The book also examines the role of women and the enslaved who both contributed to and were caught up in the war that raged in the South Carolina backcountry.

Learn more about Backcountry Resistance at the University of South Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna O. Law's "Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship"

Anna O. Law is the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at CUNY Brooklyn College. She completed her PhD in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications appear in political science, history, and law journals and investigate the interaction between law, legal institutions, and politics. Her first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts (2010), examined the role of the federal judiciary in U.S. immigration. She teaches and researches in U.S. constitutional law, federal courts, U.S. immigration policy history, federalism, American Political Development, and race/ethnicity.

Law applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, readers will find:

Native nations living on land the Americans coveted influenced slave states delegates to vote for constitutional ratification. The framers sought to balance accommodation of regional interests with creating a robust national government that could defend against foreign and domestic insurrections that might destabilize the young republic. Gregory Ablavsky argues persuasively that the framers convinced reluctant states to ratify the Constitution by repeatedly invoking the threat of “savages” to justify the creation of a fiscally and militarily sturdy federal government. Both elements of centralized authority over Indian affairs and a stronger central government had been glaring deficits in the Articles of Confederation.

In the founding era, the attempt to assign by subject matter the management of Indian affairs exclusively to the national government resulted in continuing conflict between the US and state governments given their divergent policy goals. From the confederation period forward, states often claimed Native land under colonial era charters. Congress putatively had the power to reconcile some of these sometimes-overlapping claims between former colonies but did not often step in to resolve conflicts. The legislative branch instead asked states to turn over their claims to the national government, and these requests were usually ignored. Through the colonial and confederation periods, states continued to operate by local laws and pass new ones regulating Native people in their territory. For example, states exercised their authority by regulating the sale and supply of Native land, driving down prices, and facilitating dispossession. Either by statute or by creation of systems, states continued to allow settlers to purchase Native American land without federal coordination and oversight and without any questions from the courts post-Revolution.

By claiming sole authority over Indian affairs, the federal government had the daunting responsibility to “make peace with Natives, restrain illegal settlement, and conciliate state assertions of sovereignty, all with limited funds and while seizing the land necessary to repay the national debt.” Even if the national government enjoyed the sole authority to manage these many tasks, with the cooperation of the states, it would have been a huge range of laws to enact and enforce.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work for my book because it omits the central contribution of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. My intervention is to synthesize into one study the histories and laws governing the citizenship and migration of groups that are usually read separately in disciplinary or time period silos. These are voluntary migrants, African Americans, and Native American. Page 99 only discusses Native Americans. If readers open to this page, they won’t be aware that voluntary migrants and free and enslaved African Americans are also part of the story and that their fates are intertwined.

Although we today think of these groups as unrelated, federal court opinions from the nineteenth century mention all these people in the same decisions. Take for example Mayor of New York v Miln (1837), a case brought by shipping companies against New York to challenge a NY migration law. The statute required ship captains to turn over passenger manifests listing travelers by name, and physical condition (whether they are disabled, or sickly). Failure to comply would result in a fine. The shipping companies hated these laws that were eating into their profits. In that same opinion, Supreme Court justices discussed the implications of striking down New York’s migration restrictions for slave states who had laws controlling the entry, movement, and settlement of free and enslaved Black Americans. Before the Civil War ended slavery and separated the two subject matter areas, slavery and voluntary migration laws were inextricably linked.

Page 99, though, spotlights Native Americans who some readers might find surprising to be in a book about voluntary migration. The land Indigenous peoples lived on and owned for generations was obtained and sold by states and the US government at subsidized prices to lure voluntary European migration to the colonies and the states through to the nineteenth century. States and the US government often gained Indigenous lands by treaty negotiations, levels of coercion, or outright fraud. For example, the US government funded and carried out the violent deportation of 80,000 Native Americans in the southeastern states in the 1830s. The US government did so after being goaded by the states for the expansion of the cotton crop and slavery. Thus, the ability of Native Americans to stay on their own land was inverse to settler migrants’ desire to possess and occupy that same area.

Visit Anna O. Law's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cisco Bradley's "I Hear Freedom"

Cisco Bradley is professor of history at the Pratt Institute. His books include The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (2021). He is also the director of the documentary Take Me to Fendika (2024).

Bradley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power, and reported the following:

This test gives an insight into my book, but it does not do a good job of revealing the whole of it. Page 99 is as critical as any page to the book, but one small part of a much broader idea. Page 99 is mostly composed of blues lyrics from some specific musicians who worked in Atlanta in the early twentieth century. The book focuses primarily on jazz musicians who emerged in Cleveland and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s and is split into 3 parts. The first part, in which page 99 appears, details the ancestral roots of the musicians who emerged in the two northern cities and considers what cultural inheritance they were bestowed by their ancestors, and along what routes and from what points of origin. For example, the saxophonist Albert Ayler, had roots in eastern Mississippi and western Alabama, and the book looks at the migrations and motivations for them to move first to Birmingham and then north to Cleveland. Part 2 of the book examines the coalescence of the two music scenes and the musicians who primarily stayed in those cities to do their work. Part 3 then follows the musicians who left for other cities, primarily New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Paris. The book is quite expansive, but the Page 99 Test gives a little glance into the larger idea of the book.

Visit Cisco Bradley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Kurashige's "American Peril"

Scott Kurashige is the author or co-author of five books, including The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (2008, recipient of book awards from the American Historical Association and Association for Asian American Studies), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century with Grace Lee Boggs (2011), and American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism (2026). He is President of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation, previously served as faculty at the University of Michigan, University of Washington Bothell, and TCU, and had fellowships at Harvard and the Smithsonian.

Kurashige applied the "Page 99 Test" to American Peril with the following results:

As I write this, the headlines are dominated by two stories: 1) the US-Israeli War on Iran, in which one of the most horrific scenes has been the bombing of a primary school for girls resulting in the massacre of 175 or more victims; and 2) new reporting of sexual violence against women and girls by the noted labor leader, Cesar Chavez.

Page 99, which contains graphic accounts of misogyny, sadly demonstrates a deeper connection to the problem of violence against women and girls in US history, especially the history of militarism. Here are some passages:

From 1972 to 2015, according to Okinawan police, U.S. military personnel and their family members murdered twenty-six and raped 126 Okinawans. The latter number is almost certainly a severe undercount, because most rapes were not reported or prosecuted, owing to sexist social and legal structures, internalized oppression among Okinawans, and extraterritoriality provisions in the SOFA granting Americans effective immunity. These problems received more exposure following an international incident that prompted over ninety thousand Okinawans to protest on October 21, 1995, demanding curtailment of the U.S. military presence. Three American men in their early twenties—two in the marines and one in the navy—kidnapped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl and bound her with duct tape.

Thankfully, the young girl survived a brutal sexual assault. But others were tragically lost.

Despite some reforms and concessions by the U.S. military, both the bases and the tensions on Okinawa persist. In fact, a new wave of mass protests erupted more recently following the murder of Rina Shimabukuro, whose badly decomposed body was found in a suitcase, spawning another international incident. In May 2016, Kenneth Gadson, an American contractor and ex-marine married to a woman from Okinawa, stabbed Shimabukuro in the neck and clubbed her on the head to subdue her—thereby enacting a longstanding rape and kidnap “fantasy.”

I began research the problem of anti-Asian violence decades ago as incidents erupted during the 1980s and 1990s. But I wrote much of American Peril specifically in the aftermath of the March 2021 shootings in Atlanta-area massage parlors that led to the mass murder of eight people, including six Asian women. The authorities and the much of the media initially treated it as an isolated incident that was “not racially motivated.” They largely ignored how the dehumanization of Asian women as sexualized labor for American men is rooted in the establishment of “R&R stations” surrounding U.S. bases in Asia, media stereotypes of Asian sex workers in war movies, and discriminatory laws and practices rendering women and immigrant workers vulnerable to exploitation and repression.

In this way, my book points to the deeply rooted history of anti-Asian racism, especially as it connects imperialist violence overseas and violent acts of racism within the United States.

Visit Scott Kurashige's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Shifting Grounds of Race.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Fee's "Believing in Light after Darkness"

Molly Fee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of South Florida. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford where she was also a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Believing in Light after Darkness: Displacement and Refugee Resettlement, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Toussaint noted that “resettlement [in the] US is a good solution for refugees,” but the extent of the adjustment “makes refugees to feel uncomfortable.”… The experience of early resettlement is complicated by the fact that gratitude and disappointment can exist simultaneously. While refugees may know that resettlement is the best outcome for their families, it can be difficult to reconcile this knowledge with feelings of dissatisfaction. The realities of financial insecurity, minimum wage jobs, and poor housing complicate prior notions of what resettlement will be.

The Page 99 Test does a remarkable job of capturing the main argument of my book. While U.S. refugee resettlement offers refugees a tremendous opportunity to leave behind the challenges of forced migration, limited rights, and food insecurity, it nonetheless comes with new and unexpected hardships that weigh heavily on recently arrived refugees. My book reveals the numerous tensions and contradictions that shape the experience of resettling in a new country. Based on over 1,000 hours of ethnographic fieldwork and over 100 interviews with refugees and service providers in San Diego, CA and Boise, ID, I explain how understanding resettlement as another displacement more accurately captures the complexities of refugees’ experiences. Even if it is ultimately a “good” and wanted displacement, resettlement is profoundly disruptive to refugees’ lives. This page manages to encapsulate the book’s overall contribution that resettlement to countries like the U.S. can simultaneously be the best outcome for refugees while also being disorienting and even disappointing.

Importantly this page also notes how this reality of displacement is fully understood by the Resettlement Agency service providers who support newly arrived refugees on a daily basis. As noted on page 99, “A casework staff member in Boise struggled with how best to convey to new clients that their lives were going to get a lot worse before they got better.” These service providers understand intimately the myriad challenges that their refugee clients will face, starting from the day of their arrival in the U.S. My book seeks to show how both refugees and service providers navigate the complicated terrain of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, doing their best despite insufficient funds and significant obstacles.

Visit Molly Fee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristina Jonutytė's "Between the Buddha and the New Tsar"

Kristina Jonutytė is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. She is a social anthropologist with research interests in political anthropology, ethnicity and religion.

Jonutytė applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Between the Buddha and the New Tsar talks about urban Buddhism as it is practiced and perceived in contemporary Buryatia (Russian Federation). Here, readers will find the final passages of an ethnographic story of a Buryat Buddhist family who encountered financial and other difficulties while moving from a small town to the capital city Ulan-Ude and retreated to numerous ritual interventions – Buddhist and shamanic – to cope with them. Beyond being a coping mechanism at difficult times, however, “religion is at the core of pursuing a meaningful and prosperous living in the city. In this, it provides an alternative not just to the otherwise powerful Soviet secular modernity project but also to idealized imaginaries of traditional pre-Soviet Buryat life, as well as to current Russo-centric mainstream visions of the good life in the city… In these cases and many others, Buddhism plays a key role in urban aspirations and their pursuits rather than playing an ornamental role to the seemingly more concrete materialities of the city.” Towards the bottom of the page, a new section begins where I demonstrate that my interlocutors in Ulan-Ude saw Buddhist infrastructure such as temples as “normal human needs”, comparing them to…public toilets!

Page 99 test works very well for my book since it places in-depth ethnographic stories with the broader socio-political and historical context of contemporary Buryatia. At the core of the book are ethnographic stories of Buryat Buddhists who navigate often precarious livelihoods in contemporary Ulan-Ude and creatively engage with religion to conjure divine power, own agency, and community support. This takes place in a complex multi-ethnic and multi-religious setting where people engage in Buddhist but also shamanic, Christian, secular, and other kinds of ritual and religious practices. Despite being the titular ethnic group in the region, Buryats constitute only about a third of the population there, while the majority are ethnic Russians. This minoritisation is highly relevant to the contemporary religious life where Buddhism continues to surge since the 1990s, following the Soviet repressions of religion. On the one hand, Buryat Buddhists are striving to be adequately represented in Ulan-Ude urban space where secular Russian/Soviet modernity still prevails. On the other, Buddhism constitutes not just a faith, but a complex socio-cultural milieu that destabilises prevalent Russo-centric interpretations of history, authority and sociality in contemporary Russia.

An important strand of the book that is not well reflected on page 99 is the oppressive militant regime of contemporary Russia that Buryat Buddhists live under. The current war in Ukraine is an important part of it, and the official leadership of Buryat Buddhism is complicit in it through supporting the Russian regime and its war efforts and mobilising Buryats and other Buddhists to enlist in the army. The Buddhist leader Khambo Lama Ayusheev has even claimed that the guardian deities, past leaders of Buryat Buddhism, and even the Buddha supports the militant pursuit of Russia. This book aims to show a more complex picture of Buryat Buddhism where everyday religion does not neatly comply with such official pronouncements but often reveals apolitical or even subversive attitudes and practices. Apart from the current war, Buryat religion and society today are shaped by the significant effects of the long history of colonisation, extraction, and marginalisation within the multi-ethnic but Russo-centric Russian state.

Learn more about Between the Buddha and the New Tsar at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Nadler's "Spinoza, Atheist"

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt’s Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age.

Nadler applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Spinoza, Atheist, with the following results:

A reader who turns to page 99 will find a summary of what Spinoza calls the “tenets of universal faith.” These are the doctrines (about God, worship and repentence) that, he says, are both necessary and sufficient for a person to live “in obedience to God’s law.” That is, a person who believes these seven doctrines — most of which, philosophically speaking, are false and superstitious fictions — will be motivated to live piously and act toward others with justice and loving-kindness.

This page, by itself, would not give the reader a good idea of the whole work; it would be hard to understand what is going on here without knowing the context in which I introduce these doctrines. So the test does not work very well for this book. The chapter that includes page 99, however, provides an important contribution to my overall goal of examining just what Spinoza’s God is. This chapter is devoted to God in the Theological-Political Treatise, the “scandalous” book that Spinoza published, to great alarm, in 1677. Having shown in previous chapters how Spinoza’s reputation evolved from “atheist” in the seventeenth century (with all the ambiguities that accompany that term as it used pejoratively in the period) to “pantheist” in the eighteenth century and later, I turn in Chapter 4 (“The Most Godless Book”) to examine how Spinoza’s mature conception of God or Nature is only tacitly present in that work. In subsequent chapters, I argue that the atheism that is his true view only really comes out in the Ethics. In this posthumously published metaphysical and moral treatise, it becomes clear that there can be no true divinity for Spinoza — nothing deserving of worshipful awe, reverence or adoration. There is just Nature and whatever follows with necessity from natural causes; and the only proper attitude to take toward Nature is understanding.

Learn more about Spinoza, Atheist from the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Best of All Possible Worlds.

The Page 99 Test: A Book Forged in Hell.

Writers Read: Steven Nadler (April 2013).

The Page 99 Test: The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter.

The Page 99 Test: The Portraitist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Wolfendale's "American Torture and American Terrorism"

Jessica Wolfendale is Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University with a secondary appointment in the Case Western Reserve School of Law. She is the author of Torture and the Military Profession (2007), co-author (with Matthew Talbert) of War Crimes: Causes, Excuses, and Blame (2018) and has published more than 40 articles and book chapters on topics including war crimes, military ethics, torture, terrorism, and security.

Wolfendale applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Torture and American Terrorism: The Myth of American Decency, and shared the following:

Page 99 describes the close relationship between state and nonstate white supremacist terrorism during the Jim Crow era. During this time, the KKK (a nonstate group) inflicted terrorism on Black communities to maintain and enforce white social and political control. But state officials also played an important role in this violence. To quote from the page: “Law enforcement officers often tolerated extra-legal and vigilante violence (and even participated in it); they failed to arrest perpetrators, let alone seek their prosecution; and they used violence to enforce the law disproportionately and arbitrarily against Black Americans and their supporters.”

Page 99 is a good example of one of the main arguments I make in the book – that white supremacist terrorism is embedded in American society and that state officials were (and still are) often implicated in inflicting terrorism on Black Americans. But it doesn’t refer to other core arguments in the book. For example, it doesn’t refer to the definition of terrorism I propose in Chapter 1, nor the definition of torture I defend. And it doesn’t give readers a good sense of the scope of the book’s arguments. For example, the book discusses torture and terrorism in relation to incarceration, immigration detention, police violence, American colonialism, and drone warfare.

Page 99 is interesting because it offers a “taste” of the book’s overall argument: that torture and terrorism, inflicted by state institutions and state officials on predominantly nonwhite people (particularly Black Americans) has a long history in America, challenging the idea that American is a morally decent society. And this history has been largely ignored or minimized in mainstream political, legal, and social narratives about American history. So it’s crucial to bring to light the scale and impact of American torture and terrorism on the many thousands of victims of these practices.

Learn more about American Torture and American Terrorism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rivka Weinberg's "The Meaning of It All"

Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Risk of A Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. Weinberg specializes in ethical and metaphysical issues regarding procreation, birth, death, and meaning.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time, and reported the following:

In a book as ambitious as The Meaning of it All, which is a book that explains what Ultimate Meaning is (it's the point of leading a life at all), what Everyday Meaning is (it's the meaning in our everyday lives), what Cosmic Meaning is (it's the meaning of our role in the cosmos) and how death and time relate to meaning (death much less than has been claimed, time much more than has been noted), page 99 turns out to be a page on which a narrow point is made. It is therefore not the best sample page if you are looking for a page that gives you a good idea of the book, since this book addresses big, broad, deep, and important matters. But page 99 will suffice to demonstrate that the claims made in the book are well argued, with specific premises that lead to their conclusions, and that even the narrower points are of interest.

Page 99 of The Meaning of It All addresses the view that significance – how much something matters – is only relative to other things. On this view, our cosmic significance would be greater if we were the only intelligent beings in the universe and lesser if we weren't since significance is relative: "the broken knuckle on your finger is insignificant when you've also been shot in the face" (that's from page 98). So we should hope that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos because that would make us more cosmically significant.

I dispute this on page 99:

This perspective neglects intrinsic significance, which does not depend on how many things there are that can be considered similar to you. Although there are billions of people in the world, Kahane is wrong to conclude that we are each, therefore, “terrestrially insignificant” because significance— how much something matters— has both an intrinsic and a relative component. There’s no shortage of people in the world, “plenty of fish in the sea,” yet each person matters. Each person, like Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes”; each person, a world, because each person has unique, untransferable, unfungible, and intrinsic value. You can’t kill a person and claim you did something insignificant because there are billions of other people. There is an intrinsic kind of significance, just as there is an intrinsic kind of value because how much something matters cannot be divorced from its value. Generally, the more valuable something is, the more significant it is: the more it matters if you lose it, destroy it, ignore it, create it, nurture it, etc. Intrinsic significance doesn’t disappear no matter how widely you pan out— even as far out as the entire cosmos—because it is inherent in the thing itself. Therefore, since we are intrinsically significant, we are significant wherever you find us. In this way, we have cosmic significance because we are significant in and of ourselves, and therefore significant anywhere, including the cosmos within which we reside. Does this make our lives more Cosmically Meaningful? I don’t think so because it doesn’t change how significant we are. It just reflects a fact about where that significance is located: in the cosmos.
[footnotes omitted]

This discussion tells us that even though we are intrinsically cosmically significant, that doesn't add a lot of meaning to our lives because it doesn't seem very different from our earthly significance, so what does it add, really?

And this challenge runs throughout the book's chapter on Cosmic Meaning. If we assume all the miracles in the world, what kind of meaning would that give us? How meaningful would it be to commune with god in the afterlife or enjoy heavenly bliss? Probably not very meaningful because, think about it: heavenly bliss sounds more like a drug trip than a meaningful experience, and communing with god probably gets old too. Why? How? Well, for that, you'll have to read the other 176 pages.

Visit Rivka Weinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue