Susan Jacoby is going around saying that America is in an age of unreason – a time when ignorance rules the roost. One of the things she harps on is that studies show that we are reading less. Well, I have to admit that here in 2008, I've been doing my share of reading. While I've meant to write more about my reading habits the past couple months, I have not done so. So here's a brief overview of the books I've digested so far this year.
I have already written about Matt Rothschild's
You Have No Rights and my blathering can be found
here.
Being a big Monty Python fan, Jones' book was a no-brainer. It's a collection of columns that he wrote for various UK newspapers in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. He takes Bush & Blair on for waging war against a concept and does so with great sarcasm and humor. Since these pieces were directed at an English audience, there are times when I was a bit confused because of my ignorance of the structure of the UK's government and the personae of various figures. Still, it worked very well as a critique of the motivation for the war and the rhetoric of the justification.
Christopher Hitchens' slim volume gives the case for Hank Kissinger as war criminal. Most of the incidents elaborating upon here are familiar to folks who are knowledgeable with America's foreign policy - the bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and the Greek dictatorship – but I'm sure there are loads of people who are ignorant of our complicity in these horrors. It is incredibly sad to read the charges here. Just imagine how things would be different if the peace talks of 1968 had been successful. Hitchens make a good case for Kissinger sabotaging the process. As I said, it's a fairly short book but it made me want to read more about the figure I grew up seeing parodied on SNL.
Another book by a local. John Allen Paulos spent part of his youth in Milwaukee before coming here to attend school at the UW. He is now a professor of mathematics at Temple University. Paulos is like the Carl Sagan of mathematics as he writes for a lay audience. Innumeracy is like illiteracy but with numbers instead of letters.
He lays out a case for the importance of math and shows how it is useful in everyday life beyond balancing one's checkbook. It helps develop one's critical thinking skills which, in turn, allows one to cut through the statistics that are blithely thrown out by the media. Paulos laments the perverse pleasure people take in their mathematical ignorance and says, "Of course, some people have more talent than others in mathematics, just as some write better than others, but we don't advise students to forget their English and literature courses if they're not planning to be journalists or novelists." The reader is shown how an unfamiliarity with large numbers and probability leads to irrational fear of being the victim of some heinous random event. We also learn about coincidence as well, the ignorance of which serves as the foundation of belief in pseudoscience. There is math here but the reader is not burdened with equations. Instead he approaches the topic with stories that serve as examples, some of which are culled from real life.
This is an excellent book and essential reading for getting beyond the numerical soundbites which are all-too common in today's media.
I first read Benjamin Barber's
Strong Democracy in college and it's taken me nearly 14 years to read something else by him. But I did it. The book is about the spread of American consumer capitalism and its attendant culture (McWorld) and those who would oppose it (Jihad). Note, "jihad" here does not directly refer to anything related to Islam. Despite being nearly 12 years old, many of the arguments within still ring true.
Barber laments McWorld where we are nothing more than consumers of private goods with transnational corporations branding everything they can while trying to post the greatest gains in the shortest time by aiming straight for the lowest common denominator. Freedom means having choices – consumer choices. We may have options when it comes to buying a car but precious few in the public transportation (a.k.a. – social choices). Denizens of McWorld have many ways of constructing private lives but many fewer for creating social lives. As globalization spreads, there are those in opposition and, Barber tells us, they are notable for their tribalism. They are xenophobic and very resistant to change of any stripe.
Barber is at his beset when he sticks with documenting the changes. The early chapters detail the spread of American brand names, the movement of labor, and where mineral & energy resources are located around the globe. And I personally agree with him when he laments how city streets around the world are beginning to look the same dotted as they are with McDonald's, KFCs, and Pepsi signs.
The problem I have is when he leaves the world of statistics and moves to the level of the individual. He starts lumping people strictly into McWorld or Jihad and doesn't allow for an intermediary state. In one chapter, Barber notes that many Parisians travel outside of the city to rural areas to spend weekends in the country. He leaps into their psyches and claims they do this to "escape French modernity". Then, straying as far away from facts and figures as he can, he opines that these weekend travelers destroy "the rural landscape they wish to honor, just as their ex-urban occupation of quiet farm villages infects these hamlets with a corrosive cosmopolitanism." Moreover, they "cannot do for more than a long weekend without the twin fixes of twentieth-century consumerism and twenty-first-century technology". In other words, there is no respite from McWorld because it is like herpes – you can't shake it.
This is a good example of what I find wrong with the book. Everyone is a member of one tribe or the other and so is either a McWorld drone who swallows global consumerism hook, line, and sinker or you are a backwards, xenophobic country bumpkin who may also have bellicose tendencies. Instead I think that people are more likely to find ways to mediate the two extremes. If you're reading this, I'll bet that, like me, you are neither a credit card bearing automaton nor a backwoods Luddite railing against anything that came about after 1900. Barber is too black and white whereas I think each of our lives is grey. Barber spends a lot of ink bashing the notion that people are merely consumers preoccupied with purchasing goods as well as promoting the idea that we also like to pursue non-commercial ventures such as friends, love, religion, charity work, et al yet he always characterizes people as being at one extreme or another instead of seeing them as pursuing multiple interests and adopting different roles. Eating fast food and shopping at a big box store doesn't render one incapable of finding joy and meaning from things that money cannot buy.
Lastly we have
Nature via Nurture which I just finished yesterday. It was an utterly fascinating book which argues against both the blank slate idea as well as natavism, or that everything about us is programmed in our genes. Ridley begins with an imaginary photograph of 12 hairy men, each of which has contributed to the debate about the roles of nature and nurture in determining our make-up. Each chapter begins at some point in the past and examines the ideas of these 12 men. He explains how the ideas came about, how they developed, and how they fit into the puzzle.
In addition to the history lesson, I learned (again) that nearly a quarter of the human genome consists of genes bestowed upon us by retroviruses in our past. Although genes are, at their most basic level, merely recipes for proteins, they are amazing. Ridley does a great job of exploding the idea that there is a single gene for everything. Too many people I've encountered think this way. For them, the idea that something has a genetic basis or component means that there is a single gene which causes the phenomenon and this is far from the truth. Sure, there are single-gene diseases but most maladies have much more complicated causes and the section on schizophrenia is worth the price of admission alone.
Not having a strong biology background, I found some of the tales here enthralling. For instance, there was the paragraph on how tadpole eyes become frog eyes with a gene activating so that ephrin B is created and this protein directs the growth of axons from the retina to the part of the brain that deals with sight. Another interesting bit was the examination of the KAL-1 gene in the development of Kallmann syndrome which leaves the victim with no sense of smell and small gonads. There's a lot of important nasal action that needs to happen in the womb.
There were even a couple pages devoted to researchers who did work right here in Madison. First there was Harry Harlow who placed baby monkeys in cages with a wire "mother" equipped with a bottle of milk and a cloth "mother" not offering food. He found that, while they suckled at the wire model, the baby monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth model. These results and others struck a blow to B.F. Skinner and his behaviorist notion that children only love their mothers because the latter supply food. In 1980 Susan Mineka also did some experiments here at the UW. She showed that monkeys could be taught to fear snakes but not flowers. Ridley concludes, "It shows that there is a degree of instinct in learning, just as imprinting shows that there is a degree of learning in instinct."
Aside from the material itself, Ridley's writing is to be commended. The science is explained well for the lay reader and he tells a good tale. I liked how he mixed history of science with his subject and injected the personalities of various scientists into the stew. In addition, the book shows the best and worst of science as an enterprise at work. On the bad side, we see certain people take their knowledge in this area and align themselves with eugenics. On the good side, science moves forward with established theories being tossed to the wayside as more evidence comes to light.
A highly recommended read.
