Category Archives: Book Review

The Analects – Confucius (trans. David Hinton)

“If you can revive the ancient and use it to understand the modern, then you’re worthy to be a teacher.” – Confucius

Confucius (around 500 BC), stood for family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders, and ritual. He argued that society was made up of the structure of human relationships, and that to be fully human you had to fulfill your role in society with respect to others. He also argued for egalitarian education for all and a meritocracy, as well as espousing an early version of the Golden Rule. While alive, he was one of many philosophers: after his death, his philosophy would be adopted as an official creed in China, and Confucianism is one of the most lastingly influential creeds in history. It also came to stand for obedience to authority and sacrifice of the individual, but at least from the Analects it’s not clear that’s a fair interpretation.

In any case, I thought I’d share a few quotes that struck me!

General Advice

“When you’re an official with free time, study. When you’re a student with free time, take office.”

“For people to talk all day, enthralled with their clever chitchat, and never once mention right or wrong – that must be difficult indeed!”

À la Rumsfeld: “When you understand something, know that you understand it. When you don’t understand something, know that you don’t understand it. That’s understanding.”

On governing

“I can hear a court case as well as anyone. But we need to make a world where there’s no reason for a court case.”

“One day the stables burned down. When he returned from court, the Master asked: ‘Was anyone hurt?’ He didn’t ask about the horses.”

On Society

“To be poor and free of resentment is difficult. To be rich and free of arrogance is easy.”

“We’re all the same by nature. It’s living that makes us different.”

“Don’t grieve when people fail to recognize your ability. Grieve when you fail to recognize theirs.”

The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell

If you were one of the few survivors of some sort of global apocalypse, what sort of knowledge would you need to rebuild a functioning society? Building an iphone isn’t exactly easy, and I think most of us would struggle with even more basic things like a lens (for science), a bike (for transportation), or a system of crop rotation that would keep sufficient nitrogen in the fields (essential for food), never mind something like a pottery kiln or steam engine.

The Knowledge has two goals. One, to teach future survivors how to rebuild a technologically advanced civilization, ideally advancing them as far as possible without creating things too difficult to repair or maintain (there’s no point in jets if you can’t repair jet engines). Two, to examine the fundamentals of science and technology that are very remote from most of us. To do so, Dartnell covers the basics of food, shelter, and water plus some more ambitious projects, explaining to the reader how to get an arc furnace going to work metals; recover antibiotics, X-rays, steam engines, and photography; and reproduce electricity and cement, trying to strike a balance between useful detail for the survivor and overwhelming a casual reader.

The book is interesting even given the low odds of an apocalypse (depending on time scale – just ask this documentary produced by Stephen Hawking), and it’s even better as a way to provoke a thought experiment on what you think should be passed on. Theory of atoms? Evolution? How to make cement or grow food? Chemistry? As a social scientist myself, something I wondered is the role of social invention in all this. Are there social technologies that should be passed on? The Knowledge mentions only physical tech, but what about how to design a democracy, the importance of trade, or a la Steven Pinker, how to restrain violence? Overall, though sometimes a bit heavy into the detail of engineering that I must confess I skimmed, the basics of the technologies that underpin our society have shaped the way we live, the way we talk, and the way we think. Dartnell does an excellent job highlighting all of these, from how we say o’clock to show we mean clock time, not solar time, to the advantages of golf cart batteries over car batteries. Read it to learn more about the basic technologies we use, but whether you read it or not it’s interesting to think about what you would want to pass on.

Disclosure: I read The Knowledge as a free advance reader copy – it is released on April 3rd. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). You never know when such knowledge might be handy!

Out of the Ashes – David Lammy

“The riots spell out a fundamental challenge in British politics: to replace a culture in which people simply take what they want with an ethic of give and take, reciprocity, something for something.”

The Economist reviewed this book not so long ago, so I decided I’d pick it up. David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, an area of London central to the riots in 2011, and in Out of the Ashes he “explores why they happened, what [he] think[s] they tell us about Britain, and where we should go from here.”

In brief, he suggests the reason is an over-focus on individualism in modern culture. People don’t have a stake in society, and so they feel no sense of responsibility towards others. Unemployment is corrosive to our sense of who we are and what we stand for; businesses fail and we stop feeling like we’re part of a community or that we owe the community anything, least of all respect. Even in prison, the UK isolates their prisoners and prevents them from forming or keeping communities, unlike the Scandinavian model that focuses on giving prisoners social ties, to the extent of creating couples wings in prisons.

Books written by standing politicians are generally terrible, for the simple reason they want to be elected, not inform. This one is better: he still indulges in the periodic unrealistic suggestion or political haymaking to establish his credentials (I’m unconvinced of the value of giving football clubs to the people, but I’m sure it wins votes), but parts of the book are insightful. He writes well about his concerns about our modern focus on human rights, for example: they bring considerable benefits, of course, but they’ve also lead to a modern discourse where we focus on what we can do by right, instead of trying to decide the right thing to do.

Ironically, this is in some ways a small-c conservative argument, with a focus on community and group rights, though I suspect he’d disagree with that. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it’s a nice expression of feelings I think a lot of people in the UK share about the riots. Most of the policies aren’t new, but he argues well for them, whether requiring young people to help care for the elderly, reforming prisons, or a guaranteed minimum income (also known as a negative income tax). If you’re willing to wade through some standard fluff and electioneering, it’s one of the better books available about the London riots.

The Roman Experience – L.P. Wilkinson

“Baths, sex, and wine our bodies undermine; /

Yet what is life but baths and sex and wine?”

-Roman jingle

I can remember visiting Palmyra and hearing the story of some poor Roman engineer having a fit over the Arabic and therefore angled central street, making elaborate architectural efforts to conceal the bend. For Romans, main roads had to be straight. It has always captured our shared humanity for me: I can well picture a modern engineer going to similar lengths to ensure elegance. Such minor details help humanize ancient cultures, and remind us that human nature has changed little in the intervening thousand years.

In some ways, we know a surprisingly large amount about the Romans. We can say what they ate for breakfast (bread, oil, and sometimes cheese); that moralists condemned shellfish, central heating, hothouse flowers, and out of season roses; that they worried that eating meat was immoral (probably not due to carbon emissions); that they invited guests to parties in sets of 9, because that’s how many people would fit around couches on three sides of a table; and that they laughed at a man’s taste when a joke made the rounds that he threatened his shipping agents that any works of art from Corinth damaged in transit would have to be replaced by replicas just as good. In other ways, we know almost nothing: all of the above, for example, refers only to a narrow subset of elites, not to the plebian Roman citizen.

Wilkinson has written a book to attempt to tell us how the Romans lived; not what they did or who they conquered, but what their everyday lives were like. It’s a noble effort; historians often seem to focus on political and military history exclusively, and though I enjoy both those forms of history, I’d be the first to admit they’re hardly the whole story. Unfortunately, it faces the standard problem; there simply isn’t information about what everyday Romans did or thought. What we have, and we have a lot, is almost exclusively from the Senatorial or upper class, or later the Emperors themselves.

The book is appealing: the personal detail of everyday life in Rome is interesting, and it humanizes the Romans. The book does, however, require knowledge of history of the Empire in order to piece it all together, a fact for which the author is unapologetic. Still, it would have been nice to see a book capture both the broad themes of Roman history as well as provide some of the quotidian detail. Failing that, I can’t deny that it’s fun to relish some of the everyday tasks and troubles of Romans, even given the incomplete picture we have.

The Blank Slate 2 – Steven Pinker

Having reviewed The Blank Slate earlier this week, I’d thought I’d share a few choice quotes.

On the influence of genetics:

“Familiar categories of behaviour – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

“‘Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

On the modern emphasis on culture:

“Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”

The Blank Slate – Steven Pinker

“Yes, science is, in a sense, “reducing” us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound organ. But what an organ!”

Where else can you find out, to misquote Tolstoy, how unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way? (Evolutionarily speaking, parents want to allocate resources amongst their children equally. Children want a 2:1 ratio: they share half their genes with a sibling, but all their genes with themselves. The two groups disagree. So much for Tolstoy). Or that herding cultures are the most prone to honour violence? (They are both far from law enforcement and have assets that are easy to move and steal – they have to be prickly, as the Hatfields and McCoys found out). Or even that studies of boys raised as girls generally show that subjects display traditional ‘male’ behaviour?

Yes, it’s another Steven Pinker book, this time The Blank Slate, with opinions on how we think about children, fine art, morality, nihilism, and feminism. In it, Pinker argues that we vastly underestimate the importance genetics plays in human nature. We like to assume everything is culture because that means it’s under our control, but that simply isn’t the case. The dislike of evolutionary biology, he argues, stems from confusing ‘is’ and ‘ought’: people object to some biological imperatives, and so argue they are false. But genetics are not destiny, and simply because someone has a predisposition for selfish behaviour doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be criticized if they submit to it, or lauded if they overcome it. Parents should not abandon their children just because genetics explains half their variance, after all.

Pinker’s careful to stay in the middle; he certainly doesn’t deny the role of environment, but only wants the role of genetics to be recognized as well. I found the first third of the book a bit slow, in part perhaps because the nurture-is-all argument is less popular than it was, but the rest focused on his analysis of the implications of the science for morality, politics, and various social movements: all was excellent.

Pinker is always fun to read, definitely one of the wise we so like here at Subtle Illumination, and this book is no exception. Still, I wouldn’t start with it: I think Better Angels, for example, is even better. If you’re looking for a nice overview of evolutionary biology’s implications, though, The Blank Slate is a great start. If you do pick it up, though, I recommend reading it with someone else nearby; Pinker is at his best when excerpted and read out loud, if only to test the reaction of the listener and provoke yourself to think.

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!

The Tyranny of Experts – William Easterly

“Development seems to be almost exclusively about the fate of nations rather than the fate of individuals. We seem to care more about Zambia than about Zambians.”

In the 4^th century BC, Plato sailed to Sicily in order to help educate the tyrant Dionysius the Younger, the leader of the city of Syracuse. He believed he could turn him into a philosopher-king, the perfect leader of a country, despite his tyrannical tendencies. It did not turn out well. Plato would end up banished (though it could have been worse: the tyrant’s father had sold Plato into slavery when they disagreed) and the tyrant was bad as ever until he was overthrown in a coup.

Though he doesn’t mention Plato, Easterly worries about a similar modern problem. He points to the World Bank-supported theft of land from farmers in Uganda for a British company’s forestry project, about which the World Bank refused to conduct an investigation, or their support for development policies which resulted in the forced displacement at gunpoint of around 1.5 million farmers in Ethiopia so land could be leased to foreign investors, for which UK aid is now being sued. The development industry, he argues, has a nasty habit of accepting or supporting dictators and human rights abuses in its quest for development, accepting a false bargain of material development in exchange for overlooking human rights.

Development experts get all excited about their favourite policies, and then find that the democratic process to enact those policies is messy and slow. With the best of intentions, some turn to autocracies and let the end justify the means. This, Easterly argues, is not only immoral but also ineffective. In the short run, supporting an autocrat who rewards loyalists and punishes everyone else eliminates incentives for growth: in the long run, it leaves a legacy of poverty and poor human rights for generations (see Why Nations Fail for more on this).

As befits a book that emphasizes local context, each chapter begins with the specifics of an individual or region developing, from the Mouride Brotherhood, an Islamic order based in Senegal that produces wildly successful international traders, to Hyundai in South Korea. I was disappointed that, as Easterly himself admits, the data to decide whether autocracies are bad for growth just doesn’t exist, and the book is not really convincing in either direction, though there are certainly reasons for skepticism. Readers hoping to be convinced that China is bad or good for growth will be disappointed. Well taken, however, are his moral and long run criticisms: he rightly points out that in the absence of statistical fact about whether autocracies boost growth, the burden of proof surely lies with the side that violates human rights.

Disclosure: I read The Tyranny of Experts as a free advance reader copy – it is released on March 4th. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). I’ve also had the opportunity to see Easterly speak in person about one of his previous books; he’s an excellent speaker, for what it’s worth.

Strange Fruits: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate – Kenan Malik

“As the rise of the politics of difference has turned the assertion of group identity into a progressive demand, so racialisation is no longer viewed as a purely negative phenomenon. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities…The concept of race is irrational. The practice of antiracism has become so. We need to challenge both, in the name of humanism and of reason.”

The idea of race has what I find a surprisingly short history. For much of humanity’s past, it was group membership of things like socioeconomic status, citizenship, or faith which mattered. As late as 1881, the King of Hawaii was given precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany; social rank mattered more than race.

Race then had its heyday, but post WW2 it for good reasons became unacceptable. Malik worries in “Strange Fruits” that it is returning in popularity in the guise of culture and under the auspices of antiracism. The right, he argues, uses human diversity as an argument to exclude the different; the modern left uses human diversity as a reason that people must be treated differently. Both, he suggests, rely on race and emphasize differences between people. Often it is culture that the left argues must be preserved: but that he suggests is too often used as a proxy for race, and one’s membership in a culture is defined by who one’s ancestors were. When museums restrict access to certain exhibits for cultural reasons, as they do in Australia and elsewhere, genetics and descent is the gatekeeper to knowledge.

In the end, race explains an insignificant 3-5% of human variation. Its categories are almost entirely arbitrary, and impossible to define over a constantly changing humanity. If science wishes to use it as a pragmatic way of grouping people, Malik argues, as when the FDA approved a drug targeting African-Americans, then fine; but it is the use of a social construct for convenience without the specificity to be anything more, and should be treated as such, not as a fixed dividing line between groups. Antiracists on the left who argue that cultures/races must be treated differently because they are different, he suggests, should remember the same: celebrating racial differences requires the same assumptions about race as those held by racists, an unscientific and unfounded philosophy.

To find out more, you can pick up a copy here (or just read the reviews) – or in the UK or Canada.

The Restoration of Rome (Charlemagne) – Peter Heather

The last history post for a while, honest! We’ll be back to doing books next week. But can’t you just feel all the character you’ve built learning all this history?

Charles the Great. Karolus Magnus. Charlemagne. Around 800 AD, he would be the last of our three wannabe reunifiers to attempt to recreate the Western Roman Empire. He had the right pedigree for it; his grandfather, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, is often credited with stopping the Islamic invasion of Christendom through Spain in a major battle.

Charlemagne was the leader of the Franks in Northern Europe, and was called to Italy to help defend the Papal state from the Lombards in the North of Italy. He did so, incidentally conquering the Lombards and most of Western Europe.

Having conquered the territory, however, he still needed a way to show he was emperor. The Catholic Church was respected, but it was reluctant to pronounce anyone emperor, since emperors were seen as the chosen of God and in some sense even outranked Popes. For some reason Popes weren’t wild about that. In 799 AD, however, an opportunity arose. The pope at the time, Leo III, was accused of various crimes, imprisoned, and barely escaped. After a meeting with Charlemagne, however, he was sent back with troops enough to protect him and ensure his authority. A year later, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Leo III. Interpretation is left to the reader.

Even Charlemagne’s empire, however, would last only a century. Why? Heather argues that without Roman bureaucracy, a new Empire was impossible. The Roman Empire worked because local nobility wanted to become part of the imperial bureaucracy; that’s where power and influence was, but revenues still flowed to the Emperor. The Carolingian Empire, on the other hand, used gifts to buy the loyalty of nobles, often of land and the associated tax revenues. With the loss of the tax base, combined with the decreased agriculture productivity across Western Europe, emperors weren’t much wealthier than their nobles, and so nobles would rebel or support rival claimants to the throne, carving the empire up. This problem was only exacerbated as the Vikings attacked from the North, since the presence of a highly mobile attacking force meant even more resources had to be devolved to local areas, which would in turn feel less loyalty to the central power. The result was many smaller kingdoms, not one large empire.

It’s a difficulty all Empires face; devolving enough power to make regions able to solve their own problems, without giving them enough to be independent. In a time when it could take a month for a message to cross Europe, the problem was even worse, but its remnants remain in debates of decentralization and state power in the UK and the US.

And so ends our week and a half of history: back to book reviews!