“A Culture of Growth” by Joel Mokyr

I have long been searching for a book that adequately explains Europe’s rise to dominance in world affairs. For obvious reasons, I found genetic explanations distasteful and geographic reasons incomplete. Yet the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, colonial appropriation, and global hegemony must not have occurred purely by happenstance. Contingency had its role, but Mokyr’s book argues a unique cultural milieu that gained prominence around the sixteenth century led not only to the West’s propulsion, but, more importantly, its ability to stay on top the global stage. 

Mokyr’s book is a combination of the disciplines of economics and cultural evolution. He seeks to explain why between 1500-1700 AD Europe’s material wealth grew exponentially while the rest of the world remained at just about a subsistence level economy. He suggests it was a unique culture that developed across Europe. Mokyr accepts Boyd and Richerson’s definition of culture as “a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.” Mokyr continues, “the advantage of models of cultural evolution is that they are contingent and concern ex ante probabilities rather than deterministic causal models. In other words, they force us to recognize that things could have turned out differently than they did with fairly minor changes in initial conditions or accidents along the way.” He begins his argument by claiming that knowledge is a public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable. As such, “economists suspect knowledge tends to be chronically underproduced.” 

Mokyr suggests that the largest factor in Europe’s success was its encouragement of invention over tradition. “If the culture is heavily infused with respect of ancient wisdom so that any intellectual innovation is considered deviant and blasphemous, technological creativity will be similarly constrained.” It was individualism that promoted heterodox ideas that challenged boundaries and created outside the box solutions to old problems. There was a sense that the ancients did not know everything and that the classical period was not a golden age to be cherished and preserved, but a starting point of knowledge to be built upon. These were radical ideas in Europe at the time, when recently heretics were burned at the stake and non-Aristotelean and non-Ptolemaic teachings were grounds for dismissal from Oxford’s colleges. 

For cultural evolution to succeed one must have variation. For good ideas to win out there must be many ideas to choose from. These ideas must be inheritable. There must be a mechanism to have them passed on and diffused, both vertically (generationally) and horizontally (geographically).  There also must be a repository of shared knowledge, since no individual brain could hope to master and remember all the group learning of human society. In all societies, there is a small leadership of cultural entrepreneurs who synergize and transform latent and prevailing thoughts. They do not make up ideas ex novo, but take the zeitgeist of the day, reshape it, and transform the cultural milieu. Europe succeeded, in large part, because it was culturally homogenous while politically diffuse. “This unity derived from both Europe’s classical heritage and widespread use of Latin as the lingua franca of intellectuals, and the Christian Church.” However, the small nation states that warred for political and religious reasons created small arenas where ideas could be tested against one another. Successful ideas were copied regardless of the religious affiliation of the inventor, because rulers could not afford to get behind in the technological arms race. Heretics could easily escape across borders, where they were often welcomed as the enemy of one’s enemy and given patronage and protection. There they could smuggle back innovations through the newly ubiquitous printing press. 

Europe created a competition for ideas, but also an atmosphere where both propositional and practical knowledge flourished and were combined and reinterpreted. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers interacted with engineers, explorers, cartographers, and farmers to create inventions that helped the lives of everyday man, while also reconceptualizing the metaphysical reality of humanity. The distinctions between intellectuals and artisans blurred. That combination was powerful. Christianity encouraged a homocentric worldview where nature was expected to bend to the will of man. Science, in the puritanical view, became the study of God’s creation and inventions, discoveries, and technical improvements were not seen as heretical, but the blessings of God. “The ideal life was one that efficiently deployed one’s ability for personal advantage and public service and glorified God by maximizing one’s material resources.” It was Weber’s Protestant ethic at work. “The systematic and meticulous study of God’s creation was the closest a Calvinist could get to an inscrutable deity that could not be grasped by the cultivated intellect.” 

The two men who contributed most to this sea change were Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. Bacon felt “knowledge ought to bear fruit in production, science ought to be applicable to industry, and it was people’s sacred duty to improve and transform the material conditions of life.” His method was a bottom-up empirical induction, rather than the deductive philosophizing favored by Aristotle and Descartes. Bacon wanted facts, datum, and proof: a proto-positivist. Newton expanded on this thirst for quantification and measurement. He was not interested in a grand encompassing system, but more modest truths. 

The Republic of Letters codified a system to share knowledge across national boundaries and religious sects. Through prestige and censure, the system also rewarded individuals for generating useful knowledge and new concepts. It finally paid reputationally and financially (through patronage), to be original. The Republic of Letters was a clearinghouse for new ideas that rewarded “property rights” through crediting the inventor. The main rules “were freedom of entry, contestability, that is, the right to challenge any form of knowledge, transnationality, and a commitment to placing new knowledge in the public domain.” Furthermore, qualitatively, it prized different kinds of knowledge. “The most important of these were the ever-growing use of mathematics where it was applicable (astronomy and mechanics), the validity of experimental data in those fields where experiments were possible, and the collection and careful taxonomy of empirical observations where neither of these approaches worked (e.g., in botany and entomology).” The Republic of Letters created a merit based system which encapsulated a single European group mind, where people could build on the knowledge of others through shared notes, papers, and books. 

The last section of Mokyr’s book contrasts China of the same period. Mokyr reveals that in the Song Dynasty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries imperial China was actually leaps and bounds ahead of all of Europe. Measured by increased use in fossil fuels, iron, textiles, transport, agricultural productivity, and internal trade, the Song were on the verge of industrialization. But by 1500-1700 AD things had stagnated and even retrograded into decay. The culture did not sustain innovation and growth. Education was a state run monopoly that consisted entirely of Confucian classics and traditional writings. Examinations stressed rote memorization. The best students went exclusively into the civil service after studying only ancient philosophy. Medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture were held in low esteem. Confucianism denigrated all manual labor. There was a strict divide between scholars and artisans. Books and encyclopedic knowledge were kept in the hands of the Mandarin elite. The large geographical landmass, ruled centrally, instilled a homogeneity of thought. “Stability and domestic peace were increasingly regarded as an overriding value, and this included intellectual stability.” Heretical views were suppressed and rarely spread. Li Zhi, Wang Yangming, and Xu Guangqi all individually rose high in the bureaucracy, and had enlightened ideas regarding experimentation, practical applications of inventions, and even quasi-Epicurean philosophy, but their ideas did not survive beyond them. Neo-Confucians viewed world history as steadily in decline and antiquity was upheld as an ideal. 

Mokyr concludes by suggesting that European growth was sustained through two complimentary ideas: “the concept that knowledge and the understanding of nature can and should be used to advance the material conditions of humanity, and the belief that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large.” 

“Oedipus Unbound” By Rene Girard

In this book Girard brings the "Girardian framework" to the myth of Oedipus, as well as to the novel, myth, and stories in general. He first tackles the never-ending human quest for desires and impossible wants. “It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires…. Behind every closed door, every insurmountable barrier, the hero senses the presence of the absolute mastery that eludes him, the divine serenity of which he feels deprived.” Desire, for Girard, is always framed in opposition to the Other. “Desire, a force oriented toward the Self, an energy which is strictly narcissistic and yet which tears the individual away from himself to make him into the satellite of an Other.” This is the eternal duel between the Self and the Other. The more one seeks to identify differences, the more one loses the reality of the sameness inherent in man. “To turn back against oneself the curse first hurled at the Other, to discover that this wicked Other and the Self are one, means discovering the Same in what once passed for absolute Difference, it means unifying reality. But first of all it means dying.” In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus creates bitter enemies from his closest rivals. “Creon, the enemy brother, and Tiresias, the blind prophet, are the doubles of Oedipus, blind and a prophet himself. Each episode goes a little further in revealing Oedipus’s adversary to be an alter ego.” It is his own subjective viewpoint that blinds him from the truth. 

The tragic conflict of the Oedipus myth begins with Oedipus and his father, Laius. “Driven by the same desire, the two men are constantly headed towards the same violence…. The conflict between the two men does not feed on differences, as all thinking in line with common sense would have it, but on resemblances continually elicited by the identity of aims and the convergence of desire…. The object that lies behind an obstacle is only the more desirable for being forbidden. The obsession with forbidden fruit is not primary, it is not the cause but the consequence of the rivalry.” It is the rivalry the begets the object of desire. Whatever is identified as an obstacle becomes a sign that he is, in fact, on the right path- the path to fulfill life’s desire, the impossible goal. The violence becomes circular as the object disappears and both become focussed on each other instead. The model and the obstacle merge as one, while the object loses all importance. “Each seeing in the Other a real or potential rival, each takes refuge in the same violence…. Each contemplates in the Other the truth of his own desire.” This is an anti-Manichean view of the world. “The signifiers of good and evil superimposed on the tragic relationships are always unstable, always ready to reverse themselves.” There is only “the lie of the myth, the effort of all men to shunt their truth onto the Other…. Each person, at this level, plumbs the other’s “unconscious,” each congratulates himself on his own perspicacity. The more real this perspicacity is, and it is real, the more it focuses us on the Other. It conceals from us the essential aspects of the structure, the role that we personally play in it.” The more similar the Self and the Other, the more obsessed we become with irrelevant differences. Every man is the guilty party to the Other, who he never sees as himself. We speak the truth, but only half-truths, for we cannot see in the Other what is most like ourselves.

The tragedy of the myth of Oedipus is that the contagion of rivalry spreads to the community at large. In the myth this is symbolized by the very real threat of the plague. “The mythic plague is the passive contagion of desire and hatred, which, spreading from one person to the next, shakes the very foundations of society…. Along with the plague there are bad harvests and women dying in child-birth. Everything here is a metaphor of sterility.” In Western culture this problem in society has been intensified as traditional roles and hierarchies have disappeared. There is no rigid system to put the individual in his place. Instead, roles are fluid and rivalries multiply. “With a small number of rigorous prohibitions replacing the immense variety of positive prescriptions, the exchanges display a degree of mobility never before attained.” In the pre-Christian days, sacrifice mitigated the rivalry that arose within the community. “To sacrifice an animal is to have recourse to a means of purification that may originally not be simply ritual, since it substitutes, for the fathers and sons pitted against each other, for those guilty parties of whom the interminable pursuit would lead to a terrible familial vendetta, a living creature, a victim still but a “neutral” one, intermediate between a man and an inanimate object, a victim that can be put to death without aggravating the divisions within the city. To sacrifice an animal is to make allowance for a desire for violence incapable of being entirely sublimated…. The goat takes upon itself the sins of the fathers, of the sons, of the brothers, indeed of all of the citizens. It carries away, into death or into the desert that closes around it, the seeds of those conflicts that the convergence of desires, which is to say the very unity of the culture, its internal cohesiveness, cannot fail to provoke.” 

When an animal will no longer do, often a man becomes the scapegoat. He is kept at a safe distance and excluded from the community even before he is killed or exiled. The choice is often arbitrary. There must be a sameness, but also difference. That is why the selection is often a newcomer or one with a deformity that marks him apart. “The scapegoat is responsible for all guilty desires. He is the only one to commit the crimes these desires suggest. If the myth is a perfect mirror, if it is purely and simply the projection onto a single mythical figure of a reality common to all men, the choice of this figure, the choice of the scapegoat, is completely arbitrary…. Just as an animal was first substituted for man, so the hero substitutes for the animal.” He is the one that absolves the city at large from its crimes. He purifies the city by taking on all its sins. The arbitrary nature of the choice must be hidden from the city for the choice to work. The human sacrifice is now no longer neutral, but he is the only guilty party. He is the exceptional one, apart from the rest. “If the collective decision designating the scapegoat is arbitrary, that is because only this decision can put an end to the hunt of all against each and of each against all.” It puts an end to the skandalon, the scandal, infecting the whole community and spreading throughout it. “If the conflict involved tangible goods, a solution would be conceivable. It is the nullity of the difference that renders the conflict inexpiable.” Cultural creation is the fruit of trying to prevent this contagion. Culture neutralizes rivalry. Taboos, hierarchies, and institutions block the convergence of desires and seek to eliminate confrontations. however, modernity has broken down these walls. “If there is no longer any difference between men, that is because in truth there never was. The truth of the myth is absolute symmetry. There is no true father, and that indeed is the knowledge that the expulsion of the scapegoat obscures…. To choose a scapegoat is to choose the universal other who will put an end to the universal discord. In the case of physical violence, the cure is genuine insofar as the community is truly re-unified against the single victim, insofar, therefore, as the evil qualities of the random victim are unanimously and uncritically accepted.”

“The Crooked Timber of Humanity” by Isaiah Berlin

In this collection of essays, Berlin ruminates on culture, politics, history, and philosophy with his usual style, which is academic without being overly didactic. He maintains he is a pluralist, not a cultural relativist- a theme he propounds on throughout his writings. “Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false.” Therefore, he offers up that any humane political philosophy should be moderate, have a presumption towards the utilitarian, possess humility, and avoid the extremes of suffering. Berlin ridicules all forms of utopia as static models with no need for novelty and change (by definition) and, therefore, insufficient. He claims that if it is deemed that there is only one correct answer, then all other answers must necessarily be incorrect. “This is not accepted by those who declare that men’s temperaments, gifts, outlooks, wishes permanently differ one from another, that uniformity kills, that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in societies in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions- the freedom for what J.S. Mill called ‘experiments in living’- in which there is liberty of thought and of expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence; that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.” These disagreements arise when talking not just about means, but also about ultimate ends “for variety entails the possibility of the conflict of values, of some irreducible incompatibility between the ideals, or, indeed, the immediate aims, of fully realised, equally virtuous men.” 

His essay on Giambattista Vico contrasts what he sees as Vico’s pluralism with relativism, which does not seek to understand and comprehend the other. Pluralism does see multiple cultures, each with their own visions and scales of values, but bounded by the commonality that makes us all human. Vico sought to ‘enter into’ or ‘descend into’ the minds of others to understand them based on their own unique historical milieu. Vico points out that “Homeric men are ‘boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult, and obstinate in their resolves.’ Achilles is cruel, violent, vindictive, concerned only with his own feelings; yet he is depicted as a blameless warrior, the ideal hero of the Homeric world. The values of that world have passed away.” Homeric men were not worse men, just of another time. Ultimately, what Vico rejected was any sort of “possibility of establishing the final truth in all the provinces of human thought by application of the laws of the natural sciences.” For Vico, culture, history, and human development all had to be accounted for to understand, if not accept, a plurality of morals, all equally human. “Each phase is incommensurable with the others, since each lives by its own light and can be understood only in its own terms, even though these terms form a single intelligible process, which is not wholly, or, perhaps, even largely, intelligible to us.” Berlin contrasts this with relativism. “Relativism is something different: I take it to mean a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood…. Relativism, in its modern form, tends to spring from the view that men’s outlooks are unavoidably determined by forces of which they are often unaware- Schopenhauer’s irrational cosmic force; Marx’s class-bound morality; Freud’s unconscious drives; the social anthropologists’ panorama of the irreconcilable variety of customs and beliefs conditioned by circumstances largely uncontrolled by men.” In contrast, Vico argues, “we are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.” Berlin threads the needle between utopia and relativism, but also confirms that “to understand is not to accept…. One can reject a culture because one finds it morally or aesthetically repellent, but, on this view, only if one can understand how and why it could nevertheless, be acceptable to a recognisably human society.” 

Berlin’s longest essay is on Joseph de Maistre, who Berlin argues, far from being a conservative, actually presaged and exemplified 20th century fascism. Maistre lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era as a Savoyard aristocrat and diplomat. He famously argued for the trinity of classicism, monarchy, and the Church, which he further boiled down into two- “Throne and Altar”. Emile Faguet characterized him thus, “‘his Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the State’; his faith is ‘a slightly touched-up paganism’. He is a Roman of the fifth century, baptised but Roman; or alternatively a ‘Praetorian of the vatican’.” Needless to say, he was an enemy of the Enlightenment and all abstract thought. He despised a priori reasoning, appealing, instead, to actual lived man and historical fact. “Maistre, at any rate in the works of his maturity, is consumed by the sense of original sin, the wickedness and worthlessness of the self-destructive stupidity of men left to themselves. Again and again he dwells on the fact that suffering alone can keep human beings free from all falling into the bottomless abyss of anarchy and the destruction of all values. On one side ignorance, willfulness, idiocy; on the other, as the remedy, blood, pain, punishment…. Whatever is rational collapses because it is rational, man-made: only the irrational can last. Rational criticism will erode whatever is susceptible to it: only what is insulated against it, by being inherently mysterious and inexplicable, can survive. What man makes, man will mar: only the superhuman endures.” But man is free. Alone amongst all creatures, he struggles for knowledge, expression, and, finally, salvation. “Religion is superior to reason not because it returns more convincing answers than reason, but because it returns no answer at all. It does not persuade or argue, it commands.” As for monarchy, Maistre “prized loyalty above all virtues; the less worthy the embodiment of the legitimate royal power, the greater obedience was due to it, so that the principle of unquestioning obedience owed by the subject to his sovereign might shine forth the more clearly.” Institutions “are strong and durable to the extent that they are conceived of as divine…. Sovereignty must be indivisible, for if it is distributed there is no centre of authority, and all things fall to pieces.” Maistre viewed power above all else. It was his unquestioning loyalty to this power in which Maistre presaged the fascist monstrosities to come. 

Berlin concludes this collection of essays by circling back again to the theme of pluralism in political philosophy. He asserts that it is a modern Romantic concept, not shared by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Platonists, or even Stoics. “The notion that the truth is not necessarily one, that values are many, that they may conflict, that there is something sublime in dying for one’s own vision of the truth even though it may be condemned by the rest of the world- that, I think, would before the eighteenth century have seemed to be a very eccentric position.” There are choices between final ends- justice and mercy, order and liberty- and these value judgements are ultimate, not incidental. “Man is independent and is free, that is to say, that the essence of man is not consciousness, nor the invention of tools, but the power of choice…. The glory and dignity of man consist in the fact that it is he who chooses, and is not chosen for, that he can be his own master (even if at times this fills him with fear and a sense of solitude).” As Kant professed, without freedom there is no morality. The Romantics were devoted to following their own Will, their unique calling, no matter the consequences or their resulting impressions upon society. “The Romantic outlook condemns success as such as both vulgar and immoral; for it is built, as often as not, on a betrayal of one’s ideals, on a contemptible arrangement with the enemy. A correspondingly high value is placed upon defiance for its own sake, idealism, sincerity, purity of motive, resistance in the face of all odds, noble failure, which are contrasted with realism, worldly wisdom, calculation, and their rewards- popularity, success, power, happiness, peace bought at morally too high a price…. For the disciples of the new philosophy suffering was nobler than pleasure, failure was preferable to worldly success, which had about it something squalid and opportunist, and could surely be bought only at the cost of betraying one’s integrity, independence, the inner light, the ideal vision within.” As Fichte stated, “I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will.” Pluralism cannot only descend into relativism, but it can also be perverted into nationalism. It is a slippery slope from pride in diversity to the thought that one particular culture is better- the one best way amongst many. The German Romantics and Idealists such as Lenz, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Holderlin straddled that line. “This is the beginning of nationalism, and even more of populism. Herder upholds the value of variety of spontaneity, of the different, idiosyncratic paths pursued by peoples, each with its own style, ways of feeling and expression, and denounces the measuring of everything by the same timeless standards…. Human customs, activities, forms of life, art, ideas, were (and must be) of value to men not in terms of timeless criteria, applicable to all men and societies, irrespective of time and place, as the French lumieres taught, but because they were their own, expressions of their local, regional, national life, and spoke to them as they could speak to no other human group. This is why men withered in exile.” Herder believed in a rich variety of life and a diversity of national forms, none superior to another. Berlin was a true political moderate, who proudly tried to thread the needle between delicate concepts without compromise or wishy-washiness. His truths were not always simple, but they were profound. Pluralism and negative liberty, in which man was given space to fulfill his own wishes, were his ideals. His idea that final ends sometimes cannot be reconciled, but that each are equally valid was anathema to Christians and Marxists alike. Berlin gave place to science and reason, but also knew that man was a creature of his unique culture and history. Berlin believed that all of this was part and parcel of man and, in the end, had to be reconciled within him and within the society in which he happened to live.

“The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This is one strange book. On the surface it is an autobiography written by two people, neither of them real. Pessoa’s mind inhabited many characters, personas whom he called his heteronyms. They had their own fictional biographies, philosophies, and writing styles. Pessoa created complete imaginary worlds for each of these writers. In “The Book of Disquiet” Pessoa begins writing as Vicente Guedes and then switches over to Bernardo Soares, a semi-heteronym, because he is a mere mutilation of Pessoa’s own personality. The book itself is more treatise of philosophy than memoir. Pessoa pontificates on the meaning of life and other big questions through the heteronyms Guedes and Soares. Pessoa despises banality, even as he observes the everyday in Lisbon. His prose reads like poetry. With flowery verse, Pessoa gallantly describes the world he inhabits, while you get the feeling he is not quite of this world. There is a mysticism and a remove, though not an asceticism by any means. He begins, as Vicente Guedes, by describing his soul, “My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.” Life’s purpose is a constant theme, "Some have a great dream in life, and fall short of it. Others have no dream, and also fall short of it.” And the banality of the mundane, "The only thing that prevents the everyday greeting of "How are you?" from being an unforgivable insult is the fact that in general it is utterly empty and insincere.” Even as he describes the commonplace, Guedes despises it, "Practical life always seemed to me to be the least comfortable of suicides.” He thinks of himself as a man above the masses, “All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.” Soares, Pessoa reveals, is more like his real self, in style if not in content. Soares, although a humble bookkeeper, also lives apart from the world, “For me, everything that is not my soul is, whether I like it or not, mere scenery, mere decor. Even if I recognize intellectually that a man is a living being like myself, my real instinctive self has always felt him to be of less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful than him.” He ruminates on the escape of death often, “Perhaps death will wake us up, but there is no answer to that either, apart from faith, for which it is enough to believe, and hope, for which to desire is to have, and charity, for which to give is to receive.” Life for him is a living death, “We are death. This thing we consider to be life is the sleep of a real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. The two worlds have been switched. When we think we are alive, we are dead; let us live while we are dying.” Soares lives in his writing, not in his life, “I am, for the most part, the very prose that I write. I shape myself in periods and paragraphs, I punctuate myself and, in the unleashed chain of images, I make myself king, as children do, with a crown made from a sheet of newspaper or, in finding rhythms in mere strings of words, I garland myself, as madmen do, with dried flowers that in my dreams still live.” He barely touches on politics, except to decry its pettiness, “I always find it hard to admit that anything done collectively can possibly be sincere, since the only true sentient being is the individual.” For Soares, art and literature are the highest of pursuits, “The value of art is that it takes us away from here.” He is not tired by life, but seeks to live apart from it, “Tedium is not a sickness brought on by the boredom of having nothing to do, but the worse sickness of feeling that nothing is worth doing.” His metaphysics is one of disrespect, “The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be. The weariness of all hypotheses….” He lives an unfulfilled existence in the knowledge that his personality could never properly be fulfilled, “I was more of a genius in dreams than in life. That is my tragedy.” Perhaps what Soares is seeking no man has found, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are only free if you can withdraw from men and feel no need to seek them out for money, or society, or love, or glory, or even curiosity, for none of these things flourish in silence and solitude. If you cannot love alone, then you were born a slave…. To be born free is Man’s greatest quality; it is what makes the humble hermit superior to kings, superior even to gods, who are sufficient unto themselves only by virtue of their power but not by virtue of their disdain for it.”

“Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” by Adam Grant

This is a Malcolm Gladwellesque book. It is light reading, breezy, but highly informative: giving you new facts followed by anecdotes to prove the point. I had not known that people who do not use the default browsers to access the internet (Explorer or Safari) tend to be happier at work and stay at their jobs longer. Grant gives tips like procrastinate strategically (Martin Luther King did not begin writing his “I have a dream” speech until 10pm the night before) and balance your risk portfolio (Phil Knight and Paul Allen kept their day jobs while founding their companies). His most interesting section is on raising original children: set values not rules, complement character not specific behavior, find role models outside of parents (even fictional ones), and explain reasons, do not dictate. The advice often seems obvious, after the fact, but still hard to implement consistently in actual daily life.

“The Invisible Cloak” by Ge Fei (translated by Canaan Morse)

This was a strange little novel, originally written in Chinese. Set in modern day Beijing, it is narrated by an audiophile who builds custom-made stereo systems for businessmen and academics in the city. He has to deal with a sister and brother in law who are pains in the ass, he has been divorced by his wife who had been cheating on him with her boss, his mother, who predicted the divorce even before the marriage, dies suddenly, he has a tempestuous relationship with his only friend in the world, he is constantly being setup on excruciating blind dates, and he lives in a small apartment, owned by his sister, that has a huge crack in the exterior wall, which lets in the cold, dirty air, and mosquitos. The only thing that he loves in the world is listening to classical music, particularly Beethoven and Brahms. The tale gets weirder from there. He is introduced to a mysterious gangster who commissions him to create the world’s best sound-system, sparing no expense. The narrator uses his lifesavings to buy the equipment in the hopes of using the profits to buy his own place, because he is being kicked out of his apartment by his sister. The writing is plain and subtle. The descriptions of Beijing and modern Chinese society are rich. One finds oneself rooting and hoping for the narrator as he goes through all his travails. The story ends strangely, with plenty of mystery and ambiguous loose ends, but the tale is definitely one worth reading.

“Against the Grain” by James C. Scott

Scott is a professor of anthropology and political science at Yale, whose latest book reaches substantially back further in time. He seeks to describe the origins of State-making in Mesopotamia. Scott fully admits that his expertise is not in prehistory, archaeology, or ancient history, yet he brings a startling new hypothesis to the table. Perhaps it would take an outsider to bring a radical new reappraisal to the origins of human history. “We thought (most of us anyway) that the domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism and fixed-field agriculture. It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared.” The invention of agriculture did not beget fixed residency and fixed residency existed for thousands of years before the first State formed! Scott focuses on Mesopotamia, beginning with the Ubaid Period, roughly 6500 BC, through the Babylonian Period, ending roughly 1600 BC, although he makes lengthy digressions and comparisons with ancient Greece, Rome, and China.

Scott begins by reminding us just how new the State project is in the course of history. “The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and state in Mesopotamia occurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on the planet…. Evidence for the use of fire is dated at least 400,000 years ago…. Permanent settlement, agriculture and pastoralism appearing 12,000 years ago…. The first states in the Mesopotamian alluvium pop up no earlier than about 6,000 years ago…. Until the past four hundred years, one-third of the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and independent horticulturalists, while states, being essentially agrarian, were confined largely to that small portion of the globe suitable for cultivation.”

Scott dates the beginnings of the Anthropocene to the introduction of fire. Fire was actually invented by Homo Erectus, even before Homo Sapiens came onto Earth’s scene. “Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning.” Hominids began to shape their environment and in doing so changed the evolutionary path of the plants and animals that they interacted with. Even hominids themselves became shaped by the harnessing of fire. “The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes starch and denatures protein…. [It] allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition [from food]…. Plants with thorns, thick skins, and bark could be opened, peeled, and detoxified by cooking; hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable; the flesh and guts of small birds and rodents could be sterilized.” It is no exaggeration to assert that fire changed the landscape of the entire earth by changing the diet available to hominids. Fire also allowed the human anatomy to transform. Compared to other primates, humans have smaller teeth, a gut half the size, and a brain three times as large as would be expected for our size.

Getting back to habitat, Scott maintains that “sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little to no cereal cultivation.” This flies in the face of accepted history. Furthermore, even after that, “domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears.” The gap between the first domestications and the arrival of the State is now put at around 4,000 years, as reckoned from new archaeological records and soil samples. Instead, the first sedentary settlements sprang up in wetlands between the Euphrates and Tigris, initially having no need for grain or irrigation. “The density and diversity of resources that are lower in the food chain, in particular, make sedentism more feasible. Compared, say, with hunter-gatherers who may follow large game (seals, bison, caribou), those who take most of their diet from lower trophic levels such as plants, shellfish, fruits, nuts, and small fish that are, other things equal, denser and less mobile than the larger mammals and fish, can be far less migratory.” These initial sedentary communities also sprang up at a time when the ocean water reached much further inland than currently. Mesopotamia was not today’s arid climate, requiring irrigation to channel scarce water resources, but was a marine environment between coasts and estuaries that created multiple diverse habitats in which to scavenge and hunt. Seasonally, as the brackish line between fresh and ocean water would shift, the peoples learned to adapt to the changing environment. The natural water environment moved through the seasons instead of the people moving to new environments. From Mesopotamia, to the lower Nile, Jericho, the Indus, Lake Titicaca, and Hangzhou Bay, the first settled peoples always chose wetland locations with diverse ecologies to put up stakes. The important thing to note is that these people also shifted in methods of acquiring sustenance. Gradually the people of the Mesopotamian alluvium learned to incorporate aspects of agriculturalism and pastoralism, as well as being hunter-gatherers. They shifted their methods and would switch back and forth as the seasons, climate, and fauna dictated. There was no need to practice labor intensive farming and livestock rearing, besides as insurance, as long as the food supply was bountiful. The earliest agriculture was probably “flood-retreat” in that it relied on nature to transfer, by erosion, upstream nutrients to a flood plain that was then seeded annually.

Eventually, as agriculture gained traction, man and nature interacted to change the evolution of both. “The tilled, sown, weeded field is an altogether different terrain selection [from the wild]. The farmer wants nonshattering (indehiscent) grain spikes that can be gathered intact, as well as determinate growth and maturity. Many of the characteristics of a domestic grain are simply the long-run effects of sowing and harvesting. Thus plants that produce both more seeds and seeds that are larger, with thin coats (allowing them to quickly germinate and outrace weedy competitors when sown), that ripen uniformly, are easily threshed, germinate reliably, and have fewer glumes and appendages are likely to contribute disproportionately to the harvest, and thus their offspring will be favored in next year’s planting.” Humans also shaped the evolutionary direction of the animals that interacted with their domus. “The hallmark behavioral difference between domesticated animals and their wild contemporaries is a lower threshold of reaction to external stimuli and an overall reduced wariness of other species- including homo sapiens.” These traits were not just intentionally bred by humans, but came as a natural result of living in a domus environment. This can be shown because even uninvited “commensals such as statuary pigeons, rats, mice, and sparrows exhibit much the same reduced wariness and reactivity.” Sexual dimorphism was also reduced, fertility increased, neotany (the early attainment of adulthood) increased, a shortening of the face and jaw occurred, and the limbic systems in the brains of domesticated animals were reduced in size, resulting in an overall dampening of emotions. With agriculture, the very cycle of humanity changed. Humans shifted from a natural calendar to one that was based on field clearing, sowing, weeding, watering, and harvesting. Humans had shifted the very cycles of time. “This codification of subsistence and ritual life around the domus was powerful evidence that, with domestication, Homo sapiens had traded a wide spectrum of wild flora for a handful of cereals and a wide spectrum of fauna for a handful of livestock.” Scott considers this Neolithic Revolution to be a great deskilling of mankind on par with the specialization of the factory worker, related by Adam Smith’s pin factory during the Industrial Revolution.

Scott asserts that the domestication of food was a lot of work. It was fragile and vulnerable. It created a monotonous food source prone to fungus, disease, weeds, rodents, and insects. It was also labor intensive. It also created new diseases that affected humans. “Virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand…. Of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases, originating in nonhuman hosts.” Fortunately (or not), “despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-a-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction- enough to compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.” The spacing between births was also greatly compressed. Mobile populations only birthed every four years or so, due to prolonged weaning, abortions, and infanticide. A combination of exercise and a protein rich diet also induced later puberty, earlier menopause, and less regular ovulation, resulting in less births compared to sedentary contemporaries. Thus, while the lives of hunter-gatherers were more nutritious, less prone to disease, and, overall, healthier individually, they were still being outcompeted as a group by the greater birthrates of agriculturalists.

The first State was probably Uruk around 3200 BC. Its population was somewhere around twenty-five to fifty thousand, in an area of about 250 hectares. Some define the State as having a monopoly of violence over a given geographical space. Others include a specialist scribal class, soldiers, and standardized weights and measures as marks of stateliness. Most agree that social stratification arose with the State, as separation between an elite and a peasantry formed. Agricultural surplus, provided by the peasants, was needed to feed the specialized class of clerks, artisans, soldiers, priests, and aristocrats. Transport was always arduous, so most grain had to be produced within the smallest radius possible from the State core. Water transport, far easier than land, almost guaranteed that all States would be next to a water source. Cereal grains were the basis of all States. That was because “only cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops- legumes, tubers, and starch plants- have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages.” Cereals were ideal to distribute to laborers and slaves, for requiring as tribute, for soldiers, and to store in case of famine or siege. Hunters and gatherers, on the other hand, were dispersed and mobile, with no permanent base, and their tubers were impossible to find and even so had to be dug up one by one. Owen Lattimore suggests that the Great Wall of China was not so much to keep the Mongol hordes out, as to keep the Chinese tax-paying base in. Wars in this period were for people, not land. People meant wealth for the State. Wars, slave raiding, and destruction of other urban cores provided forced resettlement of a peasant base that elites could extract a surplus of grain from. “As late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage.” Female slaves were as important for reproduction as for labor. Captive women and children also may have played a necessary role in alleviating the unhealthy effects of population concentration and homogenization around the State core. There was social mobility in this system, however. As former slaves were incorporated into the civilization, new slaves were found to occupy the bottom rungs of society in a never ending cycle of raiding and plunder. The use of slaves to occupy the worst jobs in society also helped to mitigate insurrectionary pressure and civil war from within. Writing was also critical to this enterprise. “Behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders.” In fact, in early Mesopotamia, writing existed for over five hundred years, just in the form of government lists and for bookkeeping, before it spread to other purposes, such as literature and religious texts.

The State was always a fragile affair, teetering on the brink of collapse. “Climate change, resource depletion, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance” could all lead to the abandonment of a State core. “Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent.” This would mean collapse for the reigning elites, but was it always catastrophic for society at large? After all, these events “do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition” and often, by these measures, humanity, in fact, improved.  Why was the State so vulnerable? There were two main reasons. It depended on a single annual harvest of one or two cereal staples. A crop failure was often an irrecoverable event. The population was always in danger of an epidemic of infectious disease, often brought on by contact through trade or warfare with a new community. There were also many reasons that led to a more gradual decline. Deforestation, the loss of nutrients in the soil, and overgrazing of lands slowly eroded State productivity. Because of the limits of transportation, trees had to be felled as near to the rivers as possible. This led to further erosion, silt build up, and unpredictable flooding downstream. Malaria, nicknamed the “disease of civilization”, also first appeared in early Mesopotamian States. “As the silt accumulates, it creates its own levee or barrier, blocking its passage to the sea and causing it to back up and spread out laterally, creating malarial wetlands that are both anthropogenic and perhaps uninhabitable." Irrigation projects also gradually caused the salt tables to increase, eventually leading to the salinization of the top soil. Finally, warfare diverted manpower from grain production to defense. Walls and weapons had to be constructed, using up manpower. Furthermore, city sites now had to be chosen on the basis of ease in repelling invaders, not just where the best soil, timber, and food sources were located. Warfare had existed before the State, but the State amplified the gains and risks involved. “The advent of the early states raised the stakes largely because they represented a stock of fixed capital- canals, defensive works, records, storehouses, and, often, a valuable location with respect to soil, water, and trade routes. These assets were nodes of power.”

Scott ends by rethinking periods labeled as “dark ages” by historians. “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription. As such, it may stanch the worst losses that arise from concentrated sedentism under state rule.” Scott goes on to consider the barbarian as one who simply lives outside the confines of the State. He is the “other”, not taxed or counted by the “civilized” core. The State was also a boon to these barbarians, however, as it provided a stationary target to raid and trade with. Barbarians were often given tribute or protection money to stay away from State centers and were often able to control the main trading routes connecting State to State. “A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war.” 

“The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen” by Aileen Kelly

Alexander Herzen was the illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat. Although raised in wealth and spared no expense in education and upbringing, he sensed that he lived in a world apart from his family. He had few playmates and spent most of his time with his German mother and his tutors. During the course of his life he would be banished to Siberia by the Tsar and eventually flee Russia to live in exile first in Paris, then Italy, Switzerland, and, finally, London. Kelly’s book seeks to describe a side of Herzen rarely revealed, his affinity for the natural sciences and, particularly, biology. Kelly, in fact, paints many of Herzen’s ideas on the process of history as influenced by the budding evolutionary theories in science, well preceding the publication of Darwin. As a young man, studying at Moscow University, he was influenced by the ideas drifting into Russia from the West. He claimed, “the cult of the French Revolution is the first religion of a young Russian; which of us did not secretly possess portraits of Robespierre and Danton?” But even more lasting, Herzen was influenced by the Romantics, who challenged the notion of the Enlightenment’s universal ideas. He was also well read in their precursors: Giambattista Vico, the pietists Johann Hamann and Johann Herder, as well as Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, and others who were affiliated with the German Sturm und Drang movement. From them he picked up notions of cultural pluralism and history as contingent on life’s unpredictable mysteries, instead of progressing ever-forward in a single path towards a predestined goal. 

Among Russians, the scientist, M. G. Pavlov, was an early mentor. “Science without philosophy is by no means devoid of value, but philosophy without science is impossible.” Herzen, himself, would later claim of some philosophies, "you often see that in idealism all nature is forced into one brilliant hypothesis; idealists prefer to mutilate nature rather than their idea.” Herzen described his own early ideology, “we preached a constitution, a republic…. but more than all else, we preached hatred for all forms of violence, for all forms of tyranny practiced by governments.” He took from Francis Bacon a devotion to the inductive method and a respect for empiricism. However, Herzen still felt, “there’s no true life without faith.” He would later be influenced by Leroux, Hegel, Belinsky, and especially Proudhon, whom he would collaborate with on pamphlets while in exile, all the while disagreeing on the most fundamental of issues. However, there was always a mutual respect. Proudhon espoused the view, “let us not set ourselves up as apostles of a new religion, even if it be a religion of logic or of reason. Let us welcome and encourage all protests…. Let us never consider any questions exhausted, and when we have used our very last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony.”

Herzen was a materialist, who believed in living life for this world. He claimed, “true Christians could regard all that was done to them with indifference: life for them was an inferior staging-post on the road to the Kingdom of God, where labors will be rewarded. We don’t look at life like that. Our faith is too shaky, we see weakness in what they regard as strength.” On Russia, he often mused about the vanity of the superfluous man- the general breed of Russian gentry. “We are either animals or ideologists, like my sinful self. We either do nothing at all or everything under the sun.” But he was nothing if not a realist. “Let us not aspire to the existence of pure intelligences; let us learn to live sensibly within our given reality.” He believed in human agency as moving the flow of history and, therefore, he believed in contingency as shaping the fate of mankind. “There is something about chance that is intolerably repellent to a free spirit: he finds it so offensive to recognize its irrational force, he strives so hard to overcome it, that, finding no escape, he prefers to invent a threatening fate and submit to it. He wants the misfortunes that overtake him to be predestined- that is, to exist in connection with a universal world order; he wants to accept disasters as persecutions and punishments: this allows him to console himself through submission or rebellion. Naked chance he finds intolerable, a humiliating burden: his pride cannot endure its indifferent power.” 

Herzen wants us to live in the present, instead of always sacrificing the moment to some mythical future to come. “If one looks deeply into life then, of course, the supreme good is life itself, whatever the external circumstances may be. When people come to understand that, they will also come to understand that there is nothing more foolish than despising the present for the sake of the future. The present is the true sphere of existence. Every instant, every pleasure must be grasped, the spirit must constantly open itself, absorb all that surrounds it and pour its own being into its surroundings. The aim of life is life itself. Life in that form, at that stage of development at which a creature finds itself. Thus the aim of man’s life is human life.” Above all, he wants to live through action along with thought. “Do you truly want to condemn human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on…. or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge…. with humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?” In living for the moment man is fulfilling his destiny and creating a unique history for himself. It is in humility and humbleness that the present humanity lays the groundwork for the future. “If only people wanted…. instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for…. the liberation of man.” 

Herzen stood in contradistinction between both the Russian Slavophiles who sought a return to a mythical Orthodox past and the Russian Europhiles who sought to mimic the Enlightenment philosophers. For Herzen, man “wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future.” Unfairly he was painted by both camps as a member of the other. He would vehemently decry both, “I am even less a patriot than I am a liberal.” Herzen was humble as to what the present actually should entail. “I’m not a teacher but a fellow seeker. I won’t presume to say what must be done, but I think I can say with a fair degree of accuracy what must not be done.” Herzen, although a radical, was, in many ways, a man of the middle, viewed with skepticism by ideologues on all sides. “Could you explain to me why belief in God is ridiculous and belief in humanity is not; why belief in the kingdom of heaven is silly, but belief in utopias on earth is clever? Having discarded positive religion, we have retained all the habits of religion.” 

Herzen despised the entire bourgeoisie class for their meanness, their vulgar aspirations, and their “hidebound philistinism.” He mourned “the narrowing of men’s minds and energies, of the obliteration of individuality, of the ever increasing shallowness of life, of the constant exclusion from it of general human interests, its reduction to the interests of the countinghouse and bourgeois prosperity.” However, he did not think much of the proletariat either. The masses “are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power; they are offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand equality of oppression…. They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.” He later admits, however, that his tastes are bound to be different, but no better, than those of the herd. “You grieve for civilization? So do I. But not the masses, to whom it has given nothing except tears, hardship, ignorance and humiliation.”

Herzen, above all, believed in a kind of humanist realism. Humans should not aspire to perfection that was contrary to their nature. His ethical beliefs stated, “that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty- of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history, or humanity, or progress, still less the State or the Church or the proletariat.” Herzen warns of importing a determinism into both the natural sciences and history. “That fatalism that…. speculative philosophy has imported into history as it has into nature. What has existed certainly had reasons to exist, but that in no way means that all other combinations were impossible; they became so through the realization of the most probable chance, that’s all one can concede. History is far less determined than is usually believed.” 

His cultural pluralism also allowed him to see Russia in a unique light. He laments, “sadness, skepticism, and irony: these are the three chords of the Russian lyre.” But he does not see blindly aping Europe as the answer either. “Europe has not resolved the antinomy between the individual and the State, but at least it has posed the question. Russia is approaching the problem from an opposing direction, but has also not resolved it. In confronting this question we stand on a ground of equality…. Russian history has been the development of autocracy and authority, as the history of the West is the history of the development of liberty and rights.” When he started his newspaper in exile, The Bell, he set forth a three point “minimum program” that advocated emancipation with land, the abolition of corporal punishment, and an end to censorship, eventually also adding also openness in court procedures. He later viewed these aims as quite modest, but he felt, “thought must take on flesh, descend into the marketplace of life.” He also admitted that he felt like, “a stranger at home and a stranger abroad.” 

The constancies in Herzen’s life were his fights against established authority and against the impossible utopia, while giving mankind as much space as possible to live up to its potential and to fulfill any of life’s varied possibilities.  Kelly posits, “if he is to be associated with any retrospectively constituted tradition, it is with a small minority of thinkers who opposed deterministic systems of post-Enlightenment rationalism while keeping an equal distance from the limitless subjectivism of Romantic revolt, and who began to map out new approaches to problems of history and society free of teleological assumptions. Like Mill, Herzen stressed the importance of the inductive methods of the natural sciences as a corrective to thinking that approached such problems from the narrow perspective of predetermined goals.” 

To the end, Herzen was nothing if not practical. “We try to impose our wishes, our thoughts, on our surroundings and these attempts, always unsuccessful, serve to educate us…. Life realizes only that aspect of an idea that falls on favorable soil, and the soil in this case doesn’t remain a mere passive medium but adds its sap, contributes its own elements.” He warned of pushing the revolution ahead of the pace of the masses that “the people’s conservatism is harder to combat than the conservatism of the throne and the pulpit.” He also sought to scientifically probe for answers, not just sling slogans at his adversaries. “To deny false gods is necessary, but not sufficient: one must look beneath their masks for the reason for their existence.” However, he never lost his revolutionary fire. “We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new revelation, we eliminate the old lie.” Herzen, himself, felt of his life’s quest, “since the age of thirteen.... I have served one idea, marched under one banner- war against all imposed authority- against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. I would like to go on with my little guerrilla war- like a real Cossack- auf eigene Faust (on my own initiative)- as the Germans say.”

“Zero, Zero, Zero” by Roberto Saviano

Where “Gomorrah” is at heart a personal account of immersion into the underworld of the Camorra, “Zero, Zero, Zero” is by necessity written from afar. Saviano, by this time, is writing while in hiding, protected by the Italian Carabinieri. As such, it reads more like the gossipy tales told by cops who at once loath, respect, and mythologize their criminal adversaries. The common thread between the worlds of the Italian mob and the international cocaine industry is that both are above the control of the individuals involved. Men come and go, into prison and into the grave, while the system, uncaring and oblivious, continues ever-on. Indeed, the Camorra provide a critical chain in the importation of cocaine (via West Africa) and its distribution throughout Europe. Saviano has a story-tellers gift of weaving narrative with facts that whip you from the jungles of Colombia to the drug labs and factories of northern Mexico and, finally, into the living rooms and bathrooms of Upper Westside apartments in New York. He convincingly affirms that the cocaine trade is just basic economics and where there is a demand there will be those who supply. But the price paid is not only in cash, but in dead bodies of the guilty and innocent alike. “Zero, Zero, Zero” reads so much like fiction it is distressing that one is not able to ascertain where the reporting stops and the conjecture and rumors begin.

“Terrors and Experts” by Adam Phillips

Phillips understands we all have problems. For him, “psychoanalysis affirms that there is something unmanageable about being a person, and it is this that makes a person who he or she is.” But the process can also be prescriptive. “Psychoanalysis, like religion and medicine, turns panic into meaning. It makes fear bearable by making it interesting.” It does this through the talking cure. “Talking changes the way things look” both to the speaker and to the listener. It is a process with two equal participants. But in psychoanalysis sometimes this seems not to be the case. The analyst is in a position of power, the expert. Or worse- the parent substitute, the first expert. The conversation is a process to find something important- what is lacking. “In psychoanalysis the opposite of ignorance is not so much knowledge (and therefore virtue) but desire (and therefore something unpredictable and morally equivocal).” It is not the search for philosophical truth, in some Socratic sense, but something more basic- more primal and subjective. “A want…. may not be something we can know, but only something we can try out- an experiment and not a fact. Psychoanalysis cannot enable the patient to know what he wants, but only to risk finding out.” This is the process and “knowledge can’t put a stop to that, only death can.” But was talk therapy the cure or only a replacement for what ails you? “It was as though Freud had invented the psychoanalytic relationship as a refuge from intimacy- a place it could be studied, a relationship about intimacy but not ‘really’ intimate itself.” After all, the paradox was Freud “had invented a form of authority, the science of psychoanalysis, as a treatment that depended on demolishing forms of authority.” He cloaked his cure in the verbiage of science to gain legitimacy as he bordered on the periphery of the knowable- the psychic, the unconscious. “This, indeed, was one of the radical things about Freud’s work: it legitimated his patient’s responses to their predicaments making them intelligible.” 

The project of psychoanalysis seemed to try to rationalize the unconscious. “People are only ever as mad (unintelligible) as other people are deaf (unable, or unwilling, to listen)…. The aim of psychoanalysis, after all, is not to cure people of their conflicts but to find ways of living them more keenly.” It is about asking the right kind of questions, not about finding the right answers. To that end, “fear, like desire, tells us very little about its object…. We unconsciously invite, or sustain contact with whatever we fear…. Once every fear is a wish, as psychoanalysis asserts, our fears become the clue to our desires; aversiveness always conceals a lure…. Fear is constructed through the ways we protect ourselves from it…. If fear is a form of anticipation, of hope inverted, then to talk about fear is to talk about our fantasies of the future and of our relationship to these fantasies.” Fear is as much about your past as your future. In fact, it is a mixture of the past and the future as felt by one’s feelings in the present and as such blends time and reality. 

Phillips goes on to elucidate some of the most reoccurring themes in psychoanalysis. On dreams he asserts, “only I can be an expert on myself; in fact, I am already an expert, but I work at being a stranger. I dissimulate because I am an expert on what I cannot bear…. Nothing as personal as the contents of a dream could possibly be addressed to another person…. To say that we dream is to say that we do not know what is going on inside us.” He goes on to discuss the unconscious in general, but also specifically in the sexual realm. “Psychic life was astonishingly mobile and adventurous, even if lived life was not…. The good life, in psychoanalysis, seems to involve a talent for giving things up, but with no guarantee of satisfactory replacements.” It is through this act that there is some conquering of fear. You take agency, not to succeed, but to experiment. Life is one big experiment, in which many more failures will be bound to arise. “In Freud’s view, we become what we cannot have, and desire (and punish) what we are compelled to disown.” The only pleasures are the forbidden? But again, there must be give and take. We have agency, but do not live in a world alone. “There is a freedom- as well as a terror- in being able to be an object for others.” 

In the end is psychoanalysis about discovering the unconscious self? And is that, indeed, the true self? But is there one true self? “That there can be no normal loving is potentially a liberating psychoanalytic idea; it makes room for more people and for more versions of more people.” After all, “hypocrisy has been consistently underrated. We are never one thing or another, but a miscellany.” Phillips ends by discussing the mind as the only refuge of reality. Descartes would refute Freud’s whole concept of unconscious. It was not in his world. Thinking, for him, was the only thing that was real. It alone guarantees existence. “Psychoanalysis was born, in a sense, of the relationship inside Freud between the Cartesian and the anti-Cartesian, the psychoanalyst and the dreamer.”

“Out of the Mountains: Urban Guerrilla” by David Kilcullen

Kilcullen was a former Australian special forces officer, who cut his bones in East Timor and went on to advise General Petraeus in Iraq and Af/Pak. The thesis of this book is that the COIN operations of the early part of this century will turn out to be aberrations with most future conflicts happening in mega-cities. He identifies four major trends that 1) the world population is growing exponentially 2) it is become more and more urban 3) these urban spaces tend to be littoral (near water), and 4) that cities and peri-urban areas are becoming more greatly connected to each other and their peripheries. The peri-urban areas are often actually transitional hubs with airports, highways, or ports located nearby and often are poorly serviced by urban core infrastructure- lacking electricity and sanitation, ripe for insurgencies to blossom. The book is focused on the challenges of military engagements, but is a great read for anyone interested in the future of sociology and urban planning.

“Adaptive Markets” by Andrew Lo

Despite Lo’s credentials as a professor of finance at MIT, the audience for this book is the moderately well-read layman. Lo begins with basic lessons in economics detailing the efficient market hypothesis that would bore most economists. From there he recounts behavioral biases that would be familiar to anyone versed in the psychological work of Daniel Kahneman. Next, Lo gives a primer on genetics and evolution that would be old hat to anyone who remembers his Darwin. He also touches on points of neurobiology that describe the mainstream accounts of what bodily actions the amygdala and prefrontal cortex “control” in the brain. Lo summarizes each of these fields adequately, but almost two hundred pages into the book we have nothing of original insights. Lo’s effort is to synthesize these fields into his own new theory of financial markets. As he points out over and over again, “it takes a theory to beat a theory.” The book flows smoothly and Lo is a great storyteller. His skill is in explaining concepts in ways that are easy to understand. This should not be undervalued. 

One of the main thrusts of Lo’s argument is that financial markets exhibit more properties common to biology than physics. Despite post-WWII economics having derived many of its methods from Paul Samuelson, who was primarily inspired by mathematical physics, the proper way to see how financial markets behave is by looking to parallels in evolutionary biology and how evolution has shaped the behavior of men. "The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis puts a much greater weight on past environments and adaptations to explain market behavior, and like Darwin's theory before it and Farmer's ecosystem of trading strategies, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis doesn't predict any trend or end-state as inevitable.” Lo uses his adaptive market theory to analyze the financial crisis of 2008 and the market events that led up to that event. 

Humans are adapted to learn from their past experiences. Therefore, after prolonged periods in the absence of accidents, we tend to push the boundaries of risk. Memories of the last catastrophe recede from the collective memory. Those who urge caution are shunted aside, labeled as pessimistic bears, while those taking greater and greater risks reap greater and greater gains. No one wants to be the one to first stop dancing while the music is still playing. The Great Moderation, between the mid-1980s and the financial crisis of 2008, was such a period. Market volatility decreased. Quantitive analysis enabled funds to use mathematical models to squeeze gains from the market. No one wanted to be the sucker playing it safe. By taking on more and more leverage financial firms could generate even greater profits. Unfortunately, many of these highly leveraged investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance providers were also wedded to similar strategies. After all, while the market remained relatively static, the winning strategy generated the greatest returns. Once the formula was found out, more leverage was the only way to keep maintaining profits at previous rates. This also created systemic risk. Hyman Minsky predicted that after such bouts of confidence in ever-rising financial values, over-confidence and an under-appreciation of risk were bound to ensue, resulting in a system-wide catastrophe. Greg Ip would call this a failure to be “fool proof”. Relative safety in the short term breeds excessive risk taking, lack of pruning along the edges, and, therefore, a massive failure later on down the line. All these firms were adapted to a stationary environment and when the market fundamentals shifted they did not foresee change fast enough and so could not adapt to the new financial landscape. “When conditions change, our fallible human heuristics use our old adaptations to respond to unexpected events.” Markets freeze, there is a flight to quality, and even safe assets are viewed with skepticism. The madness of the mobs replaces the efficient market. 

Lo relates that all the actors involved (from bankers, to insurers, to realtors, to regulators, to politicians) were acting in ways that humans were “trained to” from an evolutionary perspective. Unfortunately, in the current environment with quant trades every millisecond and derivatives of increasing complexity, biological evolution is too slow to adapt to financial changes. Human cultural platforms are evolving faster than biology could keep up. Our heuristics serve us well in normal times. But when confronted with a rapidly changing arena and a disaster that had never happened before and was hard to predict (quantified as a twenty-five sigma event by Goldman Sachs), markets froze up and no longer behaved rationally or efficiently. Lo ends by stressing that it was not individuals but the system that failed. Only by changing the incentives, reducing moral hazard, and lowering the gains as well as the losses, can the market be steered in a fashion as to mitigate future market failures by reducing excessive risk.

“The Knowledge Illusion” by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

This is a pop science book about how little individuals know, compared to how much they think they do. It is written by two academic cognitive scientists, but in a breezy style, designed for the layman. Their premise is that humans actually store very little factual knowledge in their individual minds. Thought is for action and so humans have been evolutionarily conditioned to only keep the thoughts in our heads that help further purposeful action of some sort. “Your causal understanding is limited by your need to know…. The mind is not built to acquire details about every individual object or situation. We learn from experience so that we can generalize to new objects and situations.”  

One thing all humans suffer from is illusion of explanatory depth. If you are asked to explain how a toilet, a bicycle, photosynthesis, or a mutual fund works, how detailed could you be? “Before trying to explain something, people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding; after explaining, they don’t.” It is by design that we don’t remember everything. “Remembering everything gets in the way of focusing on the deeper principles that allow us to recognize how a new situation resembles past situations and what kind of actions will be effective.” Humans have evolved to learn by causal analysis. We can make predictions about the effects of our actions on other people. We can also reason backwards- figuring out how something that happened came about from effect to cause. We also tell stories- both to others and ourselves. We can imagine worlds that will never be and futures that will never happen. “Storytelling helps us to imagine how the world would be if something were different.” These are things that no other animal can do. We also think with more than just our brains. Our body lets us know about our environment in many ways, before our brains are even conscious of our surroundings. “Thought uses knowledge in the brain, the body, and the world more generally to support intelligent action…. The mind is not in the brain. Rather, the brain is in the mind.” 

Humans have also adapted to use our group mind- the collective knowledge spread throughout society, across time and space.  Cognitive division of labor has exponentially increased the efficiency and power of our brains. It has also changed how the mind evolved. “It did not evolve in the context of individuals sitting alone solving problems. It evolved in the context of group collaboration, and our thinking evolved interdependently, to operate in conjunction with the thinking of others.” Thinking together also demanded that humans evolve to communicate more effectively, to understand each other, to share common goals, and to incorporate others’ perspectives into their own thoughts. (Primates who live in larger groups also have larger brains.) The unique aspect of human society is the ability to share intentionality, which allows us to pursue common endeavors. Cognitive researcher Michael Tomasello suggests, “children,…. but not chimpanzees, often seemed to collaborate just for the sake of collaborating.” Research has shown that in couples where one partner handles most of the financial upkeep of the household their skills improve, while the other partner’s actually atrophies, over time. In another experiment, however, when individually asked to assess the percentage of household chores one does, almost every couple’s combined response was well over 100%. Group mind should make us cognizant that “we work so interdependently in groups that it would be wise to recognize the extreme difficulty of teasing out each person’s contribution.” 

Another illusion comes from technological advances. In one study, people were permitted to search the Internet for answers, but when later asked how they found the information, respondents forgot all about their searches and claimed that they knew the facts all along. Furthermore, “the act of searching the Internet and finding answers to one set of questions caused the participants to increase their sense that they knew the answers to all questions, including those whose answers they had not researched.” Other knowledge illusions come because our belief system is a connected web. “Beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take or discard at will. Instead, beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities. To discard a belief often means discarding a whole host of other beliefs, forsaking our communities, going against those we trust and love, and in short, challenging our identities.” Furthermore, once we are ensconced in these communities, these beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes become mutually-reinforcing, as ideas bounce back and forth in an echo-chamber of confirmation. 

We also use heuristics to fill in causal models that seem similar to new technologies or scientific concepts that we grasp only vaguely. Worst, according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, on any given test, whether it be cognitive or even driving, “those who perform the worst overrate their own skills the most…. Those who lack skills also lack the knowledge of what skills they’re missing.” Nonetheless, humanity has advanced by specializing, compartmentalizing, and sharing group knowledge. “The world and our community house most of our knowledge base. A lot of human understanding consists simply of awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it” and knowing what we do not know.