I just read this 2007 book by Alan Weisman, and it’s encouraging — not because it gives me any hope for humans but for the Earth.
Weisman goes on a tour of human impact (and destruction), looking at one problem (plastics, pollution, biodiversity, etc.) or place (the oceans or cities) at a time. The book is packed with facts and useful context. Here are a few notes (not quotes!) of interest:
Plastic will take millions of years to disappear, via plate tectonic sublimation. GHGs, OTOH, will be “back to normal” in 100,000 years. Oceanic life, even if all the corals die in the short run, will come back strongly after only a 1,000 years. The same is true for avian life.
Evolutionary pressures will reverse nearly every intervention we’ve made to “improve” animals and plants. Some of the invasives we’ve introduced (e.g., rats) will persist, but they will be disadvantaged without our constant protection of their (our) habitats.
The species we claim to be protecting (“save the whales”) are only in trouble because of us. The best thing we can do for them is to voluntarily extinct our own species. That would really be “giving back” but — ironically — it’s unlikely as long as humans think that the Nature is only there for our entertainment or subsistence.
It’s kinda sad that the entire funeral industry promises some sort of “eternal memory” but delivers environmental pollution.
Weisman more or less proposes the same “one child per woman” policy (or goal) that I had around 15 years ago , i.e., to either give every baby boy and girl a permit for 0.5 kids (cap and trade) or to sterlize half the population, so that kids grow up as either “breeders” or “players.”
I don’t think that we will ever make space for other species, so the ideas in this book will probably only manifest as we collapse ecosystems and force humanity into a future that could vary from interesting to savage. Nature will be fine.* I give this book FIVE STARS.
*”You know what makes me happy? Watching my species destroy itself. I take it as a sport, as a kinda hobby, and I root for the complete destruction of this culture that we live in. I root for the underdogs. I root for Nature because on this planet at this time, Nature is the underdog.” — George Carlin
I read this 1944 book by W. Somerset Maugham because it was listed as funny. I’m not sure it’s the funniest book I’ve read but it has its charms — mostly in the characters and Maugham’s delightful writing. OTOH, it is dated in the its sexist tropes.
The plot is set in 1930s Europe, as four Americans discover themselves: Elliot the would-be nobleman, Larry the ex-flyer and semi-sadhu, and Isabel and Gray, a couple united by their desire for “the good life.” Maugham himself narrates.
Here are some witty bits:
L: I’ve been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I’ve attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I’ve read everything that’s important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as easily as I can read French. Of course Greek’s more difficult. But I have a very good teacher. Until you came here I used to go to him three evenings a week.” M: “And what is that going to lead to?” L: “The acquisition of knowledge,’ he smiled. M: “It doesn’t sound very practical.”
I: Of course I want to travel. But not like that. I don’t want to travel second-class on steamships and put up at third-rate hotels, without a bathroom, and eat at cheap restaurants.” L: “I went all through Italy last October like that. I had a wonderful time. We could travel all over the world on three thousand a year.” I: “But I want to have babies, Larry.” L: “That’s all right. We’ll take them along with us.”
M: Sometimes he was obviously so far from well that I asked him why he didn’t take things more easily. E: “My dear fellow, at my age one can’t afford to fall out. You don’t think that I’ve moved in the highest circles for nearly fifty years without realizing that if you’re not seen everywhere you’re forgotten.” M: I wondered if he realized what a lamentable confession he was then making. I had not the heart to laugh at Elliott any more; he seemed to me a profoundly pathetic object Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked to one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification; and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid.
M: He [Elliot] was dead. I lit the lamp by his bedside and looked at him. His jaw had fallen. His eyes were open and before dosing them I stared into them for a minute. I was moved and I think a few tears trickled down my cheeks. An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes and counts. They had forgotten him already.
M: “And are you under the impression that America is a suitable place to practise the particular virtues you mentioned?” L: “I don’t see why not. You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We care nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”
L: “I know. One must adapt oneself to one’s environment and of course I’d work. When I get to America I shall try to get a job in a garage. I’m a pretty good mechanic and I don’t think it ought to be difficult.” M: “Wouldn’t you then be wasting energy that might be more usefully employed in other ways?” L: “I like manual labour. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating. I remember reading a biography of Spinoza and thinking how silly the author was to look upon it as a terrible hardship that in order to earn his scanty living Spinoza had to polish lenses. I’m sure it was a help to his intellectual activity, if only because it diverted his attention for a while from the hard work of speculation. My mind is free when I’m washing a car or tinkering with a carburettor and when the job’s done I have the pleasant sensation of having accomplished something. Naturally I wouldn’t want to stay in a garage indefinitely. It’s many years since I was in America and I must learn it afresh. I shall try to get work as a truck driver. In that way I should be able to travel from end to end of the country.
Suzanne: And then there is my daughter to think of. She is now sixteen and promises to be as beautiful as her father. I have given her a good education. But it is no good denying facts that stare you in the face; she has neither the talent to be an actress nor the temperament to be a whore like her poor mother; I ask you then, what has she to look forward to? A secretaryship or a job in the post office. Monsieur Achille has very generously agreed that she should live with us and has promised to give her a handsome dowry so that she can make a good marriage. Believe me, my dear friend, people can say what they like, but marriage still remains the most satisfactory profession a woman can adopt.
I give this book FOUR stars for its place in the literature of the era (similar to Great Gatsby)
I read this 2023 book by Richard J. King on the recommendation of LS. It’s all about those sailors who take to the sea alone, with only wind (or muscle power). It’s about the mental and physical challenges, and how technology and society have added or (mostly) subtracted from them.
I thought the book was insightful. It definitely convinced me that sailing alone is for other people!
Here are some excerpts I marked:
Davison’s why-go paragraphs present, most importantly, the genuine, unabashedly aspirational belief that a sail across an ocean is a passage of greater significance, a vision quest, a morality tale for how we each should spend our time on Earth. Voyages alone out to sea, taken so intensely and seriously by their sailor-authors, represent one of the nearest and clearest of metaphors of any single human life spent on Earth. A copy-editor for a newspaper in Ohio named Robert Manry, who sailed a 13.5-foot boat across the Atlantic in 1965, wrote that he tried to craft his voyage “into something nearer to a work of art than my life on land had been.” This is perhaps why the single-handed voyage story is so compelling to so many of us—in its madness, pluck, pride, and in its “do not go gentle” journey of solitude before existential unknowns. No one on the planet is more often reminded of one’s meaninglessness in time than the solo sailor in a little boat bobbing about on the eternal indifferent deep.
The sea had emerged as a respite from humanity, finding thousands of survivors seeking new lives, a “Ulysses generation” as Rousmaniere put it: people who perceived the ocean as the last place on Earth that remained wild and untouched by war [after WWII, when solo sailing took off], still seemingly clean and free without national borders and government authorities.
In Sailing Alone Around the World (my review) Slocum regularly quipped about the satisfaction of his own company, “There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” Aboard Spray at last, Slocum enjoyed a voyage free from mutiny, domestic life, and living under the roof of another family member. At sea he could avoid any interpersonal conflict at all.
Don Quixote lives in his imagination and yearns to serve a world that has long since moved on. Go to nearly any marina today anywhere in the world and you’ll find a Don Quixote, half-mystic and half-fool, applying another coat of varnish to the rail of his old, beloved Rocinante.
Jones explained to me that they had stuck the famous sailor out to anchor in the current because he did not dress like the yachtsmen at the club, his boat “looked exactly like she had been doing what she had been doing,” and they wordlessly resented this easy-going solo circumnavigator who threatened their self-esteem and view of themselves as sailors.
Maybe, though, there is something deeper here, crudely summarized, in terms of social values in modern Pacific Island cultures: an emphasis on family, serving the community, and decentering the individual? … The social-science researcher Peter Belmi, a Filipino immigrant and professor in the business program at the University of Virginia, has found that people from wealthier backgrounds end up focusing more on themselves, whereas people from communities with fewer resources seek power or success to benefit others, since they have been raised relying on their communities to survive. “We don’t need others as much in order to survive,” said Belmi, referring to the thinking of those in power, “and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you are unique, compared to others.
Since the 1960s, even as portions of the general public throughout the world began to really consider anthropogenic threats to the open-ocean environment, this has proven more the exception than the rule among single-handed mariners and the narratives they created: the sailing and adventure came first and then—often, but definitely not always—the environmental advocacy follows.
Adams said that despite what the world sees today as a powerful feminist act of being the first woman to sail the Pacific alone, she did not identify as a feminist then or now. Her why-go was not to prove anything about women. Adams feels as she always had, that this trip was simply something she wanted to do—and could. Her friend and fellow single-handed sailor Carol Baker, who herself in her late seventies still sails alone along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, told me that Adams has never had any axe to grind and “never had any patience at all with the feminist movement.”
An important point: Do I think that Peter Nichols was reflecting on how metaphorically appropriate this was, how sadly perfect his sinking boat was for his future book, even as he was stepping up the ladder onto the merchant ship that had answered his mayday? I do. I do not think, however, there is anything unethical or false in this. Aren’t we all doing this at some level all the time, always imagining an audience? It is part of that fair, old question: can you be a storyteller and be pure of endeavor at the same time? Is an adventurer, athlete, activist, politician, or even a social worker or teacher to be considered compromised, less “true,” if they know from the start that they are going to create something from it, craft some form of art or research project or any other form of creative or scholarly expression? Solo sailors present an exceptionally compelling case study in this fluidity of experience and art and story, because there is so long a tradition of the ancient mariner’s sea stories. There is no one to confirm the tale. For single-handers the stakes are often life and death, and the remains and the reality of a death are almost always unrecoverable and unknown. We will never know if Slocum’s Spray really did steer itself so well, if he did in fact escape pirates, or even how or when he died.
Put another way, it’s often quoted that the novelist Gabriel García Márquez once said: “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
His voice is one of long experience, but also humility. In an appendix, Moitessier makes clear that the ocean’s weather and sea states are too variable and complex for full human knowledge. “The sea will always remain the great unknown,” he says. “It is sometimes enormous without being too vicious; not as high a week or a month later, it can become very dangerous because of either cross-swells, or an unexpected or completely new factor. The person who can write a really good book on the sea is probably not yet born, or else is already senile, because one would have to sail a hundred years to know it well enough.”
Since the 1990s, the technologies of GPS and satellite communications have enabled far more single-handers to go to sea and do so more safely, but the technologies have also encouraged a larger portion of mariners to avoid learning or practicing celestial navigation and wayfinding, which surely reduces their spiritual connections and their deeper awareness of the sea, the clouds, and the movement of the solar system. I used a paper chart, kept track of my dead reckoning, but I relied on that little electronic box far more than I would have liked. Bernard Moitessier would have been disappointed in me.
The satellite phone and now the internet, both still exceptionally expensive out at sea, provide emotional comfort, safety, weather, anchorage information, and gear assistance. But they also reduce the sailor’s focus on the sea and their self-reliant endeavor, which was supposedly why so many went out there in the first place.
I like having this ocean crossing in my pocket. [King sailed solo across the Atlantic.] It’s like when you touch your wallet or phone now and again just to make sure it’s there. I did not plan for this to be the impact of the passage, but it has remained an ego crutch for me, even though I almost never bring it out. I just put my fingers on it when I’m speaking with someone who I think is a condescending jerk. My “pocket reminder” is my five years of (kinda solo) travel.
Many single-handed writers use “we” when talking in their narratives about their progress, referring to themselves and their boat. This makes sense, because it shows humility and the recognition that this couldn’t be done without a good boat. It was certainly true for me that Fox tolerated its new owner, caring for me far more patiently than I deserved.
Slocum, Pidgeon, and other well-known single-handers were relatively poor. They did nearly all the work themselves on shoe-string budgets. In the countries they lived in and the ports they visited, though, as white men, even without much money, they had a path to achieve what they wanted if they had the talent and gumption. Any individual and cultural discouragement they felt before departing was but a scratch on the barricades that had been constructed in front of, say, an African American man trying to build a boat and sail around the world in the 1890s, or 1920s, or 1950s—and still today.
The footage from the news cameras at the time Laura Dekker looks calm, partly confused, very young, but also maturely, mildly amused by the absurdity of the attention. She wrote in her personal notes at the time that she felt terribly depressed and exhausted by the trials, writing “It’s a good thing I’m a fine actress.” The Dutch Council for Child Protection saw Dekker’s idea primarily in terms of child neglect and seemingly a fear that this might break the compulsory education system in the country. (So apt!)
I took solace from wisdom more useful than the texts of the weather service: the words of the lobster captain that I had worked for part-time just before I left on the trip. While we were out hauling pots one morning, I asked him if it was going to stop raining. He said, “Always does.”
Conrad wrote vivid, accurate, and extravagant descriptions of waves and storms—perhaps more passionately than any other writer before or since writing in English (his third language after Polish and French). Here are a few sentences from Typhoon: It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
It is foremost the storm that is the proving ground for the individual, not the doldrums or the sharks or the logistics or the ship avoidance or even the loneliness. The solo sailor might interpret their safe emergence out of a storm as a success born of experience, toughness, personal philosophy, technological expertise, the good boat, the aid of one’s ancestors, the mercy of their god, or just merely dumb luck. Or a mixture of all these things.
Looking ahead toward the future of solo sailing, cruising or racing, regardless of what type of boat people choose to go on and at whatever speed and however connected to shore, the single-hander will always return home with a deeper appreciation for a single human’s smallness in time and on Earth. Sailing a small boat at sea is, especially for the cruisers, a commitment to a low-impact lifestyle that teaches one to adapt and pay careful attention to the natural world. Robin Lee Graham put it well after his five years on Dove in the late 1960s: “One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much.
During one of Ellen MacArthur’s first ocean passages across the North Sea as a teenager, she tried to bottle up some bioluminescence to bring home. “I began to realize that the beauty of the water can’t be taken away or captured,” she wrote, “It can only properly be appreciated first hand.
I too was almost killed by not only a steamship, but more significantly by a containership, arguably the twenty-first century’s greatest symbol of capitalism, over-consumption, and the linear economy. Could we extrapolate, as literary types are wont to do, that I was a wee symbol of Western culture and so far it has been a near miss, to be killed by our own products, our own emissions, but we have been granted a bit more time to do something with the life we’ve been left?
Then what is courage?” she wrote. “An understanding and acceptance; but an acceptance without resignation, mark you, for courage is a fighting quality. It is the ability to make mistakes and profit by them, to fail and start again, to take heartaches, setbacks and disappointments in your stride, to face every day of your life and every humdrum, trivial little detail of it and realize you don’t amount to much, and accept the fact with equanimity, and not let it deter your efforts.
I recommend this book to sailor. For everyone else, maybe not? FOUR STARS.
I read this collection of short stories by Nescio (“I don’t know”) after hearing it mentioned as “maybe one of the few pre-WWII books written in Dutch that people can still read.” Now, I read it in English, but that comment addresses an interesting issue of (a) reforms to the language making it harder for younger Dutch to read older texts and (b) competition from imported (English!) books for Dutch readers’ time. These issues do not affect native English speakers, but they are probably relevant in many other languages.
Anyways, the short stories were fun to me for their portrayal of Amsterdam and some of its people in the 1904-1944 period. I am not sure that the dropped place names (the equivalent of “going to North Beach for a coffee” in San Francisco) are as interesting to non-Mokkumers, so this book’s appeal will be more historical than geographical to most of you. That said, the book (in translation) has many delightful passages, such as these:
He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain. Those were the great enemies. You always had to eat and sleep, over and over again, you had to get out of the cold, you got wet and tired or miserable. Now look at that water. It has it good: it just ripples and reflects the clouds, it’s always changing and yet always stays the same too. Has no problems at all.
Japi was good at getting even with those well-disposed cultured Dutchmen who have no patience for anyone who doesn’t look at least as stupid and tasteless as they do, and who scoff at you and say things about you to your face, in public, as though pastors and priests in even the tiniest villages hadn’t been trying to raise people properly for centuries. Japi was a workhorse and he could lay into people, if needed, with such skill and force that even the most brutish lout had to knuckle under.
For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn’t turn into night.
Someone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so “goddamn delicious,” who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea. Someone who thought it was enough to be alive and in good health, who went on his joyful way between God’s heaven and God’s earth and thought it was idiotic that people caused themselves so much trouble, and laughed out loud at them, and sat there eternally with his beatific smile, quietly enjoying the water and the sky and the clouds and the fields, and let the rain soak him through without noticing it and then said “I think I’m wet” and laughed. Someone who could eat an expensive meal and drink expensive jenever better than anyone in Holland and then, at other times, on his long walks (because he didn’t always sit around, every so often he spent days at a time on his feet), he’d eat dry rolls day in and day out and be moved to tears because out in the open “a piece of bread like this can taste so good.”
It was eight o’clock. I put my watch down on the table next to my money, the watch that was no longer on its way to the pawnshop, and I said, “For now you’ll stay right here with Old Man Koekebakker, little watch,” and I put my hand back in my pocket. I was used to having conversations with my things since there’s so little that’s worth saying to most people. I was out of the woods for now… I had finally transmuted it to gold at my writing desk and now I could sit and look at it in the form of my own money, money you can count on and that never lets you down and never leaves you in the lurch.
You know what you should do, go get a half dram of old jen-ever, it’s on me. I’ll pay you back when I get the chance. — Japi, the freeloader (uitvreter).
You don’t know what an office job is like, Koekebakker, or you wouldn’t laugh. First you go to school till you’re eighteen. Do you know how many sheep there are in Australia or how deep the Suez Canal is? My point exactly. But I knew all that. Do you know what polarization is? Me neither, but I used to. I had to learn the strangest things: ‘Credited to the inventory account,’ translate that into French. Have a go at that. You have no idea, Koekebakker. And it goes on for years. Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realize that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I realized I couldn’t do it. I was always late, I really tried to get there on time but it never happened, it had been going on too long. And so boring. They said I did everything wrong and I’m sure they were right about that. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, I’m not the kind of person who is cut out for work. Then they said I was distracting the others
Alone. I’m going to Friesland.” “In the middle of winter?” Japi nodded. “To do what?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Do? Nothing. All you people are so pathetically sensible: everything needs a reason and a purpose. I’m going to Friesland, not to do anything, not for anything. No reason. Because I feel like it.”
And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn’t make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer, or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn’t do this because of that and couldn’t possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid. Smoke a couple cigars, chat a little, look around a bit, enjoy the sunshine when it was there and the rain when it wasn’t, and not think about tomorrow, not want to become anybody, not want a thing except a little nice weather now and then.
You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they as a rule liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.
So we didn’t do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem. I still remember it perfectly, it was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.
Outside, the spring sun shone down on the cheerless street. My God, how could a street like this exist. I was absolutely not allowed to kiss the girl in the tram but a street like this was allowed to exist. That was allowed.
A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.” And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?
Who was that gentleman?” asked the little poet. “God,” said the devil, and the knobby bumps on his forehead grew bigger… The God of all those people who say ‘I never expected that from you’ when you try to live a little, and who say ‘I thought so, that was bound to end badly’ when you end up in the poorhouse later. The God who resents that you have Saturday afternoons off, the God of Professor Volmer, lecturer in accounting and business, who thinks you spend too much time looking up at the sky. The God of everyone who has no other option besides work or boredom. The God of the Netherlands.
These were truly strange times. It couldn’t end well. And now he’d gone and said that a new age had dawned. The age of Ironic Dilettantism was over, a new age of Trailblazing Optimism and Dynamic Vigor had begun. That’s what he’d gone and said. And then, with a sigh, God turned back to the manuscript of a thick book about Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management and started reading
And when she tilted her head forward—she wore her hair up now—the God of heaven and earth himself looked up for a moment from his eternal contemplation of the eternal lands and seas and propped his right elbow on his thigh and rested his head on his right hand, thumb under his chin and index finger along the length of his cheek, and he beheld the tan little bumps above the hollow that was a poem, and the fine hairs that glinted in the sunlight, and he smiled. Then he looked gravely back down past his feet at his Rhine winding back and forth between his mountains, and he mused: “What’s going on here? How did I let the Germans found another empire? Those Prussians….”
Why was she here? Why must she die unkissed? Not just kissed, really kissed. She glowed, her whole body glowed, her heart swelled. She unbuttoned her clothes in front of the mirror and looked at her breasts, so white in her black dress, and held them in her hands. She was pure and untouched. What a joke. And in her great confusion she begged God to defile her. “Am I going crazy?”
Last night came the report that the Triple Alliance had accepted Wilson’s proposal. This morning I went into the city to see if people were drunk. It was a soft gray October Sunday morning and the little trees on the Damrak had only a few leaves left. The IJ was so quiet, so bluish gray, and behind a few long furrows it quietly thought back over the year that was coming to an end. But it was quiet on the streets, no drunk people celebrating, no flags. I wonder when shoes will get cheaper
October is especially beautiful this year, we live in a golden city, and not for any amount of money, not for a hundred thousand rijksdollar bills would I want to be respectable. I’d rather just stay who I am, a piece of humanity like this walking right at the edge of the embankment, beyond the trees, stopping and turning around every time, like someone a little confused. And it has stopped raining, it hasn’t rained for days and I’m no longer dreaming about wet feet, I’m wide awake. And definitely confused.
Brian Klaas published this book in late in 2021, which was too early to discuss Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine but not too late to discuss Trump’s first term — let alone his first day.
Those oversights do not matter because Klaas discusses the essential features of corrupt “leaders” in a way that helps us understand their psychopathic personalities, i.e., thinking they are smarter than others and can bend reality to their will, regardless of the human costs.
This page turner is a pleasure to read, even if its content and characters can drive you crazy. The pleasure comes in the stories, the diagnoses, and the patterns that Klaas shows to us. The downside — running into a number of terrible people — is mostly balanced by a better understanding of how those people are different from normal people.
Indeed, that’s one of the problems in societies with free elections: How to get decent people to challenge cheaters who respect neither rules nor humans. Klaas spends a lot of time on that subject, and he has some good ideas.
I made dozens of notes in my paper copy of this book, but I won’t be pasting a lot of excerpts here. Instead, here are a few key ideas:
Klaas sets out to answer four questions: (i) Do worse people get power? [Yes.] (ii) Does power make people worse? [Yes.] (iii) How do we let people control us who clearly have no business being in control? [Reliance on outdated concepts of leadership, stimulated by political advertising], and (iv) How do we ensure that incorruptible people get into power and wield it justly [more citizen assemblies; surveilling politicians and bureaucrats rather than citizens; etc.]
Humans, as primates, are very aware of power structures and hierarchies and we do not like to be controlled by others, but we need to update structures as conditions change (wealth, cities, etc.)
We need to pay more attention to the people who do not run for office rather than the people who do, as that’s how voters end up with a choice between Bad and Worse. We need to prioritize political competence over height.
Terrible leaders possess a “dark triad” (DT) of characteristics: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy that result (respectively) in “ends justify means” manoeuvring, self-promotion, and aggressive non-empathy. (DT is too close to DJT to be a coincidence.)
Successful psychopaths are harder to detect, as they are very good at “working the mood,” but unsuccessful ones — who get angry because they cannot get what they want — resort to violence. (Reminds me of my violent neighbor.)
DT people tend to make big mistakes because they (a) are over-confident and (b) take excess risks. #MurderousPutin.
Most of us forgive our own mistakes while condemning those of others. We need to turn that one around if we’re going to get along.
Culture and incentives matter. A “corrupt” person behaves in a non-corrupt environment; an “honest” person misbehaves in a corrupt culture. That said, leaders make tough choices that leave some unhappy.
If men do “fight or flight” then women do “tend and befriend” — both of which have their evolutionary value.
If you’re not getting the diverse pool of applicants you want, then maybe you’re not presenting the “opportunity” (university place; job opening; political office) in a way that appeals to underrepresented candidates?
The Big Gods (monotheism) who displaced Many Gods differed in an interesting, new way: They were omnipotent. Big Gods (a) encouraged would-be sinners to behave and (b) increased trust. These two responses increased social cooperation and wealth.
Are we locking up the wrong people? White collar crimes are not just 20 times more costly than regular crimes; they are also responsible for 20 times more “accidental” deaths.
Michael Lewis wrote this 2016 book about the “intellectual love story” between Amos Tversky (AT) and Daniel Kahneman (DK), two Israeli psychologists who overturned our ideas about risk, decision making and how we see the world. And by “our” I don’t just mean humans but also (to a degree) economists.
AT died in 1996, at 59 years old. DK won the economics Nobel in 2002, based (mostly) on joint work. The story of their intellectual relationship has a lot to do with their different personalities: AT was exact, confident, and smart in a sharp, cutting way. DK wondered, full of doubt, into vagaries that ranged from silly to mind blowing. They got along because they were more generous with tolerance for each other than they were with others. DK listened to AT’s criticisms without shying away; AT was willing to suspend his aggressive critical mind while DK “groped” his way thorough the sea of possibilities.
They worked most productively from the late 1960s until the 1980s, but then they had a falling out — somewhat predictably — when DK felt like AT was not giving him his due. Although they were mostly estranged in the years leading to AT’s death, AT spent more of his last days and hours talking with DK than he did with anyone else, as old partners often do in a time of need.
Lewis is a great story-teller, as usual, and I took a lot of notes:
DK’s interest in human complexity dates from the moment at the end of WWII when a Nazi soldier, reminded by DK of his own son, hugged young DK (a Jewish boy) instead of shooting him.
DK: “By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation.”
“The Gestalt psychologists and the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts might all be jammed into the same building with a plaque on the front that said Department of Psychology, but they didn’t waste a lot of time listening to one another. Psychology wasn’t like physics, or even economics. It lacked a single persuasive theory to organize itself around…Part of the problem was the wild diversity of the people who wanted to be psychologists—a rattle-bag of characters with motives that ranged from the urge to rationalize their own unhappiness, to a conviction that they had deep insights into human nature but lacked the literary power to write a decent novel, to a need for a market for their math skills after they’d been found inadequate by the physics department, to a simple desire to help people in pain. The other issue was the grandma’s attic quality of the field: Psychology was a place all sorts of unrelated and seemingly unsolvable problems simply got tossed.”
On DK: “When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.”
“A one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are… He’d sit there quietly. And then he would open his mouth and speak. And in no time he became the light that all the butterflies fly to; and in no time everyone would look up to him wanting to hear what he would say.”
On violations of transitivity (a key assumption in mathematical economics): “`Is this behavior irrational?’ he wrote. “We tend to doubt it. . . . When faced with complex multidimensional alternatives, such as job offers, gambles or [political] candidates, it is extremely difficult to utilize properly all the available information.” It wasn’t that people actually preferred A to B and B to C and then turned around and preferred C to A. It was that it was sometimes very hard to understand the differences.”
But here’s a good way to think about it: “When people picked coffee over tea, and tea over hot chocolate, and then turned around and picked hot chocolate over coffee—they weren’t comparing two drinks in some holistic manner. Hot drinks didn’t exist as points on some mental map at fixed distances from some ideal. They were collections of features. Those features might become more or less noticeable; their prominence in the mind depended on the context in which they were perceived. And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions.”
“It is generally assumed that classifications are determined by similarities among the objects,” wrote Amos, before offering up an opposing view: that “the similarity of objects is modified by the manner in which they are classified.”… A banana and an apple seem more similar than they otherwise would because we’ve agreed to call them both fruit. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.”
“DK thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said. His theory of himself dovetailed neatly with his moodiness. In his darker moods, he became fatalistic—and so wasn’t surprised or disturbed when he did fail. (He’d been proved right!) In his up moments he was so full of enthusiasm that he seemed to forget the possibility of failure, and would run with any new idea that came his way. He could drive people up the wall with his volatility.”
“Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners. How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms—which wasn’t working very well—was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those.”
“The more complicated and lifelike the situation a person was asked to judge, they suggested, the more insidious the role of availability [an image, example, or scenario]. What people did in many complicated real-life problems—when trying to decide if Egypt might invade Israel, say, or their husband might leave them for another woman—was to construct scenarios. The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments. The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking.”
“Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. “Creeping determinism,” he called it—and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”
One of my favorite observations: “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”
“AT found it troubling to think that crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority. The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”
“DK was stunned: If a 10 percent increase in the chances of full-scale war with Syria wasn’t enough to interest the director-general in Kissinger’s peace process, how much would it take to convince him? That number represented the best estimate of the odds. Apparently the director-general didn’t want to rely on the best estimates. He preferred his own internal probability calculator: his gut. `That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.'”
“If you follow the rule that you take any bet with a positive expected value, you take the bet. But anyone with eyes could see that people, when they made bets, didn’t always act as if they were seeking to maximize their expected value. Gamblers accepted bets with negative expected values; if they didn’t, casinos wouldn’t exist. And people bought insurance, paying premiums that exceeded their expected losses; if they didn’t, insurance companies would have no viable business. Any theory pretending to explain how a rational person should take risks must at least take into account the common human desire to buy insurance, and other cases in which people systematically failed to maximize expected value…. The marginal value of the dollars you give up to buy fire insurance on your house is less than the marginal value of the dollars you lose if your house burns down—which is why even though the insurance is, strictly speaking, a stupid bet, you buy it… You place less value on the $1,000 you stand to win flipping a coin than you do on the $1,000 already in your bank account that you stand to lose—and so you reject the bet.”
Expected value theory [EVT] blew up the theories of rational choice and expected utility [EUT].. “which the entire economics profession, seemed to take as a fair description of how ordinary people faced with risky alternatives actually went about making choices. That leap of faith had at least one obvious implication for the sort of advice economists gave to political leaders: It tilted everything in the direction of giving people the freedom to choose and leaving markets alone. After all, if people could be counted on to be basically rational, markets could, too.”
“Of course, EUT also predicted that people would take a sure gain over a bet that offered an expected value of an even bigger gain. They were “risk averse.” But what was this thing that everyone had been calling “risk aversion?” It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.”
“The gambles that economists studied were choices between gains. In the domain of gains, people were indeed risk averse. They took the sure thing over the gamble. Danny and Amos thought that if the theorists had spent less time with money and more time with politics and war, or even marriage, they might have come to different conclusions about human nature. In politics and war, as in fraught human relationships, the choice faced by the decision maker was often between two unpleasant options.”
“The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described. This one they called “framing.” Simply by changing the description of a situation, and making a gain seem like a loss, you could cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk, and turn them from risk avoiding to risk seeking.”
“Economists assumed that you could simply measure what people wanted from what they chose. But what if what you want changes with the context in which the options are offered to you? “It was a funny point to make because the point within psychology would have been banal,” the psychologist Richard Nisbett later said. “Of course we are affected by how the decision is presented!”
“The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them. People seemed less likely to undo someone being killed by a massive earthquake than they were to undo a person’s being killed by a bolt of lightning, because undoing the earthquake required them to undo all the earthquake had done. “The more consequences an event has, the larger the change that is involved in eliminating that event,” Danny wrote to Amos. Another, related, rule was that “an event becomes gradually less changeable as it recedes into the past.” With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds.”
Two cultures: “We tried to create a psychology and economics seminar at Yale. We had our first meeting. The psychologists came out completely bruised. We never had a second meeting.” In the early 1990s, Amos’s former student Steven Sloman invited an equal number of economists and psychologists to a conference in France. “And I swear to God I spent three-quarters of my time telling the economists to shut up,” said Sloman. “The problem,” says Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy, “is that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.” In the academic culture war triggered by Danny and Amos’s work, Amos served as a strategic advisor. At least some of his sympathies were with the economists. Amos’s mind had always clashed with most of psychology.”
“We think we know things we don’t. We think we are safe when we are not. “For Amos it was one of the core lessons,” said Redelmeier. “It’s not that people think they are perfect. No, no: They can make mistakes. It’s that they don’t appreciate the extent to which they are fallible [read The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness]. ‘I’ve had three or four drinks. I might be 5 percent off my game.’ No! You are actually 30 percent off your game. This is the mismatch that leads to ten thousand fatal accidents in the United States every year.”
“DK made a rule about his fantasy life: He never fantasized about something that might happen. He established this private rule for his imagination once he realized that, after he had fantasized about something that might actually happen, he lost his drive to make it happen.”
I didn’t fantasize about writing this review. I wrote it. FIVE STARS.
I picked up this 2010 book because I had heard a lot of people praising it. They were right. Keith Richards and co-author James Fox (who had known KR for 40+ years).
I liked it for telling his story from the beginning (he met Mick Jagger on a train platform because MJ had a bunch of blues albums under his arm); through the crazy (paraphrasing: “we were the bad boys in comparison to the Beatles, but we were all mates”); the deadly (“I just used heroin at the same level for ages. I thought I was in control until I wasn’t. Guys died when they (a) started up again after going cold turkey with their old dose or (b) raised the dose thinking they would get higher”); and the glorious (“All I wanted to do was play, and I met the most extraordinary people through music…. I’ve had all the girls in the world but finally I found a WOMAN.”)
The prose is sometimes a bit too casual to understand, but it’s nice to feel like KR is “talking to you” in the text Fox provides. KR comes across as a quite the nice guy, if only in comparison to badder pirates 🙂
Here are a few quotes I enjoyed, running from the 1960s to 2000s:
The Flying V [of snot] was the one that missed the handkerchief. People were always having colds in those days; things were always running out of their noses and they didn’t know what to do with them. And it can’t have been cocaine; it was a little too early. I think it was just bad English winters.
We had nobody to impress except us and we weren’t looking to impress ourselves. I was learning too. With Mick and me at the beginning, we’d get, say, a new Jimmy Reed record, and I’d learn the moves on guitar and he would learn the lyrics and get it down, and we would just dissect it as much as two people can. ‘Does it go like that?’ “Yeah, it does as a matter of fact!’ And we had fun doing it. I think we both knew we were in a process of learning, and it was something that you wanted to learn and it was ten times better than school. I suppose at that time, it was the mystery of how it was done, and how could you sound like that? This incredible desire to sound that hip and cool.
At first, our audiences were female driven, until towards the end of the ‘os, when it evened out. These armies of feral, body-snatching girls began to emerge in big numbers about halfway through our first UK tour, in the fall of 1963. That was an incredible lineup: the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Mickie Most. We felt like we were in Disneyland, or the best theme park we could imagine. And at the same time we had this unique opportunity to check out the top cats.
The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them — it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than to be faced with this unstop-pable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is – it’s unknown even to them. The cops are running away, and you’re faced with this savagery of unleashed emotions.
The little idiosyncrasies become so annoying. It was the typical drug thing, that they think they’re somebody special. It’s the head club [as in “crack-head” or “smack-head”]. You’d meet people who’d say, ‘Are you a head?’ as if it conferred some special status. People who were stoned on something you hadn’t taken. Their elitism was total bullshit. Ken Kesey’s got a lot to answer for.
Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel – whether it’s ‘Jumpin’ Jack’ or ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘All Down the Line’ – when I realize I’ve hit the right tempo and the band’s behind me. It’s like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I’m elevated to this other space. People say, ‘Why don’t you give it up?” I can’t retire until I croak. I don’t think they quite understand what I get out of this. I’m not doing it just for the money or for you. I’m doing it for me.
The smack helped my siege mentality. It was my wall against all of that daily stuff, because rather than deal with it, I shut it out, to concentrate on what I wanted to do. You could go out and about, totally insulated. Without it, in certain cases you wouldn’t have walked into that room at that time to deal with something. With it, you could go in there, brazen it off and be very smooth. And then go back and get the guitar out and finish what it was you were doing. It made everything possible. Whereas straight, I don’t know, there were too many things going on. While you’re insulated like this, you live in a world where other people go round with the sun and the moon. They wake up, go to sleep… If you break that cycle and you’ve been up for four, five days [his record was nine days], your perception of these people who have just got up, who have crashed out, is very distant. You’ve been working, writing songs, transferring tape to tape, and these people come in and they’ve been to bed and everything! They’ve even eaten stuff! Meanwhile, you’re sitting at this desk with a guitar and this pen and paper. Where the fuck you been?’ It got to the point where I’d be thinking, how can I help these poor people who have to sleep every day?
It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything. I put that sort of shit about just for fun, quite honestly. Because I very rarely eat before I go on stage. It’s the worst thing you can do, at least for me. Barely digested food in your stomach and you’ve got to head out there and do ‘Start Me Up’ and another two hours to go. I just want it there in case I realize I haven’t eaten that day and I might need a bit of fuel. It’s just my particular metabolism; I’ve just got to have enough fuel.
There was Syphilis, a big wolfhound I had before Marlon was born. And Ratbag, the dog I smuggled in from America. He was in my pocket. He kept his trap shut. I gave him to Mum, and he lived with her for many, many years. I’m away for months, yet the time you spend with pups binds you forever. I now have several packs, all unknown to one another due to the size of the oceans, although I sense they scent the others on my clothes. In rough times I know I can count on canines. When the dogs and I are alone, I talk endlessly. They’re great listeners. I would probably die for one.
Oh, and Mick… He’s a control freak (Lead Vocalist Syndrome) and selfish, but they’re like brothers — writing and jamming since 1961.
I found, while reading this book, that I paid a lot more attention to concrete, and steel, and other aspects of our built environment. It forced me to balance away from the digital world where I spend too much time.
The author, Ed Conway, devotes a section to each of six materials (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium), looking into the history of their use and their role in our lives today.
One fact that anyone should keep in mind is the large difference between the price we pay for any of these materials and their value in use. That difference is often very large for water, but it’s also large for these “endless” (not!) raw materials.
I was fascinated from beginning to end, so here are some quotes and notes:
Consumption of some materials is falling in some locations, but it is rising globally, which often means that the pollution and other negative impacts from sourcing the materials is rising faster than rates of extraction, due to the common habit of mining the easier stuff (less work, less pollution) before looking to more difficult sources.
Sand is quite the material, with many uses, like mirrors that are “probably the smoothest man-made structures in the universe’. If you blew one of them up to the size of the United States, the biggest bump would be less than half a millimetre high.“
Don’t think “supply chain” but “supply web” with all the complexity that allows for.
We need salt in our diets to live, but it’s used in so many other ways. Governments tax salt for this reason (we need it). The obligation to pay for 7kg of salt per year (sel du devoir) spurred the French Revolution. Gandhi’s march to harvest salt outside the British Government’s monopoly (salt satyagraha) spurred Indian independence.
Iron …accounted for roughly 95 per cent of all the metal we produce and use. Indeed, it’s so fundamental to our lives that it is just as good a measure of living standards as GDP. If you live in a developed economy like the US, Japan, UK or most of Europe, you have roughly 15 tonnes of steel in your life.
If we wanted everyone in the world to have the same amount of embedded steel as we enjoy in the rich world – 15 tonnes per person – that would imply increasing the total global stock of this alloy to 144 billion tonnes. And since that is nearly four times what we have ever produced since the beginning of humanity, and since methods of producing steel without any emissions remain experimental and expensive, we are caught in the horns of a dilemma. The world’s twin goals of decarbonisation and development are heading for a collision. As countries become richer and more prosperous, are they really to be denied the concrete or steel the West poured and forged as it developed?
The need to smelt iron and charcoal to get steel led to shortages of wood until that fuel was replaced by coal. Welcome to the Industrial Revolution, an exponential increase in wealth, and the beginning of climate chaos.
In 1800, 95 per cent of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90 per cent – still came from burning wood. No longer was Britain yoked to the organic limitations of how many trees could be grown on its landmass. And around this time, its income per capita, which for most of history had been more or less the same as France’s, began to soar. By the early nineteenth century it was 80 per cent richer than France.
Here we run smack bang into the same lesson we learned from concrete [sand]: what makes steel [iron] a mainstay of the Material World? Not merely that it is very good at doing what it does, but that it is both very good and very cheap. That cheapness – which means steel is a vanishing part of our GDP statistics – is its secret weapon. Back in 1810 Americans spent roughly the same proportion of their national income on iron nails as they do today on computers. Today steel nails cost next to nothing – while being far superior to their iron predecessors – meaning we have more money to spend on, well, computers. The same observation (a big gap between cost and value) can be said about water.
Copper is the great, unseen substrate that supports the modern world as we know it. Without it, we are quite literally left in the dark. If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.
There was an …astonishing leap in productivity afforded to manufacturers by electric drive motors [built with copper coils and powered by electricity delivered via copper wires]. Out went the clunky, inefficient steam engines in factories and in came electric motors. This alone doubled American manufacturing productivity by 1930, and then again by 1960.
A note for the industrial ecologists: The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual copper production by 2.6 per cent. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75 per cent. The most staggering thing about this statistic, however, is not just the numbers themselves but the fact that they show up in no environmental accounts or material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measures of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.
When scientists discovered the hole in the ozone layer it didn’t take long to engineer near-identical alternatives to the chlorofluorocarbons that were mostly responsible. It was possible to save the environment without even noticing. Oil and gas are by their very nature far trickier to substitute since they represent an almost perfect energy source and a near irreplaceable feedstock into nearly every manufactured product. Weaning ourselves off them will take far more than a bit of goodwill and a net-zero target.
As of 2019, right before the pandemic struck and skewed the data, just over 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy – which includes both electricity generation and also other uses such as transport, heating and industrial processes – came from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. The striking thing about this number is how stable it has been: just over 80 per cent at the turn of the millennium, just over 80 per cent in 1990 and only a touch higher – around 85 per cent – in 1980. Wind and solar, by contrast, provided just 1.5 per cent of our energy in 2019.
The story of modern agriculture is really about… replacing natural forms of energy with fossil fuels…a kilogram of greenhouse tomatoes generates as much as 3 kilograms of carbon emissions… And since most consumers are reluctant to spend much more on tomatoes, and for that matter have little conception of how they are actually grown, that suits everyone just fine… In 2022, as gas prices soared after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some growers simply opted out altogether. All of a sudden, glasshouses were left empty, tomatoes were in short supply, and food prices rose across Europe – in large part because of the shortage of natural gas. Even growers in Spain and Italy, who tend not to grow their tomatoes indoors, were hit by the rise in costs of fertiliser and of the diesel fuel in the trucks transporting their produce. Vaclav Smil has calculated that each tomato from this region has an energy cost of five tablespoons of diesel.
So we return to that same tension we have encountered repeatedly: How to balance the demand for stuff with the consequences of producing it? In the case of lithium the balance is even harder to strike, since it is our means of escaping fossil fuel dependence. Yet in much the same way as the internal combustion engine helped humankind out of one hole (the pollution of our towns and cities by horse manure) yet helped create another one, what are the chances the very same thing happens with lithium, or cobalt or nickel or manganese?
As Wright observed this steady fall in prices and improvement in quality, he came up with a rule of thumb: every time the production of an item doubles, its cost falls by about 15 per cent. And Wright’s law, as it is sometimes called, has been eerily successful at explaining the fall in the price of everything from container ships to specialised plastics.
We are beyond carrying capacity: …we went from having to rely on the sun for all our sustenance, complemented by some mined fertilisers such as the caliche of the Atacama, to relying on fossil fuels. Today our tomatoes, our potatoes and indeed pretty much everything else are nourished with fertilisers made of natural gas. Thanks to the Haber–Bosch process, we are all made out of fossil fuels. That allowed the global population to grow beyond its Malthusian limits – the carrying capacity of the planet if we could only rely on renewable resources like the sun, the wind and the unfertilised soil – but as our numbers swelled there was an arithmetic increase in the amount of fossil fuels we burned. There is a paradox here. Without fossil fuels, roughly half of us would not be alive. Yet now, the carbon emissions from those fossil fuels are causing problems that threaten us all.
No energy transition of this sort [net zero carbon by 2050] has ever been achieved as quickly, indeed the previous four would be better measured in centuries and we are still reliant on coal for more of our energy than oil. And this is before you factor in that in each of the previous transitions – the move from coal to oil and from oil to gas – there was a big incentive to shift: manufacturers could benefit from cheaper, more energy-dense fuels. Each previous shift made their lives easier. This time around, the opposite is often the case. Except for nuclear power, we are shifting to less dense sources of energy. And we are doing so even as the world’s most populous nations are industrialising, and hence increasing their energy consumption. The numbers are challenging: some would say nearly impossibly so.
Consider what it takes to replace a small natural gas turbine, pumping out 100 megawatts of electricity, enough for up to 100,000 homes, with wind power. You would need around 20 enormous wind turbines. To build those turbines you will need nearly 30,000 tonnes of iron and almost 50,000 tonnes of concrete, along with 900 tonnes of plastics and fibreglass for the blades and 540 tonnes of copper (or three times that for an offshore wind farm). The gas turbine, on the other hand, would take around 300 tonnes of iron, 2,000 tonnes of concrete and perhaps 50 tonnes of copper in the windings and transformers. On the basis of one calculation, we will need to mine more copper in the next 22 years than we have in the entirety of the past 5,000 years of human history.
As someone who has worked my entire life in the ethereal world, enjoying the spoils of the Material World without ever getting my hands dirty, the journey recounted in this book has been somewhat chastening. The more I travelled, the greater the nagging feeling that we have all become disconnected from the primary industries upon which we all rely for our survival. Perhaps this is simply the quid pro quo of modern capitalism. You can get anything you want from anywhere in the world for a bargain price, but don’t whatever you do expect to understand how it was made or how it got to you. Perhaps it hardly matters that there is no single person in the world who understands how to make a pencil, or a silicon chip. But what if this disconnection is fuelling the alienation so many people feel towards capitalism?
Bottom line: I give this book FIVE STARS. Read it and appreciate the infrastructures that make our modern lives possible and pleasurable, and then think of (a) how expensive it will be to shift to sustainable consumption and (b) the consequences if we do not.
Someone recommended that I read this 2004 book by Rory Stewart (a Scot with quite a CV). Although I enjoyed it, I am not sure that the average person would be too enthusiastic about reading a series of mano-a-mano encounters in which tribal customs mix with male violence and companionship.
The book focusses on a “missing link” in Stewart’s early 2000s walk across Iran, Pakistan and India, i.e., the section in Afghanistan that was closed until America overthrew the Taliban (for the moment).
To the reader’s benefit, Stewart was willing to risk his life while (a) walking a month along a “road less travelled” that no one local knew from end to end and (b) negotiating a “fluid” security and governance situation in regions where the Taliban had killing locals only a few months earlier. Stewart reminds me of Thesinger (1959) and Sir Richard Francis Burton (19th c.)
This book is thus a travelogue that focusses more on culture and anthropology than on fine dining and the sights. Stewart is utterly vulnerable to the idea(l)s and whims of the people he encounters, the hosts on whose hospitality he depends, and the complex humanity of a culture (or mix of cultures) that outsiders have forever misunderstood and underappreciated — at their peril.
So it’s obvious that he should pick up a dog-as-companion on the way.
He names the dog “Babur,” in honor of the historic Babur who (a) walked the same way (losing many men in the process) and (b) conquored India in the 16th century.
Here are a few insightful passages:
I took out my notebook and sketched Abdul Haq, who was sleeping on his back with his rifle across his thighs, his large chest slowly rising and falling. He had a clear, honest face. I found my fondness for him difficult to reconcile with what I knew of his enthusiasm for killing people and making small children cry.
Islam does not encourage strong social distinctions, and the war and social revolutions in villages had destroyed many of the old feudal structures in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, villagers were very aware of one another’s backgrounds. A multitude of points of etiquette, tradition, and tribal identities differentiated a servant such as Wazir from a feudal lord… Class did not necessarily reflect education and experience. My current host, Seyyed Umar, was a wealthy man from a respected family of landowning clergy, but he could not read or write and had never been abroad. Abdul Haq, who was from a much humbler background, was literate and had traveled. What mattered was power and that depended on allies.
Why did you become a Mujahid [resistance fighter]?” I asked Seyyed Umar. “Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys.” “And why did you fight the Taliban?” “Because they forced my women to wear burqas, not head scarves, and stole my donkeys.” It seemed if the government did not interfere with his women’s headdress and his donkeys he would not oppose it.
Babur seemed prepared to examine, mark with urine, and take possession of every meter of the next six hundred kilometers. Only once or twice in my eighteen-month walk across Asia had I felt some magical claim to the territory I touched with my feet. But Babur apparently felt it all the time. The warm stream of urine was set like a flag to mark his new empire. All his movement was conquest and occupation. He seemed ready to ponder and possess every place in the world. He was like a canine Alexander.
This was a very useful map. It specified everything in terms of a man on foot: the best tracks, the distances that could be walked in a day, whom you should speak to in each village… Day one: Commandant Maududi in Badgah. Day two: Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar. Day three: Bushire Khan in Sang-i-zard. Day four: Mir Ali Hussein Beg of Katlish. Day five: Haji Nasir-i-Yazdani Beg of Qala-e-Nau. Day six: Seyyed Kerbalahi of Siar Chesme… I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map. I chanted it even after I had left the villages, using the list as a credential.
Though most communities, whether Islamic or Hindu, and Muslims talked a great deal about their formal religious responsibilities to a mosafer (traveler), or meman (guest), in practice people often welcomed me reluctantly. This was understandable—they were often very poor, lived tough lives, and were suspicious of the few strangers they met. I was often disappointed by their hospitality. Only later did I begin to see how fortunate I was that they provided me almost every night with shelter and bread to eat.
Six years earlier [1996], two thousand families had lived in Shaidan. Three years ago the Taliban had killed eighty men in the bazaar. A year ago, fresh from dynamiting the giant Buddhas thirty-five kilometers away, they killed one hundred and twenty. Seven months before my arrival, they found the village empty and torched it. Most of the population had fled to refugee camps.
Some [foreign aid workers], such as the two political officers in Chaghcharan, were experienced and well informed about conditions in rural Afghanistan. But they were barely fifty out of many thousands. Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights, and fiber-optic cable networks; to talk about transparent, clean, and accountable processes, tolerance, and civil society; and to speak of a people “who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government.” But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi’s wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? [snip] These differences between groups were deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas. Policy makers did not have the time, structures, or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist. They acted as though villagers were interested in all the priorities of international organizations, even when those priorities were mutually contradictory. [snip] The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal. He was a peasant farmer and had a better idea than most about where his next meal was coming from. If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan. Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change.
Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression. Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.
Almost every morning, regrets and anxieties had run through my mind like a cheap tune—often repeated, revealing nothing. But as I kept moving, no thoughts came. Instead I became aware of the landscape as I once had in the Indian Himalayas. Every element around me seemed sharper, the colors more intense. I stared, expecting the effect to fade, but the objects only continued to develop in reality and presence. I was suddenly afraid, uncertain I could sustain this vision. This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in this place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.
I am not sure if I read this book as a school assignment, but it’s obviously one of the great works of American fiction. Mark Twain published it in 1876, and now it’s available for free via Project Gutenberg.
The book’s hero is Tom, a twelve-year-old boy (it’s never stated). The plot involves Tom’s various attempts to (a) avoid school work and (b) go on adventures (often with Huck Finn) and (c) court Betsy Thatcher, a girl whose family arrives in town early in the book.
Long story short, Tom gets into a lot more adventures than he plans, which drives his Aunt back and forth between mourning Tom’s death, thanking heavens that he’s alive, and punishing him for driving her crazy.
The book’s tone of every day a new adventure is delightful and innocent, in contrast with that years’ events: the first telephone call, the first transcontinental (US) railway line, and the ongoing exploration and seizure of Native American territories.
…but by far the highlight is the lovely text, imbued with the priorities of boys in the face of adult silliness. Here are three examples:
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while—plenty of company—and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village. Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.
One feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brainracking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious. But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable
I just read this 2007 book by Alan Weisman, and it’s encouraging — not because it gives me any hope for humans but for the Earth.
