The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, and Company, 2000)
I’ve enjoyed some of Malcolm Gladwell’s other books (Blink, and Outliers), and heard a lot about The Tipping Point, so I expected to like this one better than I did. Certainly the story of how New York City cleaned up its subways and lowered its crime rate is encouraging, and well worth the whole book. Mostly I found it terribly depressing, however. As with the Heaths’ Switch and Made to Stick, I really don’t like learning that so many people in positions of trust are using every trick in the book and then some to manipulate us. Worse, these authors seem less concerned with arming the public against such efforts and more with teaching the tricks to those with “good” motives. But I say, if it’s wrong to manipulate a child to beg his parents for a toy, it’s still wrong to manipulate him to learn the alphabet. And what you learn about Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues from Tipping Point is not going to make you happy about plunking your child in front of the television, for all Gladwell’s approbations.
Even more depressing is the book’s description of fashion, style, what’s “cool” and how it gets that way. By contrast, Calvin’s views on Total Depravity are light and optimisitic.
Worst of all is the section on teen smoking, and other places where Gladwell reveals just how low his expectations are of teens, and how little he thinks parents can influence their children. It’s peers that matter, and if you move into a bad neighborhood, or adopt troubled children, expecting that your family strength, love, and high values will protect your children from the negative influences of their environment, you are tragically mistaken. A child is much better off in a bad family in a good neighborhood than the other way around. It’s normal, and even right, for teens to admire troublemakers, reject anything suggested by an adult, and seek out stupid, life-threatening, risks. There may be something to what he says—certainly no one should enter naïvely into a dangerous ministry—but such a hopeless, dystopian view is more than I can take, at least in my current fighting-the-remnants-of-the-flu state. For a reality check, I stop and look at our wonderful nephews, and remember my own life, where it was God’s grace through my family and nothing else that saved me from getting into a lot of trouble in the 1960’s.
Depressing as much of it may be, The Tipping Point does have some interesting ideas. One section I particularly enjoyed was “The Law of the Few,” in which Gladwell explains the unexpectedly great influence held by a few people, and not because they are rich or obviously powerful. Those he calls Connectors, for example, are far above average in the number and variety of people they know. They have mastered the art of the “weak connection,” a relation greater than mere acquaintance but far less than true friendship, and maintain this connection with a long list of folks from elementary school friends to college buddies, from fellow summer campers to people met on an airplane flight, from work colleagues to the people who mow their lawns. These “weak” connections are actually very powerful, because breakthroughs in our lives often come, not from our own circle of friends, but from those whose knowledge and resources are not so similar to our own.
The Tipping Point was written in 2000; I’d love to see an update, because with all his analysis of connectedness, information, and influence, leaving out social media and the Internet is a glaring, even incomprehensible, omission in 2013.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry; audiobook published by christianaudio Fiction and narrated by Susan Denaker
With Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry has half made me want to live in Kentucky, which—all my Kentucky ancestors notwithstanding—was not even on my places-to-visit list. Susan Denaker doesn't so much narrate the book as become Hannah Coulter, telling the story of the people of rural Kentucky, who "keep on living" through the sorrows and changes brought by the 20th century. I found it spell-binding.
Denaker's skill, I think, helps save Berry from the hubris of writing a first-person narrative as a woman. He mostly succeeds, though there are places—most obvious when Hannah is talking about her children, or sex—when the point-of-view comes across more like a man trying to think like a woman and not quite getting it.
There is beauty here, and sorrow, and strength, along with places where I wished I could argue with Hannah: it might be a good choice for a book club, because there are several interesting discussion points.
I'd heard about Wendell Berry, but this was for me the first of his novels. There are several more about the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky that will probably be worth reading eventually.
Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood (Collins, 2006)
I don't believe one gets closer to God simply by climbing physically higher, but there must be something special in the rarefied air of the Himalayas. Greg Mortenson returns from a climbing expedition inspired to build schools for isolated, impoverished communities in Central Asia; John Wood visits Nepal, then quits his high-level, very highly paid job at Microsoft, and begins building libraries for poor children all over the world.
The organization Wood founded, Room to Read, has earned the highest Charity Navigator rating of four stars. That it has grown explosively and yet responsibly is as much a tribute to Wood's business accumen as to his good heart. His years at Microsoft were preparation for his life's mission, though he didn't know it at the time.
As for the book, it's fascinating to read, as much for the insights into Microsoft as for the larger story. There is, perhaps, a bit too much of Wood himself. I find him, like Mortenson, to be rather too much full of himself. John Wood does not seem like a pleasant person to live or to work with. I was particularly bothered by his abrupt decision to drop all previous commitments to get on with his mission. He broke up with his girlfriend, whom he supposedly loved, and with whom he was apparently serious enough not only to live with but to follow when her job moved her to China. He made (as far as I could see) no attempt to work things out, to give her time to adjust to the radical idea and catch his vision—just "my way or the highway" (never mind that his way was the highway). He quit his job abruptly, leaving his boss and coworkers in the lurch, not giving his employer a reasonable amount of time to find a replacement and make a smooth transition—just "Goodbye."
But one does not have to be good in all aspects of life to accomplish good things, even great things. And it may be said that full-of-yourself, aggressive personalities are much better at getting certain types of things done. Wood (and Mortenson, recent problems notwithstanding) certainly have done and are doing amazing work. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World is a great testimony to how important to a community it is to include members with different strengths and different personalities, even personalities we dislike. Even more, it's a brilliant example of what can be accomplished—beginning with a single, inspired, hardworking, driven individual—when great vision and solid business sense come together.
The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, 2010)
I am now caught up with Bauer's history series, at least until The History of the Renaissance World becomes available later this year. The History of the Medieval World is as good as the first book, The History of the Ancient World, though I will admit to some disappointment, as I was hoping for a little less of the "kings and battles and political intrigue" factor and more about art, music, and everyday life. But alas, the former provide the background on which the rest of life is played out—and the book is 667 pages long as it is. I'll have to be content with building up my times-people-places framework, and look elsewhere for the rest of the story.
Although the history of China, Japan, India, the Americas, and a few other parts of the world are important, it's harder for my euro-centric brain to keep the names straight, so my knowledge of those areas is still weaker. Not that it's easy with Europe: Just because "Charles" fits better into my memory than "Suryawarman," that doesn't mean keeping all those Germanic kingdoms straight isn't mind-boggling. I can't even manage the Wars of the Roses yet.
The sections on European history were the most interesting to me for a different reason: Having genealogy as a hobby means that many of the names are familiar. Recognizing Henry the Fowler as my 34th great-grandfather, for example, lends an unusually piquant flavor to the story.
I Like Birds is a video story created by my cousin, D.B. McLaughlin. The words, music, and photos are all his.
Think of this video as a children's book, read on a tablet by a caring adult to someone who is hungry to know more about their world. Pause the video or mute the music as you wish.
I hate to think of tablets replacing printed books, but that being said, this is great. Perhaps some of his first cousins once removed would enjoy it. (Update: I see I wrote "once removed"; I had meant to say "twice removed," but no doubt the parents will enjoy it, too!)
A Year with G.K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit, and Wonder editd by Kevin Belmonte (Thomas Nelson, 2012)
How can you go wrong with Chesterton? How could I pass up the opportunity to receive a free copy of this collection of a year's worth of his wisdom? So I didn't, despite my complaints about overflowing bookshelves and not enough time to read.
Since I had an obligation to review the book for its publisher, I couldn't really spread the readings out over 365 days—not that I would have exercised that much self-control anyway. Still, it was a delight, mostly. The selections themselves are fully delightful, mostly unknown to me, and interspersed with quotations from the Bible and quotations about Chesterton. My only quarrel with the book is the lack of sources. Who can read a good quotation and not want to see it in context? Many times Belmonte tells us the origins of a particular selection, but as many times he does not, which I found very frustrating.
Google came to the rescue. Many of Chesterton's writings are in the public domain and available online. This made finding the context of most of the passages easy, and should have saved much time in providing samples for this review, since all I had to do was copy them. Alas, I'm not sure that there was any savings at all, since finding the context inevitably meant I spent more time reading than I would have spent typing.
Be that as it may, here are a few treasures, mostly from the book, but some encountered through my online meanderings. Remembering the Golden Rule, I have provided the sources. (More)
Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids by Kim John Payne with Lisa M. Ross (Ballantine Books, 2009)
This review was interrupted so that I could write the Things Dr. Spock Won't Tell You post, simply so I could reference it here. When I get around to updating my list of favorite childrearing books, Simplicity Parenting will be there.
Insert here the usual disclaimer: I don't agree with all the author says. But there is so much of value here; I'd recommend it to all parents and parents-to-be. Grandparents, too, and even those without children in their lives. Because the book is as much about simplicity as it is about parenting.
I won't be able to do justice to the content of the book—and I sent it back to the library in part because I knew that if I had it I'd take too much time trying to do just that. But I'll attempt a one-line summary: There are incalculable advantages to a child's well-being to be found in simplicity, rhythm, and clutter-free living.
Most of the ideas in the book are not new to me. Perhaps one reason I like it so much is that it resonates well with theories I'd already encountered (and appreciated) over the last thirty-odd years. Simplicity Parenting connects the dots, and its strength lies in its comprehensiveness, its gentle encouragment, and above all in its practical suggestions. No matter how hurried, harried, stressed, and cluttered your world is, Kim John Payne convinces you that the benefits of simplicity are possible, taken in small steps and beginning exactly where you are. (More)
Guitar Zero: The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age by Gary Marcus (Penguin Books, 2012)
Hooray for our library for ordering this book after I requested it! Janet has written a great review already (which is why I wanted to read Guitar Zero in the first place), so this will be short. For what the book's really about, read what she has to say; I'll just mention a few of my impressions. I have 36 Post-It flags marking sections that especially interested me, but have neither time nor energy to type out more than a few.
Guitar Zero is a much better book than Kluge, also by Gary Marcus. A bit of the professional arrogance I talked about in my review of that book comes through here when he's talking about the brain, but it's much less, and I might not even have noticed it had I read this one first. Now I understand why Janet perceived him as very humble: His first serious attempts to tackle playing the guitar, at nearly 40 years old, with no musical background except listening, and the handicap of an extremely poor sense of rhythm, took place during a two-week stay at the family's summer cottage, where he practiced for several hours each day, for two weeks, where not only his wife but also his in-laws could hear every painful note of his miserable beginnings. To me, who with few exceptions won't sing or play a note unless I'm completely alone in the house, Marcus's behavior speaks of humility at a level I can't even imagine. He also makes no attempt to hide his musical ignorance, though his musical learning is very impressive.
It was fascinating, in reading, to learn just how vastly ignorant I am of the kind of music most people love and know best. I've kept myself consciously and deliberately ignorant of rock 'n' roll and its spawn, ever since my sixth-grade art teacher inflicted on us every day in class the music of an oddly-named British group called the Beatles. So it was with a kind of perverse delight that I read Marcus's careful, meticulous explanation of the parts of music I've known since elementary school while tossing around names of bands and singers and musical techniques with the assumption that of course they needed no explanation.
Just a few quotes:
By around six or seven months, infants start to become sensitive to the shapes of melodies. Given enough exposure, they can detect when a note has changed, recognize a short melody even when it has been transposed upward or downward in pitch, and sometimes remember melodies for weeks.
And maybe even younger. I think of two different instances I've read about: one where the sibling of a young Suzuki violin student clearly recognized, after birth, the Vivaldi concerto she had heard her brother practicing during the previous nine months; the other the newborn baby of a professional cellist, who responded similarly to the works her mother had practiced while pregnant.
The process of forming chords [on the guitar] is further complicated by the fact that one's fingers don't naturally move independently. (Try, for example, to bring all of your fingers together, with your palm facing down, and then slowly move your pinkie back and forth; your ring finger, and possibly your thumb, will be tempted to go along for the ride.)
I have no trouble doing this, but it's easier with my left hand than with my right, the legacy of my very-long-ago violin playing in school and some teenaged efforts on folk guitar. I never got above the barely-capable level of playing, but the circuits for the necessary independent finger movement are still imprinted on my brain.
Marcus spends a lot of time analyzing the differences and similarities between music and language. Most of it makes sense, but I do quarrel with some of his reasoning. He makes much of the fact that nearly every child learns to speak, and easily, whereas music is difficult to learn, not natural. My point is that children are naturally and constantly exposed to language from before birth, have great incentive to learn to talk, and are constantly encouraged in their efforts. What if they were similarly exposed and encouraged in music?
[Speaking of a master teacher] The single point that Michele was most adamant about was a rule for when parents should correct a child's mistake: never, ever until the child had made that error at least three times. [P]arents who corrected their children could easily wind up destroying their kids' motivation.
Many people probably imagine that kids are simply quicker learners, but laboratory research suggests otherwise. In the few direct comparisons of "procedural" learning in children and college-aged adults, adults actually tend to be quicker learners than children. ... If kids outshine adults, it's probably not because they are quicker to learn but simply because they are more persistent; the same drive that can lead them to watch the same episode of a TV show five days in a row without any signs of losing interest can lead a child who aspires to play an instrument to practice the same riff over and over again.
I figured out one of the reasons why music had always been such a struggle for me: rhythm turns out to be deeply tied to the balance-tracking vestibular system. Since I was a child, my vestibular system has been lousy. I could never bear to ride on a swing, despised being bounced up and down, routinely became nauseated when sitting in the back of the car, and opted out of roller coasters altogether. A new study showed that electrical stimulation of the vestibular system can directly affect rhythmic perceptions, and in retrospect it is easy to see why rhythm has always posed a challenge for me. It's a pretty safe bet that Jimi Hendrix enjoyed being bounced as a baby a lot more than I did.
Guitar Zero is almost enough to make me pick up an instrument again ... if only I could be humble enough to let someone hear me. And who am I kidding? Marcus proved (as John Holt did before him) that it's never too late to learn, what would I give up in order to find the hours and hours I'd need to practice?
Here are a few more quotes I pulled from Half the Sky before relinquishing it to the library.
Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately grabbed national attention there. ... [The Rapex] resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed. When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely: "A medieval device for a medieval deed."
There's a certain poetic justice in the device, for sure, though I believe the inventor is slandering the medieval era. One can only hope the women survive the mens' reactions. Though rape is famously the "fate worse than death," I'm not sure the victims in Darfur would agree.
In Darfur, after interviewing several women who told of having been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question: "If women are raped when they get firewood, then why don't they stay in the camps? Why don't the men collect firewood?"
"When men leave the camp, they're shot dead," one of the women explained patiently. "When the women leave they're only raped." In almost every conflict, mortality is disporportionately male. Bult whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.
Alasdair Neale guest conductor
Sarah Chang, violin
Gioachino Rossini: Semiramide: Overture
Samuel Barber: Concerto for Violin, op. 14
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64
As much as I like music, it's not often a "happiness moment" coincides with a concert. (Mostly because the particular kind of happiness I'm documenting is rare.) But Sunday was a bright exception. I had been particularly looking forward to the afternoon concert, because we've loved Sarah Chang's violin playing since she was playing on a quarter-sized violin. But Ms. Chang's lovely performance was not the most memorable event of the concert.
Wow.
How often does the orchestra outshine the soloist?
We love the Barber Violin Concerto and we love Sarah Chang.
But hands down the best of the concert was the Tchaikovsky. Porter called it, "possibly the best I've ever heard the Orlando Philharmonic play." I don't care much for the modern habit of giving standing ovations so often that ordinary applause makes musicians think, "What did we do wrong?" But this one was truly well-deserved. The music came alive, it was meaningful, it was powerful—and what's more, it looked as if the musicians were enjoying themselves. This is hardly an obscure piece—and yet I can say that I've never heard a performance of Tchaikovsky 5 that moved me more.
Plus, it really helped that the concert was at 3 p.m. I'm far from my best and most appreciative when I'm struggling to stay awake. Not to mention the earlier time is safer for the drive home. :)
You may wonder, considering how disappointed I was by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, why we decided to go see The Hobbit Saturday night. But we had a free movie pass that was about to expire; moreover, I was feeling more kindly toward the LOTR movies, having watched my nephew spend much of his Christmas vacation devouring the books—which I doubt he would have done without having been inspired by the movies. So last night we ventured into our local theater for the first time in nearly five years.
Yes, we were disappointed. Peter Jackson is consistent, and so am I. I could very nearly simply quote my review of The Fellowship of the Ring for The Hobbit. I fault it for the same lack of attention to the basic nature of the characters (though not as badly as in LOTR), the same gratuitous rewriting and addition of scenes, the same modern-action-film-with-swords emphasis on battles and chase scenes. In the middle of a fight that wouldn't end, Porter and I looked at each other and said, "b-o-o-o-r-i-n-g." So sad to feel that way about a movie made to honor one of my very favorite books, one I can read over and over again without coming close to boredom.
I'd read that The Hobbit movie was not intended to simply tell the story in the book, but would have some scenes added to include some of the backstory and tie it in more directly with LOTR, and I was okay with that. That's not at all the same thing as directly contradicting the book, which, for example, the eagle rescue scene does in spades.
As in the previous movies, this one does hobbits and the Shire best: believable, beautiful, noble, inspirational. The other races are more caricatures and too alien. The character of the dwarves (that's the way the word is spelled in the book, complete with explanation) is downright maligned. Radagast is played as a drug-crazed hippie; elves are wrongly cast as vegetarians. The trolls, goblins, orcs, and wargs are over-the-top in their ugliness and puerility, so that they come across as more disgusting than evil. On the other hand, Gollum, though not the character as I imagined him, is very well conceived and acted (as he was in the other films).
There are some good lines, and some funny ones, though too much of the humor is of the snot-in-the-soup kind.
I've said before that an important key to good fantasy is that if you want the audience to accept an outlandish premise (e.g. magic), the rest of the story must be down-to-earth and believable (minus the magic, Hogwarts is a normal English boarding school). Watching the credits, I commented that it sure takes a lot of people to make a movie. With all those folks, couldn't they have sprung for two more? A physicist and an EMT come to mind. When big things fall or are thrown they look too much like models (with modern CGI there's no excuse for not doing better), and even dwarfs, to be at all "realistic," can't fall a few hundred feet, have massive timbers land on top of them, then get up and go about their business with no more than a brief groan.
Would I recommend The Hobbit movie? Only for those who aren't likely ever to read the book. I definitely wouldn't recommend it for grandchildren. The PG-13 rating is well deserved (and frankly I don't think anyone, of any age, can benefit from so much violence).
Still, it has its good points, and I have to keep in mind how much stronger it is, even in its weaknesses, than most contemporary fare.
The best of the movie? Bilbo and the Shire, the music (though it owes a lot to Braveheart), and the awesome New Zealand scenery.
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
Inspired by the PBS documentary and the recommendation of a friend, I put myself on the library waiting list for Half the Sky. As usually happens, it became available at an inconvenient time, and I had to return it to the library in a hurry. That was back in October, so I'm trying to craft this review from my hastily-scribbled (typed) notes and quotes.
The book is better than the television show, if only because it features fewer American pop-culture icons and more real people. It also, of course, gives more detail, though there is something to be said for the visceral effects of seeing and hearing the people behind the words. Both left me with two distinct reactions, neither of which is probably what the authors had in mind.
When reading (or watching) these stories of unbelieveable brutality and oppression of women, the first, and no doubt intended, reaction is, "What are we doing to our women and girls, to the majority of the population of the world, to half of the very image of God?" Particularly since the authors relate all these horrors while barely touching on the problem of sex-selective abortion. And yet my lasting impression followed almost immediately: What have we done to our men and boys? Not everyone will agree, but I say that there is something even worse than the atrocities committed upon these women, and that is being the kind of person who commits such acts. Ultimately, no solution to the problem of violence against women will succeed unless the rehabilitation of men is also addressed.
Not that women, as a sex, are innocent:
In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters' genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take thieir sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war.
But by and large, men have the power, and they use that power in ways that hurt women, even their own wives and daughters.
Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men. it is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito net and then find the child's father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. ... Roughly 7 percent of the total spending of the poorest people in Indias's Maharashtra State went to sugar. ... [I]n much of the world even some of the poorest young men, both single and married, spend considerable sums on prostitutes. ... [A]t least in Udaipur, the malnutrition could in most cases be eliminated if families bought less sugar and tobacco. ... If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do in beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls ... would be the biggest beneficiaries.
Or, as my son-in-law succinctly put it, "Men can't be trusted to bring home the bacon rather than eating it on the way home."
Why not? Why is it that when women in poor countries get jobs, they use the money to feed and educate their children, but men spend their incomes (and their wives', if the money isn't hidden from them) on beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes? It was (is) not always thus: men used to be proud to support their families, and many still are. Perhaps in this country one can cast some blame on feminism, which robbed men of the assurance that their own sacrifices were essential to their families' survival. But in many poor countries little of the bread ever made it to the children's mouths until their mothers began earning it. Here's one theory:
[Quoting David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian] The economic implications of gender discriminaion are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.
(On a side note, while I applaud the movement in some Christian circles to encourage boys and men in chivalry, graciousness, and love, I cringe when I see how often this is taught through the idea that boys are superior to girls—sometimes even to the extent of being stronger and wiser than their mothers! As Landes said, this is not only harmful to their mothers and sisters, and future wives and daughters, but to the boys themselves. Here's an article I ran into recently that addresses a related problem, and has the lovely title, Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him.)
On the bright side, as men see the economic potential and power of their wives, they often come to respect them more, and then see the value in educating their daughters. On the other hand, there's a clear risk that they will only see the economic value, and women will find themselves further enslaved, working at a job, running the household as usual, and funding their husbands' bad habits as well.
Half the Sky rightly celebrates the efforts of women worldwide to address the problem of their own oppression, but it will take both men and women, working together, to address the heart of the tragedy.
I'll leave my second, and quite different, take-away from Half the Sky for another post. I was going to add some more quotes, but as they, too, are on a different subject, so that will make a third post—a record for one book review, I think.
asdf
Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus (Mariner Books, 2008)
After reading Kluge, which only made my reading list because the author's Guitar Zero was unavailable, I'm all the more anxious to read the book that so impressed my daughter, because I found this one decidedly unimpressive.
I'll admit my prejudice up front: Unless I've chosen a book for it's religious content, I don't like books that wear their faith ostentatiously. Example: A robust and glorious Christian faith shines better through every corner of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, without any direct mention of God, than the in-your-face faith of much of the "contemporary Christian fiction" genre. Kluge makes this error loudly and heavily, and if it hadn't been for Janet's enthusiasm for Guitar Zero, I might have given up on Kluge. To be honest, though, I have a terrible time dropping a book even if I've determined it isn't worth my time, on the thought that despite all appearances, the book just might get better. And I'm glad I stuck with Kluge.
It's best, I think, to think of it as two parallel books. One is Marcus's attempts to explain the quirks, foibles, imperfections, and out-and-out breakdowns of human mental systems, as failures of evolution. Simply put, evolutionary processes, although able to produce remarkably functional, successful, and even beautiful organisms, usually stop short of the best. With evolution, "good enough is better than perfect," and if a system works well enough to give a reproductive advantage, eons of selection are not likely to be unravelled even if a future organism would do better with a fresh start. Thus as life evolves, new systems are layered on old ones, and the layers do not always interact in the most efficient manner. The human brain is a "kluge," cobbled together from from parts as old as life and as recent as yesterday, and in human behavior, the rational, thinking part of the brain is often overruled by more primitive reactions. I'm not doing justice to his thesis, but that's the gist. This is the book I thought I was going to be reading, and like Made to Stick, is a good look at why we're not as rational as we think, how this weakness can be used by others to our detriment, and what we can do to mitigate the situation.
The second "book" is a fascinating view into the mind of a materialist. I don't mean "materialist" in the sense of "consumerist," one who is driven by material desires, but one whose world-view is materialism ("a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter"). This is the in-your-face religion that I object to, and it begins in the second paragraph of the first page:
If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable. Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable. Our sentences would be crisp, our words precise, our languages systematic and regular....
And in the penultimate chapter:
It seems safe to say that no intelligent and compassionate designer would have built the human mind to be quite as vulnerable as it is. Our mental fragility provides yet another reason to doubt that we are the product of deliberate design rather than chance and evolution.
This theme is repeated ad nauseam throughout the book: If I were creating the world, I would have done X; since what I observe is Y, then there is no design and no designer (with or without evolution as part of the process). Naturally, I rattled off several alternatives to his "my way or no way" argument with almost no thought at all. (The world was created by a designer whose idea of the best design is different from his; the design was initially perfect but was later marred by other forces; there is/was a designer, but one who is not compassionate; it shouldn't be hard to come up with others.)
As put off as I initially was, this is actually as interesting as the other part of the book. It was fascinating to see the world through the mind of one for whom evolution is not merely a mechanism, but a religion. In many ways, Kluge is a remarkable attempt to make evolution answer the question that all religions and philosophies must wrestle with: sin. Of course Marcus does not call sin by that name, but that's what he's dealing with nonetheless.
To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through.
In fact, Marcus deals with many of the great questions of mankind, and I find that commendable, even if some of his attempts to force answers out of evolution seem to me as stretched as the ancients' adding sphere upon sphere and complication upon complication in order to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies without considering that the earth might revolve around the sun. Marcus wants a consistent, definitively explainable system—a desire as old as Job.
As interesting as his theories are, I don't like Marcus's ideal world. He's much too enamored of computers, and repeatedly asserts that our minds are obviously defective because they don't work the way he would design them—like computers. I like that our language is sometimes ambiguous, irregular, and unsystematic. I'm glad I'm human, and not Vulcan.
Most of all, there seems to be no place in his ideal creation for free will (another difficult concept for any religion), which I believe explains much of the gulf between the intelligent, compassionate creator and the all-too-visible faults of the world we know. It is also the capacity which—more than toolmaking, more than language, more than intelligence and the ability to reason—makes us truly human.
One thing that had impressed Janet with Guitar Zero was Marcus's humility. Since I didn't notice that at all—"God should have done things the way I would have" is not exactly a humble attitude, and neither is "if you don't agree with me, there's something wrong with your brain"—I'm left wondering if it's a matter of personal growth over time (Kluge is the earlier book by four years), or the difference between his attitude toward something he knows he knows nothing about (music) and that toward his field of expertise (psychology). Certainly Kluge has one significant mark of humility in my mind: On the cover of the book the author is identified as simply "Gary Marcus." I am not impressed by the habit of many authors of putting all possible letters prominently after their names: John Doe, Phd, MD, LLD, etc. Credentials are a good thing (Marcus is identified on the back cover as "a professor of psychology at New York University and the director of the NYU Child Language Center"), but I see no useful purpose in boasting about one's degrees on the front cover.
A couple of random quotes:
[Humans tend] to believe that what is familiar is good. Take, for example, an odd phenomenon known as the "mere familiarity" effect: if you ask people to rate things like the characters in Chinese writing, they tend to prefer those that they have seen before to those they haven't. Another study, replicated in at least 12 different languages, showed that people have a surprising attachment to the letters found in their own names, preferring words that contain those letters to words that don't. One colleague of mine has even suggested, somewhat scandalously, that people may love famous paintings as much for their familiarity as for their beauty.
Scandalously? Not at all. I thought it was obvious, and in large part a good thing, that familiarity with a subject increases appreciation which increases the desire to learn more which in turn increases familiarity. It's a blessed cycle, unless there's something bad about the subject itself. Isn't that a great deal of what parenting is all about, helping our children become familiar with, and thus inclining their hearts toward, the good, the true, and the beautiful?
Pay special attention ... to what some economists call "opportunity costs"; whenever you make an investment, financial or otherwise, ponder what else you might be doing instead. If you're doing one thing, you can't do another—a fact that we often forget. Say, for example, that people are trying to decide whether it makes sense to invest $100 million in public funds in a baseball stadium. That $100 million may well bring some benefits, but few people evaluate such projects in the context of what else that money might do, what opportunities (such as paying down the debt to reduce future interest payments or building three new elementary schools) must be foresworn in order to make that stadium happen. Because such costs don't come with a readily visible price tag, we often ignore them. On a personal level, taking opportunity costs into account means realizing that whenever we make a choice to do something, such as watch television, we are using time that could be spent in other ways, like cooking a nice meal or taking a bike ride with our kids.
There's a lot more in Kluge I could talk about, but I'm thinking about opportunity costs now, so I'll stop here.
Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton (Dover, 2000, originally published in 1912 by the John Lane Company)
Orion is upside down.
My first view of the Southern Hemisphere sky; floating above a seemingly infinite abyss while snorkeling through crystal-clear water; reading C.K. Chesterton’s Manalive. Awestruck, weak-kneed, disoriented, and just on the edge of fear. How can I review a book that reviews me?
Reading Chesterton can be a lot like trying to drink from a waterfall. I know I’m in the presence of a mind and a spirit much greater than my own. There’s wordplay and swordplay; there are twists in the logic and logic in the twists. It’s like riding a well-designed roller coaster, or skiing down a slope that’s just beyond your skill level.
I hear you muttering through your clenched teeth: “Get on with it! What is the book about?” In a phrase: the joy of being alive.
Okay, okay. From the back cover:
Innocent Smith … is taken up by a fierce wind one day and dropped on the lawn of a boardinghouse inhabited by a group of disillusioned young people. … In the course of the book, Smith courts and remarries his wife repeatedly, lives in various houses, which all turn out to be his own, and attempts murder, but only succeeds in firing life into his victims. … Manalive is full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas: life is worth living, one can break with convention and still maintain moral and ethical standards, and much of the behavior that civilized man has been led to believe is wrong, isn’t wrong at all.
That’s about as good a summary as you’re going to get, though it is rather like trying to learn what a roller coaster is by consulting Merriam-Webster: an elevated railway … constructed with sharp curves and steep inclines on which cars roll.
You have to brave the ride.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink (Riverhead Books, 2009)
Drive is yet another book I read because it was on my son-in-law's Amazon wish list. We gave it to him for Christmas, and I hope he reads it soon so my daughter can read it, too. Although the focus of the book is on motivation in business, the material is widely applicable, and I find it exciting.
I had barely begun the book when I exclaimed to myself, "Published in 2009? This is news? It sounds exactly like what we learned a decade ago from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan." That was at a University of Rochester "Meliora Weekend" of lectures and seminars. I looked up my journal entry from the time, to be certain:
Our next stop was the chapel, for “Your Personal Freedom” with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, U of R psychology professors who are world renowned experts on autonomy and human motivation. I found them fascinating, much more so than I’d expected. From them I heard what I’d only heard before in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, that rewards as well as punishments destroy intrinsic motivation. They cited one experiment in which people were paid to do what they enjoyed doing, and were doing without pay, but then stopped doing once the pay stopped. I spoke with them afterwards about Punished by Rewards, which they said is based on their research, only is a bit too polemic, too one-sided, missing out on the positive values of encouragement, but otherwise true. I surprised myself by having the courage to speak up during the question and answer session. They had talked a lot about motivation in schools, but never mentioned homeschooling. Since I’m convinced that one of the best things about homeschooling is that so many home educated children develop strong intrinsic motivation, and a great love of learning, it seems to me an important phenomenon to investigate. To my surprise, they have not studied it at all, and while they seemed to agree with me about the intrinsic motivation of homeschoolers, they were very cautious and seemed hesitant to appear to endorse homeschooling in any way.
I was so impressed, in fact, that I later bought Deci's book for laymen, Why We Do What We Do.
Sure enough, Pink quotes and references Deci and Ryan, Alfie Kohn, and others whose research was done even earlier. But Drive is invaluable not only because he ties all the research together and extends it, but because despite the very clear and well-established case for the superiority of intrinsic motivation and the negative effect of "carrots and sticks" on motivation, engagement, and especially creativity, no one is listening. Well, not no one, but very few. Pink sites some encouraging news from forward-thinking businesses, and he does not neglect the example of homeschoolers, particularly their unschooling subset.
The only thing I found annoying about Drive was Pink's repeated use of the phrase, "The science says..." in exactly the same manner some people aver, "The Bible says...." Overdone, either weakens the case being made.
Other than that, I have nothing negative to say. It's a great book, full of even greater ideas. I wish there were more practical examples in non-business areas (homemaking, childrearing, homeschooling), but that's not the book Pink was writing. There may be more online if I dig a bit.
I read the book in a hurry, so there are no quotations for you this time. Perhaps the above-mentioned son-in-law will come through; he does a better job with that than I do, anyway. Here, however, is a Dan Pink TED talk to get you started:
