Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin

 

Some detectives you meet stick with you. Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Spenser, Arkady Renko, Harry Hole, and John Marshall Tanner (of whom I am not the creator), come to mind. To this list, I must add John Rebus. I’d listened to one Rebus book some time ago, but I was lucky to find this, the initial Rebus book by author Ian Rankin, published in 1987. John Rebus is a police officer in Edinburgh, Scotland. Divorced, with a young daughter, a brother, a love of Scotch (the whiskey), some faith, and a past, Rebus is a round character. Typical of this genre, Rebus is neither a model of rectitude nor a model crime fighter. He lacks the suave confidence of Bogey’s Spade or Marlowe. Rebus, like many of his detective fiction contemporaries, is far too vulnerable.

As the book opens, someone is kidnapping girls. Rebus gets pulled into the investigation as he deals with his own life. His relationship with his brother, his ex, his daughter, an attractive fellow officer—you get the drift—all pull upon him. Rankin digs into the messiness of life in creating this character. Rankin’s prose is medium; descriptive without excessive detail, but not the sparse, hard-boiled prose of many of the outstanding Americans.

I’ve already mapped out what book in the series comes next. I’ll be visiting Rebus again, but then, some of his peers listed above still beckon.

P.S. I found this book in Jaipur in a bookshop. Read a paperback copy. Good luck to have found it!

David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits & the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

Let me ask you a series of questions:

Can a team with only mediocre offensive skills and limited physical gifts regularly beat teams that are more talented?

Are larger classes sometimes better for learning than smaller ones?

Might an accomplished young woman interested in science find career success by attending a state university instead of the Ivy League school that admitted her?

Might a guy with dyslexia (a serious disorder that affects reading ability) do well in a legal career?

Can a physician with a very troubled youth develop a breakthrough protocol for treating a fatal childhood disease by ignoring colleagues and forcing patients (and parents) to push through the pain?

Can an oppressed minority gain rights and dignity through tricking the oppressor into dumb moves?

Can the campaign of a heart-broken father to limit crime after the murder of his daughter backfire into promoting more crime?

Can forgiveness provide a stable and fulfilling way of responding to horrific loss?

Can a small group of dissenters thumb their noses at Vichy and Nazi officials and openly harbor Jews, saving them from internment and death?

Can David beat Goliath?

If you’ve ever read any Malcolm Gladwell, you will know that the counter-intuitive answers to some of these questions are Gladwell’s answers. Gladwell opens his latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by explaining how David’s victory over Goliath was not so great an upset as we've come to believe. David, as an expert with the sling (not an unusual talent in that time), held a real advantage over the armor-clad, pituitary case (Goliath) that he faced. Like the game of rock-scissors-paper, each strategy entails an effective counter-strategy. So a girls basketball team, coached by an Indian immigrant father with no basketball experience, used the unorthodox strategy of an aggressive full-court press to win games and go the national tournament. (Gladwell journeys into basketball lore to describe the education of Rick Pitino about the value of the press. I must add that the press is under-utilized still. I loved it.) If you don’t have rocks, use paper.

As Gladwell often does in his writing, he weaves insights from social science into real life tales, and in doing so, he challenges the easy assumptions we tend to make. In two segments involving education, he challenges a couple of common assumptions, assumptions that cost a lot of money and that have very serious repercussions. First, he explores the assumption that smaller class size always improves student achievement. Gladwell finds that class size, like many things in life, has a sweet spot—a Goldilocks point—that is neither too large nor too small. In smaller classes, there may not be enough variety to facilitate a desired give-and-take for discussion and projects. Thus, the class never reaches its full learning potential. Gladwell concludes (and I intuitively agree) that outstanding teachers are the key to educational success, not simply more teachers. Rather than paying outstanding, experienced teachers to retire early to hire some additional new, untested teachers, we should work to keep outstanding teachers working as long as possible. (Yes, I’m thinking of C, for an example, although she’s still working.)

Another very interesting point involving education addresses the issue of college choice. Gladwell uses the instance of a young high-school student interested in science who goes to Brown (an Ivy) rather that her home-state University of Maryland. Because of the intense competition and high-skills range, Gladwell’s young woman abandons science as her major. She tried to make it as a big fish in a big pond, but as statistics show, this is tough. Those who succeed tend to be those who succeed in comparison to their peers in a particular environment, whether at State U or an Ivy League college. For young people making excruciating decisions about where to go to study or where to go to continue playing a sport, this is vital information. (Of course, the Ivy League works well for some, as I know a couple of Ivy League grads whom I think have done quite well.)

Another tale that interested me especially was that of David Boies, one of the premier trial and appellate lawyers in the nation. Boies has dyslexia, which makes reading very difficult. To compensate, he learned to learn by listening—listening very carefully. Boies didn’t go to college until a bit later in life. He ended up graduating from Yale Law. (I guess his Ivy League choice worked out okay, too.) One strategy he used in law school was to read the synopsis of a case rather than a whole opinion (a lesson there, I think). And he listened—very carefully. (I suspect that careful listening is a skill that most of us, including lawyers—or especially lawyers?—too often fail to practice.) Boies chose litigation as a field because it didn’t require as much reading as corporate law would have. (Still, there’s still plenty to read in litigation.) Interestingly, unlike most lawyers, Bois doesn’t read for pleasure, either, reporting that he only reads about a book a year. Boies learned to compensate for his disadvantage and by doing so, cultivated skills that allowed him to rise to the top of his field.

From the list of questions at the beginning of my review, you can discern some of the other topics Gladwell addresses. Gladwell has mastered this genre. Gladwell, along with Michael Lewis, Daniel Pink, and a few others, has learned how to weave nonfiction narrative into social scientific insights in a manner that is both instructive and entertaining. Gladwell’s counter-intuitive insights and arguments challenge us to consider what things may not work the way that we easily assume they do.

An Entertaining Visit to Greeneland: Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent

In 1938, Graham Greene was busy writing two novels. The better-known book became his classic, The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican whiskey priest. But Greene feared that The Power and the Glory would not sell, and he needed money to support his family. Therefore, in the mornings, he wrote one of his “entertainments”, The Confidential Agent. As an entertainment, The Confidential Agent qualifies as a thriller. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. In this regard, Greene’s tale is like those of his contemporary, Eric Ambler, and later writers such as Alan Furst, who inhabit the same shady and treacherous underworld of pre-World War II Europe.

But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.

So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.

I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”,   you  are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. 

P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.

A Review of Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies by John Kemp

 

I discovered courtesy of the Social Evolution Forum that back in Iowa City a physician at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics has produced a book that looks into a number of issues that interest me, so, although in China at the time, I downloaded it to my Kindle and began reading. The book looks at what it means to be a “highly adaptive society” (adaptive in the Darwinian sense). It identifies basic characteristics and surveys nations around the world, gauging their relative adaptability viz. the factors that he identifies as crucial to highly adaptive societies. These factors are “a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.” (Kemp, John (2013-06-11). Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies (Kindle Locations 68-70). Kindle Edition.) After further discussing these factors, which one can recognize as common factors that many scholars identify as crucial the rise of Western domination of the world in the last 500 years, Dr. Kemp looks more carefully at nations and societies around the world to gauge their adaptability according to these standards. Finally, he addresses some of the challenges that the remainder of the 21^st century will present to such societies.

This summary of the book is short because I want to get to what made it fun for me to read. This book really got my juices flowing. As you will see, I have a number of criticisms and suggestions that I set forth below, but this is a terrific project and it really goes to the heart of what we have to do in the years to come. Accordingly, here’s a list of thoughts that this book has generated and which I hope will contribute to the project. (Based on memory and with no pretense to scholarship or form, I randomly cite some thinkers and books that I believe pertinent to any particular point in my discussion below.) 

1.      Dr. Kemp is an optimist. He seems to believe in Progress or a variation of the Whig theory of history (that history is moving inevitably toward liberal institutions). In his inventory of nations, for he opines that most of them are moving toward becoming “highly adoptive societies” (hereinafter HAS). I am less optimistic, or at least less certain. I agree that overall, his discernment of the general direction of change is correct; however, his available data set is short. That is, the advanced nations of today (Morris, Why West Rules—For Now) are very recent developments. The Industrial Revolution is only about 250 years old. Given this short time span against about 10,000 years of agriculture and civilization (i.e., cities), this is a brief period in human history. Can we say that Progress, in this case defined as movement toward HAS, will prove inevitable? I sense an assumption of inevitability in the tenor of the book, although it’s not an explicit argument. I don’t believe that representative government is the inevitable result of human change. Germany came close to prevailing in the Second World War (before the entry of the U.S.) (J. Lukacs), or perhaps Communism could have prevailed before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. or the change in China (look at the persistence of N. Korea & Cube, for instance).

2.    A key question, I think best formed by Peter Turchin and his work (War & Peace & War), is whether the historical cycles (“secular cycles”) that he’s identified in agricultural civilizations will continue to apply in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Age. Turchin recognizes this is a key issue. I note that Turchin has done some preliminary work on cycles in U.S. history, most of which encompasses the Industrial Age and qualifies as an HAS. Perhaps it will address to what extent we might be really different from the past and therefore exempt from the social gravity that has dragged down earlier societies.

3.    I think that the term HAS is misused, or at least misplaced. It strikes me that the most highly adaptive societies were those of the hunter-gathers, who really did have to adapt to their natural environment. With the advent of agriculture, humans really begin, tentatively, to shape their environment. With the Modern Age (beginning, shall we stipulate, around 1600), humans significantly begin to change their environment, a project that truly takes off with industrialization. Thus, what Dr. Kemp identifies has HAS should, I think, be dubbed Highly Transformative Societies (HTS). The Modern Age marks the transformation of society and (not always intentionally) the transformation of the natural world as well. If we think of adaptation, what has the Modern Age adapted to?

4.    Dr. Kemp refers often to the “fragmentation of power”. I don’t like this term for several reasons. As a term, I think that several options are more appropriate, such as “de-centralization of power” or “devolution of power” (Khanna), or “disbursement of power”. The connotation of “fragmentation” is not a good one, but it does lead us to a deeper issue. I agree with the general proposition that de-centralized decision making, such as we find in markets (Hayek) and democracy are usually the best ways of decision-making in complex societies. However, if we understand power as the ability to make decisions and effect change through speech (and not through force) (Arendt, Habermas), then too much fragmentation damages power in a society. With too much fragmentation, anarchy (in the non-philosophical sense) or political impotency become problems. For instance, the U.S. Constitution came about as a result of the excessive fragmentation of power inherent in the Articles of Confederation. The Civil War came about from an attempt to fragment power (the secession of the Confederate States). Indeed, much of post-Civil War U.S. history shows a trend toward centralization of power in the federal government, which on the whole, I judge to have been beneficial. Today, we see a strong fragmentation sentiment in the Tea Party and Radical Republicans (Wills) who want to strip the federal government of much of its power and role in American life. For the better? I don’t think so, although finding the right balance between centralized (coordinating) power and de-centralized decision-making is not an easy issue or one given to bright lines. (See Coase’s theory of the firm, which I think has applications in political theory, and, of course, The Federalist Papers.)

5.     The book doesn’t address directly the theory of complexity as applied to societies (see, e.g. Gaddis, The Landscape of History; Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth). Whether we can model societies successfully seems to me crucial to gaining a sense of how we can successfully shape the future. It will also help us understand how things might not go the way we want. (Or is this wishful thinking? Theories of the cycles of history have been around almost as long as history itself, yet societies seem to be immune to their insights—historians have just been so many Cassandras to the extent that they might have hoped to alter the course of events.)

6.    The book’s seeming faith in progress (movement towards HAS) is not balanced by a consideration of how things might go amiss, both in countries that have achieved a high level of development and those who might hope to achieve it. Some nations get stuck in an unfavorable equilibrium and have a hard time getting out of it. As a current resident of India, I perceive that despite some strong economic growth recently, it’s hard to see how this society will gain traction in the near future. Corruption, extreme poverty, poor infrastructure, political fragmentation (in the negative sense): all of these factors make me much less optimistic that what I take Dr. Kemp to be from his discussion of India. Having just spent a month in China, I was amazed at the overall level of development, but much of the cost has been externalized (some horrible air pollution and apparently even greater problems of water quality and quantity). These facts serve to cancel much of my amazement at the terrific infrastructure improvements and astonishing commercial development. The prospects of democracy in China are uncertain at best, and the model of centralized power seems to growing in popularity for some. (See M. Pettis, Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring, on prospects and problems for the Chinese economy.) 

7.     How do societies avoid the collapses or declines described by Turchin, Tainter, Diamond, P. Kennedy, Homer-Dixon, Toynbee, et al.? (This list could go on at some length.) This, to my mind, is the ultimate adaptation that any society can aspire to, which assumes that the society has achieved a satisfactory level of equilibrium. (Has any society ever achieved this?) We need to address not only factors of collapse identified in past societies (as controversial and elusive as these causes can be), but we also need to contemplate new threats to social survival. Nuclear war (hey, I’m a child of the 50’s & 60’s), as well as human-caused global climate change pop to mind, but certainly others exist. (Local climate change has certainly altered and contributed to the collapse of many social orders.)

8.    What will drive future adaptation? War, along with economic competition, drove much of the European change (Ferguson, Civilization). What will drive change in the future? If war becomes the driver, it could destroy much of social development achieved to date. (The physical survival of the U.S. allowed Europe to recover after WWII; compare what happened in Europe after WWI). Can we continue to compete in economics with the same system that we have now? (See #9 below.) There have to be ecological limits to growth (Julian Simon notwithstanding). 

9.    We have to figure out how consumer capitalism will morph into a sustainable equilibrium. Can consumer capitalism come to such a state? One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to believe that this system is unsustainable (although Marx had some insights; also see John Stuart Mill). This is the visionary aspect of a program for thinking about future societies.

I’ve said enough for now. I hope it’s apparent that the book has certainly stimulated my thinking, and the parts of the projects that I’ve suggested need further development are a huge challenge, especially given that Dr. Kemp has a day job. I hope that as an amateur who has not ventured such a demanding project as writing a book on such an important topic, my writing this this review isn’t too galling. Think of this, please, as cheerleading, or egging on, if you will.

If you’re interested in this topic—what our future holds and how we might shape it—start with this book and join the conversation!