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Welcome to the big leagues, rookie!

Rand Simberg reports that the Russians have suddenly become concerned about the safety of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when used as a supply vessel for the International Space Station … now that that rocket seriously threatens the near-term Russian monopoly in heavy lift transport of people and materiel.

SpaceX’‘s story, for those who aren’t space enthusiasts, is a tale of new technology, dot-com money, and threatened “iron rice bowls” from one end of the high-technology world to the other.

Started in 2002 by Elon Musk with money he acquired after co-founding PayPal, Musk’s vision was to develop a new American liquid-fueled rocket engine and use economies of production and scale to reduce per-pound launch costs to a fraction of current commercial rates. Rather than a game of giant consortia, he thought that a relatively small private company could launch commercial rockets safely and much more cheaply.

In the early years, the Falcon 1 rocket, using a new Merlin engine designed and manufactured by SpaceX, was subject to several flight failures that insiders largely attributed to lack of company access to the vast body of engineering lore used in past rocket launches. Not enough engineers. Not enough expertise. Whether that was true or not, the Falcon 1 (single engine) rocket had its first successful launch-to-orbit in 2008. Six years from blank piece of paper to orbit. Nonetheless, Musk has often been dismissed by other commercial space launch organizations as a dilettante, wasting his own money on a venture that would never amount to much, and would certainly never deliver any service cheaper than the giant aerospace companies of Russia, China, the EU, and the United States.

All that started to change when less than two years after the successful launch of the Falcon 1 rocket, SpaceX’s new Falcon 9 (running 9 Merlin engines in tandem) was able to reach orbit. Suddenly SpaceX had a rocket big enough to deliver serious weight to space, and compete with the biggest commercial and state-sponsored launch services. Musk’s philosophy of rocket modularization (and cost reduction) had been proven out. A mere six months later, the company launched a second Falcon 9 to orbit with a pressurized “Dragon” capsule on top. SpaceX became the first private firm to launch and recover a crew-capable space capsule, with a splash-down off the Pacific coast of the US. To successfully launch a brand-new model of rocket, twice, with complete success, defies the laws of probability in the space launch industry. Maybe Musk really had stumbled onto a new way of designing, manufacturing, and operating rockets.

The idea that a private firm could deliver cargo, let alone crews, to the International Space Station at a fraction of the cost of the Space Shuttle or Russian Soyuz capsules would have been inconceivable a decade ago. And yet here we are in 2011 with an American dot-com multi-millionaire announcing new rockets and successfully delivering them.

Just recently, SpaceX announced plans to develop the “Falcon Heavy” which would run three Falcon 9s (3×9=27 engines) as a single first stage, delivering a proposed 117,000 pounds to Low Earth Orbit … more than the capacity of all other currently available commercial heavy-lift rockets. More, in fact, than has ever been lifted in single launches since the Saturn V carried the Apollo moon missions star-wards. First launch of the Falcon Heavy is scheduled for 2013, from Vandenburg Air Force Base. Characteristically, Musk isn’t shy about his dream for the Falcon Heavy. Hypothetical trips to the Moon, to Mars, to an asteroid, now fill his speeches.

Musk’s earlier claims of “game-changer” technology and corporate process appear to be coming true. If he delivers on his recent promises with anything near the success rate of his earlier claims, almost every space-faring nation or corporation is going to be deeply affected.

Let’s be clear, also. Musk has played the taxpayer-dollar game skillfully as he’s found initial technical success and grown his company’s staff and technical capacity. He’s received several multi-million dollar contracts from NASA for demonstration flights and future cargo delivery to the Space Station. He’s parked his corporate facilities in California (HQ and manufacturing), Texas (engine test-stand), and Florida (Cape Canaveral launch facilities) … covering his political bases by hedging good relations with US senators who already know what kind of money and jobs are created by space industry. The only senator not to dip his beak, as far as I can tell, was from Alabama (Huntsville). So Mr. Musk knows his domestic politics, or has learned its harsh anti-market lessons. And he’s successfully squared the circle of NASA bureaucracy, launching rockets on the one hand, and reassuring various government agencies that he should be allowed to.

But the opening salvo by the Russians is a prelude to a new playing field that Musk will need to master. International politics.

There are a lot of rocket engineers around the world who’ll be out of work if Elon Musk and his company can deliver cargo and people to space for half of what it costs the current aerospace giants. And even the Russians and Chinese, who can subsidize launch costs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, still can’t afford to give away those launches indefinitely. Both nations operate in the market economy to the extent that they can, at the very least, estimate their per-launch losses trying to undercut SpaceX’s prices.

As an amateur who’s thrilled by the appearance of a private space industry in the last ten years, I enthused about SpaceX’s successful December launch to an colleague (ex-military) who specializes in high-tech project management. His response was “now the sabotage begins.”

And he may well be right. Whether Musk has been smart, or just plain lucky, the progress of SpaceX over the last decade has been (to my mind) dramatic. My sense is that it’s a matter of capital investment leveraging a backlog of knowledge (in technology and operational process). As long as he was a unproven minnow at the government trough, he could be ignored. Now however, SpaceX is getting big enough to put a dent in established companies’ profits and executive bonuses. There’s no reason why nations or large corporations could not have duplicated what Musk has done … but they either had no incentive or had organizational and social impediments. An “installed base.”

At the moment, they don’t seem to be trying to beat him with comparable technology. And he doesn’t seem to want to be bought out. So what competitive strategy is left? Political impediments are cheapest. Intellectual property theft is likely but it still takes time to turn that into a competing product. And what if the technology is just a part of the equation. What if workforce optimization and “one rich, risk-taking, boss” are the essential components of SpaceX’s rapid success? Will sabotage of SpaceX rockets be the only route to slowing the company down? Fulfilling, conveniently, Russian “concerns.”

Up until now, Musk has been calculating costs based on his technical requirements for design and manufacture (with a fudge factor for domestic political arbitrage). I rather doubt he’s also factored in the burgeoning security apparatus he’ll need to wrap around SpaceX’s activities to inhibit industrial espionage and/or industrial sabotage. And as he takes on more government contracts (both military and civilian), no doubt the bureaucratic restrictions on payload handling and the extra demands for operational oversight will boost company costs dramatically. Will SpaceX be strangled by a combination of bureaucrats, thieves, and saboteurs?

It’d be disheartening to see SpaceX costs slowly but surely reach equilibrium with pricing in the rest of the industry. But there’s no doubt that, left to itself, the private space industry will make some wealthy men incredibly rich, and some aerospace executives unemployed. How clever people respond to that challenge will be interesting to watch.

Enough SpaceX technology appearing in other countries in bootleg form, and enough “unexplained” failures of those really big (really expensive) SpaceX rockets, will spell a new and grimmer phase of the private space business. More and more “iron rice bowls” are being broken by SpaceX with each passing year. Hope Elon’s brushing up on his Sun Tzu.

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Wolff, Diane, Tibet Unconquered: An Epic Struggle for Freedom, Palgrave McMillan, New York, 2009, 248pp. Foreword by Robert Thurman.

The publisher kindly provided a copy of this book for review.

A year ago, my Holiday 2009 Book Roundup on chicagoboyz here recommended Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road as an outstanding overview of Central Asian culture from prehistory to the present day. Complementing that title is Diane Wolff’s new and approachable overview of Tibet’s relationship with China.

It’s hard to imagine an extended American family that doesn’t have at least one member who’s been fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism in some way. The Dalai Lama remains as one of the few religious leaders given wide respect in the Western world. His recent emphasis on the preservation of Tibet’s environment (which forms the headwaters of five major Asian river systems) gives him even more popularity with Greens. As Wolff notes, Buddhism has been the default “cool” religion in Hollywood for many years apart from the recent and occasional forays into Jewish Kabbalah by the Malibu crowd. In turn, Tibetan Buddhism also appeals to adolescents looking for a way to peeve their parents … without getting kicked out of the house.

A book that tries to give a general reader a solid historical understanding of Chinese-Tibetan relations is welcome. It’s a tangled and tragic piece of history, one fraught with opportunities missed on both sides and historical trends that have largely worked against Tibetan culture. We have a vivid “virtual Tibet” (in Orville Schell’s phrasing) but will we still have a Tibetan culture in 2050? Wolff offers a heart-felt and practical solution to the current style of Han occupation of Tibet. She’s also realistic enough to understand that the current generation of Chinese leaders may not be suited to making the adjustments and compromises necessary to pull a Tibetan thorn from the Chinese paw. A Fifth Generation of Chinese Communist Party leaders may be needed.

Wolff’s book is written for the non-specialist. It requires close reading (because she often approaches subjects thematically with a certain amount of bouncing back and forth between time periods) but Tibet Unconquered is pitched for mortal readers, without a forest of footnotes.

An intelligent high school student can easily make their way through this book, with profit. So if you’ve suddenly found your kids flying Tibetan prayer flags in your backyard, Diane Wolff’s book definitely belongs on your 2010 holiday book buying list. You can bask in some of that reflected “cool” yourself. It’s a very affordable, useful introduction to a fascinating subject. It works fine as a springboard to the specialist literature for motivated readers. Those interested in China’s capacity to adapt to a world demanding more transparency, more honesty and more credible self-reflection could hardly find a better ongoing touchstone than Tibet. Educating yourself about how things got the way they did in Tibet (and China) is therefore well worth the time. The Han Chinese have plenty of challenges facing them. Tibet is where the world proclaims they are most “uncivilized.” That’s a slur the Han cannot, cannot bear after a millennium ruled largely by northern barbarians and more recent humiliations by industrial nations. So the Roof of the World is where the Han must come to a successful solution without losing face. For them, let alone the poor Tibetans, the stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s a situation worth watching.

Even better for those of you racing into the e-book world, Amazon offers an even more affordable Tibet Unconquered. Consider this title as a gift or for a thought-provoking bit of holiday reading.

To briefly discuss Ms. Wolff’s suggestions about a future Tibet, it’s also necessary to very quickly summarize the history outlined in the book. Needless to say, the book itself offers far greater detail, with greater precision.

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Table of Contents

Maps vi
Foreword by Robert Thurman xi
Introduction
Part I: Surging Storms: Tibet as the High Ground of Inner Asia 11
Part II: The Mongol Khans: China’s Claim to Tibet 45
Part III: Ming and Qing Dynasties: Tibetan Religious Influence in the Chinese Imperial System 71
Part IV: Tibet and the Great Game: The Manchu, the Raj, and the Czars 95
Part V: Early Twentieth-Century China: The Nationalists Adopt Imperial Policy in Tibet 113
Part VI: Mid-Twentieth-Century China: The Communists Retain Imperial Policy in Tibet 127
Part VII: Late Twentieth-Century China: Hu Yaobang and the Liberal Policies of the 1980s 171
Part VIII: The Twenty-First Century: A New Road Map for Tibet 191

======================

Tibet Unconquered leads off with a chapter on the different “Tibets” that exist in the modern world … including the expatriate communities and the wider global influence of Tibetan culture and religion. The earliest state relations between Tibet and Tang China occurred during the ninth century when the Tibetans had a clear military advantage. Dynastic collapse in both Tibet and China led to a centuries-long pause in formal relations. The chapter concludes with a summary of Chinese dynastic history and the current state of relations between Tibet and China.

Mongol Rule and Tibetan Buddhism

With the appearance of Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Yuan dynasty governing China, Tibetan Buddhists became very influential in the Chinese court. Tibetan Buddhism had been adopted by many of the nomadic peoples north of China, which placed Tibetan religious authorities in the role of “honest brokers” to those peoples in coming centuries. The imperial descendants of Chinggis maintained a close relationship with Tibet, even as their relationship with the subject Han grew more unstable.

Because the Mongols themselves were northern peoples, and non-Han, the Tibetans became inadvertently aligned with “foreign” invaders generally, and thus in relentless conflict with the Confucians and Daoists who also provided secular and religious advice to Chinese emperors. Nonetheless, the Yuan dynasty formalized a Chinese relationship with Tibet that for many centuries took the form of priest-patron (chö-yon, in Tibetan) … a Tibetan lama presided over the enthronement of Khubilai Khan. Most importantly, for modern discussions of Tibet’s independence, the Mongols stationed a garrison in Tibet and collected tribute, but otherwise left the Tibetans to themselves — an autonomous province. Though having a special relationship with the emperor of China (and most of central Asia!), the Tibetans were not directly administered by the Yuan dynasty’s bureaucrats.

The Ming and Qing

Ms. Wolff describes the change in China-Tibet relations as anti-Mongol forces eventually rose to overthrow the Yuan Dynasty and form the ethnic Han “Ming” dynasty. This empire was much smaller than either the preceding Yuan/Mongol dynasty or the subsequent Qing/Manchu dynasty. Ming emperors were to continue the chö-yon ties between China and Tibet, especially since they were under continued pressure from northern horse peoples and needed Tibetan priestly co-operation as intermediaries. The much-reduced Ming boundaries meant that they had no administrative control over Tibet at all … not even the “loose-reins” style of the Mongols. In Tibet, the final civil struggles between the Karmapa (head of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism) and the Dalai Lama (head of the Gelugpa lineage) concluded. The Dalai Lama became the secular head of Tibetan traditional government. Formal relations between the Tibetans and Ming court finally fell apart in the sixteenth century as the Confucians and Daoists at the Chinese court gained overwhelming influence. The Ming lasted from 1368 to 1644, falling to Manchu invaders from northeastern China, ethnic relatives of the Jurchens who formed the earlier Chin (Jin) dynasty (1115-1234).

The Fifth Dalai Lama made a treaty with the new Qing dynasty (1644-1911) to maintain regional peace and assist with the never-ending negotiations with the northern pastoral peoples, among whom were many Tibetan Buddhists. Tibet accepted Chinese overlordship (suzerainty) by accepting a renewal of the chö-yon titles that bound Chinese Emperor and the senior Lamas of Tibet. These treaty obligations also permitted tribute and trade relations to continue undisturbed.

The Qing appear in a period of world history that verges on the modern. Russian expansion to their north, propelled by gunpowder and new technology was matched by the Zunghar (Junghar) Mongol conquests to the northwest of China that threatened to cut off Qing access to Silk Road profits. The Qing, while largely isolationist on the coast of China, were militarily aggressive on their western borders. They conquered (indeed exterminated) a number of nomadic peoples in the west … many of whom were “unified under their Buddhist faith and united in their devotion to the Dalai Lama.” By 1696, the Qing had expanded their territorial boundaries to their maximum.

The disruption of the Zhunghar power structure had a secondary effect on Tibetan politics to the southwest. The Dalai Lama was murdered and a successor was chosen under suspicious circumstances. The Zunghars looked set to reconstitute themselves in the west. Qing imperial troops reached Lhasa in 1720 and occupied the capital. This marked the beginning of direct Chinese intervention in Tibetan administration and in the selection of religious leaders such as the Dalai Lama. As long as Mongol peoples continued as Tibetan Buddhists, the Qing would pay close attention to events in eastern and central Tibet.

The rest of the chapter deals with Qing foreign policy in light of the expansion of the British (moving north from India in the late 1700s) and the Russians, moving east and south. With the conquest of the Zunghar, the central Asian steppe was finally purged of the feared cavalry archers who had threatened so much of the settled world (east and west) for 1500 years. While Japan was ultimately forced to open itself to Western ideas and technology, the Manchus were largely able to resist the outside world through the 19th century. Though Tibet could be maintained as a “forbidden kingdom,” a series of humiliating wars in the mid-1800s established European trading centers along the coast of China. The Nepalese Ghurkas continued to press against Tibet’s southern border and after a second invasion of 1842, concluded a treaty with Tibet that insisted on its separation from Chinese protection. Direct Qing occupation of Tibet came to an end.

The Great Game

The late 19th century and early 20th century were the heyday of competition between the British Empire (with Ghurka proxies), the Russian Empire, and a dwindling Qing Manchu empire. Tibet had become the jam in the sandwich. Like the Qing, Tibet felt that it could close itself off from the outside world. That isolation, however, convinced all neighboring empires that their competitors were secretly expanding in Tibet. The British sent a series of Asian “surveyors” to secretly explore and map Tibet. Convinced that the Russians were moving into Tibet, as they were in the rest of central Asia, the British finally sent an armed mission to Lhasa in 1904. At the cost of many Tibetan lives, the British were able to discover that the Russians were nowhere to be found. An Anglo-Tibetan Convention (treaty) was signed to keep it that way. Simultaneously, the British signed agreements with Russia about Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet to reassure the Russians that Tibet was not about to become a British protectorate.

Tibet couldn’t count on protection from China (and indeed had dispensed with Chinese oversight fifty years earlier). The British and the Qing dynasty however signed a new agreement expanding the Chinese role in Tibet in 1906 (an Adhesion Agreement) which gave the British some civilian access (and allowed them to explore more of central Asia), and kept the Russians out. The British army withdrew, a Qing special commissioner arrived in Lhasa, and Qing armies occupied eastern Tibet provinces (which to this day have large ethnic Tibetan populations). Tensions grew … the Dalai Lama of the time was to leave Lhasa for India (Darjeeling) in 1910 in response to a Qing edict deposing him. With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, however, Tibetans expelled the Chinese from Lhasa and the Dalai Lama returned.

The 20th Century

Tibet’s independence, between the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the rise of the Chinese Communists in 1949, occurred during the turbulence of World War One and Two. For a region that was geographically remote from the world’s oceans and from the technological changes of the era, a return to self-sufficiency was doomed to be fleeting. With the completion of World War 2 and the Chinese civil war, China was to fall under Communist rule. Stalin had peeled off large parts of Mongolia into the Soviet Union (or established a client state in Inner Mongolia). Mao was convinced that Stalin would move on to control as much of northwest China as possible. Mao’s exposure to Tibetans during the Long March had not left him positive toward minority rights, nor towards the Tibetans specifically.

It’s with the reassertion of Communist control in Tibet in 1950 (just as the Korean War was heating up) that the arguments about the Chinese right to control Tibet take their modern form. After having reviewed the history of Tibet-Chinese relations through the centuries, Wolff walks the reader through the ups-and-downs of Communist control of the region in the last fifty years. The Chinese have variously tried loose and tight control of Tibetan ethnic areas. They have had shifting views of ethnic minorities rights in a socialist state (as did Lenin and Stalin) … often in response to their own political initiatives (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, post-Tiananmen) which either limited Han resources or provoked greater Han chauvinism (masked under the principles of international socialism).

They have sought to legitimize their rights of control by referring to earlier Mongol and Qing rule in the region … ironic in that the Han autarchs of the Communist Party are using the “northern barbarian” empires as the foundation for legitimacy of their own rule. To accommodate this, Han political mythology has shifted to claiming that the Chinese consist racially, in fact, of five peoples … including Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, etc. Thus any efforts at modernization and socialism need not accommodate the religions, cultures, and languages of people who are (effectively) Chinese. A rejection of this manufactured Chinese identity, whether by Muslims in the west of China or by Tibetans, is therefore seen as political rebellion and intellectual backwardness.

The Communists have sought to establish their boundaries as close to the maximum established by the Qing/Manchu as possible. This was initially a matter of controlling the expansion of the Soviet Union, but as the Cold War progressed, and the 14th Dalai Lama escaped to permanent exile in India in 1959, the border with India and Nepal became a boundary of ideology and world-view. The inactivity of the United Nations in the face of the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950 was governed by the circumstances of the time. India had gained independence in 1947 and wasn’t interested in antagonizing the Soviet Union or Communist China. Indeed, there was considerable friendship amongst these countries. As a result, whatever interest that Britain (and to a lesser extent, the United States) might once have had in supporting an isolated land-locked country’s independence from Russian or Chinese rule no longer pertained. No large power in the post-WW2 world had an interest in expending resources to help the Tibetans. The United Nations did pass resolutions calling on Communist China to respect Tibetan human rights but since China wasn’t a member of the UN at the time, the words meant little or nothing. And since Communist China has become a member of the UN and the Security Council, Tibetan concerns have been addressed more by public relations than by international or diplomatic organizations.

As late as 2008, there have been widespread protests through eastern and central Tibet as Tibetans have bridled under an influx of ethnic Han into Tibet. By education and language, these immigrants have come to dominate the political or economic structure of the region. Tibetans are now cast as backward folk in their own land.

A Solution for Tibet

Having glossed over so much of the author’s careful historical summary at high speed, regrettably I must also race through the author’s suggestions for mode of governance that would satisfy all parties as much as possible.

As a model, Wolff turns to Hong Kong and Macao and the “Special Economic Zones” established by the Communist Chinese to control but not stifle economic and technological activity along the Chinese coastline. These zones, offering “two systems, one country” have worked well up to now, though outsiders wonder how long this pattern will continue as the rest of China catches up.

Wolff sees the solution in Tibet to recasting its role in the Chinese mind from “rebellious western province” to “special coastal zone.” Tibet’s specialness comes from its religious, ethnic, and cultural distinctiveness from the rest of China. It also has tremendous ecological importance to a wide swathe of Asia because it forms the headwaters of so many river systems. If those distinctions can be harnessed for sustainable economic prosperity, then the economic, military, and diplomatic burden that Tibet places on China can be relieved. Wolff envisions a Special Ethnic, Trade, and Ecological Zone (SETEZ) that would offer the Chinese sovereignty over the geography for political and national security purposes, but allows the Tibetans to evolve their economy in ways that place less pressure on the environment (water, food, forests, etc.) while maintaining their language, culture and religious tradition. Indeed, it is the combination of Tibet’s remoteness, natural beauty, and its culture that have made it a source of international fascination even as it is largely out of reach for the wealthier tourists of the industrialized world.

Wolff considers carefully whether the life experience of the current generation of Chinese leaders (the Fourth) would allow them to support such a unique status for Tibet … one that reflects the “loose reins” philosophy of control used by the Mongols … rather than the typical “police state” that was the model of governance through much of the 20th century in Communist states. She sees hope in a coming Fifth Generation of leaders in China, who have seen more prosperity for China with a loosening of control over economic activity, and might be convinced that Tibet is simply not worth demolishing at the expense of international prestige and a skittish set of regional allies such as Pakistan and Iran.

Conclusion

Tibet Unconquered isn’t dispassionate. It seeks out a best possible solution for both the Chinese and Tibet.

The Chinese cultural experience over the last few thousand years has led them to dread instability created by external “barbarians.” In the last thousand years, they’ve been ruled for long stretches by ethnic groups they only now (for the sake of geopolitics) pretend to be genetically part of themselves … the Han peoples of eastern China. Thomas Barfield’s The Perilous Frontier is a great reference to consult on this historical theme, as is the aforementioned book by Beckwith on Empires of the Silk Road. Similarly, Edward Luttwak’s recent book on the Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire reviews in detail how devastating mounted archers using compound bows were on the various empires that surrounded central Asia. As the nomads sailed on endless oceans of grass, unreachable and unconstrained by the Chinese, the Romans, the armies of Islam … so the English-speaking peoples of the world have sailed the oceans of water and had several centuries of geopolitical freedom where their enemies could barely reach them, and rarely contain them. The Chinese experience of history, geography, and such nomadic peoples has been altogether less positive. Their paranoia over the significance of Tibet’s location and its appetite for restored independence may not be admirable but it is at least comprehensible.

From the Tibetan side, the ironies abound. The one ally that could have stood them in good stead through the 19th and 20th century was the one that they largely, successfully resisted. The British Empire’s relationship with its colonies and protectorates around the world have often been traumatic but when one looks at the overall impact of the ties to England fostered in small countries around the world, it’s hard to imagine that the Tibetans would have been worse off in 2010 as some large variant of Nepal … filled with prosperous, well-intentioned English-speaking tourists and NGOs keen to see the sights, and do good. Instead, those tourists make the pilgrimage to Dharamsala in India to see the 14th Dalai Lama. And around the world, they sit on prayer cushions at Tibetan religious and cultural institutions quietly or string up prayer flags on scenic mountain tops a world away from the Himalayas.

Independence at the interface between three great empires was never very likely after gunpowder and railways put a permanent end to the great nomadic warrior cultures. Now Tibet sits under a Han boot and must try to convert its “mystical underdog” status in the wider world into something that can withstand a fervent Chinese effort at cultural re-education.

The Chinese have big problems of their own, of course, irrespective of the choices they make, or are forced to make, in Tibet. China has had an ongoing crisis in governance … as noted in a chicagoboyz review of Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition. It also has a terminally toxic set of business ethics in its manufacturing sector that are unsustainable, as noted in a chicagoboyz review of Midler’s Poorly Made in China. China also has a spiritual crisis that will only grow worse if it cannot maintain a torrid pace of economic expansion. When matched with a population that will age rapidly in the next few decades, it’s been widely noted that “China will get old before it gets rich.”

Somehow, amidst the brittle, tenuous communist rule from Beijing, it’s hard to imagine Tibet being able to create some elbow room for its cultural survival. Perhaps economic and political setbacks in China will once again free Tibet from control. Perhaps the toxic nationalism and racism of modern China that currently replaces religion and cultural confidence will pass away. Perhaps the Tibetans will cease to be a fundamental ideological and philosophical affront to Chinese Communism and become something else. Certainly they could become an idealized Asian novelty and source of modest Chinese pride … a role into which indigenous peoples around the world have largely been cast (willingly or not). One can, after reading this book, hope for an easier path for Tibet and Tibetans than they’ve had for many years.

Tibet Unconquered recounts a harrowing tale from a rugged land where ideals have rarely had their just reward. A land all too well suited to Buddhism, one suspects.

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Word came early last week from the Washington Times and Washington Post, while I was away on vacation, that Ishmael Jones, pseudonymous author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture would be sued for breaking his secrecy oath.

I reviewed Jones’ 2008 book here on chicagoboyz in April, and followed it up more recently with a late September review of a similar book by Canadian “Michael Ross” on his time with Mossad.

I found both books surprisingly revelatory about the organizational culture of these two intelligence organizations, but found little that would interest the James Bond crowd, or be of much value operationally to foreign governments.

Jones’ book was by far the most damning, however, because he illustrated (with incidents from his own deep-cover career) the extent to which the CIA now operates for its own bureaucratic benefit with minimal attention to its central mandate – gathering actionable intelligence. All the most virulent criticisms of the Tea Party against big government are understatements when it comes to how national security has been subordinated to the HR nostrums of the day at CIA. Jones effectively outlined how “the emperor has no clothes.” Not so much inept as indifferent. As someone operating under “deep cover” in the clandestine branch, away from the support and comforts of consular life, he was certainly qualified to note the career paths and day-to-day obsessions of the “home office” and his colleagues. While he didn’t name names, he described enough duplicity and lassitude in the CIA’s management and staffing to earn the undying enmity of “tap dancers” and “clock watchers” alike.

Most notably, Jones outlined in some detail how the vast number of clandestine officers that were supposedly hired and deployed by the CIA post 9/11 (at huge expense) were posted to the continental US. Numbers were further bulked up by counting support staff as “officers.” Meanwhile, CIA clandestine officers already in the field overseas at the time were being methodically hindered and removed to avoid bureaucratic risk. Jones contrasted this institutional predilection with his time in Iraq as part of a team of intelligence agents (largely Army).

Apparently the Panetta CIA will now conduct lawfare against one of its own, after having done so much to limit his success when he was overseas secretly working on WMD proliferation. No good deed goes unpunished. Execute the messenger when the news is bad.

It’s still early days in the legal matter. I’ve not seen any indication that Jones’ legal team has formed a strategy for protecting or saving their client. Goodness knows Jones’ pocketbook will necessarily take a massive hit, which may well be the intent of the suit in the first place. Having delayed Jones’ out-of-pocket reimbursements during his active clandestine career (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars), it’s only appropriate that the CIA’s parting shot would be to take away what they did pay him. Pour encourager les autres.

After risking his life overseas, there’s some irony that his own employers will hold him accountable for leaking their institutional dysfunction, rather than any actual secrets.

Will a change in control of the House mean that the CIA finds itself under Congressional scrutiny for misleading elected representatives about how they were spending billions of dollars? One would imagine that Jones’ defense lawyers will be dropping hints about the potential perjury committed by his CIA managers testifying on the Hill over the last decade. Be a shame if something should happen to all those shiny careers. Horse-trading ahead, I assume.

The intelligence agency that works safest, works not at all. And a CIA entirely based in the US or ensconced behind the walls of embassies can look busy without actually being busy. The current CIA bureaucracy, for entirely understandable reasons, has preferred Potemkin villages and iron rice bowls to aggressive intelligence-gathering. Jones’ misfortune is to have been a witness to it all. I hope this all turns out OK for him.

My mini-book review offers additional details for those with an interest in intelligence organizations.

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Ross, Michael with Jonathan Kay, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007. 278 pp.

Recommended by Ishmael Jones, author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Culture, reviewed here on chicagoboyz.

In late 1982, 21 year-old Michael Ross arrived in Israel to escape cold weather. After a three year hitch in the Canadian Army, tackled right out of high school, he was on vacation. Backpackers visiting Europe on a budget often traded their wintertime labour at Israeli kibbutzim for free room and board. Michael was soon headed for one in the Beit Shean valley.

Hailing from Victoria, British Columbia and a mildly Anglican religious background, even being in Israel was a stretch. Far more likely that he’d be kayaking, or mountain-biking, or growing dope up in the Rockies. Short of the North Island of New Zealand, or perhaps Marin County, California, there’s hardly a more heavenly place in the English-speaking world than the Gulf Islands between the city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It’s “Lotus-land” to eastern Canadians. A young man just out of an army should have found all the pleasure and excitement he could want in the Pacific Coast lifestyle.

Michael’s background certainly didn’t suggest a future in one of the most respected, yet constantly imperiled, clandestine services in the world — the Mossad. Nor could it predict that he would take a side in one of the nastiest confrontations between the modern industrialized world and its neighbours. Yet for almost two decades “Michael Ross” was to serve in a variety of military and intelligence roles for his adopted home under conditions of unimaginable danger. How he came to do so is both fascinating and rather unsettling.

It all started, as much of life does, with a girl. By marrying an Israeli girl, having a child, working on a kibbutz, learning Hebrew, and converting to Judaism, Michael Ross also took on the obligation of service in the Israeli reserves. In this book, he contrasts his basic training in the Israeli Defense Forces with what he received in the Canadian military. While the Canadian army is professional force with a noticeable distance between officers and men, the reserve forces in the IDF are known by name to their commanders and the men themselves form life-long bonds in the small country. Unbeknownst to most of his Israeli compatriots, however, Michael Ross had already served in Canada’s 2nd Special Service Force … a unit (since disbanded) which provided the bulk of commandos for the Canadian military. While maligned on occasion by Canadian newsmagazines as “lethal Boy Scouts” in comparison to the UK’s SAS , membership in the SSF nonetheless marked Ross as much more than an ordinary young soldier. His strength and exceptional marksmanship soon put him in charge of his platoon’s machine gun, one of three in his 150-man reserve company. With completion of his active service, he was transferred from a “regular combat engineering post” to a demolitions platoon in a reserve unit of the Golani Brigade. Again, this isn’t the mark of a JAG — just another guy. By 1985, he was deployed into south Lebanon for operations to ambush Hezbollah fighters.

Active service in IDF over, he was able to return to his young family and the kibbutz and spend time amongst the orchards and fields tended by his community. It was then he received a nondescript letter from the Israeli government inviting him to interviews for a government job. The interviews were unusual and the questions he was asked appeared aimless at times. His own imminent plans were to head back to British Columbia with his family. He was given a card with a number to call if he was still interested in a job when he returned to Israel.

A two-year stint in Vancouver with his family eventually left them homesick for Israel and when Ross returned to the country in the summer of 1988, he called the phone number on the card. He was 27.

He was invited to begin training with “The Office” as those in Mossad refer to the organization. The chapters that follow in The Volunteer describe his initial training in creating “covers” … being dropped in the midst of a group of people and making up plausible identities and experiences which seemed consistent but which couldn’t be casually validated. Sustaining such covers on the streets of Israel, while performing simple intelligence work such as information-gathering and surveillance, was no mean feat. Because of a long and deadly domestic bombing risk, ordinary Israelis are naturally suspicious and quite willing to quiz strangers on their business. For a novice clandestine intelligence agent, the streets of any Israeli city were as fine a training ground as any in the world.

Within months, Ross was ready for a second phase of training which involved specific fake missions, still within Israel. In some cases, his own superiors would surreptitiously use officers from the Israeli internal security service, Shin Bet, to arrest Ross and aggressively interrogate him to see whether he could maintain his cover during unexpected disruptions to his make-believe intelligence activities. Ross was being groomed for one of the most dangerous assignments in the Mossad, active duty in “The Unit” — cryptonym “Caesarea” — which is the foreign clandestine group tasked with working undercover in other countries. Caesarea was compartmentalized even from the rest of Mossad. Agent identities were scrupulously hidden from everyone but the Unit’s managers.

The chapters in Ross’s book which describe his training are in marked contrast to Ishmael Jones’ descriptions of his preparations for the CIA’s clandestine service in The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. While Jones was always being trained in classes of trainees, and regaled with tales of CIA derring-do from the Cold War, the Mossad trained Ross in very small groups with a shifting array of specialist teachers … almost a “bespoke” method of creating an intelligence agent, one person at a time. The two books turn out to be complementary to each other. The Mossad is portrayed as small, intense, parsimonious, and very concerned with quality. They would appear not to have the resources or time to be sloppy in training.

By the summer of 1989, Ross had met with the head of Caesarea and was assigned to become a businessman based in Europe. A crash course in economics and business prepared him for an entirely new existence. Soon after the birth of his second son in Israel, “Michael Ross” (codename: Ridley) was leaving his family behind to create a new persona, living, working and spying in the cities of Europe. Before he left, he swapped all his identification (and any indication that he’d ever visited Israel) for his assumed identity. Once abroad, he set about filling out the details of his identity with an office space, secretary, and casual acquaintances near his residence. And he began to learn the subtleties of meeting with embassy staff and other Mossad agents in circumstances that wouldn’t attract attention. To all intents and purposes, he was an up-and-coming Yuppie, keen to create international business opportunities wherever he could find them.

In tandem with a partner, “Charles,” he began a six year assignment deep undercover which took him around Europe and the Mediterranean, gathering intelligence and performing dangerous missions which included attaching explosive devices to ships and vehicles, and conducting preliminary reconnaissance for insertion of Israeli special forces. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Ross’s introduction to the world of intelligence included trips to Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, and Sudan. His cover as a Western businessman was the foundation of his continued survival. Discovery as an agent, let alone an Israeli agent, would lead to torture and death.

The handful of assignments which Ross describes are hair-raising when the reader imagines the risks, but the author relates his tale in a straightforward manner that belies the exceptional personal qualities that Mossad must have spotted years earlier. His life required extended absences from his family (unlike the overseas family life that Ishmael Jones maintained with his wife and family while undertaking clandestine work for the CIA). At one point, Ross was permitted to move his family to France but couldn’t live in the same city as them.

Mossad’s small size seems to also carry the risk of interpersonal friction and incompatibilities. Ross’ partner was something of a “golden boy” in the organization and Ross found it increasingly difficult to deal with him personally. After six years in the field (unusually long by Mossad standards), Ross asked for a transfer from “Caesarea.”

Back in Israel, back to a normal salary (instead of the triple salary of a foreign clandestine posting), Ross was to join “Tevel” — the department of Mossad that deals with other intelligence agencies around the world. Being Canadian, Ross was a natural fit for the North American department and liaison with the CIA and FBI (both in Tel Aviv and in Washington DC). Through 1997 and 1998 he was to work closely with the Americans on counter-intelligence in the US (Hezbollah procurement agents living and working in America) and on providing background information during Dennis Ross’ negotiations on behalf of Bill Clinton between the Israelis and Palestinians. The bombings of African embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam occured while he was in Tevel, as did the abortive assassination attempt in Jordan on Khaled Mashaal by the Kidon branch of Mossad. Canadian passports were used by Israeli agents at the time. Ross also tries to resolve the “Mega” Israeli agent story generated by the Washington Post in 1997 — it turns out “Megazoid” was the Mossad cryptonym used for the D.C. CIA liaison officer and the communication was entirely aboveboard. Michael was also instrumental in allowing the CIA to nab significant Al Qaeda agents in Baku, Azerbaijan and forestall a meeting they were scheduled to have with Iranian intelligence agents.

As a side-note, Ross indicates that the entire Mossad Washington DC bureau at the time was two people, while the CIA alone had 30 in Tel Aviv. It’s a reflection of the relative scale of the bureaucracies used by the two countries to fight their intelligence battles.

In late 1998, Ross transferred from Tevel back to undercover counter-terrorism in southeast Asia and Africa. He joined a department known as “Bitsur” which had responsibility for developing local intelligence assets in foreign countries. It also has responsibility for helping persecuted Jews around the world. From 1998-2001, Ross was the only Mossad agent in sub-Saharan Africa apart from liaison staff in Nairobi and Pretoria. He was able to arrange a small exodus of Jews from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe that were being lined up for extortion and abuse. As a “jumper,” someone in Mossad who worked in foreign countries but staged his activities out of Israel, he was also involved in a number of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) counter-proliferation activities … passing along information to media and government departments on scientists or military people in Russia and India … under the guise of working on a documentary.

Finally, Ross discusses a harrowing trip to South Africa to intimidate Iranians agents, pretending to be a South African intelligence service member. The action involved Ross directly in “rough stuff” and it would seem that it turned his thoughts to retirement. He’d come to the end of his emotional rope in the work that he did. Over the course of a few months in early 2001 and mid-2001, he began breaking in his replacement for his work in southeast Asia and Africa. 9/11 found both he and his partner in Asia, making a rapid trip to the Australian embassy to make secure contact with Israel and get instructions on what to do next. Despite an intensive round of interviews with the local Asian intelligence assets, nothing of significance was discovered.

Ross was ready for retirement. In the midst of a divorce and a mid-life crisis, he found himself missing Canada. His estranged father was experiencing poor health and Ross saw a final opportunity to form an adult relationship with him. And Ross began to see the stresses of Israeli life in a different light … the terrorist explosions, the traffic, the taxes, etc. The mental burden of living in the country finally caught up with him after almost twenty years.

He retired on October 1, 2001 … just weeks after 9/11. By his own account, he had no more to give. Returning to Canada, he’s had a chance to watch the coverage of events in the Middle East from the outside. Not surprisingly, it differs dramatically from what he knew of the attitudes to civilian casualties amongst the different parties in the region. Ross concludes his book with comments about jihad and Islam as experienced by those who are its daily victims.

And he continues to comment on world events in the National Post, a Canada-wide newspaper, sometimes as a co-author with Ishmael Jones.

Conclusion

The final chapter of the book broaches the question that repeatedly occurred to me while reading through the book “why did he write it?”

He’s not boastful about his actions, despite plenty of evidence of his intelligence and courage throughout. While perhaps due to using a co-author, surely the writing style was partly by the author’s intent. Ross is quite revealing when he describes training and assignments as a “combatant” (as Mossad clandestine agents are known) but he clearly didn’t intend to write a “tell-all” book. Like Jones’ The Human Factor, The Volunteer is (for me) a disturbingly useful sociological document on how the Mossad operates. And as mentioned earlier, it’s a vivid contrast with the often self-serving bureaucratic behemoth that’s the CIA.

So if the book wasn’t about self-aggrandizement, or about scandal-mongering and money-making, why do it?

As Ross tells it, his desire to write the book was first driven by an appetite to get his experience on paper. He also believes the world will be a safer place if people more widely understand Israel’s experiences dealing with terrorism. Though he feels he owes the Mossad much, he doesn’t feel the book will hinder the organization. Fair enough. But he returns to his home country which has a post-WW2 tradition of valuing nothing more highly than “a quiet life.” As a result, it’s become a global magnet for organized crime and international terrorists … who have a hankering for the “quiet life” as well.

I think back to Michael Totten’s recent interview on Pajamas Media with an Israeli who talks about “wanting to be where the action is.” I can get that completely. Israelis are personally appealing because they are wide awake. You can see 100% of their intelligence at work, moment by moment. They don’t have time for BS, and they’re perfectly willing to look at life “with the bark on” in ways that North Americans (and North American Jews) can barely fathom. So I can imagine why Ross chose Israel when he did and how he did. But I wonder, as he lives out his life on the west coast of Canada, whether he’s picked a place to live that’s also decided on “retirement.” No one seems wide-awake in British Columbia except the business people in downtown Vancouver and the Asian gang-bangers in the suburbs. And they’re mostly doing their business elsewhere.

The other people who are wide awake are the alphabet soup of jihadists in Canada who surely would love to bag an ex-Mossad agent who writes letters to the Editor. The details that the author gives about his operations in North Africa and the Middle East in The Volunteer seem entirely sufficient to track him down in Victoria, BC. Unless he’s changed his appearance dramatically or taken unusual precautions in his daily life and telecommunications, I think his book has placed him at some continuing risk.

Mind you, if his intent was to wake Canadians to the dangers of the wider world, he can rest easy. Canadian businessmen, at least, around the world will be living closer to the edge. Canadian passports are already well-established as the document of choice for the nefarious (on both sides of the law). Ross’ account now gives every Muslim intelligence agency license to grill Canadians without regard to whether they “look Jewish.” Cultural mannerisms that were entirely protective for Ross (as a Mossad agent) in the past are no longer protection at all for hapless civilians. Canadian consular services will be getting a regular work-out, one assumes, in the future.

Final Comments

For me personally, reading The Volunteer was all rather unsettling. Ross’ biography overlaps my own at several spots. I’ve worked and studied where he grew up. I was raised in a Canadian military family which had ongoing friendships with active-duty IDF members. I wrote essays on the Six Day War in school as a kid. As an adult, I’ve worked closely with Israelis and with North American Jews from a wide range of family backgrounds. He and I are roughly contemporaries … but I can’t say there was ever a time in my own life when I even imagined stepping into the Middle East and its conflicts. A wife and kids is an obvious motivation but clearly Michael Ross had a rare constitution for adventure, risk, and disciplined study. He doesn’t toot his own horn, but his biography (read carefully) speaks very loudly indeed. Why did he take such astonishing risks? Why did he return to sleepy, oblivious, ignorant Canada … and not become disenchanted? There are plenty of mysteries to mull over when the reading is done.

Inadvertently, I’ve found myself writing mini-book reviews by a bunch of risk-takers over the last six months. The youthful drama of Michael Yon’s training in the US Special Forces. The “slumming with the troops” hair-raising account of one year at war in the Korengal Valley with Sebastian Junger. The bureaucratic rat’s nest of the CIA’s clandestine service by Ishmael Jones. And now, the matter-of-fact derring-do of a Canadian in the sharpest end of the espionage business.

What have I learned? Mostly gratitude, I think. It’s our good fortune to have individuals who will take on these tasks, by circumstance or by nature. But I came to these books with one personal understanding … “you may love the job but the job doesn’t love you.”

All these individuals have paid a price for their exceptional physical and mental gifts. Society found ways to use these young men and reward them (at least temporarily) for that use. A faceless, less-adventurous reader can only hope that they find peace and happiness, either in the midst of the fray when the adrenaline is running high. Or at the end of the day, when there’s nothing left to give.

Of all the fiction authors who’ve addressed these issues, the one I’ve found most insightful in recent years is science fiction author Iain M. Banks, whose Culture novels set in the distant future are filled with protagonists who are trained for “special circumstances” and cast amidst pre-modern or quasi-modern societies to try to make things better. The endings aren’t always happy. We can only hope our societies can continue to raise kids with the appetite and dedication for international service in an affluent society that won’t ever value their efforts enough.

The Volunteer is highly recommended for those interested in the Mossad.

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Ridley, Matt, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Harper Collins, New York, 2010. 438 pp.

Matt Ridley is a well-known British science writer who, in recent years, has specialized in writing books for the general public on new research in biology … evolutionary biology, genomics, plus a biography of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA.

For well over a decade I’ve enjoyed his books and been very impressed with the quality of his writing, so “on spec” I put a library hold on Ridley’s latest without paying much attention to what it was about. That decision turned out to be a wonderful piece of serendipity. I’ve been reading about European “trading republics” (ancient and modern) for a few years, and trying to assemble an amateur theory about how economic dynamism and technological innovation follow, or are reinforced by, republican values. Whether Athens, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Boston, or New York and Montreal, trade under republican regimes creates massive relative wealth and huge leaps in human knowledge and standards of living.

Now Matt Ridley looks at the innate human capacity for “exchange” … and how that unique capacity affected the course of prehistory, the introduction of agriculture and “civilization,” and more latterly, the shape of the industrial revolution and the modern world. Underlying the politics of republicanism, and individual freedom, we can see the human appetite for exchange creates persistent economic advantage. Trade flows from comparative advantage, in the words of David Ricardo, and comparative advantage relentlessly rewards more specialized use of the natural environment … from the labor of humans carrying sea shells inland for trade 80,000 years ago, to the labor of domesticated horse and sheep and dogs largely for human benefit, to the use of vast quantities of ancient vegetable matter (in the form of petrochemicals), to extend the efforts of humans out of all proportion. Our species is most prosperous when most specialized, when most dependent on the differentiated talents of thousands of others. We now can live lives like the Sun King, without a retinue of thousands.

In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide. p. 350

Table of Contents
===============
Prologue: when ideas have sex 1
1 A better today: the unprecedented present 11
2 The collective brain: exchange and specialization after 200,000 years ago 47
3 The manufacture of virtue: barter, trust and rules after 50,000 years ago 85
4 The feeding of the nine billion: farming after 10,000 years ago 121
5 The triumph of cities: trade after 5,000 years ago 157
6 Escaping Malthus’s trap: population after 1200 191
7 The release of slaves: energy after 1700 213
8 The invention of invention: increasing returns after 1800 247
9 Turning points: pessimism after 1900 279
10 The two great pessimisms of today: Africa and climate after 2010 313
11 The catallaxy: rational optimism about 2010 349

Ridley introduces his book with a chapter or two on the prosperous lives that we all lead, rich and poor, relative to those of even a few decades past. That’s a useful corrective to the “Woe is Us” litany proclaimed by the Private Jets for Poverty brigade. Then the author introduces us to a recap of the most recent discoveries of hominid paleontology and the tenuous survival of our ancestors on the coastal margins of Africa. What surprises the modern reader, so used to rapid change, is the complete absence of cultural change through much of our origins. The stone handaxe, central human tool for hundreds of thousands of years, barely changes through that time. All the way down to the Neanderthals (~ 300,000-~20,000 BC), the pace of change in material culture is extremely slow and reflects virtually no resources outside a day’s walk from the owner’s camp site.

With the advent of homo sapiens sapiens however, we see the first signs of traded objects from outside the family group. Note that many species, including modern apes, “share” food or objects within their pack or troop. But none exchange different foods or tools, either amongst their own kin or with neighboring groups. Indeed, field observations in the last 20 years have revealed unremitting “tribal warfare” amongst chimpanzees. And a complete inability to swap “more of a less valued food” for “less of a more valued food.” Chimps can’t barter.

Starting with the “comparative advantage” of sexual division of labor in hunting/gathering humans, somewhere along the line, people overcame their violent distrust of the neighbors to conduct their first trade. Just as diversifying food acquisition between men and women gave an economic (and therefore selective) advantage, diversifying the acquisition of food, stone, and other necessary raw materials across geographies led to greater stability to human populations, generally. Ridley hypothesizes that it was trading networks, specialist skills, and diversifying toolkits for economic activity that gave our ancestors an advantage over the larger, stronger, Neanderthals. We had more options.

With the expansion of modern humans across the planet, suddenly the archeological record explodes with new varieties of tools, material remains, and economic strategies. The larger the pool of trading populations, the more intense the trading networks. Where humans lived in remote or marginal environments (the far North) or isolated conditions (Australia), the pace of change in material culture tended to be slower. Indeed, in some situations like Tasmania, tools and food-gathering skills dwindled or disappeared entirely. For small groups, without trade access to specialists, available tools like boats, or arrows, or nets, simply vanish from the archaeological record.

… Exchange is therefore a thing of explosive possibility, a thing that breeds, explodes, grows, auto-catalyses. It may have built upon an older animal instinct of reciprocity, and it may have been greatly and uniquely facilitated by language — I am not arguing that these were not vital ingredients of human nature that allowed the habit to get started. But I am saying that barter — the simultaneous exchange of different objects — was itself a human breakthrough, perhaps even the chief thing that led to the ecological dominance and burgeoning material prosperity of the species. Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter.

[...] I have a lot of trouble getting this point across to both economists and biologists. Economists see barter as just one example of a bigger human habit of general reciprocity. Biologists talk about the role that reciprocity played in social evolution, meaning ‘do unto others as they do unto you’. Neither seems to be interested in the distinction that I think is vital, so let me repeat it here once more: at some point, after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object. This is not the same as Adam scratching Oz’s back now and Oz scratching Adam’s back later, or Adam giving Oz some spare food now and Oz giving Adam some spare food tomorrow. The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz. And the more they did it, the more valuable it became. For whatever reason, no other animal species ever stumbled upon this trick — at least between unrelated individuals. p.58-59

Before we know it, Ridley is on to the next big event in human prehistory – agriculture. Instead of agriculture being a fortunate event, randomly and independently discovered around the world, Ridley believes that agriculture followed the creation of villages or sites built around regular and necessary trade routes. The option to harvest plant species was made possible by elaborate and growing interaction with other tribes who could provide hides or meat or fish or ornaments or stone tools. As a result, it’s less of a mystery why we see apparently independent discoveries of agriculture in the Middle East, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Agriculture is a natural extension of economic diversification for peoples who already had plenty of options for successful sedentary life. Droughts might come and go but the foundation upon which agriculture might exist — the regional trade relations which ensured that predictable human barter would occur year over year — were firmly in place.

In subsequent chapters, Ridley turns to the development of cities and the zig-zag of cultural development as various chiefs and kings, priests and bureaucrats sought to turn the advantages of specialization and trade into a permanent sinecure for themselves. This is the stuff of early human history and less surprising to hear the author’s suppositions about the success of particular kingdoms and empires that encouraged, rather than suppressed, trade (and change).

Here, too, some past book reviews on chicagoboyz offer supplemental information for Ridley’s hypothesis. Firstly, Cochran & Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion which discusses recent human physical evolution affecting the human ability to eat particular foods and survive particular environments. Secondly, Ward-Perkin’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization for an unvarnished re-examination of the economic and trade collapse of the western Roman empire, matched with Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire for further illustration.

As we reach the Middle Ages, a Europe ravaged by the Black Death was simultaneously visited by an unexpected burst of technical creativity — focused largely on new tools of quantification (Crosby’s The Measure of Reality – Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600). Ridley reviews the changes in trade and agriculture which were to keep European populations ahead of starvation, despite all predictions and expectation. That this period also saw the first expansion of the European population outside the continent on a global binge of trade is surely no mistake.

Here it was, in the great trading entrepots of 17th century Amsterdam and London, that the technology of exploration and trade was matched with new products, new ideas, and vast new sources of capital. I quibble with Ridley when he turns to the origins of the industrial revolution …

The perpetual innovation machine that drives the modern economy owes its existence not mainly to science (which is its beneficiary more than its benefactor); nor to money (which is not always a limiting factor); nor to patents (which often get in the way); nor to government (which is bad at innovation). It is not a top-down process at all. Instead, I’m going to try now to persuade you that one word will suffice to explain this conundrum: exchange. It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world. p.269

… following Professor Joel Mokyr, l think there was intellectual (even religious) fervour to match the literate entrepreneurial ambitions of the time. The process which Ridley describes by which 18th century England leveraged coal, water, and overseas trade to feed, clothe, and enrich itself is familiar. Little surprise, because I’ve been reviewing some of the same books that Ridley’s been reading: Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy and Mokyr’s The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, plus Professor Alan Macfarlane’s books on the global impact of Glass and Tea, and his work on Japanese agricultural involution and individualism, capitalism, and modernity.

While the 18th century provided the foundation of steam power … the 19th century saw a continuous chain of breakthroughs in metallurgy and an industrial chemistry revolution. The culmination was the development of the Haber-Bosch process which freed the world from dependence on manure to provide nitrogen for its domesticated plants. Nitrogen drawn from the atmosphere could be turned into food that would grow the human population from 1.75 billion in 1900 to 7 billion (a number we’ll see in the next year or two).

Ridley summarizes it as follows:

Around 10,000 years ago, the pace of the Species’ progress leapt suddenly ahead thanks to the suddenly greater stability of the climate, which allowed the species to co-opt other species and enable them to evolve into exchange-and-specialise partners, generating services for the Species in exchange for their needs. Now, thanks to farming, each individual had not only other members of the Species working for her (and vice versa), but members of other species as well, such as cows and corn. Around 200 years ago, the pace of change quickened again thanks to the Species’ new ability to recruit extinct species to its service as well, through the mining of fossil fuels and the releasing of their energy in ways that generated still more services. By now the Species was the dominant large animal on its planet and was suddenly experiencing rapidly rising living standards because of falling birth rates. Parasites plagued it still — starting wars, demanding obedience, building bureaucracies, committing frauds, preaching schisms — but the exchange and specialisation continued, and the collective intelligence of the Species reached unprecedented levels. By now almost the entire world was connected by a web so that ideas from everywhere could meet and mate. The pace of progress picked up once more. The future of the Species was bright, though it did not know it. p.352

The 20th century dawned, however, with a new wave of Malthusian pessimism. And here Ridley takes a detour from describing the “better and better” effects of exchange to consider the deepening intellectual pessimism of the last few centuries. These folks have plenty of earlier antecedents (Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History) . Ridley reviews the 19th century doom-sayers and then follows up by a careful look at the bugbears of the 20th century — cancer, nuclear Armageddon, famine, resource shortages (and the famous Simons-Ehrlich bet), clean air, genes [and genomics], plague). Are we really that imperiled? Are we worse off?

Most of the contrarian argument will be familiar to readers of this blog but it’s still an impressive assemblage of material when laid out as a “sociological pattern” rather than simply a “scare headline” from today’s paper. Here the author must really earn his spurs as a “rational optimist.” Ridley assembles the statistics and facts about how humanity has responded to each of the purported catastrophes which it faced. The people who’ve done yeoman’s work in this general area are the “methodological skeptics” — the publishers of Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazine who keep the lid on the fantastical and the hyperbolic, much like a hotel maid service. Ridley’s efforts must therefore stand as an excellent summary but he’s not alone in his pessimism about the pessimism. Authors like Michael Shermer, for example, are always worth a read on such scientific or economic topics.

The media, the bureaucrats, the fund-raising scientists, and the eco-puritans all have a vested interest in kiting the latest scare into money, prestige, and power. The method by which they do so is now well-established. Too hot, too cold, too dirty, too clean, too many, too few, too smart, too dumb, too elite, too vulgar … there’s always some problem (some NEW URGENT problem) that must be ameliorated with other people’s money and other people’s time. Every problem’s insoluble without mobilizing every human on the planet. And inevitably, whether it’s acid rain or peak oil or DDT in Africa, human ingenuity and the passage of time ultimately make a mole hill out of a mountain of hot air. So another “hot air mountain” must then be summoned to satisfy institutional needs.

Having taken a new perspective on the archaeological research of the last 30 years, and reviewed the anxieties and nostrums of the last century to show why the human capacity for innovation and specialization has overcome insoluble problems, Ridley turns to the two 21st century Pessimisms which hold a fever grip on affluent minds. Africa and Climate Change. Things actually aren’t so bad! And Ridley wrote his chapter before the events of Climategate which showed how scientists were putting their thumb on the scales of scientific research and holding it there with third-rate computer programming and conveniently lost raw data. The capacity for “exchange” to nibble methodically and successfully against the malicious effects of African economics and atmospheric CO2 are everywhere in evidence.

Ridley wraps up his book with a final chapter that looks ahead to the year 2100 and instead of just extrapolating problems and limitations, he also extrapolates the solutions and trends predicted by increasing exchange. Why solve 21st century problems with 20th century resources and tools? Why make the (relatively) poor taxpayers of today solve the problems of the (relatively) rich occupants of the latter half of the 21st century? And what book on exchange would be complete without a reference to that recent denizen of rap videos and Amazon bestseller lists … Mr. Friedrich von Hayek and his term catallaxy — the science of exchange.

We’ve just begun to tap the distributed resources of eBay, and Amazon, and Youtube, and Google for swapping ideas, products, and services. Those early traders on the south side of the Mediterranean (circa 80,000 years BC) were just the start of something dramatic. Ridley makes the case that exchange will provide further unimaginable breakthroughs in technology and culture. In a further evidence of serendipity, my next full book review will be Free: The Future of a Radical Price by WIRED editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson. A profound shift in economic activity is occurring as computation, bandwidth, and data storage become so cheap that they are, to all intents and purposes, without cost … and can therefore be applied more widely in the service of exchange of products, services, and ideas. We are just beginning an entirely new phase of lateral exchange.

I have presented the case for sunny optimism. I have argued that now the world is networked, and ideas are having sex with each other more promiscuously than ever, the pace of innovation will redouble and economic evolution will raise the living standards of the twenty-first century to unimagined heights, helping even the poorest people of the world to afford to meet their desires as well as their needs. I have argued that although such optimism is distinctly unfashionable, history suggests it is actually a more realistic attitude than apocalyptic pessimism. ‘It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair,’ said H.G. Wells p. 352

Conclusion

In this brief review, I’ve necessarily skipped the details of Ridley’s discussion of prehistory and history. Suffice it to say, readers of chicagoboyz could find The Rational Optimist a “gateway book” for all that we discuss on this blog. If you have an interest in the theoretical roots of economic activity and their impact on human origins and political structure, you’ll like this book. You may not come away an “optimist” but you’ll certainly have a lot more confidence in the capacity for free markets and free peoples to work their way out of trouble.

If you want to introduce the practical implications of Hayek’s insights on human exchange to friends or family, this is the perfect “beach book.” Drop it in the suitcase for vacation or send as a graduation gift for a clever high school or college student. The writing is polished. The pacing is excellent. The tone is meant for the general reader and the end notes have all the supplemental details that a CB reader might crave.

If you enjoyed the broad historical sweep and global vision of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies or Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Ridley’s latest book is highly recommended. While no doubt just an archaeological and scholarly “progress report,” it brings together a narrative that is very compelling.

And what better credential could this book have for chicagoboyz readers than a scathing review in the Guardian from Leftist biologist, Professor Steve Jones … damning the entire thesis by comparing Cuban and US life expectancy. It just doesn’t get sweeter than that. The pitfalls of “teleological thinking” are indeed many and varied, but they are part and parcel of the intellectual journey. Matt Ridley has given us plenty to think about, and plenty to be grateful for. And a fascinating read.

While the library’s copy of The Rational Optimist has now moved on to other readers, I’ll be buying a personal copy as “cheat sheet” for the research (circa 2008) on the history of human economic activity and the over-hyped crises du jour that plague our media. This book won’t be the final word on the subject for general readers, but it’s a very fine contribution to it.

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Junger, Sebastian, War, Harper Collins, 2010, 287 pp.

The author of The Perfect Storm has written a book about his time with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the remote, steeply mountainous Korengal Valley — 200 kms east of Kabul, and 200 kms northwest of Islamabad. Patrolling and living five times between June 2007 and June 2008 with Second Platoon, Battle Company, Junger gives the reader some sense of the life of combat infantry out at the very end of the logistics chain — small high-altitude outposts protecting larger, lower bases with covering fire. Every creature comfort is reduced to that which will serve weapons and fortification. Niceties like hot and cold running water, cooked food, clean clothes, air-conditioned or heated sleeping quarters are simply absent. No one over 30. No women. No rear-echelon MFs. No one but Taliban wanting to come across the perimeter wire and kill or kidnap you. The troops live for weeks amongst scorpions, camel spiders, dust, and dirt in ramshackle outposts carved out of hilltops with their own hands. Resupply is based on occasional helicopter “speed balls” (air-dropped duffels or kit-bags) or whatever the men can pack on their backs up the mountains. In other words, Fort Apache – Korengal. No generals or pundits or “pros and cons of war” in sight.

The region of Afghanistan is so remote that it has largely been ignored by all forces in the area: Afghan, Pakistani, and European. No central government ever existed in the area. The Korengalis live in small tribes within a valley barely six miles long and one mile across. They were animists and adopted Islam barely a hundred years ago. Though speaking Pashto, they keep largely to themselves. Meager, valley-bottom subsistence farming is subsidized by illegal timber-cutting of the large cedars found high on the mountain-sides. Thus the Korengalis are entirely in thrall to their elders, the local Pakistani timber smugglers, and the Taliban forces that pass back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Americans weren’t welcome. No one was.

American forces established themselves in the Korengal to act as “spoilers” for the Taliban transit zone through the neighboring Pech River valley. The 173rd were replacing a previous deployment by the 10th Mountain Division, who in turn had replaced the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines. The members of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the 173rd were assigned to man an isolated outpost called Restrepo.

Junger’s account of his time with Second Platoon is organized as a set of squad and platoon vignettes on three major themes (Fear, Killing, Love) and bridged with his reflections on his own experiences (patrolling, combat, surviving an IED), interviews and biographic details on the troops in Second Platoon, and a review of the latest literature on combat psychology and physiology. As an established adventurer and war reporter, he was struggling to come to terms with a new and deeper experience of relentless combat in a very small group.

As befits someone who works for Vanity Fair, and gets excellent editing, the quality of the writing is very high. Some passages of the book are lyrical, even beautiful. The subject matter is intense, personal, and necessarily stripped to the essence of survival for the troops that Junger lives with. Death and injury are omnipresent. Physical endurance and combat skill are admired above all else. Eccentric personality flaws aren’t important for group survival, so they simply aren’t important. Weekly doses of the antimalarial mefloquine trigger nightmares and sleep disorder. The pressure of being under sporadic attack with mortars, snipers, and heavy machine guns strips the men down to utter dependence on each other. The biochemical roller coaster of combat changes each soldier’s priorities. Firefights are longed for. The boredom of waiting for firefights must be overcome in a thousand counter-intuitive ways. Tiny steps to reduce platoon vulnerability at the outpost, or on patrol, are treated with absolute focus and religious commitment. A poorly-tied shoelace can mean life or death. Sloppy noise discipline can betray an entire squad. A jammed weapon, a night terror. Combat can take the team from dead sleep to firing weapons in their flip-flops and gym shorts in 30 seconds. The result is a level of group cohesion un-matched in civilian life.

The troops, even Junger himself, wonder if they can adjust to regular life again.

War is big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive — that you can get skydiving — but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up. p. 234

There is a great deal of compelling narrative in Junger’s book. Uniquely amongst the accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 10 years, the focus of War is platoon-level combat in an isolated outpost, day after day after day. While we have battlefield accounts from places like Fallujah (Robert Kaplan) or Helmand (Michael Yon), events at Restrepo center around a smaller, stable group … where every casualty, every fatality, is a body blow that must be borne for further months of intense combat. For troops on leave from Restrepo, all they can think about is getting back there to protect their brothers. Junger himself starts to experience this compulsion, and only a new wife back in the States kept him from committing to an entire 15 month tour with the platoon.

The contrast between two realities of war (macro and micro) is more … the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan versus the soldier’s experience in Band of Brothers or the more recent The Pacific. Sharing combat stress with the same set of men for months on end creates unique bonds.

The recent abandonment of the Korengal Valley by US forces may add some poignancy to this book and to an associated documentary based on Junger’s year with the Second Platoon which will be released in a few weeks to theaters — Restrepo (Box Office Mojo, imdb). But in the big scheme of things, this book is really a contribution to a well-established literature … certainly extending back to the North American Indian Wars and the trench warfare of World War 1. We can respect the men that Junger describes without casting them as unique.

The Dunbar number is a sociological pattern which seems to reflect our origins as hunters-gatherers. For most cultures, small day-to-day work groups seem to cluster in size at 30-50 while larger mating/face-to-face amalgamations draw from a pool of 150 people. Junger cites these numbers as possible ways to explain the psychology and functionality of the squad (8-13), platoon (26-55), and company (80-225). There’s much plausibility to this argument, especially when it comes to the cohesion required for combat effectiveness and self-sacrifice. Human males evolved as pack predators in environments where their weapons did not protect them against apex predators. Thus they were both predator and prey, every time they walked out of camp. It’s hard to imagine that thousands of generations of men weren’t affected by this experience. Or that “domestication” of modern men would entirely submerge this inner nature. Junger’s observations of the members of Second Platoon would strike any social anthropologist or prehistoric archaeologist as completely self-evident.

As noted in the quote above, men need meaning — and one can hardly find greater meaning than in fighting to protect one’s brothers (literal or functional), entirely apart from women, against great odds, and armed to the teeth. That Junger should have reached such an age (46) without experiencing what every rural Boy Scout learns by age 12 is a bit surprising. Especially in light of his life of great danger and adventure. But there’s a big difference between the individual achievements of elite athletes and journalists, risking life and limb to climb mountains, or surf or sail under extreme conditions, or report from some turbulent Third World war zone … and the entirely different environment of very ordinary young men of very indifferent abilities, cast into a situation of combat in their late teens or early twenties without option of escape. The former might be considered adrenaline junkies by birth. The latter become so through baptism of fire and complete dependence on their platoon. Thus War can come across as a wee bit voyeuristic. This was obviously a world that Junger found compelling but it is telling that he found it all mysterious. It just seemed, to very innocuous me, as regular “men in groups.”

Readers already familiar with the following books will find Junger’s War elegant, heart-felt, informative, but largely unsurprising:

• Phil Caputo’s A Rumor of War
• Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
• Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down
• Michael Herr’s Dispatches
• Kenn Miller’s Tiger the Lurp Dog
• John Keegan’s The Face of Battle
• Martin Van Creveld’s The Culture of War
• Gwynne Dyer’s War TV Series- Episode 2 – Anybody’s Son Will Do
• Thomas Rick’s Making the Corps

CB readers may also be interested in a five-part video interview with the author (Part 1).

Personal Reflections

I enjoyed this book, and found it a quick read. I’ll definitely try to catch the associated documentary at some point in the coming year. For readers wanting to know how young men respond to sustained combat in isolated, harsh conditions, War is as good an introduction as any. The book is timely, well-written, and unvarnished. The coverage of the literature on combat psychology and physiology is solid. By its nature, it mercifully escapes the thumb-sucking of modern military punditry. This is combat. Not “WAR.” It certainly does credit to the men it describes, even as it highlights the gulf between modern life for men in the “information economy” and what it takes to fight tribes in the further reaches of the world.

For readers more versed in military history and tactics, or the psychology and physiology of combat, War is a little less compelling but offers some worthwhile scenarios for thinking about mountain warfare where hand-to-hand combat is mixed up with B-1 bomb runs and strafing by A-10s. The base-and-outpost model of terrain control has been used many times in history and will no doubt be applied again in future. War gives a great capsule description of how one platoon handled the challenges.

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Levenson, Thomas, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2009, 318pp.

The publisher kindly provided a copy of this book for review.

This book was recommended during a Holiday 2009 Book Roundup on chicagoboyz here.

Fans of fiction author Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age and Anathem were reviewed for chicagoboyz) may recall that one of the most intriguing episodes in his mammoth Baroque Cycle trilogy was Isaac Newton’s use of the Royal Mint to further his interests in the alchemy of gold. In the course of taking on Mint responsibilities, Newton also inherited the responsibility for halting widespread coin tampering and counterfeiting.

Now we have a non-fiction title by a distinguished American science writer focused on the same subject. Newton’s actions as Warden, then Master, of the Mint were less glamourous than his revolutionary contributions to science and industry, but no less critical to the rapid transformation of England into an industrial giant. The real story behind Isaac Newton’s efforts to rescue England’s silver currency from impending disaster, and to revitalize the Royal Mint, is rather unexpected. And Newton’s methodical (and rather fearsome) efforts to hunt down and hang the country’s counterfeiters turn out to be just as fascinating, and just as strange, as Neal Stephenson’s fictional tale of Newton’s derring-do. Stephenson’s blurb on the back-cover of this book confirms as much.

Levenson’s book is built around two dramatic themes.

Firstly, the “fish out of water” transition of Isaac Newton from nerdy reclusive Cambridge savant, obsessed with his privacy, to senior government functionary … comfortable in parliamentary committees, Law Courts, and in the Royal Mint’s interrogation cells.

Secondly, Newton’s multi-year game of “cat and mouse” with a notorious counterfeiter (William Chaloner) that constantly risked Newton’s professional career, and Chaloner’s life. Chaloner actively sought to have Newton pilloried as incompetent, a thief, and anti-government conspirator, and Newton did his best to see Chaloner hung, drawn, and quartered … counterfeiting being a treasonous offense.

The author first builds contrasting biographies of the scholar and the criminal, providing a snapshot of criminal London in the late 17th century. The woeful state of English silver coinage brings Newton to London where he was soon to begin an education entirely unlike anything available in Cambridge University.

SPOILER ALERT: If you’d prefer to learn the story of Newton and the counterfeiter on your own, by reading this book, please skip down to my general comments in the Section titled General Impressions where I’ve tried not to give too much of the tale away.

EYESTRAIN ALERT: This review runs about 10,500 words. Some readers may prefer to print it out.

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Table of Contents

Preface: Let Newton Be ix
Part I: Learning to Think 1
Part II: A Rogue’s Progress 47
Part III: Passions 75
Part IV: The New Warden 107
Part V: Skirmishes 145
Part VI: Newton and the Counterfeiter 185
Epilogue: “He Could Not Calculate the Madness of the People” 238

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Preface: Let Newton Be

The book begins by fore-shadowing, almost cinematically, Isaac Newton squeezing an informer in Newgate Jail for information about one of its famous inmates, a certain William Chaloner. This gives the author the chance to contrast Newton’s reputation and earlier career with his seamier duties as Warden of the Mint (second-in-command at the Royal Mint). Chaloner was but one of dozens of Newton’s prey though perhaps the most personally irritating to the great man. Over the course of several years Chaloner was to slip through Newton’s fingers repeatedly while casting public doubt on the integrity of the Royal Mint itself.

To catch Chaloner, Newton was ultimately forced to learn more about the law, about “thief-taking,” and about building an air-tight case against the counterfeiter in the chaotic legal world of 17th century England — replete with obstinate juries, hanging judges, murky jurisdictions, and the darker arts of interrogation and evidence acquisition.

Part I: Learning to Think

In Part 1, Levenson outlines the personal history of Isaac Newton from childhood through his years at Cambridge, his impact on scientific circles, and his desire to find some suitable employment in London. Chapter 1 covers his early life and activities as a student. By 1664 he’d begun to formulate a set of questions that were to form the core of his master work, the Principia Mathematica. The arrival of the bubonic plague in Cambridge soon after was to send Newton back to his home in Woolsthorpe. Chapter 2 describes his efforts there to develop calculus and the underlying mathematics to describe gravitational forces more exactly. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was to reduce the risk of plague in England and Newton was back in Cambridge by the spring of 1667. There he continued to teach, to write extensively, and to undertake various alchemical experiments in a small smelter created on the grounds of his university college.

Chapter 3 moves forward to 1684 when Edmund Halley drops by to discuss the shape of orbits of comets. To Halley’s surprise, Newton claimed such orbits were elliptical and that he’d written out the mathematical proof of this some time earlier. With prodding from members of the Royal Society, Newton then began to organize and formalize his writings … the three laws of motion and Books One & Two of the Principia were complete by Fall/Winter 1685. Book Three “on the system of the world” was to present propositions about gravity and how gravity ties the laws of motion together. For astronomers, the distinctions between elliptical and parabolic orbits could be made mathematically precise. The Principia went to press in July of 1687 and was simultaneously acclaimed, and decried, with great fervor. As linked above, the Principia’s impact on common folk and English pride is outlined with great clarity in Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire 1687-1851, reviewed earlier on chicagoboyz. For reasons both logical and arcane, it was adopted with great speed as both a religious and scientific explanation of how the world worked.

Chapter 4 discusses the aftermath of the publication of the Principia in Newton’s life. England was in turmoil as Stewart rulers were expelled from England for the second time in the century. The Glorious Revolution promised greater opportunities for Newton in London, especially since he’d been in some danger from King James for his actions in Cambridge. Newton took part in the Convention Parliament which gave support for the ascension of King William. Newton was now both lionized for his scientific efforts and supported by newly elevated friends such as William Boyle, John Locke and Robert Hooke. Nonetheless, no appropriate patronage position appeared for Newton and he returned to his alchemical experiments at Cambridge, while nudging his friends for opportunities during the next five years.

Part II: A Rogue’s Progress

Having summarized Newton’s life from birth up to the point of his public engagement in London, Levenson now turns to the far grimmer and seamier life story of William Chaloner. Much of the detail for his early life must be drawn from an anonymous “yellow journalism” biography printed shortly after his death (Guzman Redivivus: A Short View of the Life of Will. Chaloner. London: printed for J. Hayns, 1699). On such shaky ground, Levenson estimates that he was born sometime between 1650 and 1660 to a poor weaver in the English Midland, making him anywhere from 10 to 20 years younger than Newton. A sister and brother were also in the mix.

Young William was apparently a handful. Clever but uneducated, he was apprenticed to a nail-maker in Birmingham. It was there, amidst the metal-workers of the city, that he was given his introduction to the art of “coyning” and counterfeiting. Apparently he soon outgrew his master’s tutelage in the arts criminal. By the early 1680s, he escaped his apprenticeship by walking on foot to London. London of the time, as today, was a urban behemoth … dominating England demographically and famous through the rest of Europe for its size, wealth, and trading volumes. Levenson first provides some background on the City and then turns to its opportunities for masterless apprentices such as Chaloner. They were slim. Through the 1680s, Chaloner apparently did some work making cheap watches and trinkets, and involving himself in the promotion of quack medicines. By 1690, however, he’d become implicated in a theft and had to avail himself of London’s seamier districts to “disappear.”

Chapter 6 introduces us to Chaloner’s final “apprenticeship” … to a “japanner.” Though originally referring to Oriental lacquer- or varnish-work, by Chaloner’s time the trade described any skill requiring the application of an opaque surface. Initially Chaloner specialized in coating cloth and leather to make old clothes appear new or of fine quality. Soon, however, he was turning his hand to gilding metal instead. His timing was appropriate. Between 1690 and 1696, England was running out of silver coinage. The result was a wave of “clipping,” whereby the smooth margins of coins were shaved to acquire additional silver. The tradition was ancient, the action treasonous (since the sovereign’s visage was on the coin) and the punishment was capital. Nonetheless, the financial incentives to variously alter, duplicate or mimic the debased coinage of the realm was overwhelming.

England had attempted to eradicate the clipping of coins with the introduction of new dies and “edging machines” in the late 1660s. Nonetheless, all the older coinage in the country could continue to be counterfeited with relative ease. By roughly 1691, Chaloner followed up his “japanning” apprenticeship by one with a goldsmith named Patrick Coffee, who taught him the techniques of manipulating molten metals. The combination of iron-working skill (drawn from nail-making), gilding/japanning, and precious metal handling gave Chaloner all the background needed to counterfeit coins of every kind and value.

Chaloner’s intelligence led to a notable decision. The greatest vulnerability in counterfeiting was not the manufacture of fake coins but in their distribution. The poorer the fake, the more likely that they’d be immediately spotted. The threat of the death penalty meant that anyone caught distributing the coins was likely to immediately implicate the manufacturer to save their own skin. So for someone skilled in making counterfeit coins, the goal was to make their product as close to the original as possible. There lay the greatest profit (a high premium in comparison to face value), and the greatest safety against confederates “ratting” one out to the authorities.

And so Chaloner began to identify methods to maximize the quality of his products, including techniques to mimic the “edging” of legitimate coinage through the use of molds and presses. The final key to perfection were the “dies” or graven molds used to stamp or press the coin blanks. For that, Chaloner sought out a key tradesman, a master engraver named Thomas Taylor. In 1690, Taylor made a set of dies for French gold “pistoles” and soon after, in 1691, a second set of dies for the English gold guinea. By using an alloy of silver, and gilding the coins with a thin layer of gold (courtesy of the goldsmith Coffee) Chaloner and his colleague (one Thomas Holloway) began distributing thousands of fake gold coins.

The quality was so high that demand on the street was enormous. Chaloner had difficulty keeping up with that demand. Profits were immense and all involved suddenly found themselves with the wealth to climb several rungs up the ladder of social standing. A new female companion for Chaloner (a wife and kids in Birmingham were abandoned) and a new house in “semi-rural” Knightsbridge completed the transformation.

For two years, it was all a great success. Then a William Blackford was arrested for trying to pass counterfeit gold coins and immediately implicated one “William Chaloner.” Chaloner hurriedly cast a final batch of coins for his impending escape and then abandoned his new girlfriend and new house entirely, disappearing underground. Later in 1692, the unfortunate Blackford (with no Chaloner to be found) was duly hung for counterfeiting. Chaloner resurfaced shortly thereafter and took a pause from counterfeiting, perhaps triggered by a lack of start-up capital.

He turned instead to incitement of treason, since the government of the time was offering rewards for information on Stewart sympathizers. Chaloner wrote a suitably incendiary screed, induced (by threat) two printers to publish the Jacobite tract, and promptly turned the men in to the authorities.The courts promptly hung them. As reward, some time later Chaloner received 1,000 pounds from the English government.

Chaloner followed this up with a few less successful attempts at stimulating others to commit treason, and eventually turned to the dangerous but profitable trade called “thief-taking.” In the absence of an official police force, the authorities were dependent on individual agents or bounty hunters who could track down criminals in the sprawling city. An unscrupulous thief-taker, the only kind apparently, could corral likely suspects and manufacture or plant evidence on their person, and turn them in for a reward or fee. Soon, a profitable side-business in threatening to falsely accuse the innocent and guilty alike was in full swing.

This was a profession fully to Chaloner’s liking and a good match with his honeyed tongue, but there was only one problem. Thief-takers were the apex predators of criminal London. And the biggest danger to an apex predator is another apex predator. Chaloner’s career as extortionate rogue in service to the courts was cut short by his association with another thief-taker named Coppinger. Coppinger had ended up in Newgate for having in his possession someone else’s watch, worth four pounds. To save himself, he gave evidence that Chaloner was a coiner. Chaloner found himself soon in Newgate Prison as well, where he claimed to the magistrates that he’d been framed. In absence of any concrete evidence to convict Chaloner, beyond a “he said, he said” exchange, Coppinger was hung for felony theft (much later in February 1695) and Chaloner was released.

By 1693, Chaloner had decided to return to the slightly less dangerous but still very profitable trade of counterfeiting … and leave the thief-taking to others.

Part III: Passions

Part III of Newton and the Counterfeiter is a brief interlude of sorts, a series of briefing notes (Chapters 6, 7, and 8) on the intellectual setting of England at the time, on the role of alchemy in natural philosophy and metallurgy, and on Newton’s emotional and physical health in the mid-1690s. These short chapters set the stage for why Newton, specifically, would receive a strange request from the government in the autumn of 1695. Would he assist with answering the question on “what the nation should do about the worsening shortage of silver coins?”

Part IV: The New Warden

By mid-decade, the English Secretary of the Treasury realized the the country was on the verge of a crisis. Silver coin was disappearing. In its place the only coin still circulating was counterfeit and of abysmal quality. The Secretary wrote to the leading men of the day and asked their help. Newton, acknowledged as the smartest man in England, was on the list. There being no profession or discipline of “economics” at the time, it was logical that the Secretary should cast his net as widely as possible amongst the scholars and merchants of the time.

As described in Chapter 10, the foundation of the “silver problem” was one of arbitrage. The face value of a given amount of silver in England to a given amount of gold was worth less than the silver in bullion form would command in Paris or other European capitals. Enterprising traders for decades had been melting down legitimate English coin and shipping it across the Channel as bullion for resale, at a profit. By 1695, “bad coin” had driven out the good. Silver was heading eastward relentlessly. Gold to buy that silver on the English market moved westward.

Aggravating the problem were two parallel coinages in the realm … a pre-1662 hand-struck coin without edging and the “new improved” coins with edges made by heavy machine presses to a higher standard. Needless to say, the former were more subject to clipping and counterfeit mimicry and the latter were more subject to melting down and shipment overseas. Some scholars claim that the situation became so bad that barely 1 in two thousand silver shillings gathered directly by the Treasury were legitimate. The impact of the degradation of silver coin was most noticeable for domestic trade. Silver shillings were the currency of employment and food purchase. Inflation (because of degraded coin) and shortage of coin (of any value) was bringing economic activity to a halt. An era of barter was on the horizon. What brought the situation to a crisis was the fact that King William was fighting a war on the Continent and foreign bankers would only accept (understandably) legitimate coins in payment. England was running out of both bullion and coin. In November of 1695, William laid the problem for raising money for the foreign wars directly in the lap of Parliament. On the heels of the Secretary of the Treasury’s appeal to the country’s leading lights, the “silver problem” needed urgent solution.

Chapter 11 reviews the debate between the proponents of devaluation of English coin (resetting the ratio of English shilling to English gold guineas) and those convinced that recoinage (at the old ratio) would solve the immediate problem of the silver exodus. Newton and the Secretary of the Treasury (Lowndes) favored the former. John Locke the latter. Since adjusting the amount of silver in the English shilling would reduce the amount of silver collected by the landed aristocracy in tenant rent, a recoinage (without re-balancing the ratio of silver to gold) was ultimately what was approved.

Who to oversee the recoinage? There, at least, a consensus was formed. On the 19th of March 1696, Isaac Newton received a letter indicating that he would be appointed Warden of the Mint, the second-in-command under the Master of the Mint, a do-nothing political appointee. It was implied that Newton would do the heavy lifting for the recoinage of all English silver coins. By mid-April, the paperwork was complete and Newton abandoned Cambridge for London, with barely a backward glance for the decades of his life spent there.

In Chapter 12, we return to William Chaloner who used the “golden age” of English counterfeiting in the first half of the 1690s for great personal profit. Uniquely, among his colleagues, he also used the impending currency crisis to raise his status and visibility in an audacious way. He became convinced the way to maximize his counterfeiting enterprise was to co-opt the Royal Mint itself. To that end, in 1694 he published a pamphlet (Reasons Humbly Offered Against Passing an Act for Raising Ten Hundred Thousand Pounds) in which he argued against the raising of taxes to make up for a shortfall in legitimate coinage. He followed the piece with another pamphlet, this one called Proposals Humbly Offered, for Passing, an Act to Prevent Clipping and Counterfeiting of Money. Here was the master counterfeiter, already the subject of various past man-hunts and imprisonments, offering his advice to the government on how to control counterfeiting! Ironically, Chaloner recommended a recoinage with devaluation (like Newton) … though he suggested a second recoinage at a later date to restore the coins to “full” weight.

These publications were not meant as serious solutions to the silver problem. Clearly they were meant to establish Chaloner as an expert on the subject. And to that end, they were successful. His pamphlets were seen by Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Monmouth, former Lord of the Treasury. Mordaunt had fallen out of favor at court and was seeking to undermine Newton’s patron, Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Chaloner was now a useful tool with which Mordaunt could attack the government functionaries trying to solve the silver problem. Chaloner was brought before the Privy Council and delivered a stinging indictment of the Royal Mint, its methods and its staff. While the Council was smart enough not to give Chaloner the keys to the Mint, his comments did trigger an investigation into the institution, nudged along by Mordaunt’s political ambitions.

None of this put money in Chaloner’s pocket. While he might play the “long game” to suborn the Mint, he also needed immediate cash. And the appearance of the Bank of England in August 1694, and its promulgation of “bank notes” opened broad new avenues for counterfeiting for a daring and resourceful man like William Chaloner.

In Chapter 13, while waiting for the Mint investigation to lead to new opportunities, Chaloner took up the challenge of learning all he could about counterfeiting Bank notes. Having found a printer who could simulate the marbled paper that the notes were printed on, Chaloner began counterfeiting. Unfortunately the Bank’s investigators tracked down the printer, who quickly gave up Chaloner’s name. Chaloner then, in turn, gave up the names of conspirators in another counterfeiting scheme … stolen checks from the City of London’s Orphans’ Fund that had duped the Bank. Did Chaloner go to jail? Hardly. He received the thanks of the Bank and two hundred pounds. By November 1695, he was offering recommendations to the Bank on how to reduce the risks of counterfeit bank paper appearing in circulation. The Bank’s governor, in turn, helped out Chaloner with his occasional scrapes in Newgate Prison.

By the fall of 1696, England (and Sir Isaac Newton) is in the midst of the great recoinage, recounted in chapter 14. From 4am to midnight, six days a week, the Mint began to produce the standardized, edged silver coins. Arriving on-site in May of the year, Newton set to work as Warden under the inept political appointee, Master of the Mint Thomas Neale. Within weeks, Newton had begun to master the complex accounts and day-to-day technical details of the Mint … immediately reducing the graft and increasing the productivity of the institution. The huge volumes of bullion and coins handled by the Mint required an expansion and optimization of the coining “machines” used. The Mint added eight new rolling mills and five new coining presses under Newton’s direction.

In what appears to be an early variant of time-and-motion studies, Newton examined the manufacturing process and identified every place where more efficient use of men, machines and material could be made. This boosted coin production from 15,000 pounds of coinage per week (a previously unheard of rate in England) to 100,000 pounds of coinage per by late summer 1696, a pace unknown in all of Europe. By the end of 1697, most of the available silver in England had been re-coined. Virtually all recoinage was complete by mid-1698. The extra coining machines were sold off in mid-1699. In all, 6,840,000 pounds of debased coin had been taken in and turned into about 4,100,000 legitimate silver shillings. A huge nominal loss of value but a dramatic improvement in the quality and dependability of the English shilling, with an immediate follow-on effect for domestic trade. The speed at which the new coins were created from old was central to maintaining the stability of the economy. The government’s worst fears about riots, Jacobite rebellion, and starvation were averted. King William was able fund his continental war and the realm returned to relative tranquility after its coinage crisis.

For this unimagined and rapid success, all gave Isaac Newton credit.

Part V: Skirmishes

And so, 145 pages in, we open Chapter 15 with the central story of the book. Up til now, Newton and Chaloner had led separate lives under a common English sky. In background and education, they could hardly have been more different. Yet their respective skills now set them on opposite sides of the table. Chaloner’s self-confident villainy and Newton’s dedication to his job (for which he’d received widespread praise) were to propel Act 2.

The Warden of the Mint was its only official magistrate and part of the position’s responsibility was “enforcing the King’s law in and around London for all crimes committed against the currency.’ During his first summer at the Mint (1696), Newton sought to have these responsibilities set aside … to no avail. In fact, his superiors set him the task of addressing an urgent criminal activity. The disappearance some coining dies from the Mint. Chaloner had been busy.

Recall that Chaloner had given evidence to the Privy Council in 1695 about Mint operations. By January, 1696 Chaloner was in Newgate Prison, claiming the Mint staff had fabricated evidence against him and that the Mint itself was compromised. Hauled out of Newgate in May 1696 (just as Newton was getting underway with the coinage), Chaloner gave evidence to the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Mint staff were debasing the silver and counterfeiting the coin at source. Further, that the chief engraver has sold of the master dies for the new coins. For the moment, he was freed. Chaloner named several notorious counterfeiters (including one of his own aliases) as members of the conspiracy. But other counterfeiters, languishing in the hell of Newgate Prison, suddenly also started to recall where the missing dies might be. Under threat of imminent hanging for unrelated counterfeiting cases, they implicated both Chaloner and yet more Mint staff in wrong-doing.

Into this circular firing squad of the larcenous and the condemned was thrown Isaac Newton. Though his training in criminal investigation was non-existent, he was fully capable of mastering whatever detail necessary to meet his purposes. His education in law, crime, and power politics was about to begin.

It was one thing to leverage one criminal against the other with ever-tightening webs of self-incrimination. That might give satisfaction in hanging the multitudinous small fry associated with London counterfeiting in the “golden era.” It didn’t solve the real problem of where the Mint dies might be. Despite arresting thirty suspects, and interviewing a cross-section of the London underworld during his first summer at the Mint (including Chaloner), Newton could make no further progress on locating the missing dies. No solid evidence was acquired that would uncover the truth. A few minor parties were hung as a matter of course but by August 1696, many were released. Chaloner was convinced he’d pulled a fast one on the new and innocent Warden of the Mint. Whose mind just happened to be focused on the incredibly urgent silver recoinage of the entire realm.

Chapter 16 describes the evolution of Newton’s strategy in criminal investigation and intelligence gathering after the unsuccessful resolution of the missing Mint dies. As noted earlier, the greatest danger in counterfeiting was the movement of the fake coin or product from the makers, through the distributors, to the unsuspected innocent. Newton began assembling “informations” … interviews with the small participants of the counterfeiting trade … with the same persistence he brought to learning the functions of the Mint. He spent the government’s money relentlessly and methodically to inform himself on how the counterfeiters were operating.

At the same time, he overcame the limitations of 17th century London governance by forming what was, in effect, a private police force. This involved using many of the same “thief takers” that had traditionally terrorized the London underworld. By cross-referencing the names and roles of all the various parties in counterfeiting schemes, and using his “constabulary” to capture and constrain individuals to Newgate Prison or the Mint’s own interrogation cells, the Warden of the Mint could begin to identify the technology, methods, and parties involved in counterfeiting his precious new coinage. Within six months, Newton’s organization of informers and enforcers gave him unprecedented tools to identify who in London and its surrounding counties was counterfeiting. He’d mastered the methods of setting thief to catch thief, and of direct interrogation of his informants. Interestingly, he later burned many of the documents gathered during this part of his government career. While some biographers have made wild statements about Newton’s enthusiasm for playing “bad cop” in the shadow of the noose, for whatever reason Newton saw these early volumes of criminal “informations” as irrelevant, uncomfortable, or both. So he burnt them. A sad event for modern historians.

Nonetheless, in Chapter 17, the documentary evidence that remains of Newton’s criminal investigations (from the years 1698-1700) show that his earlier efforts at fully understanding counterfeiting as an organized enterprise paid great dividends. Every case, by its nature, was a capital case. His discretion as magistrate and prosecutor therefore ranged between life and death. By careful adjustment of risk and reward, the minor participants in London’s criminal activities could be impelled to speak plainly and fully, and to remain in permanent debt to the Warden. In time, the news of who’d spoken to the Warden became very valuable indeed to London’s criminal world. As Newton’s skills and understanding grew, his control over London counterfeiting increased. He began using his wide network of informants as jail-house spies. Many went to the gallows convicted on the words out of their mouth in the dank cells of Newgate.

Meanwhile, Chaloner had hatched a scheme to take advantage of the new Warden. Since the passing of counterfeit goods was the most dangerous part (since it involved confederates who could be compromised), Chaloner sought to tamper with the coin at the source — the Mint itself. In his first brush with Newton, Chaloner had failed to get his political sponsors to foist either himself or a colleague into the Mint (under the guise of improving Mint operations). Chaloner figured the next best thing was to cast doubt on the Warden’s integrity and competence. To this end, in February of 1697 he gave evidence at a special Parliamentary committee investigated alleged abuses at the Mint, itemizing how the relationships by marriage amongst the Mint staff indicated a pattern of self-dealing and duplicity. In effect, he claimed that the government’s own coins were being debased and clipped right at the Mint. To improve things, Chaloner offered a number of suggestions to increase the security of the coinage process. Perhaps a demonstration was in order? The committee commanded the participation of the Warden.

Needless to say, in response to the committee’s inquiries, Newton was upset and rather defensive (since he was not entirely sure the Mint staff he’d inherited the previous summer was entirely legit). He challenged to Chaloner to describe his reputed technical improvements and produces some samples using such techniques. When samples appeared, Newton showed the committee how inferior they were. Newton resisted entirely the committee’s desire to have the Warden allow Chaloner access to the “holy of holies,” the portion of the Mint containing the coining machines.

Chaloner continued to press his case with the parliamentary committee during the spring of 1697. Privately, Newton raged at the explicit and implicit slur on his character and competence. More ominously, he also turned loose his newly-assembled army of informants, agents and leg-breakers to start collecting information on Mr. William Chaloner. In the case of the missing Mint dies in the summer of 1696, Chaloner was just one of a long list of rogues being interrogated by the brand-new Warden of the Mint. That was Round One, so to speak. Less than a year later, Chaloner had cast personal aspersions on Isaac Newton’s character before members of Parliament. Newton would not forget that. It was personal and business now. Round Two was a draw but it had placed Chaloner completely in Newton’s sights.

Chapter 18 describes Round Three. Chaloner, after two passes against the Warden, was feeling invulnerable. He had every indication that continued pressure would encourage Parliament to give him or an associate access to the Mint and oversight of the Mint’s activities. And with knowledge of how the actual coins were made, he could fine-tune his counterfeiting operations on the outside and co-opt the Mint staff on the inside. Chaloner’s political sponsor, Charles Mordaunt, still had sufficient power and appetite to make the life of those in court favor less pleasant. But pestering political foes is not the same as overturning the Warden’s legal authority over the Mint. In the end, Mordaunt wasn’t willing to risk political capital to force Chaloner on a very obstructive Newton. As the spring of 1697 ended, Chaloner was shocked to hear that Parliament would grant him no perks, benefits, rewards, nor any access to valuable Mint secrets.

He was back to his own devices and sources of income. He quickly reformed his crew of counterfeiters from earlier years, including Thomas Holloway for logistics, a metalworker called Hicks for development of an innovative new molding process, and finally a John Peers for the final steps of filing and polishing the counterfeit surfaces. Unfortunately, the iron rule of criminal associates proved true. Peers was soon arrested on an unrelated matter in May of 1697 and squeezed for all he knew. He gave up Chaloner and the entire counterfeiting scheme.

Newton, however, only heard of this evidence about Chaloner by accident, three months later. He immediately arrested Peers and re-interviewed him. It was clear that Piers did not have any direct evidence against Chaloner since his role was limited to the final step in counterfeit production. So Newton turned Peers into an informant and sent him back to the gang with a few shillings to keep him going. Peers briefly was arrested by a thief-taker (news of Peers’ visit to Newton essentially confirmed him as a counterfeiter of some kind to the thief-taking world) but by this time Newton’s intelligence network got him the information immediately and Peers was released immediately back to collect more detailed information on the Chaloner gang. While Peers wormed his way further into the counterfeiting operations, gaining additional training, meeting with gang members held in jails, and participating with the coinage, Chaloner grew frustrated with the slow pace of manufacture.

Though he’d kept out of sight and away from the actual sight of counterfeiting, Chaloner needed money immediately. He returned to his previously successful routine of creating Jacobite sedition where none existed. He and an associate approached the Lords Justice on the last day of August 1697 to offer their services as couriers and spies for an alleged plot against Dover Castle. Unfortunately, they appeared before the court just as Newton was also appearing for an unrelated counterfeiting case. Newton spotted Chaloner, and informed the Justices about his investigation. They ordered Chaloner’s arrest.

Newton was worried however. The evidence against Chaloner for the new counterfeiting operation was still thin and very preliminary. The Justices were unconcerned. A jury would sort out the details, they said. Chaloner was back in Newgate Prison again but soon realized the weakness of Newton’s case. Chaloner arranged for the emigration of a key witness (his associate, Thomas Holloway) to Scotland, out of Newton’s jurisdiction. Other witnesses were threatened and soon recanted. Within weeks, the presiding judge in the case dismissed the charges. By the end of October of 1697, Chaloner was again a free man. The premature exposure of Newton’s case had doomed it. Round Three had gone to Chaloner.

Part VI: Newton and the Counterfeiter

The latest legal bout between Newton and Chaloner had left both shaken. The former, because his careful plans and gathering of information had been circumvented by witness-tampering, and the latter because yet another expensive counterfeiting operation had been disrupted by a stay in Newgate Prison. Chaloner no longer had the luxury of legitimate activities and testimony before Parliamentary committees. He needed money, and more crucially, he needed money to “make money.”

In February of 1698, he returned to Parliament for redress … claiming, with the acquiescence of this political patron Mordaunt, that “some” in the Mint were seeking his demise and constantly manufacturing evidence and witnesses against him. Newton was hauled before yet another parliamentary committee. Though the committee was stacked with Newton’s friends, it was clear that Chaloner might have a legitimate case to make. In fact, Newton had been assembling a web of informants and witnesses, some of whom had been paid for their services. In the end, however, Chaloner’s claims were dismissed but Newton’s reputation was certainly not restored. What really changed was Newton’s attitude. Chaloner had started as one of many counterfeiters. Then one of few elite counterfeiters warranting close attention. Now Chaloner had challenged Newton directly, repeatedly, and personally, standing up to the Warden after undermining a legitimate if premature prosecution.

Newton was about to return the favor and make Chaloner the focus of his fury and his intellect.

Chapter 20 describes the final round between Newton and Chaloner. The government, constantly seeking ways to fund King William’s continental wars, hit upon a lottery scheme that paid a prize for the few, and the equivalent of a fixed rate of return for the many who bought tickets. The Malt Lottery opened in April 1697 and because ticket-bearers received annual returns, the tickets became de facto paper currency. By June 1698, after his latest brush with Parliament and Newton early in the year, Chaloner was looking for a safe and profitable way to make money. Counterfeiting Malt Lottery tickets seemed like the solution.

By this time, Chaloner had run out of trusted colleagues … having either sent them into exile in Scotland, or ushered them off this mortal coil via the gallows to save his own skin. So while Chaloner engraved the plates necessary to counterfeit the lottery tickets, he still needed operational capital to complete the work. Unfortunately, the man he approached through an intermediary to fund the enterprise (one David Davis) was actually a paid informer and thief-taker for the Secretary of State. Since the lottery tickets were not currency, they were Treasury’s problem and Newton was not immediately informed about the infiltrated conspiracy.

Newton had not forgotten Chaloner, however. Though Sir Isaac could not compel anyone to do anything in Scotland, he’d reached out to Thomas Holloway there and arranged for him to return to England. When news of this reached Chaloner, he immediately shut down his operation, hid the critical printing plates, and disappeared. This collapsed the Treasury’s investigation that was being run by David Davis. Inadvertently, the Mint had stumbled over the Treasury’s case. In desperation, the Secretary of State for Treasury placed a 50 pound bounty on Chaloner’s head. And in London of the time, 50 pounds went a long, long ways.

Without too much delay, Chaloner was captured by a thief-taker and hauled to Newgate. With the immediate threat of waves of counterfeit Malt Lottery tickets gone, Treasury was content to hand the case against Chaloner over to Newton, who had his newly acquired witness from Scotland from the previously tampered case, plus an unquenchable thirst for Chaloner to swing from the gallows, once and for all. This would be Round Four.

Chapter 21 details just how much Newton had evolved and changed his strategy. A new and rigourous handling of William Chaloner was instituted. All the lessons he’d taught the Warden of the Mint about escaping justice in earlier days had been duly noted. Where Chaloner had once bribed jail guards, companions, and witnesses with ease, Newton now held all in Newgate Prison in a tight fist. None came in contact or spent time with Chaloner without Newton’s permission. Escape to, and communication with, the outside world was suddenly impossible.

Newton had learned further lessons. All Chaloner’s jail-mates were paid informants and owed their lives entirely to Newton. Newton could put a kaleidoscope of potential jailhouse witnesses beside Chaloner, night and day, for weeks. And Chaloner’s trial date was entirely at the discretion of the prosecuting magistrate, as was the formation of the jury or selection of a friendly judge.

Chaloner felt confident in making the case for his innocence (he had neither printing plates nor forged tickets on his person when he was arrested). What he didn’t suspect was that Newton had made a cold-eyed assessment of the English legal system and had figured out a way to nail a slippery character like Chaloner.

Newton learned from Round Three that a tight focused case was also a vulnerable case. A case that involved specifics was subject to bribery and generous witness tampering. Most witnesses, by the nature of counterfeiting, were themselves were guilty parties. Juries were hesitant to convict in capital cases if there was a hint that witnesses were perjurying themselves entirely for their own survival. Newton had discovered a way around the problem.

He would present a huge volume of witnesses and facts, assemble a long historical pattern of Chaloner’s personal behaviour, and let the jury read between the lines. All of Chaloner’s “near-death experiences” with the judicial system would be used to imply guilt rather than prove it.

In the meantime, Chaloner could stew in his own juices. Newton spent the spring and summer of 1698 gathering every bit of hearsay on Chaloner that he find. With that information he began assembling a comprehensive list of Chaloner’s associates. That would the pool from which he would “encourage” an equally comprehensive set of witnesses of Chaloner’s activities since his arrival in London. By January and February of 1699, with the recoinage largely complete, Newton was free to dedicate days of his time at a stretch to interviewing Chaloner witnesses. Though the record of Newton’s counterfeiting investigations are spotty and sometimes entirely missing, for this case alone there are 140 statements in the archives.

Newton wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Irrespective of what the actual court appearance brought, he would have all his facts in place beforehand. Newton made full use of the testimony of wives and mistresses in the counterfeiting schemes. As his base of information grew, he began to focus more intently on the primary conspirators in the Round Three coin counterfeiting scheme (and its emigré logistics chief, Thomas Holloway), and on the final Malt Lottery ticket scheme (including a distributor Thomas Carter, caught red-handed with tickets).

Word got out on the street that the Warden was looking for any and all incriminating information on Chaloner. A number of criminals on “Death Row” attempted to add their pittance to the pile in hopes of saving themselves. None were so saved, but Newton collected all details on Chaloner, large and small, nonetheless. Newton was assembling an army of individual witnesses, all confirming that Chaloner was in the counterfeiting business for years. The specific facts and details would fade into the background in light of the size and scale of Chaloner’s perfidy.

In Chapter 22, Levenson turns to Chaloner’s situation in prison. Initially, Chaloner hoped to turn the evidence of his co-conspirator Thomas Carter. But Carter had long since been co-opted by Newton and Chaloner finally realized he needed to keep his mouth shut. Then Newton inserted John Ignatius Lawson, former physician and elite coiner consigned to Newgate, into Chaloner’s cell. Not ever having been in any conspiracy with Lawson, Chaloner began unburdening himself to the man … who promptly informed Newton of every word. Newton wasn’t looking for incriminating evidence so much as Chaloner’s plans. And Chaloner duly began talking about those witnesses who might be most incriminating to him. Those witnesses would suddenly find themselves wheeled in front of the Warden of the Mint for a round of detailed interrogations.

Somehow Chaloner had received word that his friends on the outside had successfully tampered with the juries for the current criminal court sessions. And Chaloner himself started to consider whether providing the government the printing plates for the counterfeit Malt Lottery tickets might sway them to go easy on his sentence. All this and more filtered into Newton’s office within a day or two of Chaloner’s conversations.

Weeks passed. Newton had let two sessions of the criminal courts pass since Chaloner’s arrest and imprisonment. Another was upcoming in March of 1699. Chaloner must have wondered if the tampered jurors would stay bought over such long periods. Finally, Chaloner cracked and decided to write a letter directly to Newton, offering to tell all he knew.

In Chapter 23, we hear that Newton was willing to listen. In all Chaloner was to write three letters to Newton, and one to a judge of the criminal court (which Newton arranged to have copied). Chaloner’s desperation was becoming clear. The letters begin as calm denials of guilt … often moderated by admissions that he might have been an innocent bystander. Chaloner was hopeful that Newton would overlook the small matter of his claims before Parliamentary committees of the Warden’s incompetence and venality. Surely Newton wouldn’t hold that against him.

Newton read the first letter, and did not respond. Letter number two shows Chaloner’s understanding that he’d have to cough up some additional useful information on London criminal enterprise plus some likely candidates for his own crimes. He tried but it all came down to “I’m not guilty.”

Then Chaloner writes to a magistrate, Mr. Justice Railton, listing all his services to the Crown in exposing mis-deeds at the Mint and indeed his reward for having identifying those nefarious Jacobite printers, long years ago. It was such service, Chaloner claimed, that had inspired the enmity of those bearing witness against him. No reply from Railton exists and since the Warden of the Mint was entirely in control of his case, none may have been made.

The final letter was again to Isaac Newton. By the end of February 1699, with another session of criminal court imminent, Chaloner knew he was close to the end. As a final ploy, he claims that he lacked the technical competence to conduct the counterfeiting operations that have been claimed against him in the Malt Lottery ticket case. That this flew in the face of his many writings, protestations, and testimony about his knowledge of counterfeiting before both the Privy Council and parliamentary committees was necessarily glossed over.

Newton, throughout this period, remained silent. Chaloner’s letters remain in the Mint archive but there’s no indication that Newton even began a draft answer. Finally, Chaloner began having fits and showing signs of madness in his jail cell. Whether these events were real or feigned, no one in authority was about to believe William Chaloner on any matter, any longer.

On March 2, 1699, William Chaloner was brought before the court sessions at the Guildhall, where grand juries for London and Middlesex met to take part in trials. In Chapter 24, Newton presents three indictments before the jury, using just two witnesses from those he plans to use. Firstly, the counterfeiting of French pistoles, backed up by testimony by Thomas Taylor and Katherine Coffee. Secondly, the inducement of Thomas Holloway to escape to Scotland to avoid testimony on the earlier counterfeiting ring. Finally, a comprehensive indictment on a coining extravaganza in August 1698 where Chaloner was claimed to have created fake coins in gold and silver and in many denominations. After Newton’s presentation, the Middlesex jury returned the three bills of indictment as “true.” None were linked to the Malt Lottery ticket scam that Chaloner had expected. When asked what he pled, he remained silent. This risked a forced plea, potentially with iron blocks piled on his body. Chaloner eventually pled “not guilty.’

The next day, March 3rd, was reserved for the trial at the Old Bailey. Unlike modern trials, the 17th century featured swift and ferocious justice. There were no lawyers. Felony victims often stood in as prosecutors. In cases of crime against the Crown (such as counterfeiting), an agent of the state stood in as the aggrieved party. Chaloner would speak for himself. There was no presumption of innocence. Either he proved himself innocent or he wasn’t. The court would hear fifteen to twenty cases a day. Perhaps his case would last only minutes.

Worst of all, apparently Chaloner drew a notorious “hanging judge,” one not above a bribe by all accounts but one far too expensive for Chaloner’s purse to bribe … Salathiel Lovell. Now Chaloner’s history as a provocateur before parliamentary committees worked against him. Lovell would score major points by being harsh with a counterfeiter well known to the educated public and London’s underworld. Opening statements by the judges indicated that Chaloner was going to have a serious head-wind to overcome.

The trial was underway and it appears that Newton intentionally kept the train of evidence muddled. A series of six witnesses rapidly proclaimed their first-hand knowledge of Chaloner’s coining activities, stretching back seven years before the trial. From the perspective of the 21st century, it seems clear that the testimony was either fudged or slanted to amalgamate events that took part on different dates and in different places.

Chaloner could hardly criticize the testimony by parsing the details of the counterfeiting without admitting that it took place and he was there. Newton’s tactic is all too well known to us: throw enough mud and some will stick.

Testimony was soon complete. The judges and jury waited for a response. Chaloner claimed the testimony was perjured but apparently none in the court were willing to accept that the perjury might outweigh the overall impact and content of the testimony. Chaloner claimed that a Middlesex jury had no jurisdiction over events in London. True, but a nicety of law that none in the court apparently thought worth much. Others tried the same approach to better effect. A sympathetic judge could have released Chaloner but there was no sympathetic judge, nor indeed much sympathy for William Chaloner, in the court on that day. He had to speak once and hold his peace. Having done so, the jury retired for a few minutes and returned a verdict of guilty of High Treason. The next day, March 4th, sentence was handed down … Death, by hanging. The trial was over.

One last hope remained. Death sentences had to be reviewed promptly by the King and his ministers. Two of the nine brought forward on March 19th received royal clemency. Chaloner was not among them. On March 22, 1699, he was taken by sledge to Tyburn for hanging. A day or two earlier he’d had the counterfeit lottery ticket printing plates returned to the government. It did him little good. As a counterfeiter, guilty of High Treason, he was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. He was allowed to be hung until dead and his corpse mutilated … instead of his conscious body.

And that was the rapid end to years of back-and-forth between England’s great natural philosopher and England’s great counterfeiter. The tale of his life then fell to the anonymous biographer who quickly wrote a pamphlet following Chaloner’s hanging.

Epilogue: “He Could Not Calculate the Madness of the People”

Newton didn’t attend Chaloner’s execution. And his enthusiasm for hunting counterfeiters seemed to wane in the coming months and years. By year-end, Newton’s nominal boss died and in December 1699, Newton was appointed as Master of Mint. He was now in control of the entire institution and for the first time in his life, the recipient of an annual income (salary plus percentage fee per coin minted) that would make him indisputably wealthy.

In the new century he was to return to his natural philosophy studies and publish further on his optical research. His role at the Mint ensured that the mysteries of gold and silver trade would continue to play a role in his thinking. The problem with the incorrect English valuation of silver was finally solved when most of the silver coinage struck during Newton’s early years at the Mint simply headed to the Continent as bullion. Of necessity, the basis of the British economy shifted to gold … and was to give the British pound a pre-eminent place in the global economy for several centuries.

As for the debate over paper and metal money, Newton was to live long enough to participate in the South Sea Company stock bubble … and to be caught up in the frenzy of buying that was to ultimately leave him 20,000 pounds poorer. His annual salary as Master of the Mint was 500 pounds. Intellect was no substitute for good timing and market bubbles are certainly with us to this day.

Newton and the Counterfeiter describes a fascinating time when savant, bureaucrat and criminal were all attempting to cope with rapid economic changes and with the “meaning of money.”

General Impressions

It might seem like the “high concept” of this book (fish out of water/cat-and-mouse) lends itself to a Hollywood-style treatment that could “write itself.” Think “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” meets “The Untouchables.” There’s probably a bad movie in this book somewhere, starring Jeremy Irons. But this story is deceptively easy to epitomize. It’s much tougher to execute.

Professor Levenson’s task, blending the two stories together under a single cover and providing sufficient historical background for a 21st century reader, is non-trivial. Newton and the Counterfeiter presented an interesting challenge to any author. A wide audience has some sense of who Newton was … something about gravity and apples. But a much smaller set of readers is familiar with Newton’s social setting or with his role in late 17th century coining and counterfeiter-hunting. On the one hand, Levenson has to provide enough background to the reader so that they can understand the dramatic significance of Newton and Chaloner’s activities. On the other hand, he can’t overwhelm his audience with so much detail on 17th century London, and the politics of the time, that the reader loses track of the protagonists entirely. The story, in other words, has to survive the history.

That he succeeds so well is a testament both to his writing skills and to the balance he sought between too much information and not enough. I certainly don’t envy the amount of background reading required to write Newton and the Counterfeiter. I compare this book very favorably with the The Ghost Map, an excellent book I reviewed earlier for cb on a devastating cholera outbreak in 19th century London. Both books faced the same challenge. The reader needs quite a bit of technical and social background, even some psychological briefing, before historical events can be fully understood. Yet if an author digs too far into the details of England’s past, the main story fades too far into the background. While the author may have months or years of immersion in the subject, the historical period, and the controversies of current scholarship, the poor reader must be introduced to the material at break-neck pace, without losing track of the reason for the book in the first place.

Mr. Levenson did risk an occasional beating from specialist academics (and Britain’s poison dwarf journalists) for factual errors here and there (a selection of book reviews can be found through Google), but he took on the daunting task of bringing London vividly alive in the last decade of the 17th century, without drowning his story. He succeeded. This book is a real master class in the genre. Along with the aforementioned Ghost Map, this book illustrates just how beautifully historical non-fiction can be written for the general reader.

At times, it does seem like the reader can’t tell the players without a program … a Dramatis Personae. This is a dense story, involving two memorable characters, a multitude of supporting personalities, and a fascinating turbulent time in English history. Nonetheless, the reader can largely enjoy the tale without mapping out names, dates, and details. Someone reviewing this book … not so much. For fans of the time, or of Newton, this book will be a great pleasure.

I’d already read Gleick’s brief biography of Newton (recommended in Levenson’s Bibliography). And I’d already read widely on Newton’s contemporaries (such as Hooke) and Samuel Pepys) and the natural philosophy of the era (such as Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Soul Made Flesh). I’m not sure a general reader, coming to the subject cold, would take as much inspiration from Levenson’s hard work as I did. But the strength of the story really provides the momentum for any reader, and the more you already know about the period, the richer the reading experience.

Quibbles and a Tangential Rant

After reading a well-written book on a fascinating subject, it seems pretty mean-spirited to offer criticisms but perhaps dozens of hours, pages of personal notes, thousands of words (drafted and re-drafted), and my own Everest to climb in summarizing Newton and the Counterfeiter give me a brief license to snark.

The review copy I received had a dust jacket with what appears to be a Thames-side photograph of the Victoria Embankment, looking south to the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Bridge. Someone at the publishing house’s art department was either an idiot or had a wicked sense of humor. London in the 1690s looked nothing like the 19th century promenade (built over sewers) on the west side of the Thames. As a design, it beats a bust of Newton superimposed by a Photoshopped golden guinea … I guess. But not by much. After hundreds of pages describing how different Newton and Chaloner’s London was from our modern world, the author deserved better.

I do feel the book’s subtitle perhaps over-sells the idea of Newton as detective (let alone whether he’s the “world’s greatest scientist”). I think a better case can be made for Isaac Newton as the world’s greatest natural philosopher (or world’s Last Alchemist). This book certainly makes the case for him being one of England’s most effective 17th century bureaucrats. As described above, the climax of the story …the trial and demise of Chaloner … was altogether anticlimactic. After several years of confrontation with Newton, the counterfeiter had become a political liability. Newton finally grabbed him, tarred him in court with innuendo and the testimony of compromised witnesses, and the presiding judge dispatched Chaloner forthwith to the gallows. For Newton, it was “on to the next one.” While Levenson makes a strong case that Newton focused much of his energies on finally nailing Chaloner in 1699, it’s not entirely clear that the back-and-forth over several years with Chaloner engaged Isaac Newton as completely as it might look to outsiders. For the sake of selling the book, much may be forgiven. Nonetheless, fans of detective stories (let alone “great scientists”) may find the gruel a bit thin.

Law & Order aficionados won’t get complete satisfaction from Newton and the Counterfeiter but, as mentioned in my Holiday book roundup, fans of Isaac Newton and those interested in England’s 17th century economic history will enjoy this book a lot. This might be just the gift book for friends or family with interests in economics, physics, or the history of science. It’s definitely written so that intelligent high school students would find it interesting and comprehensible. If you’re looking for a book that might get the family’s science geek into history, Newton and the Counterfeiter might be just the ticket.

Mr. Levenson is a really literate man. And scattered throughout the book are modern American and British terms, slang, phrases or references that would make a general reader feel more at home. Being a Canadian, quite used to translating between the two vocabularies, these efforts stood out. I’m not sure they were entirely necessary but they may well provide emotional and visual landmarks for modern readers trying to orient themselves to 17th century London crime.

Let me now take a final detour to rant generally about non-fiction books on history and/or science in the 21st century. They are my joy, and often my frustration.

First off, it should be revealed that Mr. Levenson is head of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. The quality of this book speaks volumes for the wisdom of his employer. Along with the review copy which I received (far too long ago, I must note with shame), there was fascinating package of review and promotional material from the publisher which outlined some of Professor Levenson’s research activities that underlay the writing of this book. I found that material really interesting.

A year ago, in a review of a book on the story of the Antikythera mechanism, I said that I think authors have less and less excuse for a lack of explanatory diagrams and maps in books on science history. In the case of that book, for example, I was left to using Google Maps to locate the island of Antikythera in the Aegean, and to hunt out a number of excellent virtual reality simulations that dramatically complemented the author’s verbal descriptions of the famous mechanism. In subsequent e-mail conversations with the author, she indicated that the publishers were loathe to spare pages for illustrations and diagrams.

Fair enough. I’ve been involved in enough publishing projects to have fought the “space wars” myself, in multiples of 8, 16, and 32. Nonetheless, in the current age, authors who invest hundreds of hours in research “to render their ox into ox-tail soup” can still avail themselves of a permanent URL, just for their book, that provides a repository for all that they might have included in their book if the constraints of dead-trees were absent. Particularly for topics that are complex (for historical, scientific, or technical reasons), a book might be better thought of as the centerpiece of a wider range of materials, available at next to no cost online.

When Newton and the Counterfeiter was first released, for example, there was no Wikipedia entry on William Chaloner. Now there is … but I don’t think Mr. Levenson wrote it. There is an anonymous biography of Chaloner, published shortly after he was hung. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a chance to read it? Googling “Newton and the Counterfeiter” still leads one to many websites selling the book and some videos by the author … but no central permanent spot where the author might have offered supplementary or updated information on the subject of his book. If there were such a site, the book itself would have been a wonderful place to advertise the URL, at every opportunity.

Whether through voluntarily beefing up public sources like Wikipedia or by creating their own modest permanent website (in support of their book), I don’t see why authors can’t build ongoing relationships with motivated readers. I count myself among that group when it comes to Mr. Levenson. I’d like to read his next based on the quality of this one. Where will I go to learn about it? … though Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com will no doubt inform me in a timely fashion based on my purchasing history!

Ironically, the next book in my review queue is Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” His thesis: creators need to form ongoing relationships with readers that drive attention and build reputation for their work. And he put his money where his mouth is … he gave away the book in electronic form (audio/textual) and maintains an extensive blog interacting with his readers as he works on his books.

So without singling out Professor Levenson for any kind of personal criticism, or slighting the fact that as Head of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT he might be on top of this marketing and communication trend in professional writing … herewith I offer a short list of items that I would have loved to see on a website called newtonandthecounterfeiter.com, after seeing the URL in the book reviewed above.

• illustrations of the tools and techniques associated with the minting or counterfeiting of 18th century coins. I “imagined” these tools and techniques but I would also have liked to have seen them.
• “holographs” or scanned images of Newton’s notes on his counterfeiting cases and his “informations” taken in evidence from witnesses.
• the text or scans of the letters which Chaloner sent Newton in the last days of his life
• illustrations and maps on Newgate Prison
• same as above, for the Royal Mint
• text or scanned version of “Guzman Redivivus: A Short View of the Life of Will. Chaloner.”
• any additional or supplemental information on how the author conducted his research, assembled his book, and any regrets he might have had on the direction that either took. The press package was great. I’m sure other readers would enjoy it.
• the topic of Mr. Levenson’s next book and an estimated publication date

Let me conclude this short rant on non-fiction books, and the obsessives who read them, by simply repeating that Mr. Levenson’s book is great and reflects a lot of careful effort. It has a quality in writing and organization that I will never reach though I very much appreciate it. The subject matter is fascinating. And Isaac Newton was one strange and wonderful dude.

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Yon, Michael, Danger Close: The Michael Yon Story, Apple Pie Publishers, 2000, 400 pp.

Over the last decade, Michael Yon has emerged as a pre-eminent American military blogger. His photos from Iraq and Afghanistan appear occasionally in print media. Fox News will interview him and reprint his articles on their website. He’s heard on radio periodically with personalities like Dennis Miller and Hugh Hewitt. It’s in the blogosphere, however, that his impact has been the greatest.

He specializes in combat reporting and by some accounts, no journalist (professional or otherwise) has spent more time embedded with US and Allied combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than Mr. Yon. His travels with the military have also taken him to the Philippines, and training environments throughout eastern and southern Asia. His blog posts are illustrated by digital photography of a very high caliber. His insights into events, tactics, and troop morale are deeply informed by his earlier training as a Special Forces soldier. He knows the physical and mental challenges of combat, first-hand. He knows the sounds made by different weapons and their significance in the midst of the battles he witnesses. He’s often able to ask questions and evaluate troop conditions in ways that would escape a non-vet. And he’s drawn a dedicated following on Twitter and Facebook, especially amongst the families of troops that he spends time with. In many ways, he’s a unique voice and a unique set of eyes in the combat zone. The personal risks he takes to be with the troops are frightening, even second-hand. And his battles with army “public information officers,” over what he’s seen and what he believes, are almost as legendary as his combat reports. He speaks his mind bluntly and has paid the price for it a number of times. He gets booted out. Yet he keeps going back.

The sum total of his independent efforts has been a series of compelling and often harrowing pieces of online photo-journalism, supported largely through reader contributions. For the last few years, I’ve made periodic contributions to his blog’s Tip Jar, and sponsored the purchase of a box of his latest book (Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New ‘Greatest Generation’ of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope) for subsequent donation to the troops. I felt it was the least I could do to support a kind and quality of journalism I wasn’t seeing anywhere else. From time to time, Michael Yon mentions his personal history on his blog but his background is largely hidden. The audience must often read between the lines.

I’ve always been curious about how he had the motivation and confidence to take on the challenges of combat reporting, sponsored only by his readers. Fortunately, inexpensive copies of his autobiography are widely available through used book websites.

Danger Close is his personal story from childhood up to the time of his assignment to the 10th Special Forces Group in Europe in the 1980s. It covers his childhood in Florida, vacations in the southeastern United States, and completion of high school. Yon joined the Army directly from high school with the aptitude necessary to apply for Special Forces. First he would complete Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) … then onward to Special Forces pre-selection, and Phase I, II and III of the Selection Course. The autobiography concludes shortly after his completion of German language training at the Defense Language Institute facilities at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Soon after completing his Special Forces Selection course and receiving his green beret, he was involved in a bar fight lasting only a few seconds. It left Yon’s antagonist dead and Yon charged with second degree murder. That event forms the skeleton upon which his entire autobiography is hung. The ups and downs of Yon’s young life could hardly have been more extreme.

The first thing that becomes clear is that the Michael Yon of Danger Close is a very different person and a very different writer than the man posting articles in 2010. His autobiography is pre-9/11, pre-Iraq and Afghanistan. It stops before providing anything more than trivial details of his operational responsibilities in Europe during the last days of the Cold War. So it is partly a child’s story and largely a teenager’s story, reflected upon by someone in their mid-thirties. Mr. Yon’s childhood wasn’t easy, especially after the early death of his mother. And Mr. Yon’s experience with the US Army, right out of high school, are probably replicated by thousands of young men and women every year. What makes the story unique is Yon’s own personality and upbringing, and the way he coped mentally and physically with the extreme adversity that was part of his military training.

So current readers of Michael Yon’s work have a mental adjustment of their own to make. You’ll learn a tremendous amount about the man’s history and how he came naturally to his curiosity, courage, and cantankerous manner. But you’ll read about it by listening to an author intent on sorting out his own personal demons, irrespective of the audience. This is Michael Yon reviewing his early life like a man running his fingers over Braille type. Nothing of significance or dramatic tenor appears left out. It’s not a story of “how I ended up on patrol in Afghanistan” but rather “how I ended in Special Forces after a tough childhood.”

It is also, in many ways, Creative Writing 101. The experiences of his life that were most intense (physically and emotionally) are recounted with as much vitality as he could manage. He and his editors then faced the challenge of knitting all those recollections together into a coherent story. They succeed but not without a lot of effort. And, one assumes, a lot of writing and re-writing. Having been through the grind of such writing exercises myself, I know how hard it can be.

Building the story of one’s childhood, adolescence and young adulthood around a tale of legal jeopardy isn’t unheard of but it is still a technically challenging writing project. It probably isn’t the preferred choice for a novice writer. Rather than simply foreshadow the murder charge and then march uninterrupted from the beginning of his life to a climax, Yon chooses to interleaves the events of the fight, arrest, arraignment, and proceedings throughout. At the same time, he “flashes back” in the latter half of the book to his childhood and youth. The reading experience is therefore a bit jarring but the reader of 2010 has to adjust for a Michael Yon many years removed from the more polished writer of today.

I think Michael Yon (circa 2010) would return to the subject wielding a red pen more aggressively. An author who’d fully digested the course of his life would lend more stability of tone to recollections. As it stands, the book pops and explodes with passion in unpredictable moments. Occasional tangents on military tradecraft will fascinate aspiring young people but often let Yon’s broader story lose a bit of steam.

Clearly though, from childhood, Michael Yon was an unusual person. He was intelligent, audacious, small but feisty (out of self-preservation), and not very interested in fitting into a structured educational environment. If we can take his autobiography at face value, he was as skillful at getting into trouble as he was in getting out of it. Explosives, for example, were a teenage enthusiasm. Most of his adventures qualify as adolescent pranks however, and the focus of his life appeared to be outdoor activities with beloved grandparents and weight-lifting.

Yon’s childhood in Florida with a loving family and the dissolution of that family after his mother’s untimely death is recounted in the first person, even in the vocabulary and thoughts of a young child. His father’s remarriage and business failures led to a rapid decline in family fortunes. Yon became subject to physical and mental abuse and the details of his early life are very much geared to daily survival. His older brother had a mean streak that manifested as regular beatings for Michael. Like many dysfunctional families, outsiders were unaware of what was happening at home however Yon’s grandparents provided a respite from the family home.

The autobiographical details of the author’s life oscillate between the descriptions of intense emotions (loneliness, fear, anger, an unwillingness to quit) and the adventures of a boy in suburban and rural Florida, hunting animals for sport and food and observing the natural world.

As the years progressed and Yon left high school for the military, it was clear that the obstacles of his youth, and his physical conditioning were essential to his continued success. Yon’s descriptions of the various training exercises he experienced are memorable. Learning about dozens of weapons from around the world … jumping from airplanes and helicopters in the dark … living off the land while avoiding the enemy … precision navigation through the bush while avoiding capture. It certainly seemed like an adrenaline-pumping lifestyle. Blessed with good luck, intelligence, physical abilities, and audaciousness in dealing with the whims of Army life and bureaucracy, Fortune smiled on the young man during the rigors of his training.

Until a fateful night in a Maryland beach bar when Yon and his friend from the Special Forces Selection course were targeted for harassment by an obnoxious and mentally unbalanced drunk based on their close haircuts. Despite asking for help from the bouncers, somehow Yon became the focus of the larger man’s aggression. When the man closed in on Yon and threatened to kill him, Yon parried the first blow thrown and hit the man with three or four bare-handed blows to the skull. Yon ran from the bar, worried that the bouncers would blame him for the fight (and thereby risk his budding military career). What he didn’t realize was that the man was fatally injured. Yon’s Special Forces buddy rushed to lend first aid to the fallen drunk but by then the deed was done and the “killer Green Beret” was lose in the community. The story of how Yon was hunted, jailed, bailed, and finally vindicated by the courts goes a long way toward explaining his touchy relations with life and authority ever since. As a nineteen year old, he experienced how quickly life could change from exultation to despair.

Conclusion and Recommendations

For those familiar with Yon’s writing in the last few years, Danger Close is quite a departure from expectations. Published in 2000, the book reads like a polished college creative writing project … as if there would never be another book … so everything about the man’s life to that time was wedged in around the smaller but significant thread of his legal troubles associated with the bar fight. All the Yon passion is there, plus plenty internal pain that’s only hinted at in his blog postings. On the one hand, the book seems to have reviewed too much of his life to effectively frame his manslaughter charges. On the other hand, the book stops unexpectedly as Yon wraps up his language education and takes a vacation in northwest Canada. Did the printers run out of paper or did the author’s friends bring out the hook? It’s a mystery.

We’re now used to a terser, more focused writer in the wilds of the Third World. And a writer whose efforts have been widely lauded. Michael Yon should no longer feel like he has to make something of himself. Driven he may be, but forsaken he’s not. Ten years after the writing of this book, there’s so much more to tell in “The Michael Yon Story.” A second installment of his autobiography would benefit from both this experiences and his experience as a writer.

As for recommended readers for Danger Close … anyone who’s a real Yon fan will want this book to get a better sense of the author’s background. It’s a quick read and if particular parts aren’t of interest, they can be easily skipped.

Any young man with aspirations for an elite infantry career (Rangers, SEALS, Special Forces) will find a lot of useful information in the book … though they’ll have to wade through Michael Yon’s childhood to get there. Again, it’s not difficult to identify the content of interest. The Army does find a way to winnow through young men and identify those with the physical and mental toughness and the personality to succeed in different military environments. In Special Forces, it’s clear that intelligence, attention to detail, and innovative thinking are strongly encouraged. Young men with a greater appetite for day-to-day structure and a by-the-book solution to problems will likely look elsewhere in the military.

Yon is a product and exemplar of the Special Forces ethos. Here’s someone with no professional credentials or financial support, who strikes off into the unknown and learns as he goes. Despite the odds, he’s nonetheless created a portfolio of very memorable photos and articles describing life amongst modern combat troops. Self-starting and flexible. Self-confident and inquisitive. Yon’s autobiography explains a lot about what he brought to the Army and what the Army brought out of him.

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Jones, Ishmael, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Encounter Books, 2008, 383 pp.

This book is the career memoir of a former Marine and stock broker who entered the “non-State Department” clandestine service of the CIA and was a deep cover case officer from the ’90s through the late ’00s. It covers the story of his training, deployment, and activities overseas focusing on radiological and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the course of tours in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and finally a “combat tour” in Iraq. Serving overseas with his wife and children under the cover of a “software solutions expert,” he contacted disaffected or bribe-able scientists and business-people from rogue nations. By casting his inquiries as commercial and academic opportunities, he was able to gather a steady stream of intelligence on WMD programs in the Third World.

The central theme of the book, however, is how staff at the home office (from top to bottom) either intentionally or inadvertently got in the way of his doing an effective job. Most authors are the hero of their memoirs but Jones does an admirable job of giving his pride in his accomplishments a reasonable airing without masking the real value of his book. The CIA is a large modern business with a primary mandate to stay out of the newspapers and off TV. How it does so is a tale both depressing and all too familiar.

Other reviews of this book have proclaimed Human Factor a rather boring recollection of examples of institutional ineptitude and better as a guidebook for potential employees than a useful description of the CIA but I feel this is in fact the most useful book on the CIA’s clandestine service since:

Orrin Deforest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam, Simon & Schuster, 1990, 294 pp.

David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, Atheneum, 1977, 309 pp.

which covered clandestine case officer activities, first person, in Vietnam and Latin America.

Like these two aforementioned titles, Human Factor focuses on the day-to-day challenges of being a covert case officer … the “teeth” in any intelligence organization. It is noteworthy that the Director of Central Intelligence has rarely, if ever, been one of those covert (non-State Department) officers. It’s as if your dentist was being overseen by experts in small-engine mechanics.

Ishmael recounts the minutiae of what reports he needed to write, the porous e-mail systems he had to manipulate, and the permissions he needed to gain. The timing and delays of decisions from Langley … the phrasing and terminology that was necessary to get anyone back in the US to allow any activity whatsoever. As a former stock broker, Jones was entirely comfortable with the challenges of “cold-calling” and dealing with “No” over and over again. But this wasn’t the case for his fellow trainees or for any of his superiors. At every turn, he was able to contrast his experience in the Marines (and military culture), and with Wall Street’s “make the call” ethos, with what he was experiencing as one of the most at-risk members of the Agency.

Across hundreds of pages comes the tale of a large, risk-averse organization that’s inherited all the ills and current nostrums of big business/big government with even less accountability than commercial or non-profit institutions. Less nefarious than profoundly dysfunctional (as the title suggests), the CIA is portrayed as an intelligence agency with a huge “tail” … an administrative/support organization that consumes vast funds without any noticeable contribution to foreign intelligence that the Executive (the President) can use. Obsessed with “off-sites,” diversity programs, human resources initiatives, continuing education, political correctness, and correct grammar in the paperwork … the CIA appears entirely familiar to anyone who’s worked for government or a Fortune 500 company. I have, and therefore I found this book a profound education on how not to run an intelligence agency. I also recognized many of the same “zoo animals” and tricks of the organizational trade that make for nasty office politics.

Those “derring-do”-obsessed reviewers of this book, who missed the cloak-and-dagger excitement of CIA “tell-all” books, have also missed the point. The Human Factor isn’t a guidebook for those who sincerely want to protect their country. Only a very “slow” individual could read this book and come away optimistic about their chances of doing that in the CIA … either as a CIA officer in the State Department program (the CIA embassy staff), or the much more vulnerable non-State Department program where Ishmael Jones struggled to stay safe and effective for many years.

No, Human Factor, by reverse engineering, is the perfect guide for those expensively-suited “climbers” found in every large organization. In this book, such useless mouths can discover the thousand ways that Langley (aka “HQs” in Jones’ book) can increase budget, perks, and underlings relentlessly while reducing the risk of getting in trouble, or doing anything of value. Oh, I suppose the feeble utility of the polygraph (“The Box”) is also highlighted to great effect — inadvertently giving us such lethal CIA traitors as Aldrich Ames and his FBI counterpart Robert Hanssen. Regrettably, Human Factor provides an entirely benign checklist for how to co-opt the organization in aid of whichever of the Seven Deadly Sins a “new hire” might aspire to. Lust, Greed, and Sloth make regular appearances.

Jones describes an organizational culture with outdated training routines drawn from the good old days of the European Cold War. And a headquarters that’s chock-a-block with “blown” agents or those simply too stressed, corrupt, or inept to be allowed out of the country. The organization was so backward in its accounting and provisioning that the author was often obligated to wait years for personal reimbursement, quietly advancing the government $200,000-300,000 of his own money to support his family and fund his intelligence contacts. To avoid being returned to career limbo in the US, Jones could never describe or discuss any personal health concerns, or those of his family, to Langley. He would never report any problems with his children’s education or squabbles with troublesome landlords. To admit any problems at all overseas was to be returned immediately and, often permanently, to a “bench” of other case officers in the US who never seemed to return to more active duty. Many would drift from the aimlessness of Virginia to complete disillusionment and leave the CIA. Of Jones’ initial entry class of trainee case officers, less than a handful made it into the field and none lasted as long as the author.

To accommodate the birth of one of his children, yet not risk the delicate timetable of paperwork associated with making an approach to a prospective agent, he queued up requests to undertake three other slightly risky operations. Knowing that Langley would be paralyzed by his ambition and take weeks to come to a “No” decision, he was able to stay home with his wife, welcome his new child, and promptly pick up with his actual intelligence work uninterrupted. The theme of his career was to act before asking permission, downplay the risk of all his activities, pass along a steady stream of intelligence promptly, never report any problems in his personal life or the financial strains caused by his lack of prompt reimbursement for operational costs. The final key to his career success was to never complain when other CIA agents from the US or the local embassy staff poached his intelligence sources after he’d proven such sources safe, low-risk, and productive. Make no waves, claim no credit, and keep supplying information.

When the US office wasn’t making life miserable, the local CIA embassy stations would go off the deep end. Jones recounts an amazing tale of the Italian CIA station proclaiming that hotels were difficult to book in the country from early Spring to late Fall … so intelligence operations would be halted during those seasons. HQ agreed. With the camel’s nose under the tent, other stations suddenly found new reasons to avoid doing anything. Not to be outdone, the Swiss station soon discovered that they also were unable to find adequate accommodation for their operations during summer. Soon the German stations decided that the impending World Cup activities in Germany should mean that they should suspend intelligence activities for months. And the French, through strategic embarrassment of the Paris embassy CIA staff had simply intimidated the CIA into conducting no intelligence activities in the country, at all, ever. After all, they’re “allies.” Surely one hopes such tales are exaggerations or apocryphal … but they certainly match perfectly with the mundane procedural habits of the organization described in other passages by Jones. Companies (of whatever sort) have a culture, nurtured by management and sustained by the rank-and-file. Once absorbed, such cultures are slow to change.

Jones was constantly having to protect his own identity … both from state-side disclosure and from vindictive exposure by CIA embassy staff where he was working and wherever his family might be living. At every point, a false accusation could be made against him that his cover was blown, without attribution or supporting facts. His successes could give rise to jealousies that would lead people to sabotage his career. They would simply make up reports that he was being followed. This would mean Jones would have to hop on a plane to the US to plant countervailing gossip in the head office pipeline and make the rounds of managers to ensure that he could continue working “deep cover.”

All par for the course in a big corporation, of course. Sabotage, self-dealing, physical and mental illness, outright fraud and theft. It’s all there. But theoretically, officers such as Jones were to be discovering WMD and preparing their country for dealing with them. As we read of Jones’ activities through the late ’90s and through 9/11, it’s clear that both Presidents Clinton and Bush were ill-served by the CIA, when they weren’t being actively sabotaged. In some cases, permission for Jones to act was delayed … and by his own account this lead to President Bush and Condoleezza Rice working with less information than absolutely necessary at crucial points during the War on Terror.

Most appallingly, after 9/11, the Clandestine Service received a huge boost in funds but in secret was purging its non-State Department deep cover case officers and returning them to Langley. By Jones’ account, there were actually fewer case officers at work overseas after 9/11, while the number of CIA domestic offices in the US (where trainees and officers wouldn’t create trouble for senior managers) expanded dramatically. By counting the support staff for the Clandestine Service as “officers,” Congress was given the impression that the CIA was busier and more active around the world.

At many a point, the reader is left wondering why Jones continued with his career. It certainly seemed an endlessly frustrating job, even apart from the difficulties of the central task itself. Jones talks about his ups and downs over the years … and the many methods he used to camouflage his activities and make himself palatable (or at least, non-threatening) to his superiors. Particularly sad is the passage where he had a personal meeting with DCI Porter Goss after Jones applied to leave the CIA. Goss actually had operational experience as a case officer and seemed to recognize the institutional obstacles to effective intelligence collection. Jones was encouraged to stay and did so. Goss, however, was soon a victim of the management carousel that keeps the CIA entirely the province of the career managers who are only under Congressional or Administrative control in the most nebulous way.

In concluding chapters, Jones talks about a dangerous but uniquely productive tour in Iraq, working mostly with young contract case officers who’d come up through the military training programs that ironically had been organized by the CIA. The author was left very impressed with the assertiveness, expertise, and risk-taking of the military intelligence officers. At the conclusion of his Iraq tour, sometime in the mid-2000s, Jones retired from the CIA after four covert operational tours.

In Conclusion

As with any review, the details and subtleties of a book are left untapped. The Human Factor will be of value in proportion to one’s personal experience, one’s bad experiences, in big organizations. Jones provides dozens of anecdotes and examples of how the game is played in the CIA. Most were familiar to me, albeit in situations fraught with much, much less danger and significance.

Extrapolating such office politics into the intelligence sphere gives the civilian some deeper understanding of why the CIA has so often been unable to assist Presidents, from Truman onwards. Each era of American history brings forward different personalities with different appetites for service. Each era has its own social bugbears which have absolutely nothing to do with effective secret intelligence. The CIA is necessarily a government agency and the events of the last few years have given everyone pause in considering the effectiveness of organizations when there’s little or no accountability for employees and managers. Government bureaucracies form their own momentum which is focused on institutional survival, not on providing benefits. Because intelligence products are necessarily transitory and often difficult to assess by outsiders, the essential element of accountability and responsibility can no longer be applied to the CIA. As least as far as I can see, as a reader of The Human Factor.

A book such as this one is yet another argument for why America and the free world may ultimately be better served by the more dynamic tools of open source intelligence endorsed by people such as Robert Steele. Google Maps and Google Earth weren’t created by the military or the government satellite-mapping agencies. They are examples of re-purposing the tools of commerce, academia and, simple recreation into something that creative government employees can use.

Jones gives us little reason to hope for an effective CIA but with his own story and that of his colleagues actually in the field, under duress, we can still see the commitment, cleverness, and creativity that might allow the US to respond to adversity, even if it may not have the right resources to correctly anticipate threats.

Recommended For:

Anyone interested in how the intelligence community reflects government culture. Tea Party folk who are looking for another reason to be hopping mad. Anyone contemplating a career in the secret or semi-secret worlds. A cautionary tale.

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Midler, Paul, Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game, John Wiley 2009, 241 pp.

Paul Midler began his academic career in Chinese history and literature and then went to Wharton for an MBA and further graduate work in East Asian business. Fluent in Chinese, over the past ten years he spent his time in southern China working as a consultant to American importers and was witness to the economic boom that’s amazed the world.

This book, however, is about all the other things he witnessed … the methodical transfer of technology and profit to Chinese manufacturers and the methodical transfer of risk, liability, and innovation/marketing/design costs to American companies. “Poorly Made” is a master class in how ill-equipped American companies are to operate in “low circle of trust” cultures … even when those American companies are managed by savvy mercantile clans and even organized crime!

Midler introduces to the manufacturing world of south China through the eyes of his clients … names changed to protect the “innocent.” For Midler, his experiences formed a perfect complement to his academic training and the over-optimistic economic estimates created by his friends in the financial analysis business based out of Hong Kong and Shanghai. From a distance, it all looks pretty good. Close-up, when one watches how the factories operate, how products are formulated and packaged and shipped, it’s clear that a foreigners are veritable “babes in the woods” in the Chinese market.

Midler organizes the book into a series of educational vignettes in a variety of industries: health and beauty products, store display equipment, diamonds, aluminum construction equipment, paper recycling. He also uses his book to introduce the honeymoon and “marriage” between a crafty businessman trying to move into the US cosmetic product big leagues and a start-up Chinese factory that is just as interested in letting him unwittingly finance and develop their own growth into his business.

For the sake of brevity, let me paraphrase Midler’s “fable” which he introduces toward the end of his book. Say you arrive at a Chinese airport late at night and hail a cab … negotiating an inexpensive price for a trip to your hotel … US $20. Half-way to your destination, on a dark isolated stretch of road, your cabbie pulls over to the side of the road and declares the distance to your hotel is more onerous that initially thought and the price will now be $30.

Do you (A) pay the $30, (B) get out of the cab and stand by the road, or (C) accept the new price and try to pay $20 instead when you get to your hotel?

“Tough” businessmen, by the way, would typically opt for C and find themselves in a Chinese police station at 4am explaining themselves (and paying the $30 if they’re lucky).

As Midler illustrates through several hundred pages, in the absence of transparency in commerce and culture, options A, B, and C are effectively the only options the foreigner has. And, of course, a few months later, you’ll arrive back at the same airport to find that the cabbie now runs a fleet of cabs, all relentlessly subsidized by hamstrung foreigners. A year or two later and the cabbie has moved into real estate and is half-owner of the hotel you stay in.

This fable illustrates the method by which Chinese companies acquire foreign business and then squeeze up pricing on their customers until there’s no profit at the US (or foreign) end. By low-balling initial costs of goods, the Chinese partner acquires a source of funds and technology with little or no possibility that the foreign partner can discover where products are being diluted, adulterated, counterfeited, or sold out the back door to other countries or even First World competitors.

What the importer and customer doesn’t know literally can’t hurt them. Unless there’s melamine in the dog food or lead paint on your toy products … in which case the Chinese government and manufacturers will blame *you* and insist you apologize to them for any slur on their reputation caused by your complaints or threatened lawsuits … or you face expulsion from their country, loss of your assets, and collapse of your supply chain. Nice doin’ business with you.

So this is a situation where it’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” Business relationships are very easy to start (business travelers are generally safe and there’s a tremendous willingness to prototype products quickly) but profitable ventures are increasingly difficult to maintain … a tendency which Midler describes variously as “quality fade” when referring to products … and “relationship fade” when referring to the relationship between foreign and Chinese business partners.

The smaller foreign operators are working at an inherent disadvantage since they deal in smaller volumes and rarely have proprietary products or technology to give their manufacturers. As a result, they rarely receive discounts … and may watch their own products walk out the back door of the factory to the Third World with their labels on them. No need to counterfeit what you can steal directly.

Giant companies like Wal-Mart can initially get massive discounts on pricing but soon find that Chinese manufacturers (having been briefed on all the technology and market trends necessary to enter the American market) soon become indifferent to manufacturing quality. Wal-Mart may press back, or hire quality control staff at their own cost, but eventually the compliance and liability costs outweigh any potential profit at the US end. At some point, the Chinese manufacturers decide that “formerly manufacturing for Wal-Mart” is actually more valuable to them in the marketplace than continuing to manufacture for Wal-Mart. And suddenly Wal-Mart, mighty Wal-Mart, will find itself without a manufacturer.

Midler does a great job of showing the logical rationale for the Chinese treating each customer, even each batch of product, as an opportunity to maximize profit. In an environment where there’s no shortage of customers and no effective penalties for contractual malfeasance and domestic collusion, the sensible long-term Chinese view is to use each customer as a source of funds for rapid development and manufacturing “know-how.” Once sucked dry, they can be tossed aside. Importers get dispensed with as Chinese companies deal directly with the importer’s customers. Then the importer’s customers are next in line for pricing coercion and product liability. Pecked to death by ducks, a succession of bigger and bigger companies are taken to the cleaners.

All this makes fascinating if rather sickening reading. Long before Midler stops using any Chinese products on his skin (he doesn’t trust even the US brand names), one wonders whether the author figured that he was enabling staggering amounts of crookedness. Making a bad situation better still doesn’t make it good.

As the book concludes, Mr. Midler devotes only a page or two to hypothesizing that China, Inc. is using identical methods in its foreign relations as its manufacturers do with customers. Crying “poor mouth” and then throw a nationalistic hissy-fit when anyone questions whether a Han boot naturally belongs firmly on the world’s neck. Power without accountability appears the ultimate goal. Whether some kind of environmental or social catastrophe intervenes before we see the denouement of this strategy is anyone’s guess. The world is giving entirely positive reinforcement to the Chinese at this point.

What isn’t debatable, in my opinion, is the quality and value of this book for understanding the Chinese cultural and business perspective at this point in their history. Contrary to the pundits, Midler has made a strong case that a wealthier China will not be easier to deal with, will not be any more moral, and certainly won’t be volunteering to help make the world a better place. Expect lots more poisonous products showing up out of the blue in your local stores. And don’t expect the Chinese to accept responsibility for a second. Caveat emptor. Apparently, people and cultures that are so stupid in their negotiations deserve to be fleeced.

Anyone with an interest in foreign policy, and the meeting of industrial and industrializing nations will find this book of great interest. It’s a perfect companion to Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy which I reviewed a few years ago on chicagoboyz. Between products that are illegal and those that are relentlessly substandard, there’s little difference. Our gluttony and greed are fueling globalism as relentlessly as cheap fuel and telecommunication.

A final bit of food for thought.

Wonder where all that spam comes from?

Midler found a wonderful paper recycling plant in southern China where paper products were resorted into 30 categories from the initial 12 categories used by the US. The local workers make 1/25 the daily wage that the illegal immigrants in the US get paid to do the preliminary sorting … plus the Chinese workers sleep on-site and buy their food from their boss. Much more efficient. And the owner’s warehouse? It’s filled with business correspondence and print-outs from Wall Street that are a treasure-trove of names, phone numbers, job titles, e-mail addresses, and company initiatives. Little wonder that American IT companies are sieves for Chinese hackers and Google is their main target. Sweet dreams!

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As someone who’s written several times (here and here) about the course of modern health care (its inherent complexity and cost), I’ve been watching the latest moves in US health care funding with a great deal of interest.

From the introduction of antibiotics to the breakthroughs in transplant surgery, medicine in the 20th century was in a position to provide dramatic improvements in health care (both quality of life and length of life) at relatively modest cost. Many consider it a golden age in medicine. My personal belief is that medical care is about to hit another burst of creativity and success (but at much higher cost-to-benefit) as non-invasive imaging, micro-surgery, diagnostic testing, and DNA-propelled pharmaceutical customizations kick in. I may be wrong, but I think my beliefs are a reasonable extrapolation of the trends in medical care since the end of the 1970s “silver bullet” period of medicine.

So what do my guesses about modern medicine mean in a new era of greater tax subsidies for US health care? An era which, by necessity, must politicize health care further. It got me to thinking about the hidden subsidies during earlier periods of American history, powered by the domestic political systems of the time, and driven by citizen/voter appetites. And it got me thinking about the law of unintended consequences.

After a few minutes scribbling on the back of an envelope, I came up with the following:

I’m hardly an historian nor an expert but l think the diagram above identifies at least some powerful appetites in American society that were supported and encouraged by political powers at the time. Appetite begat political response. Politics generated subsidies. Subsidies generated yet more appetite. A first American subsidy, even before political freedom, was obviously economic opportunity … which in a pre-industrial society translates into land ownership. Away from European cities and epidemics, early Americans had few limits on their ability to clear and thereby own the land which they settled. Force of arms would remove the land from Native American or Spanish/French control. High reproductive rates and greater life expectancy created a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who also desired their own property. The laws in place, and the decisions of authorities, supported the development of squatting and land purchase which built up its own momentum in the 18th and 19th centuries … defying both British imperial preference (to keep the colonies east of the Appalachians) and the hostility of Native Americans to the methodical conversion of their land from hunting/gathering/subsistence agriculture, to the newly vibrant agricultural practices of the English-speaking world. Every phase of economic development … agricultural equipment and railways … drove further expansion of land development. As late as World War 2, land clearing for agriculture was still underway up North. 350 years.

In partnership with the desire for land was the desire to escape the religious conflicts of the European continent. For Protestant Christians, members of a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of sects and denominations, the development of laws and political traditions that would provide them with freedom of worship were important … and sustained a suspicion of clerical central authority that lasted well into the 20th century. Laws and political traditions responded accordingly. The concept of religious exemptions encouraged churches to acquire their own economic assets.

As part of that religious tradition, dating back at least to the late 16th century, literacy and education were encouraged and seen as an important part of full participation in both religion and society. As time went by, public funds took over from religious organizations in the sponsorship and maintenance of primary and secondary education. Schools were important, and worthy of parental supervision and participation whether on the frontier or in the city. The provision of schooling was therefore a significant political concern as well. The “Land Grant” educational Acts of the late 19th century were a major commitment of funds to the parts of America that were still being settled. The development of these educational institutions was to carry the western part of the country through the transition from predominantly agriculture and resource-extraction, to industrialization and the modern service economy.

As industrialization took hold, and the farms were emptied in the early 20th century … the “hired hands” who once aspired to land ownership were now workers in factories, mines, and urban industries. A new demand for safety and collective bargaining for wages was matched by a burst of laws and regulations governing the formation of unions and the status of labor. The idea of a pension income after a lifetime of service to a company became commonplace. Social Security in the 1930s reflected a new concern that some regions of the country, and some families, were simply unable to provide sustenance for the very elderly. The definitions of “sustenance” and “elderly” were to broaden in following decades. In latter days, we’ve seen a further subsidy of financial arrangements as individuals have become responsible for their own pension schemes (401Ks) and a constellation of laws have made retail investing (and the associated services) a going concern.

Soon after 20th century unionization had changed the terms of work, the workplace, and “retirement,” a new benefit was encouraged by law, tradition, and government … reflecting the aspirations of a newly prosperous and newly urbanized population … home ownership. And thus for many years, the tax regulations, laws, and financial instruments of the United States have leaned heavily toward subsidizing home ownership. Sometimes those subsidies have been generous to the point of silliness (the so-called NINJA loans).

In the post-war era, a college or vocational education changed from being a rare opportunity to an expectation, almost a right. Through direct and indirect subsidies, governments encouraged the expansion of post-secondary education. Educational institutions became non-profit engines of growth … fueled by industrial and government subsidies, and tuition that outpaced inflation. Educational quality now became a distinguishing feature in pricing. The assumption of personal debt in the pursuit of a college or university degree was widely considered reasonable. Certainly the income of college graduates seems to have held up far better in the latter half of the 20th century than that of agricultural and industrial workers.

And finally, health care … and the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-Sixties, which first subsidized health care for citizens during what I’ve proposed was a unique “golden age” of medicine. These programs have since grown like Topsy, to the point that they are woefully underfunded. As we know from the heated discussions surrounding the latest debates on tax-supported health care, the hidden penalties placed on the public health care system to provide emergency room care to all comers, and Medicare treatment at less than cost, has led to the disappearance of many non-profit health care organizations. Someone has to pay. Non-profit can’t be “negative-profit” for long. Either the taxpayer, or the health care plan purchaser, or the company health care plan (and therefore corporate customer) has to pony up. Of course, we’ve seen there’s another option: … make the next couple of generations of citizens pay for current consumption.

Reflecting on four centuries of political subsidies in America, it seems to me that sustainability only comes if the populace is willing to drop some subsidies in order to gain new ones. Land ownership (forty acres, and a mule) gave way to salary work. Not without resistance, mind you. Religious freedom gave way to religious indifference and the dwindling of denominational political power. The union pension (and associated “Cadillac” health care plans) are now limited to government employees and the aging members of dying industries.

Unfortunately, as the diagram above indicates, that still leaves the US with a very full plate of political subsidies to squeeze out of the electorate, and the electorate’s kids and grand-kids.

To make a long story short, then,

* if medical care is about to get more and more expensive (because there’s just more of it), and
* if good medical care and great medical care are more easily distinguished, courtesy of the Internet

Price-pressure on the very best care will be relentless. How many politically subsidized aspirations can the nation support then? How much room is there on that American subsidy plate?

“Retirement”

“Home ownership”

“College education”

“Medicare/Medicaid”

All have been subsidized by past US prosperity, leading to unsustainable “bubble” demand and pricing in the last forty years. Retirements that start too soon and last too long. Home ownership (why not a cottage as well!) far beyond physical need. College education inflated in cost and reputation by self-perpetuating bureaucracies rather than employment requirements. Unfunded liabilities for the medical care of millions of poor Americans, run as a giant Ponzi scheme with the hope that kicking the can down the road will solve the problem on someone else’s watch. Expectations have been established. But which of these cultural expectations and political subsidies will fall away first? In the words of the wise-ass market pundits, “you can make it hop but you can’t make it fly!” You can run up the credit card to pay for the subsidies but eventually the bill comes due.

Having just added a massive set of subsidies in the domestic economy for a service (medical care) that is enhanced by basic scientific and industrial research (and by the inherent frailty of the human form!), I think America has placed its chips on the next big “bubble” … maybe the last big bubble … in human appetite. As one Internet commentator noted … do you really have something better to spend you money on than your health? Not something more preferable but something better. What dream will you give up in order to add a new one to the American subsidy story?

Just as our parents and grand-parents no longer expected to have their own farm, and we gave up trading 35 years of our life for a union pension, we’re going to have to start talking to our kids about what we’re going to give up to get this new health care dream, as and when and how we need it. For everyone in the American boat, legal or not. With the vision of “best possible care” all too visible before us, like foreign vacations, McMansions, and Harvard degrees.

Interesting times ahead.

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Smith, Lee, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, Doubleday, 2010, 256 pp.

Strong Horse is a series of conversations, observations and recollections of the author’s experiences in the Middle East over the last decade … focusing on Cairo, Beirut, Israel and Damascus. Living in Brooklyn, Smith took the events of 9/11 as a personal challenge to study in the region. That led him to discussing the political and social culture of the Arab world with individuals as varied as Sufi scholars, Koranic recitators, Lebanese Druze warlords, and Cairo doormen … engaging as well with more famous names such as Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian Nobel Laureate in Literature), Edward Said, Omar Sharif, and Natan Sharansky.

As the title of the book suggests, Smith feels the conflicts of the Middle East are largely an internal clash of Arab civilizations and involve the “captive” peoples (Copts, Druze, Christians, Jews, Sufis, Shia, etc.) who must somehow survive with Sunni majorities and governments in the region. The spillover of violence into the West, while constant, is therefore largely a secondary effect. The key question, the author believes, is over “who’s the real Muslim?” Since that bloody debate, by definition, doesn’t extend to the infidels, violence in the non-Muslim world is usually some form of manipulation in benefit of domestic agendas. The evidence of the last decade suggests the Arabs reserve the lion’s share of their bile and violence for each other. Though they provide unrelenting warnings about the dangers of inciting further violence by Muslims (through American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan), such concerns never seem to translate into a lighter hand by authorities within the region. It is this observation which leads Smith to propose that “strong horse” politics was, is, and will be, a enduring principle in the Middle East … and widely supported by Arabs of every persuasion.

For Smith, Arab antagonism to Americans and Westerners is fundamental, being as they are neither Muslim nor, more importantly, Arab. The various Arab tribes and sects who feud endlessly amongst themselves do not permit any profound reconciliation with the Other, either across the religious and ethnic boundaries or within them. Muslim willingness to leverage Western allies against other Muslim powers is built right into Islamic history, as outlined with methodical effort in Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History, reviewed earlier on chicagoboyz here.

The author’s conclusion after his travels and conversations over the last decade is that “overthrow, domination, and eventual collapse” is a political pattern long established amongst the Arab tribes, largely reinforced (not introduced) by Islam, recognized for over half a millennium by Arab historians, and it shows little or no sign of change in the 21st century. The strong horse is the model for successful political change in the region. It was not chosen as a metaphor by Osama Bin Laden on a whim. And it resonates deeply within Arab culture. It is the aspiration of all participants in the political process in the Middle East, in Smith’s belief … and any discussion of peace (as opposed to interim truce) is a form of cultural betrayal. And punished accordingly. Despite the fact that this cultural habit reiterates destructive cycles without end, it cannot be relinquished without giving up a fundamental cultural narrative. The toxic results are self-evident to modern Arabs but if Smith is to be believed, they are caught in a situation where all they can do is “double down” on the model of political change that has served them very poorly in the past. Struggling to cope with the impact of two centuries of Western technology and culture, the Arab hope is that an Arab Strong Horse will arise. The reality is that it is the United States, and inadvertently Israel, that have found themselves in the role of Strong Horse in the Middle East. The burden of the role is that all parties in the region look to gain favor and/or manipulate the destruction of their domestic and regional competitors by playing games with the Strong Horse. As Smith quotes in passing, Arabs are better at feuding than warring. At the point at which they are able to escalate conflict to war, inevitably it is their culture and self-regard that pays the price. What was true of Napoleon in Egypt is now true of America in the Middle East.

Apart from giving the reader the interesting opportunity to listen directly to ordinary Arabs from many walks of life describe their world to Smith, Strong Horse does a fine job of introducing the history of the theme of “renewal” that has been developed by Arabs since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the early 19th century. That invasion was to shine a light on the backwardness of Arab technology and power that’s reverberated through the centuries. Like Bernard Lewis before him, Smith notes that the Arab world’s failures in the military and technology realm are not merely political failures. Because Islam is the newcomer amongst the People of the Book, a failure to dominate Christians and Jews, and suppress the various “heresies” within Islam itself, casts doubt on Muhammad’s authenticity as Prophet and the essence of his message. Apostasy is a major concern in the Muslim world. The response of the “liberal” strain in Arab culture to the shocks of the Industrial Revolution and European dominance was not to begin a process of Koranic hermaneutics (a process, as noted here, fraught with danger to this day), but rather a house-cleaning of Islamic hadiths or commentaries, and an attempt to return to the time when Islam was unsullied by Sunni-Shia splits, by Caliphate collapse, by Mongol disruption and Turkish hegemony. The good old days, in other words. And a very tall order for any political philosophy.

Smith interweaves his conversations with modern Arabs with the history of Arab political thought, especially the pan-Arab movements that sought to respond to European occupation, and more latterly (post-Nasser), the 20th century rise of Islamic “purification” as a political solution to Arab woes. To kick things off, the author turns to the Arab world’s most widely-known medieval historian. Ibn Khaldun identified the Arab pattern of “rise and fall” some six hundred years ago. Even then it was seen as a very old tradition. Ironically, Khaldun’s own scholarly efforts, greatly admired in the West, were to subject him to abuse and imprisonment by the authorities of the day. For me, as a reader with a passing familiarity with the scientific and cultural history of the region, this detail of the great historian’s biography jumps out. As Smith notes, and other authors such as Toby Huff (The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West) and Christopher Beckwith (Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present) substantiate in great detail, intellectual innovation in the Arab World is often rewarded with torture, assassination, and death. Often the innovators are outsiders (Ibn Khaldun a Tunisian, for example, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) a Spanish Muslim) and their lives are often spent back-pedaling from insights and commentaries of their youth. A golden age of scholarship and organized education appeared to be in collapse by the early 12th century, with the writings of Al-Ghazali bringing the Arab enhancement of Hellenistic philosophy to a permanent end.

Smith, however, focuses not on the time when the Arab world gave up its lead (and its interest) in natural philosophy but on the the liberalizing and modernizing trends of the 19th and 20th century as they appeared in the Middle East. Ironically, and as noted in Michael Oren’s book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (reviewed here on cb), so much of American involvement in the Middle East began as an accommodation to the limits of Christian proselytization in the Ottoman Empire. It was through medicine and education (the “American University in …” system) that American missionaries came to influence the region. And indeed, they were the “good guys” (in contrast to the British and French) for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. The intellectual discussions amongst Arabs of the way forward eventually generated a movement of “return to Islamic basics.” This approach fully accepts the West’s technology but rejects its political and cultural values. The process of suppressing dissent (weeding out heretical or fantastical hadiths), and promoting intellectual agendas through violence, is often undertaken by the individuals in society (e.g. doctors, engineers) who are notably apolitical in our own world. Just as the natural philosophers of an earlier Arab era found themselves under attack, the political/religious philosophers of this later era contend with their national authorities. In their appetite to become the Strong Horse, they set up a cycle of violence which often consumes them personally.

Smith works his way through the history of the last two centuries in the region and identifies the intellectuals of the period that came up with the approaches we now know as Wahhabist or Salafist, and the eventual evolution of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The guiding lights of the modern Arab rationale for worldwide jihad are all there:

Muhummad ibn ‘Abd Al-Wahhab 1703-1792 (casting a baleful eye largely on other Muslims)
Jamal-al-Din Afghani 1838-1897
Muhammad Abduh 1849-1905
Rashid Rida 1865-1935
Sati’ Al Husri (1882-1967)
Hassan al-Banna 1906-1949 (formed Muslim Brotherhood 1928)
Sayyid Qutb 1906-1966

The story of how Arab intellectuals responded to the Western world … casting hither and yon for a solution to their inability to fulfill their religious destiny and assume their correct role over dhimmis and heretics … meeting failure at every turn … is solemn reading. No bad idea appears to have been left untried. Domestic politics in many Middle Eastern countries appear to outsiders to consist of a fearsome police state riding herd on a bubbling stew of various ethnic, religious, and sectarian divisions. Every new technological innovation, from firearms, to explosives, to television, and cell phones opens up a new front for argument, then oppression and violence.

The Arab ability to generate and maintain antagonism within their own world appears inexhaustible when presented in this light and Smith looks to explain this. Israel, to the author’s mind, is a convenient bogeyman in the region which now performs the role of designated Strong Horse. Street cred comes from resisting that Horse. The reality is that the Arabs and the many minorities undermine each other’s national and economic aspirations. The security services of the Middle East are demonstrably capable of working with nominal enemies to destabilize (or, better yet, threaten the destabilization) of their next door neighbors. Every Arab man’s hand apparently against the other. With mutual assured destruction for whatever clans are at the top of the Arab nation-states should they stray from the ancient habits. Ironically, it is now Israel that acts as buffer and guarantor for the Sunni states against a resurgent Persian Shia state, and Arab Shia populations throughout the region.

Cultural habits seem to work against forming a consensus that would actually create the pan-Arabism that was so urgently longed for in the middle of the 20th century. All, however, are apparently certain that the Jews and Americans are the cause of all their suffering to a minute degree. Washington, in this worldview, watches every Arab nation and power group with a close eye. All through this book, Smith is a conscientious and generous rapporteur of these viewpoints. The reality, as those of us in the West know all too well, is that the citizens of the G8 are industriously indifferent to the Arab world except when absolutely compelled to be otherwise. In some ways, I suppose this is the more grievous insult. To be despised is one thing. To be ignored, entirely another. Does this mean more generations of Arabs “acting out” in order to gain status, or favor, or assistance? That’s a sobering thought but I think this book goes some way to making that case.

With such a conclusion, I believe it can be safely said that Smith falls within the “school of skepticism” about Arab democracy but he is certainly more sympathetic to the culture and the people than some earlier authors who feel that Arab and Islamic culture is irredeemably toxic to itself and its non-Muslim neighbors. Smith is not so pessimistic as to write off the Middle East indefinitely, but he’s at best neutral about the potential for true liberal belief and behavior in the region any time soon. Tying modern antagonisms to ancient habits (which long predate European, let alone American intervention), he’s certainly not optimistic for the Arab world’s abandonment of terror and violence as an accepted method of governance, and dynastic succession. The architecture of Cairo itself gives him a perfect way to illustrate the shifting tides of Muslim belief as caliphate and Mameluke, Sunni and Shia, each build mosques in the city proclaiming their enduring authority and Islamic authenticity. Each, in turn, is overturned violently. To Smith, modern Egyptian political structure, irrespective of its European veneer and American subsidies, is entirely within the flow of Arab tradition of the past millennium. The momentary fluorescence of a Westernized model of Arabic culture in the 20th century, as illustrated by authors like Mahfouz or actors like Sharif, seem largely lost.

Latter parts of Strong Horse spend time in discussing the realities of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel … and the momentum created by Iran to use Syria and Hezbollah as their proxies in establishing Shia prestige in the Middle East. As noted above, ironically Israel becomes the region’s Strong Horse, providing indirect protection and stability for Sunni majorities west of the Euphrates by counterbalancing Iran’s military force. It’s hard to imagine that this state of affairs gives Arabs much comfort. Though Iran can bluster and threaten its Jewish and Sunni neighbors, it must (at least for now) work through proxies in order to make good on its threats. As for George Bush’s legacy of the last decade, Smith believes the events in Iraq and Afghanistan may well turn out to be the most momentous in Arabic history since the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258. In setting the Shia above the Sunni in Iraq, an Arab (rather than Persian) Shia power has been established. America, for better or worse, now has the power to intimidate all parties in the region whether it goes or stays. The natural zig-zagging of democratic America in forming foreign policy can only create heartburn in a region that must broker status with the current Strong Horse to compete with its domestic antagonists and regional competitors. What seems like transitory dithering in America translates to life and death in the Middle East. The US is in the position of arbiter and guarantor of a multitude of unofficial agreements which prop up the Arab world … whether freedom of the seas, access to oil, or military/technological subsidization. From Smith’s point of view, then, the US is cast in the role of strong horse whether wanted or not, and as such, people in the Middle East will see it both as tyrant and benefactor simultaneously, and indefinitely. That means complaints and begging aren’t likely to end any time soon. And idealistic American foreign policy, untempered by the application of real power, will perpetuate bloodshed.

Conclusion

Strong Horse is a fascinating, if unsettling, read because Smith lets the Arabs speak for themselves, across their various economic situations, locations and denominational differences. Arab dreams of the last fifty years have been largely dashed. A dread of the future is widespread. Yet it is matched with a world-view that still seems largely fantastical to a Western reader, and inevitably blood-soaked. The author’s conversations do seem to reflect a deep trust by the people who spoke openly to him. Where he asks follow-up questions, they are probing, if respectful.

This book is an excellent complement to more rosy assessments of political change in the Middle East. People with a long-standing interest in the region will find it a quick and somewhat contrarian view, by someone without a professional axe to grind. It’s a relief to hear about the region from someone who doesn’t have an academic, diplomatic, or journalistic career to advance. Strong Horse will also be of interest to those fascinated by the question of European, English and/or American exceptionalism. Does culture matter? Smith’s book would suggest that it does, and it will. For Israelis and Americans who find credence in Smith’s assessment, the book has rather ominous implications. Both countries will be co-opted into the ancient Arab political tradition of unquenchable grievance, of “Resistance to Illegitimate Power” … of people alternately vilifying and passively suffering the Arab governments of the day. America may yet be honest broker, bogeyman, and benefactor for generations of Arabs wedded to violence as their only tool for change.

Strong Horse is written well, and written for the general reader. It’s a quick read but for those with limited time or interest, you’re in luck. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt gave the book a careful and thoughtful reading, and then invited Lee Smith on his program for an extended interview. The transcript of their conversation here is a tribute to Hugh Hewitt’s intelligence. I wish my review could have given Mr. Smith’s book half as credible a summary. To Hewitt’s great credit, his interview manages to cover all the central points of a book while engaging the author in a deeper conversation about Smith’s views on the future of the region. For additional commentary by Lee Smith, check out his recent article in Slate on the Obama Administration’s treatment of the Israelis. Realpolitik at its grimmest.

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Groopman, Jerome, How Doctors Think, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

This book is several years old but deals with timeless subject matter that might be of interest to cb readers. In the past decade or two, a major initiative called evidence-based medicine (EBM) has tried to improve how medical research is conducted and how it is used in everyday clinical practice. It’s the application of the scientific method (with all its strengths and weaknesses) to confirming how we know what we know about medical practice. Some examples of such efforts “organized improvement” were covered in a book I reviewed earlier on cb called Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. Like Dr. Gawande, Dr. Groopman writes extensively for the New Yorker. The resulting quality and clarity of his writing in How Doctors Think stands out. Either he or his editors are very good.

In How Doctors Think, the author looks at a very different avenue of medical improvement. Deductive, evidence-based, medicine necessarily involves many patients and the careful collection of information about how a treatment works for large numbers of people. This is the foundation for proving the efficacy of particular treatments for particular populations, and winnowing out cases where doctors are “fooling themselves” about their treatment. Not fooling ourselves, as physicist Richard Feynman once pointed out, is one of the great challenges of science. The folks doing EBM research always give themselves a good laugh by evaluating the mathematical and statistical skills of the average GP. Interpreting the scientific medical literature is a real skill. One that needs to be taught and reinforced. As a baseline, we can aspire for a medical profession that can dependably read, critique, and interpret its own research.

The inductive process of forming a diagnosis and executing treatment with a specific patient benefits mightily from the disciplined research of EBM, but it by no means replaces the services of skilled physicians. Checklists or AI applications in medicine can reduce egregious errors, but human judgment, matched with experience and rigorous thinking, are necessary components of health care. And that’s the focus of Groopman’s book.

Humans present with a bewildering array of symptoms. Which ones are important? People (especially kids) may have limited language and vocabulary skills. They may have limited understanding of their own bodies. And be embarrassed by what they do know. Diagnostic tests are subject to a range of problems that can lead to “false-positive” or “false-negative” results. How much re-testing is warranted? Indeed, as I discussed in an earlier review of a book by Greg Easterbrook, diagnostic medicine is becoming inherently more complex, feeding more and more information back to the physician rather than less. For example, the recent fad for full-body CT scans can identify a wealth of physical anomalies or sub-clinical problems in any individual. Such variations from the mythical norm may, however, have little or no health impact. But when matched with mysterious symptoms or illness, the information overload created by the latest generation of non-invasive tests is guaranteed. So how does the physician separate the important from the trivial, hundreds of times a day?

We don’t really have a handy rubric to describe this face-to-face process. “Medical decision-making” is a handy term but it masks a great deal of subtlety. Psychologists (primarily from the social and cognitive branches of the discipline) have recently been looking more closely at exactly how doctors make their clinical decisions (from diagnoses through treatment). Groopman’s book is about their most notable discoveries, and whether these new insights about how doctors make decisions can be used to alter the education and work habits of modern medical practitioners.

A moment’s reflection by any lay person might come up with their favorite list of physician shortcomings …

• too fatigued,
• too busy to listen more than a few seconds,
• jumping to wrong conclusions,
• just plain incompetence,
• too constrained by insurance rules
• or legal demands
• or subtle economic self-interest.

Dr. Groopman touches upon all these issues in his book but because he’s a practicing doctor at a prestigious teaching hospital, he’s in a position to look at a much wider range of errors and biases in physician thinking … both from his position as practitioner and teacher, and from his experiences as a patient and the parent of a sick child. The author combines interviews with senior physicians with digestible summaries of the scientific research on how choices are identified and made in particular patient cases. The fascination in reading his book comes both from the human interest, a standard component of every medical TV show, and from the candid discussions between practicing physicians about where they’ve gone wrong and what they do, mentally, to avoid those errors in the future.

The result of the author’s efforts is an excellent, though sobering, look at the multitude of ways that human cognitive errors are expressed in the practice of medicine. While we wait for the medical academics to translate their work into the nuts-and-bolts of medical education, and from there, one hopes, to better tools for physicians to moderate their cognitive biases, the general reader can turn to How Doctors Think.

The book is organized into a series of case studies (some involving the author) but most engaging Groopman’s medical colleagues in different parts of North America. While each chapter could stand along as an interesting New Yorker vignette, the cumulative effect of these anecdotes and professional conversations on how doctors think introduces the reader to a number of themes in human cognition.

While EBM tries to train doctors to use the probabilistic results of medical research on thousands of people to select effective treatment for their particular patients, the cognitive scientists try to help doctors avoid jumping to conclusions and ignoring the cues that a patient’s body or conversation might be offering. “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” That’s a common rule of thumb in clinical practice, notes Groopman. Nonetheless, zebras do exist. We don’t want our doctors focused on horses to the exclusion of zebras. Correctly identifying them … one time in a hundred, or one time in a thousand … requires a particular mental discipline for busy physicians. Not unlike that of an athlete who must face every contest with fresh perspective to respond to the unanticipated.

In no particular order, here are some cognitive errors which Dr. Groopman discusses:

Mis-diagnosis by groupthink A set of symptoms with no clear diagnosis sets off a round of different diagnoses. Each new specialist offers a new or variant diagnosis that fits their own body of expertise. The patient’s deteriorating health leads to physician frustration and intimations that the patient is malingering, psychologically disturbed, or not complying with medication and treatment. An ever-expanding case file may create an unwarranted set of assumptions for each attending physician. Confirmation bias, search satisfaction and diagnosis momentum are cognitive errors, well identified by psychology, that can herd a group of physicians into making a premature diagnosis in a case and sticking with it despite contrary facts. There’s never a good or inexpensive time for a doctor to start with a blank piece of paper, re-interview a patient and ask for a brand-new round of diagnostic tests. Nonetheless, it is through such “blank sheet” reviews that errors inherent in diagnoses (both human and technological) are often caught. Recall the brief discussion during my mini-review of Easterbrook’s Sonic Boom about cost controls and medicine. To spot the zebras amongst the hoof beats, more time, more careful attention, and more money must be spent. As medical science is becoming constantly more complex, and the treatment alternatives proliferate … good, better, and best medicine may well correlate with the resources available to nail down the “possible but less likely” explanations for illness.

Question cogently, listen carefully, observe keenly This epigram, introduced by the author, is an inadvertent introduction to the scientific literature on human attention. Attention which narrows so much as to eliminate the things in front of our nose. Attention which is so distracted by clinical pace that details are missed. Attention which is so overwhelmed by fatigue, emotion, rapid-fire pace, and information overload that the zebras all but disappear. For the physician, how does one maintain an open mind for each patient, neither over- nor under- valuing the information presented by patients.

Two doctors, three opinions A great deal of clinical practice is learned during the course of rounds and internship. As Groopman notes, follow-up research suggests that much of this practice may reflect hospital or senior practitioner “tradition” rather than a method of diagnosis or a course of treatment that has any careful study behind it. Conflicting results, when patients seek a second opinion may reflect the fact that there is a lack of thoughtful consensus in the medical community. Not much help to a patient! Individual doctors, in the face of unknowns in a particular case, may resort to “wild-ass guessing” based on the last article they read, the last patient they successfully treated, or the last conference they attended. The psychological literature has a lot to say on how people deal with uncertainty and conflicting information.

Last bad experience Conversely, a physician’s last bad experience with a particular ailment, medication or therapeutic action may color their actions in the next similar case that they face. The vividness of recent events is a function of human being’s short-term and long-term memory. Again, this subject of “attention” in medical decision-making has a large body of science attached to it.

Bad diseases, bad patients Physicians form opinions about prognoses for particular diseases or conditions. They also form opinions about their patients — their likability, pliability, and curability. Some diseases, and some patients who don’t seem to improve, may receive a physician’s “second-best” effort in paying close attention to reported symptoms. Doctors need accurate feedback. Patients may come to feel that “no one’s listening.” A mute, suffering patient may be subtly resented by a doctor. All these factors … leading to how the doctor feels about their own competence and “agency” in a clinical situation, may influence the practitioner’s willingness to re-evaluate their initial assumptions about a case, about a treatment regime, about a particular medication.

Feeling good about your doctor vs. feeling good Some cognitive biases in the doctor-patient relationship can lead the physician way off track. The desire to be seen as competent and successful can steer a physician to make decisions that will impress or satisfy their patient but have less and less to do with treating a condition. Groopman talks about a cadre of physicians in his region who have wonderful social skills and are well-liked by their patients (often across generations of patients) but whose clinical skills are deficient. In some cases, they assist their patients more by referral than by direct diagnosis or treatment. Medicine is a big tent. Its practitioners can leverage all their skills and attributes … whether a cheerful disposition, vast reservoirs of physical energy, a capacious memory, a brilliant intellect, or a manipulative psychology … to attain career success. Groopman wants to outline all the different ways that physicians can go off track in providing medical care for the patients.

The examples highlighted above are just a sample but they give a sense of the narratives that the author discusses in his book.

Why I Found This Book Particularly Compelling

As someone who switched from prehistoric archaeology to medical anthropology twenty-five years ago, and went back to school to pick up credentials in health care and medical writing, I’m quite impressed with How Doctors Think. It covers the subject of physician-patient relationships humanely, broadly, and with a great deal of insight. As someone who’s further spent the last ten years grinding through the generic literature on decision-making (the work in behavioral economics is most well-known), How Doctors Think is a particularly welcome addition. Finally something compelling, written for the general public.

Some years ago, inspired by how important the subject is, I joined the Society for Medical Decision Making. In retrospect, my membership has been more “charitable donation” than intellectual satisfaction because the scientific (or social science) literature on this topic is very advanced. It bears all the advantages and burdens of modern scientific research … arcane statistical analyses that are de rigueur, the burdens and logistical challenges of conducting studies and getting adequate case numbers, and the narrow and/or tentative applicability of any results. It seems like a discipline that creeps forward at great expense and struggles to convert its results into everyday clinical practice that an ordinary lay person might experience.

For me as an anthropologist, however, after years of watching practitioners inside and outside mainstream medicine, it was interesting to contrast Groopman’s comments with my own observations of how much traditional medicines control the physician-patient encounter. The timing of interviews, the uncertainties of symptoms and results, the environment of the clinic, the emotions of all concerned — medicine and health care are fraught with circumstances that can lead treatment astray. While the efficacy of “alternative medicine” will never be subjected to the rigor of evidence-based analysis, it seems to me that the cognitive and social gamesmanship used by various shamans, healers, and ancillary practitioners nonetheless explain a great deal of their popularity. “Feeling better” counts for something … even if it’s not “getting better.” The nebulous obligations of “alternative healers” to the State, the insurance companies, and the legal profession, often means that they benefit from superior psychological conditions for helping others to those available to a beleaguered medical doctor.

How to give the ordinary medical doctor a leg up on the “competition” is a subject that Groopman doesn’t cover. The obligation to avoid cognitive errors in medical decision-making can be proclaimed. The long list of cognitive biases which may trip up a doctor can be listed (and matched to those everyone makes in daily life). Nonetheless, a rigorous training and environmental regime by which such physician errors can be avoided seems a long way away. Some obvious solutions, like limiting physician work hours, evaluating physician personality traits, extending patient interviews, or self-conscious training in methods for reducing cognitive error seem very unlikely to be introduced to medical education or practice. And yet, I’ve seen such solutions applied in the least convincing alternative medical practices one could imagine. The cognitive psychologists, at least, would approve.

There’s an irony there.

Conclusion

How Doctors Think is a well-written treatment of the subject of medical decision-making on the front lines. It does suffer, I think, from a lack of tighter integration with the scientific literature on decision-making as a whole. I struggled to match the chapter themes to the specific phrases from psychology that science uses to discuss cognitive biases that we all are prey to in ordinary life. A table or summary or illustration organizing the pattern of cognitive biases in medical decision-making would have been very welcome in this book. It’s hard to tell if this was an author’s preference, an author’s oversight, or editorial opinion that general readers wouldn’t want such graphic material in How Doctors Think. Nonetheless, I think the use of graphics would have provided complementary information to the scientific articles cited in the End Notes. Especially for readers with a motivation to go further.

Understandably, Dr. Groopman’s conclusions about “how doctors think” are less easily translated into how we, as patients, can ensure that we get doctors that are swayed by as few cognitive biases as possible. As a result, the book seems to limp across home plate. Perhaps a second book will appear, turning knowledge into action. In a sense, we’re asking doctors to perform like mental athletes … responding reflexively with the benefit, but not hindrances, of experience. In the absence of all but the most coarse-grained “quality assurance” that now exists in the medical profession, it’s hard to know how an ordinary physician could be evaluated and make improvements on their own. For the moment then, Dr. Groopman’s discussions with his senior colleagues that he has shared in his book seem like the only uncertain (if informal) way forward. Disappointing but understandable.

As individuals, we may be more comfortable with authoritative physicians who brook little discussion, let alone skepticism. Or we may prefer a doctor who will review all the details of our case and outline how they come to a conclusion. Our choice. Not everyone wants the “agency” and responsibility to confront disease as a patient. While we might like a calm, well-rested, well-trained, focused physician with wide experience and the time to listen to us for as long as we have something to say, modern health care (short of the Mayo Clinic or platinum-care options) means that we sometimes take “pot luck,” even with a physician we know and trust. This book gives us a sense of how much randomness is in the system.

This book is highly recommended as a gift for college students in psychology, medicine, or the health care industry. Most general readers would find Dr. Groopman’s anecdotes, case studies, and discussions very thought-provoking. I do think that readers who’ve had bad experiences with the medical profession in the past would NOT enjoy this book. Doctors are human. And humans are prey to many mistakes in thinking. This book highlights the ways that medical diagnoses and treatment can go astray, up close and personal. Once you know how sausage is made, you never look at sausage quite the same way again. And second-guessing one’s treatment can lead to a lot of enduring anxiety. Barring such a caveat though, How Doctors Think is a great read.

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Easterbrook, Gregg, Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed, Random House: 2009, 243pp.

Sonic Boom falls within the genre of the quick-reading airport business book. Using a series of places as exemplars (Shenzhen, Waltham MA, Yakutsk, Erie PA, etc.), the author shows how a globalized economy can create prosperity from swampland, and restore prosperity to Rust-Belt and 19th century industrial hubs. The writing is crisp and smooth. The manner is often witty, and occasionally wise-ass. It’s anything but turgid … which is a great relief from many of the “big think” books which come and go on the bestseller lists.

Easterbrook’s central theme is that globalization is a net plus for the world, but it also creates accelerating levels of change and uncertainty for all participants. And he feels that both trends will continue. He makes the effort (in distinction to the MSM) to uncover the positive changes to mortality, health, and prosperity for the world’s people in the past century and even more in the past two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The case for “uncertainty,” on the other hand, could hardly have been made more emphatically than by the economic and political events of the last 18 months. And in line with his earlier book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, increased quality of life doesn’t necessarily translate to more personal happiness.

For readers of this blog, this may all seem old hat. Free markets, free trade, “Creative destruction,” etc. etc. Readers more interested in the nuts and bolts explanation of globalization’s success might better refer to Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works but Easterbrook’s book might be a fine option as a gift for teenagers or for friends whose “to hell in a handbasket” experience of modern life is leaving them at loose ends.

The optimistic (if cautionary) tone of the book is compromised a bit, to my mind, by Mr. Easterbrook’s concluding chapters. His enthusiasm for better health care and education as a foundation for further American prosperity is admirable. Betraying his Brookings Institution background, however, his solutions for more equitable distribution of the benefits of these two industries harken to an earlier era and betray none of the optimism and “silver lining” perspective of earlier chapters.

Education and heath-care costs are increasing at a rate that out-paces inflation. While Easterbrook is methodical in his earlier explanation of how people leave the farms for factories, and then for service industry and white-collar work … he doesn’t seem to spot the same pattern in the allocation of individual or family budgets over the last century.

We are no longer an agricultural society. Nor one based around industrial factories. For a brief shining moment, Western prosperity was so dominant, and medicine’s successes and failures were so starkly drawn (in favour of increased life expectancy at modest cost), that the majority of people could aspire for suburban comfort and prosperity while paying diminishing attention to the costs of all else: Not to food, not to heat, not to clothing, not to tuition or doctor’s bills. They fulfilled their aspirations by dedicating the majority of middle-class family budgets to vehicles, real estate, and vacations. Such priorities may no longer be sustainable. Making an adjustment in 21st century dreams may be far more wrenching than for the generation that moved off the farms or saw the de-industrialization of America.

Health care is becoming increasingly elaborate and increasingly engages the most highly-skilled members of our society. Demand is unlimited (for better, more comprehensive, more insightful care) and supply is necessarily limited. The pressure for cost increases (absolute and relative to other household expenses) is therefore relentless. Similarly with education, elite universities have switched to being prestige engines … effectively a zero-sum game. Frank and Cook’s The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us is a great review of this process in the educational system. As a result, education at the undergraduate level isn’t delivering a knowledge product so much as a social milieu. And that, again, is costed based on highest bidder for service. Even at state schools, the elaborating demands for professional certification necessitate larger budgets and larger fees … not to mention pressure for successful football teams.

Fewer kids, diminished housing and vacation dreams, bigger education and health care bills. I’m not sure how that cycle gets broken at any point in our lifetimes. We no longer dream of forty acres and a mule. Nor of a lush pension after 35 years on the shop floor. We dream nonetheless, and markets respond accordingly. McMansions and tropical beaches are currently a necessity of the good life but “nice-to-haves” and “must-haves” tend to shift over time.

Barring Mr. Easterbrook’s Big Rock Candy Mountain digressions (for which he can’t really be held accountable since they are my hobbyhorses), Sonic Boom is an upbeat, well-written book that explains the impact and trends associated with globalization in plain language. Recommended for readers seeking a quick introduction to the subject.

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About six weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about the dismal trailer for the movie Avatar, which made it clear that the movie was going to recycle Dances with Wolves. In other words, a turgid, adolescent paean to the Noble Savage, carefully white-washed to eliminate the less savoury elements of hunter-gatherer existence and to emphasize every stereotypical flaw in white men. “Fade to black” before the farmers and ranchers show up. Yawn.

Well, Avatar has just passed the $400 million mark in box office gross income after less than a week in theaters. I caught a late-night showing yesterday and I contributed my $15 (Cdn) to the pile. My wise-ass prediction from the earlier post, that the protagonist would bite the bullet tragically, didn’t come to pass. Foolish me. What was I thinking?

Not “SEQUEL-SEQUEL-SEQUEL” apparently.

So the Kevin Costner character gets the exotic girl, impresses the natives with feats of improbable physical skill, betrays his sponsors, invokes Gaia/Pandora to save the day, and sees off those wretched American soldiers Space-Mining Conglomerate white male bigots. Happy ending. Every politically-correct Hollywood hobbyhorse, carefully groomed and manicured. Hell, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio were made for this one. Except that they wouldn’t put up with Jim Cameron’s legendary brow-beatings.

The analogy to the 19th century American West does hold up amazingly well, however. In the case of Avatar, director James Cameron gets to rewrite history by setting his story 150 years in the future, with “scientists” filling in for missionaries, on a different planet, with completely different/unpredictable rules of physics. Thumb firmly on the scales, this time the director ensures that the Native Americans win … the Sioux Ghost Dance … in which the White Man is supernaturally banished from the land … actually works in the year 2154.

The plot did require a sudden onset of retardation in the movie’s various villains. Though living on a planet with deadly atmosphere and life-forms, and mysterious forces which limit their technological advantages unpredictably, the antagonists suddenly stop watching their security cameras, noticing employees acting suspiciously (just the women and non-whites, you idiots!), or keeping all their military eggs out of one basket. Oh, yes. Cue the obligatory “monologuing,” so the chief villain gets a dramatic death. No worries. There are lots of military gizmos that’ll thrill the boys 8 years and older, and provide toy company tie-ins.

After 150 years of inter-planetary space exploration, you’d think Americans, woops, Space-Mining Conglomerate greed-bags wouldn’t have forgotten the basic lessons of tactical warfare with indigenous peoples … but no … it turns out that mining on a distant planet is run much like a third-rate mining operation in Papua New Guinea. Strangely, enough, even the military slang is identical in the 22nd century, sloppily copied from every hackneyed wannabe shoot-em-up of the late 20th century made by James Cameron.

In sum, Avatar‘s plot is dreck … but in delicious Hollywood irony, while it bangs the same old drum (Americans=bad, 3rd Worlders=good), the lesson it’ll actually teach the world is that they’ve just been priced out of the movie blockbuster market, yet again. They don’t have the money. They don’t have the technology. They don’t have the people. They don’t have the logistical skills and industrial marketing might. I’m not sure that’s what James Cameron intended but I’m sure he’ll be happy to cash the royalty checks on his technology patents for many decades to come.

Yeah, people in the hinterlands can prance around with a camcorder taping car bombs and beheadings, but for real eye-popping entertainment, you have to spend $500 million in petrochemically-powered Anglosphere computation (produced in London, LA, Montreal, and New Zealand) and release your 3D movie everywhere on Earth simultaneously (except for Argentina, China, Italy, and Uruguay). Between Steve Jobs, Page and Brin (the guys at Google), Burt Rutan, and James Cameron, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s grabbing the world’s tech-culture high ground from the US anytime soon. One way or the other, all your base are belong to us.

I’m glad I saw the movie. It definitely raises the bar in movie experience and gives a middle-aged adult a reason to brave the endless advertising and sticky floors of the modern cinema. The visuals were, by turns, charming, imaginative, and dramatic. But I agree with other commentators who felt the technology would be the only memorable impact that Avatar has on movie history. And the temptation for Cameron to screw up the sequels (like George Lucas did), will be immense. Based on blogosphere comments, I skipped the “IMAX experience” and went to a generic (i.e., RealD) 3D theater. No nausea, no vertigo. But in contrast to the relatively short kid’s 3D movies, the length of this film does challenge the vision a bit.

Avatar sucks … but it sure is purty. And it proves that anti-Americanism will put mountains of money in American (er, ex-Canadian) pockets.

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I’m late, late, incredibly late on four books that authors gave me to review. That doesn’t mean that I can’t give credit where credit’s due … in plenty of time for the book-buying frenzy before the holidays. With luck, I’ll finish off the full reviews in December but since *I’m* buying copies of these books for friends and family, maybe one or more of them might fit someone on your list. All recommended for the categories of people headlined.

Economists, Physicists, History of Science buffs

Newton and the Counterfeiter describes Isaac Newton’s multi-year battle with one of London’s most successful counterfeiters. No surprise who wins in the end, but it is surprising how well Levenson provides background on the protagonists … without overwhelming the reader. Recommended for students or professionals with an interest in the history of money, finance, or just a fascination with what the great Newton did after he polished off the Principia. The counterfeiter’s “colourful” life precludes giving this book to a pre-teen but all others will find it, like the earlier-reviewed The Ghost Map, a fascinating snapshot of life in London.

Japanophiles, Asian culture fans, World History Buffs

I’m years late on this one but Through the Looking Glass is highly recommended for anyone wondering how Japan ended up with such a different culture … and why their adoption of Western technology at a breakneck pace in the late 19th century was so successful. Thought-provoking and such a good summary of Japanese culture that I’ve struggled for over 50 hours to epitomize in writing what the author has written in hopes of getting a full book review out the door. I’ve failed, but I’ve also bought more than a half-dozen copies of this book for friends on two continents with an interest in Asian culture.

Entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 cube jockeys, Economics students, Anglosphere buffs

Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson picks up where his Long Tail finished. The halving of computation, bandwidth, and data storage costs each year has made a new generation of businesses financially feasible. The freemium service (like Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) where basic services are free and a small set of customers pay for additional features, has become so common that it is now unremarkable. Anderson looks at the history of the word, the different definitions of free in the context of culture and business, and the gap in the academic literature in understanding the new generation of businesses that leverage “free” in profound ways. My book review will, like my earlier review of Long Tail, look at why the Anglosphere has been the source of so much “free” over the last couple of centuries and why it leads the way in both charitable and profitable businesses that leverage the idea. A “must have” for anyone thinking of starting a business. People under 30 will think “d’uh” but Anderson still offers a lot of context and some very good background on the history of “free” in business in the 20th century for younger readers. And a fun, even revolutionary, read. I’m buying copies for nieces and friends with an interest in media.

Ambitious NCOs, Military Officers, World History buffs, Prognosticators of the American future

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is a grand summary of the culture of the steppes, from the time of the domestication of the horse and the appearance of lactose-tolerant humans (see 10,000 Year Explosion), to the 21st century suppression of the Chechens, Tibetans, and Uighurs. A fascinating source book on the ebb and flow of culture across the “ocean of grass” and the firm focus these cultures had on trading with the great empires on their periphery. Trade with us … or die. Most of these cultures, and the direct influence they had on world history, has been largely unknown except to a handful of scholars. In Empires, the author brings all this background information together in one place, draws on the most modern scholarship in linguistics, history, and archaeology, and provides a ground-breaking introduction to the general public. The striking parallels with the European nations that built empires based on liquid oceans becomes clear only by the end of the book … as is the tentative nature of Russia and China’s hold on the vast interior steppe (triggered by the introduction of firearms, and only solidified in the final massacres of the Junghars by Qing China in the mid-18th century). Anyone with an interest in Russia, the Middle East, or China will learn a great deal about the role of the Central Asian Culture complex on these areas in the last 4,000 years. Nowadays, military folk posted to the ‘Stans or places like Mongolia will find this book invaluable … firstly as a brisk introduction to the cultural roots of the place, and secondly as a reference book to read and re-read in future years to grasp “the big picture.” If you have friends or family that are ambitious for learning about the continent (let alone the region), start them off at the beginning. Anyone senior to Captain should buy this book simply to have it ready when needed. Because it will be needed. You can’t understand the Chinese and Russians without understanding the “enemy” they faced for centuries and the echoes that continue in their territorial obsessions. Highly, highly recommended. My full review will comment on the author’s more personal assessments but his account of Central Asian history is a entirely straight-forward, well referenced, and real service to the English-speaking public. I’ve bought copies, again, for friends in Europe and North America.

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Director James Cameron, of Titanic and Aliens fame, has been working away for the last decade developing new technology for a film called Avatar, to be released in mid-December. It will combine digital extrapolations of humans and filmed actors in a 3D projection format. Talk is that it’ll cost $500 million dollars by the time that marketing costs are factored in. News that Rupert Murdoch was “excited and moved” by a sneak peek doesn’t necessarily bode well for adults looking for something more than vision quest fodder for teenage boys.

Trailers have been appearing with increasing regularity as the release date approaches. The latest here on Youtube has an appropriately exotic and violent set of clips to whet interest. For the first time, however, it telegraphs enough of the plot to actually reduce my desire to see the movie.

Let me reach for my psychic hat and do my own “spoiling” after having read little, and seen less, of the promotion for this movie.

Looks like a traumatized military vet/amputee is a given a mission to infiltrate a tribal alien species to make the acquisition of the planet’s commercially-precious resources easier. He does so through an alternate body — an avatar — that allows him to blend with the alien species and gain their trust. He’s promised that his own legs will be restored if he’s successful. Vet goes native, has preliminary success with his mission, falls in love, starts to have “doubts.” The corporate/military invade for access to raw materials. The vet switches sides, and leads the courageous Noble Savages in a rebellion against predatory corporate interests. In a climactic scene, they win!

Twenty years ago, you may recall having watched this movie. A long, saccharine historical fantasy called “Dances with Wolves.” It filled Kevin Costner’s wallet to overflowing, won a lot of Oscars, and pretty much concluded his involvement with interesting films. No particular loss.

Now it looks like we’re going to be treated to “Dancing with Aliens,” only with Jim Cameron’s trademark combination tongue-bath and bitch-slap of America’s culture.

My wild-ass guess for the ending of Avatar (cover your eyes, fan boys!): Aforementioned veteran’s punishment for betraying his own kind and “going rogue” is the destruction of his crippled body and his tragic slow mental death while trapped in his avatar body. No new legs! Lots of violins. Closing credits.

Who knows if the movie has enough boobs and bombs to sustain adolescent interest? It’s certain to have enough credulous heroes and nefarious middle-aged white men to steer the average 13 year-old straight. Its ground-breaking technology may very well be enough to sell the movie as the “next big thing” in entertainment and by that very fact, trigger attendance (and higher 3D ticket prices) that will recoup the initial investment. This is a guy who managed to sell a “star-crossed lovers on a boat” story when everyone knew how it was going to turn out.

In a world festooned with newly empowered tribes (courtesy of cheap explosives and pervasive NGOs), the question of what to do with the Natives isn’t going to be left to Hollywood hypocrites. America will have some hard choices about whether to cosset or shatter recalcitrant tribes around the world. There are plenty of supporters for both sides of the argument. For better or worse, few of the tribes are sitting on anything much worth having (except perhaps coltan) … that’s why they’ve been allowed to stay tribes for as many centuries as they have. That places them in the role of “pet” or “zoo animal” in the ecology of globalization. And we all know that pandas prosper and less big-eyed, baby-faced critters get the bare minimum.

What tribes can do, as we’ve seen, is “pee in the pool” (extort) or provide safe haven for ne’er-do-wells (and claim rent). In the bad old days … say 50 years ago, such behavior might get your tribe quietly co-opted and demolished. A century ago, it got your tribe publicly co-opted and demolished. Two centuries ago, your tribe was simply exterminated to make way for agriculture, or mining, or manufacture.

Avatar will likely get my money as eye-popping value-for-money in an otherwise dreary selection of holiday season fare. But the morality play on dealing with the tribes should be left to the kids, young and old.

Can’t wait to see if I guessed right on the ending.

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Gallagher, Winifred, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Penguin:New York, 2009, 244 pp.

Rapt is a wide-ranging and elegantly written summary of what scholars, authors, and a few mystics have to say about human attention and the role that it plays in our emotions and our day-to-day actions. Written in a very polished and literate style, it finds a nice balance between the author’s personal reflections on the role of attention in her life, quotations about focus and attention by authors such as William James and Thoreau, and interviews with leading psychologists and medical professionals. There’s perhaps a bit too much meat on the book’s bones to warrant selection for Oprah’s book club but fans of her TV show will find much to like and enjoy with Rapt.

In some ways, the book could be considered a skillful Boomer reflection on a subject that was grabbed with adolescent abandon by the same generation in the Sixties. The Power of Positive Thinking can’t quite match a world with many more religious, philosophical, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic choices in dealing with our unhappiness, or our endless distractions, or our frustrating procrastinations. Gallagher’s book makes a serious effort at surveying what we now know about particular habits of thought and focus. Anyone surrounded by colleagues wedded to their Blackberries, or by hordes of teenagers flogging their multi-coloured cellphones, has paused to wonder whether all of this is really “good” for people.

Table of Contents
=============
Introduction: Choosing the Focused Life [1]
1 Pay Attention: Your Life Depends on It [15]
2 Inside Out: Feelings Frame Focus [29]
3 Outside In: What You See is What You Get [43]
4 Nature: Born to Focus [55]
5 Nurture: This Is Your Brain on Attention [67]
6 Relationships: Attending to Different Worlds [81]
7 Productivity: Work Zone [99]
8 Decisions: Focusing Illusions [115]
9 Creativity: An Eye For Detail [133]
10 Focus Interruptus [145]
11 Disordered Attention [163]
12 Motivation: Eyes on the Prize [173]
13 Health: Energy Goes Where Attention Flows [189]
14 Meaning: Attending to What Matters Most [203]

Gallagher can lapse into school-marm mode on occasion as she itemizes all the ways that our mental and physical habits can undermine our satisfaction and health. Fortunately the breadth of her subject matter keeps her own attention moving at a steady clip. The finger-wagging takes a back seat to discussion of each new aspect of the topic. I enjoyed this book’s review of the new scientific understanding of attention and focus. Readers who have a more personal stake in the subject matter of distraction, inattention, or depression (at home, work, or with children) would find Rapt an excellent place to begin. There is a checklist of ideas and issues that appear to have stood the test of time though this cannot really be classified as a “self-help” book.

The book would also make a good gift for friends and family who have a spiritual bent and no aversion to learning about a bit of psychological research. This is another title that would make a fine holiday gift for an undergraduate in psychology, religious studies, or social work. High school students might find it too much though the right teenager might love it. I’ve added the title to my holiday list for a friend who works as a clinician in a cancer clinic.

Interestingly, Gallagher looks at some of the research on cultural focus and intelligence by psychologist Richard Nisbett, whose books were reviewed earlier on chicagoboyz here and here. I ran into a number of familiar names and recent titles while reading this book, which reinforces just how broad a scope the subject of “human attention” commands. When Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle make an appearance alongside Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Albert Einstein, you can be certain the subject tackles a serious human conundrum.

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Cochran G. and Harpending, H., The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Perseus Books, NY, 2009.

In an earlier cb review of a book on the role of culture and education on American intelligence (Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It:, I mentioned a hypothesis by physicist and iconoclast scholar Gregory Cochran suggesting a genetic basis for Ashkenazi intelligence scores (slightly less than one standard deviation above the American population’s average). Nisbett noted that this slight difference in average IQ translated into massive differences in the distribution of individuals at the very highest IQ levels (140+).

Cochran, and anthropologist Henry Harpending, have now written a fuller discussion of their Ashkenazi hypothesis within the context of a much wider contrarian, and occasionally irreverent, book on the new discoveries in human genetics affecting our understanding of the evolution of modern humans. The authors explicitly reject the convential wisdom that human evolution largely stalled with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens as the sole hominid species on the planet.

With new techniques for examining the human genome, it’s possible to give approximate dates on the major recent changes to human physiology triggered by migrations into new environments or the adoption of new economic lifestyles (such as pastoralism or agriculture). Key physiological adaptations such as lactose tolerance, resistance to diabetes or obesity, Vitamin D absorption through skin, malarial protections (subject to recessive genetic disease such as sickle-cell anemia), high-altitude occupation, and the aforementioned Ashkenazis’ IQ, now have associated dates and timetables … and new research promises to nail down the timing and nature of similar genetic changes amongst the world’s populations. The impact of such genetic changes, and associated vulnerabilities, on the human occupation of Europe, North America, and Africa/Asia for the last 50,000 years are the focus of this book.

In contrast to most authors in the biological and social sciences, Cochran and Harpending believe that significant and influential human evolution has occurred in the recent past and that the pace of such evolution continues and even accelerates as selective pressures on modern populations intensify. The larger population pools in turn make it more likely that valuable mutations can spread widely and relatively quickly … often in ways that are completely independent of the X and Y sex chromosomes first used to map human genetic history. For example, Cochran and Harpending suggest that there may well have been an exchange of advantageous genetic mutations (through “introgression”) from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon/H. sapiens sapiens without any associated impact on the paternal or maternal lines of genetic material associated with our species.

By looking back into post-Neanderthal human prehistory with new genetic data, scholars can track the movement of humans out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. They can also begin to hypothesize about the role that genetic change played in the relative reproductive success of Upper Paleolithic hunters, the first agricultural communities in Eurasia, and the Indo-Europeans who left their cultural and linguistic imprint on roughly 3 billion of the people in the world today.

Table of Contents
==============

1. Overview, Conventional Wisdom [1]
2. The Neanderthal Within [25]
3. Agriculture, The Big Change [65]
4. Consequences of Agriculture [85]
5. Gene Flow [129]
6. Expansions [155]
7. Medieval Evolution: How the Ashkenazi Jews Got Their Smarts [187]
Conclusion [225]
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

The 10,000 Year Explosion is a fast-paced book which covers a lot of terrain, often at the leading edge of genetic research. It’s written in straightforward language for the general reader but a familiarity with the basics of human genetics, disease, and prehistory would be helpful. As such, the specifics of any given argument made by the authors is liable to change relatively quickly as scholars engage the arguments and new data is discovered.

The overall argument proposed by the authors, that the pace of human evolution is actually picking up, is a very useful perspective for assessing such new information as it appears. The suite of ailments and genetic predispositions that face an industrialized and tightly-linked world is radically different that the hunter-gatherer environment of 10,000 years ago. Who lives, who dies, who successfully reproduces, and at what rate. That’s demography and genetics in constant interplay. As the authors describe, we aren’t exactly alike under the skin. One small fascinating case in point is the two physiologically distinct ways in which Tibetan and Andean peoples adapted physically to high-altitude living. The invisible history of these adaptations, at the physiological and genetic levels, is only now being understood.

Individual mutations have had a massive impact on the history of the planet (cf. the disease vulnerabilities of Native Americans, absent in Africa and Asia, or the significant economic advantage of lactose tolerance amongst pastoralists). The mix of genetic vulnerabilities or slight reproductive advantages that particular peoples maintain after decades, hundreds, or thousands of years of exposure to agriculture are also as unique as a fingerprint. Why, indeed, would the pace of that change be slowing if humans continue to move into new urban environments with brand-new combinations of environmental and genetic pressures?

With the acceleration of digital computation, storage, and transmission speeds, we can count on new surprises coming out of genomic research. As entire genomes (rather than just small chunks of human DNA) are compared (between individuals and between populations), “genetic archaeology” will enter a new phase of describing/dating population movement and subsequent admixture in far greater detail. This is bound to rewrite large chunks of history before the modern era, and dramatically change our understanding of prehistory, if only to highlight circumstances where favourable adaptations spread throughout world populations and led to some marginally greater rate of survival for particular peoples. Rather than a story of population replacement, often genetic prehistory was the story of genes or adaptations independently expanding through extant populations.

And rather than a conclusive statement about their hypothesis, the authors provide a solid opening salvo in an argument about the nature of humanity, past and present. Our society currently has a schizophrenic attitude to genetic variability in modern populations. On the one hand, an obsession with genetic testing for medical purposes but simultaneously a desire to deny the historical circumstances that led to such variation in the first place. In the next decade or two, as genotyping becomes more closely associated with both disease diagnosis and therapeutic prescription, the hidden history of humans in the last 10,000 years will get more air time.

Cochran and Harpending ensure that it will be difficult to put this genetic genie back in the bottle. Strongly recommended as a birthday or holiday gift for biology students (high school and above) and for those that follow theoretical arguments in medicine and biology. If you liked Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel you’ll also enjoy the briefer The 10,000 Year Explosion. The book is also recommended as a library check-out for anyone with an interest in human evolution, Neanderthal-CroMagnon interaction, the history of American and African colonization, the effects of agriculture on human prehistory, and the causes for the dramatic Indo-European expansion from the steppes.

Controversial, a bit flippant at times, but an enjoyable read, the 10,000 Year Explosion signals a new and exciting phase in science and history.

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McDougall, Christopher, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009, 287pp.)

I’m a miserable runner, and apart from a brief time in graduate school, I haven’t run since high school. Walking has been my exercise alternative. Nonetheless, a childhood spent in the Boy Scouts and a youth spent doing prehistoric archaeology have given me an abiding interest in the discipline of hunting, especially the role of dogs in human culture and the tradition of persistence hunting practiced by the !Kung bushmen. In Born to Run, magazine writer McDougall has managed to bring together a tale of endurance running, sports capitalism, evolutionary biology, and Mexican ethnography to create a compelling reading experience. Maybe, just maybe, it’s an insight into who we were.

A chance reading of a Spanish language magazine article on the exceptional running achievements of the Tarahumara Indians led the author on a multi-year quest to confirm what seemed counter-intuitive. A tribe of people (men and women) who could run incredible distances well into old age, without exotic diets, footwear, training regimes, warm-ups, etc. etc. Like the !Kung, they were reputed to run down deer through sheer stamina. As an oft-injured runner himself, McDougall simply couldn’t believe it. The Copper Canyon area of Mexico, where the Tarahumara live, is a remote, rugged, but increasingly dangerous part of Mexico where drug gangs, dope growers, and resource extraction compete to make life miserable for the natives. The author took considerable risks on his first journey to visit these people, only to discover that a white man had been living, and running, among them for many years — The White Horse — Caballo Blanco.

The story thread running through Born to Run is Caballo Blanco’s efforts to assemble a small group of America’s elite ultradistance runners to compete in a race through the mountains of Mexico with the best runners of the Tarahumara. Included in the mix are one of the leading American advocates of barefoot running, and the author himself, attempting to recover from years of running injuries by altering his training to mirror Tarahumara methods. In providing a back story for this race, McDougall notes that the Tarahumara once made a huge splash in the running world in the 1990s by twice dominating a brutal high-altitude race in Colorado, the Leadville 100. Then they “disappeared.” By weaving the biographical details of the Western participants in the 2006 race, with the ethnographic literature of the Tarahumara, the author sets the scene for the friendly showdown, a “middle of nowhere” mountain race out of sight of cameras and the world’s attention. At the same time, McDougall gets a chance to make his case for the negative effects of high-tech running shoes on runner health and performance … and for the evolutionary forces that apparently shaped the human frame for endurance running even before our species made tools or used fire. It’s a possibility that our ancestors ran down their prey for tens of thousands of years without leaving a single trace in the archaeological record. Selective forces slowly altered their physiology (large head, springy Achilles tendon, hairless skin, upright posture) in ways that made it simply impossible for game animals to out-run humans. I must admit, I was shocked when the author outlined the limitations of four-legged creatures when it comes to running. For sprints, no problem. For long distances, however, the humans win. When added to the advanced cognition required for tracking and predicting game movement (proposed by South African scholar, Louis Liebenberg), one school of scholars now firmly proposes the “Running Man” theory of human evolution — that we are literally born to run down animals. That is our niche in the world.

So this book is a skillful mix of adventure tale, archival research, plus interviews with running coaches, physiologists, race directors, and evolutionary biologists … culminating in that “secret” race in Mexico in 2006. Interestingly enough, the book has no photos, no maps, no URLs. But two minutes of Googling uncovered photos of the race itself. For the first fifty pages of this book, I assumed we were in for another hoax or scholarly flim-flam along the lines of Carlos Castenada‘s shamanistic voyage through the Yaqui Indians. But as I read further, the author didn’t stray into “magical realism,” though he was using the tools and tricks of outdoor adventure/extreme sport writing to add drama and vitality to a subject area that was plenty fascinating on its own.

And the results of the race? Well, I’m not going to spoil the ending. But let’s just say that Caballo Blanco is now in the small-scale race management business in remote Mexico and Barefoot Ted has a stellar book to make his case that it’s running shoes, not running, that injure so many enthusiasts. Just out of curiosity, today I visited the local outdoor co-op to see if they have any pairs of the Vibram FiveFingers footgear now popular for “barefoot” running. Sold out completely. I suspect this book is going to make a big impact on the sports community and word of mouth will be strong.

This book is recommended for anyone with an enthusiasm for running or extreme sports. Couch potatoes will enjoy the story. And anthropologists and biologists will be left with some fascinating scientific puzzles to ponder. A great gift or vacation book.