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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Horse Soldiers” is a straight-forward account of the CIA/Special Forces (SF) efforts in Afghanistan from October through November 2001, culminating in the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif to the forces of the Northern Alliance, and the prisoner revolt at nearby Qala-i-Janghi fortress. The latter led to the death of Mike Spann (CIA paramilitary officer) and the discovery and capture of John Walker Lindh (”American Taliban”).

The book opens off with a short passage of the fortress firefight then resets the book in a “how did we get here?” manner to the events Ahmad Shah Massoud’s assassination and 9/11, and how the individual CIA and SF protagonists experienced that day with colleagues and family. Through this approach, the author sets up a cast of characters for later events, establishes mini-biographies, and gives some sense of background of the people and teams that were assembled for insertion into Afghanistan.

As the weeks unroll, small groups of CIA and SF are moved to Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airbase in Uzbekistan and from there by SF helicopters into northern Afghanistan to help Northern Alliance warlords (primarily Dostum / Usted Atta).

Right off the bat, the theme of under-preparation appears. Equipment is assembled in the US by credit card and frantic phone calls to suppliers and retailers all over the US. Out-of-print books are rush-jobbed back into circulation. SF language skills are substantial but are generally of limited utility (Arabic and Russian, for example). The CIA have the only Dari speakers. Map resources are woefully outdated and largely consist of poached Russian maps.

Even getting the troops into Afghanistan is an unexpected nightmare. The altitude stresses the Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) helicopters to their limit. Oxygen supplies are interrupted by break-downs in the helicopter systems so that everyone in the chopper passes out on the run over the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan … except one pilot with a dedicated oxygen supply. The hypoxia leads to ferocious headaches for everyone once they get down to lower altitude near their landing zone. Previously unknown weather conditions called “black stratus” hit the helicopters at 10,000 ft above sea level, creating white-out conditions that grow from the upper altitudes downwards, often extending almost to the ground.

When the troops are finally deposited (often in the wrong locations), they are immediately required to ride small tough horses to keep up with the Afghans. Most of the troops have never ridden, leading quickly to back damage and bleeding saddle sores. An Afghan preference for riding stallions makes novice riding down the narrow cliff-side trails even more harrowing. A general lack of maps leads to improvised methods for planning and navigating across the landscape. Many of the troops from the Northern Alliance are desperately short of clothing, shoes, blankets, food, and ammunition. Most are illiterate but incredibly tough and very courageous.

Quite quickly, the Americans are calling in air-strikes on Taliban vehicles and troops near the initial drop-sites. Day-by-day the Taliban are driven back. Technical and logistical problems plague the troops. The co-ordination and targeting of aerial bombing is still rather experimental as the SF and USAF work out (by trial-and-error) which parts of the GPS and laser technology actually work in the dusty, high-altitude environments. Day by day, the techniques and tools improve … though problems with planes bombing from too high with over-large bombs continues.

On the ground the Americans are living very lean, suffering from a lack of food and water and in extreme exhaustion from climbing, and traveling along dangerous trails laden with Russian and Taliban mines. Radio communications are also disrupted by inadequate supplies and occasionally failed equipment. Co-ordination across the various teams (still roughly only 50 people) is spotty. On one occasion this leads to the bombing of a building by one team with allies of another team still in it.

Within a matter of days, the Northern Alliance and aerial bombing has pushed the Taliban north into the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. The concluding section of “Horse Soldiers” talks about the chaos of the fall of Mazar. A surrender of nearby Taliban troops (courtesy of a bribe worked out with one of the warlords) suddenly places hundreds of un-searched Taliban in close proximity to the city. The warlord decides to place them within in the century-old walls of Qala-i-Janghi fortress. The Americans are horrified when they hear this because there are massive armories still left within its walls that are undestroyed. Sure enough, suicide attacks (with grenades) by some of the Taliban prisoners kicks off an exchange of gunfire between Alliance and Taliban troops. In the melee, CIA officer Spann is killed and another officer barely escapes with his life to another part of the fortress. A rescue crew of SF and UK Special Boat Service (SBS) are cobbled together from different teams within Mazar-i-Sharif and make their way out to the nearby fortress. No proper direct communication links between the CIA and SF had survived the revolt so the stranded CIA officer was borrowing a satellite phone from a reporter (in the wrong place at the wrong time), calling the US consulate in Turkmenistan, who patched him through to US Central Command, who patched him through to the SF troops in Mazar-i-Sharif … 20,000 miles of telecommunication links to call the neighboring town and tell them he was alive and badly needed help.

The battle to re-take the fortress from the Taliban took several horrific days and included the mistaken aerial bombing of US/UK forces. Finally, an AC-130 Spectre gunship was used to destroy the Taliban weapons store and whatever moved above ground in the section of the fortress they controlled. Even yet, in the basement of one of the Russian additions to the fortress, several hundred Taliban had taken refuge. After the Northern Alliance flooded the basement with 6-7 feet of water (drowning the sick and injured), a negotiated surrender was arranged. Up from the hellish basement came 86 men, including the “American Taliban.”

The successful retaking of the fortress was pivotal because it halted a Taliban rollback of Northern Alliance attacks further east of Mazar-i-Sharif. The city, accessible by road from Uzbekistan, was rapidly filling with refugees and reporters. Quite soon, the SF troops were withdrawn entirely from Afghanistan as regular forces were flown in and air bases were re-established, etc.

“Horse Soldiers” is a well-written book pitched for a general audience. It’s neither a “fire-fight fanboy” tall tale, nor an ass-covering general staff briefing. The author isn’t a newspaper reporter. He’s a long-form magazine journalist and, by-and-large, played the story straight. The CIA and Special Forces folks come out looking like heroes, which is entirely justified in light of the physical and military hell they went through over the course of six or eight weeks. The dire poverty and horrific conditions in Afghanistan are laid out in some detail without going over the top. Even an even-handed accounting is harrowing, however.

The Epilogue of the book, including a “where are they now?” section, is a bit more glowing about the significance of the events and the role of SF. Written largely when Iraq was dominating the headlines, it’s not clear that “Horse Soldiers” has much to offer readers on current events in Afghanistan. As someone quoted in the book says, the success of the “horse soldiers” is not likely to ever be repeated. No American adversary in the future will sit around waiting in open country for the B-52s to show up.

Indeed, in many ways, this book seems like ancient history. The US military has adapted in dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to improve their equipment, methods and support for Special Forces troops. There have been many lessons learned from this episode and, like Black Hawk Down, “Horse Soldiers” will make a fine teaching tool for young officers … vivid, specific, well-written, and dramatic. Nonetheless, it is a snapshot of where the US military was, not where it is.

This is a solid book, a smooth and rapid read, and a recollection of a time that already seems “long, long ago.” The author has collated a substantial amount of information to create a concise and lively summary of a uniquely successful SF/CIA operation. “Horse Soldiers” holds up well as a birthday or holiday gift for the right person.

Chapter 8

(Advantage Asia?) is a 180 degree turn from the previous chapters. The author switches from looking at kids facing the toughest of odds in getting effective education and a supportive environment for the enhancement of IQ, to the racial group most identified with brilliance in modern US education. Talking about Asian cognition is also a return to Nisbett’s scientific specialty as a cognitive/social psychologist.

Fortunately there is a great deal more scientific research on Asian success in America, following individuals and families in the generations since the change in US immigration laws in the mid-60s. For proponents of the “environmentalist” school of IQ development, this is a very important body of data. What’s the impact of parental IQ, academic achievement, occupational accomplishment and elevated SES on each generation of Asian kids?

Tying back to Nisbett’s research on Asian cognition (a focus on object relationships rather than object attributes), Asian children at the time they begin school may have average IQ scores or even slightly less that Caucasian kids. With each passing year, however, all average indicators for Asian kids begin to outpace the average numbers for white children. Higher IQs, greater academic achievement for a given IQ, greater occupational accomplishment for a given IQ and education. By the time post-secondary education is begun, the averages in IQ score are substantially different (in excess of 1 SD). With the industrialization of non-communist east Asia in the last half of the 20th century, this pattern of achievement has also extended to Asian kids there.

In the US, it’s clear that a pattern of “over-accomplishment” and the re-inforcing effect of having high SES parents (with higher average IQs) is strongly influencing the performance of Asian kids. In the “sweat versus brains” competition, it’s no surprise that “sweat and brains” turns out to be the most powerful combination of all.

Nisbett can turn to his research (with Asian colleagues) in Asia itself to get some hints on why education and persistence are so valued amongst Asian immigrants to America in the last two or three generations. In Asia, the sheer number of days of school has an impact on achievement. Working harder for more hours, on more days (especially in math) naturally leads to better performance on IQ tests and academic knowledge tests. Supplementary tutoring is common, almost a given, in countries like Japan.

Asian families play a major role in this over-achievement, emphasizing academic achievement as a contributor to family success and the child as a representative of the family, which (according to the research Nisbett outlines earlier) powerfully reinforces IQ scores. The family encourages and supports the child’s commitment to overcoming difficulties during study.

“Persistence in the face of failure is very much part of the Asian tradition of self-improvement. And Asians are accustomed to criticism in the service of self-improvement in situations where Westerners avoid it or resent it.” p.159

The author takes a minor detour to talk about the distinctions between the Eastern and Western understanding of the nature of the “individual” and the individual’s relationship to family and society.

“These East-West differences go back at least twenty-five hundred years to the time of Confucius and the ancient Greeks.” p. 160

“[W]e might expect Westerners to be more likely to emphasize rules, categories, and logic, and Easterners to be more likely to emphasize relationships and dialectical reasoning. And, in fact, my coworkers and I find this to be the case.” p.166

These Western habits of mind were all necessary for the foundation of science. By setting out explicit models of the way the world works … with pass/fail attributes … Western science sets itself up for the unexpected and surprising. Reconciling these surprises is how scientific theory moves forward. In many ways, one might say that science is a set of habits designed to overcome the biases of group consensus or confirmation bias which do so much to overlook or undervalue surprising information. Western mental habits and institutions had to be introduced as a set to east Asia in the 19th century. A fascinating story of this process is reflected in the life of Japanese scholar Yukichi Fukuzawa who literally had to “write the book” on being Western for a Japanese audience and introducing many very strange ideas such as public speaking, logical argument, and universities to a bewildered audience. This East-West transition, and Fukuzawa’s role, is ably covered in Prof. Alan Macfarlane’s book The Making of the Modern World.

Nisbett describes the two thinking styles as holistic vs. analytic. and takes some time to walk through his research on the practical implications of these two

“My coworkers and I showed that Americans will sometimes judge a given plausible proposition to be more likely to be true if it is contradicted by a less plausible proposition than if it is not contradicted. The Americans assume that if there is an apparent contradiction between two propositions, the more plausible one must be true and the less plausible one must be false. Asians make the opposite error of judging a relatively implausible proposition to be more likely to be true if it is contradicted by a more plausible proposition than if it is not contradicted — because they are motivated to find truth in both of two opposing propositions.” p.167

For Asian students in America, however, they have the benefit of an educational system that encourages fluid intelligence and analytical skill (rather than memorization) and tests for it. They (or their parents/grand-parents) been selected for higher IQ during the immigration process, and their family attitudes (and higher family SES since the 1960s) have given them a head-start when they begin formal education. Every small genetic, social, and environmental advantage seems to work in their favour.

The result is several generations of Asian-Americans who are successful in the professions wildly out of proportion with their representation in the general population. For Asian kids educated in Asia, however, some hurdles remain. The “Asian engineers versus Western scientists” debate is borne out to some degree by the Asian representation amongst Nobel prize winners (versus Asians who live or were largely educated in the West). For the social sciences especially, scholars debate fiercely over the potential for unique Asian contributions to scholarship in coming years:

• Miller, G. F. (2006). The Asian future of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Psychology, 4, 107-119.
• Kanazawa, Satoshi. (2006). No, It Ain’t Gonna Be Like That. Evolutionary Psychology, 4, 120-128.

Nisbett himself notes that his Asian graduate students (distinct, I’m assuming from his Asian-American graduate students) find the standard rhetorical form of scientific argumentation the last thing to be picked up in their post-secondary education.

A final comment of my own. The best summary of the difference between Western and Eastern approaches to science and technology, accommodating the latest scholarship, is an article called King Kong and Cold Fusion: Counterfactual Analysis and The History of Technology by economic historian Joel Mokyr (found in Tetlock et al.’s Unmaking the West). Expanding on material from his book Gifts of Athena — cb review, Mokyr notes that it is in the constant interaction between “savants” and “artisans” that the foundations of scientific thinking and scientific methods get established. In the East, while meritocracy existed for the civil service, the scholars who pondered the nature of the world were never socially engaged with the folks who made things. Without the friction of theory and practice, unexpected and uncontrolled breakthroughs in technology were never exploited.

Chapter 9

(People of the Book) is a chapter on the other ethnic group in America is that considered very smart, at least by reputation. The average IQ score of Ashkenazi Jews is roughly 1 SD (10-15 points) higher than the Caucasian average score. While in day-to-day terms this difference between populations is minor … on the top end (or right side) of the IQ curve, it means that IQs with genius level (145-ish) are about 10 times more likely amongst the Ashkenazi. When examining the Nobel Prizes or Ivy League admissions, the Ashkenazi are over-represented even by the standards one would expect extrapolating from IQ and relative population size. The Sephardic Jews, meanwhile, appear to have average IQ scores virtually the same as Caucasians.

Nisbett outlines five potential reasons for the superior IQ of the Ashkenazi:

1. persecution theory – the Ashkenazi have been generally selected for intelligence. “Only the smart survive”
2. Babylonian captivity – the elite of Jewish culture were transported to Babylon and when they returned to Israel the average IQ had been dramatically increased. Those who remained behind ceased to practice Jewish culture.
3. “marry the scholar” – successful Jews married their daughters to the most scholarly and intelligent in society.
4. literacy – religiously prescribed literacy created a society which encouraged the skills measured by IQ.
5. occupational pressure – Persecution restricted Jews to occupations that demanded and rewarded high intelligence.

By and large, Nisbett is unconvinced by any of these reasons. They may well be supportive of Ashkenazi intelligence and accomplishment but for various reasons they offer no conclusive answer to the question of why this particular population has a higher average IQ. The author does mention more controversial genetic information which ties Ashkenazi intelligence to higher sphingolipid formation in nerve sheaths. The associated genetic diseases found in Ashkenazi which involve faulty sphingolipid storage (Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher’s disease) hint that there might be a recessive gene at work … one copy leading to increased intelligence, two copies leading to serious disease. There are many unresolved questions with the research, however, which simply add the genetic explanation to the long list of other potential reasons which aren’t terribly conclusive.

Nisbett turns instead to a section on the waxing and waning of reputed intelligence amongst many European populations. The Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal were instrumental in the transmission of much of the literature of Antiquity into medieval life. When expelled from the Iberian peninsula, many went to the Netherlands where they took part in an explosion of commercial and scholarly activity. Today, their average IQ is largely indistinguishable from Caucasian averages. Similarly no one would have predicted that the northern Italians would suddenly dominate the new wave of quantification that swept technology, art, music and commerce between 1275 and 1325 (cf. cb review of Crosby’s The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 ). Yet the focus of scientific development in subsequent centuries shifted north and west in Europe. No one would have predicted the “Athens of the North” during the 18th century in Edinburgh and Glasgow, yet much of our modern world is shaped by the Scottish intellectuals such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Lord Kelvin. Scotland has not recovered its intellectual dominance since.

Nisbett notes that there is a major North-South divergence in American IQ scores and this may well support his “environmentalist” perspective on IQ growth and sustainment for we know that Americans have been relentlessly sorting themselves by geography since the 1960s … poorer, whiter, more fertile, and less educated to the “flyover states.” The best plain-language book on the subject is Bill Bishop’s Big Sort which I’m hoping to review sometime later this year.

Perhaps, as with Asian IQ scores and accomplishment, we can look to Ashkenazi culture for possible sources of excellence. Here, Nisbett seems pretty confident that the focus of Jewish life (or families where one parent is Jewish) reinforces the habits and skills that show up in intelligence, intellectual life, and achievement more generally. There are certainly plenty of anecdotes to support this perspective. Placing an emphasis on education and academic achievement, and the responsibility of the child to make the family proud, matched with a leveraging of minor biological selective forces across generations probably goes a long way to explaining Jewish success. Over-achievement seems a more likely explanation for the out-sized impact of the Ashkenazi rather than depending purely on an inherent IQ advantage .

Chapter 10

(Raising your child’s intelligence … and your own) collates the results of research described in earlier chapters to answer the question “what about me and mine?”. Anyone caught reading Professor Nesbitt’s book, or for that matter reading chicagoboyz, already falls into two unique categories: adults who read non-fiction and adults interested in intelligence and education. As a result, much of what the author outlines in this chapter he knows is the “obvious” … talk to your children, include them in adult conversations, read to and with them, encourage them without flattering them, and give them a low-stress environment in which to grow.

Some of his suggestions are less obvious but no less sensible. Ensure that their after-school and summer-time activities continue the intellectual stimulation of school. Encourage them to form peer groups that also have intellectual interests. Center your attention on building their ability to categorize, compare, analyze and evaluate. Unfortunately, the author notes that most of these activities correlate well with increased IQ but the data on causality is shaky. And it gets even more speculative for programs/music that claim to stimulate the intellectual growth of infants.

There do appear to be some strong correlations between larger babies and smarter adults. Pregnant women can increase the size of their babies with exercise and adults can maintain IQ by regular strength training and cardiac exercise. Breast-feeding for up to 9 months seems to add about six IQ points on average to children.

There are activities that will improve fluid intelligence (ability to solve novel problems without learned rules or concepts) for children and adults. Exercises which work with anticipation, stimulus discrimination, conflict resolution, and inhibition-control have been studied. Working memory and attention control exercises seem to help with ADHD children. Even certain kinds of meditation have been found helpful in increasing IQ scores on tests least dependent on specific knowledge (e.g Raven Progressive Matrices).

Apparently children with above-average self-control have higher intelligence, more academic achievement irrespective of intelligence. Unfortunately the research hasn’t yet confirmed particular methods for increasing self-control in children. Whether mental habits or parental models can make a sustained difference is under investigation.

In light of the research described earlier in the book, ensuring that children actually know that IQ changes with age and education is an important first step to counter school-yard misinformation, as is the emphasis on hard work and the idea that “IQ is under their control.” Praise for hard work seems to keep children more persistent in the face of difficult tasks as opposed to praise for their intelligence. Nisbett recommends avoiding making “contracts” with a child which inevitable turns play into work. As for supplemental education, it’s clear that there is very good research on effective tutoring methods which both parents and tutors can put to use.

For schooling, chapter 4 outlined a few major do’s and dont’s. Avoid rookie teachers. Try to ensure rewards for good teaching (which may mean working around teachers’ unions). Stick to methods confirmed by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse. Focus on teacher quality rather than the number of certificates or degrees that the teacher has. Encourage teacher-teacher mentoring to build actual teaching skills.

Epilogue

The epilogue of Intelligence summarizes the material from the earlier chapters … so it’s much like the synopsis I’ve written above, though more elegantly done! Best to let the author speak for himself a little.

“There is no fixed value for the heritability of intelligence. It differs from one population in another set of circumstances, to another population in another set of circumstances. If the environment is highly favourable to the growth of intelligence, then the heritability of intelligence is indeed fairly high — perhaps as high as 70 percent. This is the situation that exists for the upper middle class in developed countries.” p.193

” At the limiting extreme of identical environments for everyone in a given group, the only factor that can influence differences in intelligence is genetics. The upper middle class comes close enough to that situation that heredity for that group can be very important in determining differences in intelligence.

But if the environment is highly variable — differing greatly between individual families — then the environment is going to play the major role in differences in intelligence between individuals. And this is the situation for the poor.” p. 194

“Why have the [IQ] gains occurred? It is simple at base: the schools and the culture have changed radically in such a way as to affect scores on many of the subtests of IQ tests. Parents and schools increasingly teach children how to categorize objects and events in taxonomic terms suitable for scientific analysis. The media teach children the ways of the world — why policemen wear uniforms, why street addresses are numbered in order, and why people pay taxes — resulting in higher scores on comprehension subtests of IQ tests. Improvements on the Raven matrices — and in the fluid intelligence underlying performance on it — can be traced at least in part to the ever-more geometric and analytic ways of teaching arithmetic over recent decades, and possibly in part to computer games. A few years ago McDonald’s was including in its Happy Meals mazes that were more difficult than the mazes in an IQ test for gifted children!

And there there is the fact that people are receiving a lot more education than ever before. In a century the mean number of years of schooling has gone from seven to fourteen.” p.194-195

Having set the stage for his book by weakening the causal link between genetics and IQ, the author has walked through the various influences which clearly do have an impact on intelligence … home life, socioeconomic status, and the schools. And he turns to the over-achievers amongst America’s ethnic groups to get a different but supplemental argument for the role of SES and culture in developing IQ and propelling occupational accomplishment.

While race has no role in IQ across populations, it’s clear that genetics, family circumstances and primary education can be very influential (in combination) on individual IQ. There are activities that make us smarter and lifestyles and surroundings that keep us smarter. And while it may be easy to claim that IQ isn’t measuring “everything” about a person, it’s also true that it clearly is measuring something important and useful about a person’s skills. People can accomplish wonderful things without benefit of high IQ but the analytical skills measured by IQ can be put to use in a vast array of academic and occupational settings.

While it’s unrealistic to expect schools to shoulder the entire burden for eliminating the differences in IQ and academic achievement between the races (à la No Child Left Behind mandates), it’s clear that there’s enough research to confirm that intensive early childhood education tied to home visitations can yield huge immediate gains in IQ. Sustained patterns of long-term academic achievement and occupational attainment can be initiated … irrespective of measured IQ.

Belief that one is in control of one’s IQ is a start, but it doesn’t do the work necessary to grow and sustain IQ.

Conclusions

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I began reading it primarily on the strength of the author’s previous work rather than from any particular interest in primary/secondary education. Nonetheless, the more I read the more interesting the informatin became. This book really shines in the quality of the writing and the use of summaries and reminders to keep the reader on-track.

Intelligenceintroduces the earlier research on IQ and race, and a great deal that is appalling about modern educational infrastructure and associated effectiveness research. The book reviews quite a range of academic literature on the role of intelligence in the real world, and it teases apart fundamental flaws in past research that have largely gone un-examined in the last few decades.

Culture matters … indeed, the dust jacket of the book has a little graphic annotation that says “Why Schools and Cultures Count.” Addressing the cultural angle is not very popular and I wonder if that might work against this book finding a wider readership. Culture is a contentious word to use in economics and politics (cf. the cb review of Harrison’s book on the “Central Liberal Truth” or Lewis’ book on the Power of Productivity). While Professor Nisbett largely avoids reflexive Bush-bashing (apart from a wee bit of snark re: the No Child Left Behind Act), he is clearly unhappy with the status quo. Both political parties have been co-conspirators in inadvertently maintaining the current race- and SES-based distinctions in IQ, academic achievement, and occupational accomplishment. Can we expect any notable change in education policy now that Democrats control both the White House and Congress? I suspect not.

Democrats are content to shovel more money into school systems that are locked into mediocrity by teacher’s unions, administrative overhead, and unexamined educational principles. But Intelligence suggests that more money, in and of itself, is clearly not a solution. Ignoring the role of family life and parenting styles in the development of IQ is the “dirty little secret” of modern policy-making. The author also makes the point that scientific study of educational effectiveness has itself been largely undeveloped.

Republicans, on the other hand, are likely afraid of doing much more than fiddling with curricula for fear of being called “racists.” They are content, I think, with setting educational expectations (the 3Rs) for school populations that are culturally ill-prepared to take full advantage of particular content or teaching method, no matter how worthy. These habits, from Left and Right, allow implicit assumptions and popular biases about the inherent genetic capacities of American blacks, Asians, and Jews to be comfortably reinforced … much to the long-term detriment of the country. Hopefully Intelligence will re-open the discussion about the talents most individuals need in the modern world. IQ is a very useful proxy for judging whether children are getting the right introduction to the skills and habits they require. Freed from its genetic predetermination, an IQ score can be a useful gauge for skills acquisition. Effective testing can be conducted at a very early age. Does anyone really want to know, year by year, how the school system is doing?

Who would be an ideal reader for this book?

Parents will find a handy checklist. There are tips for maximizing a child’s intelligence, their schooling, and future career opportunities with ideas for reading, tutoring, language use, and parenting strategies. For people with limited budgets or time, borrowing a copy of the book from the local public library and skimming key chapters might be adequate. Incidentally, I would definitely recommend that every public library have a copy of this book. It is an excellent and very approachable reference work.

Those with direct responsibility for public education will get a thorough and sobering briefing on how off-track things have gotten … and how poorly prepared current social science is to contribute to practical solutions. Those in charge of political policies will have less of an excuse for the continued “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward discussions of race, IQ, and accomplishment. Policy wonks, on the other hand, now have an excellent introduction to the literature on the whole question of heredity versus environment (as it relates to IQ). For social scientists generally, there’s an indictment of educational research, and some useful discussions on the foundations of ethnic over-achievement.

Unfortunately, the reader is also introduced to evidence for a major bifurcation in the social and cultural environments of America generally, and black America more specifically. Each generation of the black middle class is rapidly increasing its average IQ and providing the home environment (generation-over-generation) that is the necessary foundation for IQ, academic achievement, and occupational success. Each passing year will bring that average closer to white America. In parallel, each generation of lower-class black America (along with its white compatriots) are systematically undermining the capacity of their children to take full advantage of any educational and occupational opportunities. There’s no reason to think that this separation of the SES groups (irrespective of race) will not continue.

When matched by the 40-year geographic, political, and sociological separation underway by the American electorate (cf. Big Sort — cb review pending), the foundations for a future “have” and “have-not” society are in place. America is “pouring a lot of concrete,” so to speak. Republicans need to be as worried as Democrats by the contents of Intelligence. Any social trend that separates one population more than another from the tools and attitudes needed to increase IQ scores is a long-term problem. Whether it’s years of schooling or attitudes toward science, middle America needs to recommit itself to a “brains and sweat” approach. Nisbett’s book has shown that Asian- and Jewish-Americans are “doubling-down” on the skill sets most associated with higher socioeconomic status. That’s also unlikely to change any time soon.

Intelligence would make a fine gift to any high school student active in debating/forensics. There are topics enough for years of podium battles in this book. An undergraduate student with a psychology, education, or sociology major would enjoy this book very much and find a great deal of interest in it. Nisbett’s review of psychological and educational research is a casebook on understanding how not to do social science. Anyone interested in social psychology, education, or social policy, either professionally or generally, should definitely give this well-written book a careful read. Teachers and school board members, however, should park a copy of Intelligenceon the shelf by their computer, consult it regularly, and think about it constantly!

While the potential readership for this book is substantial, getting anyone to act upon its insights is another matter entirely. I am pessimistic that the professor’s well-meaning (often passionate) suggestions on balancing the IQ playing field will ever see the light of day. The focus in American governance has shifted recently to health care and the restoration of economic growth and away from education. Massive budget deficits and public debt loads stretch to the horizon. The very states most likely to take a pro-active role in education (coloured Blue) are now teetering in various stages of bankruptcy. At this point in American history, no one has the incentive to take the information from this book and translate it into social programs. The fact that Intelligence so often quoted useful research from the 60s and 70s (subsequently ignored) seems to suggest that the family-by-family approach to IQ improvement is a dead letter.

I came away from the book drawing the conclusion that “nothing succeeds like success” and thanking my lucky stars that I was born to parents who came out of the hyper-literate Scotch Presbyterian culture (though raised as rural poor). Inadvertently, they inherited the parenting attitudes that moved literally all my cousins from the working class to the professions in a single generation. From parents who were hardscrabble farm kids to children who were doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, broadcast personalities, and federal bureaucrats. Lucky, lucky me.

Lucky also, for that matter, to be any reader of chicagoboyz. Some combination of family, friends, schooling, and inherent abilities gave us the appetite for ongoing intellectual challenge outside the demands of family and work life. That’s a great gift that many are unlikely to receive, as this book highlights.

If environment and culture are major contributors to the formation of IQ (childhood and otherwise), then IQ will probably continue to be a reflection and reinforcement of socioeconomic status and family traditions. The analytical and interpretative skills that are identified by IQ tests are precisely the abilities being demanded in the global workplace. The issues and insights about IQ raised by Professor Nisbett’s book aren’t going away any time soon.

“What to do with the poor?” is an ancient and perennial social question. The educational systems of the early 20th century, unrepentant and unapologetic in their desire to create uniform citizens through the public or Catholic school systems, once asked “what to do to the poor?”. Those days of enculturation are gone, however, and the generations of the middle class they “manufactured” are passing away.

In a world where smarts and hard work will still lead to broad success, “what to do to the poor?” returns as a big and politically vexing question. How can one provide the tools of IQ improvement and economic opportunity to new generations of students and citizens in a “multicultural” society? As Intelligence notes, the schools are merely one element in establishing and expanding IQ. This book suggests that a lot more people are going to have to tell the truth about intelligence before improvements, outside of fortunate cultural sub-groups, are going to extend across the American population as a whole.

Intelligence is highly recommended. I fully expect it to stand alone for some years as the “go-to” book on this topic. Though an unlikely book for “summer beach reading,” it deals with fascinating and important matters. It’ll permanently change the way you think about education and home life.

Return to part 1/2

[The publisher kindly provided a copy of this title for review]

Jump to part 2/2

Warning: 10,000+ words.

One of my side-interests is cognitive psychology, particularly cognitive biases in medical decision-making. Back in 2006, I stumbled over some research on how Asians and Westerners place very different emphases on objects when evaluating the world. The material was intriguing enough that I bought and cb reviewed) a copy of U Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…And Why (2003). Since then I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the history of science in East and West, and I found “Geography” very useful as a basis for thinking about past and future trends in global scientific culture. The subject showed up again indirectly in a cb review of Shutting Out the Sun.

My purchase of “Geography” earned me a pre-publication nudge from Amazon on the Professor’s latest book, which is different in subject matter from his earlier publication. Intelligence is a cognitive/social psychologist’s look at the educational and social environment leading to success in current American culture. It appears to be a plain-language summary of his NIH/NSF-sponsored research work on IQ/race and education. A less sexed-up title for the book might therefore be “The Role of Environment in American IQ and Accomplishment.”

Needless to say, the topic is massive so Intelligence spends a great deal of time recounting earlier research on the topic of IQ and race, academic achievement, career accomplishment, and the success of American secondary educational programs. In its academic variant, my guess is that the material was larded with footnotes and statistical detail. In Intelligence, the author take pity on the reader and adjusts the book’s content to describe research in plain English, and the impact or influence of potential activities on IQ scores in terms in of SD (standard deviation) or percentiles of student achievement. Appendices handle statistical definitions, a professional-level discussion of race and IQ, and a consideration of multivariate analysis. As noted, however, the book covers at lot of territory so my goal in this review is to mention the book’s topics (to tweak reader interest) rather than try to reiterate the author’s careful summaries and lucid assessments of the scientific literature. In other words, don’t take my word for it when it comes to the subtleties of research on particular subjects. Read the original, and the underlying articles.

The challenge, as with all social science research, is identifying the “confounding factors” that can muddy the results of research on IQ and subsequent individual success. The effective use of “controls” in a research program will improve confidence in the results. Otherwise, scientists are comparing apples and oranges without reaching any useful conclusions. Nisbett goes out of his way to give a sense of whether the research he reviews is misguided, inadequate, or merely suggestive without sufficient followup.

The Acknowledgements section of the book mentions John Brockman and Katinka Matson. This is a very good sign.Those two individuals are literary representatives for a stellar cast of scientists currently writing for the general public. Intelligence, despite being an overview of a vast amount of social science research, is very well written and edited. You’ll not find a better use of introductory, summary and concluding materials in each chapter to keep the reader oriented and motivated.

Table of Contents

1 Varieties of Intelligence [1]
2 Heritability and Mutability [21]
3 Getting Smarter [39]
4 Improving the Schools [57]
5 Social Class and Cognitive Culture [78]
6 IQ in Black and White [93]
7 Mind the Gap [119]
8 Advantage Asia? [153]
9 People of the Book [171]
10 Raising Your Child’s Intelligence … and Your Own [182]
Epilogue What We Now Know about Intelligence and Academic Achievement [193]

Definitions and Limitations

First off, the reader needs to understand that when scientists talk about the heritability of IQ, they aren’t talking about the percentage of any particular individual’s IQ that is controlled by genes. Instead, they are describing the distribution of IQ scores for a specific population. Differences in distribution between men and women, between ethnic or occupational groups, or within families would be example populations. The focus of this book is the American population generally, and different ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) groups specifically.

Heritability of IQ

Chapter 1

(Varieties of Intelligence) kicks off with a review of the role of IQ testing and its relation to scholastic and real-life accomplishment. The different definitions of intelligence are discussed. The most widely used definition of intelligence identifies two components: fluid intelligence (logical/analytical thinking) and crystallized intelligence (facts, step-by-step practical knowledge). These two kinds of intelligence seem to map most successfully to discrete brain function. The former capacity tends to level off in adulthood. The latter may increase throughout life. Recently, the term “intelligence” has been poached to describe other skills and attributes. Nisbett briefly evaluates whether such an expansion accurately mirrors intellectual capacity and sets the stage for a more traditional, but workable, definition.

The author notes that socioeconomic status (SES) tends to trend well with IQ. People with higher incomes tend to have higher IQs. That confirms the pattern that higher IQ has a “multiplier effect” on academic success and occupational achievement. Teasing apart the role of genes, specifically, in the IQ of particular occupations or social classes is the core issue addressed by Intelligence in the many pages that follow.

“Higher socioeconomic status of parents is related to educational attainment of the child, but higher-socioeconomic-status parents have higher IQs, and this affects both the genes that the child has and the emphasis that the parents are likely to place on education and the quality of the parenting with respect to encouragement of intellectual skills and so on. So statements such as “IQ accounts for X percent of the variation in occupational attainment” are built on the shakiest of statistical foundations. What nature hath joined together, multiple regressions cannot put asunder.” p.18

Teasing out the role that family environment has on IQ, distinct from the genetic variance in IQ within families (or between families) can identify not only the role of upbringing but the multiplier effects that determine how siblings, raised in the same environment, can have very different incomes & social outcomes affected specifically by their IQ. Nisbett makes an important point. If all IQ heritability research is undertaken within a relatively narrow range of SES, or depends on small pools of people, conclusions about the role of genes and environment will be inevitably skewed. It’s important that the research on IQ aggressively seek out data from as many environments and as many different types of people (from the very young to the very old) as possible.

Chapter 2

(Heritability and Mutability) takes a very close look at the statistical research associated IQ and race … and seeks to tease out the role that environment and socioeconomic status (SES) has on IQ as a child grows to adulthood. The author admits that this is the most intellectually challenging chapter of the book but does a good job of presenting the arguments in a methodical manner.

It’s been widely proclaimed, and largely assumed that IQ is “75-85% heritable” … that is, the particular distribution of IQ for the general population (averages, means, modal distribution, etc.) is mostly determined by genetic inheritance. Nisbett describes this as the “heriditarian” viewpoint, and it dominates general scientific received wisdom to this day. Any influence on IQ or its growth that is environmentally determined is largely assumed to disappear entirely by late adolescence. In contrast, the “environmentalist” viewpoint holds that IQ distribution in the general population is controlled by genes less than 50%, that IQ growth can be influenced much earlier and much later than traditionally assumed. Nutrition, perinatal health/prematurity, home life, education, and experience are all considered to have direct measurable impacts on IQ growth, IQ sustainment, and subsequent application of that intelligence to academic and occupational achievement.

We do know that there is roughly a 12-18% difference between the average IQ of high SES populations (the top third) and low SES populations (the bottom third). Even so, there may also be a 15-25% differences between the IQ of specific children within or across families in the same SES. Differences in environmental influence on IQ have been assumed to be nil after childhood and therefore not influential on adult life. Birth order, for example, may have a role in childhood development but the hereditarians would suggest it has very little adult impact on IQ.

Nisbett reviews the scientific foundation of the estimates on the role of genes by looking more closely at the research conducted 40-50 years ago which largely focused on adoption studies (kids from the same parents raised in different families) or twins studies (identical [monozygotic] twins raised in different families). The results of these studies suggested very little difference in IQ by adulthood for these study subjects. Confirmation of genetic influence on IQ … or evidence of research “confounding factors”?

Nisbett notes that not only are the number of study subjects very limited (N=?), but the controls to eliminate the role of environment were very poorly evaluated. For example, twins may share extensive uterine and post-natal environments before leaving the parental home. And when twins, or non-twin children, are re-located they often move to relatives or families with a predisposition toward adoption. And when science looks more closely at those adoptive families they find a few things. Firstly, those families are quite similar (i.e., non-randomly) to the birth family. And secondly, the families with a predisposition to adopt are largely middle or high SES and have parenting skills well above average (as measured by indices such as HOME – Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment . Finally, researchers found that middle class twins are logistically easier to study … so they inadvertently focused on families where the range of family/schooling environments was unusually narrow and generally quite positive.

In other words, the scientific basis for the heritability of adult IQ has been inadvertently reinforced by major research design flaws. The environments that children were born into and raised in were not randomly chosen, nor were they methodically controlled. If you move a child from a home and into a largely identical home, it’s not surprising that you’ll not spot any environmental impact on IQ. The more similar the environment, the less that its impact on IQ across a population will be accurately measured. Heritability will be measurable only when other externals are measured and controlled. Within SES classes, similar research challenges await. Genes affect IQ .70 standard deviations (SD) of IQ amongst the upper class and .10 SD in the lower class. Why? Because the range of home environments in the two classes are dramatically different. From largely good to excellent (in the upper class) to “quite good to pathological” in the lower class.

Fortunately, there is some research that attempted to randomize the impact of environment on IQ and IQ growth. A French study which didn’t constrain the SES of adoptive homes found a difference average IQ of 12 points between children raised in low SES homes and high SES home. Adoption, generally, seems to offer an IQ improvement for children-at-risk … but the increase is 8 points when adopted by a low SES family, 16 points when adopted by a middle SES family, and 20 points when adopted by a high SES family.

Such numbers are non-trivial when one considers that distinctions between average IQ for working, office, and management/ professional classes are often measurable in 10 point increments. An indirect confirmation of the role of environment in IQ also comes from the fact that there is a poor correlation between adoptive parent IQ and adoptive kid IQ. If environment quality has a major impact, then an adoptive parent’s IQ (distinct from their parenting skills!) may only play a small role on an adoptive child’s IQ growth.

Nisbett wraps this chapter with some references to very recent science books for the general public that largely accept at face value that IQ is overwhelmingly governed by genes … just as it was proclaimed in the Bell Curve 15 years ago. In a final point, Nisbett notes that there’s no known inherent limit on the mutability of IQ if the role of environment is, in fact, substantial. That interesting tidbit leads naturally to the next chapter which discusses the continued growth of average IQ through the 20th century and into the 21st.

Chapter 3

(Getting smarter) examines the puzzling relentless upward trend in IQ results, for all populations, over the last 90 years. The so-called Flynn effect is the upward trend in average IQ score in the US from 1947 to 2002, roughly 0.3 points per year for a total of 18 points of increase. Where does it come from? And how can it keep climbing? The answers are fascinating. IQ tests were developed and refined during WW1 to help the Army predict the academic potential of its recruits. The tests were largely successful and led to their wider adoption in subsequent years.

The growth in IQ through the 20th century largely parallels the expansion of, and change in, the schooling received by the American public. It can’t, for example, be attributable to IQ test-taking familiarity since that was largely non-existent before WW2. Nor can it explain the phenomena in the years since WW2 because IQ re-testing only tweaks IQ results by several points. Similarly, nutritional deficiencies substantial enough to seriously impede IQ largely disappeared in the US after WW2. So we can have some confidence that the growth in IQ over the last 60 years has some very real ties to education.

So each generation is “smarter” than the previous. And noticeably moreso than their grandparents. Is there something about schooling that makes you smarter? Strangely enough, we can say with some certainty that time away from school — summer vacation — seems to make you “dumber.” Student growth in IQ (and academic skills) stagnates or even falls backwards during summers off. Nisbett works his way through the literature on the impact of schooling (number of days per years, number of years total, variations between schooling hours in different countries) and largely concludes that more schooling increases IQ … that one year of school has twice as much impact on IQ as one year of additional biological age. Dropouts, for example, have anywhere between a 13 and 18 reduction in average IQ. In cases where schooling was arbitrarily cut off from children during the 20th century (examples include WW2 and periods of civil rights controversy in the US) children had noticeable reductions in average IQ … as much as 2 points per year of schooling missed.

Most interestingly, even a few months of Western-style schooling can have a major impact on IQ for both younger and older children in places such as Africa where neither IQ testing nor formal education have been available. Clearly IQ is measuring something acquired by schooling and reinforced by physical and social maturation.

What does this mean at a practical level? Say a post-WW2 grand-parent had an average IQ (100). They would find a modern four-year college curriculum very tough. Their grandchild with a 118 IQ however would be considered well-equipped for a profession and for the extensive post-secondary and graduate education involved.

A side-issue associated with IQ has always been “culture-relevance.” Are IQ tests inherently biased to particular cultures? The results of recent testing which correlates very modest Western education with big jumps in IQ test results in developing nations suggests that even the IQ tests which proclaim themselves most independent of any particular cultural content (names, dates, grammar, etc.) such as the Raven Progressive Matrices are actually measuring something enhanced by the content and nature of modern education. What is it?

“[W]e have every reason to believe that the culture is producing superior executive-control functions than were found for earlier eras, and that these altered executive functions are improving performance on fluid-intelligence tasks — certainly for Raven matrices and probably for other fluid-intelligence tasks such as those in the WISC performance package.” p. 50

It turns out that the shift in education over the last century (and even videogame entertainment in the last two decades) has been enhancing ability in particular kinds of categorization, organization, modelling, and analysis.

“… [I]t does mean that we can think analytically in ways that help us to understand and generate metaphors and similes and that we have gained in our ability to categorize objects and events in ways that are relevant to scientific classifications. And these changes are of real significance.” p.52

While there has been no improvement in scores related to static information or simpler arithmetic ability … there has been a major change in the more advanced kinds of mathematical skills and the capacities which support scientific reasoning and logical organization. Nisbett notes in passing as a case example that geometry was an advanced subject for schools in 1900 and calculus was left largely to colleges. In 2000, calculus is now widely taught in high school and sometimes creeps down into junior high. And while the Flynn effect appears to have levelled off in places like Scandanavia, IQ averages are surging in the developing world as exposure to particular kinds of education, and more years of education, are becoming more widely available.

Chapter 4

(Improving Schools) looks at school performance and the quality of educational social science research that evaluates school performance. Angst over US performance on the “league tables” of the world’s educational systems is perennial. Just like health care, one can find pockets of excellence and pockets of abject failure. Nisbett notes that US students taking advanced placement (AP) calculus and physics (1% and 5% of American students respectively) do about as well as the top 10-20% of students in other nations.

Is it a matter of money? Whether the students are rich or poor, adding more money to the current systems does not appear to be an influential factor. Where civil rights litigation has mandated the investment of many millions of dollars in schools, gyms, pools and equipment (e.g. Kansas city) it has had no impact on school performance. While Nisbett does support spending more than what is spent now, it must be spent in particular ways.

Voucher systems and charter schools do not appear to be a panacea either. There is the problem of self-selection … parents who take/use vouchers or who jump through the hurdles to put their children in charter schools are likely superior parents in the first place. Parents who don’t seek out such educational advantages may be more influential (in a negative sense) than any specific educational system. Some research claims a 1/3 reduction in the black/white IQ gap in such schools but the underlying ability to properly control sample groups opens the results to serious question.

When lotteries are used to control access to charter schools, a .10 SD difference in IQ distribution (very small) is identified. Nisbett says that these schools may be good, but there is no good evidence to prove it. The research does suggest that charter schools have minimal impact on student performance in first few years of operation and are much less positive for students who starting in the charter environment at an older age.

If not money, then, what can positively influence IQ and academic performance? The research on class size is conflicting, though it does seem to help more for poor and minority students to have smaller classes. The training of teachers (certificates or graduate degrees) has no impact on teacher quality … though stronger evidence suggests that first year teachers can have a negative effect on class success. There is plenty of solid anecdotal evidence for the powerful influence of individual teachers on many hundreds of their students … but such “statistical outliers” are an impossible way to renovate an educational system. It does appear that excellent first-grade (even kindergarten) teachers have an outsized impact on eventual student success.

All this discussion takes place in the debate minefield of teacher compensation. How to identify, train, and reward good teaching is “very poorly handled.” The tales of “effective schools” are rarely more than anecdotal and it’s clear that Nisbett (coming from social and cognitive psychology) is a bit scandalized by the state of the quality in educational research which “rarely rises to the level of being scientifically acceptable.”

[...] schools with better outcomes have better principals with better strategies and teachers who are more committed to seeing that their students flourish.”p.67

” Without knowing *that* a treatment is effective, there can be no way of knowing *how* it is effective.”p.68

Nisbett turns his attention from the issues of educational funding and technique to look at “whole school interventions” but finds that research into their effectiveness is similarly poor in design, under-sized in scale, or simply not extended for a long enough period. The research out of instructional design offers a bit more hope. Computer usage for instruction in math and reading, or for the use of mentoring, appears to make a significant positive impact. A structured mentor/student approach can similarly be beneficial. Nisbett does recommend the US Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse as a first stop for parents and teachers seeking educational methods that have some solid (or relatively solid!) research behind them.

There are interesting hints of what curriculum enhancement might offer if a focus was made directly on logical thinking and problem solving. Many years back I recall hearing that Edward de Bono (the originator of the term “lateral thinking”) had successfully convinced the Venezuelan government to introduce one of his courses into the national school system. Nisbett notes the research of Richard Herrnstein in the same country, looking at teaching seventh-graders the basics of problem solving. The results clearly showed that general problem-solving skills can be directly taught and practical abilities substantially enhanced. A change of government, apparently, spelled the end to the program and research. And in light of recent news from the region, we’re unlikely to see Venezuelan petro-dollars directed to teaching thinking skills in the classrooms of that nation any time soon.

Nisbett wraps the chapter with a summary of the great deal that we do know about effective instruction and the little we know about good-to-great teachers. The absence of solid evidence on entire school systems that work (in all SES environments) is something that clearly bothers him.

Chapter 5

(Social class and cognitive culture) returns to a discussion of socio-economic status and its impact on IQ. The author leads with some sociological definitions of the poor (unemployed, on welfare, non-skilled), the working class, middle class, and upper-middle class. He first reviews the specific environmental issues that affect IQ and IQ development for children in poverty: low birth weight, poor overall health, lack of breast-feeding, inadequate or non-existent medical care, local pollution, and asthma are just a few of the highlights. In terms of the social environments for kids, poor families tend to move more often and children have increased behavioural problems. Parenting is usually described as “punitive/stressful.” Disrupted neurological development in early childhood can’t help but have downstream impact. There’s some suggestion that the prefrontal cortex has a role in “fluid intelligence” of the kind directly measured by IQ tests. I don’t think it will come as news that kids from poor households have lower average IQ and academic achievement.

Nisbett notes that US income disparity is usually matched with a skill disparity and that “gap” sets the tone for the adult stress levels and cognitive/social focus of the family. The author implies that this is something that can and should be urgently addressed. To chip in my own two cents, I think it’s worth pointing out that American social disparities are inevitably inflated by a scale of immigration (legit or otherwise) that inadvertently re-supplies the unskilled labour pool. Tens of millions of unskilled immigrants have moved their families into the middle class during the 19th and 20th centuries. It hardly seems fair to expect the US, alone among industrialized nations, to approach the levels of income equity shown in the rest of the G7 when only it is expanding its population.

It will be pretty hard to shrink the relative size of the low SES group in the US without some major economic and political adjustments. The industrialized populations in the EU and Japan (now well under zero population growth), have low to nil immigration and therefore less income disparity. They manage only about 75% of the per-capita annual GDP of the US (see cb review of pertinent data). The capacities of those nations to actually accept large numbers of immigrants is therefore much more constrained. “Our jobs would be more equitable … if we created any” doesn’t seem like much of a boast.

The point the author makes, that household income can directly influence childhood development, is a solid one. I’m not sure “elevating IQ” has any more traction on the Right as a rationale for income redistribution than “merit pay for teachers” has on the Left. The disparity between reading and math skills for the top 25% of SES versus the bottom 25% mimics the difference between the developed world and developing countries. In other words, big.

“In a word, if we want the poor to be smarter, we need to find ways to make them richer.” p. 85

What is the role of the “cognitive culture” of a family or community on childhood development of IQ? The differences in behaviour between families in different SES groups is one of the most interesting parts of this book. Children in the families of professionals & high-level managers are cultivated to have questioning, analytic minds. Parents in lower SES families feel successful if they raise obedient children with good behaviour. Professional parents talk more to their kids and include them in adult conversations with vocabulary they may not immediately understand. Researchers have actually monitored parental behaviour across the spectrum of SES groups in great detail. Professional families speak an average of 2,000 words per hour to a child versus an average of 1300 words per hour in working class families. By age 3, that’s a difference of 30 million words versus 20 million. Kids raised in professional families will have 50% more vocabulary words than working class kids by that time. The tone and nature of parent-kid interactions differ substantially. The ratio of encouragement-to-reprimand is 6:1 in professional families versus 2:1 in working families. And it’s encouragement, as opposed to flattery or abuse, that seems to propel learning and curiosity and, in turn, enhance IQ.

Middle-class parenting encourages an analysis of the world, emphasizes reading more to children, provides more child-friendly books in the house, makes particular kinds of intellectual requests of children. Beyond simply the analysis of what (identifying the object), there are the why? questions, placing the object in a dynamic environment. Middle-class kids are frequently asked to evaluate and compare, often in the context of reading.

For the working class, raising a successful children is about socialization for factory and office. There is an emphasis on paying attention in a timely fashion and following direct commands. There’s no request to interpret detailed instructions which must be then tweaked for the practical world. Recipes are more rarely used for food preparation. As a result, the “translation tasks” that middle-class kids are inundated with are simply absent in many working class environments. It’s not hard to imagine how kids then respond to such tasks in the first few years of school. They’re confused (1) by what they are being asked to do, and (2) why an adult in authority would be asking them to do it in the first place. As a result, working class kids tend to drop in academic skill during summer vacations while middle-class kids merely stagnate in their skill levels.

Interestingly enough, these different cognitive skills in home life actually persist, according to the research, beyond an immediate improvement in family economic circumstance. Parents who’ve lifted themselves from the working class in young adulthood nonetheless tend to raise their middle-class kids in a working class manner. Apparently it takes a generation or so to integrate the educational and occupational obsessions of the middle class into home life.

Chapter 6

(IQ in Black/White)

Having set the stage for the contrast between midde-class and working class realities for childhood development styles of child-rearing, Nisbett returns to the issue of race and IQ, providing a specialist section in Appendix B for readers with the background and motivation to address the scientific literature directly. How does black America fare in a world that rewards particular kinds of intellectual skills with money?

In preamble, the author notes that the Moors and Jews of Spain, and the Romans and Greeks of the classical era, had a very low opinion of the intellectual capacities of the northern Europeans. So prejudices about what different races are capable of is nothing new. Until 600 years ago, there was little to suggest that Europe would be generating anything new or useful. Crosby’s Measure of Reality reviewed a few years back in chicagoboyz opens with the contrast at the time between the Islamic and European worlds. Expectations about particular races and groups shift back and forth through history as wealth and technology change hands. To a measurable degree, however, black Americans have internalized recent expectations about their genetic capacity and Nisbett reviews the literature from social psychology on the impact of testing IQ in black populations under conditions where there is a “stereotype threat.” The publication of The Bell Curve in the mid-90s kicked off a fierce, and ultimately too brief, public discussion of race and IQ. Despite the fact that average black IQ in America now matches (courtesy of the Flynn effect) the average IQ of white America in 1950, there is still a widely-held assumption that it is genetic capacity that will hold back blacks.

Turning to physiology, Nisbett notes briefly that attributes like brain size are poor proxies for intellectual capacity. While men and women notably different in brain size they share the same average IQ. They do not, it should be noted, shared the same distribution of IQ across the lower and higher ranges. Average human brain size has actually been shrinking since the first appearance of homo sapiens sapiens some 200,000 years ago. So brain size offers no particular value, at this point, to the discussion of IQ.

What about correlations between specific genetic makeup and IQ? If African genes have any role, or place any limitation, on intellectual capacity, black Americans provide the ideal study group to provide it … since they have widely differing ratios of European genes in their genetic makeup. But when studies of detailed genetic makeup are matched with IQ, there are no correlations between the extent of European ancestry and IQ. Other studies with mixed-race kids in post-WW2 Germany show similar results.

As mentioned, with the advent of additional schooling and the impact of education and occupational opportunity, average black IQ is now superior to that of average white IQ in 1950. Black IQ has seen rapid growth, both in a drop in the absolute size of the black/white IQ gap and in the relative improvement of black IQ toward the moving target provided by the Flynn effect. As Nisbett notes, these reductions are non-trivial, especially amongst the higher ranges of IQ. A 15 point gap in average IQ of one group over another would lead one to expect an 18:1 ratio of individuals with an IQ over 130. And an IQ of 130 is the rough benchmark for expectations of stellar achievement in the professions. A 10 point gap in relative average IQ between two groups however reduces the expected ratio of individuals with an IQ over 130 to 6:1. These changes in ratio translate into tremendous jumps in representation in higher SES groups.

Every bit of “catching up” in IQ has massive implications for academic achievement and occupational accomplishment. The “multiplier effect” is at work again.

Nesbitt, making the case for the broader role of environment in the determination of IQ, notes that black America still has many environmental barriers to accomplishment: lower SES (and all that entails, discussed above), redlining in housing, single-parent families, etc. etc. He identifies two trends: one good, one bad. The growth of middle-class black America has been substantial and it’s shown up in the rocketing average IQ figures for that segment of America. But there is also a lower class black America and the catastrophic changes occurring in the black families outlined in the Moynihan Report have become exacerbated. Cultural attitudes by young, black males has opened up a difference in average IQ between black males and black females that is unseen in white populations.

The discrimination against blacks, per se, in northern cities is really a 20th century phenomena, according to Nisbett. Indeed, the 19th century Irish and Appalachians were considered less desirable workers and neighbours than “free blacks.” The author turns to much of Thomas Sowell’s research to fill in the demographic and cultural changes in rural and urban America that shifted attitude to skin colour in the last 100 years. Even today, the attitude in American cities to West Indians with African backgrounds is driven by a reputation for incredible hard work and family durability. As Nisbett notes, ironically a lilting Caribbean accent (despite the colour of one’s skin) can be a passport to opportunity in America. A negative reputation can be equally devastating.

In a discussion sure to raise eyebrows, if not hackles, Nisbett looks at the sociological information on the role of home life in black America on IQ scores.

“On top of all the demographic disadvantages of American blacks as a whole, many also socialize their children in ways that are less likely to encourage high IQ scores and high academic achievement than do whites of comparable social and economic circumstances.” p. 111

Recalling the statistics discussed earlier where professionals averaged 2,000 words per hour with their infant children, and working class families averaged 1,300 words per hour with their children, black Americans on welfare averaged 600 words per hour with their very young children. Extrapolating as before, that means that a three year old from the respective SES groups will have had 30, 20, or 10 million words directly at them. With vastly reduced direct adult interaction, a dramatically narrowed list of vocabulary, few if any books (and none suitable for children), and a dramatically reduced set of parental demands to identify objects or create verbal or written responses … school age analogies and extrapolation are largely impossible for kids from poor families just starting school. Requests from a kindergarten or first-grade teacher are a complete mystery. Without familiarity at home to structured story-telling, and with limited opportunities to gain skills in categorization, an child’s extrapolation from a stylized school-time story to real objects in the world is incredibly difficult.

Studies following up specific communities after a 20 year interval suggest that for some African-American families the “cognitive style” and parenting skills have gotten even worse. For black families on welfare, the encouragement-reprimand ratio for conversations with their children is 1:2, in comparison to professional families (6:1) and working class (2:1). As mentioned above, the black middle class is making significant gains in average IQ scores but it still contains an adolescent male subculture that considers many of the academic skills needed to boost IQ scores as “acting white.” Athletic ability or an entertainment career is seen as the only acceptable path forward. This is creating a divergence in average IQ scores (and subsequent academic attainment) between black females and black males … destabilizing black families even further.

The story of IQ in black and white has optimistic and discouraging elements.

Chapter 7

(Mind the Gap) looks at educational initiatives to reduce the IQ distinctions between different groups in America. In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act mandated the elimination of a vast array of educational gaps (between races, ethnic groups and social classes) by 2014. Nisbett is singularly unimpressed.

“Intellectual capital is the result of stimulation and support for exploration and achievement in the home, the neighbourhood, and the schools. To think that this can be changed by mandate — operating only through the schools — is preposterous.” p.119

As Nisbett outlined earlier, while the gap between the races in average IQ scores is closing rapidly as access to education and occupational opportunities continue, the gaps in average IQ scores between the social classes are persistent. There is a built-in bias for high SES groups, because they not only have a marginal (and understandable) higher average IQ to begin with but the environment in which they raise their children is optimized for the development of particular kinds of skills. The fact that the best research available suggests a 12 – 18 point IQ advantage to being raised in a higher SES group than the lowest SES group simply confirms the current situation. It does not place an inherent limit, however, on the the potential increase possible to all kids, across the socioeconomic status spectrum. As described in earlier chapters, the educational system is still very poor at designing researcht that will identify and put into practice the methods and resources that will work. We do know that children experience a halt or drop-off in their intellectual capacity during summer vacation. What of the time before they even get to school?

Plenty of evidence suggests that early childhood education programs (the poster child is Headstart) do not get great results and are questionable value for money. For one thing, such programs cannot be sporadic or occasional. They must be sustained (as the vacation drop-off phenomena suggests). Yet many of these early childhood initiatives have better accomplishment outcomes than their gains or sustainment in IQ scores. In other words, subsequent evaluations of student participants may see initial IQ gains fade, but a pattern of improved social and occupational achievement may continue later in life.

This is all rather mysterious at the moment. We know that the abilities reflected in high IQ scores open up opportunities for academic achievement and occupational accomplishment. IQ acts as both enabler and multiplier for many positive things in a person’s life. How particular programs could temporarily increase IQ growth and yet maintain longer-term impacts on practical achievement seems like a significant piece of information. One that researchers would want to examine with carefully designed experiments.

Unfortunately, Nisbett’s review of the scientific literature on pre-school and primary school education suggests that “bad research” and “no research” are the only kinds of research in great supply. He looks at isolated examples of great results from temporary programs from decades past (e.g. the Abecedarian program of the 70s and the Perry Preschool program of the 60s). Again the pattern shows that comprehensive, year-round programs that acknowledge and support the child’s home life can make an impressive difference in IQ scores … and that those scores may fall back when the programs end but the differences in lifetime achievement can still remain significant. Black and Hispanic children seem to benefit the most from the pre-school programs, as would be predicted if they are most lacking in family environments which inadvertently reinforce the acceleration of fluid intelligence in specific areas.

The results of school-age interventions suffer, as mentioned above, from the problem of self-selection. Parents who persist in finding the best education for their children may well outweigh all the other influences that good educational methodology could provide. In some socioeconomic settings, having parents at all is a major childhood advantage. Nisbett finds questionable research methodology rampant in evaluations of the many school-age programs that are available. He looks at Project SEED, a Heritage Foundation program, and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Yet again we see extraordinary individuals such as math teacher Jaime Escalante (of Stand and Deliver fame) can make incredible strides in educating kids from lower SES backgrounds. But extraordinary individuals and fortuitous combinations of principals and school budgets make such stories unique and always ephemeral.

Nisbett also reviews the inexpensive interventions tested by social psychologists to support improved learning. Simply telling students that IQ is not a fixed value can encouragement improvement. Or asking them to map out their future, before undertaking a course of study. Or reassuring minority students, through experimental means, that people from all races and backgrounds share worries about academic ability and social acceptability when they enter high school or college. It’s clear, by implication, that there are many small and cheap ways that they educational system could remove minor barriers to educational success, even if the big barriers remain.

Interestingly enough, college seems to have fewer distinctions in attitudes between the races than high schools. Nisbett hypothesizes that the quality of the education is more even across institutions, that there is less peer pressure to not “act white” and less intentional “effort reduction.”

The author wraps up the chapter with a summary of programs with clear benefits for minority kids — SEEDS (math) and Reading Recovery (reading). The KIPP program, with young teachers working at reduced rates for several years, also appears successful. But are these benefits worth their costs? What are the social benefits of each year a child has an solid education versus the social costs when they don’t? Can such programs still be run effectively when regular union rules about teacher behaviour and teach compensation (driven by seniority and certificates) are enforced?

It certainly appears that we know how to improve minority education (at school and at home). The paucity of any research conducted in the last few decades, however, suggests neither the money nor the the political will exists to intrude on low-income homes to directly change parenting practices that inhibit IQ scores (and associated later achievement).

continue to part 2/2

Chua, Amy, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Power and Why They Fall (2007 Hrdbk, 2008 ppbk. 396 pp.)

A paperback of this title was kindly provided by the publisher for review.

Warning: 9,000+ words ahead!

While drafting a 2006 chicagoboyz review of Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), I was very impressed with the value of the concepts she introduced and her superior writing style. I had heard of her more recent book but the pace of the past few years had largely halted my book reviewing.

So I’m late to the game with Day of Empire (DOE). The publication of the paperback version of the book triggered one of Amazon.com’s oft-fatal “As someone who has purchased or rated X, you might like to know that Y has just been published …” notices in my In-Box. Based on World on Fire and Amazon’s summary blurb of the more recent book, it seemed well worth reading. I’ve purposely avoided reading any reviews of the book by other writers.

In World on Fire, Professor Chua introduced the concept of market-dominant minorities … influential groups who are resistant to change (including democratic change) that may affect their economic status in developing nations.

The concept could also be used to describe Israel and America’s impact at a regional and global level (respectively) … i.e., nations that influence the pace and direction of disruptive change for a skeptical (when not actively resistant) world.

Quoting Professor Chua in her previous book:

This book is about a phenomenon – pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo – that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.

Day of Empire is Professor Chua’s “big picture” history book exploring a different kind of dominance … that of the largest powers across the last 2,500 years of world history. Joining the flood of recent books on American imperialism and America’s future on the world stage, Day of Empire looks at the country’s dominant role in the world by matching its story against that of history’s other “hyperpowers.” (orig. hyperpuissance – the French neologism/slur).

Is there a common reason why hyperpowers arise? Do they share a pattern in their fall from the pinnacle?

Professor Chua believes she has found some answers to those questions. Her central thesis is that all hyperpowers in human history have displayed social tolerance as a necessary (though not entirely sufficient) cause of their rise and dominance. Periods of subsequent social intolerance have been instrumental in their fall. In some cases, such tolerance (too little, too late or too much, too soon) can actually hasten a hyperpower’s demise. If true, the implications for post-Cold War America warrant discussion.

In her words (p. xxi):

For all their enormous differences, every single world hyperpower in history – ever society that could even arguably be described as having achieved global hegemony – was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to pre-eminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was indispensible to the achievement of hegemony. Just as strikingly, the decline of empire has repeatedly coincided with intolerance, xenophobia, and calls for racial, religious, or ethnic “purity.” But here’s the catch: It was also tolerance that sowed the seeds of decline. In virtually every case, tolerance eventually hit a tipping point, triggering conflict, hatred, and violence.

A word on approach: “big picture” histories for the general reader necessarily have a “drive-by” feel since only a limited number of citations and references appear in end notes. The author can rarely inform us of what was read but not used. Much must be left out or over-generalized to keep the book length within reason.

A review of such a book ends up being a “drive-by of a drive-by.” I’ve tried to accommodate that reality by first glossing the book’s contents with minimal commentary, then picking a few examples of where I think the author’s “drive-by” was less than successful, and finally by addressing the bigger themes and hypotheses of the book directly. When I hit 18 pages of reading notes, the phrase “exhaustive review” kept coming to mind. Time to focus. I’m not entirely happy with the results but I am happy to chat separately about details of any given section of this book with other readers of Day of Empire. Apologies offered where apologies are owed.

In tandem with her thesis about the role of tolerance in the emergence and subsequent fall of hyperpowers, the author notes that successful hyperpowers must have some kind of “glue” that successfully binds the governing and the governed. If not co-operation and participation, then hyperpowers at least require acquiescence from the people they control.

The author sets the stage with an introductory chapter that defines “hyperpower” for purposes of her book. She also establishes the criteria of “tolerance” that we can identify in past periods, attempting to avoid anachronistic standards of who and what should be tolerated. In order to build as wide a study set of hyperpowers as possible, avoiding “selection bias,” Chua is generous in defining, and including, historical examples of hyperpowers.

What follows, as indicated by the table of contents below, is a book organized in a temporal sequence from the pre-modern and Enlightenment hyperpowers through to the modern era. Germany and Japan are used as case studies of modern intolerant societies that didn’t quite cut it. “What not to do,” as it were. A chapter looks at China, the EU, and India and discusses whether they have the potential to be hyperpowers in future. Professor Chua concludes with what her hypothesis means for America and her recommendations for American immigration, economic and foreign policy.

Table of Contents

Part I The Tolerance of Barbarians
c.1 First Hegemon (Achaemenid Persia)
c.2 Tolerance in Rome’s High Empire
c.3 China’s Golden Age (Tang)
c.4 Great Mongol Empire

Part 2 “Enlightening of Tolerance”
c.5 The Purification of Medieval Spain
c.6 The Dutch World Empire
c.7 Tolerance and Intolerance in the East (Ming/Ottoman/Mughal)
c.8 The British Empire

Part 3 The Future of World Dominance
c.9 The American Hyperpower
c.10 The Rise and Fall of Axis Powers (Germany/Japan)
c.11 The Challengers (Main Rivals of the US Today – China, EU, India)
c.12 The Day of Empire (Lessons of the Past for the 21st Century)

Terms of Art

First off, the key terms used in DOE.

A hyperpower’s power:

• clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporary rivals.

• Is not clearly inferior in economic/military strength to any other power on the planet, known to it or not.
• projects power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the bounds of mere local or even regional pre-eminence.

For Chua, the kicker is always whether a power had formidable rivals of roughly comparable might. Louis XIV’s France, the Hapsburg Empire, and the United States during the Cold War thus don’t qualify.

Tolerance, for the author’s purposes, does not mean the modern, human-rights sense of the word. Nor political or cultural equality amongst subjects.

… tolerance simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons. To define the term a little more formally, tolerance in this book will refer to the degree of freedom with which individuals or groups of different ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or other backgrounds are permitted to coexist, participate, and rise in society. … Tolerance in this sense does not imply respect. … They key concept is relative tolerance. In the race for world dominance, what matters most is not whether a society is tolerant according to some absolute, timeless standard, but whether it is more tolerant than its competitors. … I am not arguing that tolerance is a sufficient condition for world dominance … Rather, I am arguing that tolerance is a necessary condition for world dominance. Conversely, I am also arguing that intolerance is starkly associated with the decline of hyperpowers. Here, however, separating cause from effect is more problematic. It is often difficult to say whether intolerance leads to decline, or whether intolerance is a by-product of decline. In most cases, both propositions are probably true.

Hyperpowers – The Early Years

The first power examined by the author is Achaemenid Persia [550-330 BCE] … the culture which gave the Greeks such a headache during the Classical period.

The Persians complemented a formidable army with respect for the religious beliefs of conquered parties (including their predecessors, the Babylonians). The extent of their empire, and the wealth and cosmopolitan nature of their capital cities, was unprecedented. In the course of expansion to the shores of the Mediterranean, they assembled an army and navy of diverse ethnic origins drawn from the peoples of the region. Though they co-opted the ruling elites of their empire through the use of satrapy, they engendered limited loyalty from their subjects. When Alexander the Great defeated Persian armies in a series of major battles, the entire empire simply converted to Greek suzerainty and after Alexander’s death into three smaller kingships.

The next hyperpower discussed is Rome’s Western Empire [~700 BCE – 476 CE]. Chua takes the unusual step of restricting her evaluation of the Roman Empire to the imperial period of the so-called “good emperors” – the Spanish-based Nervan-Antonian dynasty [96 - 192 CE] clique that began with Trajan and continued through Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Rome established a large, wealthy and cosmopolitan city that included a wide array of religious and ethnic groups. Its wealth was staggering and reflected wholesale adoption of many influences from earlier Mediterranean cultures, most notably the Greeks and Egyptians. Its empire stretched from Scotland south to Morocco, east to the Euphrates and north to Romania. Subsequently, the adoption of Christianity set the Roman Empire on a collision course with the religious beliefs of many of its subjects. The empire was subjected to increasing assault or rebellion by pagan or heretic ethnic groups, culminating with the Vandal sacking of Rome … and the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476AD. The eastern empire (though surviving until 1453 CE as a rump in Constantinople) was never to achieve the expanse and dominance of the empire of the early imperial period.

Next up is the Tang Empire [690 – 907 CE] which established itself after a period of turmoil in China and set about creating a tolerant capital city in Chang’an with active participation of western peoples and strong ties along the Silk Road that exposed China to a number of peoples and technologies. Prosperity and economic development in China was substantial. A series of poor rulers reduced toleration for foreign ideas and religious pluralism. The relegation of western defense to non-Chinese generals and troops left the Tang open to external threat and the eventual decay and split of the country.

Through a period of intense consolidation, Temujin (known to us a Genghis Khan) welded together a confederation of Mongol tribes that were to dominate Asian history in one form another for several centuries as the Mongol Empire [~1215 – 1368 CE]. Through a “yield or die” military philosophy, the Khan was able to acquire the military engineering talent from the Chinese to tackle fortified cities in eastern and southern China. It was left to Genghis’ sons and relatives to move their military hordes west to Russia, southwest into the Middle East (and eventually India), and south into China. It took several generations for the Mongols to complete their conquest of China. An invasion of Japan was only halted by a typhoon, and the invasion of Europe was halted by the death of a Khan (Ogodei in 1241) which required a gathering in east Asia for the selection of his replacement. The Mongols were notable for their religious and cultural tolerance in the operation and maintenance of their empire. Religious leaders were given imperial protection and were invited as guests to extended religious debates.

As illiterates themselves, the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Mongols was populated by skilled people from many different ethnic backgrounds. Because the Mongols military success did not evolve out of an agricultural society, their adoption of settled ways and prosperity required changes to their culture. Some khans were more pleasure-loving than others. Some were more willing to adopt the habits and traditions of their subjects (e.g. Chinese and Islamic). Eventually there was an imperial struggle to maintain Mongol identity through setting aside certain benefits and powers only for Mongols. The grievances of the subject peoples were to lead to the overthrow and expulsion of Mongol rule.

Hyperpower in the Age of Enlightenment

The medieval Spaniards of the 16th and 17th centuries certainly seemed to warrant inclusion amongst the hyperpowers of history. Along with the Portuguese, they dominated vast stretches of the Americas and Asia. The Pacific was virtually a Spanish lake for two centuries. Vast quantities of gold, silver, and gems were extracted from New World mines and a series of far-flung outposts across southeast Asia were linked continuously by annual galleon voyages from the Far East to Acapulco. Unfortunately, the successful reconquest of Spain from the Moors in the late 15th century had kicked off a period of substantial religious and cultural intolerance by the Spanish royalty. The Reformation sweeping Europe gave an additional religious basis for traditional warfare and antagonism against rival kingdoms. While Spain was afloat in money from its dominions, its domestic economy and its mercantile foundation were essentially bankrupt. Its attempted suppression of rebellion and heresy in the Netherlands and England were famously unsuccessful … and famously blood-thirsty. By 1600, the Spanish capacity to control the oceans of the world was limited, and by the 18th century it had little or no ability to limit the expansion and success of its Dutch, French, and English rivals. An inability to follow other European countries into the Industrial Revolution and deploy capital and technology to its far-flung colonies brought an end to its hyperpower status.

Chapter 6 outlines the amazing story of how the 17th century Dutch came to dominate the south Asian trade routes and establish colonies in the Caribbean, South Africa, and southeast Asia. Breakthroughs in banking, manufacture and shipbuilding were supported and accelerated by a tolerant urban environment, filled with people escaping religious persecution in other parts of Europe. Antwerp and then Amsterdam became the economic inheritors of the northern Italian city-state trading republics such as Venice, Genoa, and Florence, who were cut out of the profitable Asian trade network. The establishment of the Dutch East India and Dutch West India Company provided a model of investment and insurance for the transport of high-value, low-weight products … the foods, spices, silks and precious objects once controlled by the Silk Road trade. The result of this mixture of cultural tolerance with economic innovation was an unprecedented explosion in per capita wealth. The Dutch, through circumstances of geography, were able to hold off the attacks from Spanish and French land armies and trounce their naval competitors, including the up-and-coming English. Ironically, it was the invasion of England (1687) by William of Orange in support of Protestant factions that was to lead to a drop-off in Dutch wealth and influence. William was to bring many of his best soldiers, naval architects, bureaucrats, and bankers to London … and the tools of the stock market and the limited company were quickly to establish London as the new centre of oceanic trade.

In Chapter 7, the author takes a modest detour to look at roughly contemporaneous empires in the East that might have aspired to hyperpower status: the Ottoman empire, the Ming dynasty, and the Mughal Empire of India. These were substantial empires stretching across centuries and over vast areas. After initial military successes, often over different ethnicities than the conquering culture, an immediate choice had to be made between confrontation and accommodation with differing religions and ethnic groups. All three were to take advantage of trading, military, and bureaucratic talents amongst their “captive” peoples. All three were subject to the vagaries of dynastic politics. Tolerant or intolerant rulers could exacerbate tensions amongst the elite or with their subjects. And, as related by Chua, all three were to reach a point of stagnation that left them vulnerable to external forces. For the Ottomans, it was the turmoil of WW1, for the Ming it was the appearance of the Manchu, and for the Mughals, it was to be the British and French who were to take advantage.

With Chapter 8, DOE returns to England … more secure from continental invasion than the Dutch, now irrevocably a Protestant nation after the expulsion of the Stewarts after the Glorious Revolution. It became a haven for Protestants after the expulsion of the Huguenots from France and other parts of Europe. After almost four hundreds years’ absence, Jews were allowed to return to England under Cromwell, and moreso after William of Orange’s kingship. England was also at the sweet spot of scientific and technological development (Newton’s Principia was published in 1687) leading to the Industrial Revolution. With a large agricultural hinterland, and large supplies of high quality coal, England was able to leverage its relative tolerance for the skilled of every ethnic and religious background into rapid economic and military growth. Professor Chua’s description of the rise and fall of the British Empire will be more familiar to general readers than earlier hyperpowers, if only for the fact that Day of Empire is written in English for a developed world that largely speaks English because of Britain’s imperial appetites.

America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa, India, Singapore, Hong Kong. All British colonies or outposts. Great Britain was to dominate the world’s oceans for roughly two centuries. The author recounts the rapid (and unprecedentedly large) migrations to North America, south Africa, and Australasia supported by the tolerance for immigrants, first from the United Kingdom, then from northern Europe, then from southern and eastern Europe, and finally from Asia.

Great Britain had initial success in the 18th century taking advantage disintegrating powers in North America, South Africa and India. But its domestic tolerance in the 19th century was not to be duplicated in its non-white colonies. Great Britain in the mid-19th century was to push vigorously into Africa and east Asia in ways that were to highlight the practical limits of its wealth, demography, and the application of force.

A substantial portion of the chapter on Britain’s imperial rise and fall is dominated by the struggles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to accommodate the Indian elites. They wanted to be treated on a equal standing with the white colonies in North America and Australasia which had largely been given some substantial form of self-governance by the third quarter of the century. Set against the background of the Indian Mutiny, the removal of the East India Company from Indian governance, and the decisions made about investment in the industrialization of India, the story of Great Britain’s rule and eventual departure from India makes sad reading.

According to Professor Chua, the British Empire’s limited tolerance toward its non-white subjects was also a determinant in its success as a hyperpower. After WW2, the British departed their colonial outposts … in some case rapidly, in other cases at a more measured pace. The colonies themselves were often left to their own devices.

The story of the United States and the modern condition of “hyperpower” is set out in Part 3 of DOE, and kicks off with chapter 9 on the history of the United States’ growth from a cluster of seaboard colonies to global dominance.

The English colonies of the New World were often a refuge from the religious controversies of the Old. Dissenters from the Church of England were noteworthy participants in early colonies. The settlers, however, were often intolerant of religious diversity and there was a tendency for each colony to establish official Churches and encourage people to leave if they didn’t like it. As the 17th century shifted to the 18th century, and the demand for skilled labour in the colonies became crucial, economic issues trumped sectarian purity. The influence of Enlightenment thinking (and the local religious variations of the Great Awakening) led to a loosening of prejudices about religious belief. Immigrants from northern Europe (largely Protestant) began making a significant appearance in the American colonies and western frontiers.

The toleration for white Christians didn’t extend to native Americans and enslaved blacks, however.

Moving into the 19th century, and the opening phases of American industrialization, the urbanization of the country required a new wave of immigrants. Anti-Catholic riots took place in the 1830s and 1840s and nativist political movements were in full force by mid-century. The Civil War played a role in re-organizing the lines of tolerance within the United States, and saw the emergence of massive political machines in the big cities designed to trade votes for access to city budgets.

Westward development of the nation was a lop-sided competition between Stone Age and industrial technology and little or no attention was paid to native concerns. The scale of immigration to North America from Europe and Africa vastly outpaced that to South America and Australasia.

As the continental United States changed into an agricultural and industrial (mining/timber) goliath, the Spanish empire was tottering on its last legs in Meso- and South America. In the Far East, a new wave of European trade expansion was taking place as trade for raw materials was replaced by the race to industrialize the region (Japan having taking the earliest steps in this direction).

The Spanish-American War and the Great White Fleet were to convert America from an international trading power to an international colonial and military power.

As the 19th turned to the 20th centuries, the turmoil of WW1 weakened European colonial powers. It also stimulated new kinds of national decisions for the U.S. “Nationalist passions” triggered a wave of immigration laws that fixed the ratios of immigrant origins to those found in the 1890 census. The result was a reduction and refocusing of U.S. immigration that was largely to stay in place until the mid-60s.

The Second World War, like the Civil War and World War I before it, went some way towards homogenizing American culture and reducing the inter-ethnic prejudices of the soldiers who fought in it. A devastated and impoverished Europe ceased to the be centre of the world economy and was replaced by an American economic and technological dominance that was to last for some decades. Indeed, it persists on a per-capita basis to the present day.

The massive development of military prowess by America in the Second World War, culminating in the development of the atomic bomb, was extensively assisted by European émigrés, often escaping religious/ethnic persecution on the Continent.
The impact of the War and the new immigrants on America’s international scientific and academic role was substantial.

The more recent changes in civil rights and college admissions policies which changed the United States in the 1960s need not be repeated here though the details (from the perspective of increasing tolerance and increasing US wealth) are covered in DOE. Obviously, the original publication date of the book (2007) forestalls a discussion of the current economic turbulence, and the dominance of the Democratic party in the legislative and executive branches. The chapter wraps with a discussion of the role of immigrants in the development of Silicon Valley and computer/software industry – the information race which followed the atomic and space race. The impact on America’s global influence is discussed briefly. Professor Chua notes that roughly 2/3 of the richest 400 people in America acquired that wealth entirely in their own generation.

Turning briefly from America, the author jumps back to the middle of the 20th century. Chapter 10 looks at how Germany and Japan’s intolerance affected their military success.

Germany, having built a political movement on the back of cleansing Germany of non-Aryan elements, was hardly able to treat conquered peoples in the European East as active partners. The ethnic groups released from Russian domination had a great deal of goodwill toward the Germans, which was rapidly wasted and abused. The manpower and intellectual capacity that might have fueled a more powerful military machine (within fewer internal security issues) was suppressed, murdered, or expelled.

In the Far East, the Japanese aspiration for a Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere quickly ran aground on their treatment of the people of southeast Asia, especially the educated and commercial classes in the various European colonies that they took over. Just like the Germans, they suppressed or killed the very people that could have maintained or enhanced the economic structure of their conquests. Chua outlines the very different Japanese approach in Taiwan, which was a Japanese colony from the turn of the 20th century. There, the Japanese invested in education and economic development, and provided a social stability that was to still influence Taiwanese thinking after WW2.

Ultimately, from Chua’s perspective, it was Germany and Japan’s intolerance (in contrast, say, to the Mongols active engagement with the skilled amongst those they conquered) that was central to their undoing as potential hyperpowers.

In Chapter 11, we return to the present day, and a consideration of potential challengers to the American hyperpower – China, the EU, and India.

China is economically resurging and by rights should have all the elements at hand for hyperpower status. It has a massive population, an educational and industrial growth plan modelled on successful European and Japanese development, a huge unexploited base of natural resources, a long seacoast, etc. etc. Applying the author’s central premise, however, China is not set up to become a magnet for the best and brightest from the rest of the world. Though open to the world in ways unseen since the Tang dynasty, there is still an exclusivity to Han cultural identity. Expatriates in China may be very successful but there’s no sense that they will become Chinese, in identity or citizenship. Chua does see China as a likely superpower, and therefore a likely participant in a bipolar world elevated beside the U.S. Its potential as a hyperpower, assuming the book’s thesis is correct, is constrained.

For the EU, its successful tolerance has focused on the inclusion of entire nations into its economic consortium rather than outreach to individuals drawn from outside Europe. European stability and peace has led to substantial prosperity. That has led to an increased appetite to act as a countervailing force and an alternative to the American model of development and modernity. Applying her hyperpower model of tolerance however, Professor Chua notes that EU strategic tolerance appears to have reached its limits with neighbours such as Turkey. And the EU has had noticeably less success in accommodating immigrants, either those from the Islamic and African nations, or those drawn to high-tech or skilled occupations from Asia. Europe’s shortage of skilled labour is ongoing and an increasing problem. Europe’s constraint on becoming a hyperpower therefore comes from its limited inclusiveness. It is designed to welcome in largely white, Christian (or perhaps post-Christian) neighbouring nations.

As for India, the author notes the tremendous potential of the nation, successfully tolerant of a multiplicity of languages and religions. India has a young population, widely educated in English with a cadre of excellent scientists, engineers and scholars. Nonetheless, 80% of the population lives on $2/day or less. India’s growth has largely come through the service industry rather than manufacturing (the reverse of China). Thus India’s future as a hyperpower, attracting the world’s talents to it, are problematic in the near and medium term.

The final chapter of DOE focuses on the post-Cold War American hyperpower, whether an American empire is desirable, and the way forward to continued “opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.”

Chua does recognize the schizophrenic/adolescent attitude of the much of the world toward the U.S. … which might be summarized as “I hate you, now give me and my extended family a visa.”

The truth, particularly in poorer parts of the world, is that attitudes toward the United States – are deeply schizophrenic – a perverse blend of admiration and envy on one hand and seething hatred and contempt on the other. For millions of Bolivians, Nigerians, Moroccans, and Indonesians around the world, America is arrogant, greedy, preachy, and hypocritical – but also where they would go if only they could. A student in Beijing summarized this attitude nicely. A few weeks after joining other students in a stone-throwing protest in front of the US embassy, he returned to apply for a US visa. Interviewed by US News and World Report, he explained that he was hoping to attend graduate school in America. “If I could have good opportunities in the U.S.,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind U.S. hegemony too much.”

But she is optimistic that there is a way to cope with this. Democratic world government may be over-idealistic, but there are many ways that America can be less irritating to the world’s sensibilities.

Chua believes a great deal of global good will toward the U.S. has been lost in the past two decades (not to mention that last fifty years). For her, there should be no American imperium (per the arguments to the contrary of many commentators on Left and Right soon after 9/11).

She re-iterates that America is a “nation of immigrants” with only fleeting imperialist moments. It is more on the Dutch model than the British or Roman. The positive family ties of people who consider the U.S. a second “home” for their extended family should be encouraged. America must deal successfully with three contentious issues: open immigration, non-isolationism, and multilateralism. Engaging local elites overseas and participating actively in the resolution of global problems are the means by which America can sustain a hyperpower position, though not one underpinned with coercion and military force.

Some quotes from the author:

This, then is America’s dilemma. Inside its borders, the United States has over time proven uniquely successful in creating an ethnically and religiously neutral political identity capable of uniting as Americans individuals of all backgrounds from every corner of the world. But America does not exert power only over Americans. Outside its borders there is no political glue binding the United States to the billions of people who live under its shadow. [...]

First, if the history of hyperpowers has shown anything, it is the danger of xenophobic backlash. Time and again, past world-dominant powers have fallen precisely when their core groups turned intolerant, reasserting their “true” or “pure” identity and adopting exclusionary policies toward “unassimilable” groups. From this point of view, attempts to demonize immigrants or to attribute America’s success to “Anglo-Protestant” virtues is not only misleading (neither the atomic bomb nor Silicon alley was particularly “Anglo-Protestant” in origin) but dangerous.

[...] If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come – not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.

That, in an overly-simplified nutshell, is the 334 pages of narrative of Day of Empire.

First Impressions

In any book of such geographic and historical breadth, there’s bound to be bloopers or non-sequiturs. Since history isn’t Professor Chua’s profession (as best I can tell, she was educated at the undergraduate level in economics and has a J.D.), she must depend for raw material on the works of people from other disciplines. When covering 2500 years of global history, that inevitably means picking and choosing from a handful of source titles from each of the candidate powers and ignoring the contentious debates over historiography in the second half of the 20th century.

There are two limitations with this approach. Has the author read enough to be accurate? Has the author read enough to avoid embarrassing over-emphases or oversights? The obvious way to overcome those limitations is to get specialists to review sections of the book manuscript discussing their particular time period, and give a qualified collegial “thumbs up” on specifics and generalities.

Unfortunately the Acknowledgements section of DOE does not break out individuals by specialty or profession, so it’s impossible to know if Professor Chua’s manuscript got some academic “rough wooing” before publication. More particularly, how many historians reviewed the final manuscript?

Did they dismiss the term “hyperpower” out of hand? Did they suggest key modifications and why? Did they question any or all of the final tally of candidate powers? Did they recommend dropping some? Did they ask for a crisper definition of tolerance that would remove arbitrary evaluations of what was and what wasn’t a toleration of significance?

The methods of history largely involve using the vocabulary of any given speciality for a better evaluation of facts … or making a major modification to such vocabulary based on improved explanatory utility. In this case, does the term “hyperpower” give us any new insight that we wouldn’t have had in looking at powers or civilizations in general? Is there any difference in essential quality/nature (versus size) between hyperpowers and great powers? Are we employing 20/20 hindsight with an arbitrary term for arbitrary, perhaps anachronistic, purposes? As for “tolerance,” are we elevating practical expediency beyond its natural role in military success … to the level of a distinctly modern virtue?

The two key challenges for a book that introduces nebulous terms (i.e., hyperpower and tolerance) in its central thesis is to avoid (1) category errors (for placement of facts) and (2) “ confirmation bias”.

In defining “hyperpower,” we want to make sure all the candidate powers actually have something unique in common. Whale sharks and grizzly bears are the biggest fish and mammal, respectively, in their environments. Their differences, however, vastly outweigh their similarities and its of limited value to call them “giganto-animals” and build a new ecological theory based on the term. In an attempt to avoid “selection bias” (perhaps more accurately described as “insufficient cases”), Professor Chua has added rather than subtracted from her pool of candidate powers. If the term “hyperpower” is stretched to embrace powers that are fundamentally different in nature, however, it will confound the results of any hunt for real similarities. The author owes us an explanation of why a new term is actually needed and how it actually improves our historical insight.

Do land-based military powers with sparser technology/economies (the Mongols, the Huns/Goths/Vandals) really deserve to be lumped in with technologically superior and wealthy powers that controlled strategic “commons” like Rome, Holland, England, or America? Irrespective of their success, are we to hold them to the same standard in the hunt for “tolerance”?

Would it not stand to reason that any cherry-picking we do in the hunt for signs of “tolerance” in the two types of powers distinguished above (for example) will have fundamental and significant differences in the challenges they face? If we “re-amalgamate” our discoveries back under a rubric, won’t that do violence to any lessons we might draw? If the conqueror lets you live because you can read, does that differ from when the conqueror lets you live because you can plant crops? Are we lumping ceramic bricks and bricks of butter and dreaming up new imaginary roles for “brickiness”?

Similarly, if we pick and choose the “winners” of the geopolitical sweepstakes, regardless of the economic, geographic, and technological circumstances that permitted an inordinate growth in a power’s size, we open ourselves to “finding what we’re looking for” and conveniently ignoring what we don’t want to find. It is human nature to suffer from confirmation bias, and the community of historians has methods for reducing the influence of such bias.

Finally, we’ve not addressed any aspect of causality in such circumstances. Finding a correlation and declaring its causal role (as opposed to proving the chain of causation) isn’t history, or science. Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biology professor used to refer to a creature’s attributes that could be attributed to the incidental side-effects of selective forces as spandrels.

Is “tolerance” a “spandrel” of political, economic, and military conquest, irrespective of the size (or even the ultimate success) of a conquering power? I’d say the answer is “yes” … unless strongly contrary evidence can be organized to prove otherwise.

If, as the professor notes:

[...]Conversely, I am also arguing that intolerance is starkly associated with the decline of hyperpowers. Here, however, separating cause from effect is more problematic. It is often difficult to say whether intolerance leads to decline, or whether intolerance is a by-product of decline. In most cases, both propositions are probably true.

Why not consider the obverse argument … that tolerance is an aid to expansion and likely the by-product of military success? Who’s afraid of the conclusively conquered?

Both of the potential errors mentioned above (categorization and confirmation bias) would require the careful help of fellow historians to constrain. In my reading of DOE, the qualifications to the thesis seem to come in the introductory section, the self-confident assertions of the thesis’ truth in the descriptive middle of the book, and the passionate prescriptive direction for American choices comes last.

Making a wild-assed guess on my part, it seems like Day of Empire was actually written backwards.

1. The modern policy prescriptions for the maligned “hyperpower” first: open immigration irrespective of culture or socio-economic status, active engagement with the world and its problems, and multilateralism in foreign policy. They’d be unexceptional talking points for a speech from any Democratic Administration.
2. Then a post-facto search was undertaken for a functional definition of hyperpower, followed by identification of potential candidates in history, using a very inclusive definition.
3. The selected candidates were described, based on a handful of modern histories. Since those recent histories also obsess about many of the themes of modern life: racism, sexism, ethnic, and religious intolerance, they provide inadvertent, and possibly artificial, fodder for the book’s thesis.
4. “Tolerance” (whether strategic, calculated, instrumental, or otherwise) was selectively highlighted at points in each power’s history that support the thesis. No effort was made to find tolerance that made no difference to hyperpower success. Nor to find intolerance that was critical to the hyperpower’s success. Nor was there much effort to more fully explain the tangential comment made in the Introduction … to wit, “[i]t is often difficult to say whether intolerance leads to decline, or whether intolerance is a by-product of decline.” (Yikes. Isn’t that the central issue of the whole book for the modern reader?)
5. Then, however, my guess is that the author’s pre-publication readers started to raise caveats on the blanket assertions in the middle of the manuscript (e.g., just how tolerant were those Romans and Mongols? Are we comparing apples and oranges? Tolerating your serfs and castrated bureaucrats isn’t very significant tolerance. Etc. Etc.).
6. Those caveats were retro-actively hedged in the Introduction by fudging the meaning of “hyperpower” and “tolerance” to the point where, frankly, the terms could pretty much mean whatever the author needed them to mean, at any given point. But that hedging of the Introduction never made it back into the middle and end of the book where the “rubber meets the road.” … where very conclusive statements were made about the role of tolerance (”necessary though insufficient”) for hyperpower success, despite repeated “scholars may disagree about the causes of decline” preambles.

The result, to my mind, is a book-length argument that recasts human history in potentially unneeded terms, for an essentially modern agenda. If one doesn’t accept the soundness of the terms, however, they become less compelling as useful terms in evaluating the past. If there are fundamental problems with the key vocabulary of the thesis, then the efforts to establish the thesis with the historical record, or extrapolate from the thesis to modern American policy prescriptions is fraught with problems. For example, if a hyperpower must clearly outpace any contemporary rivals, then America does not seem to have met the criteria of “hyperpower” until the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But DOE kicks off its America section centuries before any hint of hyperpower status. Does this imply that “tolerance” is an advantage at all points of the “power curve”? Or that the geographic, demographic and technological circumstances of America made “tolerance” unusually easy?

Similarly, we might quibble and say Rome was not a hyperpower because it fought unsuccessfully for centuries with the rich, literate Parthian and Sassanid civilizations on its eastern boundaries. It was obsessed about those eastern boundaries (having largely stabilized the southern and western boundaries). It relentlessly moved legions from the west to the east (to its great detriment) in an unsuccessful effort to take the Tigris-Euphrates once and for all. Turning to my own library, I was able to lay hands on two books used by Professor Chua (Balsdon’s Romans & Aliens and Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire [cb review] but quickly found others that better discussed the Roman sense of foreigners through the centuries as it related specifically to power (Mattern’s Rome and the Enemy, Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization [cb review], and Williams’ Romans and Barbarians). Surely what the Romans thought themselves about any supposed “tolerance” and its relation to power, across hundreds of years, is worth noting in some detail. It’s not all about stereotypes about Celts and Greeks.

If, through careful attention to the definition of hyperpower, one reduces America to a historical finger-snap and Rome’s eastern stalemates to insignificance, why bother with the thesis at all from a prescriptive standpoint? To be a smartass for a minute, if the fall of the Berlin Wall was in 1989 and the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center by a culture with hyperpower aspirations was in 1993, just how long was America a hyperpower?

If being a hyperpower is really just a matter of the degree of power, geographical extent, or cultural/technical influence, then what (specifically) is the point at which it ceases to be merely a big power (operating one assumes under rules that do not require or support tolerance) and a hyperpower … which suddenly requires tolerance for success? These are questions that ideally should have been handled in detail somewhere in this book. Cause and effect. The distinction between powers. The separation of “tolerance,” per se, from the ordinary, and entirely unremarkable, nuts-and-bolts of power politics.

If the tolerance of a hyperpower’s ruling class or ethnic group can be hedged round by its calculating, instrumental, or strategic aspect, why not simply call it politics, economics, and military strategy? At least then we’d have centuries (rather than decades) of historical scholarship to draw upon and a wealth of historiographic tools to keep biases (entirely inadvertent) under control. As I say, I’m making a wild-assed and likely unfair guess about why the book’s assertiveness alters strangely, in the particular way and sequence that it does. Vague definitions, followed by ex nihilo assertions, wrapping with modern prescription.

Professor Chua wears her heart and her family biography on her sleeve. It makes her two books far more readable and her writing more lively and compelling. Having placed herself and her family’s history as brilliant, successful, recent immigrants within the structure of a “big picture” history book, however, she has an obligation to tease out the issue of causality and the specific relationship of tolerance and hyperpower, per se, with far more care. Having no family involved in the American’s hyperpower rise (if we can claim America as a hyperpower for longer than the last 20 years), she has nothing vested in the military conflicts that set one culture over another, one set of American values over another. For Official Victims of intolerance, there can be no good case for the American conquests, civil wars, expulsions, and exterminations that pre-date 1965. The grimmer foundations of hyper-power cannot be rooted in “tolerance” sprinkled like sand over the blood of the conquered and displaced.

Another option for the author beckons, however …

Just leave out the history and rationalize the “relative tolerance=hyperpower” argument on modern grounds as Francis Fukuyama did in Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, and James Surowiecki did in The Wisdom of Crowds, and as Robert Wright attempted to do tautologically (in another “big picture” history book) in Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny .

There’s nothing wrong with making the stand-alone case that immigrants generally, or the specific immigrant groups she highlights herself — the Jews and Chinese –, are central to the success of America. The last few years have treated us to a parade of “How the Scots, Irish, Jews, etc. saved/created/built something or other of world-shaking significance.” Such 20/20 hindsight history is great fun when one’s own group is being praised, but it rarely rises to the status of great history. In style, such books share much with DOE. But this genre should be considered entertainment. As history it needs to be approached with great caution. Professor Chua’s first book is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale for “market-dominant minorities” out to write their own apologias. Who lives and dies, who eats and starves, is usually driven by wider forces than the cleverness and utility of tolerated minorities.

Unfortunately, during the reading of DOE, in any place where I actually knew the historical events in any detail, I could recall an act of strategic intolerance that was just as central to “hyperpower” success as any aspect of contemporaneous or comparative tolerance cited by the author. For every batch of Catholic Scots used as expendable shock troops by the English at the Plains of Abraham (”tolerance”), there was a wholesale expulsion of Acadian families from Canada to French Louisiana (”intolerance”). If I could find such instances, what could historical experts have found with a bit of digging? If I was very uneasy with the plastic application of the term “hyperpower,” how happy would a professional historian be … say a Jacques Barzun, or a David Landes?

If the growth, expansion, and decline of major powers have many influences, proving the role of tolerance requires more than picking wildly successful powers and putting our thumb on the balance in favour of palatable modern sensibilities. That’s like interviewing Powerball winners for their opinions on recent U.S. economy theory. The causal chain for tolerance and power expansion has to be built, in my opinion, with minor winners and losers, not just the show-stoppers (Rome, Nazi Germany).

I think Day of Empire would have been a career–killer for a junior historian. For a law professor at Yale University, it’s a work of major industry and creativity, presented with the clear writing style that made her earlier book a real pleasure. What should we make of it?

Get Me Rewrite!

After many hours and many versions of this review, I came to see Day of Empire as the first draft of a deeper argument about the present. One which Professor Chua telegraphs by mentioning her mystification at Samuel Huntington’s book Who Are We?. DOE is an effort to recast social success in terms of “niceness to the Other.”

Now you might think that a book about hyperpowers wouldn’t be able to overlook all the eggs violently broken in the course of making those massive omelettes. Most of the butchery and relentless cultural demolition driven by over-weening pride, religious proscription, cultural self-confidence, and technological superiority is glossed over … to race forward to the “good bits” where worthy minorities and captive peoples are given a seat at the table, or the foundry, or the library, or the warehouse, or in the army.

As a thought experiment, however, let’s turn the book’s emphasis on its head. Instead of starting with a vulnerable minority’s perspective, however, let’s begin by looking at an ambitious young sub-hyperpower, looking to make its mark on its nearby competitors. Preferably in a conclusive and fatal manner. What attributes of instrumental tolerance will it need? What level of agency can it expect to have? Is it in charge of its own destiny or is it at the mercy of geography, epidemic disease, diplomacy, crop failure, or the depth of the gene pool of the particular “thugocracy” at the top of its culture?

We might find that as it makes new conquests, the sub-hyperpower quickly outgrows the space that it can effectively populate by itself. Some few empires (Rome in western Europe, Britain in North America) had such a military and economic dominance over their conquests that they could literally reproduce their way to geographic dominance. But for our hypothetical sub-hyperpower, however, rather than replacing conquered neighbours wholesale, it must rule over them with some combination of military, political, and economic force. Depending on the foundations of its military success, an empire may be more developed that its defeated neighbours, or it may simply have gained its military advantage by demolishing the economic foundations of its neighbours (e.g., Mongols). Either way, suddenly it’s got a bunch of strangers to control and a bunch of kin back at home base that are looking forward to the easy life.

Those same kin are plotting industriously to knock off the current lineage at the top of the heap. A fine stand-by argument for such coups is that the current boss has “gone soft”, “gone native,” or both. So any protection extended to the conquered, by anyone beyond the original conquering or colonizing force, is potentially a deadly internal political liability. Onward through the centuries said sub-hyperpower goes, waxing and waning, butchering and being butchered, until that fine day comes when it has the military and economic power to scare the bejeebers out of everyone around it. For sake of Professor Chua’s argument, let’s call it a “hyperpower.”

Where can it go from there? It’s a magnet for luxury goods, foodstuffs, grand construction, and the paper trail that follows any imperial power. The contending clans of the hyperpower’s elite are all looking for the smallest advantage to help them take over. Such advantage can come at any time through mistakes in administration or through military failures at the margins of the empire (which by now, because of the hyperpower’s success, are of limited economic value).

From here forward, the hyperpower is trying to maintain its success and trying to live up to the good old days and the revered ancestors.

As history shows us, entirely in hindsight, sooner or later there’s one idiot emperor too many, or one adversary that gains modest regional advantage, or the bubonic plague or smallpox shows up at an importune time. Perhaps a civil war breaks out and the empire exhausts itself in self-destructive politics that lets peoples at the periphery cleave off a province or territory. Maybe its technological advantage slowly leaks to its periphery and former vassals become future predators, or former peasants steal the A-bomb.

This story or a close variant of it, I’d propose, is what we’re most used to reading when we recall discussions of imperial elevation and destruction. Are we greatly hindered in our understanding by underplaying the minorities or subject peoples who provided the military or luxury underpinning for such a hyperpower? The role of subsidiary or minority groups may provide a functional role or a cultural garnish. At the margins, their skills may affect the nature and degree of success in economic or bureaucratic activity. But does any of it, in more than an incidental way, go to the heart of the political, economic, or geographic constraints that affect powers at their peak? Is there not a role for self-regard and prickly self-defense that typifies successful hyperpowers? And even more a role for the cultural self-confidence to see oneself as uniquely suited for the domination and control of other human beings for centuries at a stretch? Perhaps it’s the loss of self-identity, or “glue” as Professor Chua describes it, which determines how long a hyperpower can hold its position. Notably, the modern movement that explicitly aspires to global hegemony, sanctioned by God, is ignored by Professor Chua in her discussion of China, the EU, and India. Perhaps Islam will have the right “glue” …

And if, since the discovery of the atomic bomb and the emergence of Silicon Valley, America has been particularly strengthened, by an immigrant workforce uncovering scientific and technological marvels, it has also been particularly threatened (though espionage and sabotage). Why can’t we fundamentally distinguish such a new service industry hyperpower, dependent on the harvesting of international brains, from the agrarian and industrial giant that grew unmolested in North America from the 18th to the 20th century?

American Specifics

All the information in DOE is worth discussion and review but testing and evaluation of the central thesis should, I believe, take place from two perspectives at once … the host and the symbiote, so to speak. For Professor Chua’s book, I think there are some likely American candidates who could have provided a different perspective on the subject matter. Indeed, perhaps they already written reviews and I’ve missed it. Here is my list of people who could have profitably given the author, and us, some feedback on the utility of the terms “hyperpower” and “tolerance.”

1. Samuel Huntington. Dead, unfortunately, but he spent the last few decades really trying to sort out whether “America had a common law and civic ethos,” or a sui generis civil society and the common law had an America (see Who Are We?). He was a firm believer that America was not a “nation of immigrants” but rather a “nation of colonists” whose values dominated the country until just about the time that Professor Chua’s brilliant dad emigrated from the Philippines. Huntington would have brought a colonist’s perspective to the hyperpower discussion … and a wider context of what values it takes “building the house” of a hyperpower compared to those needed for the “interior decoration” phase. His assessment that Hispanic immigration to the U.S. in the last few decades is the first successful colonization of the English-speaking world since the Normans hit the beach near Hastings is plenty controversial. But it’s yet to be proven wrong. Time will tell.

2. David Hackett-Fischer. Now moved on to less contentious historical topics, Hackett-Fischer’s Albion’s Seeds provides a background on the long historical traditions that underlay America’s colonists and how those various groups: Dissenters, hill folk, Piedmont settlers, represented very specific folkways which can be traced into modern American social and political life. The violence that those early settlers inflicted on each other was the foundation of their willingness to apply it others. And law and religion were often playthings for those cultural attitudes.

3. Michael Barone. Author of Our First Revolution and a knowledgeable expert on American society and politics. For discussing British and American “hyperpower” history, Barone could provide additional perspective on how intolerance, and well as the well-documented tolerance, played out in the growth and success of the two powers (Britain and the U.S.) that have dominated world history for the last 250 years.

4. David Gelernter. Author of Americanism, Yale University computer science professor, and therefore an accessible colleague of Professor Chua. Dr. Gelernter would be able to talk directly to the role, and limitations, of the religious traditions of tolerance in America. And where that tolerance reached its limits and aggressively wore away immigrant cultures.

5. Alfred Crosby. Professor of American Studies, History, and Geography at the University of Texas and author of The Measure of Reality [cb review] would be able to address the nuts and bolts of inter-group tolerance that were central to the operation of European trading republics. Was tolerance the basis of a hyperpower or was it merely the “force multiplier” that let little city-states, little islands, and ultimately an entire continent create economic and military dominance? Professor Crosby would have particular insights into the chicken-and-egg relationship of development and tolerance.

6. Finally, Walter Russell Mead. Author of Special Providence, and God and Gold, and American foreign policy expert. No one, in my opinion, has done more to outline the cultural dynamics of foreign policy decision-making in American history … or better described the blend of merchant acquisitiveness and missionary zeal that has motivated American (and British) self-regard.

If Mr. Mead had a chance to review the premise of “hyperpower” and the role of tolerance, we would have a substantially enriched historical perspective from inside the hyperpower, looking out, so to speak. And of all the scholars mentioned, Mead would be able to comment on whether modern America (with its various tribes, groups, and special interests in constant change) can ever form the basis for Professor Chua’s dream that America will be a hyperpower merely of “opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.” After being a “boss,” the invitation to join a “union” is hollow. Wars have started for less.

Conclusion

Day of Empire is a prodigious effort but it does, with no apology needed, come from the pen of someone whose family inherited of European science, law, and civil society without being obligated to spill foreign blood. For those whose ancestors left northwest Europe as colonists in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and came to America, the sacrifices made were not simply those of extending or receiving toleration. Terrible choices were made again and again through the centuries, to exterminate, expel, and suppress cultural and economic enemies. Hurons were targeted, Acadians were transported, Loyalists were expelled to Canada and the Caribbean, slaveholding was accommodated as part of the compromise of Independence, the Cherokee were dispossessed (like the Scots-Irish before them in Pennsylvania), states’ rights of self-determination were crushed militarily in the Civil War, then quietly allowed to resurface with the abandonment of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow, Asians were expelled and excluded at the end of the 19th century, and immigration was throttled down to a trickle as America industrialized and then dispossessed a vast number of Protestant agricultural workers from their farms. On through the decades, the nation has selectively tolerated some minorities, obliterated others, and thrown its population into waves of intolerance, both domestic and foreign.

One could claim that a willingness to accept that relentless intolerance has been the price of broader social acceptability throughout American history. In other words, one was tolerated to the extent one shared the intolerances of the broader populace. And it doesn’t seem to have changed much to the present day … as the relative treatment of Cuban and Haitian boat people illustrates. It’s not in the tolerance we potentially find hyperpower, the rejoinder to DOE might state, it’s in the cultural capacity for intolerance in the pursuit of American security and prosperity.

To paraphrase and poach from H.L. Mencken … there is always an easy solution to every American problem — neat, plausible, and usually requiring entirely non-existent Americans to execute. Like a number of bi-coastal commentators, Professor Chua is asking for an American attitude to the world that is fundamentally at odds with much of its cultural origins and its actual electorate. Squaring that circle needed to be part of this book, it seems to me (as a non-American). Last year, Bill Bishop wrote a very useful book on American cultural geography called The Big Sort (cb review pending!) which is particularly pertinent to DOE’s conclusions. Since roughly the time of Professor Chua’s birth, Americans have been using their increased prosperity not in aid of “tolerance” but to move away from people that they disagree with politically. And their political views have centred more and more around a tightly related set of cultural and religious values. The result has been an electorate that resides more and more in “landslide” precincts (where the vote gap between winners and losers is >20%). Democrats move to Democratic neighbourhoods. Republicans move to Republican neighbourhoods. In effect, the response to an incessant demand for domestic tolerance has been a migration enabling “indifference.” From Bishop’s perspective the result is two Americas: one with weak social ties, growing economic and educational prosperity, and a great uniformity (of diversity), and a second America … sparser in its density, poorer economically and educationally, with stronger social ties, and a uniformity of religious and cultural values. It’s worth thinking briefly about the respective contributions of these two Americas to the elements of “hyper power.”

Professor Chua is asking for international tolerance and accommodation by Americans, but as noted by Moses Naim in this book Illicit, [cb review], the U.S. is also being asked to absorb a hugely destructive economic and criminal relationship with the rest of the world … (along with the prosperity and success of globalized legitimate economic activity). To give the thesis of DOE added oomph and to translate it into an American future, I think the concerns and social experiences of both Americas (urban and rural, immigrant and colonial) will need to be addressed. If one assumes that the Anglosphere’s cultural underpinnings had nothing to do with its lead in science and technology (a shaky assertion if we look to the origins of the industrial revolution (cb reviews here and here), or that its common law had nothing to do with its cantankerous, pre-Reformation Anglo-Saxon yeomanry (cf. Macfarlane here), then radical changes in the American attitudes towards its legal and economic role in the world might seem plausible. A more likely scenario is that we are entering a period of history when the debate over American identity will sharpen … and the debate will be most intense and fraught in the domestic arena before it is resolved in American foreign policy. The role of “Mom and Dad to the world” may not be palatable to millions of American voters.

Without guides to the pre-1960s history of the English-speaking world … guides able to convey that world with the same passion and honest reflection already evident in Professor Chua’s book, it’s unlikely that Day of Empire’s hypothesis will ever have the wider influence that it might reasonably expect. That’s unfortunate and entirely unnecessary. Ironically, sitting at the pinnacle of intellectual and social status in America, Professor Chua has returned to the position of a “market-dominant minority,” explained so usefully in her earlier book. As a professor of the common law and an ethnic Han, however, she’s at the intersection of two potentially enormous changes in our future: (1) the accommodation of American law to international norms, and (2) the resurgence of Han economic and military might. Those are concerns that go directly to author’s discussion of America’s role in her concluding chapter.

Just recently the Department of Homeland Security woke up to realize that thousands of young men and women have been overseas getting a graduate education (in the Army Reserve and the CIA) in low-tech insurgency. Apparently, in some imagined defiance of American history, that might lead to “right-wing extremism.” Many of those kids come from areas that cling (in that memorable phrase) to “ guns and religion.” In their skills and attitudes, however, they more resemble an earlier and less apologetic time in American history, when it was assumed that the populace would enforce its values violently against all comers, domestic and foreign. Colonial self-sufficiency was one element in American success and, it must be admitted, an endless source of antagonism. We are about to see if the American electorate can still reach a consensus on how much sovereignty to surrender and under what circumstances. If Bishop’s “Big Sort” has much validity, the discussions in DOE about an American future will be decided in tumultuous domestic battles. The nature of American identity will be vigourously contested, and if Professor Chua’s work on market-dominant minorities and hyperpowers is any indication, violence will be involved.

As the author further noted in DOE, China is unlikely to reach hyperpower status but it is entirely likely that it will achieve superpower status and return the world to a bipolar power structure. It’s hard to imagine that that will not have a traumatic impact on America’s citizens of Han descent. Hard choices will have to be made by individuals … just as an earlier generation of European émigrés helped build the atomic bomb for America, while simultaneously other émigrés stole it for the Soviet Union. As tales of Han espionage and hacker sabotage move from obscure regular tallies on strategypage.com to the front pages of newspapers, we’ll need people to address the issue head-on, immune to the “racist” smear. I think Professor Chua could have a particularly useful role in the discussion of if, how, and when American Chinese should fundamentally sever their links to Han autocracy. Perhaps it won’t come to that.

On both these incredibly difficult issues (sovereignty and the emergence of a bipolar world), it’s to be hoped that Professor Chua applies her previous insights on market-dominant minorities and restates her thesis on the role of tolerance in the rise and fall of hyperpowers. Just as fervently, we might hope that she draws in a set of intellectual collaborators that complement her perspective on America history rather than merely reinforce it. Regardless of whether the Day of Empire’s thesis stands up, we’re not so flush with academics who write well that we can spare any. And the stakes and issues surrounding America’s role in the world will only increase.

Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer–and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets

Defining the Word “Anachronism”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the sponge divers of Greece lived through a technical revolution … the appearance of the diving helmet. After many centuries of free diving to harvest local sponges, the new equipment suddenly allowed access to much more of the Mediterranean sea floor and previously unexploited sponge beds. The industry boomed. Inadvertently, the diving helmet also led to the discovery of a shipwreck off the coast of the small island of Antikythera. Amidst the spectacular bronze and marble statues at the wreck site was a strange lunch box-sized lump, covered in a limestone coating from centuries of immersion and distorted by the effects of decomposition and corrosion. Here and there were visible bits of wood and corroded bronze, faint inscriptions of ancient Greek and what appeared to be thin loops or gears.

Compared to the glamorous artworks it was found with, the “lump” was rather unprepossessing and, indeed, it spent most of the 20th century in obscurity. Not knowing what it was, the curators made little effort to preserve the object, and increasingly, it broke into a more and more fragments in the storage rooms of the Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. The early 20th century descriptions made their way into the hands of a physicist and historian of science named Derek De Solla Price. In the 1950s, he made serious efforts to fully explain what it was, culminating in a 1974 book Gears From the Greeks. And it was partly through his efforts that people as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Jacques Cousteau, and Richard Feynman took an interest in the enigmatic archaeological find.

Now, after a century of scholarship and scientific investigation, the humble lump of metal and stone known as the Antikythera mechanism is finally getting its due and we think we know what it is … a geared device, powered by hand, that allowed the successful prediction of solar, lunar, planetary, and eclipse cycles across many decades. It was meant for an educated amateur and came with extensive inscribed instructions on its metal parts. It is the ancient ancestor (in a sense) of the elaborate clocks that were to sweep through western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Except that it was likely built around 100 BC, after what was clearly a long period of earlier experimentation and technical wizardry. What was it doing there? And why does it stand alone amidst classical history without predecessors, companions or contemporary explanation? The mechanism is so unlikely that for many decades it was assumed that it simply could not be from a period in antiquity … or, according to Erich von Daniken, it was left on Earth by aliens. The Antikythera is the ultimate “anachronism” … something that doesn’t seem to belong to its time.

Science writer Jo Marchant provides the first comprehensive book on the device in the last 35 years, a substantial expansion of her 2006 summary article in Nature (In search of lost time, Nature 444, 534-538 (30 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/444534a) which includes the dramatic new discoveries about the mechanism published in 2008. Decoding the Heavens recounts how each generation of archaeologists examined the mechanism and made judgments about what it was and what it did. The story of the men and women who devoted years trying to discover the nature and purpose of the object binds the scientific tale together, often in tragic ways. Science can be a blood sport and the Antikythera brought out the best and worst in many of its students. Our most recent understanding of the mechanism dramatically changes our beliefs about the role of Greek technology in subsequent Muslim and Christian mechanical devices. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of similar devices were subject to damage, loss, and the re-melting of their brass components. The Antikythera mechanism is one-of-a-kind and that, in itself, is a sobering piece of information about the implosion of culture and technology in late antiquity.

In the end, it was the development of non-destructive testing methods (photography, linear X-ray tomography, microfocus computer tomography, polynomial texture mapping ) that finally allowed the most recent generation of scholars and enthusiasts to precisely determine how the device was assembled and operated without irreversibly damaging the fragile remains. Such space-age technology provided an exact means to measure the components, the associated gear teeth and read the faint inscriptions on metal surfaces, even when the metal parts were buried in limestone and largely corroded away. And it was the assembly of an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, astronomers, artisans, and historians of science that permits some level of confidence in the latest conclusions.

At the margins, the final few details of the operation and function will remain under debate. Did the Antikythera draw upon centuries-long records of Babylonian star-gazing? Was the Antikythera device an astrological tool for elite Greeks and Romans? Was it a functional demonstration of the philosophical orderliness of the universe (especially that of eclipses)? Was this the grand achievement of the final generations of hyper-literate Greek Stoics before Rome dominated the eastern Mediterranean? Where was it made and what relationship did it have to the devices we know were created by Archimedes in Syracuse [Sicily]? Cicero described one as “a sphere that showed the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets around the Earth.” Knowing *what* the device did promises to open up new questions of why elite Greeks wanted to make it.

What is certain is that modern Greeks are immensely proud of the significance of the new discoveries. The Antikythera is slated for its own museum, pulled out of the national museum’s storehouses and given pride of place amongst the gorgeous sculptures and ceramics that typify our idea of ancient Greek culture. It’s clear that the “clockwork” inheritance of Western Europe (so ably outlined in Crosby’s The Measure of Reality — Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600, cb review here) had its roots in the devices first created and elaborated in ancient Greece. And it’s a further sobering addendum to the recent work on Roman archaeology (Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, cb review here) which highlights just how much was lost of the literature, technology, and artisanship of the ancient world. Europe was to wait a thousand years for a reappearance of good roads, effective ceramics and glass, and high levels of literacy. Re-establishing Greek rationality was a halting and initially unsuccessful venture (cf. Tina Stiefel’s The Intellectual Revolution in Twelfth Century Europe, 1985). Devices such as the Antikythera mechanism suggest that even the Roman imperium was a step back, in some areas, from the philosophical and mathematical purposes of the Greeks.

Decoding the Heavens is a straight-forward and well-written account of the history and personalities associated with the examination of the Antikythera mechanism. The author adds atmosphere to the people and places without pitching over into melodrama. One would expect no less from a news editor of Nature. For those with an interest in astronomy, the history of science, or Greek archaeology … this would make an excellent gift, or a fascinating read over several evenings.

One caveat. One personal regret. The story of the discovery and examination of the Antikythera mechanism is so amazing … and it’s significance for ancient history so far-reaching … that we might consider Decoding the Heavens a wonderful foundation for a “teachable moment” in either high schools or universities. A fascinating syllabus or educational module could be created in ancient history, physics or science built around this book and the mechanism itself. The Internet (as evidenced by the Wikipedia article on the device) is awash with enthusiasts and commentators. There are some excellent simulated Antikythera models available in “virtual reality” which really help understand how the moving parts related to each other. It hard to imagine that students wouldn’t warm to the subject with the right introduction.

It’s regrettable that the edition of the book I read is virtually devoid of effective maps and diagrams. Reading the author’s written descriptions of Aegean voyages, astrolabes, astronomical cycles, polynomial texture mapping, pin-and-slot/differential gears, and scholarly dead-ends seemed needlessly challenging. The author is an excellent writer but not all readers start with the same technical background. The set of photographs in the book were welcome but couldn’t replace a more generous graphics budget. A few simple illustrations would make all the difference for a general reader following the failures and successes of the scholars and scientists who examined the mechanism. It’s very unfortunate that the first drawing of the mechanism appears on page 247! A map of Aegean place names mentioned in the book doesn’t seem like a publishing luxury. With Google Maps, I was able to screen capture a workable map while reading but it would have been nice to have one included in the book. Thankfully the end matter … Sources and Further Reading/Index … is very well-done and would support further study if the reader desires. For some reason, the companion website (www.decodingtheheavens.com), which offers a great deal more information of interest, receives little prominence in the book. As mentioned, this is a topic (and book) that begs for interactivity and a substantial role in science education.

The 2006 Antikythera Nature articles were far more fully illustrated and I feel that Decoding the Heavens deserved a bit better in this regard. It’s to be fervently hoped that this gap is corrected in the paperback edition. With better illustrations, spaced strategically throughout the book, this title could be widely recommended for the budding teenage scientist in any house or for the general reader who’s not mechanically or scientifically inclined. This book clearly received a lot of care and attention in the writing. It could be greatly strengthened with equal attention to illustrations and online resources (especially new discoveries in coming years).

Left as is, its natural audience will inevitably be far narrower. Those mechanically or astronomically inclined will find it easy going. All else will struggle at times, and be left to ponder instead the internecine battles between scholars who put forward their own theories on what the Antikythera mechanism was … and what it meant.

Decoding the Heavens is inspiring, thought-provoking, and well done. Those with an interest in ancient history and technology will enjoy it very much.

Anathem

Author Neal Stephenson has forged a substantial body of fiction in the last 15 years by combining elaborate narratives and witty, humourous dialogue with a more serious consideration of scientific and philosophical issues. Having covered nanotechnology, cryptography, and the early stirrings of Newtonian science in his more recent books, Stephenson turns now to cosmology and the nature of human consciousness in Anathem. The biggest of big pictures.

Set thousands of years in the future, Anathem is an adventure story that fits perfectly into the science fiction genre. The conflict between science and culture has led to intermittent but repeated civil conflicts, resolved finally by isolating the scientific and mathematic minds into the equivalent of walled medieval cloisters (maths). Outside the walls society waxes and wanes, prospers and collapses, while inside the walls the life of the mind continues, year after year. Comparisons with the famous 50s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are inevitable.

A social caste of technologists is dedicated to maintaining a very limited suite of equipment for the cloistered individuals, to minimize their impact on the secular world. Gone are the atom smashers and linear accelerators but a few simple, huge telescopes are permitted. To keep the “science” within careful limits, the technologists are forbidden to intereract directly with the “mathic” communities. Separate corridors and buildings keep the two groups aparts. Odd remnants of earlier scientific breakthroughs do remain within the cloisters … genetically engineered food plants, trees that grow paper leaves, and special clothing materials (newmatter), but the intent of the rules of cloistered life is to maintain a delicate balance with the outside world of politics and religion (the extramuros). The cloisters are left alone by the Secular world as long as they obey these rules. Periodically, an Inquisition examines every cloister to root out any violation of these ancient agreements. From time to time, men and women of the cloisters are banished to the secular world to solve some scientific problem. Apart from that, the maths are left alone as the centuries pass.

By the time in history when the story opens, the cloistered individuals have been organized into a hierarchy of temporal commitments. Using massive mechanical clocks synchronized with the Sun, the maths operate a calendar of interaction with lay people. There is a Unarian community, in which lay people commit one year of their lives to the cloister in return for an education in theoretical mathematics and certain practical skills. Once a year, the Year Gate opens and the math interacts with the outside world. Students leave and new students arrive. The next rung up are the Decenarians or ten-year folk, who commit to spending 10 years in isolation before their 10-Year Gate opens to the outside world and they have 10 days of “Apert” to interact with the surrounding community before returning to the cloister if they wish. There are also Centenarian and Millenarian adherents within each math, who commit to spending their lives in isolation from the outside world except for set times in the calendar when their communities interact with the secular world and other cloisters. Diet keeps the cloistered participants both sterile and healthy. Scholarship, and the basic chores of agriculture, construction and housekeeping, fill their days. The Centenarian portion of the cloisters is replenished with Decenarians wishing to make that scale of commitment. The Millenarian cloisters are maintained by Centenarians entering their ranks, plus the occasional supplement of unwanted newborns from the outside world.

With this premise, modelled much like European medieval society with the important role of abbeys, monasteries and nunneries on secular life, Stephenson introduces us to his protagonist, Erasmus … a young adult just finishing his first ten year hitch in the Decenarian cloister. His life within the cloister is introduced and then, with his first opportunity to visit the outside world in ten years, he reacts to the culture outside the walls and the changes that have taken place since he was a young boy. It is a culture still technically advanced, with many similarities (suitably distorted by intervening millenia) to our own. The equivalent of trucks, soft drinks, hoodies, cellphones, and reality TV are visible. Stephenson pulls our leg while playing the story straight.

Back in the cloister after his ten days of exciting and sometimes melancholy exploration, the protagonist returns to the challenges of small group politics in cloistered life. Having made the second ten year commitment, Erasmus is now required to choose an intellectual school within the Decenarian group, one of many such schools which developed over the centuries within the cloisters. He must also take a more adult role. The choices of his young friends and the interaction with their teachers now becomes the focus of the book. In the course of mundane responsibilities, Erasmus and several of his friends discover that one of their teachers has spotted an unusual stellar object in the cloister’s telescope. While they innocently try to snoop out their teacher’s efforts, the Inquisition appears and their teacher is abruptly banished from the cloister forever.

Devastated, they resolve to secretly follow up on their teacher’s research. After some months, they discover what their teacher had only seen in the vaguest of images. An alien spacecraft has entered orbit around Earth. And soon thereafter, the Inquisition swoops down, and they too are banished from the cloister … told to report to a distant cloister where thousands of scientific and mathematical minds are gathering to consider the alien craft.

But Erasmus is convinced he must first find his teacher, who has left some intellectual bread-crumbs for him to follow. His adventure begins …

Anathem is not an easy book to approach, especially if science fiction and science fantasy are not your regular fare. Stephenson attempts to give a sense of the familiar and foreign, three thousand years from now, by using a sprinkling of vocabulary that’s vaguely similar to English but still distorted from our time. For some readers, that’s a fun challenge, for others it’s a bit of a slog. I found that it took a few hundred pages for the disorienting use of these words to fall away and for the story to gather mental steam. At 900+ pages, however, there was plenty more book left!

Suffice it to say, those who enjoyed Stephenson’s earlier books (Diamond Age is reviewed on chicagoboyz here) will enjoy this one. And those whose imaginations are captured by long stretches of history … of Spengler and Toynbee ilk … will enjoy the author’s extrapolation of the 21st century confrontations between big science, politics and religion. Those who follow advanced physics, philosophy of consciousness, and cosmological theories of parallel universes will be right at home.

Stephenson throws in enough current slang and veiled wise-ass commentary to confirm he’s still the same loquacious prankster. No doubt I missed many more in-jokes than I spotted. Much like the equally-famous science fiction writer, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson is a big fan of the staple geek sex-object — the spunky socially-adept brilliant tough girl. Every man’s inner Homer Simpson therefore gets a regular airing. Anathem will appeal to both male and female readers.

One word of warning. As if channeling Monty Python’s Prince Herbert of Swamp Castle (0:55 in this Youtube clip), Stephenson is forever breaking out in song in the middle of the story. His soliloquies on the nature of human consciousness and the structure of the universe (admittedly central to the bigger plot of his book) will likely remain opaque to the vast majority of his readers. When my eyes began to cross, I just started skimming pages til the author comes back to Earth, literally. His books nonetheless stand up well as adventures in fully-imagined worlds. And to whatever extent the rest of us can keep up with the “smart guy” passages, it’s worth doing so.

In Anathem, Stephenson reiterates a “mysterian” perspective on life that can be seen in his earlier works … there’s always an implied supernatural or extranatural escape hatch of some kind for the predicament of his characters. Squaring this belief with the largely scientific and mathematical focus of his writing can make for a strange combination … described in a nutshell in reference to one of Anathem’s characters:

“He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of the world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical [sic], that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.” [pp. 889-890]

The climax of Anathem seems to reflect ideas mulled over by the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould. How will we handle the destructive capacities of scientific discovery as the secular world becomes global and dislocated from its hidden religious moorings? How will religion and popular culture respond to the influential caste in society that communicates amongst itself with mathematics and statistical probability? Are we headed for some great rift between science and society? Or some great disaster triggered by scientific hubris?

Anathem will engage you in these issues while you work your way through another large Rabelaisian adventure. Happy reading.

You can purchase Michael Yon’s book online, directly from the publisher, and the copies will be given to soldiers as a gift. It’s hard to imagine a book that would be better received and more thought-provoking for soldiers in the field. Michael Yon is one of the few voices committed to putting in the time to learn what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported only by citizen-contributors.

To quote Michael:

This project is dependent entirely upon private donations. Without your help, it won’t happen. For folks who wish to put one book in the hands of a soldier, it’s just $10. For five books, it’s just $40. Ten copies are $75. A donation of $150 will put a copy of Moment of Truth in Iraq in the hands of 30 American soldiers; that’s just $5 a book.

As a Canadian who’s donated to Michael’s efforts directly in the past, I’m particularly appreciative of the fact that he’s starting to report on the efforts of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Those guys are getting far too little credit for their courage and skill over the last seven years (Canadian special forces and snipers were engaged since the beginning). In any event, I’m hoping that Michael gets a chance to interact with the Canadian troops as he did with the Brits in Basra. Their story needs telling.

And in the wider context, putting an exciting insightful book on Iraq into the hands of a soldier for Christmas, seems like a really good idea. I’ve chipped in $150 from the Great Non-White (just yet) North.

For the direct publisher link, please go here.

UPDATE (for commenter Seerov): Great White North is a term of endearment used by Canadians for their country, first appearing in a skit on the comedy program SCTV. It refers to snow. Being as it’s early September in Alberta, we have snow on the tops of the Rockies, but not “just yet” in the foothills … not yet, but soon.

Oxford University professor of human genetics, Bryan Sykes, follows up his best-selling popular books on recent European DNA studies with a book specifically about the “Isles” — England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Casting a wide but useful net, he provides a grounding not only in the geography, climate history and human prehistory of the two islands … but describes the mythology about, and early scientific investigations into, the origins of the people there. These are far from just academic preoccupations. In past centuries, English kings made their claims for sovereignty based on tales of Trojan settlers and Arthurian prowess. Every medieval commentary and discovery was followed with intense royal interest. Well into the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rights of kings were linked to ancient origins. Not surprisingly, later Victorian efforts at phrenological and morphological interpretation of the island’s peoples (the shape of their skulls and features of their bodies) comes in for some hard knocks in this book. But Sykes gives those pioneer scientists full points for effort, thoroughness, and a methodical approach. Their efforts might now be dashed upon the rocks of genetic information, but their tables, charts, line drawings and descriptions of hair colour, skin tone, and body shape across the British Isles reflect the sincere interest of generations past, attempting to answer the question “who are we?”. In many ways, Professor Sykes continues their efforts.

Since tens of millions of people outside the UK and Ireland claim the islands as ancestral homes, this book should be a useful addition to libraries around the world. Every genealogist in the English-speaking world will want to be familiar with the subject matter if not actually own a copy. As someone who graduated with a master’s degree in palaeo-environmental studies, there were many more pages of natural history in “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts” (SVC) than I expected. “Enough already,” I thought to myself on occasion. “Where’s the genetics?” But thinking of the task which Sykes sets himself … to set the stage for the genetic information of some 100+ million people … I can fully understand why he made the extra effort to describe the full context for human existence in the isles. Without understanding the role of glaciers, land bridges, forestation, invasions, and the distinction between Palaeolithic – Mesolithic – Neolithic, the genetic information he’s discovered floats above the human reality. It’s no more informative than breeding records of anonymous domestic animals.

Fair warning then that much of SVC’s bulk comes from providing the context for how humans lived in Great Britain and Ireland through the millenia, plus past narratives they cobbled together about their origins and superiority to neighbours near and far.

Those familiar with Sykes’ earlier books will find much that is added and elaborated from his work on the female line of descent in Europe (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by our mother, from her mother, ad infinitum). In the The Seven Daughters of Eve, he assigned female names (e.g. Ursula, Helena, Jasmine) to particular genetic markers as an easier way for the reader to keep track of the geography and prehistory associated with each lineage. Readers will need to consult Wikipedia for a cross-reference to the nomenclature that scientists actually use for these markers. The results of scientific study of maternal bloodlines indicates that the European population has been largely stable, and heterogeneous, and dominated by seven female lineages for tens of thousands of years.

In starting the Oxford Genetic Atlas Project soon after the millennium, he and his colleagues began to also collect male (or Y-chromosome) lineage information. This time, he discovered five male genetic lineages which dominate both the European and island population. Again, he provides human names to these markers, and again, readers will need to head to Wikipedia to translate his names into the specific scientific terms for each marker. The results of his research on male lineages re-emphasizes the antiquity of the genetic makeup of Great Britain and Ireland. While two great streams of peoples apparently came to the islands from the south (apparently along the coast from Spain) and from the east (west along the south shore of the Baltic), they share a great deal genetically with the other peoples of western Europe.

Sykes began his research at a time when DNA samples could only be gathered from blood. As a result, a certain amount of his story involves the diplomacy necessary to deal with blood donation services, schools, and civilian donors through the years. More recently, a simple swab from the inside of a person’s cheek is all that’s necessary for DNA genotyping. Gone are the elaborate refrigeration, shipping, and handling methods for blood samples. As a result, through a commercial entity separate from the university (Oxford Ancestors Ltd.), Sykes now provides answers to finer-grained questions about individual DNA variations. Those descended from the “seven mothers and five fathers” nonetheless share near-identical DNA with a much smaller group of people. It’s those people, often sharing surname or point-of-origin, who are often of interest to the genealogist. Sykes can help determine if you’re a “northern Smith” or a “southern Smith,” for example.

In summary, after statistical analysis of roughly 50,000 DNA samples in Great Britain and Ireland, Sykes discovered deep continuity of the maternal lines in the isles, undisrupted by the Romans, Celts, Picts, and Saxons we know from written or archaeological history. And there’s a great deal more stability in paternal genetics than scientists had assumed. They can at least make the case for “family trees” in existence for many thousands of years, which (through tracking their mutation rates from east to west) ended up in Great Britain after the end of the last Ice Age (roughly 12,000 years ago) and have been there ever since. Again, the genetic “foundation” of the isles appears to be widely shared with other parts of Europe … and seems to have been in place roughly by 10,000 years ago … as the glaciers retreated from the northern parts of the continent.

A dramatic illustration of the depth of the continuity is the match of mitochondrial DNA genetic material of a 9,000 year old skeleton (Cheddar Man) with a school teacher who lives near where the skeleton was excavated.

The peoples of Great Britain and Ireland, like most of their cousins in Scandinavia, Spain, and the nearby continent, are descended largely from Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers. The subsequent changes in the material culture … the use of metals and agriculture … were therefore adopted by local people. Ideas moved. People less so. This is contrary to what had been assumed, or idealized, through most of the last few centuries of European historical speculation.

The implications for modern history and politics are substantial. The DNA of modern occupants clearly shows that most of them are descended from folk long on the islands (especially on the maternal side) and much of the ebb and flow of paternal lines of DNA reflects the mere shifting of relative percentages in the population. There was no wholesale replacement. More a patchwork quilt that roughly parallels our understanding of wider European genetic history. There’s little in the way of a specifically Roman influence, just a few possible Mediterranean or African markers. Barely a statistical blip. The Normans come and go almost unseen in the genetic record (largely because they were essentially transplanted Vikings already widely represented in the British and Irish gene pool). Where dramatic imports of genetic lines is noticeable (the so-called “Genghis Khan effect” seen in Viking advances in the north or Irish migrations during war with the Picts of Scotland), it was moderated by the fact that the Scandinavians and Irish themselves shared many genetic families with the occupants of the British Isles. And in the case of the northern islands (Shetlands, Orkneys), it’s clear that conquest was by Viking families as much by individual bloodthirsty warriors. Uniformity of genetic stock seems largely absent everywhere in Europe, within the scope of the “super-families” identified by Sykes and his professional colleagues.

The Audience

SVC is a book written for the general public, and is certainly within the reach of motivated high school students. Even a keen middle school student might find pieces of history and geography that would inspire them. Strangely, for such a solid summary of natural and cultural history, there is no bibliography and mighty few footnotes. This isn’t very reassuring, since in the few areas he touched upon where I’ve done my own reading of the academic literature, his summaries are a bit dated and perhaps more generalized than necessary. Nonetheless, it’s a fine beginning to one’s education.

As mentioned above, anyone interested in the genealogy of Great Britain and Ireland should consider this book their primer on the history and geography of the isles, and the biological and mathematical facts underlying DNA historical reconstruction. No doubt, as science continues to refine its analytical techniques, we’ll see smaller and smaller variations in DNA giving us finer and finer insight into the movement of peoples in western Europe. As data sets grow and computation tools appear, the variations, and sub-sub-variations, of Sykes’ dominant lineages will no doubt provide many more fascinating insights into history and prehistory.

It will be interesting to see if further elaborations of the genetic data will continue to support Sykes’ hypothesis about the predominantly Palaeolithic origins of most of Britain and Ireland’s inhabitants.

What about the Anglosphere argument?

If the author’s research holds up in coming years, this book is a clear contribution to the argument that Anglo-Saxon influences on English individualism were cultural, not racial. The Anglo-Saxons came to England with genetic inheritances that were diverse and widely shared with the island peoples they displaced. Their influence in the ultimate genetic ratios of modern Britons and Irish citizens is therefore hard to discern. Sykes does much to make the case that the Celts and Picts were also largely indistinguishable at the genetic level … and virtually identical in female lineages. His modern distribution maps certainly show variation from east to west, from south to north, and between Britain and Ireland. Yet his overall story is one of amazing continuity.

Table of Contents
=============
1. Twelve Thousand Years of Solitude [1]
2. Who Do We Think We Are? [20]
3. The Resurgent Celts [44]
4. The Skull Snatchers [59]
5. The Blood Bankers [78]
6. The Silent Messengers [92]
7. The Nature of the Evidence [110]
8. Ireland [120]
9. The DNA of Ireland [147]
10. Scotland [165]
11. The Picts [177]
12. The DNA of Scotland [186]
13. Wales [219]
14. The DNA of Wales [231]
15. England [241]
16. Saxons, Danes, Vikings, and Normans [255]
17. The DNA of England [267]
18. The Blood of the Isles [277]

Several years ago, Dr. Gawande published a best-selling book on his experiences as a young surgeon called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. In the intervening years, he’s written a number of elegant essays on medical topics for the New Yorker while maintaining a surgical practice at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In a further embarrassment of talent, he was a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and now also teaches at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School for Public Health.

Notably, he’s a rare voice of humility amongst his profession in reflecting on the day-to-day practice of medicine. Not just on the larger issues of “what we don’t know” or “what we can’t do” but on the oft-overlooked issues of “what we do poorly, every day, merely out of habit.” That honesty adds particular strength to his writing. In his latest book, he’s assembled his essay-chapters into three larger themes (diligence, doing right, ingenuity) all tied around his reflections on how he wants to improve his own practice as a doctor.

The results are fascinating. As befits a writer for the New Yorker, Gawande makes good use of anecdote and the background research for each topic covered. He writes well and writes for a general audience. A few months ago I listened to a podcast interview with the author and he mentioned that it’s a real struggle for him to get writing done because of his professional obligations. To some extent, that time limitation is reflected in this book. The subject area, improving individual doctor performance, could cover a lot of ground. Gawande doesn’t pretend to do so exhaustively. Instead, we have a series of vignettes on the limitations and successes of medical practice. For any reader interested in a particular chapter’s topic, the results are excellent. Those interested in the “gaps” between chapters may need to head for the academic literature and something closer to a textbook. More’s the pity.

Diligence

In his opening section on Diligence, Gawande looks at three topics — hand-washing in hospitals, the control of polio in India, and the treatment of American battlefield casualties in Iraq.

In the first essay, he outlines the ongoing challenge controlling hospital infections (often by antibiotic-resistant bacteria). Even after ambitious changes to infrastructure by full-time infection control staff, infection rates can stay frustratingly high. Gawande does a tour of his own hospital with the infection control specialist, reviews the few-and-far-between examples of hospitals that have done better, and considers his own responsibility for transmitting infection to his patients. In this area, medicine is barely getting a “pass.”

Traveling with a doctor from WHO in India, Gawande writes his second essay on the identification and “ring” or “saturation” vaccination control of polio. When a new case is spotted, all the children in the surrounding area are vaccinated and then re-vaccinated. In a nation like India, it can involve millions of kids, and thousands of health care workers, and every dose of oral vaccine must be kept refrigerated. The logistics are staggering. A disease that all but disappeared a decade or so back, thanks to heroic efforts and the financial contribution from governments and service clubs like Rotary International, polio’s now making sporadic reappearance in the Third World, often associated with local insistence that the vaccines are dangerous to children. Most impressively, in this essay the author describes the careful saturation of towns and villages around reported cases. Fitting into his larger theme, Gawande describes the methodical unrelenting focus of WHO on vaccinating every single child. Every effort to approach perfection in the vaccination program reduces infection rates just a bit. But the implications of letting polio back out its “cage,” to a world filled with un-vaccinated kids, are too horrible to contemplate.

In Gawande’s final essay on diligence, he travels to Iraq and looks at the pattern of casualties and deaths on the modern American battlefield. By any calculation, American soldiers now have the lowest rates of injury and death in comparison to earlier wars. The addition of medical technology, body armour, and ballistic eyewear have reduced the severity and lethality of injuries dramatically. What has made the biggest difference, however, is an entirely new method of handling casualties. Gawande discovered that injured soldiers were subject to immediate medical care, and just as quickly they might be evacuated to regional or European medical centres with wounds still un-stitched, limbs uncasted. The discovery that lives could be saved by a shift in patient handling was a statistical effort by overworked doctors in dusty compounds all over Iraq. By focusing on what offered incremental improvement in survival, doctors and nurses in the US Army brought death rates down to unprecedented levels. No other military in the world can match that system. Indeed, one wonders if any other army would even have discovered the approach … since it was a bottom-up effort by medical staff. Gawande goes on to consider briefly the flip-side of all this improved medical care: the survival of soldiers with truly devastating injuries. Innovation in battlefield health care will now have to be matched with new breakthroughs in rehabilitation.

Doing Right

Gawande’s second theme is “doing right” … the effort to place medical care and scientific knowledge in the context of people’s lives. His topics are “nakedness” in the examining room, medical malpractice, physician fees and incomes, medical involvement in US death sentences, and when to halt medical treatment.

The essay on “Nakedness” is a reflection on the perils and practicalities of patient examinations, both in other cultures and that of urban America. Some locations are much more concerned about chaperons and propriety than the US, others are much less so. What is clear is that the US does not have clear professional guidelines on the issue that might alleviate concern for physicians and patients alike. More to the point, investigating the question of what standards might work best in a diverse society like America hasn’t been anyone’s priority.

In a second essay, Dr. Gawande looks at medical mistakes and medical realities, introduced through a years-long court case brought against a dermatologist sued by descendants of a skin cancer victim. The doctor had recommended surgery of a growth to a woman. A second opinion suggested it wasn’t needed, and she was upset with the first doctor. Years later, the patient developed skin cancer and felt the original doctor should have insisted on surgical excision over her objections. She instructed her surviving family to sue.

The impact on doctors of such court proceedings, justified or not, and the story of a doctor who left his practice to become a malpractice lawyer help the author to frame the discussion about what is fair and reasonable in a medical practice fraught with risk and uncertainty. It becomes clear that the current adversarial system works poorly. Doctors are resigned to be all being sued at some point in their career, and their malpractice insurance is priced accordingly. Lawyers, on the other hand, are looking for “phone number” (seven digit) settlement cases which means that unappealing complainants and modestly impaired patients need not apply. Where harm is done, it may not be substantial enough or saleable enough to warrant lawyerly attention. Other jurisdictions have gone with no-fault or liability set-asides for medical malpractice or vaccine side-effects. These solutions, which share risk and liability across a society, seem to provide a better balance for remediating the inherent limitations of medicine, practiced by fallible humans.

After completing his residency, Gawande had the interesting experience of being asked to “name his price” for a flat salary at his hospital for his first three years as a board-certified practitioner. He was given no guidance on salary range. His fellow practitioners would not discuss what they were paid. And the institution would not disclose that salary information either. At the end of the three years of salary, he’d start to be compensated as a percentage of his billed services. This unsettling process, after years earning very modest income as a resident doctor, became the basis for the author’s broader essay on how doctors are compensated … and how uncomfortable they are about talking about their compensation. As students and residents, they clearly work long hours and receive relatively dismal pay. As more senior physicians, their income (adjusted for their hours and responsibilities) may still fall short of what lawyers and business professionals make. Why the discomfort at talking about money, and why does everyone feel that the *other* guy’s doctor is ripping off the system?

Costing medical care turns out to be a very complicated process, and health care professionals are just one component of a system that spends elaborate amounts of time and energy trying to determine how things should be priced and paid for. Gawande describes the work life of one woman who makes a living helping large HMOs and hospital systems recover from the brink of bankruptcy through better management of their accounting … pricing, billing, payment, government insurance claims, etc. For many parts of the health care system, it’s a paper “war with insurance.” The skillful prosper. The inept go broke. Gawande’s own quest to figure out what he was worth took him to a happy and successful New York doctor who simply skipped the hassle. He insists on payment in cash and charges what the market will bear. The savings in administrative paperwork are substantial and his take-home pay is, not surprisingly, in the seven figures. Gawande was shaken a bit by that doctor’s high job satisfaction. How does one tease apart the obligations and responsibilities of skilled doctors with their current obligations to fight their way through a forest of legal and administrative paperwork?

The author goes on to describe all the various attempts to control physician costs and increase their job satisfaction through the last few decades. There are some positive stories, but they all seem to be temporary. Little HMOs that work well, become big, hire specialists, and falter in a maze of billing complexity. And in all this, as Gawande relates in the case of his own son’s heart surgery, is a patient base that expects hundreds of thousands of dollars of care at the lowest possible price. A $5 co-pay for his son’s treatment, as it turned out! As medicine gets more complex in order to treat patients with more and more serious, or obscure, ailments, the cost just keeps going up. Without any clear solution in sight.

Ultimately, Gawande arrived a ballpark figure for his salary for the first three years. His administrator accepted the number with alacrity … and now Gawande is among the group of physicians embarrassed to say what they make.

In perhaps the weakest (though still compelling) essay of the book, Gawande writes about the “Doctors of the Death Chamber” … the physicians and skilled nurses who assist US states with executions. Gawande describes the history of the relationship between the medical profession and state executions … and the fact that the AMA has washed its hands of the conundrum by stating that physicians should not be involved in any part of executions. Nonetheless, the slow, and rather monstrous, shift from hanging to firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers, and finally … to lethal injections … has been fraught will medical issues. It’s certainly a toss-up whether the strangulation and suffocation of hanging has been ameliorated in any of the 20th century’s innovations. Gawande clearly feels that they remain cruel and unusual but he certainly gives a fair and honest treatment to his discussions with the handful of medical professions who would discuss their involvement in executions. All are rather conflicted about their role … and about the inherent imperfections of the methods of execution that they implement and/or witness. There are always anomalies in individual prisoners’ bodies, always system failures, never enough redundancies in equipment. When things go wrong occasionally, the anecdotes make for harrowing reading.

That being said, much of Gawande’s essay comes across as squeamishness, on his part and on the part of society. There’s no mention of the rampant violence and rape of modern prisons. No discussion of the treatment of animals in medical research. Indeed, no discussion of Chinese doctors involved in reputed execution-on-demand organ harvesting. Nor a consideration of the rather more humane bullet to the base of the brain as an alternative to all the elaborate kabuki of executions in the US. So this essay is perhaps more parochial, in jurisdiction, philosophy, and politics than it might be. It does not address the inherent biases and prejudices of the American medical profession … their sensitivity over the pain and suffering of some, and their studied indifference to the suffering of others. “Don’t get your hands dirty” is the AMA credo … and they are mighty selective over what they judge “dirty.” The under-equipped palliative care units. The care of disabled newborns. In face of these broader painful realities, the medical profession’s relationship with executions is as conflicted as that of broader society. For folks that stand daily at the nexus of life and death, they appear rather fastidious and fussy when faced with dealing death on society’s behalf, in broad daylight.

Gawande’s broad them of “Doing Right” concludes with a final essay on the suspension of medical treatment … when to keep fighting … when to say enough is enough. And when it is the physician who wants to continue to “fight” for his or her own reasons and ego. Sorting through this thicket of uncertainty (of solutions and motives), is a daily practice for Gawande and this essay takes us just a first step beyond describing the problem. Families have a role in deciding just how much should be done, at what price in pain, suffering, and cash, for any particular patient. The risks and responsibilities are so weighty, for both physicians and families, that zigzags in decision-making and recriminations after the fact are commonplace. It’s hard to know, without some shared ethical system, just how to draw the line against excessive treatment. The topic is thoughtfully broached however.

Ingenuity

In his final theme in Better, Dr. Gawande looks at “Ingenuity” and the steps that physicians can take that require mental creativity and effort but which need not place a large financial burden on medical care.

His opening essay is a fascinating discussion of the development of the Apgar score for newborn infants. Long disdained as the least rigourous of the medical disciplines, it’s ironic that obstetrics should have the simple 10 point scale, developed by anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in the 1950s. Now used around the world, the Apgar score has improved the treatment and care of newborns far more effectively than earlier US attempts to improve treatment plans. It is quick, simple, and virtually free. It ranks the skin colour, heart rate, reflex irritability, muscle tone, and respiration of the child (each on a 0 – 2 scale), totals the five values and comes up with a ranking from 0 – 10. Over the last half-century, medicine has used those numbers to improve infant health generally, and improve the treatment of at-risk children from the moment of birth.

Strangely enough, being able to quickly categorize newborn status has led to aggressive pragmatic research by gynecologists and obstetricians, mapping their treatment methods and preventive care to that moment-of-birth score. Obstetrics hasn’t following the idealized approach dictated by “evidence-based medicine” but the author makes a strong case that the near-universal use of this simple scale has underlain its great positive impact on actual health care. “Best” practice is not necessarily “available” practice. Gawande builds his description of the value of the Apgar score around the anecdotal birth experience of one of his colleagues, a fellow doctor. Her harrowing time is the centrepiece of a broader discussion about the changes that have been made in medicine to account for “ordinary” physicians. A case in point is forceps delivery. In the hands of skilled practitioners, it is safer than a Caesarian birth. But developing that skill takes time, effort, and errors. Many physicians do not master it. By contrast, Caesarian sections are more successfully executed by physicians with ordinary skills.

Gawande is a little concerned that we are now building an entire medical system designed to adapt to mediocre doctors. And with the news that one healthy baby in 500 can be saved by using early C-sections (39 weeks), it is entirely possible that the Western medical system will eventually abandon “natural” childbirth entirely, justified by the improved prospects of surgical intervention for mother and child. This essay is by times both unsettling and fascinating. For Gawande, it has inspired him to work on a surgical team to build an equally useful scoring system for his own practice. Clearly, he’s also disturbed by the difference between treatment given by outstanding doctors and that which is safe in the hands of more mediocre practitioners.

Which leads him to his next, and in many ways most thought-provoking, essay on the difference between great medical care and good medical care — “The Bell Curve.” His focus is on the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF), a debilitating metabolic disorder which once led to death in childhood and adolescent. In simple terms, the mucus of the body becomes sticky and impedes respiration and digestion. Breathing and nutrition falter. In past decades, the treatment of this disease in America was organized around a network of specialized centres. Those centres improved the life expectancy of cystic fibrosis patients dramatically. In a quirk of private foundation funding, the cystic fibrosis centres were also amongst the few disease-focused medical institutions who recorded their success in treatment, nation-wide. The results of those surveys were disturbing. While life expectancy for patients generally was increasing, a handful of treatment centres were showing dramatically better results. Some of this could be accounted for by on-site medical research but it was clear that somehow a handful of centres were using established treatment plans more effectively. Eventually, the differences were so substantial that a case was made to remove the anonymity of the institutional reporting … to identify why these outcome differences persisted.

To illustrate these differences, and to dig deeper into the realities of good versus great care, Gawande contrasts the treatment of a teenage female CF patient at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and that of a similar patient at Minneapolis’ Fairview Children’s University Hospital. Even to a lay person, the descriptions of doctor-patient interaction are dramatic. It has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with attitude. At Cincinnati, subpar results in breathing or weight gain are recorded and patients are encouraged to do better. In Minneapolis, the doctor overseeing the centre (Dr. Warren Warwick) overlooks no opportunity to improve respiration and digestion, and patients are confronted directly with their lapses in routine. “Failure is not an option” to use movie lingo. In many cases, his CF patients have lung capacity superior to healthy patients of their age. The results, in lifespan and quality of life, are dramatic. At Minneapolis, patients can live decades longer than at other centres, and they may undertake activities considered impossible by CF patients in other parts of the country. Minneapolis is relentless about its program, and about physicians at their centre building treatment plans carefully based on best practice. Doctors are aggressively discouraged from treatment that can only be anecdotally evaluated. All participants, patients, staff and physicians, are focused on what works.

Surprisingly, even after the differences between centres have been identified, and the “cultures” of these medical institutions highlighted, the upper quartile of centres continues to lead the pack, and indeed are improving fastest. Nothing, apparently, succeeds like success. For Gawande, the challenge in his own practice is to identify where he might be falling down, where being “average” in his approach and treatment plans. As he says himself:

If the bell curve is a fact, then so is the reality that most doctors are going to be average. There is no shame in being one of them, right? Except, of course, there is. … When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average. p. 230.

In his final essay on “Ingenuity,” Dr. Gawande returns to the Third World and describes his experiences working with surgeons at an Indian hospital. In face of incredible limitations in facilities and supplies, and limitless demand from an underserved populace, the physicians at the hospital in question are constantly challenged to adapt technologies, tools, time management, and treatment plans. There is never “enough” of anything. For Gawande, it was an eye-opening encounter with what could be done with very little and what must be done when creativity and diligence are the only resources available to extend the physical resources. Nonetheless, the fatigue and stress on the local physicians is evident, and Gawande concludes his essay by wondering whether he would be able to bear the burdens placed on these dedicated doctors. The temptation to take those talents, that diligence, and that creativity, and turn it into a prosperous lifestyle in the West must be great.

In his Afterword, Dr. Gawande tries to epitomize what he learned in the course of his exploration of the three themes in his book: “diligence, doing right, ingenuity.” His personal goal was to improve his own skills but he feels (rightfully, to my mind) that many of the examples which he wrote about can apply to anyone in a field with risk and responsibility. In speaking to students, Gawande has come up with five brief aphorisms that clearly reflect his experiences described in his essays.

1. Ask an unscripted question. (creating a space for new information in patient interactions and removing the “rote” feeling for the physician)
2. Don’t complain. (it’s a cycle which impedes improvement)
3. Count something. (Focusing on what’s important and finding a way to work with it)
4. Write something. (whether for personal reflection or professional communication)
5. Change. (maintain a commitment to adjusting things)

Who Will Enjoy This Book?

As mentioned earlier, the book is written for a general audience. It would certainly be a great gift for undergraduates with an interest in the health and life sciences. Mature high school students (that is, emotional mature kids who can handle some ambiguity in life) would also find Better very thought-provoking. As for buying this book for friends and relatives who are doctors or nurses, that should be a more careful judgment. Gawande’s book describes his efforts to set the bar higher for himself. Not everyone has that interest. If you know someone in the health care professions who is curious and of a literary bent, I think they’d enjoy this book as well.

For general readers, if any individual topic mentioned above seems interesting, by all means borrow the book from the local public library. If you find several of the topics interesting, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it from cover to cover.

Gawande has his own personal biases and predispositions, of course. A book of essays is bound to have its stronger and weaker contributions. In terms of the challenges facing doctors … and the challenges facing patients facing doctors … Better offers rather spotty but elegant coverage. Gawande could flesh in the topic more, and perhaps he will. Personally, I’d like to see some consideration of the cultural context of medicine beyond “necessity is the mother of invention.” Some of Dr. Gawande’s predispositions have little or nothing to do with that intersection of “science and others’ lives.” But he writes so well and expresses himself so humanely that I very much look forward to his next book.

Table of Contents
————————
Introduction [1]
Part I Diligence [11]
On Washing Hands [13]
The Mop-Up [29]
Casualties of War [51]
Part II Doing Right [71]
Naked [73]
What Doctors Owe [84]
Piecework [112]
The Doctors of the Death Chamber [130]
On Fighting [154]
Part III Ingenuity [167]
The Score [169]
The Bell Curve [201]
For Performance [231]
Afterword: Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant [249]
Notes on Sources [259]
Acknowledgments [271]

History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).

By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.

The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.

Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.

Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.

As can be seen by the Table of Contents listed below, the first phase of America’s involvement with the Middle East was triggered by the loss of British protection from the piratical activities of the Barbary Coast (North Africa). The moment American trading vessels stopped flying the British flag, they were subject to increasing predation. North Africans supplemented their galleys (which were rowed) with modern European ocean-going vessels. The threat to shipping was severe within the Mediterranean, and increasingly widespread in the Atlantic. America’s eastern shoreline was the plausible next target. Captured Americans vessels and cargoes were sold in the Middle East. Sailors were held hostage and/or enslaved. Their treatment, barbaric far beyond even the rough standards of Europe, became the subject of increasing popular anger and commentary in the new American states.

Relentless demands for tribute from a series of North African city-states were to plague successive American administrations until a consensus formed about the need for an overseas US defense. Structuring this unified response to piracy awaited a reformation of the relations between the States … and the development of a formal Constitution in 1789. Having successfully, painfully, created a Constitution, the lines of national authority and responsibility became clearer. The debate about whether gold or gunpowder was the best solution to the Barbary pirates went on for many years. Here we see the first of many echoes of American foreign policy in our time.

At its worst, annual expenditures for buying hostages or buying peace in North Africa approached 20% of the US national budget. A permanent American navy was finally approved by legislation and subsequent appropriation. American attitudes became more actively vindictive toward the North African states as that navy became more effective at the turn of the 19th century. Punitive raids, rather than painful supplication, became the norm and a permanent American fleet patrolling the Mediterranean was born.

Oren notes that for the first forty years of its existence, European nations did little to assist America and its merchants in the Mediterranean. It was only with the growing American ability to project permanent force into the Mediterranean that the US was treated with respect by European naval powers. The War of 1812 disrupted efforts to protect American shipping in the region but at its conclusion, a newly sophisticated and muscular American fleet emerged which was able to reassert itself. From that point forward, the Americans presented themselves as an independent and confident trading alternative to the Europeans (primarily the French and British). The various provinces of the Ottoman Empire responded accordingly. They dropped their demands for payment and shifted instead to leveraging American commercial interests against the Great Power squabbles of the European continent. In an echo of later eras, America was “far away” and therefore preferred as a source of Western trade goods without the associated imperialist baggage.

For ante-bellum America, having reached sufficient naval strength to limit North African piracy, commercial sights shifted further east … to Istanbul and to the newly accessible Egypt and Levant. American traders had little compunction in competing to open trade with an autocratic Ottoman Empire since they’d received so little support or acknowledgement from the Europeans in earlier years. Trade expanded quickly.

At the same time, America was experiencing another wave of religious fervour (the so-called Second Great Awakening). Millennial beliefs in America for the first time began referencing events in the Holy Land … involving conventional conversion of the peoples there to American variants of Christianity, or the “restorationist” beliefs which increasingly saw the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as the final step in the End Times.

Both streams of religious belief (proselytization and colonization-before-Second-Coming) were to send a growing numbers of American Christians into the Levant, and into an Ottoman Empire that had long maintained control over religious groups through carefully prescribed rights (the millet system for managing dhimmi).

Needless to say, almost everyone in the region (ruler and ruled) was antagonistic or, at best, indifferent to the arrival of religiously fervent Americans … Americans determined to upset the status quo of “heathens, infidels, and apostates.” Americans were subject to banditry and assaults and vindictiveness from the full range of other religious communities that were living on sufferance in the Ottoman Empire.

Those seeking to live in the Middle East to be on hand for Christ’s Second Coming were largely unsuccessful in establishing the agricultural stations that would support them. Disease, violence, and local ecological and economic collapse had kept regional populations very low … shockingly so by modern standards. In this impoverished environment, idealistic Americans with North American expectations were at a distinct disadvantage.

For those Christian missionaries seeking to convert the populace, the political environment was just as tenuous. Ottoman rule was relatively decentralized so local rulers could quickly shift their attitudes toward American Christian activity as local circumstances and popular attitudes demanded. Despite a great deal of investment and effort by the American Board of Commissioners, American missionary conversions were almost non-existent.

In the course of establishing these missions, however, two American obsessions were to have momentous impact on Middle Eastern history: modern medicine and education. Indeed, the roots of American influence in the region can largely be traced to the even-handed provision of health care and modern education to the local peoples of the Middle East by the missionaries of this era. The origins of the Middle East’s current educational and medical infrastructure have been largely obscured for political reasons but America’s role was significant in most parts of the Ottoman Empire. Missionaries were never really safe in the Middle East, however, and Oren provides accounts of their difficult lives, and often traumatic deaths, throughout much of his book. For better or worse, these folk did set standards and expectations for the educated classes which remain to this day. Their efforts, far into what is now eastern Turkey and Iran, positively influenced almost all the various Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sects of the region.

Finally, under the category of “fantasy,” new ship technology meant that restless Americans could explore or play the tourist in the Middle East to an extent never before possible. A new bowdlerized translation of the Arabian Nights triggered yet another wave of fantasizing amongst the literati of America. The French occupation of Egypt had exposed the world to the very ancient culture there. In initiating the field of Egyptology, they’d also started a European interest in the aesthetic elements of Egyptian art and architecture. Educated Americans were not immune to the widespread “wishful thinking” about the Middle East that took place as Europe was increasingly able to force its will on the different far-flung portions of the Ottoman Empire.

By the 1830s, the romanticism about the area had evolved to the point where Algerian dress became fashionable for elite European soldiers (the so-called Zouave style), and, a decade or two later, American civil war units were to die by the hundreds in North African pantaloons and loose jackets.

As America drifted toward civil war, its involvement in the Middle East was reinforced by technological events (the development of the steamship and the rapid growth of American industrialization). Andrew Jackson had created formal relations with the Ottoman Empire, showing only limited concern for the constant antagonism in the region towards the religious Americans, now settling there in greater numbers.

The Ottoman Empire sought to counterbalance European power by congenial relations with the one industrialized country without apparent ambitions to dismember it. Through much of the 19th century, America was variously seen as the champion of both minority interests and of Ottoman independence. While the friction between American religious aspirations and its commercial and geopolitical interests persisted, American influence in the area was generally seen as benign.

Just as the War of 1812 was to disrupt American involvement in the Middle East, the outbreak of the American Civil War disturbed relations with Europe. Perhaps the most immediately disruptive effect was the self-imposed embargo of Confederate cotton and an associated Union blockade. Egypt had been expanding its cotton industry since the 1820s but still lagged the southern United States in productivity because of its primitive farming methods. With Southern cotton off the world’s markets, Egypt reaped an immense but temporary financial boom for its ruler, the Albanian Muhammad Ali. Ali’s efforts to modernize Egypt, and the post-Civil War crash in Egypt’s cotton industry were set the stage for that nation’s relations with Europe and America for several generations.

The Ottoman Empire, returning the Jacksonian favour of earlier years, supported the North … reflecting its own preference for stability and the integrity of its Empire. Dithering European powers attempted to maintain as much neutrality as possible. Only the British had the naval wherewithal to maintain a real independence from Union attempts to control Confederate shipping (cf. the Trent affair).

As the Civil War concluded, America stood out as the pre-eminent military power of the Americas, on a rapid pace to match or exceed the technological and military expertise of Europeans. A huge number of experienced soldiers and generals were released from service and they became a natural resource for the Ottomans … offering European-style military expertise without the imperial dangers of hiring actual Europeans. American shipbuilders and armorers were to find welcome markets in the Middle East, especially in the temporarily flush Egyptian autocracy.

Oren offers a fascinating chapter on the role of Yankee and Confederate generals in Egypt’s short-lived 19th century attempt at independent modernization. Generals of the stature of Sherman and Grant made triumphant tours through the region. Accounts of the luxurious accommodations of the Pasha …and the dire poverty, filth, and disease of the ordinary Egyptians were repeated theme in memoirs.

In support of such recollections were books like Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, which did much to make his reputation, and was a largely satirical description of his travels through the Holy Land in the company of religious pilgrims just after the Civil War. The recurring pattern of American beguilement with the exotic, followed by disillusionment with the corrupt, cruel, and impoverished is found in much American literature of the time. American romanticism about the Middle East during this period was also to find expression in the creation of the Shriners … best known in America for their parade go-karts and a North American network of free hospitals for children. Surely the “Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine” must stand as one of the great modern anachronisms of American culture.

On a playful tangent, Oren recounts how Frederick Bartholdi’s initial attempt to create a giant female statue for the Egyptian Khedive in 1871 (Egypt (or Progress) Bringing Light to Asia) for the entrance of the new Suez Canal was morphed 15 years later into Lady Liberty on Bedloe’s Island off New York City.

The Canal’s completion in 1869 was to place a new geopolitical importance on Egypt, and a new burden on Egyptian leadership to maintain fiscal and political stability around the canal. By 1882, European responded to the insolvency of the Egyptian autocracy with invasion. This not only placed local Americans at great immediate risk from Egyptian reprisal on all Westerners but inevitably concluded significant American involvement in the military modernization of the Egyptian military. The generation of Civil War vets who’d made the Middle East home traveled back to America in anonymity.

The tail-end of the 19th century was a time of American prosperity and burgeoning power. It was the high-water mark for Protestant faith (and associated self-confidence) in the nation, and included American ambivalence about the propriety of imperialism. The destitution of much of Asia and Africa was highlighted by reports from American trading enterprises and missionaries across the planet. Americans were the sole industrialized nation who’d yet to participate in the European imperialism sweepstakes of the era. But what religious and moral and social obligations did the nation have, blessed as it was by God and Nature?

The dramatic growth of the US Navy, the Spanish-American War, and subsequent American aggressiveness in the Caribbean and Philippines were to spell new opportunities and obligations for American power, faith, and fantasy. Most ironically, it was US naval strategist Alfred Mahan who coined the term “Middle East” in a 1902 paper meant to distinguish the East generally, from the geopolitical significance of the Arabia, Persia, and the Gulf.

From its earliest days, America had engaged Jewish citizens as emissaries and diplomats in the region. It should be recalled that Hebrew studies at America’s institutions of higher learning were considered central for Protestant clergy of the established denominations. By the mid-19th century, American Jews such as Edwin de Leon and Uriah Levy (the first Jew to reach commodore rank in the US Navy) were actively engaged in protecting American interests (commercial and religious) in the Middle East.

The changing demography of the America during the end of the 19th century was also to signal a shift in the role American Jews would play in the Middle East. The “restorationist” enthusiasms of many Protestant sects lent indirect support for a new social movement, Zionism. The anti-Semitism of Europe led many commentators (including Mark Twain) to focus for the first time on the utility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

As the twentieth century dawned, American Christian activities in the Middle East continued to focus on education and medicine (conversion had continued to be very unsuccessful). Americans were to be initial bystanders at the two great events of the era – the butchery of Greeks and Armenians that is associated (controversially) with the Young Turks, and the Great Power struggle of the First World War which dictated the structural demise of the Ottoman Empire. America’s initial neutrality was to partially protect its citizens from harm but these experiences … deep humanitarian concern for minorities in Europe and the Middle East, and widespread domestic loathing of European imperialism, … were to frame the American political paradox ever after.

Self-determination on the other side of the Atlantic always seemed to come at the existential peril of religious and ethnic minorities. And there would be American diplomats, businesspeople and missionaries on hand at every turn to document the horrors in detail.

America’s late participation in the Great War meant that its public focus remained on genocidal events in Anatolia through 1914 and 1915. Americans donated generously to the relief work and US Navy ships were to deliver aid for a widespread famine in the region at the time. Nonetheless, in passages reminiscent of later commentary on the holocaust of WW2, individual Americans despaired at their inability to ameliorate (let alone halt) the savagery. They took their own lives, died of broken health or after torture in Turkish prisons. The commitment of these individuals to the welfare of local peoples (who’d completely rejected American religious beliefs over the course of a century) is something worth remembering.

One of the most challenging issues for President Wilson before America entered the war was the British intention to create an international mandate over the Holy Land, and to engage the support of American Jews by supporting a Jewish national home. Even before America had joined WW1, Wilson had responded to the plan negatively. How did one oppose colonialism while simultaneously supporting a Jewish national home? Indeed, how were Americans generally (both Christian and Jew) able to reconcile their religious beliefs about the centrality of Jerusalem and their secular commitment to self-determination.

For a number of prominent American diplomats and regional experts, the quandary could not be resolved. They were determined to convince the President that any statement in support of Zionism was dangerous and should never be made. British intentions were made clearer, and US presidential ambiguity was swept aside, with the Balfour Declaration, and American Jews departed for Canadian boot camps, unimpeded, to serve in WW1.

America’s late entry to the trenches of WW1 ensured its role in “making the peace” in Europe but since its troops had never fought in the Middle East, America was a bystander to the British/French negotiations which attempted to slice the Ottoman Empire into functional fiefdoms. All the compromises, hypocrisies, and inadequacies of the process were immediately evident, however, to the many people in the region who’d been educated in the network of American educational institutions. The wave of nationalist belief in the Middle East, reinforced by the success of the Japanese in setting their own course earlier in the century, was the stepchild of American values of modernity taught by Christian missionaries.

Allied with these efforts was a new era of American fantasy manufactured by the post-war reminiscences of American reporter, Lowell Thomas. Reputedly spending all of two days in the desert, Thomas recast T.E. Lawrence as an American-style champion of Arab independence. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published widely after his death in 1935, is well-regarded to this day. Orientalism of the Lawrence of Arabia variety continued well into the Sixties. One contemporary of Lawrence was heard to say that the only accurate thing about the David Lean movie was “the sand and the camels.”

Post-war settlements in the Middle East satisfied no one, and brought only constant discord amongst its peoples. They did, however, spell the beginning of a new era in the Middle East … as American domestic consumption of petroleum products outstripped supply and a new American consortium of oil companies (the Iraq Petroleum Company, formed in 1921, muscled into the European monopoly. Americans got their oil (23.75% of all petroleum extracted from the Middle East) without the headaches of mandates and administration.

Meanwhile, Christian missionaries (against great odds) had continued to provide modern medical care to the populace of what is now Kuwait. Amongst their patients, by 1914, were the men of Abd al’Aziz ibn Saud. Over time, their role in caring for Gulf Arabians created much goodwill. Some twenty years later, when it was ibn Saud’s desire to circumvent the exclusive club created by Anglo-French companies to control Middle East oil, he turned to American businessmen and oil explorers.

On June 1st 1932, engineers from the Standard Oil Company of California (SOCOL) struck oil on the barren island of Bahrain. On that basis, intensive negotiations over exploration rights began that were ultimately won by SOCOL and sealed with gold bullion loaned from a British bank. SOCOL became CASOC (California Arabian Standard Oil Company) now Chevron which became Aramco and then Saudi Aramco. With the discovery of Dhamman Number 7 in 1938, the era of Saudi Arabia dominance of the oil industry began.

It was to be the children of Middle Eastern missionaries who dominated the American diplomatic and oil business cadres of the region for many years. The merging of religious and economic interests in the southern Gulf was to recast the region, yet again, as an American story – of exploration, perseverance, and missionary fervour.

At the beginning of World War II, America was firmly ensconced in Saudi Arabia, Germany was making belated offers of gold to ibn Saud, and American obligations to keep the Saudis happy (with money and broader geopolitical influence) were to enter a new phase.

Events in Palestine had gotten increasingly tense but America was, by and large, able to escape responsibility for any of them. By the time that the three Allied leaders met in February of 1945 at the Yalta Conference, it was clear that the US would have a central role in how the post-war Middle East would be managed despite the fact that the topic was largely ignored there.

In one of the most unsettling portions of Oren’s book, an ill, almost giddy, Roosevelt equivocates with ibn Saud about America’s support for Zionism during a face-to-face meeting on the USS Quincy in February of 1945. Promising “ibn Saud never to assist the Jews at the Arab’s expense” and proffering “assurances for Saudi Arabia’s defense, to do everything ‘short of war,’ to strengthen Syrian and Lebanese independence,” Roosevelt had attempted to square the circle in light of the imminent need to resettle thousands of displaced Jews from Europe.

Roosevelt’s comments on the meeting left the impression that it had been colourful but insignificant. Contemporary observers weren’t so sanguine. As we now know, the President could not have been more wrong. Access to oil and support for Zionism could not be easily reconciled.

Post-World War II efforts by America to assist the people of North Africa and the Middle East to gain independence from European powers were successful but they created their own set of expectations and first among them was that America would solve the region’s problems, soonest.

With the fusing of Palestine and Arabia on the deck of the USS Quincy, we enter territory more familiar to modern readers. Oren’s discussion of the creation of Israel and Harry Truman’s religious values is worth careful review, as is the resistance of much of the State Department. Robert Kaplan’s book The Arabists outlined the role that the descendants of American missionaries in the Middle East played in determining US diplomatic attitudes through the 20th century.

In any event, Power, Faith, and Fantasy continues to inform for another 120 pages but the tale is entirely familiar, if only in its litany of deaths by violence and misadventure. A grim tale, though well told.

And Finally

Oren has largely succeeded in creating a comprehensive history of America’s relations with the Middle East over the last 225 years. Verging on the encyclopedic, it makes its case that the themes of Power, Faith, and Fantasy are effective in organizing the story. Of the three, Fantasy is the most nebulous and therefore the least compelling. The American appetite for the adventurous and exotic has certainly seen expression in the Middle East. Whether it warrants promotion to the same league as commercial and religious interests is debatable.

Reading about Americans taking their faith really seriously is also a rather disconcerting. Our own era is filled with folk who hold their views deeply unless they might conflict with someone else’s. The self-confidence (if not the self-sacrifice) of American missionaries, explorers, and merchants certainly seems like ancient history.

Who’s best served by this book? An intelligent high school student or undergraduate, most certainly. A general reader needing a reference work (and a reference to other references) can’t go wrong. Power, Faith, and Fantasy is hardly a leisure read but I did find it compelling enough to make it through from beginning to end (paying some overdue library fines in the process).

Nor can I claim enough background to critique the content in detail. I’m sure experts in each country, and each time period, would have nits to pick. Oren manages to be pretty even-handed by taking people at their word, but avoiding any attempt to gloss over events as being the “fault” of one side or the other. Choosing his themes, he can work with the realist, idealist, and populist branches of history to good effect.

In fact, reading Michael Oren’s book has whetted my appetite to re-read WR Mead’s Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed The World. Little wonder that Mead himself provides a glowing back cover blurb. Oren mines the same rich vein of common sense by relating key American appetites (usually contradictory) to the vagaries of history.

Oren fares less well when he’s required to provide bridging text between the periods of history he describes. His attempts to cast the reader’s mind to earlier periods by drawing parallels are painful to read. His history is great. His poetry and metaphor can perhaps be left to one side.

As for the author’s ability to form a conclusion about his subject, it certainly felt at times that he knew the Middle East better than America. The American link to British values established during the Glorious Revolution is skipped because of his self-imposed outline. But if you think that American values in 1776 sprung out of the head of Zeus, you miss much of the frame of mind that Americans evidenced till well into the 20th century. Iceland and Cornwall had plenty of experience with Barbary corsairs before Americans were being enslaved in the late 18th century. It seems a fact worth noting. American Protestantism is not exclusively an American story. Reconciling the values of liberty and security have been the Anglosphere struggle for many centuries. Americans have lived out their best hopes, and worst fears, through their vulnerabilities of commerce and the passions of their spirituality, much as their British ancestors. The British role in the Middle East from 1800 onward can certainly be cast as nefarious, but do we see any parallels between British faith and American faith at the time? It’s not a question answered in this book.

The role of America as victim, partner, teacher, doctor, father, and fixer in the Middle East extends far back beyond our personal recollections. It should give us pause when judging current efforts. Americans were trying to convince 19th Egyptians that impaling their rebellious peasants on fence-posts was counter-productive. They’ve been well-meaning, relentless, self-absorbed, and ultimately more and more powerful throughout the centuries. American power, faith, and fantasy are still at play in the Middle East and the history of those themes, and their depth, is important to consider when reading the papers or a news website.

Oren quotes Philip Roth: “History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” We may not be able to anticipate the unexpected but Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy gives us some hope we can predict some inevitable factors in play for America in that troubled land.

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

Prologue: A Passage to Glory [3]
Introduction: Recovering a Pivotal Past [9]

Part One: Early America Encounters the Middle East
1. A Mortal and Mortifying Threat [17]
2. The Hostile and Ethereal Orient [41]
3. A Crucible of American Identity [51]
4. Illuminating and Emancipating the World [80]

Part Two: The Middle East and Antebellum America
5. Confluence and Conflict [101]
6. Manifest Middle Eastern Destiny [122]
7. Under American Eyes [149]

Part Three: The Civil War and Reconstruction
8. Fission [177]
9. Rebs and Yanks on the Nile [190]
10. The Trumpet That Never Calls Retreat [210]
11. American Onslaught [228]
12. Resurgence [246]

Part Four: The Age of Imperialism
13. Empire at Dawn [257]
14. Imperial Piety [273]
15. Imperial Myths [297]
16. A Region Renamed and Reordered [307]

Part Five: America, The Middle East, and the Great War
17. Spectators of Catastrophe [325]
18. Action or Nonaction? [340]
19. An American Movement is Born [351]
20. Arise, O Arabs, and Awake! [367]
21. The First MIddle East Peace Process [376]
22. Fantasies Revived [398]

Part Six: Oil, War, and Ascendancy
23. From Bibles to Drill Bits [407]
24. An Insoluble Conflict Evolves [420]
25. A Torch for the Middle East [446]
26. The Middle East and the Man from Missouri [475]

Part Seven: In Search of Pax Americana
27. Harmony and Hegemony [505]
28. The Thirty Years’ War [550]
Epilogue: A Profound and Visceral Gratitude [595]

While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men — the so-called hikikomori (literally, “pulling away, being confined“). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms — from friends, family, career, and society in general — for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.

In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV). Its particular set of symptoms didn’t appear in Western countries, nor in Japan’s Asian neighbours. Japan’s increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country’s economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.

In a postmodern capitalist world, young adults in affluent nations the world over probably wonder how they might seek out the genuine and the true: it is a quest that seems particularly daunting for today’s young Japanese. p. 159

The hikikomori vary in age and behaviour. Some begin their retreat in middle school. Others begin in high school. Some have the confidence to come out of their homes in the middle of the night and roam empty city streets. Others remain completely isolated in their bedrooms for decades … with the essentials of life provided by embarrassed and anxious parents. These aren’t the recluses or shy geeks familiar to Western culture. Nor are they agoraphobics, functioning well in their own homes but hesitant to step outdoors. The hikikomori haven’t jumped to take advantage of phones or the Internet to establish social networks, as they’ve become available. Instead, they have chosen the one course that Japanese society provides young men to become asocial. Their families, deeply ashamed and disoriented, simply hide the hikikomori from the outside world: feeding, clothing, and providing for them. In their isolation, these young men read, sleep, daydream … and deepen their estrangement from modern Japan.

Some hikikomori are helped by antidepressants, but during Zielenziger’s extensive interviews with these boys and men, it became clear that they weren’t so much delusional or depressed as deeply lost. They felt anxiety over their inability to fit into Japanese society, and at some point simply gave up trying to do so. Yet the nature of Japanese culture means that they didn’t have the social or mental tools to establish an independent identity, to strike off in a different direction within Japan. They were bound to their families and neighbours for identity, yet deeply resented that same identity. Answering the question “what do I want?” seems impossible for them.

In many cases, the hikikomori were subjected to bullying in school by both students and teachers, a common trigger for initial retreat from public. In the West, bullying is seen as an aberration of the schoolyard but in Japan, it can persist for years and continue into the work environment. In tune with Japanese society generally, parents respond to that bullying with a “blame the victim” attitude — what had the boy done to trigger the bullying? As a result, the hikikomori can come to distrust their parents. Most hikikomori are, by Zielenziger’s account, estranged completely from their fathers, reflecting the distant role of fathers in many modern Japanese families. Occasionally, the hikikomori can even be violent with one or both parents.

Ironically, because Zielenziger was a foreigner, the hikikomori found it easier to talk about their experiences with him. The burden of “fitting in” was lifted when speaking to an American. Indeed, some of the hikikomori had found relief from their loneliness and inertia by visiting foreign countries. Some of the most poignant parts of Zielenziger’s book relate the discussions he had with these young people. They assumed that, as an American, he would have unique words of wisdom that would give them a direction or orientation out of their loneliness and isolation. But the internal compass heading that most Western kids are encouraged to develop with toddler-hood can’t be conveyed mechanically to the adolescents and young adults of Japan. Zielenziger seemed to be able to give temporary solace to the hikikomori with his very presence, and his writing is filled with real sympathy, but he didn’t have a magical solution for these individuals, any more than their counsellors and physicians.

Shutting Out the Sun began as a Western journalist following up a curious bit of Japanese sociology. As Zielenziger looked further, and sought root causes for the appearance of the hikikomori, he began to see very different patterns of social stress evident in the behaviour of young Japanese women. Yet another round of research let him see how more elderly men and women in Japan deal with current social realities. Considering these social behaviours separately, and then as a set, he began to see a common theme.

Japan’s tremendous leap in material prosperity, based upon a culture that emphasizes “fitting it” demands a psychological price from the individual. In the end, Shutting Out the Sun becomes a detective story about the nature of Japanese society … its unique and rapid adoption of industrialization in the late 19th century … and its new challenge to harmonize a prosperous nation with a culture that has placed little emphasis on individuation.

[...] in Japan, there is no God but the ‘ie,’[household] and no one to judge but the group. “Westerners have a long history of becoming individuals, and you have established how to create relations with others. But we don’t share that experience in Japan … I often think that our challenge now as Japanese is to come up with a new way to become individuals without relying on Christianity. [Hayao Kawai, President of Association of Japanese Clinical Psychology] p.70

Zielenziger summarizes the structure of his book in this way:

In this book, rather than focus primarily on politics or economics, my aim is to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within. First I examine the plight of the hikikomori, the young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society. After looking into their lives and those of their parents and caregivers, I explore the history and culture in which their tragic stories are embedded to approach some explanation for Japan’s contemporary social deadlock. Then I examine a cluster of behaviours that seem more familiar to Western readers: the fixation on consumerism and brand names in the search for identity; women’s painful lives and their reluctance to wed and have babies; and, finally, the high incidence of suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Then, I broaden the view to see how Japan stacks up against its closest neighbor and rival, South Korea. … Finally, I speculate on how Japan’s own survival strategy may come to resemble those of the hikikomori who negate themselves and their adulthood, and shut out the sun of vigorous self-affirmation and moral purpose. p.12

As mentioned above, Zielenziger’s curiosity was piqued by the hikikomori, and a substantial part of the book focuses on their shared attributes. As he talked to the hikikomori and their parents, it became clear that the government and the Japanese health care system were largely uninvolved in trying to explain or ameliorate their behaviour.

Unlike Americans, Japanese don’t naturally organize themselves into health-related pressure groups to draw attention to issues like this. (For years, Japan’s disabled quietly accepted their third-class status.) In contrast to the nation’s [page break] dense and intense economic networks, its social networks — its tentacles of charitable and civic organizations — are far less robust and efficacious. Only within the past half-decade, since 1998, has Japan enacted new rules permitting nonprofit organizations to incorporate without formal government approval, but contributions to nongovernmental organizations are still not tax deductible. p.44

Without a discrete civic response to the issue, and with general indifference on the part of the society as a whole, the phenomenon of the hikikomori has largely been ignored. What programs there are, at least seen in Zielenziger’s description, seem ad hoc and often assembled by volunteers or psychology professionals who would, themselves, be considered oddballs in Japanese society. Creating a safe physical environment, sparing use of antidepressants, and the establishment of undemanding group interaction show some evidence of success with hikikomori. The pattern of hikikomori behaviour doesn’t seem very amenable to purely pharmaceutical treatment, however, and the whole area of mental health therapy and clinical psychology is uniquely underdeveloped in Japan because of the dominance of the medical profession — Japanese doctors benefit financially when prescribing drugs. Ironically, it’s very difficult to get pharmaceuticals approved in Japan (introduction of the birth control pill and its variants was delayed for years) though the author notes that Viagra, and many antidepressants, were successfully “fast-tracked.” Without an easy pharmaceutical fix available for hikikomori behaviour, the broader society has many incentives to simply turn away.

Escape to Shopping – How Young Japanese Women Cope

Part way through the book, after considering the specifics of hikikomori experience, and introducing the reader to the features of Japanese society which make addressing the issue difficult or impossible, Zielenziger introduces us to the role of Louis Vuitton (and brand obsession, generally) in Japan.

He had a chance to attend the opening of a flagship Louis Vuitton store in Japan and speak with the management. The store was huge, even by comparison with the corporation’s French HQ. For Vuitton, and its managing director, it was a big financial risk but one that became possible after Japanese economic turndown in the 90s reduced local land prices. Vuitton has many smaller stores across Japan, and the prestige of a massive new store was meant to boost the sales and visibility of its entire chain. Young Japanese lined up for hours for the opportunity to buy limited-run handbags, other leather goods, and accessories. Despite the luxury prices, the enthusiastic clientele were by no means rich. They were largely lower and middle class Japanese — saving for long periods to afford specific items – and avidly reading magazines about upcoming products. Zielenziger interviewed some of the young shoppers and found an almost talismanic worship of Vuitton’s product line. He interprets such consumerism as a search for personal worth and authenticity. Not unusual per se in the modern world, but Zielenziger feels that the passion expressed in Japan for such products is beyond that normally seen in young people around the industrialized world. In Japan, it is a fundamental need to identify and authenticate through brand objects. In the rest of the world, Vuitton is admired but seen as only for the well-to-do. But the upper classes don’t line up around the block in the rest of the world to await a store opening.

Many of those fervent Vuitton shoppers are the so-called parasaito singles … a generation of young Japanese women foregoing marriage and children for a life with fewer burdens and restrictions. Living at home, without obligations to care for children or obey mothers-in-law, they are young women with both free time and money, a first in Japanese history. Able to gain independence of a kind, avoid the tremendous expense of Japanese accommodation and child education, and skip the psychological isolation of a home life without a spouse, these Japanese women have found a way to escape the system to better effect than the hikikomori. Nonetheless, the cost to Japanese society may be just as significant.

In Zielenziger’s account, the role of women in Japan is still rather grim by comparison with the West. Women are entirely responsible for child care but are deeply isolated once that child enters school. Infantilization of children, and a deep dependency of children on their mother continues until age 6. This creates unusually close mother-child connections but can also create dependency and control issues in later life. Women are also responsible for elder-care, of their parents and the husband’s.

A mother is held responsible for a child’s educational success. Despite government attempts to limit the hours Japanese children are at school, a whole new wave of “cram schools” keep kids at their desks memorizing facts from a very early age, well beyond the hours of public school. It is the mother’s task to manage the logistics and coercion of such an educational treadmill. Meanwhile, husbands may spend the majority of their time during the work week entirely absent from the home. And spend the weekends sleeping, to recuperate.

Because of the structure of the Japanese economy, single motherhood is a financial and social impossibility. Abortion is a common method of contraception and family planning. Relations between the sexes within marriage can be rather hollow. Intimacy of any kind must survive many countervailing forces. Facing an unappealing future as wife and mother, young women have simply opted not to marry, not to have children, and in many cases, to have relatively little to do with men.

The glass ceiling is still very much in effect for Japanese women at Japanese corporations though the situation is apparently somewhat better at foreign-owned companies. The joys of shopping, especially for brand goods that might cast reflected status and glory, has become a vital source of happiness in the absence of alternatives.

[...]as Yamada and I talked, he seemed to envy Europeans and Americans for being able to escape from the powerful grasp of materialism through some form of spiritual practice — whether through fundamentalist Christianity or twice-weekly yoga training, it didn’t really matter. This private, personal search helps energize the individual and infuse his existence with meaning. Japanese, however, seem to have no such recourse. “In order to fill the void:” between worldliness and true inner peace, Yamada said, “all [we Japanese] can do is read manga, take trips abroad, or go shopping. It’s awful. Shopping becomes an addiction, a tranquilizer.” p.157

Zielenziger introduces the term “homosocial society” to describe day-to-day reality for many Japanese women … and illustrates it with an image that contrasts dramatically with Western industrialized nations:

If you take a weekend stroll through Ebisu Garden Palace, or any of a dozen other modern Tokyo shopping centers, you will see what the anthropologists who label Japan’s society “homosocial” really mean. You will find shops and cafes filled with smartly dressed women, eating Italian panini, sorting through Fendi scarves, or lining up for a matinee performance at the movie theatre. But — unlike the scene in a typical American suburban shipping mall on a Saturday afternoon — you will see almost no men. Of the people visible, 90 percent will be women, with only a handful of couples. Rarer still would be a man and a woman strolling together with their child.

Where is Dad? He is either at home sleeping, recovering from a stressful week at work and the after-work “drinking meetings” that are inseparable from his duties; or at the golf course, playing with his bosses or entertaining clients. Statistical surveys show that “sleeping” consistently ranks as the most popular weekend pastime of Japanese men. According to family counselors, most Japanese fathers devote little attention to their children. p.187

To accommodate the increasing reluctance of Japanese women to get married and have kids, a small number of Filipino women have married Japanese men and raised families. The roles of the sexes continue however, and Zielenziger briefly recounts his conversations with Filipino women living in Japan who are very lonely and unhappy. Their Japanese in-laws are content with the situation. But they aren’t.

Affluent Japan needs to make social changes that better balance gender responsibilities, and place less emphasis on work for the sake of work. But that’s easier said than done.

Suicide and Alcohol

After considering the role of young women in Japanese society, and the abandonment of marriage and family by the “parasaito singles,” Zielenziger moves on, rather more briefly, to the sociology of depression, suicide, and alcoholism in Japan. Tales of Japanese sararimen being overworked to the point of death (karoshi), of train stations re-designed to stop men from leaping in front of the trains, and of vomit-strewn subway stations at midnight are familiar enough to those who’ve read about Japan during the last few decades.

Less commonly known, since the Japanese economic turmoil and stagnation of the 1990s, is the shift in suicide demographics. Suicide is primarily a male enterprise, but is now an adult rather than just adolescent preoccupation in Japan. In the face of reduced economic vistas, and a society that offers limited ways to be different and happy, suicide relieves the individual of the burden of social expectation. The potential loss of seniority or loss of a job places pressure on a Japanese individual that’s literally unbearable. The response of Japanese society to such events is largely “it can’t be helped.”

Long before a suicide occurs, depression has made an appearance. The struggle to cope with years of depression without appearing different to one’s neighbours and colleagues is common throughout the industrialized world. To do so in a Japanese context appears particularly daunting.

The role of alcohol in creating a safe social space for interaction between Japanese co-workers is also widely known. For some workers, the obligation to drink long into the night with colleagues, to never turn down a drink offered by a boss, creates a cycle of fatigue and depression that is overwhelming. As mentioned earlier, men often spend their weekends recuperating from long hours of work and drink during the work week. The pressure to work long hours and never take personal vacation time is only overcome by a recent national focus on statutory holidays … everyone must stop work, and therefore everyone can, without fear of losing their job.

Regrettably, individuals caught in the trap of work-related alcohol consumption face the twin dangers of physical disintegration and burgeoning alcoholism. In an attempt to create an environment of social ease and community, yet another burden has been placed on the individual.

Having inventoried the stress that men and women face in Japanese society, Zielenziger takes a closer look at the issue of trust, and whether Japan’s cohesive and productive society can really be described as high-trust.

Trust and the Individual’s Challenge in Society

Academic Robert D. Putnam has noted the distinction between northern and southern Italians which translates well into the Japanese setting. Zielenziger bridges the two:

In districts of southern Italy such as Umbria and Sicily, by contrast, social and cultural life remains relatively threadbare. Politics there is somebody else’s job to take care of. Laws are made to be broken. Fearing others’ lawlessness, citizens demand sterner discipline. “Trapped in these interlocking vicious circles, nearly everyone feels powerless, exploited, and unhappy,” Putnam has found. This lack of civic engagement made it harder for southern Italians to form guilds or mutual aid associations that might have led to wider prosperity.

Another political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, argues that “trust” — as contrasted to what he calls “familism”– generates wealth. Rich countries exhibit higher levels of social trust than poor ones, he thinks, and Japan’s prosperity results from “networks based on moral obligation … Something in the Japanese culture makes it very easy for one person to incur a reciprocal obligation over extended periods of time,” he writes, without [pagebreak] ever defining what this “something” might be. Because it is prosperous, he says, Japan must be a highly trusting society like the United States.” p.134-135

The Japanese networks I encountered each day — the keiretsu of bank and manufacturing groups, or the tribal-like zoku of special interests within political parties — do not bear out Fukuyama’s argument. … These networks — closed, confined, and exclusive, as they are based on pre-existing relationships — are not “trusting.” They do not readily accommodate outsiders. They tend to be impenetrable and controlling, not open and sharing. They husband and broker information instead of distributing it, and use their internally created confidences to gain advantage over members of rival groups. Organized into rigid vertical hierarchies, various branches within the same company or ministry often refuse to even share information with one another. For example, the Japanese once hired a French hydrologist’s firm to custom-build a water pollution control system, but would not share water samples that disclosed the precise nature of the pollutants the system should be designed to control. Even the contractor was an outsider, not part of the inside “network. p. 135

To Zielenziger, the co-operation of Japanese groups is different, in an important way, from the trust between individuals that might build a civic society of small-scale relationships.

Meanwhile, To The West

As part of his journalistic duties, Zielenziger was able to spend time in South Korea and talk to Korean scholars and health care providers to see if there was any parallel to the Japanese hikikomori in Korea. Apparently not. While occasional reclusive personalities are noted, nothing like the distinct pattern of retreat by young males exists. Some of this may well be due to the mandatory military service in Korea, beginning at 18, which provides both externalization and communal self-confidence to young Korean men.

Even more fascinating, Zielenziger gives us a brief historical summary of the role of Western Christian missionaries in Korea, beginning shortly after the opening of Japan in the late 1860s. Koreans were exposed early to a particularly American Protestant variant of medical care (hospitals for the poor) and public education (for women and the lower classes). Throughout the subsequent period of Japanese occupation, Korean Christians were seen as nationalists and modernists, and when Japan was defeated and the Korean War began, American Christian communities were major independent sources of food, clothing, and support for South Korea. These intellectual and material bonds sustained a Korean tradition of personal moral accountability. The process of shaking off the military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s was noticeably influenced by Christian Koreans and the deep-set idea of individual conscience. In the 90s, demands for reducing the influence of the chaebols (Korean business conglomerates) and increasing economic transparency were led yet again by political leaders well versed in the Western tradition of civil society.

Though Korea has struggled with more than its fair share of social turmoil (occupation, partition, military dictatorship, economic crisis), it has also defied the odds by creating a society that is increasingly responsive to citizen demands and global change, and increasingly prosperous. In fact, Korea is one of the few large nations that’s a relative economic success story in the 20th century – making its way from the “lowlands” of per capita GDP to the “foothills” (see chicagoboyz review of Lewis’ Power of Productivity). The Koreans actually improved their economic lot in comparison to the rest of the world in the last 50 years, unlike the Japanese, whose late 19th century economic boom had already set them apart from, and above, much of the world a century ago.

Like Japan, Korea has shown an ability to change its economic structure at a rapid pace. Unlike Japan, however, it also has made the shift to modernity in a way that lets its individuals create spheres of co-operation independent of government and broader society. The dynamism of Korean Presbyterian churches across western Canada, for example, is one of those cultural realities that brings Zielenziger’s comments literally close to home.

Looking to the Future

If the Korea has chosen, or been able to choose, a path which avoids the plight of the hikikomori and the parasaito and the saririmen, Japan will be tackling these particular social issues on its own. There will be no other national model against which to judge itself, or to mimic, or with which it can work out a Japanese variation of a well-trod path. They’ll be sorting these problems out themselves, without a playbook, and in quite unique circumstances.

Zielenziger:

Many things occur “only in Japan”: that is, in their daily lives Japanese do many things that Westerners — and even other Asians — find slightly unusual. Take the many Japanese men who, to while away their long commutes to work, paw through thick manga or comic books, full of sadomasochistic violence without a hint of self-consciousness. Or the way businessmen bow respectfully when they speak to some invisible other on their mobile phones. Or the fact that long beyond infancy, many five- and six-year old children continue to sleep in the same bed with their parents.

Indeed, this obsession with appearance, with finding the right costume to wear out in the world seemed a direct expression of the modern Japanese’s perilous quest to find identity. p. 151

The conclusion of Shutting Out the Sun focuses on the role of the United States in sustaining Japanese social isolation. The relationship has often been that of parent and child. From the forced opening of the American Black Ships in the 1860s to the devastation of the Second World War, to the artificially positive trading relationships of the post-War era, America has alternately disrupted and enabled the features of Japanese society.

In the last years of the twentieth century, an acid joke began circulating among Japan’s intelligentsia: how, after years of being hectored by foreign competitors, most notably the United States, over its mercantilist trade polices and insular structure, “Japan bashing” had evolved into “Japan passing” and then into “Japan nothing.” The joke insinuated that, while the attention of the Western world was turned elsewhere, especially toward China, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, Japan’s prestige and global influence continued to wither away (In Japanese, the rhyming of the words bashingu, pashingu, noshingu only enhances the humor.) To me it seemed telling that the Japanese themselves were now describing their own once-prideful and glorious nation as one that might choose to stifle itself in seclusion, rather than seek to commingle more closely with the other cultures and economies of a shrinking globe.”

To Zielenziger, Japanese society has made a trade-off at some level similar to the hikikomori – it is retreating from the world in many ways, yet deeply dependent upon it.

Relatively few Japanese permanently emigrate to foreign lands, and those who do abandon the mother islands choose to assimilate relatively rapidly into the culture of their new-found lands — far more than say, Taiwanese- or Korean-Americans, for instance, who closely monitor events back home long after they have moved far away, and who choose, despite the great distance, [page break] to take an active role in home-country politics. Japanese-Americans quickly adopt an American lifestyle and sever almost all ties to the motherland, as if they immediately sense that, once departed, they may never be able to go home again. In addition, Japanese possess no universal religion or ideology to which citizens in other nations might easily relate.

A nation that cannot define itself clearly cannot hope to act in its rational self-interest. In periods marked by rapid social change, traditional identities dissolve and new ones must be forged. Yet for decades Japan was able to avoid this struggle for identity by immersing itself compulsively in its drive to catch up to the West, to makes its country, as opposed to its people, wealthy, to acquire products and an advanced lifestyle, and to mimic the consumption patterns it witnessed in foreign lands; to build the suburban towns, golf courses, and strip malls that seemed to bespeak a sense of prosperity. When its economic miracle finally broke apart in the early 1990s, however, Japan found it could not settle the most fundamental questions regarding its own character. What should it hope to be? p.262

One could blame America for this continued isolation, for indulging an economic system that was evidently closed in its food, construction, and banking industries, with opaque traditions of corporate governance, and which provided a lop-sided export-driven prosperity that left its domestic interest groups unchallenged. Cold War convenience might be used as an excuse. Indifference, perhaps, as well. But Zielenziger is unconvinced.

To simply blame American intervention for Japanese modern disaffection and disengagement, however, is to let the Japanese themselves rather lightly off the hook. Murakami [controversial Japanese author] fails to acknowledge how the defects so deeply embedded within Japan’s own cultural fabric make its people unable to articulate for themselves a new vision and new goals — even spiritual ones — after their tradition-bound culture began to give way and the American occupation ended. For even at the most granular and personal levels, Japanese have been schooled to look outside themselves — at group and contextual norms, rather than at inner conscience — as a means to define moral purpose. Without really understanding themselves, of course, the Japanese cannot hope to understand others. Yet rather than recognize and work to counteract their innate loneliness, Japanese seem to relish their singular inwardness — or seem, at least, resigned to their solipsistic fate, unable to imagine a different future in which they might interact and share comfortably with outsiders. p.265

Summing Up

As befits a senior journalist paired with an excellent editor (the famed New Yorker, Nan Talese), Shutting out the Sun is smoothly written, well structured, and makes compelling use of interviews and anecdotes. This book tells a story through the exploration of the lives of ordinary Japanese, and the academics/professionals who are attempting to help them. I get the sense that Zielenziger was challenged by his publishing team to really build a “big picture” around the plaintive personal stories he gathered in Japan. He has succeeded in large part. The challenges of the hikikomori, the parasaito, and the emotionally distressed are placed within the broader context of Japanese society. It’s a disturbing picture, and one with significant geopolitical implications as the 21st century proceeds.

It’s even noteworthy that Zielenziger introduces his book by describing the mental health issues of the women in the Japanese Imperial Household (Empress Michiko, and more recently, Crown Princess Masako [formerly Masako Owada]). The struggles of two generations of accomplished and pampered Japanese women to cope with the emotional demands of Imperial tradition in a modern world is symbolic of the larger stresses being placed on the prosperous Japanese.

For anyone interested in Asian studies, especially university or college students, Shutting Out the Sun would make a fine gift or a book to purchase for an upcoming trip or vacation. Approachable for the general reader, it’s also suitable for senior high school students in need of an essay topic, or perhaps just an intellectual nudge from a relative. Each reader will make their own judgment about whether Japan should be feared, bashed, or ignored, in the future. You’ll never look at Japan, Inc. in quite the same way. As to the validity of Zielenziger’s arguments and conclusions, the Internet has so many resources for seeking commentary on his book that sceptical readers will be well-served. Naturally, like any well-marketed book, you can start at www.shuttingoutthesun.com.

Shutting also makes a great complement to social anthropologist Alan Macfarlane’s upcoming book on Japan called Japan Through the Looking Glass: Shaman to Shinto (mentioned by Lex in his recent blog post). Like Lex, I had the privilege of peeking at the manuscript and Dr. Macfarlane’s cultural and historical insights seem to correspond with Zielenziger’s man-on-the-street interviews and journalistic timeframe. Japan is different somehow. Very different.

As noted above, Shutting out the Sun can also be read in tandem with William Lewis’ The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability. Japan’s unique blend of free-market export economy and carefully-controlled domestic economy is profiled by Lewis and compared with other industrialized nations. While that economic profile has had a dramatic impact on Japanese national productivity, it can be more fully understood when seen in light of Zielenziger’s descriptions of the role of competition and individuality in Japanese society. As long as there was a road map to profit-making in the international realm, Japan could play the game with excellence. But to create a dynamic and changeable domestic economy required an internal dynamic, an internal assessment of goals and dreams. To a large extent, those have been missing.

The post-modern challenges of our own culture are profitably contrasted with those facing Japan. Shutting Out the Sun highlights these differences at a personal level. In the West, young people and adults have a set of emotional and intellectual tools to cope with rapid change. While those tools are far from perfect, they seem to stack up pretty well when compared with Japan’s halting efforts at forming a national identity in an era of unprecedented prosperity. Westerners, as individuals, fall prey to many ailments and many worries, but in most cases they can find a subculture that welcomes them. And the new technologies of telephony and the Internet, have made life bearable for many who thought themselves alone in society.

Yet again we bump up against a unique and rather offbeat angle on the Anglosphere Challenge, outlined in James Bennett’s book. Ultimately, a prosperous nation needs optimistic and ambitious people … and its young people should hit adulthood with expectations verging on the preposterous. Industriousness isn’t enough. Conforming isn’t enough. Forming social appetites from the bottom of society on up seems like a chaotic and wasteful process, but Japan’s quandary, outlined ably by Michael Zielenziger, appears to be a far more hazardous course in the long term.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: An Adjustment Disorder 1
1. “An Arrow Pointed Deep Inside of Me” [8]
2. Broken Apart from Others [22]
3. A Long Tunnel [40]
4. Personalities “Front” and “back” [59]
5. Three Japanese “Lunatics” [76]
6. Careening Off Course [93]
7. The Iron Triangle of the Psyche [121]
8. The Cult of the Brand [146]
9. Womb Strike [161]
10. Marriage in a Homosocial Society [178]
11. Falling off the Tightrope [193]
12. Rising Sun and Hermit Kingdom [219]
13. A Completely New Value System [237]
14. Hikikomori Nation and Sheltering Uncle [262]
15. “A Single Ray of Light” [288]