The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley

I liked the sound of this book when I read its synopsis on Amazon and so I bought it a month ago. Indeed, I agree with the author in most respects and many of his arguments, I feel, are correct - the world is getting "better" in most measurable ways and when people talk about the doom and gloom of coming decades, they're typically misguided.

However, I found the author insufferable and struggled to reach the end of his book.



In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley is writing from the perspective of the financial crisis. He obviously wrote this book as a reaction to the panic that was caused by that particular event. As such, he looks back through human history, nearly to the dawn of time, and then very laboriously describes how everything has just gotten better and better and better, and thus how it's inevitable that things will keep getting better.

He makes some good arguments, but he labors the point endlessly and sounds like an awful curmudgeon. He makes petty attacks on nameless people and seems out to set the world to rights based on his own trivial dislikes. He takes breaks from describing human history to attack proponents of organic farming, his son's teachers, and the like. He seems childish and condescending.

One of his central ideas is that economics - the market - is responsible for absolutely every single positive thing that ever happened. In fact, it's what caused humans to change from animals to people. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but he drives this point home throughout the book, even offering petty insults to the biologists and economists who refute him, yet remain nameless. At a certain point you just wish he would stop creating little parables to describe each stage in human development and how trade suddenly made everything great.

"Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution," he claims. Indeed. Perhaps he should've left it at that.

He argues that kindness comes from interdependence - ie capitalism. "There is a direct link between commerce and virtue," he says. ... "Where commerce thrives, creativity and compassion both flourish."

This is one of his better arguments, and I must say I agree with him wholly. He also asserts that people like to think of themselves as self-sufficient, but it has been humanity's mixing and mingling and trading that has lead to our rise as a species.

Unfortunately, throughout the book, as I've said, the author sounds like a horrible person and one gets the feeling, reading the book, that one's sitting in the corner of a room at a party being lectured by a terrible bore. It's not that he's wrong but he's just awful to listen to... Moreover, although I agree with him, his arguments do seem very cherry-picked, and his research seems to have the depth of a rather hollow Wikipedia page. Matt Ridley, it seems, is a man who never considered for a moment that he might not be correct about something. 

The Pornography Industry, by Shira Tarrant

Pornography is obviously an extremely controversial topic, and like so many controversial topics, the information you get depends largely on who you're talking to. As such, getting the truth can be surprisingly difficult. Speak to an anti-porn conservative or feminist and you'll get a plethora of statistics about its supposed dangers; speak to those inside the industry and you'll get a run-down of the benefits of porn alongside the unfair actions to target actors and directors.



Porn, then, is a tricky subject. Even simple questions like, "What is porn?" will elicit different responses from different people. Luckily, Shira Tarrant's new book addresses a wide array of questions in a disarmingly neutral fashion. Reading this book, from beginning to end I was stunned by just how balanced her discussion was. At no stage did she stray from the role of a moderator in a debate.

If that makes the book sound at all boring, it's not. It is relentlessly informing, yet well-written enough that it isn't just hundreds of pages of dry fact. It is a well-structured and meticulously researched compendium of otherwise surprisingly elusive details. She documents porn's history, its legal status, the ins and outs (pun intended) of day-to-day filming, the financial aspect, and its impact on society and health.

I read a lot of books these days about science and society, and I'm sick of reading biased opinions - even if the author shares my own viewpoint. That's why it was so refreshing to read Shira Tarrant's book and feel that every detail was open to criticism and interpretation. This should not be so surprising, but in today's environment, a book like this is a rare and valuable thing.

*

The Pornography Industry will be out on April 1st, 2016.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

Readers of this blog will know that I've been working my way through the works of Jon Ronson, pretty much going backwards from his most recent book, and now I have ended up with his most famous, 2004's now-classic The Men Who Stare at Goats.



Jon Ronson is a journalist who likes to document the weird, and he seems to come across as trustworthy enough that he can get close to the real weirdos in life. Yet this is probably his most bizarre book in a career of dealing with bizarre people. It is, as the title suggests, about men who believe they can kill goats by staring at them.

The story goes back to 1979, the US government established a team of commandos who would be tasked with developing super-human abilities like invisibility and psychic investigation. They would also be able to walk through walls and stare goats to death.

He traces the history of this movement through painstaking research. Most people would have given up, but Ronson followed the story to its weirdest extents, and details it in his own Gonzo fashion. He brings it right up into the present day (for 2004, at least) and the War on Terror.

This book is a modern classic - hilarious, informative, and unputdownable. 

The Man Who Cycled The World, by Mark Beaumont

Being back in Scotland for a week, I decided to read some paperback books that my family had on the shelves as a bit of a change of pace from my usual digital diet of reading material. First up was Mark Beaumont's The Man Who Cycled The World.



I was attracted to this book because one of my New Year resolutions is to start cycling again and I'd like to do some sort of long-distance trip one day. In fact, to be entirely honest, I'd love to cycle right the way around the world, as the author did. By coincidence, Beaumont is also a Scot like me.

The book is interesting for someone like me, with an interest in travel and mildly interested in bikes, and overall it's a pretty good read. However, the author also seems a little hard to relate to. He's obviously rather well-off and although people might say that about me, too, I nonetheless felt disengaged from his "struggle." For me, if you can raise almost $50,000 to cycle around the world, it's not really easy to comprehend your mindset. I'm the sort of person who hitch-hikes and backpacks and I wouldn't even know what to do if I had $50,000 in the bank.

Beaumont does travel cheap up to a point, like me, but he also meets up with masseuses and team members around the world and is always in the phone to his mum. It's not really the sort of rugged adventure that one might have hoped for.

As a writer, too, he is lacking. Not that it's awful, but with his position of privilege, his background, his somewhat arrogant nature, and then his unnatural storytelling method, it left me cold. 

The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

"Intelligence is no inoculation against bias." 

Perhaps to some, the above quote is blindingly obvious, but I suspect that most of us, myself included, like to think that with acquired knowledge comes freedom from all forms of ignorance - biases included. Alas, that's only true up until a point. Intelligent people are far from perfect, and we all have our own biases in life - some more damaging than others. 

I think that we all, more or less, over-estimate our own intelligence, too, and that probably contributes to our idea of intelligence as precluding us from the trap of bias. We assume that bias and ignorance go hand in hand because we see these in the people around us, and yet that's not very likely, is it? We're all biased in some way, regardless of intelligence. 

This a key theme of Will Storr's book, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, which I bought after reading a few Jon Ronson books and being promised by the algorithms at Amazon that Storr was popular among Ronson fans. And I was not disappointed. 

I admit that I bought the book because I like books about science and psychology. The title made me think that Storr would simply berate religious types throughout the book. So there's my bias: I'm an atheist, and whilst I believe in a live-and-let-live world, I enjoy reading books that tell me I'm right about the world, and then educate me with lots of stuff I didn't know, too. 

The book begins with Storr out in the Aussie outback, talking with a famous creationist. I was excited. This was the beginning of some creationist-bashing. I love evolution and books about the history of our world. 

Indeed, Storr is also an atheist and a man of science (well, an interest in science). He makes no secret of the fact that the creationist is undeniably wrong in his beliefs, and yet he makes another interesting point: the creationist is a highly intelligent man. 

In our modern social media world we like to engage in tribalism just like the days of yore. Liberals and conservatives, religious and non-religious alike, we are evolved but nonetheless ruled by our tribal mentality, and we forget sometimes that people on the other side - the "them" that Ronson wrote about, are often just as intelligent, if not more, than "we" are. Yes, they can be wrong and still smart. So can we. 

That should be obvious but it's not. Or at least it's something that we need to remind ourselves of. As the quote I began this article with observes, our adversaries aren't necessarily stupid because they're wrong, and we aren't necessarily right because we're smart. 

Storr goes on from the anti-evolutionist to speak with holocaust deniers, past life regressionists, homeopaths, Illuminati-believers, and other people who are absolutely, 100% wrong in their beliefs. He doesn't mock them, but instead explains through science how they came to be this way. How could intelligent people believe such unintelligent things? 

I've not read a horror book in a long time but this one gave me the chills. Reading it, I realized just how unreliable the human mind is. We cannot trust our memories, nor can we rely upon our perceptions. Our brains make stories to justify gut feelings. No matter how scientific we try to be, we are only human and we make mistakes. 

Storr also takes on skeptics and the defenders of science to show that it is not just the religious people who are wrong, or the ones with non-mainstream beliefs. The title, in fact, is a tad misleading in that regard. At the end of this book I felt I couldn't trust my own mind. I worried I'd start seeing ghosts because maybe they were real and I'd deluded myself, or maybe they wouldn't be real but my brain would see them anyway.... 

The conclusion to this fantastic book is that humans are natural story-tellers and we don't even realize that we're telling stories. Liars don't usually know that they're lying. The heretics don't mean to be wrong and they're not idiots; they're just flawed humans like all of us. We all think of ourselves as the hero of a story, but:

"Heretics are often betrayed by the spotless coherence of their plots. They tell the clearest tales with the most perfect separation of good guy and bad. It is why they should be trusted." 

Read this book. It will change you. 

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

A few weeks ago I read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Shamed and I was so impressed that I thought I’d read another of his books. For a year now one of my friends has been trying to get me to read The Psychopath Test and it certainly sounded interesting, so last week I downloaded it onto my Kindle and began reading.

Like the author, I wasn’t entirely sure what a psychopath was at the beginning of his adventure. Of course, I knew a few things. Psychopath is a bit of a buzzword. But I didn’t know, for example, that it’s used interchangeably with “sociopath,” or what exactly constituted either a psycho- or sociopath.

At the beginning of the book, Ronson is thrown into a bit of a mystery. It’s his style to engage with the subject of his research and to follow a story wherever it goes, putting himself thoroughly into the narrative. I quite enjoyed that in So You’ve Been Shamed. One of my literary heroes, after all, is Hunter S. Thompson, who was a one-man Gonzo genre.

Yet, for me, Ronson’s insertion of himself can be a little annoying at times. Whereas Thompson was larger than life and did it partially for comic reasons, Ronson is, like me, a fairly quiet and anxious person. Moreover, he seems to leave very little out of the book. At the end, in the acknowledgments, he thanks an editor for removing a few lines and I wondered if that’s all that was ever excised from the book. But it was an engaging read, nonetheless. Ronson’s story wandered hither and thither but it was always interesting, even if you were sometimes left wondering when you’d come back to the idea of psychopathy.

Like Ronson, learning about psychopathy made me wonder: Am I a psychopath? When he introduced the Bob Hare checklist that essentially determines whether or not a person is a psychopath, I found myself applying it to myself. Even after an expert in the book tells us that wondering whether or not you’re a psychopath is a sure sign that you aren’t, I still found myself wondering.

Oddly enough, I must admit, I kind of wanted to find myself out as a psychopath… One of the key notions of the book is that psychopaths walk among us, not necessarily hidden the shadows looking for someone to rape or kill, but in plain sight: they are often highly successful people. They are successful because they aren’t held back by guilt and empathy.

In the end, I had to admit to myself I just wasn’t psychopath material. I guess if I want to be successful I’ll have to go forth with guilt and empathy holding me back.

I was interested to learn, however, that I do know one genuine psychopath. I dated her for a year quite recently. I actually called her a “sociopath” at one point and thought of her as such on a few occasions, although I didn’t truly know the word’s meaning. She does, however, check most of the boxes on Hare’s checklist. Given that fewer than one in a hundred people are psychopaths, I found that frightening and yet amazing.

Despite my criticism of its rambling narrative, Ronson’s book is very readable. It doesn’t wander too far from the point, and is always fascinating. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to better understand the human mind. 

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

A few weeks ago I read Jon Ronson's recent book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. The title pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter: the book addresses the frightening phenomenon of public shaming in recent years.

I'd never read anything by Ronson before, although I have a friend here in China who highly recommended his work. When looking through Amazon for something to read a few weeks ago, I spotted this and the concept intrigued me.

I knew I wasn't the only one to have realized this perverse obsession with public shaming that has arisen since, as Ronson points out, around 2012. I'd noticed a few people commenting on it through social media. Bizarrely, or not, these same people tended to be guilty of that same crime.

Personally, my observations on it stemmed from growing tired of liberal outrage. Now I realize that conservative outrage is also a horrible thing, but I tend to tune out conservative rhetoric, whereas most of my friends are liberals, so it's harder to ignore. And, for some reason, I still read the Guardian.

It seems that we're addicted to being upset. It seems that we settle all disputes in the modern day by demonstrating who has been offended the most. It seems that we are no longer capable of rational discourse, forgiveness, or justice.

If those seem like vague complaints, then I am guilty. However, perhaps that's because I'm not tearing into each one as well as Mr Ronson does in his excellent new book. What impressed me the most is that he could easily have done a book-length version of what my friends would do - and simply state why it's wrong to publicly shame a person, by going through several examples and demonstrating just how vicious we have become as a culture.

Instead, Mr Ronson has taken the high ground. He has explored the issue from a personal standpoint, as well as objectively, and has looked back through history. He comes at it from all sides, offering a surprisingly mature and reserved view of the issue.

He begins with his own experience - publicly shaming some people who had wronged him, and acknowledging that in his life he had participated in shamings, including many that he simply could not remember. He moved on to a few high profile examples, but rather than jump into the story in defense of the person who was shamed - the shamee, as he calls them - or even take the other side, he is very cautious and balanced.

Throughout the book he even delves into the murky world of 4chan to talk to several trolls, attempting to find out what it was the made them trolls. He examines the history of theories and psychological ideas about crowds and groups, essentially debunking supposed truths.

In the end he largely concludes that we shame out of an attempt to do good. Isn't that, after all, the liberal way - to attempt to do good, but have our heads lodged so firmly up our own asses that we instead just cause untold damage?