loquacious

Book 20: Mutants

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
Armand Marie Leroi
2003
448 pp.
Rating: 4 of 5

I'm not quite sure how I got sidetracked onto these science-related books, but I'm really enjoying it. They actually interact with the religion books in an interesting way, but more on that later....

Anyway, Mutants is not a sensationalist/sideshow sort of book at all. It's really about genetics. I can sense your eyes glazing over already, but wait --  Mutants is a great read. Leroi does a great job of explaining a lot of interesting information about genetics by using it to explain a lot of common human mutations. Why do conjoined twins occur? Why is our skin the color it is (or isn't, if you're albino)? Why are some people incredibly tall and others short? There are a lot of very interesting biological processes behind these variations in human anatomy, and they all get explained here. For example. while we're fetuses, apparently there is some group of cells that have the job of starting as a bump on our torsos, then they build an appropriate appendage from wherever they are. If they are in the wrong starting place, voila, you've got an arm growing out of your back!  If they give out before they get the fingers done, you might be electrodactyl. Or if they keep working too long, you end up with 6 fingers (a pretty common human mutation, you don't see it much because doctors tend to cut off extra digits).

There's a great section on intersex/hermaphrodite genetic mutations as well. Some estimates put hermaphroditism at occurring somewhere (to some degree) in one in every 2000 people. That would put the intersex population of the US at somewhere around 150,000.  Our normal "XY or XX" understanding of male or femaleness is woefully inadequate, there are several variations on those two combinations available. I haven't seen much if anything written about how this might relate (or might not) to homosexuality or transgender issues - but that would be interesting to know.

It's also worth noting that we share much genetic information with other animals on the planet. 98% of our genes are the same as a chimps. 90% of our genetic material is identical to any other mammal's - from a whale to a mouse. 60% of our genes are identical to those of insects, for gods' sake.  This is where things start to get interesting to me. One experiment showed that if you snipped the genetic codes out of a fruit fly that make a fruit fly eye, and you put them in a mouse (in place of the mouse codes for mouse eyes), what happens is not a mouse with fly eyes, but a mouse with regular old mouse eyes. That is to say, most of our genetic material is actually - literally even! - interchangeable with other animals.  This really puts humanity in it's place, I'd say. Or at least I'd hope so.

Finally, understanding how these genetic and biological processes work is always astounding. It's pretty incredible that such complex (and simultaneously fragile and robust) evolved to make you or I. I'm not doubting that evolution is what created it, it's just interesting that it's one of those things that's bigger than the human mind can really consider well - I think both because it happens on  a scale so much larger than us (in terms of time) and simultaneously so much smaller than us (the physically microscopic). In a certain way, you do have to take it on faith that the systems exist and occur as we are told they do.

Book 19: Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo (1939)
243 pp.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Johnny Got His Gun. How did I not ever read this in high school? It’s the perfect teaching book. And weirdly timelessly eerie in its statement of the effects of war, of young life lost. Although written theoretically about WWI, it’s a kind of timeless book that could be about the physical and psychological impacts of war on any young person. It also got the author (who was also a screenwriter) blacklisted in the McCarthy era, so it’s worth reading for that alone.

What is interesting to me, and how this relates to other reading I’ve been doing lately (though I didn’t know it when I picked it up) is that (warning: spoiler coming!) the only character in the book is blast victim who is a quadruple amputee who has lost his ability to see, hear, smell and talk.  The book is really his interior monologue as he figures out how to live life in this new state – the moat frustrating part of which is that he can not communicate with anyone. Nor does anyone caring for him know whether he is conscious or not.

Similar to Mind Wide Open and Rattling the Cage, the book makes you think for a moment about what it means to be human and to be conscious.   Or rather, Johnny Got His Gun becomes interesting in light of having read these two other books because not for a moment do you wonder if the protagonist is human or conscious, even though he can not longer perform any function that one would associate with human-ness or consciousness, typically.

Book 18: Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life

Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life
Steven Johnson (2004)
216 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

Okay, every chapter of this book was great, but I’m a little pressed for time so I’m not going to blog about each one, which is too bad since each one had it’s own insight and interesting connection to one of my favorite questions: what does it mean to be human/to be conscious?

Again, I did not intentionally read this right after Rattling the Cage, but the two books go really well together. Right off the bat, Johnson starts to tackle the consciousness question. He goes into some detail to explain what it means to be conscious of self (stage 1) and conscious of others (stage 3 I think).  From why babies are so adept at recognizing the human face (we need to understand quickly that other consciousnesses exist), to our ability to easily distinguish between the facial expressions connoting 412 distinct emotional states, to the current best thinking about what ‘causes’ autism (failure to recognize other minds and their emotional states), to why people are ticklish (yes, it has to do with recognizing consciousness in others), this is a scientific whirlwind (yet very readable, thank god) of discovery about the brain.

I hate having to overly simplify every complex book I read, but here goes for this one: The idea that we are each one conscious person is apparently out of date. The various parts of our brain, while networked certainly, also remain quite autonomous (for various evolutionary reasons). This is why it’s pretty easy for humans to perceive things that aren’t actually there, or not perceive things that are there.  He goes over many common examples of how to quickly and easily show parts of the brain conflicting with each other (example – the Stroop Test. Quick, say out loud the color of the text of the word in quote here: “blue”).  In additional, he gives some pretty interesting information on the hormonal chemistry of the brain, and how biology and environment can permanently subtly alter the chemicals that might well determine important aspects of your or my personality.

Book 17: Rattling the Cage: toward legal rights for animals

Rattling the Cage: toward legal rights for animals
Daniel Wise (2000)
270 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

I’m not sure whether the whole vegetarian/animal rights thing should be a dot in the Connect The Dots network of ideas.  While I personally gravitate towards these ideas as illuminative of our sense of what it is to be human and act morally in the world, the truth is that I’m not so sure how easily I can connect this dot to the others (eg. globalization, masculinity, the rise of conservatism) that do seem to all go together much better. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I give up on this blog!

At any rate, this is an excellent book. I had a chance to meet Jane Goodall several years ago, who handed this book out to the group I was in. Took me this long to get around to reading it. Shame on me, because it’s an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book.  Although the book Is putatively about making the legal, scientific and moral arguments about why chimps and bonobos should be consider legal (non-human) persons (rather than property, their current status), the book to me was really about having to understand what it means to be human. Because to understand how close these animals are to us, it’s necessary to understand what make us, well, us (human beings).

What is usually understood to distinguish humans from other animals is consciousness. Most importantly, an awareness of self as conscious, as well as an awareness that others are conscious as well; as well as a tertiary awareness that those others are aware of your own consciousness. Just think about it, we wouldn’t get very far if we were only aware of our own consciousness (see Mind Wide Open).

After some drier legal chapters (skippable!), Wise gets into discussing the wide variety of conclusive research that shows that chimps (and bonobos, but I’ll just say ‘chimps’ from here) raised in supporting, language-rich human environments, have this ability (and in spades!). In fact, as you’d expect, the secondary level of awareness is also proven in cats, dogs, parrots, pigs, dolphins… the list goes on). What makes chimps somewhat different than these others, is that they can master a language – sign language. So they can also communicate to us. Dramatic evidence of their consciousness is given in the book, which seems to pretty conclusively show that these chimps reach at least the developmental stage of a human 3 year old.   

Only a few chimps have been raised in this supportive environment, but all chimps have this capacity. Unfortunately, most chimps are endangered – entirely from humans, who hunt them for food, who torture them in medical experiments, who jail them in zoos. You really can’t look at chimps the same after you read this book.

The irony, of course, is that many humans who lack the abilities of these chimps – say, humans in deep prolonged comas, the profoundly mentally retarded, and in many place, unborn humans – have many more rights than these chimps do.  Of course, I am not arguing for reduced rights for any humans. I'm saying it's time to take a cold hard look at how we are treating other conscious species.

Book 16: Jane and the Unpleasantness At Scargrave Manor

Jane and the Unpleasantness At Scargrave Manor
Stephanie Barron (1996)
352 pp.
Rating: 3 of 5

Er, would you believe this is the first in a series of period mystery novels with Jane Austen as the sleuth? Believe it!

Written in the style of Austen, the novel finds Jane a houseguest at Scargrave Manor, whence suddenly a murder most foul is discovered. Using her writerly ability to uncover interesting character traits (and flaws, of course) and always working within the accepted boundaries for what a young, unmarried woman of her time could do, she works to unravel the untimely death of her dearest friends’ servant.

The gender politics are of course interesting, but so are the class politics. I read a ton of British period mystery novels when I was a kid, but of course I never really thought much about the Upstairs/Downstairs thing. To this day, I’m sure I have a very class specific view of English history, where everyone is upper class and no one lives in a mud hut.

Book 15: On Globalization

On Globalization
George Soros (2002)
186 pp
Rating: 3 of 5

Not terribly different that a lot of the basic books on globalization, Soros’ book is interesting in that it was written by a business tycoon who made a lot of money off of globalization, but definitely sees the drawback and the unbalanced playing field that global capitalism has produced. He also has some of the few concrete suggestions I’ve seen about how the international finance and trade organizations could be fixed to make them work better, and to level the playing field.  He also issues a strong call for the US to live up to its foreign aid responsibilities.

Book 14: Untouchable

Untouchable
Mulk Raj Anand (1935)
157 pp.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Yes, it’s fiction! (after reading 788 pages of non-fiction, I needed it) Picked this book up at a friend’s garage sale. I have to say I was never quite sure who the “untouchables” of India were, though I had heard the phrase. This book pretty much lays it out: generations and generations of people condemned to servitude in the worst possible jobs (oriented around unclean situations) by Hinduism – and at the same time and for the same reasons, excluded by Hinduism (if I’ve got this wrong, someone please comment and I’ll amend).

The book is a coming of age story of a young untouchable – it’s one day in his life of his own aspirations and dreams meeting up against the hard reality of his place in the world.

This book really made me think about disparaged minority groups. The untouchables seem (at least per this author) to have internalized so completely their bottom-class status, that fighting it didn’t even enter their minds. I really had to reflect on how this might translate into my own community (LGBT). While it’s easy to accuse members of one’s own minority group as "self-hating” (especially when they seem completely disinterested in standing up for their own rights), this book was a great reminder about how easy it is to internalize one’s own place in the world – and if you forget, how quickly someone will remind you of it. And the psychological damage both of those actions have.

Book 13: The Prize

The Prize
Daniel Yergin (1991)
788 pp.
Rating: 5 out of 5

This is a brilliant history of oil and the oil industry (and really, much more interesting than that might make it sound!). Where it leads to, of course, is globalization. Where it starts from is American capitalistic imperialism. Oil seems like it might well have been one of the first truly multi-national businesses. It’s certainly at the core of several world and regional wars, and one might justifiably place a lot of current global tensions at its doorstep.

The book is extremely thorough. Perhaps a bit too much at the beginning for my taste, but it does all build up to a centry and a half overview. It certainly starts to get good around 1910 and the build up to WWI. In fact, Yegin does an amazing job detailing how oil figured prominently in WWi, WWII, then the cold war and the geopolitical struggle, especially in the Mideast, that occured after that. I certainly have a much much clearer idea of why the US (and other countries) have gone to war, made the 'friends' they have, snuggled up to dictators, and much much else. One of the major turning points was when both the US and Brittain made the choice to convert their Navies from coal to oil, knowing full well that their domestic production of oil was insufficient to meet their military needs. This set the stage for a prolonged military, diplomatic and/or economic relationship (aka as a stranglehold) on the Middle East.

Growing up in the late 70's, i never did understand what was behind the Iranian hostage 'crisis'. Now I do. In the 90's and more recently, I never could figure out why the US had/has such a close relationship with the Saudi Arabians. Now I do. Buying gas, I never did know who was behind all those different gas stations. No I do.

I think most remarkable, and perhaps most pertinent is the work this book does uncovering US private interests (private industry) and their role in collaborating with the US government, to accomplish geopolical aims. The US government and the oil industry have been in bed together a long long time. I know realize that G.W. Bush is just the logical extension of 150 years of history.

Globalization Dot: Reading List

Two years ago i was part of a great book group that read only books on Globalization for a year. Since Globalization is definitely one of the dots I'm trying to connect, I might was well start with the list of books we read on the topic (and a few I read before).

• World on Fire. Amy Chua
• Globalization and Its Discontents. Joseph Stiglitz
• The Future of Freedom. Fareed Zakaria
• Empire. Niall Ferguson
• The Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver [or you could read King Leopold's Ghost if you prefer non-fiction. Things Fall Apart would be another great fiction book to add to this list.]
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Thomas Friedman (dull, I'd skip it)
• Life and Debt (film)
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard.
• Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond
• Jihad vs. McWorld. Benjamin Barber

See also Memoirs of an Economic Hitman, which I read much more recently.

Of these, I think that Guns, Germs and Steel and Chua's World on Fire might be the books that impacted me the most.  I'll blog later about GG&S, but let it suffice to say that it provides an excellent overview about how we got to where we are today -- namely, a globe where certain peoples have managed to suck up all the resources and are thus disproportionately able to control the circulation of global capital. I really can't recommend it highly enough as a sort of baseline reading to coming to understand the current state of globalization (the other thing you should be sure to get in is a strong book on colonialism).

But for today's globalization environment, World On Fire is hands down the single best book at fairly quickly describing the current state of globalization on a number of different fronts: economic, political, and cultural. Almost all the other books we read covered one of these areas (or one sub-portion, or period, of these areas). What Chua does so effectively is to call attention to the intersection of the simultaneous rapid democratization and rapid expansion of capitalism/free markets that is the hallmark of current globalization. She looks closely at a number of countries where this is occuring, and tries to draw attention to where gloablization seems to be working, and where it does not. Her compelling thesis is that in countries where a minority sub-population group holds a decisive economic position over the majority ethnic population, mixing together rapid democratization and free markets is a recipe for social unrest (and economic failure). Her list of examples is convincing: Rwanda, Indonesia, West Africa. I'm not doing the book justice here, but I have to say that I still haven't seen someone bring together these threads in as compelling a way as Chua does.

If you find the economics part of all this intimidating, try watching the film Life and Debt. It lays out the way that western countries (through the IMF and World Bank) effectively and unfairly control the economies of smaller developing countires in ways that seek to create a permanent economic servitude (at the expense of educational, health and other social services).

Africa Reading List:
Some time previously, I set out to read up on Africa, a place I came to realize I knew little about, had never been taught about, and seldom read of in the news.  Reading up on Africa is pretty useful for understanding globalization.

• Things Fall Apart. Achebe.
• King Leopold's Ghost. Adam Hochschild. 1999.
• The Shadow of the Sun. Ryszard Kapusscinski. 2001.
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard. 1990.

I have never been to Africa (well, except for a day in Morocco, which I don't think counts). However, the above 4 books, when combined with a basic political history of the continent (pick any) and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel I think start to give a pretty interesting overview of the pre-colonial to post-colonial (globalization) period. Africa is not a culturally monolithical place at all, so these books definitely can't even start to describe such a diverse set of peoples, but they do add up to a meaningful start at understanding the West's, ahem, acquisition and subsequent deacquisition and continuing exploitation of the continent, and the mess that has been made of things.

Book 12: The 48 Laws of Power

The 48 Laws of Power
Peter Greene and Joost Elffers (1998)
Non-Fiction
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I have to admit that I impulse bought this in a used bookstore when I was desperate for a book to bring on a trip. While it's not exactly a page-burner, it is a treasure trove of Machiavellian activities of the truly ruthless.

It's of interest to me for several reasons:
1. It allows you to see which of these rules one tends to use one's self to safeguard or create power
2. It allows you to see how those you are subordinate to use power, or attempt to use power (on both a personal and/or societal level)

It's actually been a great reminder about the role of power in our lives to read a book that nakedly and forthrightly addresses power (and it's cousin, control). I hope I'm not being too cynical, but so much of life (everywhere?) seems to me to be about man's (human beings') search for control of their own existence.  Because we must live in society with other humans, controlling our own lives almost always seems to mean trying to keep others from controlling us - which many of us try to do by controlling others. It's a kind of endless game.

I guess the authors (whom I can't quite tell whether they wrote this sort of tongue-in-cheek or not) are suggesting that some humans are much more serious about this game than others. Certainly their compendium is more about those who are serious about consolidating power at any cost.  In that light, and given recent political events surrounding the Bush administration (leaks, false reports, mis-statements; policy directions such as use of torture, pre-emptive war doctrine, keeping out of international treaties; and the whole Delay/Abramoff scandal(s)), it's also interesting to read on a more 'public' power level. Perhaps it's just that I feel that the US public is being 'played' at the moment that this rings so true to me.

Anyway, here are a few of my 'favorite' laws:
4: Always say less than necessary
7: Get others to do the work for you, but make sure you get the credit
11: Learn to keep people dependent on you
13: Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim
17: Use absence to increase your respect and honor
20: Do not commit
27: Play on people's need to believe in something
31: Control the options / Offer false choices
33: Discover each man's weaknesses
37: Behave as if you are like everyone else
48: Assume formlessness

We probably know most of these, but it is impressive to see them all laid out together in one book of evil manipulation.  The authors provide lots of historical examples.

I think what I was struck by in sum is how many of these laws rest on manipulating instinctual human behavior. It's almost as if for so many of them, we are compelled to be perfect marks for those who would exploit us. We want to believe and trust in others. We will fill in a void where one is left (and we fill it in with our own meaning).  We think that something vague might be profound. It's just really exhausting to go around suspecting and mistrusting others! Who could keep that up? And so we are easily manipulated by those who have the energy to camoflague their real intentions, lie, mis-direct, play out a strategy, and live without real friends or love in their lives.