Category: Non fiction

  • Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

    Ryan Holiday , Stephen Hanselman

    As almost every philosophy goes, it is a mindset and a way of life. Though we have tons of literature, perhaps the best lessons of Stoicism are offered in the way Stoics led their lives. And that’s what we get from the book – the time and lives of 26 Stoics – 25 men and 1 woman. 

    Named after the Stoa Poikile (painted porch) where Zeno and his disciples gathered for discussions, we follow the evolution of the philosophy and its practitioners across ancient history – Zeno (334 BC – 262 BC) to Marcus Aurelius (121 CE – 180 CE). While many of them were born in wealthy families, many others were commoners, and for Epictetus, a slave, freedom was not just a metaphor. His is the life I found most inspiring. 

    The core tenets of Stoicism – courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom – have remained changed, but how they have been interpreted and how much they have been adhered to is where one can draw lessons from. From being philosophers who wanted nothing to do with politics and bureaucracy, to a philosopher king, and from being persecuted by despots to being the persecutors of Christians, the contexts of Stoics changed, but there are lessons in each life. 

    The world has changed or remained unchanged depending on how we frame a context, but the Stoic’s focus is on self, and how to be a better person. In that sense, the philosophy has much to teach us, and help us navigate our lives.

    Having read Meditations and Letters from a Stoic earlier, I can see why this book is a bestseller – it delivers accessibility very well. And thus, it’s a great place to start if you want to get familiar with the philosophy and the people who shaped it. 

    Quotes

    ‘To have but not want, to enjoy without needing.’ 
    ‘We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought – without even the benefit of getting paid for it.’ 
    “If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious,”

    Epictetus said, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.

  • Behave : The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

    Robert M. Sapolsky

    I remember Don Draper’s words from Mad Men – “When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there.” Robert Sapolsky asks this to our behaviour, and tries to answer it using multiple disciplines of science. 

    At any given point in time, we are behaving in one way or another. What influences that? To understand that, he travels back in time. From the seconds before that behaviour, and the possible neurobiological explanation, to the genes we have inherited, to the early days of our non-human ancestors and the environment that shaped many of their behaviours. Hormones, environment, culture, and events from millennia ago, all offer but clues to understanding how we are today. 

    From a narrative point of view, you’re first thrown into the deep end of the pool. I found the first few chapters reasonably tough to get through, simply because between the names of neurotransmitters and hormones and their little quirks, I had to repeatedly go back and check if I had understood right (even if it’s a remote understanding!) It doesn’t help that there are footnotes on practically every page. I stopped reading them after a while. It also doesn’t help that each chapter is a rabbithole with multiple little sections.

    And finally, I know the author means well and is probably trying to keep the prose conversational, but repeated “see what I did there?” are also a bit painful. As an exception, I did find the part on genes interesting, especially how it doesn’t act in isolation and interacts with the environment. ‘Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities.’

    Having said all that, once we have gotten out of the body, and moved into environment, culture, decision-making etc, the text is a lot more accessible and at least to me, supremely interesting. Behaviour and what goes into it indeed becomes fascinating as we start to see the behaviour of other species and how similar we are in some aspects. It is also awe-inspiring to behold the species we have become. And much of it purely by chance. Also mind-bending how biology affects our tendency to violence, our sense of justice and many other things whose behind-the scenes we don’t really look at. 
    I think I’ll need at least one more read to assimilate everything in the book.

    But it is indeed fascinating to know that ‘we are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.’ ‘Our worst behaviours, once we condemn and punish are the products of our biology. The same applies to our best behaviours.’

    It’s not the easiest read, but if you persist, a lot of insights await you.

  • Uncharted

    Margaret Heffernan

    From the time imagination and projection became a part of our survival toolkit, our species has been finding more and more ways to be certain. But as the world becomes increasingly complex, certainty is more difficult to find. ‘We live in a world of irreducible uncertainty‘. So how does one think about the future, at not just the individual level, but at organisation, societal and civilisational levels? Margaret Heffernan moves through history, business narratives, science, and her own relationships to offer perspectives.

    The book is divided into three sections to take us through multiple concepts. The first section uses history to set the context for our ‘addiction to prediction’. We convert history into smooth flows of continuity and manifest destiny whereas events weren’t inevitable but a series of choices, complex and contingent. In addition to pointing out how even professional mathematicians find probability counterintuitive, she also shows how we quickly accept the propaganda of predictions and ‘leave ourselves open to those who profit by influencing our behaviour’. Even in our individual lives, everything from personality tests (MBTI) to genetic profiling is used to typecast despite humans being complex. The big danger is in confusing complex systems for a complicated process. The lessons in this section is that neither history nor genetics nor models can say with certainty how the future will unfold, and what we lose when we try to automate our way into efficiency is the system’s robustness. 

    The second section has a bunch of examples on how people, companies and societies have navigated the future. It brings out the importance of experiments, scenario planning, and creating a shared understanding. Scenarios ‘illuminate the contingencies, contradictions and trade-offs of the real world, where no one interest or single perspective is in control‘. At an individual level, there are some excellent examples of artists whose projects are defined by uncertainty. The Future Library was one I found very interesting – Katie Peterson has planted a thousand trees in a forest outside Oslo. Once a year, for a hundred years, authors will submit manuscripts commissioned for the book. It could be poems, stories, a novel, or even a sentence, but no one else can read it until a hundred years from now! This approach is in stark contrast to the ‘brand you’ concept of fixed positioning. At a broader level, there are examples of ‘cathedral projects’ like CERN, whose by-products have revolutionised multiple industries, and yes, given us the internet too! The Human Genome Project is another example. They are destined to last longer than a single human lifespan, and have to adapt to changing needs, tastes and technologies, relying on human imagination and the willingness to explore, to succeed. ‘They are voyages of discovery in uncharted territory.’ 

    The final section is all about the importance of being human, and coming full circle, how we can prepare ourselves better for the future. Using examples of individuals, companies like Nokia, and a civilisational crisis like AIDS, the author highlights how human relationships helps us solve problems which are uncertain even from a ‘where to begin’ perspective. Human ingenuity manages to create emergent solutions. The penultimate chapter is a fantastic presentation of death as a feature, not a bug, and treats it with dignity and respect. 

    This is a book that creates an excellent narrative for the times. While we extoll AI and its ability to make our lives better, the focus here is the human ability to ask better questions, share ideas, and find solutions. In our search for efficiency and metrics, we tend to forget the creativity and imagination prowess of the human mind that has brought us so far. There are no readymade solutions in the book to tackle an uncertain future, and that is the precise point it makes. It offers perspectives and possible approaches, and despite the tough and diverse subjects it deals in, is optimistic and very accessible.

  • The Great Game : On Secret Service in High Asia

    Peter Hopkirk

    I first came across “The Great Game” in Sherlock Holmes. Not the series, the book! The phrase is attributed to Captain Arthur Conolly (but made famous in the book Kim), and fittingly his last moments in 1842 in Bokhara, a classic Great Game location, is where Peter Hopkirk starts his narrative. The Great Game was the name given to the diplomatic and political confrontation between two empires – British and Russian – across Central and South Asia that happened through the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

    The British felt that the ultimate aim for all of Russia’s expansions in the Central Asian region was its crown jewel – India, and the Russians didn’t take kindly to any attempts made by the British to block these advances. While a lot of it seems like shadowboxing, it involved intrigues, treachery, and adventures featuring individuals on both sides, Sultans and Shahs and minor chieftains, and sepoys and Cossacks fighting for every inch and fort. 
    When it all began between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, over 2000 miles separated them, and by the time it ended in early 1900s it had come down to 20 miles. The book features the military personnel and politicians on both sides, many of whom made dangerous trips in the guise of traders and holy men into areas where no white man had been before, and in some cases, gave up their lives to seek information that would strengthen their respective empires. Across the 1800s, the British explored the many paths that Russia could use to conquer India, even as Russia increased its sphere of control across Central Asia. Beginning with France, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian empire, and then Tashkent, Samrkhand, Bukhara, Khiva and Afghanistan, and towards the final stages Tibet, China and Japan, this was Monopoly being played at global levels and possibly the longest and most intense geopolitical conflict the world saw before the Great War. Ironically enough, in that war, the former foes were allies. 

    In the context of the US leaving Afghanistan, this book, written in 1990 offers a fantastic lesson in history – not of the Soviets in the late 1980s, but the humiliating and tragic withdrawal of the British in the 1840s when they tried to displace Dost Mohammed with their favourite Shah Shuja. Peter Hopkirk tells history the way it should be told – a very accessible narrative, full of excellent details, and practically recreating entire episodes for the reader. If you like history, this is a must-read. If not, it’s still a treasure trove of excellent, old fashioned intrigue.

  • Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

    Niall Ferguson

    This, if I’m not mistaken, is Niall Ferguson’s fifteenth book, and it shows in the buffet of information and perspectives that the book offers. The title Doom : The Politics of Catastrophe does a good job of not forcing the book into any category. More on that towards the end. It allows Ferguson a free hand in bringing his breadth and depth of knowledge to a bunch of relatively disparate subjects – history, epidemiology, cliodynamics, network theory, economics, geopolitics – all viewed through the lenses of catastrophe and decision-making. 

    Across different chapters of the book, we are fed a rich assortment of disasters – from the eruption of Vesuvius (geological) to the World Wars (geopolitical) to the Spanish Flu and AIDS (medical) to Chernobyl, Challenger, and the Titanic (oh well, hubris) to the recent handling of the pandemic by various nations. It does a good job of showing what we can learn from history (and don’t!) Disaster (mis)management has its own categorisation too – failure to learn, failure of imagination, tendency to fight the last war/crisis, threat underestimation, procrastination. 

    As much as it enlightens, I think it is also meant to provoke – not just the low-hanging fruit like Trump supporters, but even climate change activists (calling Thunberg a “child saint of the twenty-first-century millennialist movement”) and those who support a lockdown as a necessary course of action (which Ferguson seems skeptical about). He is also clearly on the side of institutional incompetence as opposed to individual idiocy. 

    The broad scope of the book, not just on the temporal and geographical axes, but also on disciplines, sometimes made me dizzy. It doesn’t help that in the first few sections Ferguson is reeling out facts and figures like a “this day in history” AI gone rogue, and in one chapter tries to connect Black Swans, Gray Rhinos and Dragon Kings! What loses out in all this is the narrative arc, and patterns a reader could use to make sense of the direction of the book. (Guns, Germs & Steel or the two-part Political Order come to mind as positive examples) 

    I’d also say that the attempt by the publisher to link this to the pandemic was probably belated (after the author had written most of the book), too obvious, and doesn’t do the book any favours as it tries to weld COVID-19 to a general history of catastrophe. That is not to say the book isn’t worth reading. On the contrary, it does a great job of not just historical chronicling, but also uncovers precedents (Asian flu 1957-58, which is missing from most coverage of COVID, but was the closest on many counts), linkages without narrative fallacies, causes (active and latent), and in the end even categorises dystopian sci-fi – the “history of the future”!

    Doom The Politics of Catastrophe