The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating book, but how much it interests you depends on how curious you are. Grann mentions in his introduction that all the ‘stories’ are true, but I thought it was a gimmick to add to the effect. (like say, The Bridges of Madison County) When I got to the third chapter, I actually got really curious and googled. He wasn’t bluffing.
The book begins with the death of a Sherlock Holmes (or rather Conan Doyle) expert, the mystery surrounding it, and the existence of a ‘curse’. The last chapter is about ‘Toto’ Constant, a Haitian warlord, who founded a death squad, terrorised a democratically elected president’s supporters, and when the chapter starts, is a real estate agent in the US! He was nicknamed ‘The Devil’. That is as far as the connections with the title will go.
The book is divided into three parts. The first is made up of mysteries, ranging from arson investigation to a grown man who masquerades as a child, to a Polish detective trying to figure out whether an author has written a post-modern novel based on a crime he himself committed. The second part is about ‘a strange enigma is man’ – people (and in one case, generations) who are devoted to a specific calling and just won’t quit. The last part is about the ‘wicked in the universe’ – organised prison gangs that are practically beyond the reach of law, a city in love with the Mob and yes, Toto.
This is actually a superb work of investigative journalism. It exposed me to people, lives and worlds that seem so out of the realms of possibility that it is difficult to believe that they exist. A thoroughly interesting read if you’re so inclined.
Quite a few of Arthur C. Brooks’ columns have resonated with me and also been thought-starters for some of my blog posts, so I was looking forward to ‘From Strength to Strength’. The premise is that in the first half of their lives, (most) people single-mindedly strive to be successful, often at the cost of health, relationships etc. But with age, many of the abilities that made them successful start to decline. They resent and resist this, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction. The book is about navigating the second half of one’s life when there are changes in mind and body, and the rules by which one worked and lived no longer seem to make sense. How does one get through this liminality, and thrive?
The book begins with one of his articles I had particularly liked – Your Professional Decline is Coming. I found this chapter very interesting thanks to the concepts that appear in it. For instance, “the principle of psychoprofessional gravitation”, the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige. Also, the two kinds of intelligence – fluid intelligence, defined as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, and crystallised intelligence, the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. The former is high in early adulthood, and starts to diminish in the thirties and forties. The latter starts growing from then on. Simplistically put, intelligence, and wisdom. The trick is to jump off from the first curve and on to the second in the later stages of life.
The book then moves on to how we objectify ourselves at work, and are addicted to the success it brings, making the jump to the second curve difficult. Many things are involved – pride, fear, social comparison, and a loss aversion that focuses on well, losing things like wealth, power, and fame one has amassed through hard work.
The rest of the book offers perspectives on how to get off the treadmill – mindfulness, finding friends and meaningful relationships, focusing on companionate love in marriage (rather than passionate love), facing one’s fear of death, distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic goals and focusing on the former, starting vanaprastha and understanding how to detach, finding a faith. I found this part not entirely different from things I have read in other books. I think I expected a bit more, but on hindsight, that’s an unfair expectation, since this is something one has to figure out independently, books and other people can only offer perspectives.
Having said that, ‘From Strength to Strength’ is a great start if you’re feeling the waves of midlife hit you. It provides context and perspectives to help you start framing the second half of life.
Notes Fear of death: “thanatophobia.”Whether paralyzing or mild, the fear of death has eight distinct dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death. and fear of premature death. Edsel problem: The famous car that Ford executives loved, but consumers hated. They sell what *they* like, instead of what the consumers wants and needs. (in the context of helping people at our convenience and in our way) “The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him.They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.” Leo Tolstoy
It is difficult to slot God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Meghan O’Gieblyn sets us off on a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection of faith, technology, and the human experience, and traverses many interesting paths to understand what makes us human, and our search for meaning. Descartes started us on the path to the Enlightenment by ‘separating’ the material world and our ‘soul. From then, we took pride in using scientific temperament and technology to systematically solve nature’s puzzles. And now, when the same toolkit has created machines whose learning and thinking models are increasingly ‘black boxes’, there is fear, uncertainty and probably a bit of ego.
Through chapters that are at once seamless and disparate, she navigates philosophy, technology, and theology and our different ways of understanding God, ourselves, and the world we are creating through technology. The metaphors of our time are built around technology, and AI and tech are raising questions that have for long been asked by philosophers – free will, immortality, the relationship between mind and body. Science by definition requires an objective perspective, and consciousness can only be felt, and measured inside. I can never know what it feels like to be another person. While there are many hypotheses, this is an area which science has been unable to really crack.
In ‘Pattern’ it is interesting to see the many parallels between the Bible and the belief systems of technologists, despite many of the latter being atheists. Transcendence through the Singularity and trans-humanism, just as through the Book of Revelation, the resurrection and rapture, for instance. I really liked Kurzweil’s idea of consciousness as a pattern of information that persists over time. Essentially like a stream that rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules of water change, but the stream remains the ‘same’. In a letter to the author, he shares a wonderful insight that “the difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in ‘God’ is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.” From (divine) clockmakers to computers.
In the chapter ‘Network’, the idea of emergence is discussed in the context of consciousness, and so is the work of many scientists to recreate that – experimenting with robots to see if they evolve complex behaviour from simple rules. It hasn’t really worked thus far, but I did wonder about the amount of time evolution took to ‘produce’ us.
In ‘Paradox’, there is mention of the parallels between quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism, and the idea of us being in a simulation, and/or a multiverse. It is interesting to note that all paths require a reasonable dose of faith! There is a very intriguing part that uses video games to illustrate how the first-person view makes it look like a world that is always complete as things appear when you move. But were they around when the player was not looking? Does the world “only render that which is being observed”?
‘Metonymy’ moves into materialism (science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanisms), dualism (mind-body), panpsychism (all things have a mind-like quality) and finally idealism (the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness). The mind serving as a microcosm of the world’s macroscopic consciousness reminded me of Aham Brahmasmi. Towards the end of this chapter, she quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote about scientists who believed that computers can do what a human brain cannot comprehend.
That paves the way for ‘Algorithm’, which begins with Chris Anderson’s 2008 view that data deluge has made our scientific method obsolete. It has now gotten to a state where we will accept the algorithm’s perspective probably more than our own mind’s! But as Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there is no reason for a super intelligence to share our values including benevolent concern for others. The algorithm does not necessarily worry about downstream consequences or collateral damage. And yet, even as algorithms are plagued by errors and the biases we have fed it, ‘dataism’, as Yuval Noah Harari states, is the new ideology. That if we have enough data, we can know everything, thereby increasing surveillance and tracking.
The end of this chapter has a chilling, and yet fascinating observation – “What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations — to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life — a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification. To forget this truth is to use our tools to thwart our own interests, to build machines in our image that do nothing but dehumanize us.” In ‘Virality’, the final chapter, she discusses how in the digital domain, quantitative measures of success like clicks and likes have overtaken the virtue or validity of the content. There is also the funny (and yet quite true) part of how, when we treat Trump as an algorithm which has mastered social media, it all makes sense!
God Human Animal Machine is intensely thought-provoking, and O’Gieblyn manages to balance curiosity and a healthy skepticism, distilling thoughts from various streams and thinkers, to provide a coherent narrative that fuels more thinking. For all of this, the book is also deeply personal and extremely accessible. Highly recommended.
Michael J. Sandel’s ‘The Tyranny of Merit‘, which questions what has become of ‘common good’, remains a favourite because it touched upon a topic that is not found commonly in public discourse. “What Money Can’t Buy” continues that approach, and is about the invasion of market economics into areas of life that were previously considered above it – education, government, our physical body, and family life, among others. The book is about whether there is a moral limit to the reach of markets. I was reminded of “When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things.”
The book starts with multiple examples of what I would call the overreach of markets – upgrading a prison cell, the right to shoot an endangered black rhino, stand in line in Capitol Hill in place of a lobbyist, get paid in primary school to read a book, pay life insurance premium on behalf of an elderly person you don’t know and collect the payout after their death, and so on. Sandel points out that it is not just greed, it is the expansion of the market into spheres of life we once thought were beyond it.
“Drifting from having a market economy to being a market society.” The former is a tool for organising productive activity, the latter is one in which social relations are made over in the image of the market. In the subsequent chapters, he provides a huge set of scenarios where this is playing out. Examples of jumping the queue using money – from fast tracks in airports and supermarkets to hiring people to stand in queues in Capitol Hill or exclusive events. A rare opposite is Springsteen’s concerts whose pricing reflects that he sees it more as a social event than a market good. The principles of ‘wait in line’ and ‘don’t jump the queue’ are relics.
Monetary incentives are being used for everything from sterilisation to good grades to losing weight to immigration, and refugees (paying another country to take your share) to pollution permits and carbon credits. An insightful point is the nuance between fines and fees. Fine carries moral weight, it points out that you’re doing something wrong, fees is a transaction. Sandel notes how economics tries to stay away from ethics and quotes Levitt and Dubner, “Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work.” But by getting into social aspects, this distinction starts to blur.
When money gets introduced into the social sphere, it starts crowding out morality – in China, you can hire someone to apologise on your behalf. But you needn’t go that far – cash vs a wedding gift, and the middle ground of a gift card is a good example to chew on. There is also the counter example of a town in Switzerland which agreed to be a waste site for nuclear material considering their civic duty, but promptly withdrew when each resident was offered monetary compensation. Another example is the Israeli day care, where introducing fines for parents who came late to pick up their kids increased the number of late arrivals, because it eroded the parents’ sense of responsibility by making it a transaction. Even life and death are not exempt. The good use case of insurance is transformed into what is called janitors insurance. Companies buy insurance on behalf of employees without their knowledge and cash in, creating a revenue source! Then there are viatical investments – say a person with a $100000 policy is told that he has a year to live. An investor buys that for half the price in cash, which the patient uses for treatment. The investor collects the insurance after the patient’s death! Thus people have an incentive for another person’s death! Insurance had been prohibited for centuries just to prevent this! But now, investors buy insurance of elderly people using the same tricks. It is a major industry. There are also sites that apparently allow bets on celebrities dying in a particular year.
Naming rights of public places in lieu of payment is another area of infringement. It has moved beyond stadia and sports to prisons and schools. In the latter, the corporate spin is allowed to varnish or even omit truth.
In all of this, two objections usually arise from those who oppose this- fairness and corruption. Fairness, because when money is introduced, those without it start losing access. Corruption, not in the way we normally use it, but how it degrades the original quality of the interaction. The Swiss and Israel examples point to that. Ironically economists see altruism as a valuable and rare good that depletes when used too much. And therein probably begins the warped worldview.
But as Sandel himself admits, this is a discussion on what we define as a good life, and whether that’s what we want to lead. Public discourse is increasingly becoming devoid of moral and spiritual substance and money continues its march. Call me a cynic, but I am struggling to see a way out. An excellent book to read, to at least remember how the world and humanity used to be.
In The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein’s book on how capitalism hijacked crisis to further its own unbridled growth agenda – she calls out Francis Fukuyama’s “History has ended. Capitalism and freedom go hand in hand” and essentially considered liberalism the endpoint of mankind’s ideological revolution. That book gave me a lot of (alternate) context on the general narrative of capitalism, and also shifted my view on Fukuyama because of his role in (probably) encouraging the Chicago School of thought that impacted the development of multiple countries across the globe.
That meant I picked up “Liberalism and Its Discontents” with some skepticism, but though Fukuyama defends liberalism, I felt that he has tried to dissociate himself from the extreme forms the ideology has taken, and attempted to see the criticism and shortcomings objectively. In that sense, probably redeemed himself in my eyes a bit. (not that he cares)
He begins by acknowledging the challenges facing liberal democracies, and then steps back to trace the historical and philosophical evolution of liberalism and how it came to be the go-to ideology after the Cold War, and begins his defence by reminding us of the significance of individual rights, rule of law, and market economies in creating and maintaining political and economic freedom. He also looks at liberalism’s internal frictions and contradictions. For instance, tension between individual rights and collective identities, and the excessive focus on individualism undermining social cohesion and communal solidarity. Individualism, which has resulted in the twin extremes of identity politics and populist nationalism.
Liberalism is attacked on many fronts since its basic tenets are all open to separate criticism, thereby questioning its essence. Collectively, these forces challenge the principles of liberal democracy by undermining institutional structures, eroding trust, and fostering polarisation in the general public. What has also compounded this is the the rise of social media, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence, and while these could be beneficial to liberal values theoretically, the current usage is mainly manipulation of information, erosion of privacy, and the potential for authoritarian control.
But what I felt was that his thinking is still largely Western, and thus does not really go deep into the nuanced challenges faced by other parts of the world, or the intersections of related issues – globalisation, economic inequality, and complicated cultural dynamics, which foment populist movements. And because of that, his dismantling of the alternatives seem less convincing, and look closer to the paraphrasing he attributed to Winston Churchill – liberalism is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
