on Gods, Robots and the rest of us Superfluous People

The next two books in my current reading list are bestsellers – by Yuval Harari

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” (2016) and ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018).

A dislike of marketing hype makes me suspicious of best-sellers such as his earlier Sapiens – a brief history of mankind (2014) but “she who must be obeyed” persuaded me to persevere - and I must confess that “Homo Deus” is very well written.. 

LRB had a very useful summary of it a few years ago

Once upon a time, we accepted three score years and ten as our divinely allotted lifespan; we reckoned there wasn’t much we could do to prevent or counter epidemic disease; we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have become the masters of our own fate – and ‘fate’ itself should be reconceived as an agenda for further research and intervention. That is what it means to refer to the world era in which we live as the Anthropocene: one biological species, Homo sapiens, has become a major agent in shaping the natural circumstances of its own existence. The gods once made sport of us; the future will ‘upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus’.

The review then usefully puts the book in context by looking at how histories have generally been written…

Providential history – invoking God’s plans for human affairs – had lost its academic authority in the 18th century, displaced in the 19th and early 20^th centuries by secular schemas: progressivist Whig interpretations of history; Auguste Comte’s law of three successive stages in human history (the ‘theological’ giving way to the ‘metaphysical’ and then to the ‘positive’ or ‘scientific’ stage); the narratives of the march of civilisation from myth to science offered by such anthropologists as E.B. Tylor, L.H. Morgan and J.G. Frazer; the determining force of class conflict in Marxism; the environmental ‘challenge and response’ theories of writers from Montesquieu and Malthus to Arnold Toynbee; the selection pressures identified by Social Darwinisms.

The title of Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is today commonly used as shorthand to warn against histories that presume inevitable progress, but the book was, fundamentally, a freewheeling condemnation of what Butterfield called ‘general history’ – any attempt to reduce change to the workings of a definable ‘historical process’.

It is different nowadays when science and technology – innovations emerging from the minds of a visionary technical elite – write the script. No social history ‘from below’ for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.’

The revolutions of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far less common, and Harari assures us that ‘medicine in 2050 will likely be able to deal with’ new bugs ‘more efficiently’ than it does today.

If we fail to cope with new strains of flu or with multiply resistant microbes, it won’t be because the threat is insurmountable or our science inadequate but because of a failure of political will or the proper mobilisation of resources. We can look forward with confidence to continued increases in human longevity: ‘In the 20th century we have almost doubled life expectancy from 40 to 70, so in the 21st century we should at least be able to double it again to 150.’….

Climate change, environmental collapse and the renewed threat of nuclear war do get a mention – on global warming, ‘we shall have to do better’; on ecological disaster, ‘we could lessen the danger by slowing the pace of progress and growth’; nuclear weapons have compelled the superpowers ‘to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts’ – but Harari focuses fears for the future not so much on species annihilation as on species transformation.

Here too science and technology drive the future. Homo sapiens may cease to be, not because Earth will become uninhabitable or because Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un will push the button, but because we will become new kinds of beings: our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices will be altered in fundamental ways…..

Harari here enthusiastically repeats the lessons taught by Victorian scientific materialism. Religious legend notwithstanding, we are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’; our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and there is nothing fixed in our ‘nature’. The only thing that can be predicted with certainty about human nature is that it will change. Harari’s prediction is that we will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as machines’ capacities become more god-like. Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science…..

The current version of Homo sapiens will become surplus to economic and military requirements. War will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: ‘Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless.’ Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which, Harari reminds us, is what biology and computer science tell us is all we really are anyway…..

We will no longer be able to sustain belief in the unique, free-acting, free-judging individual as the basis of liberal social order: ‘We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.’

The new religion will be called Dataism. The boundaries between animals, machines and social systems will dissolve: all these will come to be seen as algorithmic information-processing systems. The notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be superseded by the unchallenged virtue of the flow of information….

Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the ‘tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms’. Some of us will then be as gods: members of a new species, Homo deus, ‘a new elite of upgraded superhumans’ clever enough, and rich enough, to control for a time the knowledge that controls the rest of humankind, and to command the resources needed to transform themselves through intellectual tools and biologic prostheses. ‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ Keynes said. If some of the wilder ambitions of anti-ageing prophets are realised, the dictum will need to be reformulated: ‘In the long run, most of us will be dead.’…

I had read the first 50 pages of “Homo Deus” but, by this stage, I reckoned that this and a couple of other reviews had told me all I needed to know about the book. I was eager to see what his ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018) held for me….

From the realisation that it consist of a lot of op-eds and answers to his fan-club mail, I’m not holding my breath! A contrarian article and a "digested read" tend to confirm my prejudice.... 

Other Assessments of Harari

A recent profile of Harari in The New Yorker revealed that a team of eight people supports him in his various   speaking and writing endeavours. Doesn’t that risk “groupthink”???

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review from the David Runciman whose book my last post lavished praise on…..

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-big-history-of-the-future/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/15/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-review

https://quillette.com/2018/10/26/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-a-review/

Breakdown and Crises

No fewer than 6 very well-written books have been vying for my attention in recent days – all dealing with the sense of breakdown and crisis which is in the air.

Let me begin with the one I have managed to complete – not least because it's a very useful guide to the others

David Runciman is one of the few political scientists who writes both thoughtfully and extraordinarily well. His latest book - How Democracy Ends; (2018) – has me not only scribbling on every page but going to the internet to chase references. No less a reviewer than the political editor of The Observer has this to say of it -

Runciman’s flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing. The cogency, subtlety and style with which he teases out the paradoxes and perils faced by democracy makes this one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject. What he doesn’t offer is solutions, bluntly admitting “I do not have any”. There is penetrating diagnosis here, but no suggestion of a cure.

He considers the alternatives and rightly finds them wanting. The Chinese experiment with authoritarian capitalism may look seductive to those who think economic expansion is all that matters to a society, but can the repressive Beijing model survive the inevitable day when growth slows down?

Government by experts, “the rule of the knowers” or “the epistocracy”, was advocated by Plato and is still promoted by those who regard citizens as too stupid to be trusted with making decisions. The public wouldn’t wear that and “intellectuals” are just as prone to making terrible mistakes as the crowd.

Runciman seems attracted to the idea that technological advances could offer some form of “liberation”, but comes to the equivocal conclusion that this “includes all sorts of potential futures: some wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable”.

But it’s, appropriately, an historian whose very positive review puts the book in an historical context

The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy but they felt deeply ambivalent about it, regarding it as just one of the phases in the political cycle. It was not until the start of the 19th century that a democratic wave began to emerge again, in the Americas and briefly in southern Europe, and not until the second half of the 20th that representative democracy in the sense we have known it spread around the world.

In that relatively brief span of time, it was fought over by liberals and socialists, rejected – in its “bourgeois” form – by communists, and smothered by dictators who could rarely decide whether what they were doing was superseding or perfecting it.

After the second world war, parliamentary democracy got a new lease of life. When the cold war ended, the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to leave democracy as the only game in town. By the beginning of this century, most political scientists, especially but not only in the US, had come to believe that liberal democracy was the new normal, something to which the entire world should aspire.

The crushing of the Arab spring, and the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, could be written off as backsliding in polities whose democratic roots were shallow.

It was the 2016 US presidential elections that, in a single moment, changed an implausibly rosy (and complacent) outlook, replacing it with an equally implausible pessimism…..

Runciman uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different ways in which democracy might end –

- a coup;

- catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics;

- technological takeover; or

- improved systems

Historian Mazover’s review continues –

Runciman draws the contrast between the situation in Greece in 1967, when there was a very visible military coup with tanks on the streets of Athens, and 2015, the year of the referendum on whether to accept the European commission’s bailout deal, when some have argued the Greek government caved in the face of what amounted to a silent coup by its European partners. It becomes harder to say what is a real coup d’état and what is normal politics.

A second challenge is posed by the way we respond to the existential threats that surround us. In the past, Runciman argues, societies were galvanised by such threats: one need think only of the mass mobilisation that occurred around nuclear disarmament or the international response in the 1970s to rising pollution. World war itself created a sense of collective action; but the dwindling of mass conscription makes that unlikely in future. And today people seem paralysed when threatened with global warming or a nuclear accident: the prospect of catastrophe leads not to collective action but passivity.

Then there is the impact of the digital revolution, which is undermining democracy in numerous ways. We simply don’t sufficiently understand the impact of current forms of communication and information gathering. The problem with huge corporations such as Facebook is not their malevolence, nor the danger that they might rival states. They are run by people who are principally interested in profits not politics, and they are far less legitimate and more hierarchical than the political systems that govern us. But the modes of communication they encourage make a mockery of democracy for other reasons. They encourage instant gratification when democracy presupposes a capacity for frustration and patience. They encourage a pretence of authenticity, making politicians seem even more fake and contrived. The politicians who flourish are the ones who play along. Populism is the natural condition of democratic politics in the age of Twitter. The most successful democratic politicians are the ones who try to turn parties into social movements – the one thing Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron have in common. The trouble is that this can work for only so long.

The book is a wonderful read and contains much good sense. It is fond of the contrarian position, overfond perhaps. After all, behind the noise and fury of Twitter-era politics, real struggles of interests are still taking place. But what Runciman captures well is the sense of living in an age in which democracy is taken for granted and thus allowed to disintegrate from within. He goes further: it is not just that it is taken for granted, it is that the “battles are all won”. It is now the preferred political system of elderly populations muddling through, and this is hardly a recipe for restoring democracy’s lustre. If all that holds it in place is the sense that the alternatives are worse, then what happens when people no longer believe this to be the case?

The other books on which I hope to comment in future posts can all be accessed in full by clicking the link in the title -

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” Y Harari (2016)

- ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” Y Harari (2018)

- The Globotics Upheaval – globalisation, robotics and the future of work; Richard Baldwin (2019)

- ”Pax Technica – how the internet of things may set us free or lock us all up”; Philip Howard (2015)

-  ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018)

The photo is the great vegetable market I have access to in what used to be the oil city of Ploiesti, Romania

More Tips for better Writing

This should have been at the end of the last post - but few readers will go back to look for new material – let alone reach the end of what are already (I unreservedly accept) excessively long posts. Seventy years separate the first 2 books I have selected for this reading list - and this shows in the style of the first. 
But Robert Graves was the more brilliant word-merchant and that shows.

-      The Reader over your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1944) The link gives you the entire book which looks quite delightful – tracing first the development of the language and then offering 3 chapters on “the principles of clear statement”. The book is replete with examples (good and bad) culled from famous authors to which the principles are applied one by one. Quite merciless

-      The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st Century; Steven Pinker (2014)

Then 2 essays

-      Politics and the english language; George Orwell (1946) The classic must-read essay on the topic

-       Economical writing Donald McCloskey (1983) A strangely neglected masterpiece

A nice contemporary piece which gives examples of good and bad writing is https://lithub.com/francine-prose-its-harder-than-it-looks-to-write-clearly/ 

Brain pickings is a lovely bi-weekly website which contains such notable advice on writing as Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin’s thirteen doctrines, H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings. 

Finally, two more books

-      To Show and to Tell – the craft of literary non-fiction; Phillip Lapate (2013) A superb teacher and essayist shares his learning (google excerpts only)

-      The Act of Writing – a media theory approach; Daniel Chandler (1995) A dense book (completely accessible by clicking the title) which repays the effort of reading. I’ve only flicked it but it has lots of great quotes. Title of chapter 4 is “writing as thinking”

How to write well

So what? I hear you ask about the last post….. You obviously chose the names to fit your case. What I did in fact was first brainstorm names and then try to find some evidence in the relevant Wikipedia entry that suggested their “Outsider” status – whether in terms of nationality, academic discipline, ethnicity or gender… . It wasn’t difficult….

But I will accept that “good writing” is a rather subjective phrase.

I personally need prose to be taut – not overblown.

And prefer quotes from other authors to be worked naturally into the text – rather than forming forbidding bibliographies which clearly serve no other purpose than that of a glorified virility symbol.

I don’t need an author to prove to me that (s)he’s read the relevant literature – what I need is an indication that (s)he has the empathy to be able to select books for my further study that the author considers will help me. And authors can do that only if they are actually writing for me – not for one of their students or colleagues.

Steven Pinker is particularly good on this point

At this point, I can see that the focus of the post is shifting from the question of how to recognise good writing to the easier one of we all might learn to express our thoughts better in writing…..

I was particularly intrigued with the quote from Charles Handy about how his experience of doing the 2 minute 40 sec BBC spot “Thought for the Day” had taught him to hone his text down to the essential core….In that particular case to 450 words!

A year or so ago I stumbled on a useful format to help me present my thoughts more briefly and clearly – viz a table with questions such as what had sparked off the thoughts and what the basic message was which I wanted to leave with the reader.

I also found that this was a useful format and discipline when I wanted to make notes about a book which I had found interesting – not least because it leaves a great archive for me to access eg https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html and https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/10/how-myths-take-root-and-are-difficult.html

And the 1982 article on Economical writing I quoted recently shows the way by being divided into 28 sections - each of which is headed by a delightfully short and clear statement or injunction viz

The author (McCloskey)'s injunction	What I think (s)he Means
Writing is the economist’s craft	Most economists are so focused on the message that they forget they are engaged in communications – which implies a reader
Writing is thinking	Most writing is thinking aloud…trying to clarify one’s own confusions….to be ready for an audience, it needs to go through about a dozen drafts
Rules can help, but bad rules hurt	A lot of books have been written about how to improve one’s writing style – some of them downright silly
Be Thou clear	Clarity is not the same as precision – and requires a lot of experiment and effort. Indeed I would rephrase the adage as “Strive to be Clear”
The detailed rules are numerous	“most advice about writing is actually about rewriting”!
The rules are empirical	The next 2 adages confused me
Classical rhetoric guides even the economical writer	Give up
You too can be fluent	Contains some lovely advice about the process of composing and transposing one’s thoughts and words
You will need tools, tax deductible	On the importance of words
Keep your spirits up, forge ahead etc	We’ve got to get the words flowing on the paper….don’t be a perfectionist….it’s just a first draft…many more to go!
Speak to an audience of human beings	Probably the most important point….who is the paper for? Imagine a typical reader!
Avoid boilerplate	Don’t use clichés or chunks of text everyone knows
Control your tone	You can (and probably should) be conversational – but if you want to be taken seriously don’t joke around
Paragraphs should have points	Readers hate to see several pages of only text. Break it up when you sense you’re moving to a new point
Use tables and graphics – and make them readable	For me, crucial
Footnotes are nests for pedants	Love it!
Make your writing cohere	Very interesting section with points I had never come across before
Use your ear	A sentence consists of a subject, verb and object, We often overburden with qualifying clauses.
Avoid elegant variation	Clumsy way of saying we should not use a lot of adjectives or adverbs to say the same thing
Check and tighten; rearrange and fit	Priceless advice….we should be doing this all the time
Rhetorical questions?	Interesting question
Use verbs, active ones	Some good points made
Avoid words that bad writers use	Some very useful examples given
Be concrete	Great example of circumlocution
Be plain	Cut out the flowery language
Avoid cheap typotricks	Don’t use acronyms
Avoid this, that, these, those	Useful point
Above all, look at your words	Words so easily take over our thoughts. Be suspicious of the words that come initially to mind ….

Does being an outsider improve the quality of someone’s writing?

A rather rambling post a couple of weeks ago tried to explore the insights which can come from straddling worlds which are normally kept separate. This drew on material from 3 years earlier about Ways of Seeing and about Role Conflict.   

Indeed I now see there is a book whicih argues this - Rebel Ideas - the power of diverse thinking by Mathew Syad (2019)

I’m now shifting the focus to try to identify the qualities of a non-fiction book that make it “terrific” rather than merely “good”. I last tried that with Yanis Varoufakis whose books zing with zest….and only, I think, once before with detailed comments on a great book called Defending Politics

Perhaps this will allow me to add a further test to those I suggested in the famous post Why we need to ration non-fiction books.  

Like the good social scientist I am, I already have a hypothesis – namely that the feeling of being an outsider is a catalyst to identify and challenge “groupthink” and that writing is an effective way of exploring the multiple perspectives which subsequently open up…..

Clearly one can be a great writer without being (or feeling) an outsider - although I suspect that people who lack empathy won’t be great writers. But the weak point in my argument is the connection between creativity and writing. There’s no obvious reason why those with creative insights should be able to express them clearly in writing,,,,……

Or is there?    

I have already identified some of the people whose (non-fiction) writing I admire and the first column of the table below simply lists them – in the order in which they came to  mind. 

The second column is my own feeble attempt to label them….

The third will try to explain their “outsider” status which can relate to country, discipline, ethnicity or even gender…Significant that all but one are men? Adding Susan George, Polly Toynbee, Oriana Fallaci or Simone de Beauvoir at this stage is artificial….the point is that their names didn’t come to mind….

What do these great writers have in common?

Name	Status	Outsider in what sense?
Yanis Varoufakis	Globetrotting political economist	Spent first 20 or so years in Greece; European perspective
Theodor Zeldin	Writer, maverick Oxford academic	Came to UK as a child (Russian parents); strong French connection
Arthur Koestler	Central European journalist who made UK his home	Was a communist in Germany. Jailed in Franco Spain. Strong interest in science
JK Galbraith	Prolific Canadian/American economist and writer	23 when he left Canada – American civil servant handling rationing; Ambassador to India for JFK; attracted envy from academic colleagues
Robert Heilbronner	US economic historian	author of the famous “The Worldly Philosophers”; very much a generalist;
Charles Handy	Irish management writer and guru	changed his career every decade
Ralf Dahrendorf	German academic and politician; EC Commissioner, Director of LSE; and Lord	Straddled German and British academic and political worlds - for 25 years apiece
Richard Rose	Policy analyst, writer	had been a young journalist, Came to UK when 27
Roger Scruton	Maverick academic,	Often complained that his traditional brand of conservatism marginalised him
David Graeber	Anthropologist, activist, anarchist	Author of “Bullshit Jobs” Failed to have his academic position renewed by Harvard. Anthropology, almost by definition, means being an outsider
Jan Morris	Journalist	Change of sex certainly gives one a new perspective! And (s)he’s half English and half-Welsh – with this article explicitly referring to her felt “outsider”status
Jonathan Meade	Journalist and film maker – culture and buildings	His autobiography “An Encyclopaedia of Myself” makes it fairly clear he felt he was an outsider
Michael Pollan	Academic (Prof of Journalism), writer	He graduated in English; Generalist; jewish Author of “Cooked”, “In Defence of Food” etc
Alain de Botton	Pop philosopher	Early years in Switzerland
David Runciman	British political scientist; writer	Author of “How Democracy Ends” Son of a famous father, his case simply doesn’t fit!
Ha-Joon Chang	Development Economist	Graduated from South Korea; came to Cambridge for further studies and remained, Author of “23 things they don’t tell uoi about capitalism”
Yuval Harari	Israeli historian	Graduated Israel and now writes bestsellers like “Homo Sapiens”
Rutger Bregman	Dutch historian/journalist	Author of “Utopia for Realists”