At a time when Europe as a whole is
suffering from extreme heat, it seem appropriate to turn to an eminent
environmentalist, Richard Heinberg, whose Power
– limits and prospects for human survival (2021) I have been trying to
read. I was attracted by its opening pages which posed three crucial questions
-
· How has Homo sapiens, just one
species out of millions, become so
powerful as to bring the planet to the brink of climate chaos and a mass
extinction event?
· Why have we developed so many ways of oppressing and exploiting one
another?
· Is it possible to change our
relationship with power so as to avert
ecological catastrophe, while also dramatically reducing social inequality
and the likelihood of political-economic
collapse?
And the introduction continues -
There is a fundamental correlation between physical power and
social power. Social scientists sometimes tend to downplay this point. But
throughout history, dramatic increases in physical power, derived from new
technologies and from harnessing new energy sources, have often tended to lead
to a few people having more wealth than everybody else, or being able to tell
lots of other people what to do.
The “will to power,” about which German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche wrote, is real—but it isn’t everything. We humans have other
instincts that counteract our relentless pursuit of power. Efforts to limit
power are deeply rooted in nature’s cycles and balancing mechanisms, and have
been expressed in countless social movements over many centuries, including
movements to curb the power of rulers, to abolish slavery, and to grant women
political rights equal to those enjoyed by men.
But the claim in the opening pages
that “no book has systematically
examined the sundry forms of power and investigated how they are related”
took me aback since this book, unusually, contains no reading list to allow me
to check what particular study this environmentalist has undertaken –
particularly in the psychological and political fields. Regular readers will
know that I have various tests
to allow me to judge whether a book is worth reading – and this is one of them. The
most thorough
study of power is that in Michael Mann’s opus (extending to 3 volumes and
more than 1000 pages) and this does indeed get a (brief) mention – but the
index makes no mention of the classic work on the subject by Steven Lukes – Power,
a radical view (1986)
I have another reason for being
disappointed with my skim of the book - we are, these days, overwhelmed with
books. I do my best to keep up but I have taken recently to issuing appeals to
publishers and authors for some self-discipline.
Heinberg’s book is some 500 pages and starts with detail (about the origins of
life) which I did not find particularly interesting or relevant. At one level his
use of diagrams and sidebars suggests he understands the problems most readers
will have in wading through a 500 page book – but whatever happened to good old
self-discipline?
ANOTHER BOOK which disappointed was
Corruptible
– who gets power and how it changes us by Brian Klaas (2021) who presents
us with different possibilities -
·
power makes people worse — power
corrupts.
· it’s not that power corrupts, but
rather that worse people are drawn to power—power attracts the corruptible.
· the problem doesn’t lie with the
power holders or power seekers, it’s that we are attracted to bad leaders for
bad reasons, and so we tend to give them power.
· focusing on the individuals in
power is a mistake because it all depends on the system. Bad systems spit out
bad leaders. Create the right context and power can purify instead of
corrupting.
These hypotheses are potential explanations for two of the most
fundamental questions about human society: Who gets power and how does it
change us? This book provides answers.
Klaas seems to have travelled
the globe in his search of shady characters to illustrate his theme but, very
curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have
done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with
these questions. When I apply my test it’s to discover that the book lacks even a
short list of useful or recommended reading and his index ignores most of the
literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long
chalk, is Leaders
we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant which I was
delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive.
It makes you wonder – how
on earth can a writer even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he
demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant
literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index –
and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who,
arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with
his “Political
Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the
index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2
pages!
My advice therefore to readers is
to use the tests I’ve pointed to in this post – particularly
https://elizabethjpeterson.com/2020/12/how-to-never-read-another-boring-book/
https://every.to/superorganizers/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books-580014