Category: Book Reviews

My reviews of books I have read (or listened to on audiobooks).

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Big curiosity

I was a better diplomat in Portuguese than in English because I had to listen harder and was a little more reluctant to talk. This is hard for a compulsive talker like me. And I did my very best work when I was really interested in learning about what others had to tell me and let them tell me.

That is why this book made so much sense to me. It imparts simple advice – a version of trying first to understand before trying to communicate – and like most simple advice it is easy to think you do it already, but when you think harder you see you don’t. I would especially recommend this book to two groups: junior officers just starting their careers and old guys like me on the way out. Both are in phase transitions and in special need of broad wisdom from others.

We never can know for sure what will come from any of these “curiosity encounters.” It is an exploration. I am making changes already next week. When I came to Smithsonian last year, I immediately & proactively started to meet people and try to learn as much as I could about … everything. When I looked at my more recent calendars, I noticed that there is much less. Fatigue? Actually, I just got lazy. It is easy to make the excuse that you know enough or meeting any particular person will not add much. You can probably argue that any missing any particular encounter is not big deal. But it is a big deal in total. Next week I am back to a more active meeting schedule.

I read an inspiring quote from William Mulholland, in a book I read last week and also talked about on Facebook. He said about the Los Angeles aqueduct project that it was …”a big one. But it is a simple one. The man who has made one brick can make two bricks. That is the bigness of this engineering project. It is big, but it is simply big.” This applies to many things besides engineering projects.

Reference – http://www.amazon.com/Curious-Mind-Secret-Bigger-Life/dp/147673075X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428843443&sr=1-1&keywords=the+curious+mind

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Water: the big thirst in California

I watched Governor Jerry Brown on “This Week” this morning. He said some sensible things about water in California. One of the questions he answered referred to water to farmers. It was the usual comparison saying that agriculture uses too much water in comparison to it contribution to GDP. This misses a fundamental point about water. Actually, several fundamental points but let me address one.

Water is essentially a raw material for agriculture in a way it is not for other industries. Making a comparison in use is like complaining that the local McDonald’s uses beef than the gas station next door and then demanding both cut their beef consumption.
None of this is meant to imply that agriculture should waste less water. Since so much is being used in general, even small % of savings will make a big difference. But as governor Brown pointed out, irrigating a farm field is not the same as watering your lawn.

I read a really good book on water called “The Big Thirst.” I have reference it below. It is good for us laymen to understand the issue better. http://www.thebigthirst.com/the-book/

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Do I contradict myself?

I recently wrote a post that included criticism of how AP classes study American history. I have been thinking about that since and noticed the persistent negativity. America became great by Americans doing great things. Every great thing, however, no matter the magnitude of benefit, will also create problems. The greater the total affected, the greater will be the total of negative effects, like a larger circle of light touches a larger area of darkness. We should certainly consider the negatives, but need to balance.
I was especially thinking about this as I am about halfway through “Water to the Angels,” a biography of William Mulholland and his bringing water to Los Angeles. I knew there was a lot of controversy about this water project, so I did a little general background research. Among the things I found was a PBS series and a lesson plan. The segment concerning this was called. “Water Use: Tragedy in the Owens River Valley.” That is kind of a loaded title, don’t you think? And it is a good example of the negativity I am talking about.
Most of the landowners in the Owen Valley lost water rights. This loss, BTW, was more potential than real. It could be called a tragedy, I suppose. But in compensation, the Los Angeles and the valleys around it got water they needed to grow. The Owens Valley was, and still is, remote. When the water project was built, there were only around 4000 people living there. It would not have supported many more. Most were able to sell the land or water rights for more than the market value. Although this was less than they would have/could have demanded had they known the magnitude of what was about to happen, but it is hardly a tragedy. In fact, IMO, it would have been a little unfair for them make all the money on the work others were contemplating.
Some people love to hate Southern California, but everyone has to admit that it is a miracle of engineering. The possibilities created by William Mulholland were truly remarkable. There were costs. There remains an alkaline dust problem in the Owens Valley. But if you compare that to all the innovation, industry and wealth created in Southern California over the past century, it is like holding a candle to the sun. If the water had not been “stolen,” growth in Los Angeles region would have essentially stopped. Of course, we could have irrigated land in the Owens Valley and produced more alfalfa.
Were I writing the lesson plan, I would title it something like, “The Miracle of Southern California” and put it in context of other projects, such as the one in New York about the same time that was supplying water to NYC, or later big projects such as Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee. W/o the energy and materials produced as a result of these projects, our country may not have prevailed in World War II. That would have been a tragedy of worldwide proportions.
Challenges overcome and costs paid say a lot about great people doing great things. We should taste both the sweet and the bitter but can choose which to emphasize. Lots of things are true at the same time.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman
Reference http://www.amazon.com/Water-Angels-Mulholland-Monumental-Aqueduct/dp/0062251422
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Pedestrian São Paulo

I walked from the Renaissance Hotel to the Fulbright venue.   It was a little more than three miles, which is a fair distance but not too far if you are doing it in the morning before it gets too hot and when it is not raining.  Like all big cities, São Paulo is really a patchwork of smaller ones.  Some are unattractive and dangerous, but the area around the original center, Jardims where the hotel is located, is green and pleasant.   This part is pedestrian friendly.  Well, maybe robust pedestrian friendly.  There are lots of obstacles on the sidewalks, sometimes missing pavement or steep steps.  You get used to the constant traffic that flows by as you walk.  The sounds merge into a kind of constant rush and it gets to be like walking on the banks of a river.  I prefer to walk whenever I practical.   It makes the journey more like an adventure.   If you sit in a taxi, you notice only the starts and stops of the traffic.  I can only imagine how stressful it must be to drive.   I have never driven in São Paulo and hope never to have that dubious pleasure.

I usually listen to my I-pod when I walk.  I have finished lots of audio-books that way and I like the Great Courses series.  These are perfect for walking, since they consist of lectures 30-45 minutes long, a good span for a walk or commute.  This time I was listening to a one about “Heroes of Literature.” There were no profound new insights, but I thought a little.    The lecture “hero” was Winston Smith from “1984.”  He is not much of a hero in the sense that he is frightened all the time, ends up betraying his ideals and in the end is just hopeless.  Maybe the better term would be protagonist, but the author says he is a hero because he wants to seek and know the truth.  Even if he ends badly, it is a tribute to the human spirit.

“1984” was and remains a depressing book.  We don’t think as much about it since communism collapsed, but maybe we should.  Tyranny did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  North Korea must be about as oppressive as the Orwellian world.  The key about “1984” is that they control not only behavior but thought.

The author mentions a part of the book where the authorities are raising hate against one of the State’s enemies.   In the middle of the oration, word comes that the State has made a treaty with the former enemy and now a former ally is the enemy.   W/o stopping to think, the people just change the object of their hate.  This is called “Doublethink” by the state.   Essentially it means that you believe what the state says w/o thinking about the contradictions.

If this seems unbelievable, the author says that Orwell had witnessed it in real life.   British communists opposed the Nazis until Hitler made a deal with Stalin.  After that, they stopped opposing Hitler even though “their” country was at war with him.  When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, they quickly again became enemies of Hitler.  Orwell was evidently surprised at how people who otherwise seemed intelligent could just ignore their own memories and experience. 

Anyway, nice walk in a nice day in São Paulo listening to an interesting lecture about a book that I don’t think I actually ever read.   I know all about it and I bet I could pass a test on it, but I cannot actually recall reading it.  I think that is true of many “classics.”  They become classics precisely because everybody can refer to them and is influenced by them, even those w/o personal experience.  Maybe that is Orwellian.   I do recall reading “Animal Farm” and a short story about shooting an Elephant, so I have read some of Orwell’s stuff.  

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Green Infrastructure

Jake and Mark Srnec

Nature provides lots of valuable services. Unfortunately, it is often hard to value them and even harder to figure out how to pay for them. Most of us have come to believe that things like water & air are free and/or belong to nobody. That attitude is what gets us in trouble. Things that are free or belong to nobody get wasted and ruined everybody. We need to think more systemically. I just finished reading a good book called “Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature” by Mark Tercek, head of the Nature Conservancy. I suggest you read the whole book, but I will expand on some of the ideas here.

The quote I liked is “Nature is not just something to preserve in a few places and degrade in others. Nature is everywhere. Yet nature is also not just a source of tangible benefits to people. It has a deeper meaning to people around the world.”

The main idea is that we can and should work with nature. Nature provides fantastic infrastructure, which the author calls “Green Infrastructure”. I will go into examples below, but first let me quote the other passage I found useful and true. “Contrary to popular opinion, companies can be better at making long-term plans for those resources than governments, which often get hamstrung by political divides and short term thinking driven by the next election cycle.” That is not to diminish the indispensable role of government, but often the point of leverage is working with businesses. I found this true when I worked in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Governments talked and promised, but you could get things done faster in private spheres. Where private business was weak, as in communist countries, the environment was in the most miserable condition. He gave an example of Coca-Cola working to preserve water resources.

But the example I liked best, one I heard before, was New York City’s green infrastructure. New York has some of the best quality tap water in the world. They began planning for its water needs way back in 1837. The system depends on forested watersheds in the Catskill Mountains. Most of this land is in private hands. Instead of building more treatment plants (i.e. gray not green infrastructure) NYC worked with landowners upstream, providing them advice on stream and water protection and sometimes money to help them do the right things. As a result, almost everybody is happier. Money has been pumped into rural communities that allow them to maintain a way of life they want that also provides clean water to NYC at a price lower than it would have otherwise to pay. And it is good for the environment. Smart all around.

Another example of great green infrastructure is restored oyster reefs. Restoring reefs was one of the good uses of Federal Stimulus Money and the RESTORE Act. It costs about $1 million a mile to restore oyster reef, about the same as the cost of a seawall. But an oyster reef is better. A seawall is as good as it gets on the day it is finished, then it starts of deteriorate and needs maintenance. An oyster reef improves with time; it is self-maintaining. And all the time it exists it filters the water, provide habitat for aquatic life and even sequesters carbon and potentially provides food for people. If there is a choice, why would anybody go with a concrete seawall?

I have been interested in the environment for as long as I can recall. I studied ecology back in the 1970s. Much of what I learned then has been overtaken by new knowledge. There really is no such thing as a climax forest, for example. I also imbibed the error that humans are separate from nature and that as one gains the other loses. Experience since then has demonstrated that both nature and humans can benefit at the same time from smart activities based on understanding relationships. I have also concluded that humans MUST manage nature. It is too late to try to keep hands off. As the head of TNC says above, nature is not just something to preserve in a few places and degrade in others. I wrote a couple years ago something I think is a good close here too.

Human interaction does not always profane nature; the interaction done right can ennoble both. Conservation is a higher order activity compared with mere preservation, which is an abdication of responsibility in the guise of wisdom. Conservation demands that you apply intelligence and ecological factors to sustaining a system that works for man and beast. We humans live in this world. If/when there is a world w/o us, it really doesn’t matter anymore. As long as we are here, however, it is our job to do things right. .

The picture is me in the 1970s. My sister just sent me a bunch of pictures she scanned. I had to post it to show people who know me that I once had hair. Notice the long hair, confident smile and kick-ass boots. Back when I knew everything it was easier to make judgments.

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A world undone

World War I may be the biggest tragedy in history. It destroyed a promising civilization and led to the evils of communism and Nazism. “A World Undone” is the best book I have read about this tragedy. The title is apt. A world was indeed undone. Meyer describes that world and how its faults AND its strengths led to the tragedy. For example, virtues such as courage, perseverance and planning many times made things worse.Author G.J. Meyer describes the privations on the home fronts. The situation in Germany is especially interesting, as we get little of that in most of the histories I have read.

I found most interesting descriptions of interactions among leaders, military and civilian. There was plenty of incompetence and short sightedness, but there were also rational and well-thought out plans that just didn’t work, perhaps because both sides were similarly matched and both sides were thinking of moves and counter moves. Meyer does a good job of talking about all sides. This is a useful antidote to one-sided accounts we often get. When I say “one-sided” I am not talking about only or even mostly patriotic accounts. Rather, it is a big mistake, often repeated, to treat the other side as an object on which we apply our best efforts. Enemies adapt. We learn from each other. It is easy to say “If we did…” This is naive and not pernicious. We and our adversaries share a system in which our common actions invariably produce results neither side could have foreseen.

Viewing all human interactions systemically is a good idea. War, especially a protracted and terrible war like World War I, brings this our in sharper detail, but the complexity and unpredictable nature of human interaction is true always and everywhere. It should be one of the lessons of history and it is what makes reading books like “A World Undone” more than an academic exercise.

Others have written if there is one book you read … I don’t think it is ever a good idea to read just one book about anything, but this one would be a good start. I have thought long about the question of whether historian create history or just report it. It is clear that some creation is going on, as authors must make sense of events and put them in a context that is the creation of the historian and his/her culture. A book like this is possible only in the post-Cold War environment, where we can better see the complexity of multiple relationships.

America has ordered the world as long as most of us have been alive. We have trouble understanding the world of 1914, when was no dominant power. Our world might be becoming more like that of 1914. I hope we do better this time.

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7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I read the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” back in 1990 and it helped change my life. You could say that the advice is just obvious and you are right. But the greatest truths are usually simple things that “everybody knows” but doesn’t seem to appreciate. In many ways, it is like a diet & exercise program. Everybody knows how to lose weight and get in better shape, but not many people do it right.   

You are only really changed by the people you meet and the books you read and then only if you think about them. Reading the 7 Habits made me think about my priorities in life. I was reading a lot of similar things at that time. I did the usual Peter Drucker and Tom Peters books popular at the time and read a lot about organizational theory in general. Covey’s book was certainly not the only influence on me and I am not attributing to the book magical powers, but it helped me. For example, that the book helped me work less and get more done. At the time, I consciously and specifically thought about my work life in relation to the 7 habits. I used to work a lot but not always highly effectively. I often would put in 16-hour days when I was building my career. It was not working well for my health, my family and even for my career. After reading the book, I felt I had a defensible reason to work less, work smarter and put more balance in my life. I started to “start with the end in mind” which made me quit doing a lot of things that were not very useful and avoid lots of meetings. I still don’t think that you can expect to be successful if you work only eight hours a day, but on most days 9-10 hours is enough if you do them right. Covey’s practical time management techniques made my shorter hours possible and his principles gave me reason to do it.

Even before reading the book, I believed in the idea that you should “serve the principle, not the master.” This made me unpopular with some of my bosses in the short term, but a life where you make decisions based on principles is better than one where you are pushed around by expedients or pulled along by your ephemeral desires. Good people recognize this as do good bosses and you really should not care about the opinions of others. Stephen Covey talked about a principle centered life and that made sense to me. He was right. In fact, I can trace almost all my mistakes and regrets to instances when I cut corners or did not act in clear accordance with my principles. You really cannot be happy if you violate your principles and you don’t deserve to be.

The other thing that the book confirmed for me was to be proactive. Don’t cry about your problems or become a victim; figure out what to do to change the situations you don’t like and then do those things.

Critics of Covey say that his ideas were simplistic. Life is indeed complex, but the basic structure of our responses really can be simple. They must be simple if we are to make them work. It worked for me for more than twenty years. I think that the “secret” of life is indeed the simplicity of thinking through and adhering to strong principles. Of course, simple solutions are not always easy ones.

Stephen Covey is dead. We should not mourn for the life well led, but I feel a loss. I met him only once in person and we talked for only a few minutes, but I felt I knew him from the work he shared. You can know people through their work and I am a better person for having known Stephen Covey. He left a legacy. 

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How Violence has Declined & Why we Didn’t Notice

Stephen Pinker is my favorite living philosopher of society.  Some would correct me and say that he is a scientists and not a philosopher, but the two can overlap extensively.  With all due respect to the ancient philosophers that I read and loved, many of the questions that perturbed them are now just “simple” matters of science.  For example, philosophers argued back and forth for years as to whether humans were “blank slates” influenced only by their environments or whether they were determined by physical or genetic factors. Recent advances in science have made this argument mute.  

People are born pre-programmed.  A variety of talents, abilities, habits are inherited to some extent.  On the other hand, within these constraints human behavior and preferences are highly mutable.  (Science proved what any perceptive parent of more than one child already knew.)  I take this to mean that you can have a lot of freedom to change things if you recognize and work with nature, its gifts and constraints.  

That is what I liked about Steven Pinker’s book the Blank Slate when I read it about ten years ago.  At first you might feel a little discouraged.   Pinker points out that human propensity to violence, intolerance & sloth were bred into us during evolution.  Humans of the stone age who didn’t react quickly and violently to threats didn’t usually live long enough to become our ancestors.   The good news is that institutions of civilization and social constraints can (and have) made us behave in ways that are – well – more civilized and socially acceptable. 
 

I just started reading Pinker’s recent book, the Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  I suppose that good intellectual rigor would dictate that I actually finish the book before commenting on the ideas, but I have read several reviews and I just finished reading an interview with the author in Veja that got me thinking about this.  There is a good recent interview here.  The best quick background is Pinker’s TED talk.  (BTW – TED lecture are really interesting in general.)

Pinker studied statistics on violent deaths. Of course there are no statistics on Stone Age people in the actual Stone Age, but it is possible to study more modern Stone Age people. It turns out that murder rates among primitive people about which we have records are astronomical. It is a myth that people were good and later corrupted by civilization. Civilization civilizes and it is better than the alternative “natural man.” 

Historical records are spotty at first, but it is clear that life was much more dangerous and violent in any ancient or medieval period we study. Death was a penalty for all sorts of minor crimes. And was often inflicted in the most cruel way possible. Torture was common. Entertainments were cruel and bloody. But things improved, at least in the west.  

Despite the great wars and murder on an industrial scale, the 20th Century has been the least violent in history.  Of course, more total numbers of people have been killed, but that is because there are more total people.  The proportions are way down. 

Most people can vouch for this, if they think about it for even a short time. It is only in recent times that most of the population could expect to live a long life w/o ever being the victim of the deadly violence that was common to all humankind in the past. 

Pinker has to take a lot of crap for pointing out the truth.  One reason is simply because most people like to think they live in the most challenging times.  Beyond that, we have much better reporting.  If a couple people are killed in nasty ways anywhere in the country and increasingly the world, we get graphic and memorable details on the news.   

A counterintuitive reason might be that things are actually improving so quickly that it makes the remaining problems seem that much worse.  We repent much more sorrowfully the fewer acts of terrible violence because they seem more personal.   “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic,” is as quote attributed to Stalin, who understood how to kill individuals and millions. It is nasty, but perhaps accurate. We get inured to lots of violence and more afraid of a little. 

Pinker also has to face what we might call the miserly industry.  Politicians selling programs and NGOs seeking donations need to paint the in the direst colors.   Pinker is a brave man to take this on.

Of course, why violence has declines is important. What goes down in human behavior could go back up.  Pinker does not think the explanation is that humans have improved or human nature has changed. He is too much a scientist to think these things.  He does not try to make a comprehensive explanation, but he mentions some possibilities.  The first is the rise of stable states.  He doesn’t use the word strong, but prefers competent in the sense of keeping order and satisfying the basic needs of its people. Competent states must be strong, but not all strong states are competent. Nazis & communists had strong states.

Another explanation is free trade.  In one of the interviews, Pinker quoted that “we can’t bomb the Japanese because they make my minivan.”  Free trade goes with communications. The more we see people are being like us, the less likely we can treat them as sub-human.

We may be less violent because there is less incentive. Hunter-gatherers are always ready for violence. They sometimes commit violence because they fear violence from others and sometimes just to rip off their neighbors, which is one reason everybody fears violence from others.   War used to be profitable, at least for the winners.  Not so much anymore.  Finally, there is a prosaic reason of habit. Many of us have lost the habit of using violent solutions.

I don’t think violence or war will ever go away, but we have seen less of it.  I have never been a victim of serious violence. I felt it personally when Alex was a hate crime victim. This is the kind of senseless thing you cannot purge. His attackers didn’t know him or try to rob him. They merely acted out of the dark demons of human nature. I saw war in Iraq and like many observers, I was stuck by the banality of violence.  I saw violence drop not because of persuasion but mostly because the Marines and our Iraqi allies established predictable order.

Violence and disorder always lurks under our veneer of civilization. The threat never is gone. We have to work  all the time to channel the primitive passions and animal desires.  I say “channel” not suppress. These impulses are sources of our energy and creativity.  The uncivilized human is not evil or sinful, as was widely thought in some religious circles, but neither is there any such thing as a noble savage.  Both these notions have caused great misery, as have the ideas that human behavior is determined by genetics or that humans are blank slates on to which society can stamp any design.

Life provides us with a never ending series of constrained choices. It is certainly not true that anything is possible, but making good choices can expand our contentment as well as our ability to make more good choices. Some human problems are intractable and some “problems” are not really problems in the sense that they cannot be solved. If we ask the wrong questions, we will come up with the wrong answers. We will never achieve a society where everybody is equal because people are not equal.  We will never achieve a society w/o violence because people have  propensity to selfishness which sometimes leads to violence. 

But if we recognize constraints, we can achieve better results. “Going back” to a more primitive society is not an option. It would add to misery. Life was nasty, brutish and short in earlier periods.  Going “forward” to a utopia is also not possible.  Life is actually pretty good for most people in our Western market democracies and it is getting better for those in the developing world. Maybe we will just have to manage with what we have.

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The Beauty of Audio Books & the Timelessness of Great Ones

I downloaded a couple more of the “Great Courses” series today.  I am very fond of them because they are relatively short, very well done and available whenever I want them on an I-Pod that can contain a library.  I listen to them while driving, walking to the store or on an airplane, times when I otherwise would not only waste time, but also be stressed and anxious.  It is better than music, which is mindless.  I have music too, BTW, for the mindless times but generally it is better to be engaged.

Audio books and courses have been part of my life since 1984. I remember this date so precisely because that is when we bought our first car. (Yes, I was 29 before I owned a car. That is maybe why I still bike, metro or walk so much). The audio books came soon after. I don’t recall the name of the first series, but it was a series of lectures. They really were not produced originally for audio books, rather they were clearly just lectures recorded in a lecture hall.  The audio quality and the presentations were of uneven quality.

Few real books were available and in those days I was more into the motivational stuff anyway, so for a few years I was into programs that told me how to be a winner.  It is easy to laugh at myself when I think about it or the type of person that wants such things, but I think it was a stage I had to pass through.  I learned a lot of skills that I still find useful.  Many of the motivational programs are just stupid, but the better ones take actual wisdom and put it into bite sized chunks, sweetened with the promise of quick success. One of my favorite was “the Secret of Power Negotiations.” A lot of the techniques were/are simple, but they were new to me or at least it was useful to have them crystalized.  There was another one about techniques for getting ahead in business that I recognized as “the Prince” updated with modern examples. My time with these types of programs lasted until the late 1980s.

My next dominant genre was business books.  I signed up for some monthly cassette clubs that sent me abridged books by guys like Tom Peters, Peter Drucker & Peter Senge. Of course I choose these example because they were peters, but jokes aside I got a pretty good business education and learned lots of things about marketing, finance & management that I either didn’t learn of forgot when I was doing my MBA.  I think there were at least two reasons why this was true. The first is that I believe I spent more total hours listening to the books than I had spent in class but more importantly I think I was more able to absorb the information. I had real world experience and need for the information that I didn’t have as a callow youth.  I have generally passed through this stage too. There tends to be a lot of repetition.   

The business related books that I still use today are those related to new media or prospect theory, which are still developing fields that apply to my current work.  Although I am going to give up the new media stuff soon.  The breathless “new” quality is starting to annoy me too much. A new, “must jump on,” bandwagon rumbles past every few months.  Not having jumped on several hasn’t hurt me.   

In Krakow we had a big district with lots of places who welcomed visits by American diplomats, so I drove around a lot. I think it was a lot like being an old country doctor. Usually I drove myself or went with our drive, Bogdan. I learned a lot of Polish from Bogdan, often things that my more educated staff would castigate as low class, but eventually we exhausted our stories. The audio books were great. I discovered Blackstone Audio Books, where I could rent unabridged books about history, politics and literature.  It is funny how memory mixes. I presented a series of lectures in a little city called Bielsko-Biala, about an hour and a half from Krakow. I drove there every week for six weeks to give the lectures, doing business along the way in Silesia, so I was in the car alone a lot, I think every Wednesday.

I listened to a couple of Audio books during these trips. The one I remember best was called “Novo ordo Seclorum” about the Constitutional Convention in 1787. I tended to let the tape play and sometimes repeat, so I got it good.  The funny thing is that my memories of the information are mixed with the memories of the sights, sounds and smells of Silesia in the fall, so when I think of Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional convention, I usually recall the smell of burning leaves or the coal smoke from the chimneys and I can still picture the foggy skies and the rainy forests of Southern Poland in October.

I stuck with the cassette technology for a long time. There was a kind of golden age for cassettes after 2000. As others moved to DVD, I could get the cassette cheaply. I didn’t really matter to me if they were a little old.  If you are listening to a biography of Julius Caesar it really doesn’t matter if it was published in 1985 or 1995.  But I did have to change technologies to take advantage of more contemporary topics.  I liked the Bob Woodward books about the presidents and the Robert Reich comments on the economy.   

But my favorite topics were biographies.  Four stand out in my memory from my DVD days.  There was “His Excellency” about George Washington, a biography of Franklin, the exact title escape me and two really good books by Ron Chernow, a biography of Alexander Hamilton and an even more interesting one called Titan about John D. Rockefeller.  I liked that one so much I bought and read the paper version.  Suffice to say that Rockefeller was a complex man, generally mistreated by popular history. He certainly was ruthless, but his reorganization of the oil industry was a necessary step in the development of our country.  He was also admirable in his work ethic and personal habits.  He made the money with his own intelligence (cunning?) and hard work (i.e. didn’t come from a rich family) and always gave away at least 10% of his income, even when he was poor. As he got richer, he couldn’t do it well, so he created a business-like way of philanthropy – the philanthropic foundation.  

I was also a late convert to I-pod, but I have enjoyed it a lot. I used to get my audio books from I-Tunes, but after I noticed that most of them came from Audible.com, I went directly.  When I checked today, I was surprised that I had download sixty three audio books from Audible since the middle of 2009.  Mostly I listened to them on the Metro of walking around. I never listen to I–pod while I run, since I like the total running experience, but I do listen on the walk back. In Virginia, I run out for around a half an hour.  The walk back takes three times that long, so I get in a lot of listening. The problem is the competition.  Now that NPR programs are on I-Tunes, I sometimes do them. There has also been significant competition from Portuguese. I have been trying to get the same audio books in Portuguese, kill two birds with one stone, but the selection is not as complete.

Usually, I listen to a couple of books during the same period.  I am listening now to “the Big Thirst” about water policy and “the Drunkard’s Walk” about randomness.  Sometimes I like the “theme” my books. When I drove through Texas, I listened to “Empire of the Summer Moon” about the Comanche. It is a great book that I recommend. I also listened to “the Forgotten Man” about the Great Depression during my last cross country trip. I recommend that one too.  

As I wrote at the top, I am still enamored with the Great Courses. They have lots of things I should have learned in college but forgot. I also think that the Great Courses are sometimes better than average college courses.  There is some competition, of course.  There are some very good courses available on I-Tunes U.  For example, the “don’t miss” course is a history of Greece given at Yale by Donald Kegan.  

In history & literature, for example, the Great Courses still talk about great things. It seems that in modern colleges they often concentrate details that make little difference and/or on life’s losers and all the troubles of the world related to contemporary problems. We are not the end of history. The thing that makes literature or history great is timelessness. The fact that it is NOT lashed to an ephemeral “relevance.” I hate it when they think I want to learn about “people like me.” I want to learn about those who are different, maybe greater than I am. I prefer to concentrate on the great achievements that can inspire me to better things and consider the timeless lessons.  Human nature doesn’t change.  I also believe in the importance of great decisions.  The behavior of Agamemnon still has a lot to teach, for example.  I understand it is literature, not fact, but the fact that hundreds of generations were influenced by that narrative makes a difference.  There is no such thing as a modern classic or one that is newly discovered.  A classic is like wine or cheese. A classic has to be aged and have a chance to influence more than one generation in more than one place. 

Speaking of timeless value, I mentioned that book “Novo Ordo Seclorum.” The author talked about the personalities of the founding fathers, but also about the books and ideas that influenced them.  Madison, Hamilton & Washington read and were influenced by many of the same classics that influenced me.  I can put myself in their august presence to say the “we” learned the dangers of republics from Thucydides.  We accompanied the abuse of power with Tacitus & Suetonius.  Understood the nature of balances of power with Aristotle and accompanied various human interactions with Shakespeare.  Practical people also need to be grounded in the wisdom of the ages.

Below is the list of the Great Courses I have down loaded in the last two years.  I actually thought I had a few more.  I suppose I am conflating them with the audio books and I-tunes and I used to get them on DVC, which I have lost or damaged. The Great thing about the Great Courses is that they remain on the website and you can download them again if you change computer or your I-pod dies.  And you cannot lose or ruin the disk by spilling Coca-Cola on it (happens to me more than you might think.)

America and the World: A Diplomatic History

American Mind

Art of Critical Decision Making

Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft

Conservative Tradition

Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor

Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitut…

History of the United States

Late Middle Ages

Making History: How Great Historians Interpret th…

Odyssey of Homer

Peoples and Cultures of the World

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Great Books

Understanding Complexity

Western Literary Canon in Context

Wisdom of History

World War I: The “Great War”

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The Light Bulb Goes Off

The great Ronald Reagan said that you could accomplish almost anything as long as you don’t care who gets credit. Of course Reagan was not the first person to say that. It is almost impossible to trace an idea to its “source” because there really is no one source. Ideas don’t pass unchanged through the people who hold them and none of us ever has a truly original thought, which is why we might not fight so hard to take or give credit. 

 I proudly proclaim that I have never in my life had a truly original thought. I am well educated. The chief benefit of education is that you tap into the accumulated wisdom of other people, places and other generations. I spend a lot of time reading with the specific goal of appropriating the ideas of others. I cannot keep them straight. I often cannot remember where I picked them up and I mix them together in ways that complicate provenance. It doesn’t bother me, although I suppose that some people of deceive themselves about their own originality might be upset that I “stole” their ideas. Footnotes have always been a challenge for me. 

The image of the lone genius coming up with a great breakthrough was always mostly mythical. Innovative ideas are created when they bounce off and recombine with each other. (Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist characterizes it as ideas having sex and producing synergistic offspring. His book, BTW, is among those I have assimilated in the Borg-like fashion I mentioned above.) They do not do well when they are contained in a single mind, the more people involved in an idea, the better.

I have little patience with the careful parsing of credit. That is a reason I had to flee academia, where the first ¾ of any research consists of summarizing and discussing the lineage of all the ideas you will be considering in the second-last paragraph of your thesis. It is just an awful long run for a very short slide and beyond that it does not reflect how people think or ideas are born outside the ivory tower.

Let me break my credit rule again by referring to another book I recently read called Where Good Ideas Come From. If you follow the link, you will find a good illustrated summary of the main ideas of the book, which saves me the need to write it all down here. The summary does not include, however, the point that in an academic sense I would give him credit for. That is that many people have similar ideas when faced with similar challenges and similar opportunities. Of course, this is not a new idea. I wrote a post with some of the same thoughts before I read the book and I think before the book was published. It kind of proves the point about ideas flowing around.

You can also look at the TED Lecture. If you are unfamiliar with TED lectures, you might want to take a look; they are usually interesting. On an unrelated note, one of my favorites was on the intelligence of crows.

Johnson gives some good examples. The most famous is probably Darwin and Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution completely independently about the same time. The idea was gestating around in general at the time. Thinking up the theory was made possible by scientific advances that made analysis of species possible, by floods of communications that spread that knowledge and, not inconsequentially, by the society that had developed in the West that would not stone or burn anybody who published such ideas as infidels or heretics. In short, a person living in the 15th Century anywhere in the world or even living in the 19th Century anyplace else probably could not have thought of the details of the theory of evolution at all or, if he had managed the thought, would have died in a nasty way shortly after revealing it to anybody else.

When I studied anthropology and ancient history, we used to refer to diffusion. This was the concept that ideas and technologies were created in some place, in ancient history usually the Mesopotamia or Anatolia, and then they were carried – diffused – to other parts of the world. This led to a linear type of history, where your attention is first drawn to Sumer in southern Mesopotamia and then you move the “center” of civilization to northern Mesopotamia, expand it to include the Eastern Mediterranean, then to Greece, then Rome. After that you move to the Empire of the Franks, then to England and finally you end up in America.

Of course, I am conflating diffusion with an ethnocentric historical perspective, but diffusion is essentially an ethnocentric historical perspective and it is based on that bogus concept that ideas are invented and then spread, rather than the more correct one that ideas spread and then they are invented. (This diffusion thing gets even worse, BTW. Some people believe that space aliens came around and “seeded” ideas)

It is not exclusive. It is likely that people in different places, faced with similar challenges and opportunities came up with similar adaptations. It is also likely that when they came in contact with other ideas the mixed, matched and innovated. So did the use of particular tools, pottery or agricultural techniques spread through diffusion from originating centers or did they develop in many places at once? The answer is yes.

So the academic exercise of trying to find the “origins” can be fun, but it is isn’t much use.

Next year we will essentially outlaw the traditional incandescent light bulb, and with it the long-time symbol of innovation and new ideas. We all learned that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but there are always wise guys who point out that he didn’t. They are right. The Greeks invented light bulbs almost 3000 years ago. The problem is that they didn’t work. Who had the basic idea first doesn’t really count for much. It matters who can make it work and make it useful. The greatest innovators are not those who have the best new ideas, but rather those who can figure out how to make ideas work for themselves and others and those who can reformulate ideas into new mixes.

All ideas are old in their basic form. I am convinced that the Greeks, Chinese or Native Americans (if you want to be PC) pretty much thought of everything on a basic level. If you want to say that the concept of a chariot of the gods is essentially the same as the space shuttle, you are being silly and impractical but you have a nerdly rhetorical point. Just don’t take that kind of thing to seriously and don’t get annoyed when you don’t get credit for having useful ideas.