This is the wrong future!

I’m an angry old man. Well, maybe not angry so much as disillusioned. This is not the future I expected. It’s not the one I was promised by pretty much everyone from “futurists” to cartoonists to song writers. I’m not talking about space stations and Mars colonies and things like that, although their lack is disappointing, too. I’m talking about peace, prosperity, freedom, equality, justice…. Age of Aquarius type stuff, the dreams of John Lennon’s Imagine.

In the latter half of the last century, young, naïve idiots like myself truly believed that a new age of human understanding, progress, and cooperation was just around the corner. Humanity would finally realize that race, religion, nationality, gender, and things like that, really don’t matter very much. It wouldn’t be a case of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It would be more like “don’t know, don’t care, not important.” Not to society in general, anyway. People are people. Black or white, gay or straight, religious or secular. All of them. All of us. Whatever differences we might possess are far outweighed by the things we have in common. The dawning of a bright new century would somehow bring a second Enlightenment that would leave all our petty biases, prejudices, and superstitions behind us. We would finally accept that working together to achieve common goals made far more sense than constantly arguing and fighting one another over relatively unimportant things, most of which boil down to matters of taste or opinion.

Obviously, that idealistic future didn’t happen. In some ways, it seems we’ve become even more sensitive to minor personal differences now than we were half a century ago, especially when it comes to matters of religion and gender. Perhaps this kind of sensitivity is a result of people grasping for some semblance of individuality in an increasingly homogenized world. Maybe it’s a cry for acceptance by those who feel that society has rejected them. I don’t know, but I find it disheartening. I shudder when voters rally to support a politician simply because he or she claims to share their religious faith. I don’t understand why anyone would be hypersensitive about gender pronouns. Neither a person’s religious beliefs nor their gender identity makes any difference to their ability to be a valued citizen. Any society that respects personal freedom should be equally accepting of all choices like that.

I now appreciate that there was no realistic way this kind of change could have happened. Not in half a century, at least. Human history, and probably human nature as well, is burdened by far too much irrational baggage for that. I understand that, now. But unjustified as it may be, I can’t seem to let go of the dream that somehow, someday, the bright future we imagined back when I was young might still happen. I’m not confident it will. I certainly don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, but I can’t seem to abandon all hope in it. So, yeah, I’m disappointed, but I guess I’m not entirely disillusioned after all. Maybe we can do better with the next century. I wish I could be there to find out, but countering the incredibly inconvenient and invariably terminal effects of aging is another thing we haven’t made much progress on.

Avery Slom

Rationality

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title poses some very good questions, but does the book answer them? Well…

Steven Pinker is undoubtedly a brilliant fellow, and I loved his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, but Rationality reads more like a textbook on probability than a clear explanation of reason and critical thinking. Rather than introducing the subject in layman’s terms using specific examples, it starts off with definitions of rules of logic, graphs, and diagrams. That’s all well and good, but it’s a tad dry. The issue on the minds of many people, and the reason this subject is so timely, was/is what seems like a spreading plague of irrationality epitomized by the rise of Donald Trump. How were otherwise intelligent people lured into his delusions? Did they not notice that much of what he said made little or no sense, or did they simply not care? And if they didn’t, why not? What is going on in the minds of religious extremists and terrorists who believe that God wants them to hurt people? What draws people into giving any credence at all to ranting radio talk show hosts and internet conspiracy theorists? This book mentions some of these questions, especially in the final section, but I didn’t find succinct answers to any of them. Maybe there aren’t any.

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The Delusions Of Crowds

The Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups by William J. Bernstein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Why do people go mad in crowds? Good question. Despite the subtitle, this book does not provide a succinct answer, although it does present several historical accounts of when people did succumb to irrational economic and religious beliefs. Underlying them all is the premise that humans are not rational creatures. Not predominantly, anyway. Sure, given sufficient time to examine a situation, they may make rational choices, from time to time, but for the most part, nope. Most human behavior is based on instinct, learned heuristics, cultural narratives, beliefs, habits, and emotions. That’s not news. Any casual observer of human behavior will notice the same.

About half of this book (a rough, personal estimate) is devoted to apocalyptic doomsday type cults, from Anabaptist to Islamic State, and how the believers in these narratives react when their fiction hits fact like a bug on a windshield. It’s a scary, even depressing topic because of the harm a small, devoted, and utterly insane group of people can cause before it ultimately fails or evolves into something a bit less extreme (like Millerites becoming Adventists). And if this kind of pathological behavior is indeed based on our evolutionary heritage, one has to wonder if we are, ironically, doomed. Will all future generations be plagued by this kind of madness? Will our species be destroyed by it?

Well, maybe, and this brings up another omission I thought existed with this book. A few possible ways to mitigate such insanity are mentioned at one point. It seems that affluence has some effect on the formation of apocalyptic cults. Scientific and historical education might help. I would assume that greater equality of income, wealth, and opportunity would also tend to suppress the formation of irrational narratives, but the question is never pursued and no summation is provided.

This isn’t a bad treatment of this important subject, but I felt it could be better.



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Extraterrestrial – A Short Review

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is mostly a boastful autobiography, but a small portion of it is dedicated to the hypothesis that Oumuamua, the strange, interstellar whatever-it-was that zipped through our solar system in late 2017 is an alien lightsail vehicle, possibly a defunct probe from an unknown extraterrestrial civilization. The evidence the author presents basically comes down to Oumuamua being abnormally shiny, probably disc shaped, and exhibiting non-gravitational acceleration. These are traits comets and asteroids don’t have, at least not often or all at the same time. It’s quite intriguing, but it’s hardly conclusive. It’s no wonder the scientific community didn’t hop onboard and proclaim it an alien artifact, and yet the author is quite critical of his colleagues for not doing so. At one point he challenges the often quoted adage, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” stating that he doesn’t know why this should hold true. This caused me to pause in my reading for a brief moment of WTF? Of course extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! It’s what distinguishes science from tabloid journalism! It’s why scientists don’t accept a couple fuzzy photos, an odd ripple in the water, and an indistinct impression in the mud as proof of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. Yeah, perhaps there is too much resistance to serious consideration of the alien tech hypothesis in the case of Oumuamua, and perhaps humanity should be putting more effort into a search for signs of extraterrestrial life, but it’s not like this points to a systemic flaw in the scientific process. It’s more the fault of our screwed up priorities, which leaves too few resources available for pure scientific inquiry. But that’s another argument, entirely.



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The Velvet Rope Economy

The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book takes a quick contemporary look at the thorny age-old of issues of equality and fairness. The focus is on America, a nation ostensibly founded on enlightened principles of human equality and the rejection of a privileged aristocratic elite. That’s a wonderful ideal, except that we haven’t actually done that. We have an aristocracy, or at least a privileged class, but it’s not based on family history. It’s based on money, and it doesn’t really care about when or how that wealth was accumulated. If you have money to spend, you can buy privileges, which can be passed down, along with the wealth that bought them, from one generation to the next, so that what we end up with looks a whole lot like a hereditary aristocracy.

Is that fair? Should the wealthy elite enjoy privileges that commoners like the rest of us simply don’t have? Is it okay for them not just to cut in line but to ignore lines completely when boarding a plane, visiting a theme park, or going to a sporting event? Bear in mind that this means that the common folks being passed by will have to wait a bit longer and that their seats when they do arrive will be slightly more cramped.

The point this book seems to be trying to make is that there is something basically wrong with this. Personally, I think the issue is more complex than that. It seems as if the rich are being treated better than the poor. Except that’s not exactly what’s going on in these specific cases. The people jumping the line are buying something that those waiting their turn are not. You pay more, you get more. It’s not much different from buying anything else. You don’t expect to buy a Jaguar for the cost of a Kia, and you don’t feel cheated if you order a cup of coffee at a restaurant and it doesn’t come with a free stack of pancakes, a cheese omelet, and enough greasy fried animal bits to clog arteries the size of the Panama canal. The simple fact is that people with loads of money can buy more and better stuff than people who have less. (Whether or not it’s fair for some people to have a hugely disproportionate mountain of discretionary cash is another subject entirely, and one I’m not about to get into, at least not here and now except to say that I think we’re already far beyond the limit for how much wealth disparity is appropriate and sustainable.)

But getting back to this book, the author spends an inordinate amount of time and ink discussing professional sporting events and bringing up anecdotal examples of how team owners cater to the rich by building stadiums with private access, and special boxes with comfy seats and minibars or whatever. Not being a sports fan might color my opinion here, but I really don’t see much of a problem with this. The commoners waiting in line with basic tickets don’t expect and probably won’t miss perks like these. Sports are a form of entertainment. Seeing a game up close rather than from the nose bleed seats, or not at seeing it at all, is unlikely to affect a person’s life in any significant way. The same applies, to a somewhat lesser extent, to plane tickets. If you want to pay more for a larger seat with more leg room, you certainly may. It may not be fair that some people can afford these things and some cannot, but unless force is exercised to prevent it, that’s reality, which is not known for its adherence to human concepts of fairness. As long as there is less of something than there is demand for it, it’s going to be rationed disproportionately to those willing to pay.

It’s an entirely different situation when we look at essential services such as health care, education, fire prevention, and even law enforcement. Or at least I think it should be. Today, in America, those with money can and do spend it to get the best of all these things. A 4.0+ GPA kid still has to compete to get into an Ivy League college, so there’s a private company that can help them stand out and above all the other similarly privileged rich kids…for a cost. And there are companies that locate and obtain the best possible medical care for wealthy clients, who can also buy policies from high end insurance companies that will send out firefighters to protect their mansions from oncoming wildfires. And for those charged with a crime, well, that’s less likely for the rich to begin with, but it does happen, and if charged, the wealthy can often pay for a program that will drop the charges and even expunge the record. Even if convicted, the well-heeled can pay extra for a nicer prison with a private room. This last, I think, is where we unquestionably cross the line. To my mind, there are some things that money simply shouldn’t be allowed to buy.

The examples presented, and the arguments the author offers, lead to two conclusions — actually, three, but “It sure would be nice to be rich” is so blindingly obvious, no one needs to highlight the point. The less obvious conclusions are: 1) that the rich almost live in a different world than the rest of us, and 2) because of #1, real world problems are either not addressed or addressed poorly (no pun intended).

Looking at #1, consider the people who run the world. It’s not the poor. It’s not even the middle class, assuming that’s still a thing. Business leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and others who can “make things happen” have one thing in common. Money. They either own it or they control it, which provides them with privileges that shelter them from the hardships and inconveniences of normal life. Even if they are not born into affluence, once they obtain it, their problems and priorities change. They can quickly lose touch with what passes for normal life in our society. Even if they still drive their own cars, they’re likely to pay extra to bypass traffic by using well maintained toll roads and HOV lanes (or for the super stinking rich, helicopters). With VIP access, they don’t wait in lines pretty much anywhere. Living in affluent neighborhoods, they never experience what it means not to have a good school for their kids, a local bank, a grocery store, or a nearby hospital. A lack of such things aren’t problems the rich and powerful have, so they aren’t problems they’re likely to think about. It seems ironic that the people best positioned to address societal problems cannot fully understand them.

Before I go on (and on and on), let me clarify that I don’t think all rich people are scum bags who don’t care about anyone else. The rich, on the whole, are not intrinsically scummier than the rest of us. In fact, many use their wealth and influence to try to make the world a better place. Some succeed to an extent. Entrepreneurs occasionally do, coincidentally, perhaps. Philanthropists try to intentionally, sometimes without even an ulterior motive. Every once in a while, even presidents and other politicians attempt to do something helpful. FDR is a good example. Although he suffered character-building hardships due to his polio, he was never poor, but he helped a great many people who were when he created the programs of the New Deal, despite constant pushback. Unfortunately, however, even when these folks do try to help, they often fail due to lack of support from their peers and the inability of the elite to either recognize or fully understand the problems average folks have.

Yeah, fine. Rich people don’t understand the problems of the poor. So what? It’s not their job to. They aren’t responsible for making the world a better place for anyone but themselves. That’s what capitalism is all about, right?

Well, yes and no, and although some may disagree about the responsibilities that common human decency imposes on us, there is a group of people whose job it is to make things better for everyone— politicians, but those with the greatest capacity for change, the ones at the federal legislative level, are members of the elite as well. They may not (all) enjoy personal wealth, but they are treated as elite, they have perks associated with their jobs, and they influence what problems the government chooses to address and how it spends its money to do so. And what problems might those be? Well, the ones they and their biggest political donors have, of course.

So, getting back to essential public services —police, fire fighting, schools, hospitals, roads, and things like that. All of these can pose real problems for a great many people if they fail to perform adequately. But for the wealthy elite, none of them are ever a problem because the rich can opt out. If their kids’ public school (for example) can’t afford field trips, or a sports program, or a band or an orchestra, those programs can be supplemented, either through donations, such as PTA fund raisers, or through additional costs for participation, which is all fine for well off parents in affluent communities. And if that still doesn’t satisfy, there are private prep schools.

I feel that this is fairly close to how some people, even politicians, often see issues like this. They don’t recognize how essential these services can be because the people they hang with have options. Don’t like the public schools? Send your kids to a private academy. Your neighborhood doesn’t have a hospital? Move to someplace that does. Roads jammed? Too many potholes? Use the toll roads or hire a helicopter taxi. And politicians, believing in the viability of these options, at least for “normal” people like themselves, make public policies accordingly, creating a kind of causal circle. Funding for public schools, for example, is fine and probably worthwhile in principle… unless it has to be paid for with higher taxes, which the wealthy would likely be required to share a large portion of, which would make it more difficult for them and other normal folks to pay tuition for their kids’ boarding schools. So, if the purpose of the legislation is to improve education, funding public schools won’t work. In fact, it’s probably counterproductive because, as everyone knows, a dollar spent on taxes is one that can’t be spent on investment in, for example, a corporation that runs private schools, which means fewer dividends and capital gains, which can be used to pay tuition at even better schools. And who cares anyway? Certainly not anyone worth knowing. Even among the not so rich there are those who claim that public services are inherently inferior. Private companies, the mantra goes, always do it better, as if this was a commandment of their capitalist religious faith despite all evidence to the contrary. The proposed legislation fails. Public schools deteriorate, which provides the wealthy with further reasons to send their own kids to private schools, which gives them additional cause to view public schools as even less worthy of support. And so on.

So how do we fix this? The author of this book offers some ideas at the end, including the need to recognize that we’ve let our public institutions deteriorate and that we should strive to create a more egalitarian society. It’s all kind of pie in the sky stuff rather than concrete solutions, which I’m not sure anyone can offer. I’m sure I can’t. If I were absolute ruler of the world, I might look at raising the minimum wage and tying automatic adjustments to it to the GDP, or something like that. Maybe I’d propose legislation requiring that nongovernmental providers of essential services such as health care, education, law enforcement/detention, and the like operate as non-profits. I haven’t really thought about this in great depth because I’m not ruler of the world, and I don’t want to be. When I was younger, I’d regularly sit at a cafeteria lunch table with a bunch of friends and discuss how to solve all of humanity’s problems. We never did, of course. We were probably wrong, for one thing, and no one would have listened to us anyway. We weren’t rich. It’s just as well. Being supreme leader sounds like a horrendously hard and thankless job. I’m glad it’s not mine. I’m content with being a strange little old man who reads too much and sometime writes rambling reviews and commentaries on books he finds interesting.

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They’re Not All Racists

Recently, I saw a Facebook post by a lady who self-identifies as both a Republican and a Trump supporter. She said she resented being accused of being a racist because of her political affiliation. Not all Trump supporters are racists, she maintained.

Logically, I can agree with that. I am sure many Republicans don’t see themselves as racists, or as any of the other negative stereotypes that have increasingly become associated with the party, especially since Trump became its primary spokesperson. Republicans aren’t all racists, or sexists, or religious fundamentalists, or paranoid gun toting conspiracy theorists, and the many who aren’t understandably resent being grouped with those few who are.

Sadly, this kind of cognitive pigeonholing is common. There is an unfortunate human proclivity to generalize a universal truth from a few (perhaps anomalous) examples. I imagine such behavior has evolutionary survival value. Think about it. While only a few types of snakes are poisonous, avoiding all of them makes it far less likely you will be bitten by one that is. We probably have a gene for this kind of thing. That doesn’t mean all snakes deserve to be shunned, although many of us do have an irrational phobia about them. It’s called ophidiophobia.

There doesn’t have to be a psychologically accepted term for an irrational fear for it to exist. There are people who fear butterflies, or trees, or speaking in public. Some people feel anxious around police, or protestors, or clowns. This kind of generalized anxiety may not be deserved, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. There may sometimes even be a cause for it, some experience the fearful person had that traumatized them for life. Apparently, it doesn’t take much for people to build themselves a phobia, and it takes even less for most of us to make unwarranted assumptions and jump to unjustified conclusions. So, when we see video of a cop kneeling on a black man’s neck, or a picture of someone at a protest throwing a rock or breaking a store window, we sometimes must struggle to avoid thinking, “They’re all like that.”

Not so long ago, in an America that felt much different than the one we have today, I worked for the US Department of Defense. Ethics was a big deal back then. DoD employees were advised (formally and repeatedly) to avoid any possible semblance of impropriety. We were told to always be mindful about doing anything that might be misconstrued to imply corruption or favoritism. So, for example, when attending a meeting at a defense contractor’s facility, we could accept free cups of coffee (if such were available to their own employees), but a donut might be a bit too much. Being treated to a free lunch was right out. Someone (probably with an agenda) could claim we were accepting a bribe to award the company with a lucrative contract, or to overlook some deviation in the performance of one they already had. My point here is that, justified or not, impressions matter. The policy was meant to preclude any behavior that might, even inadvertently, undermine confidence in the integrity of the DoD. It was intended to minimize the chance of anyone having any reason to jump to the wrong conclusion. Because that’s what people do. They generalize from the specific to the whole. Whether we like it or not, we are often seen as representatives of some group. In my case, above, it was Defense Department employees. For a cop, it’s police in general. For a guy in a MAGA hat, it’s Trump supporters.

In most cases, these generalizations make no sense. People who are likely to be swayed by a free lunch are not predisposed to work for the government, and most people prone to excessive violence are not disproportionately inclined to flock to the ranks of the police force. But when it comes to Trump supporters, it’s a bit different. I think it’s safe to assume that anyone waving a Confederate battle flag and flashing a White Power hand gesture also supports Donald Trump. So, whereas all Trump supporters aren’t racists, it seems pretty clear that most racists are Trump supporters.

Yeah, but so what? That’s hardly Trump’s fault. He can’t control who likes him. And if a long-disfavored ideological group such as white supremacists suddenly finds favor with a major political party, there’s hardly any harm in it. It’s certainly good for the party, which can count on the racists’ votes, and it’s good for the racists because they get to feel that their movement has regained some measure of lost legitimacy. It’s just politics, after all, and, as the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows. You shouldn’t take political rhetoric too seriously. I have heard Trump supporters (well, one Trump supporter) make this very claim. Republicans in general are not racists, sexists, religious fundamentalists, or even gun owners. They only play some minimal lip service to these groups to gain their votes. And it’s not like it really matters. Legal segregation is never going to return, women aren’t going to lose the vote, and the Constitution isn’t going to be changed to impose a state religion.

Perhaps, but let’s go back to appearances again. How does it look when someone you don’t want to be associated advertises their association with you, like when the racist puts on his MAGA hat? Even accepting as true that racists, sexists, religious extremists, and armed survivalists combined do not make up the majority of the Republican Party, in the eyes of the public at large, they do represent it. When the guy flying the Confederate battle flag also has a Trump sign in his front yard, does that not give the impression of a link exiting between racists with Trump supporters? (This isn’t a hypothetical. There is a house on my street with both a large Confederate flag and a much smaller Trump 2020 sign in the front yard. It’s the only house in the neighborhood with either, and it has both. Granted, it’s a very small and nonrepresentative sampling, but it provides a 100% correlation. If you drew a Venn diagram to represent the two groups (racists and Trump supporters), it would be a single circle.)

I’m not claiming that there is a legitimate reason for suspecting someone is a closet racist simply because they identify as a Republican or even as a Trump supporter. I am simply attempting to explain why people might jump to this conclusion. It’s all about appearances. Right now, the Republican party appears to support racism, not only because of things Trump has said (e.g. his now infamous rant about Mexican immigrants), but also because some of the party’s more vocal members are overt racists. I believe the perceived association between Republicans and racist and other fringe groups will persist until such time as Trump and other party leaders strongly repudiate and take substantive actions against them. Until that happens, traditional Republicans may wish to ask themselves with whom they choose to be associated.

Origins – How Earth’s History Shaped Human History

Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Humans evolved in western Africa and, over the course of tens of thousands of years, expanded across Earth. In this book, the author looks at how physical aspects of the planet shaped these events. I’ll give you a hint. If this were a murder mystery, I’d call this a spoiler, but it’s not, so I think it’s all right. A large part of humanity’s activities were shaped by… plate tectonics. As everyone probably knows, the shapes and relative positions of Earth’s continents slowly shift as the plates they rest on float on a subterranean sea of molten rock. This movement creates rift valleys and mountains and seas. Together with the shape of Earth’s orbit and its tilt to the plane of the ecliptic, which has a major influence on the climate, we have pretty much all aspects of the playing board for life’s evolutionary game. It determines what any species can be or do. Humanity is no exception. So, the fact that we thrive where there is potable water and fertile soil, tend to avoid deserts, and have difficulty crossing high mountains or wide oceans, all comes down to plate tectonics. Not so surprising, I suppose, but what’s kind of neat about this book is that goes on to offer a bit of explanation for things like how oil and minerals got to where people could get to them, and why the trade winds blow, and who hasn’t wondered about such things?

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Fields of Blood

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It is commonly held that religions, especially monotheistic religions, have been and still are responsible for a great deal of violence and oppression. Crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and things of that nature are pointed to as examples. In this book, Karen Armstrong argues that it’s more complex than that. To demonstrate how, she presents a long and rather dry history of violence, which sometimes obscures the point I think she is trying to make. As best I can tell, her position is that it’s not religion per se that’s behind such things. Religion is just one aspect of culture, so pointing to religion alone as the culprit for any brutal or inhumane act is far too simplistic. Prior to the Eighteenth Century, there was no clear separation between what we now think of as religion and other aspects of a culture such as politics and customs. For much of human history, there wasn’t even a clear line between the natural and the supernatural in peoples’ minds. Kings ruled with divine authority, and angels and demons were as real as snakes and bunny rabbits. The United States was the first nation to intentionally and officially separate politics from religion, and even then, it did not excise religious influences from affairs of state. Humans being what they are, that would be impossible. But once we do, at least intellectually, define religion in such a way as to distinguish it from everything else, it’s still unfair to claim that religious motivations predominately lead to unsavory behavior. Although religious beliefs may motivate one person to hijack an airplane and fly it into a building, they may encourage another to acts of charity. Also, religion isn’t the only motivator for acts of inhumanity. Nationalism, ethnic identity, or political ideology can be equally responsible. The terror one person brings about for God, another may do for his people, his country, or for what he believes is the betterment of mankind.

Although I think the author is far too quick to dismiss religious motivations for certain historical acts of violence, her observation that religion can be a motivator for good as well as bad, and that beliefs other than religious ones can also motivate behavior (again, both good and bad) is unarguable. But all of this seems obvious. The real question, the interesting question is: what common traits do religion, nationalism, and ideology share that make them such strong motivators for extreme behavior? It’s a question this book does not pose.

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For Small Creatures Such as We

For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We recognize and celebrate the cycles of our lives -night and day, the passing of seasons, birth and death- through rituals, many of which have religious trappings. Until relatively recently, religious speculations were the only stories humans had for making sense of such things. Now, as we learn more about how the universe works, people are becoming more secular, but our desire for ritual and tradition to mark the events of our lives remains. What’s a modern secular person to do? In this book, Sasha Sagan, daughter of the late Carl Sagan, shares some of the things she and her family have come up with. As such, the book can be seen as suggestions for secular ways to mark meaningful events, but in large part, it’s a tribute to her dad, a truly great and inspirational human being. I can only imagine the sense of loss Sasha felt when he died. I know I did, and I only knew him through his writings and public appearances. To me, Carl Sagan epitomized humanity at its best. He is missed. I found him both enlightening and inspirational. He left the world far too soon, but he made a positive difference. That’s as much as any of us can hope for.

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The Body: A Guide for Occupants

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are some disturbing reminders to be found here…or perhaps revelations, depending on what you brought with you when you arrived. One is that the human body is not a remarkably well-designed machine. But enough of them work well enough and long enough to reproduce, which is true of all life. That’s all it takes to be successful. That’s why we’re here. It’s why our species is not yet extinct. But the main point in this book is not the flaws in our biology, it’s the state of our knowledge about it. That’s the big revelation. We’re a curious species, and we’ve learned much, often accidentally or despite ourselves. There is no doubt that our discoveries of vaccines and antibiotics have saved countless lives. But it’s disturbing how much medical science does not understand, how many of our standard treatments are not overly effective. Unlike just a couple short centuries ago, you’re now better off seeing a doctor when you’re sick than you would be to avoid them like the plague, but there is still a very good chance they won’t know what caused your illness or how to cure it. And it’s not just because our understanding is imperfect. Our bodies are what they are. They work well enough, long enough, and that’s about all you can expect from them. Trying to get them to remain healthy for a century or more is like trying to fly a Model T Ford to the moon. It’s ain’t designed for that. Unlike the Ford, it’s not designed at all, and there are some things that don’t make much sense. But if you take care of it, you can may be able to get it to run a bit better and last a bit longer. Don’t expect much more from it, though.

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