Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (2023)

The first 90% of this book is scintillating, the final 10% perplexing and disappointing. Kennedy's work aims to update William McNeill's pioneering 1976 work on the interplay between people and germs, Plagues and Peoples. Five decades ago, we simply didn't know much about ancient plagues. In the intervening years, the revolutionary growth of biological knowledge, especially the sequencing of contemporary and ancient genomes, has put us on much more secure ground. Kennedy begins by making a plausible case for a revolution in our thinking about human history: just as Copernicus and Darwin (and perhaps Freud) decentered man, our increasing understanding of microbes should now do the same. Humans don't make history on their own (even in circumstances not of their choosing a la Marx) - humans and microbes (bacteria and viruses) together make history. After all, the number of bacteria in each of us is apparently about the same as the number of "our own" cells. These bacteria attack us occasionally, of course; they help us digest food; and they play a role apparently in modulating our moods. Their even more numerous cousins, viruses, have become incorporated in our DNA. Who am I, indeed! Kennedy doesn't spend much time on microbes' role in influencing out behavior (perhaps for the reasons David Reich gave - see previous post) and instead focuses on their role as agents of destruction. He makes plausible arguments that microbial diseases have played a much more decisive role in turning points in human history: the triumph of homo sapiens over other humans, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the Hobbits of Flores; the displacement by early Indo-Europeans of neolithic farmers in Europe; the Europeans' preference for African slaves rather than European indentured servants. These first 90% of the book changes my picture of big history in major ways. Then we get to the last part of the book. Kennedy barely mentions the breakthrough due to the germ theory of disease, the development of antibacterial and antiviral drugs, and the exponential growth of biotech thanks to genetic manipulation. He discounts the role of medicine and rising living standards in improving health. Instead, he claims, improvements all due to political commitments to public health. I wish he had consulted Angus Deaton's magisterial The Great Escape. In his coverage of the last 150 years, Kennedy focuses on politics, especially baleful political decisions made by "neoliberal" leaders. Bizarrely, in a book about plagues, he switches from microbial to lifestyle diseases. In the end, he suggests, most people today live in "what must feel more like a dystopia" (226). All in all, this last section seemed like it was shaped by what I take to be Kennedy's political commitments. It's a perplexing ending to what otherwise is a thought-provoking, persuasive book.

David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018)

This is a fascinating look at the new science of ancient DNA by one of the field's pioneers. In the 1980s the female mitochondrial and male Y chromosomes were first sequenced, followed in 2001 by the entire genome. 2010 was the breakthrough year for ancient DNA when Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig first sequenced ancient Neanderthal DNA. Five years later, Reich's lab at Harvard built on Paabo's work to "industrialize" the sequencing of ancient DNA: by now thousands of ancient individuals' DNA going back more than 50,000 years and including "modern humans," Neanderthals, and species newly discovered by these techniques, including Denisovans and Homo Floriensis ("Hobbits"), have been analyzed. Interestingly, Reich says that the sequencing of the whole genome has not yet shed much light on the genetic sources of behavior. Given the fact that usually dozens of genes contribute to individual behaviors, Reich admits, it may never do so. However, whole genome sequencing, including of ancient individuals, has made a major, indeed revolutionary, contribution to the understanding of the deep human past. Reich thinks this revolution is so fundamental that is best grasped not by comparison with the dedoding of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953; rather, it's more like the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century: a whole new world is coming into view, much of it at odds with previously held theories. The mixing of modern humans and Neanderthals turns out to be much more complex than previously thought. Several "ghost populations" - no longer extant but the source of some contemporary populations - can be identified. A much more detailed, and radically new, picture of the peopling of Europe, India, the Americas, and East Asia has become possible. For example, ancient DNA has settled the debate about the origin of the earliest Indo-Europeans - they came from the Pontic steppe, not Anatolia. As they spread to the west, they merged with neolithic farming population, who in turn had merged with indigenous hunter-gatherers. The precise contribution of these three source-populations to contemporary Europeans can be measured. Something similar happened in India, where Reich's techniques have allowed him to identify the emergence of numerous endogamous populations - castes - starting around 2,000 years ago. Four distinct waves settled the Americas, one of which, however, remains hard to pin down. As Reich repeatedly acknowleged, ancient DNA is a rapidly developing field. Many of the results he included in his 2018 book will now have been modified, overturned, or superceded.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)

I stumbled upon this in my search for readings for my course Media and Minds, and it's a gem. Birkerts first drew me in because of some biographical overlap: growing up the child of European immigrants (in his case, both parents from Latvia, in mine my mother from Germany, but my father, with his rejection of his Irish Catholic background and of American culture and his interest in East Asia, might well have been an immigrant), Birkerts was painfully aware of how he didn't fit in with his peers, and wanted to assimilate. Eventually, however - and this is just my surmise - Birkerts's outsider status has given him a perch from which he castigates the entire drift of our culture in our electonic age. The book is a worthy sequel and complement to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written 10 years after Postman's work, and on the cusp of the internet revolution, Gutenberg Elegies is astonishingly prescient in its picture of what has come to pass: the fracturing of attention and selves, the loss of interiority, etc. First, though, Birkerts gives an account of how "deep reading" (a term he coins here and which Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home, borrows) - which was on its way out already 30 years ago - allows us to explore other worlds and uncover or invent other selves, other versions of us.

Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006)

Kandel won the 2000 Nobel prize in physiology for his pioneering work on the neurobiology of memory. In this fascinating scientific autobiography, Kandel takes us from his early years in 1930s Vienna to his Nobel prize and beyond. Kandel explains the cellular and molecular science very lucidly, so that this layman only felt he got lost in the details a few times. Kandel's big contribution was to prove that short-term memory depends on chemical changes - increasing the flow of neurotransmitters at the synpapses between neurons - while long-term memory depends on structural changes - adding dendritic connections between neurons. The three key conditions Kandel examines here, inspired by early behaviorists such as Pavlov, are habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning (all of which he, as usual, explains very clearly). In his 60s and 70s Kandel turned from this foundational work on implicit memory to the more complex topic of explicit memory, which depends on attention and, Kandel suggests, spatial awareness. Kandel also reflects on the skills, choices, collaborations, and serendipity that propelled him to the heights of the scientific world. Through his college years (at Harvard), Kandel was focused on historical questions, writing an honors thesis on different intellectuals' accounts of the Nazi menace that had chased Kandel's family from Europe. A college romance with the daughter of prominent Austrian-Jewish psychoanalysts piqued his interest in the mind and a possible career in psychiatry. However, early on this new path, under the influence of a different mentor, Kandel made a pivotal decision. Trying to pinpoint the biological substrates of the id, ego, and superego, as Kandel hoped to do, was too grandiose; instead, he should focus on the individual neuron. This "radical reductionism," as Kandel calls it, served him very well indeed! Beyond the science of memory and his account of his career, Kandel includes glimpses of him as a person: his lifelong interest in high culture and Bildung, his love-hate relationship with Vienna, which led him in later years, when he was raised to great prominence by his accomplishments, to pressure Austrian politicians and institutions finally to reckon with their country's past.

David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (2019)

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. The topic has been on my mind for the last decade, as I've become increasingly alarmed by our phone-based lives. Courtwright has read very widely and integrates evidence and ideas from many fields. His writing is taut, witty, often masterful. His judgment, at least in my eyes, is superb - for example, while castigating "limbic capitalism" - a term he coins here - he pays homage to the great good done by its benevolent twin, plain capitalism. He contrasts undisciplined and disciplined pleasures. The book belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in "big history." Courtwright starts with hunter-gatherers, who generally stumbled on limited pleasures in their diverse habitats, before he quickly and skillfully moves through the role of trade and the first globalization in creating globally homogeneous pleasures (as well as glocalized ones). The last two-thirds of the book consider the accelerating pleasure revolution of the last two hundred years, as pleasures, vices, and addictions have been engineered and relentlessly marketed. Courtwright makes interesting observations about the reasons why the anti-vice movement of the Progressive Era generally lost out to the pro-vice movements of World Wars and rising affluence. He cautiously subscribes to the recently emerging consensus that all addictions share the same neural footprint, all being diseases of the brain. Courtwright acknowledges that his emphasis on the supply-side of addiction (engineered pleasures, big business) must be complemented by the demand-side story, which traces the rise in addiction to the dislocation, isolation, and anomie of modern life. Bruce Alexander has pursued this story in The Globalization of Addiction. Age of Addiction was persuasive enough to make me rebalance my assessment of capitalism. Its somber assessment must now join Shoshanna Zuboff's indictment of surveillance capitalism and Fred Hirsch's and Robert Frank's works on zero-sum status competition (as well as older works by Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell on the cultural contradictions of capitalism) as another dark, and possibly growing, stain on capitalism's reputation.

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

For a tutorial on social capital, I've had the chance to reread this modern classic. What a joy! Bowling sets the standard for how to do social scientific research. Putnam has a knack for writing in a very accessible way, for finding all sorts of relevant data, and for humanizing the data with stories. Published 25 years ago, it's fascinating to see how he discerned trends that have only gotten worse - for example, the crisis in mental health, especially among the young (when I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, I assumed that this crisis had started around 2010 - but Putnam points out that it goes back decades earlier). And of course, the collapse of community of his subtitle has now morphed into disastrous polarization. Putnam is one of my heroes.

Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (2023)

Incoherent wishful thinking I read this for a reading group I've been in for the past 10 years. It's one of the worst books we've read. I'll start with some relatively minor (but still significant) flaws: 1) This reads like a piece of journalism blown up to 200 pages. Much of the book consists of Saini setting the scene of her encounters and quoting conversations with scholars rather than pointing to specific, more substantive evidence and scholarly arguments. 2) There are insinuations of gender biases in the literature (male scholars argue this way, female that) and of the role of European colonialism in spreading patriarchy to the rest of the world. These remain at the level of insinuation, so are never defended systematically. Some of Saini's own evidence undermines her own insinuations, especially in the case of Europe's impact (this is an instance of the incoherence I mentioned above; for more of which, see below). This is not to deny that European colonialism may in some cases have reinforced or changed patriarchy. I suspect this happened in smaller-scale societies, where patriarchy may not have existed already or been as entrenched. 3) Saini explains that her title - Patriarchs - is meant to acknowledge that there is no single thing patriarchy, just different versions of it. Yet repeatedly she discusses patriarchy precisely as a single thing. Furthermore, patriarchy, according to Saini, hasn't really diminished over time - a strange conclusion to anyone familiar with world history, especially in the last 100 or so years. 4) The greatest incoherence and wishful thinking occurs when it comes to Saini's central thesis. She argues that patriarchy is not at all rooted in biology, but rather took off when the state, needing growing populations, imposed rigid gender categories on their populations. But Saini's own evidence undermines her theses! She points to genetic bottlenecks that occurred before states formed as men who were successful in raiding and war were able to capture females and have lots of kids (this was one of the main rewards, and presumably drivers, of early warfare) while other men failed to reproduce. While she occasionally acknowledges these inconvenient facts (without, of course, recognizing how they simply don't dovetail with her the-state-launched-patriarchy thesis), she never wrestles with the extensive literature on the millenia of raiding and warfare before the state. Looking deeper in evolutionary time, Saini's treatment of human evolution is wholly inadequate. For example, she never discusses the fundamental evolutionary point that male and female mammals generally have different reproductive strategies - the former, whenever possible, favoring many offspring, the latter fewer and of higher quality. (These strategies don't apply at all times or under all circumstances, but they are a good starting point for explaining mammalian reproductive behavior). Saini never considers Richard Wrangham's influential work on male violence among the great apes (Demonic Males) or Bernard Chapais's on the evolution of pair bonding (Primeval Kinship). She mentions Christopher Boehm once, but does not explore the potential relevance of his ideas for the origins (and now decline) of patriarchy. Namely, Boehm argues that hunter-gatherers were not more egalitarian than chimpanzees because their individual desire to dominate had disappeared; rather HGs developed collective mechanisms to tame alpha males. Once agriculture happened, and population increased, however, those mechanisms broke down. The alphas were unleashed. My hunch is that this tracks what happened with patriarchy as well. And in recent times, of course, conditions have changed once again with industrialization, urbanization, democratization, modern communications. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward equality. Boehm's explanation includes biological elements, but also an important role for circumstances of one kind or another.