Book Report: 2021
Here’s a writeup of the books that made the biggest impressions on me this past year, along with some reflections on each.
I’ve enjoyed gathering my thoughts together. And I’m forever humbled by how much there is to learn about this magnificent world of ours. Perhaps you’ll find a book of interest here. Or if you’ve read any of these and want to discuss, please tap me.
To foreshadow the themes below: existential risk, the wealth gap, charitable giving, Buddhist practice, psychedelics, racism and social justice, and nature vs. nurture.
But first…
Moby Dick — Herman Melville
“I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as the lamb” wrote Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851 about his new novel.
What can be said about this colossus? It’s profoundly strange. Hillarious. Tangential hardly covers it. And the phallic innuendo is so widespread I can’t tell if half of American slang came from whaling (and whaler) anatomy or the other way around.
Moby Dick must be one of the most peculiar gems of literature and I enjoyed the monomaniacal voyage greatly. In fact, some of the most sublime moments of my year were Sunday mornings in bed, with a cup of tea and PB&J sandwich, reading the delicately embossed letters that so many have read before me.
This week, on my first night of covid fever, I re-opened this book of 143 chapters to The Hyena, which starts thusly:
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
I also came across this weird artifact of the internet: a reading out loud of all 143 chapters each with a different reader, including Tilda Swinton, John Waters, and Sir David Attenborough. Indeed, John Waters reads the chapter called The Cassock, in which Melville describes one of the crew as he carves up a whale carcass, cutting loose the penis skin and wearing like a papal robe as he goes about his slicing and dicing.
Find it on Soundcloud and Spotify.
(read in hardback, a copy that had once belonged to the San Francisco Public Library, with woodcut illustrations by Rockwell Kent)
The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Decours the Elite — Daniel Markovitz
I found this one oddly gripping. Markovits is a Yale scholar of law, and it’s a dense read (or listen). But the argument and thesis is fresh and fascinating. Markovitz takes on the divide between poor and rich, subordinate and superordinate, those who work the “gloomy” and the “glossy” from the perspective of the American meritocratic sorting system.
He reminds us how the aristocracy of the past flaunted their status by working as little as possible. He then takes us to mid-century America where the middle class and the rich were hard to tell apart, and the most expensive car you could buy was only about twice as expensive as a normal car.
Contrast both of these eras to today. The unskilled and less-educated workforce is segregated from the skilled, highly trained workers, with less and less upward mobility in the corporate ladder. While the societal elite sacrifice themselves on the pyre of work, self-sacrifice, and self-alienation.
“Economic inequality now threatens to divide America against itself” and turn us into a “caste society,” with the very poor and the very rich making up the fat ends of the spectrum. It sucks at the bottom, it sucks at the top. And there’s not much of a middle class remaining.
He makes clear calls for wealth distribution and for widening the meritocracy gates, such as higher education, to more people. This book will be shaping my outlook for years to come, I believe.
I listened to his interview with Sam Harris twice before cracking the book.
(audiobook)
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity — Toby Ord
Ord comes out of the Oxford research community that studies existential risks: the probability that we’ll be wiped out (or close enough to it). He and Nick Bostrom probably play darts at the pub and have terrifying debates.
The Precipice is Ord’s look at our chances of survival as a species on this planet, and what risks loom largest. It’s sober, not completely disheartening, and well researched/argued. Maybe more than anything it’s a wake-up call on the risks of AI and engineered pandemics (see the stats below).
If you spend time thinking about whether we’re going to make it, and what might be our demise, read it.
Want the cheat-sheet?
Chances of existential calamity to humanity in the next 100 years, according to Toby Ord:
Natural disasters:
– asteroid or comet: 1/1M
– volcanic eruption: 1/10k
– stellar explosion: 1/1B
Total risk of natural disasters: 1/10k
Anthropocentric (human-caused) risk:
– nuclear war: 1/1,000
– climate change: 1/1,000
– other environmental damage: 1/1,000
– natural pandemic: 1/10k
– engineered pandemic: 1/30
– Artificial Intelligence: 1/10
Total anthropocentric risk: 1/6
Grand total existential risk (all causes): 1/6
Sleep tight!
Here’s Ord interviewed on Sam Harris and 80,000 Hours.
(audiobook, read by the author)
Doing Good Better — William MacAskill
There’s really something of a revolution in the world of charity, philanthropy, and the philosophy of generosity. This book stands out as a milestone in the thinking around how to tackle big problems in the world, and how to know we’re actually helping.
MacAskill is a young Scottish philosopher and research fellow at Cambridge University (he’s 34) who has become obsessed with approaching generosity and giving with data and critical thinking. In the process, he takes on philanthropic truisms and bashes them apart. The premise is simple, what efforts actually help the most people rather than helping the givers feel good. Does boycotting sweatshops make things better or worse for the global poor? Don’t answer so fast. Should you quit your overpaid finance job and join Oxfam? Probably not.
This school of thought isn’t just rhetorical, either. It’s closely tied to the Effective Altruism movement and the Giving What We Can Pledge (which I took after reading this book) committing to give a minimum of 10% of my annual pre-tax income to the most impactful charities.
If you fancy yourself a person who wants to make a positive change, please consider the frameworks outlined in this book. And if you have philanthropist relatives and friends, it makes a great gift.
Related: Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do
MacAskill interviewed on Sam Harris’ podcast
(audiobook, I didn’t like the narrator)
Cultivating the Empty Field — Zen Master Hongzhi
Now we get to the Eastern Religion section of the bookstore. If this is not of great interest to you, skip ahead to racism, psychedelics, evolutionary behaviorism, and more!
Hongzhi Zhengjue, known as Master Hongzhi, was a Chinese Buddhist monk who taught in the twelfth century. The Soto school of Zen treasures his teachings on Silent Illumination meditation, known as Shikantaza.
This translation of short poetic verses is some of the most sublime religious writing I’ve ever held. It can only be taken in slowly, so, despite being a slim book, it took me about a year and a half to read to the end.
One line in particular persisted with me and helped me during my darker moments of 2020:
Face everything, let go, attain stability
(read in print)
The Way of the Bodhisattva — Shantideva
A classic of the Buddhist canon, The Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra was written by Indian scholar Shantideva in the 8th century. It was originally suggested to me by a sensei during face-to-face teaching (dokusan) at Zen Mountain Monastery. Written in verses, it’s s a beautiful exploration of compassion that focuses a lot on the equalization of other and self, and the raising of bodhicitta, or the desire to awaken for the benefit of the world.
It’s also not lacking in color:
How can you remain at ease like this
When you have done the deeds that lead
To contact on your tender baby-flesh
Of boiling liquids in the hell of Extreme Heat?
Both a core classic of Buddhist thought and a potent source of insight and guidance.
(read in print, although the audiobook is a trip!)
The Dhammapada: A New Translation of the Buddhist Classic — Gil Fronsdal
Considered one of the most widely-read Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada is a collection of the words of the Buddha, (500 BC) first preserved orally, then in Pali. Harsh, poetic, illuminating. The OG.
(read in print)
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion — Sam Harris
This book made a big impression on me this year. Sam Harris has been one of my favorite thinkers for the last few years, and his Making Sense podcast is a mainstay of my idea diet. Many of the books I’ve read are by authors he’s interviewed, but somehow I’d managed not to read Waking Up, despite my strong interest in meditation.
Published in 2014, Waking Up has a very personal core for Harris, who spent years of his younger life chasing meditation teachers through Asia, and ultimately spending the equivalent of several years in silent retreat. He also sets the stage with tales of his early MDMA and psychedelic adventures and misadventures.
While the book markets itself as spirituality without religion, it could more rightly position itself as: a rationalist’s guide to Buddhist philosophy and practice. The central argument is that the self is an illusion (one we’re better off losing) and meditation is the tool for dismantling it.
The self is an illusion of consciousness, he argues. And yes, “there are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons.”
“…like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.”
And this is “an experiment you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind, by paying attention to your experience in a new way.”
I’ve yet to come across such a steeped Western rationalist make such an earnest case for the importance of the contemplative project, and the overturning of the illusion of the self. It hit me quite hard, and offers a rare combination of structured argument and experiential call to action.
Along the way we get interesting cases drawn from his neuroscience background (like the fascinating strangeness of split-brain patients as illustrations of the mechanical reducibility of the self). We get a cautionary chapter on the fallibility and Eastern spiritual teachers (in both East and Western settings) whose misbehavior ranges from absurdly glutinous to criminally abusive.
Waking Up also gives psychedelics their airtime (Harris confides that he thinks his daughters would be missing out on one of the most important things in life if they decide not to try hallucinogens).
There’s also the fact that Harris has created one of the best meditation apps out there (also called Waking Up) and the book is a great gateway into the app (section of the book are actually excerpted here and there in the app).
Whether you’re a spiritual seeker, student of consciousness, in the field of cognition, or interested in the philosophy of sentience, this book is a tightly rigged ship and a very fun sail.
(audiobook, read by the author)
On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious— Douglas Harding
This odd little book is referenced frequently in Sam Harris’ Waking Up book and in his guided meditations in the Waking Up app. Harding was an English architect who had a “headless” experience while in the Himalayas and developed a philosophy/practice of selflessness. I can’t say is you’ll find Harding’s exercises moving — which involve looking back at yourself, the perceiver, in a flash attempt to prove you’re not really there (at least not in the way you think you are). But the writing is passionate and beautiful, and he’s a fascinating if rather unremembered thinker who offers something refreshing.
Magic and Mystery in Tibet — Alexandra David-Néel
Here we have one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century you’ve never heard of. I remember sitting in a noodle shop in Brooklyn transfixed to her Wikipedia page until long after the noodles were cold. Alexandra David-Néel was a French-Belgian explorer, author, and spiritualist who was obsessed with the religions and mysticism of Asia, in particular the insular majesty of Tibet. As early as the 1910s she was costuming herself as a man or in beggar's rags to sneak across borders and mountain ranges to investigate and write about the mysteries of the East, gaining audiences with kings and even the 13th Dalai Lama. She wasn’t just a researcher but a practitioner and was training in Buddhism before westerners knew one Eastern religion from another.
Magic and Mystery in Tibet is her best-known book, published in 1929, and reads like an adventure script. Her books were said to have inspired the beatniks and probably untold self-appointed explorers.
Whether or not you ever read her books — just behold the life of this fearless woman! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_David-Neel
(read in 1965 edition hardcover)
One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, A Zen Memoir — Henry Shukman
I don’t seek out memories but was feeling curious about Shukman. One Blade of Grass is the telling of his life, almost in its entirety, as it leads through childhood, a peripatetic youth, dysthymic adolescence in academia, a cranky career as an author and poet, and gradual acquaintance and eventual intimacy with Zen Buddhism. Shukman is now a teacher in the Zen lineage, so this is a rarely detailed reflection on one’s own life through the eyes of a Zen master, so to speak.
On one hand, his life is boring: some of his greatest torments are recurring eczema and very familiar-sounding frustrations with his father. But he tells his life with a delicate sensitivity that made me eager to press play each night when I turned out the lights for bed.
It’s also an honest and detailed look at the long path of meditation training: the intrigue, confusion, frustration, breakthrough, relapse, and finally revolution that can unfold. I found it heartening in my own efforts to hear the path detailed in both its arduous struggle and ineffable transformation.
(audiobook, read by the author)
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — Sogyal Rinpoche
This book report entry started with delight and then took a turn into a cautionary tale of horror. I left it for the end of this section for a reason.
There’s a good chance I gave you a copy of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying this year. A friend recommended it, encouraging me specifically to look into its teachings on Tonglen, a compassion meditation. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is a number of things: an introduction to the core teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, a manual for various meditation practices, a window into the unique Tibetan tradition, and a treatise on the importance of embracing death as part of a life well-lived.
I liked it so much I started buying three and four second-hand copies at a time and gifting them to friends — I’ve probably parted with a dozen by now and there are now four more on my shelf. I’m not the only one who liked it — it was a bestseller for the author, the Tibetan lama Sogyal Rinpoche.
Sogyal was a Tibetan refugee, a venerated teacher and scholar, and the leader of an international network of meditation training centers under the Rigpa name. Though a lay-person and not a monk, he was thought to be the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century Buddhist saint.
Sogyal died in 2019. You can pray for his swift rebirth on the Rigpa Center homepage. Or maybe not…
Perhaps you know, but after decades of silence, Sogyal was accused of being a raging psycho who abused his students with sexual coercion, violence, and psychological torture.
In 2017, a dozen of his long-term students, some of whom had been dedicated to him for over thirty years, came forth with a letter saying they could no longer be silent about his misdeeds.
The letter (read it here) calls out his sexual abuse, acts of enraged physical violence, and his “lavish, gluttonous, and sybaritic lifestyle.”
The claims were taken up by an investigation commissioned by the Rigpa board of trustees (read it here) which found many of the claims (and more) to be confirmed by interviews with witnesses.
I’m going into some depth on this because it’s a cautionary tale that needs to be known. This revered spiritual leader — a darling of celebrities, and friends with the Dalai Lama — seemed to think what he was doing was all in the name of spiritual training. What was he doing?
Sogyal was physically violent both in private and in public. He gut-punched a nun in front of an assembly of more than 1,000 students in France in 2016. He would hit people with his backscratcher when the service they offered him was displeasing, sometimes drawing blood. He punched people leading to unconsciousness and concussions.
He had sometimes five or six girlfriends at a time and was frequently visibly irritable about how one or more affairs were going. He slept with his married students. He chose attractive female attendants to cater to his around-the-clock demands, including a 19-year-old daughter of a student, who he pressured to do sexual favors, including oral sex, stripping, taking pictures of their genitals, dancing for him in bathing suits, and at least once offered a 20-year-old student to another lama for sex (telling her to go out and buy condoms). When she broke down hysterically crying in a bathroom, another student took her to a bus stop and put her on a bus to the city “even though I had nowhere to go when I got there. No one contacted me or checked I was safe.”
He had his students make photo collages using photos of naked female students. He made students have sex together in his bed. He made male students take pictures of their genitals so he could compare his own.
Though he was not a monk, and not expected to be celibate, he chose to live a lavish and indulgent life at the expense of donors, with people attending to his needs around the clock and receiving punishment if their service was lacking. He watched hours of television daily (and demanded detailed programming schedules), had masseuses on call at all times, and had a taste for expensive cigars, which he smoked in secret.
Part of what is so dismally disturbing about Sogyal’s patterns is that he kept claiming he thought these were good for his students, and part of their process of releasing the ego. Like Chögyam Trungpa–the famous Tibetan teacher and founder of Shambhala, who is more famous for his drunken rages, public violence, and philandering–this insanity was often framed as “crazy wisdom,” teachings designed to jolt the student from their precious self-clinging.
(For more on Trungpa’s wake of destruction, see the chapter of Waking Up that tells of how Trungpa’s principal student, Thomas Frederick Rich Jr./Ösel Tendzin was aware he had AIDS and continued to have unprotected sex with male and female students (some of who accused him of violent rape), and was instructed by Trungpa that spiritual powers would prevent anything bad from happening. At least one of his victims died of AIDS.)
Also terrifying is that Sogyal’s students kept quiet and covered up for him. It continues to be nearly magical the degree to which charismatic abusers can maintain a circle of silence around their misdeeds that keep their secrets contained, or at least un-investigated. In their letter, his senior students express dismay and regret for their complicity in the coverups.
So there we have it: yet another revered leader exposed as an abusive psycho. The moral of the story? That no category or denomination is immune from corruption and hypocrisy. And especially in spaces where gurus are held as perfect liberators — beware. I’m especially concerned that with a new major wave of interest in meditation and eastern religion (with millions of people downloading Headspace, mindfulness-based stress reduction entering medical mainstream, and some percentage of people finding their way to spiritual teachers) we may be setting the stage for more horror stories. Maybe, as Eastern religion continues to take up root in the West, part of our contribution can be an objectivity and vigilance that keeps bad actors from entrenching themselves and praying on us.
(read in paper — free PDF here)
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys—James Fadiman
A psychonaut nerd’s delight! Fadiman is part of this American vanguard of researchers who were plumbing the potentials of psychedelics when the Nixon White House aggressively halted all such study in the panic of the late 60s. Trained at Harvard and Stanford, Fadiman co-founded the field of Transpersonal Psychology, co-authored a book with Abraham Maslow, and is probably best known as a proponent of psychedelic microdosing.
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, published in 2011, is a handy handbook, a curated research review, and a biography of some of the field’s top pioneers (and I’ve found it magnificently fun). Its five sections include excerpts from the likes of Alan Watts, Albert Hoffman (the synthesizer of LSD), Tim Leary, and Bill Wilson (founder of AA). There is also great advice and guidelines for those interested in doing their own voyaging (or seeking a qualified guide to lead them).
Some of the most stunning stuff is Fadiman’s own research into enhanced problem-solving: picture architects engineers, etc. under the influence of psychotropic compounds. The evidence is truly inspiring, and science would probably not be the same without it: Fadiman reminds us that Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in deciphering DNA, claims he first visualized the double-helix while on LSD.
And he goes into depth on the phenomena of sub-perceptual doses of LSD and mushrooms (microdosing)–a practice that is seeing great popularity and attention at the moment.
If you’re interested in this field, you must read this book. I’m also very curious to check out Fadiman’s newest book, Your Symphony of Selves (on personality psychology, not drugs).
Here’s (the 1st hour) of Fadiman interviewed on Sam Harris’ podcast.
Consciousness Medicine: Indigenous Wisdom, Entheogens, and Expanded States of Consciousness for Healing and Growth — Françoise Bourzat
A psychedelic therapist I met in Bolivia this summer suggested I read this. Consciousness Medicine makes an interesting counterweight to Fadiman’s book. Françoise Bourzat is a French/American practitioner who has made a name as a leading psychedelic therapist and healer. Consciousness Medicine is written to inform guides as much as it’s for those interested in ingesting. While she surveys other rituals like sweat lodges, vision quests, and ecstatic dance, the book pivots on psychedelic experiences, specifically Bourzat’s instruction she’s received from her mentor, Julieta Casimiro Estrada, in the use of magic mushrooms.
Julieta (as Bourzat refers to her throughout) was a Mexican healer in the Mazatec indigenous tradition. Julieta was a member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers and was friends with Maria Sabina (the legendary curandera, sacred plant healer, who captured imaginations in the 1960s) as they both come from the same region of the Oaxacan state of Mexico. Here is Julieta interviewed in BOMB magazine in 2007.
In the book’s introduction, Bourzat tells her own story, which includes recovery from heroin addiction, and her path to healing through various methods, including psychoactive plants.
Unfortunately, I have to report that in doing background reading for this writeup, I found recent allegations against Bourzat and her husband, Aharon Grossbard (also a large figure in the alternative therapy and psychedelics world) accusing them of sexual misconduct and other transgressions with therapy patients.
[Update: a season of this new podcast series from New York Magazine is dedicated to the topic of abuses in the world of psychedelic-assisted therapies. Listen to Cover Story: Power Trip.]
The most outspoken figure in these accusations is a man named Will Hall who was treated by Grossbard over a period of years, and was close with the couple. I’ll leave it to others to read and evaluate (Hall’s long writeup is here and a piece in Inverse). Interestingly, Hall believes Grossbard appears in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind as one of the psychedelic guides Pollan is freaked out by and chooses not to work with (the name is changed to Andrei in Pollan’s book, but Hall is confident it’s him).
It’s notable that it seems Bourzat had her Hakomi therapist’s certification “unconditionally revoked, with no chance of reinstatement” after “multiple ethical violations.” And Grossbard, who was listed as a co-founder of The Center for Consciousness Medicine has since been terminated from teaching and advisory roles.
We’ll see if more clarity comes to the accusations of abuse by Bourzat and Grossbard. If nothing else, this is a reminder that psychedelic-assisted therapy, a field about to very rapidly expand, has all the right conditions for serious abuses and manipulations. We should be braced (and closely on the lookout) for plenty of this.
Bourzat interviewed on Tim Ferris (with a disclaimer on the accusations)
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race — Beverly Daniel Tatum
First published in 1997, Tatum’s prologue to the 2017 edition asks: “why are all the black kids still sitting together in the cafeteria?” This book, now considered a classic in the field, is a survey of the social psychology of racism and a call to action for interrupting the racism cycle.
Beverly Daniel Tatum is a towering figure. She was president of Spellman College (America’s oldest women’s historically black college), and when at Mount Holyoke she served as Dean, acting President, and was a professor of psychology there for 13 years, teaching on the psychology of racism.
Her updated edition of the book is 100 pages thicker, and reflects on Obama’s presidency, Black Lives Matter, and the early days of Trump’s presidency.
Especially if you’re an educator or in the field of ed, Tatum’s question appears more pressing than ever. School segregation in the US seems to be sitting at the same levels it did in the 1960s and 70s, and black children are more than twice as likely as white peers to attend high-poverty schools.
“Why Are All The Black Kids” covers a broad remit, and is considerably more encyclopedic, deeply referenced, and less electrifying (or polarizing) than many books on racism that have come out in recent years (White Fragility, How to Be an Anti-Racist). I think it offers a comprehensive survey of the contours of racial discrimination and the kinds of conversations and confrontations that happen in our country moment to moment. Tatum is a social psychologist, so many of her references are from the social psych world, but the book is bolstered with anecdotes and dialogs that humanize it through each chapter.
The book isn’t just research: it’s a call to anti-racism action by whites, all of whom benefit from the systems of racism, she says. “Whites have greater access to the societal institutions in need of transformation. To whom much is given, much is required.”
Especially as more and more of my own work, community activity, and social ties are with people of color, I found this book a strong and stable guide deeper into the issues of black experience, racial identity, and the mechanisms and harms of racism.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — Isabel Wilkerson
Caste was widely read last year, and I’d like to have more conversations about it. Wilkerson is a journalist who won the Pulitzer for her book The Warmth of Other Suns about the great migration. In Caste, she seeks to re-view systematic oppression and inequity through a new lens. Neither strictly about race nor about class, caste is a societal rank system that places identifiable groups at the top and bottom of its ladder.
The three systems she excavated are the caste hierarchy in India, the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, and minorities in the US, specifically African Americans.
Wilkerson builds her thesis against a rotating montage of horrors from the eras of slavery and Jim Crow that should make the most stoic person’s knees weak. With vivid and unrelenting writing she brings her readers into the nightmare of lynchings, mutilations, petty revenge murders, and psychopathic rules and laws that constitute one of the great humanitarian catastrophes.
And this, the above, is one of the great contributions of Caste. If each generation needs to be reminded of the malevolent depths of human behavior, and the unspeakable crimes committed against African Americans in such recent history, then this book is carrying out that solemn ceremony. And it should be read for that if nothing else.
Where I’m left wondering is: does the invocation of caste (rather than race, class, economics, etc.) bring something new to the quandry that shapes our debates, research, policitcs, and policies for the better? Wilkerson is not the first to use a caste model to try and make sense of segregated America (both The Meritocracy Trap and Self-Portrait in Black and White both invoke caste in a contemporary context), but she chose to make it the central theme of this work. I will say that, in an era of ongoing injustices and new waves of confusion and hysteria, fresh views are probably a very valuable thing.
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race — Thomas Chatterton Williams
Here is a fascinating book–part autobiography, part racial philosophy–from a very skillful and brave writer. Williams, the son of a Black father and a white mother, grew up identifying as Black, but was always racially ambiguous. When he and his wife, who is white, get married, they move to France and have their first child who is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl.
Williams uses his life, his history, and his family to ask hard questions about what race really is, and what it must continue to mean, as a way of understanding one another.
His conclusion (if I’m getting it right) is that he has seen a vision of the future, and it’s good. Not that racial distinctions will be eventually blended away in the genetic melting pot and so become irrelevant. But that making racial castes (he uses the term frequently) and racial identities can truly cease to be useful and important.
He certainly is not claiming that a post-racialist society has arrived anywhere. But he also says that: “to my knowledge in my adult life I’ve never been harmed by my appearance or lineage,” that is, by those who discriminate against or mistreat him for being Black. He also takes a strong skepticism toward “the loudest voices around race today.” That is, whites who say it’s essential they self-flagellate for the original racist sins of their people, and leading anti-racist thinkers who frame everything as a struggle between races. He even draws attention to the term Black Lives Matter, and its implication of lives that are fundamentally Black, presumably for all time.
I know I’m not doing justice to the delicacy of Williams’ book, which is especially touching given how much he shares of his young family. Maybe it’s a book that’s before its time, or maybe it’s old-fashioned in its vision for racially transcendent humanism.
(audible, read by the author)
Three related books I want to read this year: Racecraft (Fields), Woke Racism (McWhorter), Uneasy Peace (Sharkey)
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature — Steven Pinker
This spring my brother and sister came to stay with me in Mexico City for a while. As we walked home from dinner one night we got on to some perennial debates like, what shapes us more, nature or nurture? and some more contemporary correlates to issues like transgender bathroom laws.
The conversation turned heated when we boiled down deeper to our underlying views on what shapes human behavior. I found that I was convinced that evolution has made us who we are, bodies and brains both, and that the ways we act starts in gene expressions. My siblings (my sister coming from an academic training in social psychology, public health policy, and healthcare economics, and my brother from a career as a visual artist–and also transgender) were far more sure that society and its constructed frameworks of meaning are the primary forces of influence.
It got heated. At one point I jolted out of my chair and slapped the glass tabletop as hard as I could. The idea that human evolution is a force barely worth understanding was an outrage. I couldn't sleep that night. I stayed up making digital flashcards with things like: Multicellular life = 1 billion years ago, Homosapiens = 200,000 years ago, and Oldest cave art = 33,000 years ago.
It was a difficult exchange, and I wouldn’t say it brought the three of us closer (and I’m still apologetic for my outburst). But it left me with important questions that I realized I hadn’t asked myself. It also made it very clear to me that there are very different schools of thought, even fault lines, present in modern progressive thought. Starker than I realized. And that, while I feel convinced of what I’ve learned about the science of evolution, I’m not actually sure what conclusions I believe it implies about how we should be making sense of the world.
So I went out looking for a book. And there, looming like a cinderblock, is The Blank Slate, a modern tome of behavioral science by the notorious scholar Steven Pinker. Pinker was the director of MIT’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and is now a professor of psychology at Harvard.
As part of setting up its thesis, The Blank Slate goes to great lengths to show that the debate on the nature/nurture divide is a raging one, from universities to Washington DC to the op-ed pages to dinner table brawls. At least it was comforting to hear we’d wound up in the same debate that had nearly gotten E.O. Wilson excommunicated from academia!
Pinker’s mission is to knock down three core ideas:
– The blank slate: the human mind enters the world with no inherited traits
– The noble savage: people are born good and then corrupted by society
– The ghost in the machine: people have souls, free from our biology, that make choices
These might hit you hard, or sound like not much. But in the real world they lead into some of hottest hot button issues around. Questions like the heritability of intelligence. If violent tendencies can be passed through genes and races. If gender differences are learned or encoded. And if selfishness is natural or a product of capitalism.
It’s probably tempting to say you’re somewhere in the blur zone between genetic determinism (well of course our genes influence us) and cultural constructionism (but of course society constructs identities), but is that enough of a foundation? Or is this a decisive binary and we need to choose a side?
I really don't know. And I’m not sure The Blank Slate helped me tremendously. It didn’t make me adore Steven Pinker very much, but that’s a different problem ;)
I do think it’s clear that we’re sitting in the middle of some tectonic-scale presumptions about what drives our civilization, and a great deal depends on how we choose to understand the forces beneath.
