Swimming with Books: Summer 2018

I'm back at work after almost eight glorious weeks on sabbatical. For those of us privileged enough to consider such a thing, allow me to recommend adding "Sabbatical" to your bucket list. In addition to paying back some family debt, here's a list of books I dove into this summer. The tales and imagery of these books are still swimming around in my mind. I hope you enjoy my summaries and please let me know you were moved by any of these titles.

Why Buddhism is True

Bestselling author Robert Wright, who is best known for The Evolution of God and Nonzero, explains Buddhism in terms of evolutionary science. I became a Buddhist about 25 years ago and have actively studied and practiced since then, so I was immediately drawn to the title. I was happy to see that Robert fulfills the promise, both explaining from a scientific point of view why we have developed so many of the confusions that Buddhism points out, and talking about what to do about them.

The author also shares personal stories of his meditation experiences, and interviews with long time meditators. This experiential view helped avoid the most common problem with books on Buddhism… a kind of conceptual vagueness not grounded in human life.

If you are curious about Buddhism as a philosophy/worldview instead of a religion, you’ll enjoy this thoughtful, even joyful, tour.

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

A decade ago I blazed through the superb naval escapism of the Aubrey–Maturin series. So I did not need to be “Pressed” (lol see what I did there sorry) into reading the first of another similar series. First written in 1948, the Hornblower series set the stage for Master and Commander, which wasn’t written until 1969.

Both books feature British naval battles, inter-crew rivalries, horrors and brutality of military life and the dense rigging of seafaring vocabulary. But the Hornblower books follow one young man through a career, and so provide a single lens through which to view the boredom and carnage of 19th century seafaring. 

White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism

Robin Diangelo, a white woman who, for the last decade, has attempted to train employees to foster a less-racist work environment, breaks it down for other white people. Through personal anecdotes, painful but hilarious stories from workshops, and excerpts from research, Ms. Diangelo convincingly makes the following argument:

1. Since we incorrectly define racism as violent attacks against people of color, which is obviously bad, we couldn’t possibly be racist, because we are all good. If we white people get the least bit of feedback that something we did or said seemed racist to a person of color, we push back in all kinds of histrionic ways.
2. That’s because we’ve grown up in a racist society. For white people, one of the huge benefits of our society is that we have the luxury of not having to know that it’s racist. But if you ask almost any person of color, read any statistic about incarceration rate, or reflect in any depth on the history of our nation, you will come to the inescapable truth.
3. Avoiding that truth, both societaly and personally, not only perpetuates racism, but hobbles our ability to see reality clearly. Ms. Diangelo plainly states that in order for us to grow up and get in touch with reality, we have to acknowledge the impact that living in a racist society has had on us personally.

“Do you know what that looks like?” she asks in a profound part of the book. According to Ms. Diangelo, all we have to do is make sure that stopping our racist patterns is more important that convincing others that we don’t have them.

Finishing White Fragility inspired me to watch the incredible documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” on the later writing and speeches of James Baldwin. Highly recommended. His insights presage Robin Diangelo’s in several important and humanistic ways.

Democracy in Chains

I heard of this book from Brad Feld (who reads like a banshee and inspired this post). It’s a True Tales of Horror kind of text by a historian who found her way into the abandoned offices of the intellectual mastermind of the right-wing attempts to subvert majority rule in the USA. Nancy MacLean spends the first ? of the book profiling James Buchanan, his rise in at the University of Virginia, his partnership with Charles Koch, and his eclipse once Koch has appropriated his ideas.

Buchanan was a nasty man. He wrote that people who fail to save money for their future needs “Are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent.”

He also was a Nobel prize winning economist and celebrated academic at UVA, George Mason and numerous right-wing think tanks. Among other things, this book is a powerful rebuttal to the common critique of academia as being too liberal. It’s also a great summary of the impact of Brown vs Board of Education and the southern states’ response to it. I had no idea, for example, that the National Guard was first called out in Arkansas to prevent black kids from attending high school. It was only after Eisenhower saw the Russians using our racial strife as propaganda that he ordered the Guard to escort the kids inside.

But mostly, Democracy in Chains is a warning about the vastness and depth of the right-wing efforts to restrict voting, destroy unions and (ideally in their mind) amend the Constitution so that rich people don’t have to pay taxes to support the society that they benefit from. Reading this book put many of the news stories over the last decade into a coherent framework of conscious activities with one overarching aim - defeat democracy so the richest of us can maintain their privilege.

The Fifth Season

Science fiction and I are not close friends. I loved Ray Bradbury as a teenager, and Kurt Vonnegut’s forays into the genre made me laugh. But Dick and Asimov passed me by, and it really wasn’t until this book by NK Jemisin did I feel re-engaged. I picked up The Fifth Season because it’s the first of a three part series - each of which has won the Hugo Award.

The story is a woven narrative of women and men struggling to survive on a planet (future earth?) whose crust periodically erupts disastrously. Some people have an inborn power to channel earth energy. Fearing and needing their power, a government has developed to control and repress that group. In the first 20 pages I felt dropped into cave. As the story progressed, NK Jemisin brought me closer to the center of the story. Everything got hotter, brighter and more painful.

The Fifth Season is a convincing vision of an alternate world with plenty of implications for our own.

Robot-Proof

?Shout out to public libraries - I stumbled on this book in San Francisco during a conference lunch break before my sabbatical. Moved by its mission, I ordered and devoured it in a couple of days. Joseph Aoun is the President of Northeastern University. For my money, Northeastern is one of the most innovative universities in the country. They’ve found a way to blend study and work in a five year degree granting program that prepares graduating seniors in a way very few liberal arts colleges can. At Yesware we’ve hired both interns and graduates of Northeastern, and have seen firsthand the results of their approach.

This book is a call to upend higher education again, this time in the face of AI. Aoun summarizes the now well-known threat of white collar automation, which will mirror the blue collar job losses of the last 20 years. He then proposes a ‘robot-proof’ learning model called humanics. Humanics, made up of three literacies and five cognitive capacities, are meant to build on the unique strengths of the human mind, and steer our education away from the skills where we can’t compete with computers.

Although I found the back third of the book too bogged down in anecdotes of Northeastern programs instead of more sweeping data or examples, I appreciated the survey of AI threats and the inspiring call for educational change.

Next up on my reading list - How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking