So my last batch of Audible books included one called American Furies by Sasha Abramsky.

Abramsky’s journey through the American prison system covers some of its history and theory, from the inception of penitentiaries to the concept of the panopticon, differentiating rehabilitative and reformative theory from punishment and vengeance. He talks a little about some of the founding theorists of correctional theory and explores a bit of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on what he saw touring prisons, and about Hobbes’s Leviathan and the works of Bentham, among others. But a lot of his focus is the here-and-now.

The author spends a fair large amount of the book exploring problems with old-school vengeance-based theories for prison, and the recent “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” trends as they relate to the growth of prison populations and the systematic injustice they incite. With increasing numbers of “life without parole” sentencing, mandatory minimum sentences (in particular for non-violent crime), three-strikes laws and other inclement policies. The main thrust of the book explains how these trends ratchet up the badness of being incarcerated: with no hope of ever being free, the only reason to follow rules is the avoidance of further brutality and suffering. Further, people who walk into prison systems psychically fragile often walk out substantially psychologically worse off than when they went in. Guards institute a culture of brutality and violence, regularly abuse prisoners or at least turn frequent blind eyes to prisoners being abused by others, and people who are paroled are often less able to obtain gainful employment after their imprisonment.

The book is largely an indictment, then, of what the modern prison system has become, and of the theories driving recent changes to the system.

Probably one of the weaker parts of the book is its brief but poignant invective against what amounts to conservative and Southern understandings of justice and the role of prison. While the parts about what the prison system is were, I felt, well-grounded in statistical, philosophical and scientific rigor, I felt like that particular section … while not in any sense incorrect, was maybe a bit … unnecessarily caustic.

Despite its weaknesses, I felt like this book helped my thinking about criminal justice, and as such it was a worthwhile listen (and/or read).

American Furies at Amazon, Audible.

More on the topic is queued up, and consider this me soliciting suggestions.

My biggest impression is that these books are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Hitchens has, as his basic thesis, that the whole idea of religion poisons everything in the world. Harris has a pretty similar view, that the presence of faith is a corrupting influence in the world.

Both Hitchens and Harris are pretty hard on the Jews and on Muslims, too, and Harris especially beats up on Islam for its intrinsic and unmoderated violence. Neither of them loses any love in the direction of the Christian establishment either, and neither has any illusions about the violence inspired by dominant Buddhism and Hinduism, and they both spend a bit of time dispelling false beliefs about so-called “peaceful religions”….

Both books have another similarity too: they spend significant amounts of time in hamfisted brutalizing of their points. Like …. I think Harris spends like 30 minutes of the 9 hour book citing chapter and verse from the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah as examples of the violence inherent in those books. Hitchens spends probably the latter third of his book beating on various historical issues pointing out how the jews were nasty people before they were the displaced minority, about how the muslims have been getting progressively nastier, about how christianity marched boldly into some really dark times.

That’s really my biggest complaint about these books … they both make good cases for their points, but at some point you just kind of have to look at the flayed mound of horseflesh and realize that there’s not much point in continuing to beat on it. That’s it.

Harris spends some time exploring non-religious spirituality … meditation, the exploration of the concept of self as subject and illusion, the nature of mind…. stuff like that. So from a phenomenological perspective, his work is pretty interesting, and leaves the window open for spirituality while slamming shut the door of dogmatic faith. He also spends time exploring a scientific morality and some of the problems with figuring out where our moral sphere does and doesn’t extend given the absence of an imposed religious order. So even if you’re going to opt to skip over the half a chapter that’s built entirely of bloody verses from holy books, the philosophical subject matter is worth thinking about.

Hitchens spends more of his time on history, talking about how religions around the world were basically the source of all kinds of evil, and how even ostensibly atheistic movements that turned out pretty badly generally involved elevating a leader to the level of occult figurehead. Less of the Stephen Pinker philosophical rigor, more of the journalistic bent.

Still, if you’re interested in hearing about how religion is bad for things, both books are pretty good things to sink your time into.

The Checklist Manifesto is a doctor’s exploration of unexpected ways we can cope with complexity in an increasingly complex world. Gawabe leads in by talking about the challenges that keeping track of a large set of relatively mundane tasks when we’re beset by complexity, especially in the context of his home discipline: medicine. He talks about patients he and other experienced surgeons have nearly lost because of avoidable complications and screw-ups in mundane stuff. It’s … a bit scary, in that regard. That leads to his thesis: that in a complex world, a well-crafted checklist, well-implemented, can be a huge boon.

He talks about the aviation origins of the checklist, and how modern pre-flight procedures in commercial airlines evolved from those origins. Explores the use of checklists in other fairly mundane but inherently complex trades, particularly construction and civil engineering, and then talks about application of the theory to less mundane things, particularly investing.

As a result of reading this book, I’ve sort of integrated its ideas a bit into my own work. Not going to get into it too much here, but … there’s a lot of things in my own life that work out better if I at least stop and take inventory of what I need to do before I start.

Blaargh, there’s more to say about it, but I’m not going to. Just read (or listen to) it, it’s good!

So Stephen Pinker’s got a really, really academic, very thorough style that really comes across in The Blank Slate. The whole book is a giant refutation of the idea that humans lack a complex, hard-wired human nature. Pinker methodically picks apart the argument from a biological and neurological perspective, then proceeds to pick apart why people are so attached to the idea of the tabula rasa, and from there proceeds to address the social consequences of the prevalence of the theory.

It’s a pretty intensive treatment — Pinker goes through every obvious argument, refutes it, addresses possible rejections of that refutation, and builds a solid case for his position at every step along the line, almost to annoying levels of thoroughness. He pulls in a wide variety of philosophers, biologists, and thinkers in general and paints a pretty complete picture. Very well-constructed, but a little plodding at times. Hard to get through, but definitely worthwhile.

Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded was also a bit hard to get through, but not for the same reasons as The Blank Slate was. While TBS suffered from its density and thoroughness, Friedman’s style is a bit less thorough, less philosophical, and more repetitive. I don’t have any idea how many times he belabors the phrase “Hot, Flat and Crowded” in the book, but it’s enough that I felt like it was gratuitous.

The book was a meandering trip through the dangers of growing populations of ever-richer people aiming for an American lifestyle replete with energy-hungry devices, polluting cars and factories, and a simply lousy way of getting that energy. It didn’t address the catastrophic consequences of dramatic global warming in quite the way I expected, but rather alluded to them while outlining the insane acceleration in emissions that rising standards of living for literally billions of people in the next couple decades will surely bring forth. He lays out the positive motivations for mitigating the problem that are true whether sea level rises three inches or three meters in the next century or so, and describes an energy economy based on large-scale adoption of sustainable sources.

The biggest reason the book was hard to get through, though, was its repeated rambles down utopian futuristic fantasies of repugnant lifestyles and micro-scale energy economies completely miss the fairly basic reasons that what he’s proposing probably probably can’t work. Beyond that, aiming at specific products, which in the two years or so since the book came out have proven quite untenable. He proposes this lifestyle that’s something like massively sedentary, which, as someone who already lives a very sedentary lifestyle, I don’t see as sustainable — I struggle with the health implications of my lack of ground covered on a daily basis as it is.

Other than getting a little preachy about some things and a little repetitive about others, and screwing up the science in a couple annoying and persistent places, he makes a good case for green, and that’s not a bad thing. All in all, I’d call it worth a go, but there’s definitely some parts where if you’re like me you’ll find yourself skipping a bit and being a bit annoyed.

Lastly, I gave a binge-listen to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This book promised, on its surface, to be an interesting run through the psychology of food and consumption, and with that regard, it delivered — kind of.

Pollan structures his book around four meals he prepares, and gimmicky set-ups to get to them. He pretty much goes from the industrially-raised corn and corn-fed beef culminating in an industrialized McDonald’s dinner to a Whole Foods “organic” meal to a meal gleaned from a particular local food operation to a hunter-gatherer meal, while exploring the food chains that the foods come from and interact with, their origins and backgrounds and how they came to be on his plate. In the process, he struggles with the ever-present question a modern omnivore faces: “what should I eat?”

This book sort of loops back in itself in almost a stream-of-consciousness way, reflecting the same thoughts and ideas in a couple different places, pulling back from the eating to think about the origins of the food, the perspective of the eater, the perspective of the eaten, evolutionary strategies, symbiosis, and what he often calls the “true cost” of various foods. Sometimes, these “true costs” are the hidden costs of industrialization — for example, fuel to produce industrial corn, fuel to transport it, energy input and water to refine it into an edible form, the cost to public health of eating a diet rich in corn. Some of the book focuses on pretty scientific topics, while others wax almost spiritual, agape at the limitations of either the author’s understanding, or the limits of the science.

Pollan brings up a lot of pretty interesting points as he explores his true costs, and as he wanders through industrial food production, then through a farm in the Shenandoah valley, through a brief flirtation with vegetarianism and into full-on hunter-gatherer mode, exposing in the process the inherent self-contradiction of a place like Whole Foods going nationwide and selling out-of-season organic Argentinian asparagus, the purported organic benefits of which likely ceased to exist over the days or weeks it spent on a boat from a continent away, and on trucks on the highway, before landing on his plate. Some of his descriptions called back to The Jungle, with his graphic descriptions of his own slaughter of chickens at Polyface Farm, and his description of how a slaughterhouse killing floor works.

Wandering from his own struggles with the question of what to eat, Pollan runs through the problems of how to feed himself, how to feed the country, the possibility or lack thereof of feeding cities without doing what we do, the ethics of eating animals, our atavistic conceits and a whole host of other issues.

One big problem I had with this one was that Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” is still fairly fresh in my mind, and so I have a lot of trouble with the strong presence of “the noble savage” in Pollan’s work. Every time he extolled the virtues of some prehistoric species or civilization and how it negotiated its way into a complex web of symbioses called out in my mind the assumption that the primitive, uncivilized way is inherently better. Some of these assertions seemed to me a bit too accepting.

Pollan doesn’t prescribe sweeping answers, doesn’t claim that industrial food is evil or that organics are always better, and does pull back some of the veil in ways that ordinary folks don’t normally get a chance to do, so that much was interesting. His refreshing acknowledgment that his hunter-gatherer meal and the organic foods he got were not for everyone and were the conceits of a modern person with a lot of opportunities to engage in those things was certainly appreciated. He engages with some of the intrinsic absurdity of his stated goal, while at the same time constructing a narrative that is both enlightening and edifying. So … again, worth a read, but with caveats.

I guess the takeaway from these last two is that we face systemic problems, the answers to which are either hard to do or simply unclear, and that we must nevertheless boldly engage these problems to make the future a better place. That’s the story, that’s where it’s sticking.