More on audiobooks. Recently tore through Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (all via Audible. Might as well do some reviewing…
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.