review

Prince of Marshes:
And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

book by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is a multilingual (among others: Farsi, Arabic) young Scottish diplomat, and adventurer. He quit his job in the foreign service (postings in Jakarta, Iran and elsewhere) in his mid-twenties, to walk across Afghanistan (he wrote a book about that too, Places in Between). When the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is formed after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he decides to offer his services to the American/British command in Baghdad. He gets posted as deputy governor of the remote south-eastern province of Maysan, on the border of Iran.

And so the young 30-year-old Etonian (I assumed he was Etonian throughout the book, good to have that confirmed on the ol’ Wikipedia) does his very best to bring his modern take on a kinder, gentler, democratic colonial rule. He achieves some success, building schools, refurbishing hospitals, setting up elections, diffusing violence, causing violence, doling out cash, keeping security, losing security, making jobs and promises, and delivering on some. And navigating his way through the maze of ethnic, religious, political and military players in the Iraqi province: the Iranian-backed factions and their militias, the ex-Baathists, the sundry tribes and sheiks and their militias, the Islamists (moderate and radical) and their militias, the Sadrists and their militias, and even an old Communist named Abu Ivan.

The prose is elegant, the anecdotes snappy, moving, funny and sad; and the arc of the narrative ultimately tragic. Stewart does well to avoid any particular slant on things, presents the facts as he sees them, and leaves the reader to make judgments (mostly, anyway; he leaves little doubt what he thinks of the Italian military).

And yet, in some ways, the smart, young, adventurous Rory Stewart is a good poster-child for the better-meaning ideals behind the invasion. What emerges is a study in modern arrogance: not the aggressive arrogance of the cowboy invaders, but possibly the more dangerous implicit arrogance of those-who-know-best-with-everyone’s-best-interest-at-heart. The arrogance of certainty that comes with the moral status of liberal demorcat. The updated colonialists aren’t much on firing squads, secret police informants, or torture (or at least, they don’t want to be); they much prefer democratic councils, defense of the rights of minorities and women; local poetry magazines; irrigation projects, and job fair. Which is the better colonialist isn’t clear. What’s clear is that in Iraq, neither was all that successful.

Thirty-year-old Rory Stewart, despite his Etonian/Oxford education, his talent for languages, and his tireless work in the service of the high ideals of democracy, openness government, human rights, could not get these Iraqis to do what he wanted them to do: to form a stable, inclusive government to rule their province. The forces pulling them - their history, religion, geography, foreign influence, philosophy - were too great.

Stewart does well to describe the flaws of the occupation and the CPA - frustrations with central decisions by Bremmer and staff in Baghdad, problems with too much money or too little, inexperienced policy-makers, arrogant decision-makers, and all the rest.

But you can’t help get the sense that the CPA, even with a flawlessly-implemented occupation, was bound to have problems, probably insurmountable. The overwhelming sense is that, as much as the Iraqi’s didn’t like Saddam, there were few in the country who wanted to buy what the CPA was selling, even from such charming salesmen as Rory Stewart.

My rating: 4.0 stars

This Is Your Brain on Music

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book by daniel levitin

What a fantastic book. Introduced by music theory for dummies (what, exactly, are harmony, pitch, rhythm, timbre, major and minor keys, etc etc … I vaguely knew, but couldn’t have told you. I still don’t quite know, but it was all explained wonderfully well for my music-interested, but music-theory-challeneged mind). Followed by discussions of neuroscience, brain function, evoutionary biology, always circling back to music, and how and why we relate to it.

Written clearly, with entertaining vignettes (Levitin, now a prof of of Cognitive Psychology at McGill University, was a music producer in the 1970s, for bands including the Clash, and Blue Oyster Cult), this is a wonderful exploration of the latest theories how the mind works (both psychology and neurophysics), and why music moves us so. Wonderful wonderful stuff.

My rating: 4.0 stars

Snow Crash

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Book by Neal Stephenson

Written in 1992, Snow Crash is a cyberpunk visionary work, presaging Second Life and other online multiplayer games, among other things.

The plot: pizza delivery man, hacker, amateur swordsman, freelance intel gatherer and Metaverse legend Hiro Protagonist stumbles on a virus - a binary image that looks like the old television snowscreens - that infects not computers, but hackers; and tries to save the day. It’s a fantastic satire of the USofA, where the country has broken down into autonomous corporate sovereign entities, who open franchulates in the burbclaves, with the Narcolumbians vying for citizens with Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, and Uncle Enzo’s Nova Scicilia, as well as Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates (among others).

There’s all sorts of cool stuff in here, including skateboarding Kouriers, who harpoon speeding vehicles, to get where they are going; meditations on Sumerian religion and the origins of lagnuage; psychopathic Aleuts; Kanata swords; thrash metal; religious and nuclear apocalypse. Again: among other things.

Not just candy (though it was candy); well worth a read.

My rating: 3 stars

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Crazy about Lili

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Book by William Weintraub

A light fluffy fantasy about a young McGill student and would-be writer in late-1940s Montreal, who strikes up a friendship and potential romance with the infamous Lili L’Amour, the great Texas-born, Montreal striptease artiste.

L’Amour is based on Lili St. Cyr, the burlesque icon, and many other real-life characters and locales are weaved into the tale, by Weintraub, writer of the fine exploration of Montreal’s seamier history, City Unique.

Good fun, especially worthwhile for the historical details of the underside of Montreal’s night clubs and characters in the 1940s.

My rating: 2 stars

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America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy

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Book by Francis Fukayama

It’s a relief to read at least one (semi) mea culpa from a leading cheerleader for the policies that lead to War in Iraq, and the catastrophe that has been the Bush presidency.

Francis Fukayama is the famous writer of the famous article/book, End of History, in which liberal democracy and free markets triumph over evil, everyone gets rich and happy, and the days of war and disagreements fade into the distant memory of unenlightened times.

Fukayama is also a founding member of the Project for a New American Century and a signatory of their Statement of Principles, along with 24 other smart cookies, such as: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Kagan, I. Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, Norman Podhoretz, and Paul Wolfowitz. The Project argues for a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,” and was a gathering place for the intellectual leaders and policy implementers of our very own actual New American Century, the one that looks a little less shiny than the one predicted by its proponents (including Fukayama) a decade ago. So Fukayama had front row seats, as a champion theoretician, to the ideological experiment whose results we’ll have to live with for the next 50 years, at least. The movement has collapsed, but we’ve not heard a peep from the rest of Fukayama’s ideological buddies - except the occasional claim that the ideas were good, the implementation was at fault.

Fukayama’s reckoning, a little late mind you, is refreshing. He’s realized that ignoring 5,000 years of human history is perhaps a bad way to run the only empire left in the world. Unless, that is, you want to run it into the ground.

Still, the book smacks of disingenuousness: it really wasn’t his fault after all, his intentions were pure. And Fukayama’s prescription for “realistic Wilsonianism” (essentially: maybe we should work within international laws and frameworks after all) is a bit of a farce. Sort of like a back seat driver who keeps yelling at you that you are going too slowly; then gets behind the wheel, speeds insanely for a few miles, loses control, smashes into an oncoming truck; and then, while recovering in the hospital tells you: I’ve decided that robust cautiousness is the way you should drive from now on.

But at least it’s 77% honest. Errors and disasters are cataloged. Reasons are given. Mistakes (sort-of) owned up to. And it offers great insights into the movement and minds that lead us where we find ourselves today. In one big mess.

Thanks to Francis Fukayama and all his ex-buddies.

My rating: 3 stars

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A Complicated Kindness

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Book by Miriam Toews

Wonderful book about a young girl growing up in a Mennonite town in Manitoba. Who knew Menonnite teens smoked pot and had sex and were so funny? Sad, hilarious, excellent.

Finely-wrought study of how social constraints can slowly tear people apart.

Good to see more CanLit shaking the old shackles. Along with Heather O’Neill, Toews has renewed my hopes for Canadian writing.

My rating: 4 stars

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The Wealth of Networks

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Book by Yochai Benkler

A comprehensive and exhaustive book about the open movement (free software, wikipedia, blogging, flickr, creative commons, crowdsourcing etc) of which LibriVox is an enthusiastic member. Not for the faint-hearted, this book is dense, big and academic in approach, but refreshingly rigourous, with significant attention paid to law, economics, and history as well as softer moral/ethical considerations. The history of radio (fascinating) & laws around who can broacast what; net neutrality; patatent law and innovation; SETI@home; copyright law; and much more all get detailed treatment.

This book really brings everything together, and for anyone serious about collaborative approach to solving problems, this one is a must. Especially for you academics out there. But everyone else should read it too.

You can get the book online here, in pdf, html, or wiki formats … or you can even buy it at amazon. There’s an extensive wiki too, to contribute to the project, here.

My rating: 5 stars

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Slow Man

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Book by J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee writes the way writing ought to be written. He is spare and economical, and his writing has a moral force for my money unequalled in contemporary writing in English. Slow Man is something of a departure for the usual realist Coetzee, something of a metaphysical mind-bender. Paul Rayment is a 60-year-old who suffers, in the first scene of the book, a bicycle accident, which results in the amputation of his leg; and he begins to fall in love with his private nurse, the hard-headed Croatian Marijana. Eventually novelist Elizabeth Costello (a character in Coetzee’s previous novel of the same name) appears in Paul’s life somewhat mysteriously: either Costello wishes to write a novel, with Paul as the basis for a character in the book; or Paul is in fact a figment of Costello’s literary imagination. In either case, the two don’t get along well: Paul upset at the intrusion of Costello into his life; Costello annoyed by Paul’s unsuitability (cautious, reserved, resigned) as the hero of a novel.

As always, Coetzee writes with a moral force, and he packs an enormous amount of weight into his deceptively simple writing. Paul and Elizabeth Costello struggle primarily with mortality, age, and the elusiveness of love; the indifference beauty has for the ugly.

This was a looser novel than most of Coetzees works, not quite the smooth offering of books like Disgrace and Foe. And he’s left his usual territory - South Africa - for Australia, where the questions are of a more intimate and personal nature, rather than the heavy weight of moral history that Coetzee struggles with in other novels.

My rating: 3.5 stars

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Next Episode

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book by Hubert Aquin

This is the second Aquin book I’ve read, both in English (for shame), and both left me with the same sense of wonderment at the confused brilliance from which they eminated. Next Episode is a slim book about (”about” seems such an imprecise preposition to attach to this book) a young Quebecois man in a hospital for the criminally insane, who writes a novel about a Quebecois spy, kidnapper, murderer in Lausanne. The narratives keep crossing paths, as one character twists into another. Good, challenging stuff.

My rating: 3.0 stars

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The Human Stain

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Book by Philip Roth

This is my first Roth book, which is a little embarrassing since he’s considered by some to be the greatest living American writer. The Human Stain is supposed to be among his best, and it is a well-crafted work of great skill: about a black man who lives as a white, turfed from his professorship for uttering a racist slur (a false accusation and a witch hunt), who recedes into bitterness and starts an affair with a younger (he’s 72; she’s 34), illiterate cleaning woman. Things end badly. A violent ex-husband, a truck, and a lake are all involved. In the back-drop, Clinton-Lewinsky (with parallels to the older Coleman Silk and the younger Faunia Farley) surfaces and resurfaces, and provides the political grounding of the novel, a campus morality tale where those most harshly judged are the petty faux-puritains maurauding around the quiet college town, and indeed the whole country.

Roth didn’t quite catch me with this book: it seems very much rooted in its time (1998, when the President’s offences involved fellatio and cigars, and not dubious wars), though there was much more in there, among other things: race relations, violence, Vietnam, the Greeks, the lies we tell ourselves and those closest to us. But something felt forced, the allegorical structure a little too present, a little too solid. Still, a master craftsman, to be admired.

My rating: 3.5 stars

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Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide

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Book by Ruth Kinna

As someone influenced by anarchist thought, I know embarrassingly little about the source texts of the movement, and its historical proponents: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon and the rest. What I know, I know mostly from the application of anarchist principles in online projects (the free software movement, wikipedia, and of course, most intimately, LibriVox), and their proponents, mainly the writings of Richard Stallman.

(For those wondering, anarchism is not about Molotov cocktails, but something like a belief in non-hierarchical organization of society, through collective actions of free individuals).

I was keen to get a primer to the historical movement and where it fits into society today. I corresponded briefly with Ruth Kinna in response to an interview with her on BBC, and decided subsequently to pick up her book.

“Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide” is designed mostly, I think, as a companion book to a university course on anarchism and the reading of the key texts of the movement. As such, it covers important figures of the past (those mentioned above, plus Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman, and many others), and more recent anarchist thinkers as well. The writing is clear and engaing, and much is packed into the slim volume, as befits a beginner’s guide. But the book has two major faults.

First, it fails to give an adequate account of how anarchism fit into the political consciousness as a serious alternative in the past. There was a time when anarchism was a popular movement among intellectuals and trade unionists, and Bakunin did battle with Marx for control of the “socialist” movement. Anarchists were considered a real threat, featuring in fiction (Conrad’s The Secret Agent text, audio), state executions (Sacco and Venzetti), and for a brief time running a country (CNT in Spain). Yet anarchism is now considered, mostly, the domain of a few crackpot hippies, the odd masked troublemaker, and, of course, a big population of hackers (more on that later). But it is not seen, I do not believe, as a major threat to established order, so much as a nuisance at WTO meetings, and good training for riot squads (who are often, much to the total unconcern of the population at large, more than happy to demonstrate the violence of the state anarchists wish to oppose). So, some questions: Why was anarchism such a powerful idea in the late 19th and early 20th century? Why did it fall by the wayside, in the face of other political doctrines (socialism, fascism, communism, and liberal democracy)? And, since it has not survived well as a political movement, why is it still important? Kinna’s book doesn’t address these questions adequately.

But the second, and most puzzling failure is that the book ignores completely the flourishing movement of anarchist-inspired activity online (except one aside mention of hacktivists, who jam corporate websites). The free software movement, and other online-enabled non-software projects such as wikipedia, distributed proofreaders, libirvox, and countless other open projects, as well as groups such as the anarchist librarians, all offer important examples of concrete implementations of anarchist ideals, implementations that actually work. When I first became interested in free software, back in 2004, I thought there must be many political philosophers studying this explosion, real-time, of anarchist-ish communities. My searches on Google Scholar turned up surprisingly few academics looking at this with any seriousness. The only philosopher I know of looking at these issues (surely there are more) is Dylan E. Wittkower, perhaps not coincidently, a LibriVox volunteer.

Those criticisms aside (and they are significant), Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide is concise and clear and an engaging read. It is a toe-dipping kind of book, one that, as a guide for beginners, provides a starting-point to explore the different movements and personalities within the somewhat chaotic ideology that is anarchism.

My rating: 2.5 stars

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Lullabies for Little Criminals

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Book by Heather O’Neill

The mind of a creative child is a wonderful thing, especially at that moment before adulthood becomes a reality, maybe age 12, where anything seems possible and innocence, imagination and ability all come together. Heather O’Neill has written a remarkable book about such a mind, the motherless daughter of a junkie, a girl who inhabits the mean streets of Montreal’s red light district. In that grim setting, O’Neill has crafted something so true to the life of a child; she has looked at the strange and terrible, the slimeballs and scheming, poverty and loneliness, the ludicrous underbelly, and shown it as child might see it: a child who laughs at the funny hats her dad sometimes wears, carts around her suitcase full of dolls, and gets up to all sorts of fun with her urchin friends in the rat-filled alley-ways. Humans are a resilient bunch, and narrator Baby (her given name) is a doomed, heart-breaking optimist, with the poet’s ability to transform the world around her into something beautiful.

O’Neill, whose radio work can be heard on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” and CBC’s “Wiretap,” channels her gift for images through Baby’s words: “His compliments,” she says about her father, “were like little cupcakes all lined up in a window.” She is also a heartbreakingly wise poet: “If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for your return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely Children probably wrote the Bible.”

Since Mordechai Richler died, you hear the occasional mutterings about who will be the next anglo bard of Montreal. Yann Martel took a stab by winning the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, but his writing (whatever its success) is in no way attached to Montreal. But here, I think, we have the only true contender to date, a novelist that in zeroing in on the gritty particular, has raised her book to a marvelous universal. This is the most exciting novel I have read by a Canadian writer in many years. It has its flaws (the impressionistic and circumambulatory narration feels a little forced in places; the staccato writing somewhat disjointed), but those minor quibbles are nothing compared with its strengths: the voice, the humour, the beauty, the emotion, the full broken-down world recreated in the eyes of its beholder.

O’Neill’s second novel is reportedly coming out soon. Second novels, so they say, are the tough ones. I’m rooting for her.

My rating: 4.0 stars

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Programming the Universe

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Book by Seth Lloyd, about quantum physics and cosmology

We all know that the universe is made up of matter and energy, but Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, adds a third basic element to our understanding: information. Everything, he says, can be considered as registering information (or bits): hot/cold, heavy/light, white/black, spin up, spin down can all be considered the 0s and 1s of a binary information system, the same system we have build computing upon. Interactions between things (people, atoms, electrons) results in exchange of information. With all these bits, the universe is, as we speak, computing. Computing what? Why, itself, of course. And at the quantum level, the famous quantum wierdness (uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, Schrodeinger’s cat) means that if you could build quantum computer, it’s parallel nature would mean computing power far beyond anything classical computers can provide. Lloyd has actually built a quantum computer (a simple one), and continues his work.

He has also written an important book, which is at once mind-bending and accessible. He is patient and clear (and funny), and this slim text presents a revolutionary interpretation of the cosmsos, which Lloyd thinks might provide a pathway to solving the great challenege of modern physics: uniting the theory of general relativity and quantum physics, which don’t get along. It might also prove a (testable) theoretical underpinning for the creation of life.

My rating: 5.0 stars

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Kafka on the Shore

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Book by Haruki Murakami

Talking cats, raining fish, death, trapped souls, parallel universes, a confused fifteen-year-old, and of course a good smattering of sex. Among other (sometimes heart-breaking) oddities. With Kafka on the Shore, Japanese novelist and fabulist Haruki Murakami continues his metaphysical exploration of the odd underside of human and not-so human experience, getting at the raw truth that lies obscured by everyday reality. The writing seems less assured than in the masterful Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which might be blamed on the translator: Philip Gabriel replacing Jay Rubin. The prose is a bit clunky (possibly Murakami, possibly Gabriel), but the narrative transcends those problems, much as his characters, willing and not, transcend physics.

My rating: 3.0 stars

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Henderson the Rain King

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book by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow, who died in 2005, was one of the great American writers of the post-war period, among a group (including Mailer, Cheever, Vonnegut; later: Heller, Roth, Updike) who forged the American literary and cultural consciousness of the late 40s, 50s, and paved the way for the revolution that came in the 60s.

Henderson the Rain King, written in 1959, is very much a book to presage that revolution. Henderson is a loud, brash voice of a wealthy America unsatisfied (spiritually, socially, morally) with the position attained at the top of the global heap. He is a 50ish millionaire, a former WWII commando, a pig farmer, father, and the sort of smashing North American intent on fixing things, and afflicted by a constant voice in his head: I want I want I want. What he wants, as with so many of us, is not so clear, and so he heads to Africa to find an answer. There he travels, tells us the story of his life, wives, the time he tried to shoot a cat, and his daughter who brings a small black baby home, and hides her in the closet; he also finds frogs poisoning the well in an idyllic village in the middle of nowhere, and sets about solving the problem. Smasher that he is, he fails, despite his good intentions; does much dammage. He flees the village, and eventually lands under the wing of a philosopher king, former medical student, and lion affictionado, Dahfu. From Dahfu he tries to learn to be, rather than to become.

Bellows writes with a vigorous honesty, maybe unmatched in American letters (Roth called him, along with Faulkner, the backbone of 20th Century American writing). It’s hard to figure just what it is about his writing that is so powerful; he is not a pretty stylist, like, say, Nabokov, and his prose is almost raw, though that rawness has a beauty about it, the rough beauty of the market, maybe, with jarring jumps in language that work even though they probably shouldn’t; and his sentences contain so much, with such little artifice, no trickery, and again, an almost brutal honesty. Henderson says: “We hate death, we fear it. But there’s nothing like it.”

I keep thinking about how conservative we are these days, despite all our freedom and access. Perhaps it is just a matter of our place in history: in the West, we are rich, we are satisfied, and our relationship with things like hunger and war are filtered through media that keeps those problems abstract and far away, in time, space. As the son of Jewish immigrants (first in Montreal, then Chicago), Bellow knew what it was to stuggle to forge a place in an unsettled society, and he served in the Merchant Marines in WWII, so would have known something of fear and death. Not to mention the Holocaust. He, like most from that generation, was acquainted with the dangers and possibilities of humans, of life on the street in America, of the risks of living, and he wrote as if things mattered, because they did. Now in 2007, maybe, things are just too easy, too fixed: we don’t feel, as people did in the post-war era, that we are building things, we don’t feel as if our decisions matter the way they might have 50 years ago. But of course they should, they do, and reading Bellow reminds you of that.

My rating: 4.0 stars

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The God Delusion

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Book by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins’ 1974 book, the Selfish Gene is probably one of the most important science books written for the general public (I’ll be reviewing that book here later) in the second half of the 20th century. Not only did the Selfish Gene do much to explain evolutionary biology to the average reader, but it also contributed a significant new conceptual framework to neo-Darwinism, that genes program biological hosts to be selfish (meaning they privilege propagation of those genes above all other imperatives), even when being altruistic. This follows from an important observation of Darwinism: that which succeeds is that which propagates, and vice versa. Genes that are not, ultimately, selfish, will not propagate = not succeed = not propagate.

What I have read of Dawkins’ work, I have liked; and I am always happy to hear him speak (thank you podcasts). He is passionate, articulate, and convincing when he discusses evolution and science. So I was excited to read his new one, the “God Delusion.”

And starting for page 1, I was deeply disappointed. Infuriated, actually. The God Delusion is a different kind of book from the Selfish Gene, though what kind of book it was intended to be is hard to say. Whatever kind, Dawkins badly missed the mark. It’s possible that I read it unfairly, expecting it to be something it wasn’t meant to be: an exploration of the scientific/cultural reasons behind the almost-universal human belief in some kind of supernatural deity or deities. But it is not that book at all. It is many other things, and none of them particularly effective. It is a catalog of many stupid things said in the name of religion; it is a list of many bad things religious people have done; it is a sarcastic dismissal of the “religious mind” (whatever that is); it is a refutation of creationism; it is a defense of the separation of church and state; it is a book of sloppy theology; poor philosophy; shoddy psychology; and most offensive to me, given Dawkins’ bona fides, a book of lazy science.

Dawkins has an axe to grind here, and he leaves no doubt that he *hates* religion. He thinks it is childish, ignorant, dangerous, evil, contemptible, disgusting. Such beliefs are not necessarily problematic, except that his contempt for religion gets in the way of his ability to make a cogent case for whatever it was he meant to elucidate (which is not particularly clear in this muddled book).

As a leading public exponent of Darwinism he has been the target of countless attacks from religionists and creationists (many of them abusive and threatening, some of them printed in this volume). As a public and vocal atheist the target on his head is that much larger. He is frustrated with dangerous and anti-scientific movements such as Intelligent Design, and is offended by the valued place religion is given in policy-making, particularly in the USA, but elsewhere as well. He doesn’t like the way religion treats homosexuals and stem-cell research, and abortion. All of which is fine.

Indeed a book about all the bad things done in the name of Religion in the past six thousand years, or even the past six years, would be a thick tome, and anyone would marvel at the horror. But I wouldn’t have much interest in Dawkins’ account of such things - I need no convincing on that point in any case. He is an evolutionary biologist, and I wanted his views on where religion comes from, and why it is a delusion. To be fair, he occasionally provides some theories on this count (one chapter): mainly that religion is the “byproduct of childish gullibility,” that children learn to obey orders from parents (helpful for keeping them alive), and later this “gullibility” mechanism is erroneously transferred onto “God.”

Perhaps. (Though I find, as almost everywhere throughout this book, Dawkins’ use of language is unnecessarily non-neutral… “childish gullibility” is an odd way to state a useful evolutionary trait).

But here is another Darwinist theory (mine, perhaps others’) of why religion and belief in God might have persisted and spread: religion is a useful way to organize societies, to force people to obey laws, to enforce social norms, to inspire warriors and to placate the discontented. Hence, from a cultural Darwinist vantage, religious societies have historically been better at organizing themselves, hence defeating their foes, hence surviving. So there has been a “natural selection” of religious societies over non-religious. Perhaps this theory is wrong, yet Dawkins is so hostile to religion, he cannot admit that religion might serve any useful purpose at all (except to produce good music, poetry, and to console the dying). And so his theories of the delusion of God, such as they are, seem woefully incomplete as any kind of explanation for the persistence of the idea of God across almost all ages, and cultures in human history. Including our own, scientific age.

I should note here my own biases: I am a very lapsed Catholic, mostly agnostic, vaguely influenced, perhaps, by the belief in some kind of universal power, but certainly not a “personal” God, certainly not as reflected in particular religious doctrine. (In fact, I think that the idea of having a “true” religious doctrine is logically inconsistent with the Christian/Judeo/Islamic concept of an infinite God; our puny human minds are too small for such things). Curiously, Dawkins dismisses this kind of loose pantheistic belief, which he calls Einstiennian belief, after Einstein’s statement: “I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.” Dawkins says this sort of belief is not religious at all (hence not worth considering), and doesn’t really address it in any serious sense. Which is curious, because if God is a delusion, surely this kind of vague belief, the kind that secular, scientifically-minded people like me harbour, would be just the kind of belief that an evolutionary biologist would be interested in studying. There are easy explanations for why teen-aged Evangelicals and those who grow up in Amish towns and Madrasses believe in God … But what about us thoughtful agnostics? Dawkins explains this away with some cheap logic showing that agnostics are in fact atheists (check this video for the hilarious “logical” move in the other direction).

Because this is a book by Richard Dawkins, it does have its moments, mostly when he is doing what he does best: explaining evolution. He does far too little of that in these pages. It is not a science book, or a philosophical book; it is a political book. An effective political book should make its case coherently, objectively. Dawkins has not done that here, and should get back to his desk and work harder to write the book this ought to have been.

My rating: 1.0 stars

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Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

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Climate Change Book by Elizabeth Kolbert

My first job out of university, as a fresh-faced, idealistic engineer, was in the energy industry, for a sort of international think-tank made up of eight of the biggest electric companies in the world from G7 countries. I got there in 1998 (a year after the Kyoto Protocol was signed), and climate change obviously was high on the agenda, so I got to know what many in the energy industry thought of it (it was a big problem, and these companies were generally worried about how to address it in the most efficient, and least-costly way. That is, they were concerned, but wanted to avoid losing lots of money as a result). From the E7 (now E8) I went on, in the summer of 2000, to a financial brokerage called Prebon in New York, which was setting up an investment banking team to build financial products tailored for Kyoto Mechanisms - financial mechanisms aimed at getting funding into projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I was the policy guy, mainly, looking at national and international frameworks, as well as doing marketing of our insurance-based products to big energy companies around the world; and negotiating with potential sellers of emission reductions. I attended the COP conference in the Hague and talked to government officials all over the place. (Those were my jetset days of flying around the world, when I thought I might just be able to save the human race and become a multibillionaire at the same time). I worked at Prebon for a year and a half until the election of George Bush (and US abandonment of Kyoto, going back on a GOP campaign promise to regulate CO2 in the US); and then September 11 forced Prebon to shut down our group. Also a factor in shutting us down: we hadn’t made a nickle, despite having a $350 million deal in the works, though I don’t think we would have made the sale even without Bush and September 11. After I came back from NYC to Montreal, I spent some time working with a small alternative energy company here in Montreal, with toes still in CO2 waters … tho since 2004 I have been just an observer.

But I have been following Climate Change more or less closely for ten years or so, and have watched as the science matured (and Canada, incidently, did absolutely nothing except sign papers year after year). I am, you could say, a Climate believer…though I have an open mind to new research: if it were to turn out that everyone was mistaken about the climate, I would be happy to recant my former beliefs. But, the opposite has happened. Since 1998 when I started paying attention, various predictions from the models (then very uncertain) have started to come to pass: plants and animals are changing their breeding habits, the Arctic and Antarctic are melting, glaciers around the globe are receding, and the temperature keeps going up. Closer to home, the ski hill I grew up on no longer operates (they never made snow, and the natural snow isn’t enough to guarantee a viable season any more), and it regularaly rains in January and February.

And so when I first read Elizabeth Kolbert’s series of articles on climate change in the “New Yorker” in 2005 I was captivated. Field Notes on a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is a compilation and expansion of those articles. It is the only climate book I have ever been inspired to buy — all the others seemed to rehash things I knew already, but there was something about the way Kolbert writes on climate — at once scientifically compelling and personal. And frightening. Of the many hundreds of articles I have read about climate change, Kolbert’s are the best.

In this book, Kolbert weaves a compelling tale, focusing on a handful of active scientists, their work on climate, and an underlying sense of terror that seems to infect all of them. They are at the front lines of climate research — out in the field and building the models. She visits the melting permafrost in Alaska, NASA climate modellers in New York, biologists studying butterflies in northern England, and Columbia paleoclimateologista with the world’s biggest collection of ocean core samples. She also talks to some historians who argue that massive civilization collapse in human history can often be attributed to climate changes destroying the agricultural systems those civilizations depend upon; and some of the people trying to do something about all this worrying problem that so many seem to ignore. The impressive thing about these scientists is not their much-trumpeted alarmism, though, but the opposite: the caution with which they make their claims. Scientists tend to be a thoughtful bunch, they are used to weighing massive amounts of data, inputs, and research from across many fields to make their conclusions. You make your hypothesis, you do your experiments, you publish your results in peer-reviewed journals, and others do their best to poke holes in your argument. More experiments are done, in various disciplines; in the case that other results consistently conflict with a hypothesis, it is rejected. When more data backs a hypothesis, from many different areas, it becomes accepted. Climate science is no different, and what’s happened over the past ten years, since I first started following the climate debate, is a hardening of certainty, as more and more evidence, more studies, and more data are backing up the theory that the climate is changing (not in doubt) and that we are forcing the change. But the real test of a theory is its predictive power: if a theory says such and such should happen, and such and such happens, it is worth paying attention to.

And this is why the much-maligned climate models are so powerful: they have been tweaked and improved over the past ten years, and have become more powerful. They back-check well against the past records, and have done a good job of predicting what is happening now. What’s scary is their predictions of what will happen in the future. It ain’t pretty.

Kolbert manages an impressive feat in this book: she presents the latest climate science clearly, and in enough detail that one gets a powerful sense of where most scientists think we are and where we are going. There are graphs and data sets, and evidence. But what emerges most powerfully is the sense of quiet, measured … panic (there is no other word for it) from the scientists working in the field. They are watching as our climate changes, and they know where we are likely to go. And most think we are pushing climate fast to that frightening place. In this slim volume, Kolbert has encapsulated the panic, and shown exactly where it comes from - scientifically and historically. And she shares this panic. As arctic researcher, Donald Petrovich relates to Kolbert:

The way I’ve been thinking about it, riding my bike around here, is, You ride by all these pastures and they’ve got these big granite boulders in the middle of them. You’ve got a big boulder sitting there on this rolling hill. You can’t just go by this boulder. You’ve got to push it. So you start rocking it, and you get a bunch of friends, and they start rocking it, and finally it starts moving. And then you realize, Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. That’s what we’re doing as a society. This climate, if it starts rolling, we don’t really know where it will stop.

My rating: 4.0 stars

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