The thermocline of truth – blog post by Rob Miller, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This month, the Court of Appeal finally quashed the remaining criminal convictions [of sub-postmasters accused by Royal Mail of embezzlement, when the appearance of missing money was due to errors in its new IT system]. How were [Royal Mail leaders] able to convince themselves almost to the last that their own systems couldn’t have been the source of the errors? How were those at the top seeing such a warped version of reality? In the ocean, … sometimes, what’s called a thermocline forms: a temperature barrier, a point at which the temperature changes rapidly. … In a 2008 blogpost, legendary IT consultant Bruce F. Webster applied the idea of the thermocline to large-scale IT projects. Why was it, Webster asked, that so many projects seemed to be on-track until just before their launch date, at which point it became suddenly clear that they were miles behind schedule? Webster observed that, generally speaking, those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. … Those at the top, though, have no such first-hand knowledge. They rely on the bubbling-up of information from below, in the form of dashboards and status reports. But, Webster noticed, those status reports tend to produce a comically optimistic view of the state of the project. … The result is that there is a thermocline within the organisation: not of temperature, but of truth. There is a clear line in the org chart, below which the truth of the project’s disastrous state is known, but above which everything looks rosy…. Thermoclines, to be clear, are not the fault of subordinates. They emerge because of the culture set by the leadership of an organisation. They are the inevitable consequence of an organisation that puts more emphasis on reputation than truth; that rewards good news and punishes bad; that has a leadership team disconnected from the delivery of the actual work; that instils fear and compliance with process into its employees, rather than a desire to do the right thing.”
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction – interview with Gaya Herrington by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.… Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse…. Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website …) independently ‘out of pure curiosity about data accuracy’. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Earlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth, the analyst wrote plainly: ‘Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.’”
The Truth About Lies by Aja Raden: a history of deceit, hoaxes and cons – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Raden takes us on a whistle-stop tour of hoaxes and cons. She’s not talking here about little fibs, the grownup version of hiding your spinach under your plate, but rather the swaggery whoppers that are capable of bringing down a whole peer group. Something like the Bernie Madoff scandal, a long con that lasted three decades and involved a lot of very rich people believing a criminal when he promised to make them even richer, without explaining how. … Why on earth would anyone – especially smart, rich anyones – fall for such obvious nonsense? Raden explains that it’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it benefits us to take information on trust.… That is why the most compelling hoaxes start with a nugget of truth. Take snake oil. The indentured Chinese labourers who built the American transcontinental railroad in the 19th century naturally looked to their medicine chests to soothe their smashed joints and sunburnt skin. Snake oil, made from the rendered fat of black water snakes, was extraordinarily rich in Omega-3 and worked a treat as an anti-inflammatory. Soon news of its efficacy had spread throughout the whole blistered-fingered west. Demand outstripped supply (the medicine had to be imported from China since there are no black water snakes in North America) with the result that any number of fakes started to appear. … The Truth About Lies claims to be a ‘taxonomy’ of deceits, hoaxes and cons, but actually it is no such thing. … What we get is a ragbag of anecdotes, from the original Ponzi scheme of the 1920s to the slips and sleights of big pharma that have led to the current opioid crisis. All hugely interesting, and certainly entertaining, but not quite the serious and scholarly investigation that Raden would have you believe.”
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks, so why do we lose so much time to online distraction? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, excerpted from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, also reviewed in The Guardian. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. … And so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. … What’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’ …. is that it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. … [Because] the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well… it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place. … Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter – the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives – that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives?… The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time. … what we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “Seventy-six years after his death, Hitler remains one of the most known men in the world and ubiquitous in western culture. … [Michael Tucker, one of the directors of the film The Meaning of Hitler,] calls it a ‘Hitler industrial complex’ unburdened by self-scrutiny. He comments: ‘Clearly, it’s not like these materials stop the spread of the ideology or that they curb antisemitism. If anything, the more they’re presented without context, the more they propagate these ideas. … ‘ Determined to avoid contributing to the cult of personality, Epperlein and Tucker use excerpts from former Observer journalist Sebastian Haffner’s penetrating 1978 book The Meaning of Hitler as a narrative spine. … They interview historians and writers … and Nazi hunters as well as an archaeologist forensic biologist, psychiatrist and sociologist in search of clues that might begin to explain how Hitler became Hitler. But historian Deborah Lipstadt … tells them: ‘When we try to figure out where Hitler’s antisemitism came from, what we’re trying to do is rationally explain an irrational sentiment. When people say, “Oh well, his mother was treated by a Jewish doctor and he couldn’t save her”, so what? The minute you’re trying to give a rational explanation for an irrational sentiment, you’re going to be lost.’ Thus the film presents a paradox. To try to understand Hitler is to risk humanising him and reducing his culpability; but to admit that he defies all understanding is to risk elevating him to superhuman status, to make him a modern Lucifer.”
‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology, then Covid hit – interview by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.… ‘Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,’ Taylor told the Guardian. … A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is psychological reactance – a motivational response to ‘rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice’. … ‘The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.’ That in turn, leads to what psychologists term ‘motivated thinking’, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.”
Being You by Professor Anil Seth: the exhilarating new science of consciousness – review by Gaia Vince in The Guardian. See also Seth’s ‘Consciousness: Eight Questions Science Must Answer’. “Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field…. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing. We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world that’s really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains…. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us,’ Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example…. What … is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being …? At its most fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seth’s often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our ‘self’ is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others’ minds.”
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Sunday, 5 September 2021
Cuttings: July 2021
The internet is rotting – article by Jonathan Zittrain in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has ‘billions of books and no central filing system.’. … Some colleagues and I joined those investigating the extent of link rot in 2014 and again this past spring. The first study… focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.… The problem isn’t just for academic articles and judicial opinions. With … the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted…. The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
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