My life in books

... is not gold: notes on some books I read this year that didn't quite meet the mark for me.


The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond

This is the book for someone who has not yet read anything by Jared Diamond. It is a respectable overview of the state of archaeological and anthropological knowledge concerning the evolution of humans and their civilisations circa 1992 when the book was published. It is also an early view of Diamond’s own theories on these subjects. It will, however, be a bit of a disappointment for anyone who has a good layman’s grasp of the issues and has read Diamond’s later works.

The structure is somewhat disjointed – not surprising, as early versions of many chapters appeared as self-contained articles in Discover and Natural History. And readers today should be aware that there have been new theories, new observations, new finds since 1992 that suggest new perspectives on a number of topics that Diamond discusses, from the evolutionary advantages of certain sexual behaviours in female primates to the date and origins of early Clovis culture in North America.

The truly interested reader might do better starting with Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel instead.


American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy has a remarkable reputation as a philosopher and social thinker, and the concept of the book has great potential – send one great French writer out to follow in the footsteps of his earlier, equally prestigious compatriot after a lapse of nearly two centuries and see what he finds. Alas, American Vertigo is no Democracy in America. Lévy has an excellent eye and ear. His short pieces form a fascinating collage of American life, snapshots of people, places, things, events, encountered during his travels around the US. This part of the book is fun to read, though it presents little that is new or thought-provoking; cotton candy and an eclectic travelogue.

The second section of the book, titled “Reflections,” presents the real disappointment. Lévy peppers his reflections heavily with references to philosophers and social theorists – Nietzche, Samuel Huntington, Kant, Kafka, Hobbes, Bukharin, Kierkegaard, Hegel and a good many more – in coming to the conclusion that America may be in a spot of trouble just now, but nothing that the great democracy that Tocqueville heralded can’t fix with a little good old Yankee ingenuity. His concluding paragraph:

...there is, in the philosophical and political heritage of America, all the vibrant material – concepts, traditions, practices – essential to taking up the challenge; this means that the America of Washington, Roosevelt, and Kennedy is indeed finely equipped to deal with the great intellectual and moral reform that will allow it, without renouncing any fraction of its identity, to revive its reasons for believing in itself.

Somehow, Lévy’s enthusiasm for an American resurrection doesn’t make me feel any better.


The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando de Soto

Hernando De Soto is the World Bank’s darling. His book bears accolades from such luminaries as Milton Friedman, Francis Fukiyama, Javier Perez de Cuellor and Margaret Thatcher. So you might be wondering why a confirmed socialist like myself even bothered to read the book.

I read it because de Soto argues that there is a way to mobilise the mechanisms of capitalism to end Third World poverty and create the material conditions for true equality of opportunity.

The claim deserves a hearing - but it is, ultimately, unconvincing. The idea is that in the West, we evolved slowly into full blown capitalism, thus giving us time to develop a legal system that provides effective mechanisms for owning, describing, manipulating, protecting, exploiting and transferring property. The developing world, being new to capitalism, lacks these mechanisms, which leaves the majority of the population of these countries without the ability to benefit from what they have – use it as capital to generate further wealth – because their property is not held in formal, legally recognised title. As a description of the reality of how capitalism currently functions in the developed and the developing world, this is true, and it is a valuable insight.

What fails to convince is de Soto's solution: record everyone’s property fairly and accurately, introduce the laws that permit free use of property as a mechanism to generate wealth, and watch everyone become wealthy. Right. The people have no power – let them eat capital. If all that the developing countries need to end economic inequality is to put in place the mechanisms currently existing in Western capitalist countries, then why is there extreme poverty in the country that has made the greatest commitment to facilitating the use of property to generate wealth – the United States?

Sorry, I’m just not buying the argument. If, as I believe, capitalism itself is flawed as a means of insuring the highest good for all, letting more people play at capitalism – and most likely lose – is not going to make it work better. It’s just going to mean that there’s more property for the capitalist elites to take away from the commons.