Book Review: "Until the End of Time" by Brian Greene

Until the End of Time (2020)
Brian Greene (1963)
428 pages

Late in his deeply engaging and thought-provoking book Until the End of Time, physicist Brian Greene recalls being asked a question that would turn out to have a profound impact on his thinking: “Which news would affect you more … being told you have a year to live or that in a year earth will be destroyed?” (318) Reflecting on it, he came to recognize that although knowledge of his own death might trigger a range of intense reactions, “contemplating the end of the entire species seemed to do the opposite, yielding a sense of futility.” (319) For what we do and what we value to have meaning, he concluded, we must believe that there will be future generations to receive it; death may give an individual life meaning, but the death of the species thoroughly destroys that meaning.

Aside from concerns about an apocalypse of our own making however, most of us serenely take for granted that the human race will continue on into a future without end. Not so Greene. Through his training and work as a physicist, he has come to understand that although it may be unimaginably far into the future, our universe will “almost certainly” (16) end at some point.

Given that awareness, he explores what impact it has on the meaning we each discover for our individual lives, “assess[ing] the prospects for everything we hold dear … reality as we know it, from planets and stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind.” (16) In particular, he considers the future of thought – in the broadest sense of the concept – and whether there may come a point in the future evolution of the universe when it will be impossible for thought to take place. For, he argues, if such a point will be reached, then all that has been thought and learned and passed down will irrevocably disappear, with direct implications for how we understand the meaning of our lives.

To prepare the path toward examining these questions, Greene first introduces “two forces sharing the role of leading character” (7) in the development of the universe.

The first, Entropy, is commonly understood as leading inevitably to increasing disorder. We come to learn, however, that it plays a decisive role in the opposite sense – enabling the formation of complex, highly ordered systems. The second, Evolution, figures in ways well beyond the commonly understood sense of natural selection among living systems. Greene describes how evolutionary processes have also impacted the development of inanimate objects, a process referred to as “molecular Darwinism” (7). By taking this more general interpretation, evolution becomes an on-going force at work throughout the universe.

With these concepts in hand, Greene then proceeds to situate life and thought within the scope of the unfolding universe by first looking back to the big bang, and the evolution of the universe from that starting point to the present moment. Though physicists continue to refine their understanding of these past roughly 13.8 billion years, some level of consensus has been achieved around an inflationary model that, while not proven, is backed by a “formidable” (51) amount of experimental evidence.

The inflationary model arises out of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, from which, in the late 1970’s, the physicist Alan Guth demonstrated the mathematical possibility “that if a region of space was filled with a particular kind of substance … and if the energy contained … was spread evenly throughout the region … then the resulting gravitational force would … be repulsive.” (47) As happens through the book, this fascinating, if relatively prosaic, description leads to a bewildering conclusion: 

Guth’s calculations revealed that if a tiny region, perhaps as small as a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across, was suffused with a certain type of energy … distributed uniformly, ... the repulsive gravitational push would be so forceful that the speck of space would inflate explosively, almost instantaneously [within a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second] stretching to as large as the observable universe, if not far larger. (47) 

That is, the universe would inflate from a size unimaginably small, to one unimaginably large, over a time scale unimaginably small.

Already in the first 50 pages we discover that we need to buckle up for a wild ride that will, at nearly every turn, challenge our natural intuitions and understandings about the physical world.

So it is with Greene’s description of the development of stars and galaxies. The basic processes of stellar formation seem, if wondrously complex in their details, relatively straight-forward at a high level: gravity pulls clouds of matter together until the resulting body becomes so dense that nuclear forces cause the fusion of hydrogen into helium, creating a counter force, and so a balancing act leading to stars that burn for billions of years.

But then some troubling questions arise!

For one, if the leading theory for the big bang requires an extremely uniform initial distribution – as any non-uniformity would have led to the gravitational force being attractive – then where did the variability come from that allowed gravity to no longer be repulsive, and instead act to build up increasingly dense clumps of mass? The answer seems to lie in the presence of quantum uncertainty according to Greene: physicists theorize that at the quantum level, in the very early period after the big bang, there were tiny, quantum variations in energy that led to temperature differences on the order of “one part in a hundred thousand.” (51) Unimaginably tiny non-uniformities, but, over a time scale of millions of years, sufficient to initiate the clumping of matter that has led to stars and galaxies.

Another important question about the development of stars and galaxies arises from the second law of thermodynamics, which “declares that over time there is an overwhelming tendency of entropy to increase” (31); how, then, can a star be born, given that a star represents a relatively low entropy condition? The answer, according to Greene, is what he refers to as the entropic two-step: entropy can decrease in a portion of space (a star, or a life form), as long as such low entropy configurations raise the entropy of the surrounding environment. Thus, for example, the human body continually “dispens[es] entropy to the environment through waste and heat.” (108)

This requirement that heat be expelled to the environment by a lower entropy, ordered configuration like a star, a body or a brain, so that the overall entropy increases, becomes central to Greene’s pursuit of the ultimate future for thought, and whether it will continue to be possible in the distant future of our universe.

With molecular Darwinism and the entropic two-step as a basis, Greene describes how succeeding generations of stars provided the crucibles for the creation of the heavier elements. These elements end up a part of the formation of the planets, including earth, and play a fundamental role in the path to life. While Greene provides a concise introduction to these processes, a more detailed exploration can be found in the book Stardust, by astrophysicist John Gribben, who notes:

[although] we still don’t know exactly how life began … we do know, very precisely, what mixture of chemicals is required for the existence of life as we know it. And we know exactly where those chemicals come from --- as a natural by-product of the processes of star formation and evolution. (17, Stardust)

Gribben provides an engrossing portrait of the build up from a universe filled nearly exclusively with hydrogen to one in which the elements necessary for life emerge.

Greene turns in the middle section of his book to the current theories about how the combination of the entropic two-step and evolution that supported the creation of the solar system also collaborated on the development of life on earth. Over several chapters, he traces the path from the origins of the earliest individual cells to more complex forms that over several billion years came to develop mind and consciousness, and then examines the distinctively human characteristics of imagination, storytelling, the concept of the sacred, and ultimately the appearance of creativity.

Exploring each of these steps in some detail, he introduces readers to a sample of the competing theories proposed for how these features might have arisen. Some of these explanations, such as the biochemical theories for the development of cells with an ability to reproduce, can be analyzed and evaluated through experimentation. Others, he notes, such as hypotheses attempting to explain the origin of language, myth-making and the importance of the sacred, rely only on interpretation of an extremely limited and spotty historical record.

Throughout his review of these topics, Greene personalizes and enlivens the discussion by bringing in his impressions and opinions regarding the various theories. He describes his thinking as based on what he refers to as his reductionist approach to understanding phenomena, which he defines one in which it is considered at least theoretically possible to understand how any phenomenon works by breaking it down to the fundamental physical particles of the universe and the laws that govern them.

Then, during his discussion of consciousness, he introduces a related term, physicalists, which he defines as referring to those who believe that consciousness can be explained by “traditional scientific methods, solely invoking physical properties of matter.” (127) Not surprisingly, given his preference for reductionist approaches of understanding, he also takes on the mantel of physicalist, convinced that consciousness arises out of the complexity of the brain, and not due to some extra-physical property. Along those lines, he argues that we humans do not have free will, and, as opposed to finding this unacceptable and unthinkable, that we should celebrate that the feeling we do have free will has arisen out of the complexity of our minds. (In a public interview with Krista Tippett for her program On Being he has an entertaining exchange on free will with a doubting audience member, the transcript of which can be at the end of my review of Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence.)

Greene places a high level of significance on the human development of language and then storytelling. This recalls the wonderful book on this topic by historian Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, in which Harari describes the creation and telling of stories as having been central to the social development of Homo sapiens: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” (28, Sapiens) And, Harari argues, this ability to create shared myths and fictions gave us a decisive advantage over other human species.  (My review of Sapiens is linked to at the right.)

Different from Harari’s focus in Sapiens on the implications of story-telling, however, Greene examines in detail various of the proposals of how language and eventually storytelling may have developed. He provides a fascinating introduction to these theories – and the uncertainty that surrounds them, given the difficulty of evaluating or demonstrating them through experimental techniques.

Having traced the path from the big bang to current day humankind, Greene then pivots in the final part of the book to explore potential futures for our universe, not only for the matter and energy in it, but also particularly for the possibility of thought being possible given what is theorized about the universe of the far future. And if the timeframe over which the entropic two-step and evolution have operated since the microbes came into existence on the earth of four billion years ago is challenging to grasp, know that that period becomes the merest blink of an eye in Greene’s push into what the future may hold.

In order to provide some small handhold for grasping the timeframes he considers, Greene asks us to picture the Empire State building. He defines street level as when the big bang occurs, the first floor as 10 years of the universe after the big bang, and then every subsequent floor as representing the passage of 10 times as many years as the previous one. Thus, the second floor is a hundred years after the big bang, the third floor a thousand years after, and so on. The effect of that increasing rate first truly sinks in when Greene notes that the time from the birth of our sun to its eventual death as a collapsed “dense ball of carbon and oxygen … ultimately transitioning to a dark frozen orb” (253) will be the short distance from a few steps below the 10th floor to a few steps above it. And yet, before his exploration of the future ends, he will have gone past the top, 102nd floor, 10120 years after the big bang. Far beyond it.

Although he bases his considerations of the future of the universe on the current understanding of its physical properties and laws, substantial uncertainty exists. This is reflected already in the first possibility he considers – that the energy that is thought to be causing the current expansion of the universe may not be constant, and so could increase. Currently, this repulsive force is extremely small, overwhelmed by the other forces in regions of space where matter is present – thus the extreme uniformity requirement for the big bang. Indeed, it is only in the huge, empty regions of space between groups of galaxies that the repulsive force dominates and so drives expansion. Some physicists, however, have modeled a scenario in which an increase in that repulsive force could overwhelm the other forces in the universe, shattering all matter apart in a so-called big rip, already around the 11th floor.

Comfortingly, Greene finds that scenario “unlikely,” and proceeds up the stairwell.

A fascinating event plays out just another floor higher, however, assuming the current expansion continues. By around the 12th floor, galaxies beyond our local group will have redshifted to the point of no longer being visible, due to the expansion of space having them moving away from our region of space faster than the speed of light. (Greene points out that this doesn’t violate Einstein’s theories, because these galaxies are not actually moving faster than the speed of light; it’s the fabric of space that is expanding ever faster, while the light coming to us from those galaxies is constrained by the speed of light.) By that point, the cosmic background radiation will also have dissipated to the point of becoming undetectable. Thus, astronomers of that future time will lack the two key experimental indictors that demonstrated to current day scientists that the universe is expanding, and they will thus find the observable universe to appear static!

Farther out, beyond the era when the stars begin winking out and the available matter for forming new stars becomes scarce, Greene considers the kinds of events that have low probability, but, when the time frames become long enough, can no longer be discounted. To demonstrate this idea based on a simple example he uses elsewhere in the book: one might dump a bag of pennies on a table once per minute, and not expect to get all heads for weeks, months and even years; but, do it for 10 million or ten billion years, and that very unlikely occurrence can no longer so readily be ruled out.

Some such events are not so surprising. For example, stars passing close enough to disrupt each other’s orbits around the galaxy, or their planets’ orbits, may be a once in a million years occurrence. Consider timescales of many billions of years, however, and the disruption of solar systems and even galaxies becomes likely. More dramatically, Greene points out that at the timescales represented by going to still higher floors, matter itself will decay.

Eventually, then, Greene arrives at his central question: at what point will thought become impossible? Clearly, having reached an epoch characterized by an “absence of complex atoms and molecules” (269), he is not considering thought in the sense of something performed by the human mind. Instead, he considers the broadest possible view: “our only constraint … being that the process of thought fully conforms to the laws of physics, can thought persist indefinitely?” (269)

What follows is a fascinating examination of the basic physical function of a human brain: take in energy, carry out processes related to thought, and release waste heat. And here again, entropy rears its head, as Greene focuses on the requirement that for thought to occur, there must be the ability to expel waste heat. The question then becomes, at what point might it no longer be possible to expel that waste heat, thus making thought impossible. Putting aside the possibility of intelligent life interceding in unimaginable ways in the future to counter the dissipation of the universe, and uncertainty over the future evolution of the physical laws and constants of the universe, he demonstrates that “the far future of thought is precarious” (278), at timescales well before we reach even the top floor of the Empire State Building.

At time scales far beyond the top of his tower to time, however, come truly mind-bending possibilities, again arising out of the current mathematical models of the universe and timescales that allow even highly unlikely events to occur. Among these oddities comes into play “that the second law’s decree is probabilistic. Entropy can decrease.” (269) A theoretical consequence of this are Boltzmann brains: spontaneous accumulations of particles which come together to form the exact configuration of a thinking brain – say, your brain as it exists at this very moment, or this next one, with all the “thoughts, memories, and sensations that currently reside in your brain.” (297) The implications, including whether I at this moment writing this, or you reading this, might in fact be a Boltzmann brain, are unsettling to consider.

And he has yet to come to his discussion of the possibilities of the multiverse…

In the concluding chapter, Greene returns to the question of the meaning of our lives in the face of the likelihood that thought will at some point come to an end in the universe: “even though we can contemplate eternity, and even though we can reach for eternity, apparently we cannot touch eternity.” (309)  He argues that it makes no fundamental difference whether we know that the earth will be destroyed in 100 years, with all humankind lost, or that the universe will end in 10¹⁰⁰ years, extinguishing all thought. In either case, eternity is lost to us, to all we think and do and learn. But, far from despairing over this conclusion, he finds it a reason to value and cherish our lives all the more, and proposes that “in our quest to fathom the human condition, the … direction to look is inward. … It is a direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of construction our own meaning.” (325)

In Until the End of Time Greene takes readers on a fascinating tour of the history and possible futures of our universe, as well as humankind’s place in that story, from the origin of the first cells to the development and ramifications of consciousness and thought. Where there are competing theories about a topic, he gives a sample of the different directions in thought on a topic, while still personalizing the account with his take on it. By including references throughout his narrative from pop culture, as well as classical literature and thought, he enlivens his presentation; his writing style transmitting the wonder he himself clearly feels as he engages on these topics.

Late in the book he touches briefly on the human longing for immortality. After summarizing the concerns many philosophers have expressed about how boring immortal life would likely turn out to be, he sounds a more optimistic note: 

 I suspect that we are sufficiently resourceful – and endowed with endless time we would become all the more so – to grow into thoroughly well-adjusted immortals … to conclude that we would necessarily grow bored suggests an unduly parochial vision of the immoral mind. (317) 

Greene turns the immortality question on its head, arguing that the significance immortality has for us makes clear how important we must take each day of our mortal lives.

In a sense, Greene’s conclusion echoes a writer who comes from a completely different tradition, the Christian philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno argues in his essay Tragic Sense of Life that to see death as

a beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed in God and, as it were, lost in him” is misguided, and that, indeed: “man’s highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. (201, Tragic Sense of Life) 

It is this passionate pursuit of learning that seems to drive Greene’s life and work, and that he imparts to readers on each and every page of his writings.

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Other notes and information:

Though I didn’t go into Greene’s discussion of the concept of a multiverse, those who come away from it wanting a deeper dive can find that in physicist Max Tegmark’s fascinating book, The Mathematical Universe. A link to my review of that book is at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman

Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020)
Rutger Bregman (1988)
461 pages

Based on a deep-seated belief that competition and greed are fundamental and even necessary characteristics of human nature, it has come to be widely accepted that absent a thin veneer of civilization people’s true, selfish nature would emerge, thereby precipitating an inevitable collapse of society into violent anarchy. So profoundly convinced are most of this dark understanding of people’s true motivations that even altruistic acts have become broadly tarred as self-serving.

According to historian Rutger Bregman, however, our received wisdom about human nature is not only wrong, but worse it undermines our ability to progress further on our project of civilization. In his enlightening book Humankind: A Hopeful History, Bregman uses a fresh analysis of human history to rebut the presumption that humans are inherently selfish, a belief that he notes has been largely unchallenged doctrine for millennia.

Through startling examples, he demonstrates how this bleak view of human nature has led scientists, journalists, politicians and the general public to develop and propagate inaccurate interpretations of both historical events and psychology experiments. More critically, he explores the impact this misunderstanding has had on how society has been structured, politically and economically, and points out the destructive consequences evident in our present-day world. His hopeful history concludes with heartening examples of localities and businesses that have been organized around what he considers a more accurate, positive understanding of human nature, approaches that he proposes can serve as a basis for rethinking the structures and goals of our broader political and economic institutions.

Bregman opens by describing findings from a range of scientific disciplines that reveal that humans, far from being selfish by nature, have in fact evolved to value cooperation. He cites work done by biologists and geneticists over the past half-century, for example, that indicates that Homo sapiens have followed an evolutionary path that favored selection for friendliness, a trait that led to the development of an extremely powerful ability for social learning. This ability meant that relative to Neanderthals, for example, who had larger brains and were possibly smarter individually, Homo sapiens were able to spread new skills decisively faster across large groups.

The historian Noah Yuval Harari makes a similar argument in his captivating work Sapiens, describing Homo sapiens as having, some 200 thousand years ago, developed the capability for fictive language during what he refers to as the Cognitive Revolution. This enabled them to effectively aggregate and transmit large amounts of information about their physical world and their group relationships, and so create social constructs he refers to as imagined orders. These imagined orders, Harari argues, enabled the successful cooperation necessary to support the formation of large, cohesive groups with rapidly evolving social structures, giving Homo sapiens a critical advantage over the other species of humankind. (My review of Harari’s book is linked to at right.)

Bregman and Harari arrive at strikingly different conclusions, however, when turning to the unresolved question of what ultimately happened to the Neanderthals, and why Homo sapiens became the only surviving human species.

The common understanding for the disappearance of the Neanderthals has been that they were in some way overwhelmed by migrations of Homo sapiens into their territory. Harari, for example, suggests that either “Homo sapiens drove them to extinction” by using their creativity to out-complete Neanderthals for resources, or, more dramatically, that a predisposition to intolerance among Homo sapiens led to “the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” (Sapiens, 17-18). Harari justifies his suggestion that Homo sapiens may have carried out an “ethnic-cleansing campaign” against the Neanderthals by extrapolating backward from more recent history, observing that “in modern times, a small difference in color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.” (Sapiens, 18)

In contrast, Bregman argues that for the idea of Homo sapiens

wiping [Neanderthals] out …there’s not a shred of archaeology to support it. The more plausible theory is that we humans were better able to cope with the harsh climatic conditions of the last ice age … because we’d developed the ability to work together. (71)

The idea that Neanderthals succumbed to Homo sapiens in aggressive competition or outright conflict is, he argues, an example of the assumed selfishness of human nature leading to conclusions apparently unsubstantiated by existing evidence.

More generally, Bregman rejects what he considers to be the widespread belief that warfare has been a constant part of human history, noting that there has been little indication of large, violent clashes among early humans. On the contrary, war appears to have only become a significant part of human behavior after the transition from hunter-gather to agricultural societies.

Settled farming communities not only increased the amount of possessions to be defended, but their inhabitants generally lived a more precarious existence, due to the rise of diseases from farm animals and an increased susceptibility to natural disasters. [Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the intriguing argument that the Agricultural Revolution represented an evolutionary trap for Homo sapiens: “the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. … Nobody agreed to this deal.” (83, Sapiens)]

(Along with humans in farming societies becoming more defensive, Bregman suggests that the transition to such settlements and the associated challenges “triggered a seismic shift in religious life … to [a belief] in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done.” (105) The development of a “whole clerical class … in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry” (105) represented a significant shift in religious beliefs and behaviors from what the evidence hints at as having been common among hunter-gatherers.)

An important role in the development of farming communities’ tendency to go to war, Bregman argues, is the apparent human preference for those like ourselves over strangers – he notes recent research that has demonstrated such preferences as already being exhibited by infants as young as six months old.

Admittedly, this result aligns with the spirit of Harari’s “ethnic cleansing” comments, quoted above. Bregman, however, argues that such distrust might have had little impact on hunter-gatherer societies, where meetings with strangers would have tended to take place with small groups of people at a time, and so “any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.” (211)

In the settled communities that developed after the transition to agriculture, however, leaders actually exploited our xenophobic tendencies, in order to promote conflicts. The fomenting of an ongoing feeling of uncertainty about and threat from others allowed (and, for that matter, continues to allow) leaders to promote their importance and so increase their hold on power. In general, warriors who successfully protected their communities became indispensable, and, not surprisingly, learned to profit from the strength of their position.

Bregman acknowledges that the all-to-common descent of such leaders into corruption and self-aggrandizement would seem to challenge his overall hypothesis: if people are basically friendly, why do leaders (in whatever context, at whatever time) so often become mean? In response he attributes this to the well-known observation that power corrupts, noting experiments that show that having power tends to turn-off people’s empathy and to make them feel separate and distant from others, leading them to become socially shameless. And, unlike in hunter-gatherer societies, which were small enough to quickly put such shameless members in their place, within farming societies’ growing, anonymous populations, leaders became so powerful that they could not be easily removed without, say, a revolution – which, as famously observed by The Who in their song Won’t Get Fooled Again, generally tended to result in a new, similarly shameless leader.

Thus, the transition to farming communities introduced an increasingly precarious existence for humankind, and the growth of these settlements led to leaders who exploited these threats and the human tendency for xenophobia to maintain their hold on power. By creating an environment in which, absent the steadying hand of the state, people felt the imminent risk of violence, leaders effectively trained people to assume the inherent selfishness of human nature. And this mistaken understanding of humankind has carried through to the present day.

Bregman’s demonstration of the many consequences of this misunderstanding of human nature represent perhaps the most dramatic portion of his book. Examining several well-known historical events and psychology experiments, he demonstrates how an unwavering belief in the fundamentally selfish nature of humankind has led to false interpretations, and lasting misunderstandings of their implications. In each case, he first lays out the commonly held understandings, before then re-examining them – not re-interpreting them, but rather simply exposing the facts of what is known about them, facts that have not been so much suppressed as ignored, because they didn’t align with the expectations of investigators or the general public.

It would spoil the dramatic impact of his telling of these examples to describe them here in detail. Suffice it to say, however, that most readers will come away with their core assumptions and beliefs about these well-known and seemingly well understood events shattered – as Bregman acknowledges happened to him also. He effectively demonstrates how the basic assumptions that humans are selfish and prone to monstrous evil at the slightest whim have led scientists, journalists, politicians, economists – and, in fact, most all of us – to accept miss-interpretations and at times willful miss-characterizations, and then to pass such conclusions on uncritically, even when contrary evidence is readily available.

Although leaders since the early period after the transition to agriculture have encouraged a selfish view of human nature, Bregman notes that it was during the Enlightenment that this idea became institutionalized. Enlightenment period philosophers and politicians celebrated it, he argues, building institutions based on reason and rationality that aimed to encourage and support each individual’s (apparently inherent) selfish behavior as a path to furthering the greater good. Thus were born: economic systems that encouraged people to focus on a desire to make a profit; democratic systems such as the U.S. constitution that created “a system of ‘checks and balances’, in which everybody kept an eye on everybody else” (246); and more generally a rule of law “governed by reason alone.” (246)

Certainly, acknowledges Bregman, “a few centuries into the Age of Reason [a]ll things considered, … the Enlightenment has been a triumph for humankind … our lives … exponentially better and the world … richer, safer and healthier than ever before.” (247)  But he then, in perhaps the most trenchant statement in this engaging and convincingly argued work, fires a direct shot across the bow of the cruise ship filled with end of history celebrants, saying of these Enlightenment approaches to our world: “it was the best answer – until now.” (248)

For, willing to grant the Enlightenment institutions their due in lifting the world over the past several centuries out of the abject poverty and misery that was the inheritance of the shift to an agricultural society, he proposes that these institutions are not the final, best approach. He argues that it has come time to consider the next step in our social evolution, pointing out that:

the Enlightenment also had a dark side. Over the past few centuries we’ve learned that capitalism can run amok, sociopaths can seize power and a society dominated by rules and protocols has little regard for the individual. (248)

The flaw of Enlightenment thinking and the institutions that arose from it, according to Bregman, is in fact precisely the mistaken assumption that selfishness is fundamental to human nature. Convinced that we are by nature generally greedy, easily corrupted and prone to violence, it is little surprise that we lived up to those expectations, and have supported the creation of systems based upon them.

Over the final part of the book, Bregman demonstrates how a world based on an accurate view of human nature could look – predicated, of course, on the possibility of disabusing people of their current, deeply held misconceptions concerning the selfishness of their fellows.

He begins by debunking the Enlightenment (and our) assumption, fundamental to capitalism, that “other people can be motivated solely by money,” (266) or, more generally, that “the only thing powerful enough to spur us to action is the promise of a reward or the fear of punishment.” (267) Reviewing studies that have shown that in fact “bonuses can blunt the intrinsic motivation of employees … and that bonuses and targets can erode creativity” (269), he notes that these approaches actually demonstrate the “parallels between the western capitalist economy and that of the former Soviet Union.” (269)

He deliberately compares the "western capitalist economy" in that quote to the "former Soviet Union", and not communism.  For, having expressed his concerns with the central institution that originated out of Enlightenment thinking about selfishness as central to human nature – free-market capitalism – he addresses the elephant in the room head on: 

“Communism, we’re told, cannot work. Why? Because it’s based on a flawed understanding of human nature. Without private property, we lose all motivation and swiftly revert into apathetic parasites. Or so the story goes. Even as a teenager it struck me as odd that the case for communism’ ‘failure’ seemed to rest solely on the evidence of bloodthirsty regimes in countries where ordinary citizens had no say – regimes supported by all-powerful police states and corrupt elites.” (307) 

Setting aside such totalitarian perversions of the idea of communism, he traces the origins of the word back to Latin to argue that communal ownership – the commons – exists in our present societies to a greater extent than we realize, and in fact represents, he argues, “a vital mainstay of capitalism.” (309)

And returning again to our earliest ancestors, he notes that essentially everything was communal in hunter-gather societies. The transition away from this came, again, with the transition to an agricultural society:

It’s only in the past 10,000 years that steadily bigger slices of the commons have been swallowed up by the market and the state. It began with the first chieftains and kings, who laid claim to lands which had previously been shared by everyone. Today, it’s mainly multinationals that appropriate all kinds of commons. (309)

The trend away from communal ownership saw a brief reversal “in the late Middle Ages [when] Europe witnessed an explosion of communal spirit … an increasing share of pasture land under collective control.” (313)  However, this period was ended by “Enlightenment-era economists [who] decided collective farmlands were not maximizing their production potential.” (313) Thus in reality, he argues,

it wasn’t the invisible hand of the market that gently shepherded peasants from their farms into factories, but the ruthless hand of the state. … [The] ‘free market’ was planned and imposed from the top down ... by states. (313-4)

The goal now must then be, argues Bregman, to move beyond free-market capitalism, to build new institutions that can begin to correct the "dark side" that has arisen out of those that grew out of Enlightenment thinking.   Along with moving toward participatory democracy – bringing a wider variety of voices directly into the decision making process a more autonomous local level – Bregman finds potential new economic approaches already being pursued in a number of places around the world.  He notes, for example, a policy implemented by the Republican governor of Alaska in the late 1970’s, who established a fund that has paid a “wholly unconditional” annual dividend to each Alaskan. Though it was argued that most people would squandered it (again, that enduring assumption of the “stench of human corruption,” to quote from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song Christina the Astonishing), Bregman notes that studies have shown “no adverse effects on employment and that it substantially reduced poverty.” (316) Applying such a dividend (effectively a Universal Basic Income, UBI, though Bregman doesn’t use the term in the book) more broadly he argues “would give each of us the freedom to make our own choices. Venture capital for the people.”

In this, Bregman makes arguments similar to those of Martin Hägglund, in This Life. Though Hägglund uses detailed philosophical arguments to demonstrate that capitalism has fundamental inconsistencies that make it inherently exploitative, his ultimate point, like Bergman’s, is that if what our economic systems valued were not purely the extraction of the value we bring as workers, then we would be free “to educate ourselves and to deliberate on what would count as meaningful activities for us ... rather than being prescribed what should count as meaningful activity by what happens to be profitable for a capitalist at the moment.” (This Life, 259) Also, similar to Bregman’s calls for a more participatory democracy and increased focus on expanding the communal realm, Hägglund argues for what he refers to as democratic socialism, noting that: 

To subordinate the state to society is to transform the state into an actual democracy. … While the commitment to serve the interests of society as a whole will always be challenging and contestable, it is in principle impossible to sustain such a commitment under capitalism. Because of the social form of wage labor, democratic politics and democratic states necessarily serve as organs for representing class interests that are competing for control. We cannot actually deliberate on how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, since we must prioritize the private interests of capitalists. This prioritization is not optional, since under capitalism there can be no production of social wealth without the profits of privately owned enterprises. (This Life, 268)

And though Hägglund doesn’t explore the origins of the capitalist system, he mirrors Bregman in arguing that democracy as currently constituted serves as the mechanism for imposing capitalism.

Bregman provides other examples of alternatives to the institutional forms created during the Enlightenment, examining present-day companies built on a “more positive view of human nature” (277) and outlining the success they’ve achieved, both in terms of their bottom line and ability to attract talented employees, as well as in the challenges they have faced from our entrenched ideas and institutions. Similarly, he explores educational systems that avoid the standard, institutional protocols and top-down organization to allow students to instead learn in a more open environment – structured, but not overly constrained. In these ways, Bregman argues, an understanding of humans as fundamentally friendly and cooperative can lead to a radically better path forward for society, one that addresses the current issues of political disenfranchisement and economic inequality.

A fundamental challenge to Bregman’s hopeful vision for better institutions beyond our current capitalist and political systems is one that he himself raises early in the book, but only lightly touches again onward the end: that power corrupts.  This idea that leaders tend to become corrupted by the distance their position creates for them from others is a point he also raises during an interview for the radio program On the Media with Brooke Gladstone, in which he nonetheless acknowledges the necessity of institutions – he is not in any sense an anarchist. Bregman never returns to address how to avoid such a problem over the long run. Even institutions that in their first generations have enlightened leaders who value and encourage participatory democracy are susceptible to later leaders who become corrupted, and, in pursuit of wealth or power, actively undercut and eventually destroy the good that has been created.

That said, in Humankind, Bregman offers a profoundly transformative vision of human nature as fundamentally peaceful and cooperative. We are not, he argues, the selfish, violence-prone species that we have been led to believe, a belief that was encouraged by the early leaders of agricultural communities to stoke our tendency to xenophobia and so strengthen their hold on power, and more recently has been at the heart of how our political and economic institutions have been formed since the Enlightenment. These institutions have come to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: to excel, or even survive, within them, people have come to believe that others are selfish and greedy, and that to keep up they themselves must also act selfishly and greedily, despite what they perhaps feel is their better nature.

We have come far as a species, particularly over the past several centuries, but our negative view of human nature – of our fellow humans – threatens to undermine that progress. By recognizing and internalizing a view of our fellow humans as fundamentally good, we have a chance to rethink our political and economic institutions, and so to remake them in ways that will enable us to overcome our current social and economic dysfunction.

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Other notes and information:

Bregman discusses his solution to poverty in a persuasive Ted Talk.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Things We Cannot Say" by Kelly Rimmer

The Things We Cannot Say  (2019)
Kelly Rimmer
416 pages

An historical event of the scope and magnitude of the Second World War offers a rich palette for novelists. With large parts of the world having been deeply impacted, the story possibilities seem nearly endless; and, able to count on readers having some level of understanding of the broad outlines of what happened, writers can develop their plotlines without having to explain in detail the larger context.

Kelly Rimmer takes full advantage of these opportunities in her moving novel of a family discovering the truth about its past, The Things We Cannot Say. The story follows two protagonists: Alice, who lives with her husband and two children in present-day central Florida; and Alina, a girl in

her mid-teens living in the small southern Polish town of Trzebinia with her parents and brothers as WW II looms on the horizon. Alice and Alina serve as our narrators, with Rimmer alternating the chapter titles as simply their names.

After a prologue that hints at a hopeful outcome for the story to come, we are introduced first to Alice, on her way with her son to the hospital to visit her grandmother who has had a stroke. Next we meet Alina, in 1938, as she and her boyfriend Tomasz face his impending departure to Warsaw to begin his studies to become a doctor. From this beginning, Rimmer then, bit by bit, closes the 70-some year gap between the timelines, and so reveals the connection between the two women.

Alice arrives at the hospital to find her grandmother, who she refers to as Babcia, unable to speak but seemingly clear-headed – and intent on asking something of her. Eventually she understands that Babcia wants her to go to Poland; but she is confused to realize that Babcia apparently wants her to go there to find Tomasz, which is the name of her recently deceased husband, Alice’s grandfather. Her ability to communicate limited, Babcia only becomes more and more frustrated when Alice tries gently to reminder her that Tomasz has died.

Confusion over who exactly her grandmother is looking for is not Alice’s only hesitation about agreeing to go. Complicating matters for her is that her family situation makes leaving for even just a week-long trip difficult. Alice and her husband have two children: a ten year old daughter who is an academic over-achiever and knows it, and a seven year old son, Eddie, who is on the autism spectrum, and requires an iPad app to communicate. We learn that Alice’s husband has largely left raising Eddie to Alice, and that she, in turn, has become convinced that Eddie cannot survive without her constant attention.

But Alice cannot refuse her beloved grandmother, and thus two interleaved plotlines are set in motion for Alice – her trip to Poland to try and satisfy her grandmother’s mysterious request, and the evolving dynamics of her strained relationship with her husband as the trip requires her to let go of her tight control over her son’s life.

For Alina, half a century earlier, the difficult separation from her boyfriend soon becomes overshadowed by the traumatic invasion and occupation of Poland by Nazi forces in 1939. Even as she and her family continue to farm their land – and to maintain a low profile to try and avoid the swift and brutal violence of the occupiers – she longs to know that Tomasz is safe, and desperately awaits his return.

Within the traumatic fight for survival that Alina experiences as the occupation drags on Rimmer slowly reveals the mysteries that Alice, through her exchanges with her grandmother and especially her trip to Poland, must resolve some 70 years later. Rimmer’s approach of alternating the story between the two women, revealing hints at the truth through Alina’s story even as we watch Alice try to uncover how what she already knows – or at least thinks she knows – relates to what she learns upon her visit to Poland, creates a dramatic tension that propels a reader forward to the dramatic revelations to come.

A love conquers all theme runs through the stories of both women, though in each case in complicated ways. For Alina, the deep love she has for her family, and that she shares with Tomasz, becomes tested by the inexorable constraints of war and occupation. The situations she faces and choices she must make come fraught with stark implications for her future and that of those she loves most.

Alice, as the primary care-giver for Eddie, has carried the weight of learning how to structure his world to accommodate his autism. In the process, however, she has inadvertently reinforced her husband’s distant relationship with Eddie, to the point that caring for Eddie has completely enveloped and consumed her life. Her solo trip to Poland, along with forcing her husband to re-engage with Eddie, tests her ability to cede control over her son’s every moment. In addition, it provides an opportunity to reset the entire dynamic of the family that she loves dearly, but that has become increasingly dysfunctional, leaving her frazzled and overwhelmed.

While the subplot of Eddie’s autism and its impact on the family supports the larger evolution of the story in several ways, it also provides a powerful look at the challenges of raising an autistic child. I can’t evaluate how well Rimmer has done that, not having first-hand experience, but it certainly feels real. More generally, there is a small but powerful moment of childhood that Rimmer captures perfectly, and that perhaps any parent can identify with in some way:

[Eddie] won’t watch [Thomas the Tank Engine videos] in public anymore and lately at school he’s been reacting violently if the teacher tries to put one on for him. She thinks he’s socially aware enough to understand that he’s probably a bit old to watch them, but he doesn’t have the language to talk to us about that, so he only wants to watch them in private. That nearly breaks my heart. (114)

As profoundly moving as Rimmer captures Eddie and his relationships with his parents and grandmother, one aspect of the novel that rang a bit false was how Rimmer drew up the other characters. For all the complexity of the plotlines, the characters were more simply drawn as basically good people with particular flaws that they eventually come to recognize and grow out of by the end of the story. (Except for the Nazi’s, of course, all presented as indistinguishably pure evil.) And the characters starting points tend to be simple stereotypes: a mother who handles all the housework and child-rearing; a husband with a well-paying job but clueless around the house; a savant daughter who can’t hide her imperious impatience with how much smarter she is then everyone else; and even the teenage Alina, loving daughter, sister, and fiancé, and yet struggling to contain her teenage impulsiveness. Certainly one could argue that all these stereotypes have a basis in reality. But it gives the characters a bit of a cardboard feel, with little complexity or depth, as if constructed solely to support the plot rather than being independent actors caught up in the story. It ultimately makes it hard to really care for them.

But that aside, in The Things We Cannot Say, Rimmer has written a dramatic story of a family history turned up-side down in the chaos of the Second World War. And, with so many English language novels set during the war having plotlines built around events in western Europe or on the American experience, I found Rimmer’s story to be an engaging window into at least a small piece of the Polish war-time experience. The half of the story set during the war benefits from the natural drama of precarious survival that ruled so many lives in those years. And once Alice lands in Poland in an attempt to divine her grandmother’s mysterious request, the novel becomes truly hard to put down.

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Other notes and information:

I had an odd experience on the day I received the book. I was given it as a birthday present, and read the back cover description of the story when I unwrapped it, which introduced the character Alina. I recall thinking that it was a name that I hadn’t seen before, or at least hadn’t noticed seeing before. Then, a few hours later, I was at the gas station, and when I went to get the receipt, because it didn’t print at the pump, the attendant behind the window turned around and I saw the name “Alina” stitched into her uniform…

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "What Is Real?" by Adam Becker

What Is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (2018)
Adam Becker (1984)
370 pages

Based on the title, physicist Adam Becker’s What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics promises a relatively sober, if potentially fascinating, exploration of how to understand what could be considered the fundamental scientific advancement of the 20th century. His book certainly delivers on the fascinating part, providing an accessible discussion of efforts over the past century to achieve a consensus about the physical meaning behind the mathematics of quantum physics.

But whoo, boy, the path toward consensus has turned out to have been anything but sober and dispassionate, despite broad agreement that the theory is “wildly successful” (287) in explaining experimental results. Becker describes what has been a bitter, century-long internecine battle among physicists over how to interpret quantum physics, a struggle that has included broadside attacks against, and repeated backstabbing of, colleagues and students, and has even involved connections between some physicists’ interpretations of the theory and their political stance in the cold war disputes between Marxism and the West. And all of this has involved many of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century, as we discover in this entertaining tour of the history.

Who knew what darkness lurked behind the staid, popular image of objective scientists simply dedicated to pursuing understanding?

Early on, Becker introduces the central dilemma that has driven these disputes:

Quantum physics – the physics of atoms and other ultra-tiny objects, like molecules and subatomic particles – is the most successful theory in all science. … But … [it] doesn’t seem to apply to anything at human scale. … Why not? Maybe quantum physics really is only the physics of tiny things, and it doesn’t apply to large objects … [but then] where is the boundary, and how does it work? (1-2)

Even just the possibility of coming to a concrete interpretation of what the mathematics of quantum physics tells us about reality has divided physicists. Early in the 20th century, Niels Bohr, along with his colleagues and students at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, “developed and championed” (13) what came to be known as the Copenhagen interpretation of how to think about the quantum world. Summarizing it, Becker writes:

What does [the mathematics] of quantum physics tell us about the world? According to the Copenhagen interpretation, this question has a very simple answer: quantum physics tells us nothing whatsoever about the world. … According to Bohr, there isn’t a story about the quantum world because “there is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description.” (14) 

Effectively this constitutes, as one disparaging physicist later observed, a “shut up and calculate” (6) view of quantum physics – use the theory as a development tool that describes the quantum world, and don’t worry about trying to develop a detailed understanding of the reality of it.

The Copenhagen interpretation came to be, already in the first half of the 20th century, the leading way of thinking about quantum physics for most physicists. Some, however, had serious misgivings about its cavalier attitude toward knowing actual reality; Albert Einstein, for example, wrote that “the theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.” (14)

Such criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation has been driven in large part by what is referred to as the measurement problem. Schrödinger’s wave function, which lies at the heart of quantum physics, describes a particle’s behavior by “tell[ing] you the probability that the electron is in [a particular] place.” (17) The measurement problem arises from the fact that

once you do find [an] electron, a funny thing happens to its wave function. Rather than following the Schrödinger equation like a good wave function, it collapses – it instantly becomes zero everywhere except in the place where you find the electron. Somehow, the laws of physics seem to behave differently when you make a measurement: the Schrödinger equation holds all the time, except when you make a measurement, at which point the Schrödinger equation is temporarily suspended and the wave function collapses everywhere except at a random point. (17-18)

And this inexplicable behavior, Becker points out, relates then to the boundary problem of quantum mechanics: large objects do not seem to follow quantum behavior, and so there seems to be a boundary between the size of tiny objects that do, and larger objects that do not. But that boundary, or threshold, beyond which quantum mechanics apparently no longer applies, doesn’t appear to be definable.

Acolytes of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, according to Becker, have effectively side-stepped these issues by viewing measurements as obeying classical physics – that is, they distinguish between the quantum world and the world of larger objects, but without ever defining where that boundary exists. They argue, in particular, that it can’t be known, and so isn’t worth pursuing.

Despite these criticisms, the predominance of the Copenhagen interpretation expanded in the wake of World War II according to Becker, as funding for physics – and the number of freshly minted physicists – increased dramatically to support the technology demands of the growing military-industrial complex. In that post-war environment, physicists had a rich field of well-funded practical applications to work on, and since the mathematics of quantum physics worked so well, they simply accepted the Copenhagen interpretation as taught. It seemed a waste of effort (and funding) for anyone to explore the more fundamental questions of what Becker refers to as quantum foundations, the pursuit of the understanding of what is real at the quantum level.

And yet some physicists have continued to balk at this decision to remain ignorant of an understanding of what’s physically happening in the quantum world. Even as the Copenhagen interpretation has cemented its place among the majority of their colleagues, these physicists have continued to seek out alternative interpretations that resolve the measurement issue, while still maintaining the fundamental mathematics that has proven through testing to work so well. In the process they have faced at best indifference from many of their colleagues, though more often outright disdain and active resistance.

Becker explores several of the alternative interpretations that have been developed, and in so doing demonstrates the push-back faced by the physicists who proposed them. This has included rejection of their work from colleagues, journal editors, and even their own doctoral advisors, often apparently behind their backs. And, it’s important to recall, such rejection is not associated with the proposed interpretations being proven wrong, through theoretical counter-arguments or experimental results, but rather out of principle, out of a hardened belief that their interpretation simply couldn’t be correct.

One such example was the work of physicist David Bohm in the 1950’s. Through his studies, Bohm had learned about and come to accept the Copenhagen interpretation without serious concern. But a meeting with Einstein led him to take a closer look, and what he found unsettled him enough that he decided to pursue an interpretation that addressed the measurement issue. His solution was

mathematically equivalent [to the Schrödinger equation] … but the picture of the world suggested by the math, the story it told, was radically different. … Objects have definite positions at all times, whether or not anyone is looking at them. Particles have a wave nature [but] particles are just particles, and their motions are guided by pilot waves. (97-98) 

His theory provided a concrete description of what was happening at the quantum level, resolving the measurement issue, and also showing that quantum physics applies to all objects – eliminating the boundary question.

In the mix with Bohm was that he was watching developments in Europe in the 1940’s and had become a Marxist, even briefly joining a communist party chapter at Berkley, until finding the meetings interminable. This got him into trouble in the US of the 1950’s, and he ended up in Brazil.

At this point the story gets wild, as scientists’ political beliefs and interpretation of the science collide.

Becker explains that the development of the Copenhagen interpretation was heavily influenced by a school of thought known as logical positivism, according to which “any statement that made reference to something unobservable was not only bad science, it was literally meaningless. Thus, talking about what happens in quantum systems when nobody’s looking is nonsensical.” (48) The promoters of the Copenhagen interpretation used logical positivism to support their rejection of any pursuit of an interpretation of quantum physics that attempted to make concrete statements about what happens at the quantum level, including Bohm’s, since they considered it “unobservable."

However, Becker notes that in the Soviet Union, from the time of Lenin through to Stalin’ death, there was a strong ideological “emphasis on “materialism” and rejection of positivism [in] Marxist thought.” (108) And Bohm’s theory aligned well with his own Marxist philosophy supporting materialism – in that it provided a specific description of what happened at the quantum level. Thus,

Bohm [had] hoped for support from Soviet physicists and other communists [in that] his interpretation made quantum physics explicitly about stuff existing in the world, rather than an abstract statement of what physicists can say about experimental outcomes. (108)

That is, like the Copenhagen interpretation.

It turned out, however, that the disdain in the Soviet Union for positivism “died with Stalin in 1953,” (109) right around the time Bohm’s work was published. The resulting political changes freed Soviet physicists who had studied with Bohr to be more vocal in their support of the Copenhagen interpretation, and so also to reject Bohm’s work, one of them in fact referring to its way of thinking as an “illness.” (109)  Likewise,

Léon Rosenfeld, Bohr’s right-hand man in Copenhagen … successfully prevented Bohm from publishing a paper in Nature … [and later] wrote a scathing review, claiming Bohm had hopelessly misunderstood quantum physics. (109-110)

In the end, political shifts inflected even Bohm’s thinking about his own theories. He gradually abandoned them in the mid-1950’s for a number of reasons, but, notes Becker, this change of heart came

at roughly the same time as another, related, major intellectual shift for Bohm: in the wake of the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Bohm abandoned his Marxism. This change in philosophy altered Bohm’s thinking about the nature of the quantum world, which further motivated him to abandon his old ideas. (115)

Certainly there has been a long history of political and social ideologies influencing the interpretation of scientists’ work and conclusions – one must look no farther than to current day topics such as climate change. Becker points out, however, that different than for climate change, “in the debate over quantum foundations, everyone agrees that science works … [the debate] has been a dispute among physicists about the meaning of a theory they all agreed was correct.” (281)

Aside from the political wrangling over Bohm’s theory, a challenging aspect of it is its strange and unintuitive feature of nonlocality. Locality, Becker writes, is “the principle that something that happens in one location can’t instantly influence an event that happens somewhere else” (51) – effectively, non-locality requires faster-than-light information transfer between particles. He notes that the Copenhagen interpretation also assumes non-locality, though considers it not something worth questioning, and that Einstein was no more comfortable with Bohm’s theory than with the Copenhagen interpretation, “reject[ing] any violation of locality, calling it “spooky action at a distance” … [and that] the facts at hand could easily be explained by the incompleteness of quantum theory.” (56)

Tackling the connection between non-locality and quantum physics head-on, according to Becker, was a theorem developed by physicist John Bell.  (Bohr, Bohm, Bell: perhaps there’s an opportunity for a Ph.D. thesis in psychology on Becker’s attraction to physicists whose names start with B….) Bell's theorem establishes two possibilities: “either the predictions of quantum physics are wrong and nature can be local, or quantum physics is right and “spooky action at a distance” is real." (151)

In clear and engaging prose, Becker describes a series of experiments in the late 20th century set up to test Bell’s theorem, and so explore the non-locality implications of quantum physics. A central feature of these experiments was to send two photons in opposite directions, and, while they are en route, randomly change the polarization of devices they then pass through at their destinations. To-date these experiments have consistently demonstrated the apparent non-locality characteristic of quantum mechanics: the results do not demonstrate the random behavior that might be intuitively expected, instead leading to the conclusion that the photons communicate with each other en route. In the terms of Bell’s theorem, the results match the expectations from quantum physics in that the photons’ behavior is correlated to a greater degree than if it was random and independent.

Thus, Bohm’s theory of particles on pilot waves provides an explanation of what happens at the quantum level, but fundamental to it is non-locality – “spooky action at a distance."

Becker describes an alternate explanation, proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in the mid-1950’s, that doesn’t require non-locality, but leads to a perhaps even stranger and more non-intuitive explanation. Everett showed that quantum mathematics can be interpreted as describing that

a single universal wave function is all there is, a massive mathematical object describing the quantum states of all objects in the entire universe … [one that] obeyed the Schrödinger equation at all times, never collapsing, but splitting instead. Each experiment, each quantum event, spun off new branches of the universal wave function, creating a multitude of universes in which that one event had every possible outcome. Everett’s shocking idea came to be known as the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum physics. (124)

Although Everett’s paper was ignored for many years, Becker notes that nowadays, as the field of cosmology has blossomed, the many-worlds interpretation has become a part of a set of theories together labeled the multiverse, an infinity of universes that exist in parallel to ours. Becker summarizes these ideas in his book, but a deeper and quite fascinating exploration of them can be found in physicist Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe, in which he details the various theories that have been proposed about the multiverse, from the fairly mainstream to the still controversial. (A link to my review of Tegmark’s book at right.)

As an introduction to Everett’s theories, Tegmark describes his own sudden awakening regarding concerns with the Copenhagen interpretation:

No, this just doesn’t make sense! There’s got to be a mistake somewhere! I’m alone in my girlfriend’s dorm room in Stockholm, studying for my first college quantum-mechanics exam. The textbook says that small things such as atoms can be in several places at once, whereas big things such as people can’t. No way! I tell myself. We people are made of atoms, so if they can be in several places at once, surely we can, too! It also says that every time a person observes where an atom is, it randomly jumps to just one of the places where it previously was. But I can’t find any equation defining what exactly is supposed to count as an observation. Would a robot count as an observer? How about a single atom? And the book just said that every quantum system changes deterministically according to the so-called Schrödinger equation. Isn’t that logically inconsistent with this random-jumping business?

Flustered, I muster up the courage to knock on the door of our great expert, a physics professor on the Nobel Committee. Twenty minutes later, I emerge from his office feeling stupid, convinced that I’ve somehow misunderstood the whole thing. This marks the beginning of a long personal journey of mine that still continues, and leads to quantum parallel universes. It’s not until a couple of years later, when I move to Berkeley to do my Ph.D. that I realize that it wasn’t I who had misunderstood. I eventually learn that many famous physicists had been vexed by these problems with quantum mechanics. (157, Our Mathematical Universe)

Interestingly, Everett’s theory has even made it into a fictional setting, playing a central role in the short story Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom in Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation. Chang describes a device central to the plot, one that operates based on the many-worlds interpretation:

Every prism – the name was a near acronym of the original designation, “Plaga interworld signaling mechanism” – had two LEDs, one red and one blue. When a prism was activated, a quantum measurement was performed inside the device, with two possible outcomes of equal probability: one outcome was indicated by the red LED lighting up, while the other was indicated by the blue one. From that moment forward, the prism allowed information transfer between two branches of the universal wave function. In colloquial terms, the prism created two newly divergent timelines, one in which the red LED lit up and one in which the blue one did, and it allowed communication between the two. (273-4, Exhalation)

In describing the interpretations of Bohm, Everett and others, Becker’s point is not that one or the other is necessarily correct. Rather, he wants to encourage the pursuit of understanding the quantum world, and to not simply, as those who follow the Copenhagen interpretation do, “shut up and calculate.” And in that pursuit he notes, considering now also Everett’s interpretation,

Bell’s theorem really leaves only three unequivocal possibilities: either nature is nonlocal in some way, or we live in branching multiple worlds despite appearances to the contrary, or quantum physics gives incorrect predictions about certain experimental setups. (160) 

Thus, one must accept nonlocality or multiple worlds, or resign oneself to the possibility of, as Einstein wrote “the incompleteness of quantum theory.” (56)

Unfortunately, from Becker’s point of view, despite the fact that the study of quantum foundations – the pursuit of an understanding of what the world is like at the quantum level – is no longer as disparaged by the scientific community as it once was, the vast majority of physicists still subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, even if only passively. He ascribes this in large part as due to the increased specialization that occurred after WWII, which he concludes has led current-day physicists, unlike their forbearers, to be not only ignorant of, but openly dismissive of the study of philosophy:

Even Einstein complained about this, and how it helped keep the Copenhagen interpretation entrenched. “This state of affairs will last for many years,” he wrote in 1951, “mainly because physicists have no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments." (273)

The result, according to Becker, is that physics students learn the Copenhagen interpretation during their studies, and then, motivated by funding and the pursuit of tenure, put their heads down and focus on concrete problems. Without the scholastic training and tools that the study of philosophy could give them, they remain unwilling to engage in the logical evaluation of the validity of the underpinnings of particular interpretations, and so unmotivated to pursue a more complete understanding of the quantum world.

In What is Real, Becker tells the fascinating history of the search for meaning in quantum physics, a theory that physicists universally agree works, but which has seen “deep and bitter conflict” (281) over its interpretation. He describes the coalescence of physicists around the Copenhagen interpretation, with its rejection of the need to, or even the possibility of understanding the details of the world at the quantum level. And he examines the lives and work of those who have dissented from this consensus, scientists from Einstein through to the present day who have refused to be cowed by the willful desire among followers of the Copenhagen interpretation to remain ignorant of the physical reality behind quantum physics, and who have as a consequence risked the disapproval and opprobrium of their colleagues to pursue a deeper understanding of the quantum world.

Becker clearly encourages this spirit of exploration – not at the expense of the work done by the “shut-up and calculate” crowd, but as an acceptable and important addition to that work.

We have a wildly successful theory, an embarrassment of interpretations, and a major challenge in moving past our theory to the next one. Pluralism about interpretations might be the right answer, pragmatically, while we face that challenge. Or if not pluralism, at least humility. Quantum physics is at least approximately correct. There is something real, out in the world, that somehow resembles the quantum. We just don’t know what that means yet. And it’s the job of physics to find out. (287)

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Other notes and information:

As it is something that I find to be too often neglected and poor in many works of non-fiction, I want to take note of the fact that the book’s Index is excellently executed: complete, thorough and very helpful for tracking down connections as you read the book. Bravo!

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018)
Anand Giridharadas (1981)
288 pages

Despite being implicated in a dramatic rise in inequality that has led to increasingly dire economic and social disruptions, as well as in practices that have contributed to world-wide environmental degradation and hampered efforts to counter the existential crisis of climate change, free market capitalism has maintained an iron grip on the Western imagination as being the preeminent economic system.

Certainly the argument has been made – perhaps most famously by Steven Pinker – that the ascendancy of free market capitalism has resulted in significant improvements in people’s lives over the past several centuries, reflected in improved standards of living and longer lifespans. According to this line of reasoning it has been a net benefit – despite its role in the current challenges and in the well-documented exploitation that accompanied colonization and empire, the destructive impacts of which continue to play out.

Whatever the final assessment of the historical benefits however, its apparent triumph over other economic systems has come to take on a kind of end-of-history aura in the past few decades, a conviction that the final summit in human economic development has been reached. So convincingly have its proponents inculcated recent generations with the belief in the supremacy of free market capitalism that questioning it often elicits the rote response, so, you prefer Soviet style communism?, as if that’s the only other option – shutting down even consideration of future alternatives.

Not surprisingly, the elite who have most benefited from the global expansion of this system have become the most passionate champions of its superiority. And, according to journalist Anand Giridharadas, their unshakable belief has recently led them to promote a self-serving form of market-based philanthropy. In his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, he presents a thorough and compelling examination of how the very people who have profited from the free market capitalist framework that has caused so many of the social, economic, and environmental problems that plague our societies now promote market approaches as the only viable path to solutions.

Giridharadas labels this empire of believers convinced in the unique ability of business methods to solve social issues MarketWorld, which he describes as populated by

an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent motivations to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo … These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the system that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform. (30)

Through an engaging combination of personal stories of people caught up in the MarketWorld philosophy – its champions as well as those conflicted by its contradictions – and big-picture descriptions of the MarketWorld milieu and ethos, he makes clear both the powerfully seductive nature of its beliefs and the strict requirements and constraints, in thought and deed, that it imposes on its disciples.

The origins of MarketWorld thinking, according to Giridharadas, can be found in the rise of “organized philanthropy” (156) as an expectation for the wealthy in the late 1800’s, a time of growing anger over the vast riches industrialists were amassing. Reminiscent of elite reaction in so many other similar episodes of agitation in American history – such as over working conditions, working hours or child labor – powerful business leaders found themselves unable to ignore the populist pressure, and so finally resolved to concede just enough of their advantage to reduce the boiling point.

In that vein, Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889 what Giridharadas identifies as a pivotal essay, one that effectively brokered a deal between the masses and the wealthy elite. In it he argued that it is perfectly acceptable that those with the talent to make money not be constrained from doing so by government regulation or other limitation, but that in return they also had the responsibility to give back a part of their wealth for public works.

Thus the foundation was laid for the modern concept of philanthropy. However uncomfortable the wealthy came to feel about their largesse and the devastation caused in amassing it, they never-the-less held tightly to the advantages that had permitted their success. To assuage their guilt they embraced philanthropy – for many years expressed through privately funded infrastructure building, but now, according to Giridharadas, also through investment in (profitable) business solutions to social issues.

The consequence of the bargain Carnegie struck for the elite has been to unleash them to pursue ever more deregulation and tax reduction, which has undermined the government’s ability to resolve social and economic problems by weakening its authority and starving it of funds. And, having de-legitimized the government as an effective institution, the elite – the winners in the game of free market capitalism – have then argued that since government is so ineffective, society must needs turn to business people to fix its problems.

Not surprisingly, Giridharadas points out, the elite then pursue solutions consistent with their experience and personal goals – market-based, profit-making solutions. He notes that traditional social justice movements tend to pursue systemic changes that lead to a win-lose scenarios, such as workers getting more rights at the expense of business profits. MarketWorlders, on the other hand, pursue win-win scenarios, market-based solutions intended to help those impacted, but without changing the fundamental (and profitable) systems causing the original devastation, and allowing still (further) profit to be made.

When MarketWorlders develop such win-win solutions for solving social, economic, and environmental issues, they tend to build off of techniques and processes originally developed to address business problems and improve business efficiency. These types of protocols, writes Giridharadas, result in solutions that typically focus on dealing with the impact of problems at the scope of individuals, as opposed to correcting them at the systemic issues at a community level.

Giridharadas goes on to point out a broader predicament for society that arises from these protocols, referencing a 2011 essay by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and his colleague Mark Kramer:

“The capitalist system is under siege.” … “A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves,” [which] had become too focused on “optimizing short-term financial performance.” … Again and again, companies that employed droves of brilliant people and had high-priced outside advisers were making decisions that ignored “the well-being of their customers, the depletion of natural resources vital to their businesses, the viability of suppliers, and the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell.”   Porter and Kramer were critiquing a culture that had overtaken the business world: the culture wrought by the atomizing protocols that obscured context. (144) 

And this business culture, Giridharadas argues, with the limitations and destructive consequences identified by Porter and Kramer, is nonetheless now promoted as the solution to the very same societal issues it has created.

Outside of the direct control exercised by the business community over what constitute viable approaches to solving social problems, Giridharadas notes that the MarketWorld ecosystem also leverages its monetary largesse to subtlety but effectively co-opt many of those who might otherwise pursue social justice movements focused on systemic change through governmental action – that is, who might put in jeopardy the profitable economic climate that currently exists for MarketWorlders.

He points out, for example, that college students in recent decades have

come of age [in] an era in which capitalism has no ideological opponent of similar stature and influence, and in which it is hard to escape the market’s vocabulary, values, and assumptions, even when pondering a topic such as social change. (17)

In this environment, idealistic students who want to make a difference are naturally guided toward the idea of market-based solutions, rather than systemic change, as being most appropriate. Such thinking diverts them from government and non-profits, leading them instead to pursue business and management degrees, and eventually take jobs at consulting firms, having come to believe that such a path is the only viable one through which to make an impact.

The other group that MarketWorld quite effectively pulls into its orbit according to Giridharadas, are politicians, professors and others actively working on identifying and addressing systemic social issues. Using the experience of one professor in particular, but also providing examples of public intellectuals in other disciplines, he effectively ‘follows the money’ that leads such critics into the embrace of the MarketWorld firmament as so called thought leaders.

Those who successfully navigate this transition to becoming thought leaders are rewarded financially with on-going speaking engagements and involvement at MarketWorld events. In exchange they tone down their message and shift away from pointing out the systemic wrongs being perpetrated, instead focusing on “helpful solutions” (92) for the victims of these now anonymously-caused wrongs. Successful thought leaders quickly learn to not implicate and antagonize MarketWorlders as the source of these problems, and to not promote the kind of systemic solutions that are of a win-lose nature.

Giridharadas pulls together his main themes in an extended examination of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a conference held yearly from 2005-2016, and for which Bill Clinton defined the goal as “require[ing] the rich and powerful people it brought together to commit, as a condition of showing up, to tangible projects for the global good.” (203)  Focusing on the last of these conferences, which occurred in 2016 in the atmosphere of rising populism that led to the successful vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Giridharadas demonstrates how the conference panels kept ‘on-message’ with MarketWorld thinking.

Referencing a session entitled Partnerships for Global Prosperity, for example, he writes that “[though] the panelists represented the left and the right … everybody onstage was part of the globalist, cosmopolitan, technocratic, win-win consensus, promoted and sponsored by MarketWorld.” (215) Similarly, he summarizes another panel as one “that could be counted on to provide the right amount of stimulation while worrying absolutely no one.” (228)   Giridharadas concludes that these conferences demonstrated how Clinton, who “when he started public office … believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action,” had completed the transition already begun during his time in office, to a belief in “the theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets ... [with] win-win solutions.” (205)

Throughout his book Giridharadas’ examples focus on US leadership in the promulgation of the MarketWorld thinking. In that sense, his descriptions of the unshakable belief of MarketWorlders in the market as the solution to social issues, and also of the almost mystical status they give to applying the latest technologies to these problems – there’s an app for that – resonates all too well with author Kurt Andersen’s conception of the U.S. as Fantasyland. In Andersen’s eponymous book, subtitled How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History, he notes that

America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a feverish appetite for the amazing. … Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots, irrationality in rationalist drag. (427-428, Fantasyland) 

MarketWorlders, with their credulous – fantasist – belief in the supremacy of technology-centric, market-based solutions, could be considered to fit in comfortably as citizens of Andersen’s Fantasyland empire. (My review of Andresen’s book at right.)

Despite their success, MarketWorlders have faced push-back in recent years in the form of populist uprisings. Giridharadas notes that suddenly, “the world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others.” (210)  To describe how MarketWorld elites have come to be viewed, he borrows historian Niall Ferguson’s term rootless cosmopolitans, a term that hearkens back to a damning observation by writer Bill Kauffman in Utne Reader in 2000:

For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. What we have is class war – though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments; nothings, really; everythings, in fact – waged by the mobile against the immobile, by the cosmopolitan against the rooted, and the winners are he professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.

It could well be, however, that these rootless cosmopolitans – Kaufmann’s depraved – will finally have the last laugh, beyond the current period of populist revolt. The historian Noah Yuval Harari, in his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, extrapolates forward current trends in the development of information technology (“info-tech”) such as artificial intelligence driven automation and data analysis, and biological technology (“bio-tech”) such as medical treatments and genetic enhancement, toward a potential future in which the elite create a self-reinforcing benefit-structure that allows them to extend their existing advantages over the rest of the population to ever more extreme levels, ultimately allowing them to live in entirely self-sufficient, isolated communities. Unless we develop paths that avoid this dystopian future, Harari argues, the masses will become “expendable” to an extent not seen before:

The two processes together – bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI – might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. To make an already ominous situation even worse, as the masses lose their economic importance and political power, the state might lose at least some of the incentive to invest in their health, education, and welfare. It’s very dangerous to be redundant. The future of the masses will then depend on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis – like climate catastrophe – it would be very tempting and easy to toss the superfluous people overboard.

In countries such as France and New Zealand, with a long tradition of liberal beliefs and welfare-state practices, perhaps the elite will go on taking care of the masses even when it doesn’t need them. In the more capitalist United States, however, the elite might use the first opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the American welfare state.” (75, Harari; my review of his book linked to at right.) 

Certainly the shifting emphasis toward addressing social issues through market-based solutions that focus on making a profit (and that are simply given up on if they don’t) subverts governments’ ability to prevent, or at least ameliorate the worst impacts of the bleak future Harari imagines possible.

The question, finally, is will populist unrest sufficiently threaten the elite’s hold on power to an extent that forces them to back down from the MarketWorld ideology and to allow governments to lead systemic change? Or have we as a civilization already passed the point of no return toward Harari’s dystopic vision of a future with an isolated elite and “redundant … superfluous” masses?

Similar to Harari, Giridharadas argues that the social, economic and environmental crises we face must be addressed through a restoration of our “shared democratic institutions,” which represent all of us as “free and equal citizens.”  Instead of allowing the denizens for MarketWorld – the “winners” in the current system – to continue denigrating and delegitimize governments in order to further their own profitability under the pretense of beneficence, he calls for a strengthening of our “common institutions,” noting that “when a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen.” (262)  Only in this way, he argues, can we have the opportunity to achieve a more successful, sustainable and socially just society.

In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Giridharadas concedes his own flirtation with becoming a MarketWorld thought leader, a path that eventually led him to question the fundamental assumptions behind its approach to solving social and economic issues, and finally to write a book on what he had learned. This insider view, as he points out, not only gave him access to the people that inhabit MarketWorld, but also a direct understanding of the seductive nature of its promises and the well-defined limits of what it consents to consider.

The result is an engrossing and convincing critique of the MarketWorld ethos. Giridharadas himself views his book as a step on the path to weakening its orthodoxy, describing his text as “a letter to the public, urging them to reclaim world-changing from those who have co-opted it.” (268) He bluntly calls out the status quo, writing:

if anyone thinks that the MarketWorld complex of people and institutions and ideas that failed to prevent this mess even as it harped on making a difference, and whose neglect fueled populism’s flames, is also the solution, wake them up by tapping them, gently, with this book. For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question – Where do we go from here? – is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us. (246)

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Michael Porter’s conclusion as summarized above from Giridharadas’ book – that the “capitalist system is under siege” – has been suggested by a growing number of authors in recent years. While some, like Porter in the quotes included above, imply that the problems lie in the current practices of capitalism, others go farther, arguing that the capitalist system is, in fact, fundamentally unsustainable.

This latter point has been made, for example, by Martin Hägglund in his book This Life, in which he discusses what he refers to as the immanent contradictions in the capitalist system, which he argues originate from the fact that “under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.” (250)  Distinguishing between “socially necessary labor time” as the time we work to survive (to secure food and shelter), and “socially available free time” as the time we work on the things that bring meaning to our lives, Hägglund states that

The very calculation of value under capitalism, then, is inimical to the actualization of freedom. Indeed, the deepest contradiction of capitalism resides in its own measure of value. Capitalism employs the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity [necessary labor time] and treats it as though it were a measure of freedom [available free time]. Capitalism is therefore bound to increase the realm of necessity and decrease the realm of freedom. (258) 

Through references to the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Hägglund make his ideas concrete:

the problem of value becomes specially manifest in the replacement of living labor time with nonliving, automated production time. In his speeches and books, King keeps returning to automation as a double-edged phenomenon. The automation of previously necessary labor should be emancipatory, since it liberates us from the need to expend our lifetime on tedious forms of work. Yet, under capitalism, automation does not lead to the emancipation of workers but rather to their unemployment, which makes them available for further exploitation in temporary jobs and with lower wages. “As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of our technological creativity,” King emphasizes in a [1962] speech. (343)

And, to be clear, for Hägglund the immanent contradictions of capitalism as a sustainable system are not at all tied to a few greedy profiteers:

The privileging of the profit motive is not a moral failure of individuals under capitalism but expresses what we are collectively committed to in being committed to capitalism and its necessary requirement of an annual growth of value. (250) 

Given this inherent goal of the system, he argues that ‘fixing’ capitalism is therefore not a viable option.

Hägglund’s critique of capitalism forms just one part of a fascinating exploration of what it means to find value in one’s life. My review of his book is linked to at right.

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Book Review: "The Best of Richard Matheson"

The Best of Richard Matheson (2017)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)
Introduction by Victor LaValle
407 pages

Déjà vu all over again.

That’s the surprising experience awaiting most anyone who reads through the 33 stories collected in The Best of Richard Matheson. Even though many will perhaps not recognize Matheson’s name, they will discover sprinkled throughout this engaging collection of horror, fantasy, mystery and science fiction stories, plots that seem strikingly familiar.

I certainly came to these stories unfamiliar with Matheson’s work. Though Victor LaValle’s delightfully crafted introduction tips readers off, I was unprepared for the number of stories that I suddenly recognized as classic TV episodes or movies.

So it was for Duel, which opens with a driver heading to San Francisco who uneventfully passing a tractor-trailer on an isolated, two-lane highway in a region of dry scrub and mountains. A few miles later, having “drifted into a reverie” on the empty road, the driver “started as the truck roared past him on the left, causing his car to shudder slightly,” and, after cutting in, forced him “to brake to maintain a safe distance behind it.” The duel has begun, as made famous in the eponymous Hitchcock movie. It turns out that Matheson not only provided the inspiration for the movie with his story, but also wrote the screenplay.

Several of the stories included in the collection also became the basis for Twilight Zone episodes. Perhaps the most famous of these, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, starred William Shatner as a man not completely comfortable with flying who becomes convinced during a flight on a stormy night that a kind of ape-man is jumping onto the wing and trying to remove a cover plate of the engine. Can he, however, convince the airplane’s crew of the imminent danger?

Matheson does brilliant job of building up of the tension in the stories of this collection. Each tends to open with the main character or characters in the midst of an unremarkable activity or moment, one that then gradually – ever so deliberately – spirals out of their ability to control or even comprehend. Quotidian lives that most any reader can identify with become suddenly transformed into dogged battles for survival against a seemingly relentless force.

If you’re the least bit skittish about the unexplained, Matheson’s tightly crafted tales will have you glancing over your shoulder at unexpected sounds or glints of light that before would have passed unnoticed. For, unlike the more famous movie and TV versions, these stories play out in our imagination, a fertile if mysterious ground in which they can link into our profoundest personal fears.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf