At Night, He Is Studying for an IT Career

Each year I seem to end up with one BIG BOOK. Last year it was Ian Morris and Why the West Rules--For Now. This year it is shaping up to be Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. I could list about 50 books, for 50 years. I'm never sure when I am reading them which ones will keep coming back to visit me. Some from when I was younger include Eric Hoffer's True Believer and Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled.

I mention these, because although there would be more famous books on my list (if I ever made this list), I don't think these books are known to most people I know.

The Better Angels of Our Natures may be a book that will give me a sense that, even without major changes in the way things are going, things may turn out better than they have been anyway. (Candide is probably on my list, also, and I have about 45 years avoiding becoming Dr. Pangloss, so you can imagine my worry about this confession.)

Wouldn't that be the damnest thing. All these years, fearing that we were becoming the worst of all possible worlds, and then one new book, and I can finally lean back and relax.

This book makes me think science is about to tell us why people do bad things to each other. Maybe, then, violence can stop. Pinker doesn't make this promise, but I'm reading between the lines. Or maybe I'm just making up new lines.

One of the many factors that Pinker credits for an improved humanity is satire. He quotes the King of Brobdingnag when he responds to Gulliver's description of English government: "I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth." That has long seemed an accurate description to me, but I am delighted to accept any evidence of change.

I am not sure if, like many old men, I am becoming more conservative as I age, or if there is really some hope that gradual improvement is possible in people, families, society, government, law. If I'm just getting old, I'll ask my friends to wait until after the holidays before they dump the ugly truth in my lap again.

Dr. Pangloss and the best of all possible worlds.

I have been reading a book by Ian Morris called Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. I would usually want to finish a book, before making a comment, but this one is long and it is a keeper. It is a wonderful book; every page causes me to wonder about something. And it may be one of those sea change books that causes everything to look different once it is read. (I know, that sea change metaphor is hackneyed. The phrase always brings to mind for me, "Full fathom five thy father lies/ of his bones are coral made/ Those are pearls that were his eyes/ Nothing of him does fade/ but doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange." So I keep using it.)

Morris quotes Voltaire: "'All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,' says Dr. Pangloss-again, and again, and again--in Voltaire's eighteenth-century comic classic Candide. Despite
contracting syphilis, losing an eye and an ear, and being enslaved, hanged, and caught in not one but two earthquakes, Pangloss sticks to his story. Pangloss, of course, was Voltaire's little joke, poking fun at the silliness of contemporary philosophy, but history has thrown up plenty of real-life versions."

I read an English translation of Candide, Or Optimism, I think as assigned reading, in high school and enjoyed the joke and was completely persuaded that Pangloss and Leibniz (who I did not, and have not, read) must have been complete idiots.

Now, because of Morris' book, it occurs to me that Dr. Pangloss may have been right, not about the optimism part, but because this is the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only possible world. This also, makes it the worst of all possible worlds, of course, but if everything had to turn out the way it does, there may be no reason with Dr. Pangloss to rejoice in the awful things going on around us, but there is little reason to be suprised or disappointed, either.