Perhaps it is simply superstition but sometimes random events fall into place and propel a series of other actions. I had company last week and somehow in the process of imposing a new order on my living room/library/studio/office/study - I found a book on the floor. THE UNDOING PROJECT, BY MICHAEL LEWIS.
I read this book when it was newly published in 2017, because it was highly praised in all the review I read in my regular weekly reading: The Sunday New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers.
There are some thinkers whose ideas throw a spotlight into the dark of mysterious existence, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Sanger, Howard Gardner, Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Pavlov, Baba Ram Dass, Jesus Christ, to name just a few who changed my life.
I can almost date each of these entering my world - I read Charles Darwin's VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE, and ORIGIN OF SPECIES, when I was twenty-one and on my way to Germany to I've for a couple of years. Good thing I took these books because it was so long ago, only 25 years after the end of World War II, that English language books were as rare as sneakers or blue jeans in Germany.
I read Betty Fridan and Gloria Steinem in the 70's and they gave me a view of the hold of patriarchal traditions on the lives of women. In college, I read Gardner, Jung, Pavlov and Marx, and in the years after, returned to Baba Ram Dass's book BE HERE NOW, regularly for a mental tune up.
Let me tell all of those who proclaim, "They live in American now, let them learn English!" It is not easy to learn a new language even if you are young, intelligent and have a talent for languages. When I was living in Germany, I tried to learn enough to read in German but never succeeded. The more I learned in my German language classes, and the more I tried out my new skills, the more I realized how far it is to fluency. I had a great accent but it was terribly difficult to memorize all the vocabulary we take for granted in our native languages. Reading the newspaper was impossible let alone trying to read a book in German.
Anyway, reading Darwin on the long trip to Germany in 1967, introduced to me the idea of evolution and adaptation in particular. That concept changed my world view. increased my understanding of how things get to be the way they are. All of my life, I have directly AND inadvertently studied why things are the way they are and how they got to be that way, and similarly with people, why we behave the way we do and how we got that way. All the thinkers and writers listed above, not to mention all the great authors I have read and loved and who have taught me about the world, were all both students, and analysts of human behavior and the authors went even further and used their discoveries and observations to create spell binding story art.
It may be a bit more difficult to read the historians and theorists than the literary writers, but I have found that if you can manage it, they each inform one another in remarkable ways. For example, historical studies of slavery and the Underground Railroad and the civil rights movements give you one perspective on slavery in America, while literature like GONE WITH THE WIND, or NEVER CAUGHT (the story of Ona Judge, enslaved to President Washington) gives you another view, an insider view, you might say, and then if you read Frederick Douglas, or the WPA slave narratives, or you watch a documentary on the development of the blues and jazz from field call and response singing, you get whole new windows onto that world. Then you can read modern writers and bring it all up to date, like with Tony Morrison, Te Nahisi Coates, and Isabelle Allende (who writes stories that speak so eloquently about slavery in South America and the plantation system there. Finally, more contemporary biographies on leaders such as Malcolm X and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., can help you comprehend the context of the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement of our current period.
But one of the books that has made the most difference in my understanding of things currently is THE UNDOING PROJECT, because it speaks to the motivations of the figures who are in fact, running the world right now in the midst of a pandemic. Tversky and Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for their work in BEHAVIOR ECONOMICS, talk about what they learned about how people make decisions, and how leaders make strategy and policy. To radically simplify and summarize what I learned from them, often leaders fall into the lazy and ego driven habit of feeling as though they know so much they don't need the data, they can go on instinct and gut reaction. They ignore the information that may be newly coming in to them in favor of old attitudes and previous patterns. Sometimes that approach brings disaster, as is the case with our current president and the Covid 19 pandemic. Not only the American president, but also the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson - (architect of the removal of Britain from the EU) and the Brazilian president Bolsonaro, who went so far as to take off his mask to tell the world he was infected with coronavirus, after downplaying it and pretending it didn't exist until his country was third from the top of the list of nations in danger from poor strategy in controlling the spread. At the top of that list of nations in trouble, is the United States, where so many mistakes were made and the virus is on the upswing, and Great Britain with another autocratic anti-information populist prime minister made the same awful errors in judgement.
All three of these leaders fear and avoid information and experts. They are so egotistical and arrogant that they think they know everything and don't need any input from more educated and informed people. The war between Dr. Fauci and Donald Trump is a perfect example. Trump spouts off whatever idiot notion has claimed his remarkably erratic attention, sends the country in all the wrong directions and hates Dr. Fauci because Dr. Fauci tries to correct the misinformation and contradicts the fearless leader.
The latest example was Trump calling for everyone to open up again and get the economy started when Dr. Fauci clearly advised that we reach a period of diminished infections first and that we needed to put into place a safety protocol featuring testing before we opened up. Trump silenced Fauci and got everything opened up and started a super spread of the disease again.
Everything that is happening right now is described in Michael Lewis's book about decision making and Tversky and Kahneman's findings. Another great thinker and writer is Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote SAPIENS, the history of mankind. I have run out of time and will save a discussion of Harari's book for another time.
Meanwhile, if you are staying in a lot, you may want to consider the Lewis book THE UNDOING PROJECT which I am sure you can find at the library,
Happy Trails, those in the outdoors and those in our own minds!
Jo Ann
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