The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley

In 1905, then Secretary of War William Taft and a host of other American dignitaries took a tour of Pacific islands and Asian nations. James Bradley tells the story of this trip, along with the wider contest of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policies toward Pacific expansion and Asia, in The Imperial Cruise.

Roosevelt, with Taft as his right hand, engaged in secret diplomacy with Japan. The Senate would not have approved a treaty with Japan with terms Roosevelt wanted, and his own State Department would have strongly advised against his course. So Roosevelt sent Taft to consummate a secret deal that he could never acknowledge.

By the time Taft set sail, Japan was already responding to interactions with the West. It was remaking itself into an industrialized, militarized country in the western mold. Roosevelt saw in them American-friendly, quasi-civilized people who could expand Anglo-Saxon virtues into Asia without slipping out from under Anglo-American influence. As with almost everything related to the Pacific and Asian peoples, Roosevelt was very shortsighted.

In reading about the early 20^th Century, I’ve been struck by the pervasiveness of racism. Bradley explains how Roosevelt viewed everything through a racial lens. These were racial lenses were proudly worn by white elites at the time. The key to history was racial history. They saw the birth of civilization in the Middle East with the Aryans, who began moving west. Around the Mediterranean, where the Aryans mixed with other races, civilizations degenerated. In Germany, pure Aryans gave rise to Teutons, who inherited Aryan civilizing with values of democracy and individualism. These Teutons moved west and were further perfected in the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxon civilization leapt across the Atlantic and push aside the savages of North America. To Roosevelt, Manifest Destiny had not closed with the conquering of the continent; it was ready to spread into the Pacific. White men would continue to spread their civilizing influence, subjugating or exterminating lesser, browner races when necessary as white Americans had done to their Indian wards. White elites like Roosevelt saw their westward destiny in this racial history, and it was further confirm by science in Darwinian survival of the fittest.

History and science refute such notions now. Bradley (and I) certainly don’t try to justify the attitudes or actions of Roosevelt, Taft or others. Bradley is plainly critical of handling of Pacific islands and Asia. Roosevelt’s racial views blinded him to the abilities and patriotism of non-whites. He had the hubris to pursue diplomacy on his own, secretly, without advice from the State Department, Senate or anyone else who might raise the slightest objection or concern. He tutored Japan in the ways of western imperialism, but could not imagine how well they would learn the lessons. Bradley places at least some of the blame for World War II in the Pacific at the feet of Roosevelt, whose interventions created the powerful military empire we faced in those waters.

Roosevelt was an astute manager of his image and he understood public relations. Because of this, he sent his oldest (and nearly estranged) daughter Alice on the trip. She was a celebrity, and her presence assured a lot of press coverage. Her presence was also a distraction from Taft’s secret mission.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

First Samuel

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Water by Steven Solomon

Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Clarence King was probably the most well-known American scientist of his time. It doesn’t hurt that his scientific reputation was built on exploration of the then still wild west of the United States of that he could spin a tale. Robert Wilson recounts the life of the accomplished geologist in The Explorer King.

King was born in 1842. He was raised in Newport, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

As a young man, King was enamored of art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin thought the rugged Alps of Europe to be the best subject of art for their beauty, colorfulness, ruggedness and variety. When he met western geologists and mountaineers through mentors at Sheffield, he wanted to be part of it.

He headed out for California in 1863 and became part of the state’s geologic survey. He would spend the next decade studying the geology and geography of the American west, especially its mountains. He showed great physical prowess and courage as a mountaineer.

After working on the California survey, he went on to lead surveys. In 1864, he was chosen to lead a survey of Yosemite.

He built on his reputation from the Yosemite survey to lobby Congress to fund a survey of the 40^th Parallel, roughly the route the transcontinental railroads would follow. Though it was under the auspices of the Army Corp of Engineers, it was the first federally-funded scientific endeavor that was completely staffed by civilians. While working on this survey, he was the first to discover active glaciers in the U.S. His team published new methods of silver smelting to make the mines for productive (the survey’s first report dealt with mining in order to show the commercial value of their research to money-conscious Congressmen).

The 40^th Parallel survey made King famous, though not because of the many contributions to science that came from it. King’s team heard rumors of a diamond discovery in Colorado. It would have been very embarrassing for them to have walked over such a valuable mineral resource without observing it. They tracked down the site of the discovery and determined it was a hoax; the site had been planted with rough diamonds and other uncut gemstones that the con men had bought mostly with money from their marks. Stories of massive fraud sells newspapers, especially when the names of big money men in San Francisco and New York are attached to it. King was the hero of the story.

When the U.S. Geological Survey was created, King was appointed to be its first director. His career as a scientist was already on the decline. He would turn his attention to making money in mining, but he would not be successful. He would have no money when he died.

This leads to an interesting point about King, though it is not the focus of Wilson’s biography. King had nothing to leave for his secret family. He was married to a black woman. This was a very unusual thing at the time. To protect his reputation, he kept the marriage a secret. He did not even reveal to his wife his real identity until shortly before he died (she knew him as James Todd). His friend John Hay provided for Ada Copeland Todd (and the five children she had with King) after King died in 1901.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Wilson, Robert. The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West. New York: Scribner, 2006.

The Big Necessity by Rose George

George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. New York: Metropolitan, 2008.

Rose George wants people to talk about something they don’t usually talk about: shit. Human excreta is a huge problem in much of the world. Even in the West where flush toilets are nearly ubiquitous, safe disposal of the waste is a daunting problem. There is probably nothing that could do more to improve human health, productivity and prosperity worldwide than to improve the disposal of human excreta, i.e. to really deal with our shit.

George deals with both the highs and the lows of disposing human waste. The pinnacle is found in Japan, the land of high functioning toilets. Japanese butts are pampered with heated seats and built-in warm-water bidets just for starters. On the other extreme, some people have nothing better to resort to than open defecation in the bushes or even the street.

There is no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to sanitation. One reason is water. The waterborne sewage systems of the relatively water-rich, flushing West would not even begin to work in the dryer parts of the world. Even where great and affordable technology exists, sanitation can be thwarted by misunderstandings of culture and society.

George’s look at how culture effects sanitation make a lot of sense, but it is easy to overlook. Many sanitation programs have failed because well meaning planners have imposed solutions from the top. The successful solutions seem to be coming from the bottom, where people find solutions that fit the local customs or where local awareness is awakened before solutions are proposed.

Another interesting thing about the book is that George has talked to many people who are trying different ways to solve the sanitation problem in different parts of the world. There a lot to be learned from their successes and failures. Maybe by openly discussing the shit, and seeing what works and doesn’t from both a social and engineering standpoint, we can come up with better policies and programs—or simple human interactions—that will lead to better living for everyone through sanitation.

Order this book here.

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005.

Rodney Stark argues in The Victory of Reason that the West grew to prominence in science, technology, commerce, and power because of its foundations in Christianity. Personal freedom, democracy, and capitalism grew and eventually flourished in Western Civilization because Christianity provided a philosophy and set of beliefs that such things were possible, achievable, and valuable. These things failed, stumbled, and declined in other parts of the world because the cultures, particularly religions, that prevailed there supported philosophies and beliefs that lead another direction.

It starts with a notion of God that is almost unique to Christianity: God is a being of reason. Therefore they could use human reason, however imperfect, to understand God and increase our understanding of Him. Christian theology wasn’t simply asserting scripture, but reasoning about God and His Word to increase, refine, and improve knowledge and doctrine.

The Christian faith embraced progress through reason in doctrine. Christians looked forward to becoming progressively better believers. God is immutable, but those who believe Him can grow in understanding as they mature and with successive generations. This religion of belief contrasted with religions of practice, which inherently looked backward to established law.

These foundational beliefs in reason and progress carried over into Christian views of the physical world. It was a real place made by God. In addition, because God created the world using His reason, we can understand it using ours, just as we can use reason to increase our understanding of God. This belief gave impetus to modern science. Some credit goes to the ancient Greek philosophers, some of who had faith in reason and others in experimentation, though not both at the same time. Islamic philosophers admired, preserved and closely studied the Greeks. However, it was Christians who took these resources and added their own worldview to create modern science. Early scientists were Christians, often supported by the church directly or through universities, which were connected to the church at the time. Western nations gained a lead in science that they still hold.

Progress carried over to social and political issues as well. In particular, Christian beliefs about human equality made the church a leader in the abolition of slavery in Europe and later the Americas. It also gave rise to increasingly democratic governments, personal freedoms, and property rights. This created an environment where capitalism could flourish. Capitalism love technological development, and it didn’t hurt that it was growing in cultures that were amenable to science, and these things grew together creating new levels of freedom, opportunity, and wealth. Christian theologians had the flexibility and reasoning power to adapt doctrine to these new developments while remaining true to received scripture.

Stark supports his arguments with examples from history. One of the more interesting things about the book is the way he compares examples from the Christian world to counterexample from other cultures, such as China or Islam. China was a prominent, technologically advance culture that did not hold its lead. Islam preserved Greek knowledge during Europe’s supposedly dark ages, but did not advance. It was the late bloomers in the Christian West who had the philosophical tools to build success upon success. He also contrasts the winners and decliners in Europe and the Americas, showing how successful and wealthy nations became that way by embracing religious liberty, democracy, and capitalism, while those that declined held to or recreated feudal systems.



If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
God Wants You to Be Rich by Paul Zane Pilzer
How We Got Here by Andy Kessler
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Steven K. Scott
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Based on his self-description in The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon and I are close in age. Unlike Weldon, the limited selection of broadcast television channels in my rural community did not present 1960s Batman series. My childhood impressions of the Dark Knight came almost exclusively from the comics. My favorite version of Batman is the “World’s Greatest Detective” (when I came across his team-up with a very old Sherlock Holmes in Detective Comics 500, I had to have it). I’m also fond of the adventure hero who hues close to his pulp roots—basically the Shadow or Doc Savage in a bat suit (I also had to buy Batman 253, in which the awestruck superhero acknowledges the Shadow as an inspiration).

I suppose that I staked out my position on Batman because that is partly what Weldon’s book is about, the contradictions between Batman the character and Batman the idea, and the tension between stories loved by hardcore fans and stories appreciated by a wider audience who engage with Batman in diverse ways.

Weldon illustrates this tension, and the character’s shift as the pull is sometimes stronger in one direction or another, through the history of the character. He sees a cycle in Batman’s depiction. He starts as a dark loner. He becomes a father figure (most directly to Robin). He grows into the patriarch of a family (Robin, Alfred, Batgirl, and Huntress just to start a list). Then a desire to revitalize the character, get back to roots, or satisfy the core fandom returns him to the loner stage.

The hardcore fans Weldon writes of generally conceive Batman as serious. They want a Batman who is realistic and gritty. In my experience as a reader of comics, “serious,” “realistic” and “gritty” are often code words for prurience, grotesquery and gore. I’m not interested in that in comics or any other media.

These fans have a love-hate relationship with the Batman of other media (they just hate the Adam West version). The Tim Burton films revitalized public interest in Batman when the comics were in a serious sales slump. (The hardcore fans hate the Joel Schumacher movies. I’m with them on that.) In the Chris Nolan trilogy they finally got a Batman who is serious and has acceptance in the wider culture.

That culture is much wider now than ever, especially due to the Internet. Comics fandom was once very insular, and in some ways it still is. In the Internet age, many people are engaging the character and idea of Batman. Comic book fans, cosplayers, fan fiction writers, movie buffs, fashionistas, retro TV watchers, hipsters and a host of others are interacting with Batman’s stories, history, image and iconography. It is a world that some of the old hardcore fans may find discomfiting, but it may be a place where Batman can have lasting relevance.

Weldon plainly likes that prospect. In his view, the super-straight Adam West Batman and the grounded, brooding Chris Nolan Batman can coexist. They are both really Batman. People have always focused on the aspects of the character that resonated with them. They have also imposed on him interpretations that the writers and artists that created his stories never imagined. We do this with every text, but few texts have the longevity of Batman. That may be the Weldon’s other point. We can take any version of Batman as seriously as we want, or we can simply enjoy the stories. He is a fictional character after all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Fic by Anne Jamison

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wisdom from the Batcave by Cary A. Friedman

Weldon, Glen. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

The success of the West...rested entirely on religious foundations

The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.

-Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason

Quiet by Susan Cain

I am an introvert.  So is Susan Cain, author of Quiet.  I imagine so are many of the other readers of this book on introversion and its strengths as they look to understand themselves and live more comfortably in a world the favors the outgoing.

Cain divides her book into four parts corresponding to four questions about introversion.  What are the roots of the preference for extroversion in the West, especially in America?  Is introversion real, a quality inherent to our nature?  Are there cultures where introversion is preferred?  Finally, how to introvert live in an extroverted culture?

What Cain calls the “Extrovert Ideal” arose with a cultural shift to a focus on personality.  This isn’t personality as a trait as she uses in the rest of the book, but personality as personal forcefulness, persuasion and salesmanship.  This seems to have arisen naturally over time with the rise of industry and our move to cities.  We were less producers and more sellers, and the main thing we had to sell was ourselves.  Cain uses as an example, though the trend started earlier, Dale Carnegie (a Missourian like me).  Carnegie propelled himself from shy farm boy to dynamic people person by mastering public speaking and he built and business that still exists today on teaching people to be more outgoing.

The distinction between introversion and extroversion is more that cultural, though.  There is evidence that inborn physiological difference play a role in these personalities.  Cain discusses research on the subject that  suggest there is a biological basis that at  least partly explains introversion, though life experience likely still plays some role.  There is not a 100 percent correlation between being a “highly reactive” or “highly sensitive” person and being an introvert, but many introverts reading this book will probably recognize themselves in these categories.

Though the Extrovert Ideal prevails in the West, introversion seems to be preferred in the East.  We see this in the quiet studiousness that has become the reputation of Asian-Americans.  Many Asian cultures prefer quiet, reserve, deference, reflectiveness and other traits associated with introversion.  They are seen as wisdom, politeness and respect.

Though extroverts draw most of the attention, and that will likely continue, introverts have strengths that can be useful in organization and society (introverts aren’t antisocial, they just deal with stimulus differently than extroverts).  Introverts are more likely to pay attention to warning signs.  For instance, Warren Buffet predicted the collapse of the internet bubble.  He wasn’t being a bearish pessimist; he was just paying attention to signs that reward-hungry extroverts were ignoring.  Cain found her questioning mind and quiet demeanor made her an excellent negotiator because she could question assertions without seeming overly aggressive.  I’ve often found myself in the role of mediator and negotiator for the same reason; I could listen, sort out what people really wanted, and offer a compromise.

Not only that, Cain offers a path for happy introversion.  We can be true to ourselves and be as extroverted as we need to be to accomplish those things that are truly important to us.  Extroverts can be as quiet as they need to be, too.

Reading Quiet prompted me to think a lot about my introversion.  With a few exceptions (I was never especially afraid of public speaking—it got me out of the crowd of pressing bodies in the audience), I’m a typical introvert.  I may write about it sometime.  I suspect many introverts who read it will find much to reflect on, especially since such reflection will come naturally.  It is a worthy book for extroverts, too, for insight into the many obvious and hidden introverts in their lives, probably a few very close to them.

Cain, Susan.  Quiet: The Power if Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  New York: Crown, 2012.

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A Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen

Esolen, Anthony. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008.

Our civilization is on the verge of disintegration. However, by recovering the best of our historic culture, philosophy, religion and government, the wisdom of our ancestors, we can recover the great things we’ve lost and continue to enjoy the advancements they’ve made possible. That’s Anthony Esolen’s message in this book.

Esolen is unabashedly conservative and religious. He sees this as keeping with the best traditions of the West. He wants to build on the hard won lessons of history, not throw it out because a new age supposedly calls for new thought.

He does not romanticize the ancients. The Greeks who bequeathed to us logic and democracy practice some of the worst kind of rhetoric and abuse of power. The Romans who had some wisdom in affairs of family and state pervert patriarchy with misused authority and undermine industry with slavery. Even the Church, with its worldview that made the best of Western Civilization possible, could go astray. If anything is consistent through history, it’s that evil people do evil things and even people of good intentions can fall short of their ideals.

Our age has dispensed with ideals. Many of the historic revolutions that advanced human happiness were surprisingly conservative in that they carried with them the best traditions of the past. The revolution we’re experiencing discards tradition as irrelevant and dangerously ignores the lessons of even the recent past. Government takes the place of God, or takes on nearly god-like power, scientific management of society supplants individual kindness and community and convenience and convention take over for law and ethics.

In spite of the alarm he sounds, Esolen is optimistic. Western Civilization, especially the Christian West, is built on hope, a hope in One who is good and active in accomplishing good in the lives of men. He doesn’t say abandon the present, but neither abandon our past, especially not the One that gives meaning to the story of human history.

Water by Steven Solomon (204)

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper, 2010.
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Steven Solomon’s Water is an epic history of civilization from its roots to modern time. Solomon’s thesis is that inventively mastered their water resources have risen and those that have outpaced their available water or innovations have declined. There are lessons in this history for us who live in an age where some nations already experience serious water scarcity and even relatively water rich nations are squandering their natural fortune.

The book generally follows sequences of technology, geography, and politics. In technology, it moves through waters many uses from irrigation to transportation, energy and sanitation. The geographic motion of the book is from east to west, starting the early innovations of Asia, sliding to Europe, then jumping the Atlantic to North America. The political trend begins with ancient, totalitarian hydraulic societies and moves on to gradually democratizing nations and the splintered, competitive, yet surprisingly workable and cooperative, market-oriented Western republics.

In the final chapters of the book, Solomon deals with the threat of water scarcity. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, are already facing water shortages. Those fortunate enough to have other sources of wealth, like oil, are importing virtual water, especially in the form of food. Control of water resources is becoming a matter of international diplomacy, national security, and possible war in much the way oil was in the last century. This is especially true in the arid, populous Middle East and South Asia. Many of the water poor live in lands that are highly populated, arid, unstable politically, and have long-standing enmities with neighboring countries.

Relatively water rich nations, like the United States, have problems, too. Much of it stems from using water inefficiently and for less productive activities. This is especially problematic in the dry western states, where long-standing, vested interests have sought to protect their subsidized access to water while others, sometimes more efficient and high value users, pay great premiums for the limited remaining available water. This isn’t strictly a western problem; eastern cities are also droughts, growing populations, industrialization, intensive agriculture, and aging infrastructure that strain their water resources.

While the problems are serious, Solomon seems hopeful that, as in the past, we may be able to develop technological, organizational, and political solutions to these issues. He objectively discusses national and international efforts to solve the looming water crisis. He seems to have more faith that workable solutions well arise in the more water rich, democratic West, where a combination of government regulation, free markets, substantial local control, and varied regional solutions are giving rise to innovation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Exodus
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Great Stink by Clare Clark
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
Water by Marq de Villiers
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

New & Interesting Stuff March 14, 2013

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort

Gas Taxes

Gina McCarthy Nominated to Lead Environmental Protection Agency

He that has not mastery over his inclinations lacks the first principle of virtue and industry

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Literature Review: Cost Overruns & Delays in Municipal Construction Projects

March Featured Book

March Featured Category

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

New & Interesting Stuff March 5, 2012

Seize this very minute

The success of the West rested entirely on religious foundations

Victory is not won in miles but in inches

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

For those looking for a brief survey of technological history around the world, Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey would be a good start. With just a little preface to introduce ideas about how civilizations interact in relation to technology, Pacey dives into a historical narrative of the development of major technologies. He starts in A.D. 700 and continues almost to the time the book was published in 1990.

Throughout the book, Pacey describes the interactions between civilizations as a dialogue. Straightforward, direct transfer of technology from one civilization to another is rare in his view. The success and development of a technology that originated in a foreign culture depends a lot on the customs, organization, government, economy, and technology of the receiving culture. Very often, the adoption of a foreign technology spurs adaptions, improvements and even new inventions among the adopters. Even the rumor of a foreign technology can spur people invent, or independently reinvent, solutions to a problem. Pacey is keen to recognize this stimulus effect in cross-cultural dialogue related to technology.

In addition to recognizing the inventiveness found in many cultures, Pacey is careful not to overemphasize mechanical inventions, which might tend to put the focus on the West. He points out that the development of more efficient and productive crops and agricultural practices in Asia were also important technologies.

Another important technological improvement centered on organization and abstraction. As technologies became larger and more complex, they exhausted what could be experienced directly by craftsmen. Improvement depended on developing new ways of thinking about materials and work. Scale drawing and model-making became a way to deal with complex construction. New principles of organization were applied to work, such as specialization and division of labor, especially as people began to work with powered machinery. Some technological improvements even required a new way of understanding materials, spurring interest in the development of sciences, especially chemistry.

Pacey follows this progression through guns and railroads and into the 20^th century with computers, nuclear power, and flights to the moon. He doesn’t stop there. Instead, he takes a look, seemingly “back,” to survival technologies. Technologies related to agriculture, sanitation and environmental health in the 20^th century have a huge impact on the way we live today. In the decades since this book was published, the Internet has revolutionized the way we think about computing and communications, but in many ways our health, wellbeing and lifestyles depend on technologies that are centuries old and we cannot neglect them. Perhaps in an ongoing cross-cultural dialogue about technology, new and old, we can find solutions to current and future problems (climate change, water shortages, clean energy, food security and more) that are adaptable to the various needs, scales and organizations of cultures around the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Pacey, Arnold. Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990.

Interesting Stuff Halloween 2009

90,000 Residents Without Water Service After Mains Break
Advisory Issued For Jackson, Miss. After Sewage Spill
Blowing Up a Bridge in Miami, MO
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Interesting Stuff Oct. 17, 2009
People in business
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Sewer Line Rupture in Kansas

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

Depression and anxiety are growing problems in the West. The model of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is breaking down, and antidepressants are ineffective. (I’m not suggesting you should stop taking antidepressants. Even if they are not working out for you, discuss it with your physician first.) Where do we turn to find relief?

 Johann Hari considers this problem in his book Lost Connections. Hari was a long-time sufferer of depression and taker of ever-increasing doses of antidepressants. He was happy with the model that depression was a chemical imbalance that was beyond his control and a pill could fix it. The problem was that a pill didn’t fix it; he was still depressed.

 First, it isn’t all in your head—or even in your chemistry. Though there is a physiological, and even hereditary, aspect to depression that can make some more susceptible, depression is triggered by our experience and social environments. Depression is a symptom of problems in your life. To Hari, depression is essentially a social disease and it requires social treatments.

 Though Hari does not claim to have completely uncovered the causes of depression, he outlines several that are supported by research. He describes them all as types of disconnection.

 For example, many are disconnected from meaningful work. They have no sense of control over their work. There is no connection between effort and reward, and the work can be humiliating drudgery. In addition, work has become much less secure; many have no idea if they’ll have work next week or even tomorrow.

 Related to this is disconnection from status. Research of primates suggests that depression is an expression of low status intended to protect apes from the abuse of their neighbors. In highly stratified cultures, like the United States, stress is higher than in cultures with more status equality. Low status people are under constant stress, and high status people experience extreme stress when their status is challenged.

 Most of all, we are disconnected from other people. We are less likely than ever to belong to a church, club, civic group, professional organization, sports league or similar structure of getting together with other face-to-face, bonding over common interests and building relationships. Neighborhoods are no longer communities; they’re just clusters of homes.

 Though it is more challenging than taking a pill, the solution to depression is to reconnect in those areas where we have become disconnected. It is especially important to reconnect to other people. If you want to feel better, do something to make someone else’s life better.

 The difficulty is that it is hard to get better on your own. Fortunately, if you’re willing to take a step, there are things you can do. On the bigger scale, we need cultural reform that supports personal relationships, meaningful values, meaningful work, empathy, hope and time in natural settings. There is no money to be made in prescribing a community garden, a book club or a job where one is treated with respect, so the money will probably continue to pour into drugs (whether they work or not), until we demand—and start to create for ourselves—something better.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

 Hari, Johan. Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Writing: Steal Characters

A lot of writing revolves around characters. For some writers, characters are central, and they’re drives, decisions, history, and idiosyncrasies move the story. A popular series character can be the jackpot for a writer, especially a genre writer.

Great characters are all around. How do you find them? Do as your predecessors in inventing great characters. Steal them.

I’m not suggesting that you actually steal characters. Nor am I suggesting that the writers I’ll be discussing stole their characters. It’s a matter of looking around in literature and life for real and fictional people then reworking them, consciously and unconsciously, into your own character.

Let me draw an illustration. Let’s take a popular character and see how other popular characters are in some way a reworking of it. These connections are my invention. I have not idea what the creators of these characters were thinking. I doubt most of them were thinking along these lines.

Let’s start with the Lone Ranger. Created by George W. Trendle (written by Fran Striker) in 1933 for the radio, the Lone Ranger saw success in several media, especially television. Before looking at the masked strangers successors, look at his predecessors. There were white-hatted cowboy heroes before the ranger. His contribution was the secret identity and the avoidance of lethal force. These heroes were white knights transformed for the gunpowder age. You might see those chevaliers as vaguely Christianized versions of mythological questers like Odysseus and Hercules.



Now imagine that the Lone Ranger is an antihero, his bullets are deadly lead and he uses a lot of them. You might picture something like Jonah Hex. John Albano and Tony DeZuniga created Hex in 1971. He is a scarred frontiersman who roams the West, not necessarily protecting the innocent, but collecting bounties or dealing deadly justice.

Maybe you like that the Lone Ranger avoids deadly force. Let’s keep that, but make him a pulp-era vigilante. That is what Trendle and Striker did in when they created the Green Hornet for the radio in 1936. They even made the Hornet a distant relative, though not a descendant, and imitator of the Ranger. The Hornet is darker, though. Instead of riding a white horse, he drives the Black Beauty. He sometimes pretends to be a criminal, but it is mainly to allow him to infiltrate gangs and break them apart from the inside. In spite of this, he avoids killing just as his predecessor did (I guess Seth Rogan didn’t notice that).

What if the Lone Ranger was a costumed superhero? He might be Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939. Bruce Wayne’s identity isn’t hidden from the audience, but his costumed crusade against crime could have been modeled on the horseman. Batman writer Bill Finger gave Batman a code of ethics that would have made the Ranger proud. Not only did Batman eschew deadly force, he rarely used a gun at all. In appearance, at least, Batman resembles Zorro more than the Lone Ranger. (Batman comics tie him to Zorro, too. Several authors have depicted it as the move the Waynes had just seen when Bruce’s parents were killed by a criminal). Zorro himself might be taken as a Latin American spin on the Ranger, except he was created 14 years earlier by Johnston McCulley.

Not all of these ostensible progeny are as good as Batman. Put the Ranger in a talking car and you might end up with something like Knight Rider. Put Jonah Hex on a motorcycle in a futuristic megacity and you might get Judge Dredd. (The Judge Dredd comics weren’t bad, just not my cup of tea. The Sylvester Stallone movie was bad.)

The Lone Ranger is an archetypal hero, which is how we can so easily draw connections between him and characters that came before and after. It doesn’t denigrate Trendle and Striker to say they drew on archetypes, or even specific characters or people, in creating his own character. It’s a compliment that they created a character that was so popular, enduring, and inspiring to other writers.

Think of your own twist on the Lone Ranger archetype. You might have other characters you love that you could call on. Take your favorite romance heroine and put her in a completely different setting (Charlaine Harris put Sookie Stackhouse in a Louisiana full of vampires). You could put a detective in the far future (Isaac Asimov did in Caves of Steel). Bring a dragon into the atomic age (yeah, Godzilla). You could make a dragon a slave to the boilermakers in a steampunk fantasy—hey, maybe I’ll do that.