1. Cultures and Organizations by Geert Hofstede.
After visiting East Africa on 2 separate occasions, I became fascinated by the very different world view that I found there. Some of my good friends have spent 30 years in Africa, and they are still puzzling about the differences. This book helped me understand cultural differences in a major way. It is old now, but the author's son continues to update it. It offers a major insight into why people do what they do, and how they think. For one simple example, I would characterize a part of the US culture as, "we can fix anything". I can't walk into a toilet anywhere on the planet that is running, without wanting to take the lid off and fix it! Similarly, our political powers cannot ignore a problem. As a people, we are persuaded that WE ARE IN CHARGE, and we can fix anything. Other parts of the world do NOT share this conviction. The East Africans seem to think that NO ONE is in charge, and in Latin America, the prevailing attitude I have found is, SOMEONE ELSE is in charge - not us.
The book is splendidly done, lots of anecdotes and examples, and lots of statistics. It changed how I view the world.
2. A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
. This book is a real eye opener. Howard Zinn is a teacher and historian. This book is well researched, and well written. It offers a view of the history of our country that you will not find in most history books. From Columbus to the acquisition of Mexico, through 2 world wars, Korea and Vietnam, this book sees history from the perspective of the people, not the leaders.
What I learned is that for most of our history, the people of the United States lived in conditions worse than most developing countries. We all know now about the oppression and destruction of the Native Americans -- but I had never heard of most of the events described here. We somehow managed to clearly reject slavery and discrimination, but the memory of it tends to pale as time goes by, even for those of us alive during the racial turmoil of the 50's and 60's. And I had never heard the stories of how we acquired California and the Southwest from Mexico. I had never understood the rich and poor gap of the early colonies, or really understood how much this gap has grown in the last 20 years! I had never seen such a catalog of foreign interventions to protect American interests. I never understood the violence and despair that brought forth the labor movement, and how much we all owe to those who died for the right to organize. Somehow I had missed all of the trumped up excuses for military intervention that our government has used over the years. I had not heard that our free speech was so restricted that questioning government policy in time of war was punishable by prison, and still remains illegal to this day.
The book offers hope in one sense, and despair in another. Hope in that we have been worse off. In our history, we have had a severely oppressed underclass, the indentured servant, the share cropper, the hourly laborer with no rights and benefits. And we managed to overcome all of that. Despair in that we seem to be slipping back to a world controlled by the rich and powerful, with decisions made against our wishes, with decisions for violence escalating our national debt to the point where we are once again a debtor nation, at the mercy of our creditors abroad, especially in Asia. We seem to slipping back to an atmosphere where fear of terrorism is once again restricting our freedom of speech, and seems bent on reducing our way of life to that of a developing nation.
3. Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan.
This is one of those books that I wish I had read back when it was originally published in 1976. As Harvey Cox says on the cover, "The most accurate and balanced short reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus."
This is an outstanding book. I am not much for "religion" as such, despite being Catholic on my parents' side, and spending 25 years in Catholic educational institutions, but this book hit me just right. This is the historical Jesus, based on the best scholarship of the New Testament. It reveals the shape and tenor of his time, and explains how he understood himself, and how his listeners heard him.
If you just read the gospels from our frame of reference, the impressions you form are not correct. For example, when Jesus speaks of the coming of the "Kingdom of God", most of us think he is referring to heaven. Or we think that "the coming judgment" refers to the end of time. Neither is true! And Gehenna is not a description of hell, but rather refers to the dump outside of Jerusalem. Lazarus is not in heaven when he confronts the rich man, but rather in Sheol, under the earth, together with the rich man. The "salvation" which Jesus spoke of was not to be delivered in the next life, but it was here and now. "Faith" is not a list of things to believe in, but a hope and trust in the ultimate victory of goodness and truth over evil. Jesus did not intend to establish a church of believers, but to change the world fundamentally.
The book is purely scripture driven. It offers no "theological" explanations, outside of some minor references to Greek influence on some of the later writers.
I particularly like how he explains what the early Jewish followers of Jesus must have meant by what we call the "Incarnation". Makes perfect sense to me. But you'll have to read the last chapter to find out what that is.
4. On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson.
Another of those books I wish I had read when it was first written. Edward O. Wilson has done a huge survey of the research on human beings and societies to come up with this attempt to unify the biological and social sciences. The basic idea is that there are things that are pretty well biologically driven in us -- the results of evolution. We can resist them and work with them, but we cannot afford to ignore them. It is Wilson's hope that by understanding our biological tendencies, we can fashion a code of moral values that will support our human species into the future.
Some of my "Rules of Thumb" come from this source. Wilson has identified some basic traits that seem implicit in human biology, that we encounter in all individuals and their societies. The following are some of his insights:
On Aggression. "Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of safety. Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens . . . . We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression." P. 122-123.
Sex and gender. There are some traits that seem laid down in the biology. "In general, girls are predisposed to be more intimately sociable and less physically venturesome. . . . By the age of six months, girls also pay closer attention to sights and sounds used in communication than they do to non-social stimuli. Boys of the same age make no such distinction." P. 134. " . . . most of the pleasures of human sex constitute primary reinforcers to facilitate bonding." P. 147. Not procreation as such, according to the "natural law" moral theory!
Homosexuality. The prohibition of homosexuality is similarly based on a mistaken view of nature. "There is, I wish to suggest, a strong possibility that homosexuality is normal in a biological sense, that it is a distinctive beneficent behavior that evolved as an important element of early human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind's rare altruistic impulses." P. 149.
Tribalism. We are tribal beings. "Most and perhaps all of the ... prevailing characteristics of modern societies can be identified as hypertrophic modifications of the biologically meaningful institutions of hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal states. nationalism and racism, to take two examples are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism." P. 95.
Religion. "The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature". P. 176.
Genetic Diversity. "I believe that a correct application of evolutionary theory also favors diversity in the gene pool as a cardinal value. If variation in mental and athletic ability is influenced to a moderate degree by heredity, as the evidence suggests, we should expect individuals of truly extraordinary capacity to emerge unexpectedly in otherwise undistinguished families, and then fail to transmit these qualities to their children. . . . Since each individual produced by the sexual process contains a unique set of genes, very exceptional combinations of genes are unlikely to appear twice even within the same family." P. 205. If we want to foster truly great humans, then foster diversity in the gene pool.
Universal Human Rights. Because we are mammals, we are strongly driven to some measure of equality and cooperation in our society. So human rights must be a foundation part of any moral code. P. 206. As the Catholic Church is wont to say, we are social beings, living in community. Or as that Canadian Sage, Red Green, says all the time, "We are all in this together".
Stages of moral maturity. This relates to our biological "growing up". Lawrence Kohlberg defines six stages of ethical reasoning. "The child moves from an unquestioning dependence on external rules and controls to an increasingly sophisticated set of internalized standards, as follows:
- simple obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment,
- conformity to group behavior to obtain rewards and exchange favors,
- good-boy orientation conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others,
- duty orientation, conformity to avoid censure by authority disruption of order and resulting guilt,
- legalistic orientation, recognition of the value of contract,s some arbitrariness in rule formation to maintain the common good,
- conscience or principle orientation, primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases where the law is judged to do more harm than good." (P. 173-174.)
- enthusiasm and sharpening of the sense from exploration;
- exaltation from discovery;
- triumph in battle and competitive sports;
- the restful satisfaction from an altruistic act well and truly placed;
- the stirring of ethnic and national pride;
- the strength from family ties;
- and the secure biophilic pleasure from the nearness of animals and growing plants.
- a tendency toward hierarchy;
- a tendency toward, emphasis upon and deep personal concern about status and recognition;
- a great value placed individually upon self-esteem as part of individual integrity;
- a desire for a substantial degree of personal privacy, including personal space;
- deep sexual bonding and deep parental bonding with both types of bonding having numerous and complex manifestations in cultural life including national soccer teams.
I'll tackle more recent works I've read later, and my fiction gems. Enough for the day is the evil thereof!!
Copyright Carl Scheider 2019.
