In 2023, I read 76 books, including 70 distinct titles, 4 rereads within the year, and 9 rereads from prior years. This year’s essay considers 28 of them and is somewhat more thematic and synthetic than past years, as both my reading and writing are being shaped by my vision for this site.
Themes
Cycles of Life, Cycles of History
Back to the 1970s, Forward to the Future
Eclectically Interesting
The year’s essay starts with a potpourri of titles whose only theme is that I found them fresh and interesting.
The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, by Helen Czerski (2023).
The Blue Machine tells the story of how the biggest thing on the surface of our planet works; almost none of us have any real awareness. It is delightfully fascinating, scientific, personal, and poetic all at once. As a Physics PhD postdoc, Czerski stumbled upon the question of the ocean and was stunned: “How had I managed to get through three physics degrees and hundreds of books and articles and talks and no one had ever mentioned the ocean? This was easily the biggest scientific story I had ever heard.” She dove in, and The Blue Machine is one fruit of that decision.
At its core, the story is one of energy flow. Net gain at the equator, net loss at the poles. A system that stores and distributes energy on our rotating and tilting planet. It has discernible and measurable flows at every scale. Enduring but not immutable patterns like the Gulf Stream shape the environment that civilization assumes. (The warm northerly Gulf Stream flow in the Atlantic gives Europe, which is situated quite far to the North, its mild climate.) Modern measurement and computational tools give us unprecedented insight into the energy flows and their physical and biological consequences.
Czerski takes us through the ocean’s massive layers and flows, which powerfully shape atmosphere and weather patterns, as well as the subsurface patterns that drive the ecosystems for untold varieties of ocean life. She tracks smaller movements and a range of sea creatures. The ecology of whale poo and krill is one interesting excursion; another is how whale ear wax records a history of stress that maps when humans have created a hostile environment for them. And so much more.
She concludes with a reflection on the magnitude of the stress that humans are putting on the ocean system. The ocean is the primary reservoir of solar energy and water’s great heat absorption capacity buffers short term variation due to diurnal, seasonal, solar system, and atmospheric cycles. If energy absorption is sufficient to cause major changes in ocean flows, the climate patterns civilization assumes would be disrupted and the adaptation demands would be profound.
You will not see the ocean the same way after you read this. It is indeed an intricate and planet sized engine.
Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent, by Dipo Faloyin (2022).
This is a very lively account of present-day Africa from a fiercely proud young Nigerian. At turns picturesque, wickedly funny, and seething with righteous anger at the depredations of colonialism and post-colonialism, Africa is Not a Country will leave you with the sense of a continent full of youthful energy and potential that is not a victim and is ready to take its place with at least as much and likely more to offer than other aging and spiritually exhausted continents.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis (2023).
Michael Lewis had incredible inside access to Sam Bankman-Fried’s world as he built up the crypto currency behemoth FTX. SBF’s skill powering his rise is one that is created and made relevant by the symbiotic combination of vast financial flows and astounding computational and networking technology that underlie our system of exchange, a system which grossly over rewards parasites who possess esoteric skills in clever manipulation of those flows. SBF has the full deck: outstanding mathematical skills; a truly unique ability to look at a highly complex situation full of uncertainties, rapidly assess the probabilities, and make a bet; and vision for computer systems to facilitate those bets. Otherwise, he is pretty much a mess.
The financial industry has been vacuuming up elites of this type for decades. They are disproportionately found in mathematical disciplines like physics at our most elite universities. They have little prospect of making anything like the money they make in finance in less manipulative occupations. As a group they have extreme mathematical skills and are disproportionately on the autism spectrum. Lewis goes into some depth portraying this group’s “effective altruist” subculture, which is truly pernicious. They want to live lives of maximum benefit to humanity and basically calculate that they should make as much money as they can and then spend it to change the world by doing good with that money by their lights. The problem is that their lights are largely quite defective and limited.
SBF ultimately was snared by infractions he committed in the name of this type of do-goodism. I was struck by how thin the line is between the supposedly legitimate quantitative finance manipulations he performed earlier in his career and the crypto currency fantasy world manipulations and hidden moves that landed him in jail. I am not sure there is a real difference.
This account has been criticized as being too sympathetic. I don’t think so. It just portrays SBF as a human being. A fairly pathetic human being, but one with a single freakishly brilliant dimension. A fun, fascinating, brisk, and revealing read.
The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, by Vince Beiser (2018).
This is an excellent contribution to the genre of works looking at the world through a single element that permeates how we live. Sand is a great choice. It is the dominant element in everything from sidewalks to silicon chips and is the primary constituent of our built environment. Sand is a surprisingly technical and finely graded substance with precise specifications and special supply chains for a multitude of uses. Despite being one of the most abundant substances on the planet, sand is not one thing, it is many things, and there are shortages. This book explores the extraction and use of sand and its impact on communities where it is mined. The recent scale of sand usage (think China and more) is mind boggling and unprecedented. Concrete is a miracle substance and the primary element of our built environment, but it is also perishable, so an enormous latent problem. Sand for silicon chips is very special and comes from a particular place in North Carolina that is shrouded in secrecy and intrigue. And so on. Fascinating, fun, and alarming all at the same time.
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, by Peter Frankopan (2023).
This is the second most difficult book I read this year. I briefly put it on my top 10 list until my wife convinced me it did not belong there. It displaced “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, which was there because it compellingly put forth a theory explaining how civilization emerged in the pattern that it did. For me at least, GGS filled a unique position. The Earth Transformed banishes GGS with an overwhelming synthesis of scholarship, much of it technical, from the 26 years since GGS was published and relegates GGS to a footnote. But Laurie convinced me that as a history, it is not all that great.
However, it has real value as a book length synthesis of scholarship about the influence of environment on history. It is like a technical journal survey article that gives an overview of a field and is heavily referenced. The synthesis may be valuable, but the real action is in the footnotes. So The Earth Transformed is essentially a 656-page survey article whose footnotes could fuel years of exploration.
It covers the entire history of the planet through the lens of how the environment shaped it, and how life has changed the environment. Recent technical scholarship has revealed numerous facts not accessible by other means. Some of the raw material is found in ice cores, dendrochronology, sediments, pollens, ancient DNA, and traces of events like asteroids, volcanoes, ice ages, rising and falling oceans, moving continents, geo and solar history, and so on. I would prefer that Frankopan treat the present a lot more technically and a lot less politically, but that is a quibble. He catches the zeitgeist of climate doom while providing a solid historical presentation of an ever-changing environment, all manner of past struggles, triumphs, and disasters, and is ultimately clear that he is offering a deeply informed perspective for thinking about our current fears.
Climate change has occurred for the entire history of the planet; occasionally life has driven it, but mostly not. Today’s human driven change is novel in the history of the planet, but the magnitudes involved have occurred before. There is a good chance that a volcano or some other uncontrollable external disaster will take us out before CO2 does.
Bioscience and Beginnings
Bioscience has been one of my main interests for several years and is probably where most of the most interesting science is occurring. This year’s reading found some well written gems and pushed into some innovative and technically difficult areas that substantially expanded my understanding of the immense sophistication of the mechanisms at work in all forms of life. These additional mechanisms show a much more powerful toolkit for evolution than the standard picture, but also, at life’s origins, a threshold level of necessary complexity that is so great as to be forever inexplicable without a superior creator/designer.
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2022).
The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016).
I’m going to put these two together. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a wonderful writer of sophisticated popular science. He weaves history and personal stories together with the latest science and reflection on what it all means in enthralling narratives. If you have any interest at all in these topics, you should read him. Cells and genes are awesome and intricate marvels of nature and creation—just beautiful. Mukherjee paints the picture as only a great writer can.
Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Fortified. Why Evolution Works As Well As It Does, by James A. Shapiro (2022).
This was by far the most difficult book I read this year as well as the most paradigm shifting. It is written by an eminent University of Chicago biochemist and goes into great depth describing a large set of mechanisms that constitute a biological toolkit for “natural genetic engineering”. This is a far more powerful set of operators than the simplistic random gene mutation model of the neo-Darwinian synthesis that has dominated biological discourse, ideology, and just-so stories throughout my lifetime. Quite simply, I believe the evidence Shapiro has assembled demolishes that model, although it still includes its mechanism. I struggle to track Shapiro’s details, so I will use a couple of quotes to summarize the gist:
“NGE [Natural Genetic Engineering] is shorthand to summarize all the biochemical mechanisms cells have to cut, splice, copy, polymerize, and otherwise manipulate the structure of internal DNA molecules, transport DNA from one cell to another, or acquire DNA from the environment.” (Shapiro documents numerous such mechanisms.)
“NGE is only a set of well-documented DNA change operators. While NGE can help in understanding the molecular details of rapid and widespread genome change, it does not tell us what makes genomic novelties turn out to be useful. How NGE leads to major new inventions of adaptive use remains a central problem in evolution science.”
“In order to be truthful, we must acknowledge that certain questions, like the origins of the first living cells, currently have no credible scientific answers. However, given the historical record of science and technology in achieving the impossible (e.g., space flight, telecommunications, electronic computation, and robotics), there is no reason to believe that unsolved problems will remain without naturalistic explanations indefinitely.”
“In formulating 21st-century evolutionary principles, it is important to incorporate certain major empirical discoveries in the biological sciences: All extant organisms have sophisticated molecular systems for monitoring external and internal conditions, which they use cognitively to adjust their physiologies, correct errors, and repair damage to ensure survival, growth, and reproduction. All extant organisms can actively modify their read-write DNA genomes in response to ecological disruption or biological challenge. Many hereditary changes result from biosphere interactions … These interactions can trigger the action of NGE systems and often combine molecular components from the interacting organisms, cells, viruses, or vesicles in the new organisms that evolve.”
So Shapiro is forthright: we have no idea how these mechanisms got started. But given a cell with these mechanisms (an enormously complex given), there is far more power to evolve than the conventional story offers.
Shapiro includes blog entries in this volume to help make its material more accessible to a mainstream audience. His 21st century view of evolution is indeed a new thing.
Your Designed Body, by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman (2022).
This book does something profound that in retrospect is obvious and should have been done long ago. It puts together a Systems Engineer and an expert in the human body, who happens to be a Physician, and looks at the body using the skills of the engineer. It shows that the body is loaded with systems that have a logic that is familiar to the Systems Engineer, but vastly exceed the complexity and subtlety of anything humans have designed. It barely scratches the surface of its subject although it touches the major functions and structures of the body. (While I have never held the title “Systems Engineer”, I have identified myself as a systems person from the earliest days of my career and have almost always functioned in such capacities. So what follows is informed by that inside perspective.)
In engineering, Systems Engineers are the ones who understand the whole, and who appreciate the parts and how they work together. They are generally at the pinnacle of the technical hierarchy that makes any complex system work. They are not necessarily, and indeed cannot be, experts in all or even many of the parts themselves, but they are the experts in their synthesis and synergy. Systems Engineering has a largely top-down view of the whole. The biological sciences are, by nature, mired in the vastly intricate, subtle, and sophisticated mechanisms at the bottom of the hierarchy, that is, they are bottom up. Medicine is perhaps a kind of systems engineering of the body, but it is dominantly focused on things going wrong. What goes right to make our bodies work is incomprehensibly vaster and more beautiful than its failings, and that is where the system engineering focus of this volume dwells.
There are untold multitudes of such systems and subsystems across all forms of life. This book uses the familiar terrain of the human body and surveys only several top-level systems. A picture of overwhelming system design sophistication pops out of every section. This method could fruitfully be applied to any biological system. Cells might be a good place to go next.
The idea that all these interacting and interdependent systems emerged randomly by chance is ludicrous on the face of it. This in no way precludes evolution, but I believe it requires a designed start. The start requires synthesis of an unimaginable array of precise factors, including the nature of the cosmos and physics, the properties and distribution of the chemical elements, and the original organization of these elements into systems full of very complex and intricate information coupled with subsystems capable of processing it (i.e. cells with some minimum of DNA, RNA, and amino acids integrated with an irreducible core of mechanisms capable of processing the DNA/RNA information into proteins and the regulatory systems controlling their interactions).
Your Designed Body in combination with Shapiro’s facts about natural genetic engineering appears to provide methodology and raw material for a sophisticated new take on biological origin and evolution that allows for (demands, actually) a Creator/Designer.
Artificial Intelligence
If there was anything that was hot and hyped in 2023, it was Artificial Intelligence. Practical applications of AI techniques having unique power are appearing in many places. I have both personal and professional interest in understanding how it works, what it can do, and separating hype from reality. This section is brief but has the seeds of extensive future work.
Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe,by George Musser (2023)
This book had an interesting premise and started out well, showing how these three fields can support each other and exchange valuable tools, problems, and perspectives. But by the end it degenerated into sophisticated nonsense. There are a lot of very smart people working very hard to create abstruse constructs to show that that we are just random accidents. I don’t understand that desire, but a lot of people have it, and apparently quite deeply. I also don’t understand how if they are so smart, they fail to understand the poverty of their metaphysics.
What is ChatGPT Doing…And Why Does It Work?, by Stephen Wolfram (2023)
This is a smart little book with essentially two points: 1) the success of ChatGPT likely amounts to a scientific discovery about the nature of language and 2) ChatGPT’s deficiencies in quantification and precision could be corrected by integrating it with a system the author has developed. I plan to explore this at greater depth in the future in conjunction with related work in linguistics and consciousness.
ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution, by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher (The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023)
ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution | Henry A. Kissinger (henryakissinger.com)
This is a great article laying out the nature and limits of the knowledge captured in ChatGPT and other large language models. Henry Kissinger was still doing remarkably sophisticated work right up to his death at age 100.
Cycles of Life, Cycles of History
I read three titles this year exploring patterns of life and their influence on history. I am keeping this short for now but hope to come back to these later. They are contemporary versions of the oldest story of humanity, which is told most profoundly in the Old Testament.
Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—And What They Mean for America’s Future, by Jean M. Twenge (2023).
Generations offers a detailed report on our current culture through the lens of social science research and finds that technology has been perhaps the most profound force shaping each generation.
The Fourth Turning is Here, by Niel Howe (2023).
The Fourth Turning is Here offers a perspective based on an understanding of history as driven by human nature and human agency. That creates a series of patterns that recur roughly at the length of a long human life, or about 80-100 years. Each age cohort has a common generational experience. That experience interacts with the experience of generations preceding and following it. There is a discernible pattern of a generation’s character creating circumstances that shape that of its successor. These patterns recur roughly cyclically. Broadly, hard times create diligent people who create good times which create softer people who live off the good times. The softer people create some kind of crisis that must be resolved and creates hard times [think Civil War and WWII] which creates diligent people. Howe has been working on this theory for 25+ years and has quite a bit of historical basis. He undoubtedly bends history to fit his theory, and his theory is especially fit to current circumstances. But he tells a story with many patterns similar to those of the Old Testament. I found a great deal of resonance in the details, such as his placing my age cohort at the head of Gen X rather than the tail of the Baby Boom, where we are usually assigned. Yes!
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin (2023).
End Times operates at a large historical scale and is based on a data driven quantitative historical method and model. Turchin’s story is one of historical success leading to great inequality, popular immiseration, and overproduction of elites vying for a limited number of slots in the social hierarchy. Excess elites and a dissatisfied populace combine as disruptive and sometimes dangerous forces.
Both Howe and Turchin forecast a major crisis in the next several years, followed by a period of great renewal.
Back to the 1970s, Forward to the Future
This group of books took me back to some of my formative influences as a teenager and provided a current update. They also connected some of my earliest intellectual work with the existential fears and issues facing today’s society.
As a teenager, I read George Will and Milton Friedman regularly in Newsweek magazine. Each was published every other week as the right half of a paired column with left/right authors on politics and economics. I found both sharp and on top of the 1970s situation, while their left counterparts seemed befuddled.
I also had a strong interest in the environment and energy that was expressed in a paper I wrote as a senior in high school in 1979 in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. It took a pro-nuclear power position on environmentalist and risk management grounds and warned of catastrophic CO2 driven global warming if we resorted to coal instead. (Petroleum and natural gas shortages at the time eliminated them as sources for electricity generation in my analysis.)
The following four books revisit those thinkers and the resource, energy, and sustainability topic in a thoroughly up to date way.
The Conservative Sensibility, by George Will (2019)
This is George Will’s career summation. I love the title; true conservatism is a sensibility. It is an appreciation for what is, for the past and where we come from. It is suffused with gratitude. It is realist. Realist about people, realist about the world. It believes that there is great and hard-won wisdom in the long-standing arrangements and beliefs humanity has built. It does not believe they are or ever were perfect but is wary of attempts to radically remake them as dangerous and most likely blindly destructive of too much that is not understood.
Of course, we are deeply into the radical project at this point in history, and I wonder what in our culture is left to conserve besides science and engineering—which are both profoundly conservative endeavors that build on and extend the achievements of the past. While the disciplines themselves are deeply conservative, their social consequences often are not, and indeed may be the most radical force in society. In nature, evolution is the most conservative force of all, successfully extending and building on what already is in the biological realm across billions of years of life so far.
Mostly I love this book and think it is probably the greatest exposition of conservatism in its pluralist American variety that has ever been written. Will’s particular project is preserving the genius of the American founding in our time, given the evolutions and developments that have occurred across our history with the advent and advance of progressivism, growth and change of government (executive, legislative, judicial, plus administrative), economics, education, culture, and foreign affairs. I doubt that anyone has done it better, or with more current applicability.
One example should suffice to give the flavor of the whole. Will reflects on a point in Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address shortly after his overwhelming landslide victory in 1964. He declared “unconditional war on poverty”. Will asks: what does “unconditional” mean here? Government is quite good at directing and redirecting material flows to solve material problems. Examples include defending the country and fighting wars, taming the landscape of the Southeast via the Tennessee Valley Authority and harnessing it for electricity generation, and building the interstate highway system. In the social realm, the GI bill empowered a generation coming back from the war to take on their mature responsibilities with a heightened skill set that gave them great productive power. Social Security has largely eliminated true poverty among the elderly. Johnson and his cohort were shaped by the depression, won the war, built post-war prosperity, and approached this remaining problem of poverty with can-do assurance.
Whatever you think of that list of examples individually and collectively, those programs largely met their objectives. The war on poverty has not gone so well. The core problem persists, and key aspects are arguably worse despite 60 years of effort and spending many trillions on the problem. Why? First, it is not just or even mostly a material problem; it is largely intangible. The populations involved are not basically stable and mature like the GIs and the elderly. More is required. Will’s reflection on what that more is provides a solid example of true conservative thought applied to a hard societal problem. Of course, a significant piece of this reality is tangled with our tragic racial history, but the problem is truly multi-racial, and minorities are a minority of it.
Will considers all of it with nuance, depth, and clarity over 40 pages that finds government’s ability to deliver complex intangible commodities is at best quite limited. The essay includes sophisticated reflections on the importance of the rules for avoiding poverty (“finish high school, produce no child before marrying or before age twenty”); the enormous impact of family and early childhood experience; the retreat of men from work and responsibility; the complexity and misuse of freedom and the social context in which it exists; the challenge of stratification; and progressivism’s great service of improving our nation’s behavior and character regarding race, but subsequent more problematic re-missioning with the endless project of orchestrating group identities.
Perhaps this quote captures it: “It is conservatism, not progressivism, that takes society seriously. Conservatism understands society not as a manifestation of government but as the spontaneous order of cooperating individuals in consensual, contractual market relations. Progressivism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s extraordinary—and creative—complexity. American society, understood as hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily, is a marvel of spontaneous cooperation. Sensible government facilitates this cooperative order by providing public goods (roads, schools, police, etc.)—and by getting out of the way of spontaneous creativity. This is a dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.””
And this: “It is a central insight of conservatism that most social arrangements, from families to communities to commercial systems, are not meant. They are not the results of conscious intentions, of premeditation, of design. Rather, they are the results of swarms of independent variables that defy subordination to supervision. The uncheerful aspect of this is that when unintended arrangements, such as families, are unintentionally weakened to the point of disintegration, no one knows how to put them back together.”
Clearly I am a fan, yet I never felt fully on board with Will, and he reveals why at the end. He comes out as a committed atheist, devoting a chapter to the point that begins with a quote from Huck Finn as he and Jim float down the Mississippi: “We had the sky up there … all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.” Will is firmly on the “just happened” side: “[My argument] is that not only can conservatives be thoroughly secular, but that a secular understanding of cosmology and of humanity’s place in the cosmos accords with a distinctively conservative sensibility.” Will looks at the same things I do comes to an opposite conclusion; I believe that difference is worth a fuller reflection and intend to make one separately in this space. I concur that a conservative coalition should not have a religious test, but also believe that true conservatism is fundamentally rooted in the permanent, that is spiritual and religious truths.
Will has a sturdy substitute creed, that of the American founding, which is best encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” He makes extraordinarily good use of this creed, which is rooted in a religious, and specifically Judeo-Christian, worldview, to guide his whole project. I found the consequences of his atheism most significant in the education chapter. I read his analysis as both very edifying and hollow; he simply asks more of education than it can deliver alone without a religious core.
Nonetheless and despite having a profound fundamental disagreement with him, I find Will a great and sophisticated thinker and an elegant writer, who is a close ally against the glandular crudities of what is called conservatism in the Trump era. A landmark book.
[Revised 3/16/2024, expanding the comment on Will’s atheism upon completing a reread after originally posting this essay.]
Milton Freedman: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer Burns (2023).
I am very close to the ideal reader of this book. As mentioned above, Friedman was a formative influence on me in my teen years. Friedman’s youth, education during the crisis of the Great Depression, and intellectual maturation all resonate with me in multiple ways. And two of my children graduated from his academic home, the University of Chicago.
Seeing how his thought developed and advanced gave background and insight into the formation of the post-World War II American conservative movement. This book features solid portrayals of both the academic debates Friedman was involved in and some of the shadowy figures and institutions that were referenced by conservative elders I read in my youth, like Friedrich von Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society. The genesis of the “Chicago school” is likewise described in detail. Among today’s students there is a split between those who revere that school of thought and its builders and those who see it and its leading founder as villains.
Friedman is not a villain. He is not a seer. He is a monetary economist with a pretty good philosophy of freedom. Money is not everything, but it is important to get it right to have a healthy, functioning society. Necessary but not sufficient. Burns set out to provide a full portrait of Friedman to make him available to a new generation. I believe she succeeded. Friedman is important and worth understanding. But his importance is limited by his topic.
Materials and Dematerialization: Making the Modern World, by Vaclav Smil (2023).
Vaclav Smil’s latest goes right at the heart of our modern sustainability concerns with characteristic quantitative rigor and thoroughness. It updates a similar title of 2013 and finds that progress towards dematerialization is at best limited and qualified when all factors are considered. Here I select a few illustrations and an overall conclusion.
Moore’s law and computing/communications technology has provided the paradigmatic example of dematerialization with several orders of magnitude improvement per device over several decades, but en masse has greatly increased material consumption. When comparing just personal computer memory delivered in 1981 and 2022, usable capacity increased 90 million times on a 34x increase in mass. 2021’s personal computer volume delivered using 1981 technology would require 2 orders of magnitude more material than everything consumed by humanity for all purposes (excluding water, air, and soil)—an impossibility. Relative dematerialization has enabled mass consumption. Similarly, cellphones have radically increased in capability, substantially decreased in size/mass (75% since 1990) and consolidated many functions into a single device. But they have also concentrated an astonishing assembly of rare and energy intensive materials (over 60 elements in each). The aggregate mass delivered increased two orders of magnitude from 1990 to 2020 and has effectively become a consumer disposable.
Smil considers the replacement of paper/drafting based engineering design with digital Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems and concludes: ”even in the case that appears to be a perfect example of dematerialization, the reality is nothing but a complex form of material substitution.”
Outside of microelectronics, there is no other remotely similar case of material decline. In some cases such as cars, “microprocessor‐driven dematerialization has been actually accompanied by substantial increases of the overall mass”, with electronics accounting for as much as 40% of the cost of more expensive vehicles. Replacing internal combustion engines with EVs would require a 15x increase in essential materials for batteries (copper, nickel, aluminum, cobalt, lithium, etc.), and “the electric option is highly constrained by low energy density of batteries”.
Decarbonizing as presently pursued is highly material intensive. Wind power is at least 50x more material intensive than natural gas fired electric power installations of equivalent generation capacity and requires far more space. Photovoltaic electricity generation is likewise material and space intensive with substantial requirements for concrete and steel structure, plastics, aluminum, copper, and acreage that are around 30x as intensive as natural gas. These factors and life cycle maintenance requirements must be accurately accounted for to accurately compare “clean” options with conventional alternatives.
Smil summarizes: “There can be no doubt that relative dematerialization has been a key (and not infrequently the dominant) factor promoting often massive expansion of total material consumption. Less has thus been an enabling agent of more. In an overwhelming majority of cases these complex, dynamic interactions of cheaper energy, less expensive raw materials, and cheaper manufactures have resulted in ubiquitous ownership of an increasing range of products and in more frequent use of a widening array of services. As a result, even the most impressive relative weight reductions that have accompanied these consumption increases have been only rarely translated into any absolute cuts in the overall use of materials.”
Smil provides necessary hard realism to accurately understand our past and current state. But he makes at most very limited attempts to forecast the future or predict technological developments. For that one must look elsewhere.
The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, by James Pethokoukis (2023).
This is a bizarre book that runs into territory Smil would never consider. A full-scale exposition of “we wanted flying cars but all we got was 140 characters”. Why don’t we have all manner of futuristic things envisioned 50 or 60 years ago? The Jetsons and all that. It is both blind and far seeing.
Pethokoukis’ basic paradigm is fresh, useful, and apt. “Up wing” vs “down wing”, solution oriented future optimism vs. accepting and even yearning for limits; calculated risk-taking as essential to our humanity vs. a zero-sum mentality that eschews risk as threatening and dangerous to life and the environment. He identifies 1973 as the pivotal year in which America switched from the from up to down. That was the year in which the space program defined by Apollo moonshots was killed and the Arab oil embargo inflicted shortages, inflation, and recession, and we started to shrink from abundant clean energy, space, futuristic transport, and so on.
He identifies a brief up wing moment in the late 1990s when computing and the Internet were reaching critical mass and launching, but otherwise dismisses the great achievements of the computing and telecommunication revolution as insignificant. He seriously underestimates them and seems truly blind to the profound material advances that make them work.
There was indeed a remarkable and unrepeatable century of progress from roughly 1870-1970 that introduced concrete, modern metals and materials; sanitary water, sewage and indoor plumbing; electricity and telecommunication; motorized transport (land, sea, air, and space); and computers. All were applied and scaled in every domain of life. These facts have been thoroughly documented by others including Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth, frequently referenced in Futurist) and Vaclav Smil (Creating the Twentieth Century: Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact and Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences). Smil argues, correctly in my opinion, that the 1880s were the most technologically innovative decade in all human history. From this perspective, Pethokoukis’ complaint about stalled progress and his Hollywood/Walt Disney centered futuristic paradigm seems childish.
But he asks some excellent questions. He (correctly) starts with energy, which is the fundamental enabler of all other technologies, and makes the exact argument that I made in my 1979 high school paper. He even identifies Three Mile Island as a pivotal event that triggered the risk averse behavior that strangled the nuclear option by regulation and forced much worse choices. So instead of being powered today by abundant clean energy, we have half a century of fossil fuel emissions and a moribund capacity for producing dense non-fossil fuel electricity. He argues that we stopped asking the right big questions and pursuing their answers. Besides fission, we did not look nearly hard enough at the other sources with the right properties of density and scalability to cleanly power our world—nuclear fusion and geothermal.
Pethokoukis is enamored by transportation technology and all the forms we don’t have or only have to a limited degree. Supersonic planes, flying cars, rockets, and space. My professional work is close enough to these things (especially flying taxis) that I see them as much harder and systemically difficult than he imagines, as well as much less important.
He traces the development of our down wing present with a mix of factual and counterfactual musings that are not worth summarizing. His proposed antidotes:
- Getting serious about a collection of general-purpose technologies that can spark the next phase of growth: Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Energy, Robotics, and Space. Most of these fields are vibrant today, although energy remains mired in and distorted by political/regulatory policy and space is just emerging from a half century of suppression.
- Embrace public policy supportive of risk taking and growth: intelligently double R&D, sweep away the 1970s era regulatory apparatus, don’t strangle AI, improve infrastructure, improve education, provide an appropriate safety net.
- Improve culture: value innovation, see lack of progress as a big risk, believe we can do better, act on those convictions, go hard into space.
All of that is more or less unobjectionable but is a radical challenge to the ascendent down wing, techno pessimist climate of doom. A journalist, not a scientist or engineer, Pethokoukis is glib about technology and system development. Results are much harder to deliver than they used to be because the easy things have been done, and what is left is mostly deeply and systemically complex. Merely maintaining what has been built and dealing with its consequences is an enormous challenge. That is what “sustainability” is about. He has no nuance in this regard.
Nonetheless, and despite its substantial flaws, The Conservative Futurist is a useful contrarian book.
Living Well in Body
I have been greatly blessed through my life with excellent health and sound instinct regarding exercise and food. These books provided updated science and information to help sharpen my practices.
What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by David R. Montgomery, Ann Bikle (2022).
Montgomery and Bikle are two of my favorite authors. He is a geologist, she a biologist; they are married to each other. Montgomery got me with his world history Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. This is their third subsequent book written together. It builds up from dirt to what grows in it to what you eat and how it affects you. Every step along the way is detailed, rooted in scientific research that is impressively reported and synthesized. The short of it: stripped soils growing monoculture crops force fed macronutrients and managed with chemical poisons produce nutritionally poor foods that contribute to our novel modern ailments, type 2 diabetes, other inflammatory diseases, etc.
Rich organic soils full of life grow nutritionally rich food that promotes health. Restoring soils to that state is not only a good unto itself, it has great potential as a large scale carbon sink. I think soil health and conservation is an aspect of sustainability that is crucial and extremely under-appreciated and under-emphasized. This book pulls the whole field together literally from the ground up with meticulous scientific detail at every step. The Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, and so on was a great achievement that generated the quantity of food needed to feed several billion people. We are at a new stage and Montgomery has the big picture answer and some of the local details. And the details have tremendous local variation.
I already basically ate a balanced diet of whole foods; this book prompted me to pay more attention to the quality of the ingredients I choose. I can feel the difference.
We spend more on healthcare than we do on food; if food is medicine, isn’t this backwards?
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia with Bill Gifford (2023).
This is an up-to-date presentation of “medicine 3.0” which has much more of an orientation towards working with the body’s natural systems to build health than the crisis management and procedure driven approach of medicine 2.0. It is solid and holistic. I am not with Attia at every step, but he helped me identify some ways to sharpen my practices. He strongly reinforced my bias towards exercise and its comprehensive benefits as the most powerful practice in the well-being toolkit; he made me more conscious of zone 2 cardio. He also made me conscious of the importance of protein as I age, bolstered my increasing awareness of the importance of sleep, and provided a strong and personal reminder of the importance of emotional and relational health. Overall, a very solid and holistic approach to building and maintaining health.
Living Well in Spirit
As a Catholic, I believe the transcendent spiritual realm is the ultimate ground and destiny of reality. These titles have permanent value.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (2016).
I read the Catechism by way of the “Catechism in a Year” podcast with Father Mike Schmitz. I started almost every day with it upon rising and got going for the day. I have read the whole thing more than once before, and as a thoroughly convinced Catholic I love it. It is beautiful in all aspects: what we believe, how we worship, how we should live, and how we pray. Each of these topics is covered in a major section. I think the Catholic vision for how we should live provides both individuals and societies the best guide for how they can achieve their fullest, most free, just, loving, welcoming, and merciful realization. It has never been stated so well as it is here; I believe this synthesis is the pinnacle of understanding in these matters.
The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living, by Timothy M. Gallagher (2005)
This is a very solid, clear, and useful exposition of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s principles of discernment. Ignatius’ brief sentences are one of the Catholic Church’s great treasures. I doubt there is a better or more practical elucidation of them for modern seekers. Highly valuable principles and practices for navigating life’s perplexities, mysteries, and mission.
Priestly Fatherhood: Treasure in Earthen Vessels, by Jacques Philippe (2021).
This was my top spiritual companion this year. It is 80% about fatherhood, 20% about priestly fatherhood. It puts forth a profound and beautiful ideal that I will always aspire to and never achieve. I especially loved the meditations on natural fatherhood and fatherhood lived in the light of the Beatitudes. The natural fatherhood reflections are by far the most incisive and convicting that I have ever encountered about the distinctive and crucial importance of fathers. The Beatitudes section shows the highest and most perfect way for fathers to be and live. It offers an ideal to challenge all of us men to live our vocation to its fullest throughout our lives. Its heart is a humbling and powerful reflection on living poor in spirit. This is an ideal that directly meets many of the deepest hungers of people in our time and may speak to its deepest poverty. My highest recommendation to all men.
Mary Eberstadt: Cultural Pain
Mary Eberstadt is arguably the most acute analyst and commentator assessing the fallout of the sexual revolution enabled by the invention of the birth control pill in 1960. She writes from an American Catholic perspective. 2023 brought her fifth book on this theme since 2012 and prompted me to reread her whole series in order of publication. I think the totality of her analysis stands up, but rereading showed that each of the volumes is a bit of a period piece—a characteristic that is most evident in the 2016 installment, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies.
Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, by Mary Eberstadt (2023).
This year’s installment, Volume 5, looks at the consequences of the sexual revolution in large public venues: society, politics, and churches. It is not a happy picture; it is full of casualties. It is ripe and hungry for something better.
A secularist faith is ascendent and aggressive; “nones” have become the largest religious group. There is a pervasive intolerance which has given rise to self-censorship. The rise in mental health issues—suicide, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other afflictions resulting from disconnection and loneliness—is beyond dispute and has become endemic, especially among the young. There is an identity crisis, manifested in novel forms assuming mass status and increasingly pushing down into middle-childhood.
Mary Eberstadt: “Our secularizing culture is not just any culture. Our secularizing culture is an inferior culture. It is small of heart. It defines suffering down. It regards the victims of its social experiments not as victims, but as acceptable collateral damage justified in the name of progress. This is secularism’s unspoken secret. It is also secularism’s greatest vulnerability.”
Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles: “The secularist faith is vulnerable for the same reasons that Marxism is: its promises are false, and its anthropology fallacious. The church that the sexual revolution has built is thriving. But its pews are packed with casualties—every one of them, at least potentially, a convert waiting to happen, for the churches that do still believe in what the walking wounded need most: redemption.”
From a Christian perspective, “The first imperative is compassion. If Christianity, in particular, is to rebuild from the rubble, the faithful need to grasp what lies under those rocks: massive, often misunderstood or unseen suffering. This includes the suffering of people in factions that commonly oppose the Church. It has become easy to dismiss the public enactments of identity politics … Easy—and wrong. There is a common denominator beneath the bizarre rituals occurring on campuses and elsewhere, beneath an increasingly punitive social media … indeed, beneath cancel culture itself. It is anguish. These days, many people who claim to be victims are indeed victims … they are victims of a destructive maelstrom that rattled and shrank and sometimes destroyed their families, that undermined their churches, and that uprooted their communities. From that wreckage, identity politics sends up a howl for a world more ordered, protective, and connected than most modern humans can know. People drawn to the promise of identity politics sense that the world into which they were born is somehow inhuman. They want out.”
Much of what is reported in Revisited is commonplace. Situating it primarily in the ramifying consequences of the sexual revolution is Eberstadt’s project. As the capstone (for now, at least) of her series of books, Revisted finds a moment when the forces described in her earlier books have played out about as far as they can and are producing bitter fruits. Those fruits are making and will make many hungry for and open to something better. That is an intuition which I share. It is a time of hope. Things are darkest before dawn.
Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, by Mary Eberstadt (2012).
Volume 1 established Eberhardt as a leading thinker in this field. It lays out the claim that “No single event since Eve took the apple has been as consequential for relations between the sexes as the arrival of modern contraception…Modern contraception is not only a fact of our time; it may even be the central fact, in the sense that it is hard to think of any other whose demographic, social, behavioral, and personal fallout has been as profound.”
Volume 1 looks at personal repercussions from several angles. The chapter on the impact on women is sharp and complex; as a man, I will simply adopt her summary: “In the post-revolutionary world, sex is easier had than ever before; but the opposite appears true for romance. This is perhaps the central enigma that modern men and women are up against: romantic want in a time of sexual plenty.”
The corruption of most men’s sexuality by internet pornography is a plague. “The powerful majority [of men’s] desire for recreative rather than procreative sex has led not only to a marriage dearth, but also to a birth dearth; and as the old saying correctly goes, “Adults don’t make babies; babies make adults.””
The sexual revolution’s standard of “consenting adults” has been breached far too often, including with children. The #MeToo movement came years after this work but is not the least bit surprising from its perspective.
Eberstadt closes with a reflection on Humane Vitae, the most reviled and ignored papal encyclical in history. She notes that subsequent developments have entirely vindicated its predictions. So true.
How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, by Mary Eberstadt (2013).
Volume 2 examines the mutually reinforcing nature of religion and family. Religion of course promotes family, life, and fertility. It is in favor of souls sees them as a great good. Parenthood is most people’s most powerful and primal experience of the mystery of being. Encountering your child is an experience of awe and wonder, of the magnificence and mystery of being, and of the transcendent. It is for very many a profoundly spiritual event and revelation, and a call to raise their child in the light of the spiritual and transcendent, that is religious, goodness. These are mutually reinforcing dimensions of life. Banish faith from life, or parenthood from sex and you take both down. The sexual revolution freed people to have sex but not its natural consequence. Other things and values then fill that void. Then family and religious dimensions both shrink. If either or both shrink too much a destructive cycle ensues.
It’s Dangerous To Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, by Mary Eberstadt (2016).
Volume 3, which was published before the 2016 election, is suffused with a sense of being hunted and persecuted and driven underground for beliefs that the dominant culture deemed unacceptable. I remember; I think the analysis is largely valid. But then the unthinkable happened—Donald Trump was elected president—driven in no small part, IMO, by the fear described in this book and a willingness to try something crazy and desperate in response. Then, as we all know, the furies had a new provocation and target, and they haven’t come back to dwell on this in the same way and probably won’t.
Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, by Mary Eberstadt (2019). Volume 4 is an arresting analysis of how small, broken, and dispersed families have deprived people of connection to durable kinship and local networks, which were the locus of identity for millennia upon millennia. Absent these networks, without sibling, cousin, or other durable networks, people are left to figure out their identity and place on their own. All manner of crazy or desperate things can and will be tried. The requirement to self-create identity can be liberating and empowering. It can also be lonely and terrifying. It is both. It comes in different mixes in different people. The primal scream: “Who am I?” shouts out from the disconnected and the godless throughout our contemporary world. At the time, I found this the most compelling book in the series. I think I still feel that way.
Best Books of the Year
Like last year with the “Bible in a Year”, I can’t not say The Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it is also so obvious that I make no contribution by mentioning it.
My less obvious list is this:
The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, by Helen Czerski (2023).
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, by Peter Frankopan (2023)
Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Fortified. Why Evolution Works As Well As It Does, by James A. Shapiro (2022).
Your Designed Body, by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman (2022).
What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, by David R. Montgomery, Ann Bikle (2022).
The Conservative Sensibility, by George Will (2019)
Priestly Fatherhood: Treasure in Earthen Vessels, by Jacques Philippe (2021).
Conclusion
This year’s essay is a bit late. I had been doing some intensive professional research on virtual reality sickness and wrote most of this after making the debut presentation of that work to my industry in Germany in mid-January. The main draft came in a single burst on my iPhone on the return flight to the USA; the finishing details spread over a few weeks. I just didn’t have mental space for this while finalizing the initial version of the VR work. However, that professional effort has significantly expanded my skill in doing scientific research and bolstered my confidence in the quality of work I can do when I turn my full attention to a significant topic. That is the aim of therearemorethings.com.
There are always new and interesting things emerging in the world, and a hopeful synthesis rooted in belief in God, his goodness and mercy, and fascination and awe at the richness of creation and people, along with confidence in their ultimate goodness is sorely needed. I hope to make a meaningful contribution from that point of view. I see in this year’s essay a collection of topics that would justify longer treatment when I have more time and energy for this work.
For the first time, I am distributing this only via my web site.