Richard Ford. Canada. ©2012 Fifty years later Del Parsons relates what
happened to him when he was 15 and growing up in Great Falls Montana in 1960. His father, Bev, was a retired Air Force
captain, who was decorated for his service as a bombardier in WW II and never
accomplished much of anything after that except to get broken down to
Lieutenant and asked to retire after running a scam to sell the officers’ club
sides of beef that had been rustled and slaughtered by local Indians. His next great idea was to sell rustled beef
to a porter responsible for a dining car on the Union Pacific. When the porter refused to buy some beef that
he said had gone bad, Bev was unable to pay the Indians, and they threatened
him and his family. Bev persuaded his
wife to help him rob a bank over in South Dakota to get the money to pay off
the Indians and some for themselves.
They got caught, of course. Del
saw them once in the Great Falls jail and never saw them again. His mother’s friend arranged for him to live
with her brother, Arthur Remlinger, in Saskatchewan, because otherwise he would
have been detained in an orphanage for wayward youth until he was 18. Remlinger ran a hotel and a goose hunting
operation in a town next to nowhere and had a reason for being in such a remote
place. In about 1943 he had to leave
Harvard in his third year, partly because of his anarchist views. One of the organizations to which he belonged
asked him to plant a bomb at a union office in Detroit. No one was supposed to be there when he bomb
went off. That never works out, and the
union head was killed. So Remlinger was
in Canada. A couple of months after Del
arrives in the fall of 1960 two suits from Detroit arrive to “talk to”
Remlinger. Del is just outside when
Remlinger shoots them both and then has to help him and a couple of his workmen
to bury the bodies. The story is rather
sordid but well told. What it’s really
about is how Del handles what happens to him and around him and how it totally
changes his life. It’s his coming of age
story told decades later, a device that Ford used in at least one earlier
novel. Del stays in Canada and becomes a
high school teacher, happily married and seemingly happy with his decision to
stay in Canada. May 2013
John Hodgman. More
Information Than You Require. ©2008 The title is entirely accurate. Hodgman is a funny man and this is a funny
book, but as we Pennsylvania Dutch say “Too much is enough.” I quit – with some regret – about a third of
the way through. It’s a series of
performances involving false “true facts,” scads of misinformation and, if
there is such a word, “misanalysis” and a song here and there. One concern I had was that some of his “true
facts” might burrow their way into my memory to a point where I couldn’t say
they weren’t true when they popped out again.
Some of the stuff is really insidious along with being very funny.
Steven Pinker. The
Better Angels of Our Nature. ©2011 I don’t know what possessed me when I took
on a book that ran to 30 CDs, but I’m glad I did. After the first 15, I was wondering what more
Pinker could tell me. The answer was
“plenty.” The book is too long to
summarize effectively; I took notes as I went along, but they don’t seem very
helpful. So here is the brief summary of
the core idea. Man started violent but
violence has continually declined as civilizing institutions evolved --
government and commerce -- and particularly so since the Enlightenment. Empathy, self control and a moral sense have
been important but the most important factor has been reason. Pinker goes through every kind of violence
you could imagine from warfare and torture to violence against women and
children to exposure of newborns and uses the many studies of these phenomena
to demonstrate how violence decreased as reason and rational institutions
developed. There are lots of anecdotes
along the way. One of my favorites was
that protection of children from violence began in NYC after the city’s
experience with the SPCA. He has a lot
to say about I.Q. I remember when everyone
was reading and discoursing on The Bell
Curve. My daughter left her copy
behind when she moved on, but I never picked it up. It sits on a shelf, upside down, which is
probably appropriate. The bell curve of
measured intelligence comes up in Pinker’s discussion of the “Flynn Effect.” It seems the keepers of I.Q. tests have to add
about 3.5 points every decade to keep the average at 100. An I.Q. of 100 in 1910 would measure about 70
today and an I.Q. of 100 today would be equivalent to 130 in 1910. Are we actually smarter than our grandparents
and great grandparents? Maybe so. The change in handling of answers from decade
to decade doesn’t happen in questions that test math and language, but in
questions that test abstract reasoning.
Our apparent gains in intelligence have not raised scores on tests like
the SATs. I didn’t notice whether Pinker
described results for tests of abstract reasoning other than those within
standard I.Q. tests. I hope I will soon
see a study of the results over time for part three of the GRE (Graduate Record
Exam), which tests reasoning and problem solving and would seem to be testing
the kind of development that has caused the Flynn Effect. Pinker distinguishes between 1910 and the
present by suggesting it is the difference between pre-scientific and post
scientific reasoning and points out a major difference between then and now. We routinely use terms like percentage, rates
of change, correlation, causation, post hoc, representative sample, statistical
control group, placebo, empirical, median, circular argument, cost benefit
analysis, false positive, trade off and so on.
If you tried these in 1910 your listener might think you were speaking a
foreign language. Another contributor to
our shift to more abstract thinking is simply reading, where we deal with
symbols instead of things. It’s
fortunate that no conservative will ever read this review, because I have to
note that Pinker concludes that people with higher I.Q.s tend to be liberal –
he quotes a study that found that people who said they were very conservative
had an average I.Q. of 94.8 (and that was without Michelle Bachman to skew the
results) and those who said they were very liberal averaged 106.4. He goes on to say that higher I.Q.s seem to
correlate with classical liberalism and with less tendency toward aggression and
war. Finally, nostalgia for the past is
wrong-headed. The “good old days” were horrible.
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