Civilisation

The second, updated edition of this book is a well-written and at times funny argument for the idea that we humans are a thoroughly political animal. Politics is inherent in our form of sociality, and political differences are not aberrations but simply a fact of how we are wired. We have inborn predispositions as to where on the political scale each one of us is located. This scale, the authors contend, is one that goes from the radical stance (pro-change, novelty seeking, interested in others) to the conservative position (pro-tradition, defense of the current state, wary of others). Interestingly, the authors consider the dimension of distributive justice (pro-equality vs pro-meritocratic distribution) to be of lesser importance.

Tänk dig en rapport från en haverikommission om en flygolycka. Det visar sig att tio av textens elva avsnitt handlar om hur bekvämt och säkert det är att flyga, att dåliga flygplan är osäkra och att flygplan därför bör vara välbyggda.

Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse makes the case that the study of humans and human society must take into account both our biological and cultural nature. Using examples from many studies, his own as well as others, he describes how three fundamental propensities of humans constrain the variability of how we live:

This is a well-written book, yet terrible. It describes the arguments for liberalism well. But it is terrible because it does not manage to rise over the level of a propaganda piece. The analysis of populism makes interesting points, but it ultimately fails to explain why liberalism has waned and populists have become so successful in the last 20 or so years. The recipe for countering populism is basically just "more neoliberalism".

Thomas Hobbes klassiska verk är förvånansvärt läsvärd. Översättningen är utmärkt. Det största problemet är upplägget, där Hobbes vill använda geometrins metod att utifrån definitioner och axiom bygga upp teser och bevis. Det gör bokens första kapitel till en ganska trög läsning. Men när Hobbes i kapitel 10 av den första boken kommer in på politiskt mer relevanta frågor, då blir den intressant och bitvis överraskande underhållande. Hobbes räds inte drastiska formuleringar som ibland fick mig att skratta högt.

Michael Ruse is an old hand in the philosophy of biology. He is eminently qualified to write this short book. An important attraction of it is the account of the history of the idea of natural selection. He argues that even though Darwin was clear about the importance of natural selection in accounting for evolution, many others, both in the 19th century and later, have construed its role differently.

This turned out to be Frans de Waal's last book; he died in March 2024. In it, he compares the sexual differences in behavior of humans and primates, where the focus is on the bonobos and the chimpanzees, the two species that are genetically most close to humans. He navigates the controversial subject very well. The average differences in behavior and physiology between males of females of these species are discussed in the light of evolution, ecology and culture.

This book discusses a vast number of subjects, and although it is thought-provoking and fun to read, it is also simultaneously frustrating. All too rarely does it go into sufficient depth with the ideas, theories or suggestions it presents. The book covers too much.

The idea of the rational actor in economics has often been ridiculed and criticized as a derogatory view of what humans are like: selfish, cold-hearted calculators, basically psychopaths. And the critics have often insinuated that this analysis has been normatively loaded; humans as perfect cogs in the machinery of capitalism. The accusation is that this is how economics wants people to behave. Lionel Page does not use this line of attack in his book. Rather, given the various empirically determined biases, he asks: if the actual behavior of humans is often significantly different from that predicted by the rational-actor model, then why is it so? Instead of scrapping the idea of the rational actor, he uses it as a starting point to figure out what the mechanisms are that cause these departures.

How did inequality arise? The question was famously raised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His answer was controversial, to say the least. He did not have much information to base his analysis on, given that the discovery of humanity being a product of Darwinian evolution was yet to be made. Although there was some information about how hunter-gatherers lived in parts of the world that were being colonized by European traders and settlers, it was fragmentary at best. The book "The Creation of Inequality" by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus does the hard work of summarizing the anthropological and archaeological record to identify the stages and processes that transformed human society from the large degree of equality that characterized nomadic hunter-gatherers (ignoring gender inequality) before about 12,000 years ago. It is a monumental effort, and the results give them the basis to provide some more facts-based answers to Rousseau's question.