Book Review: The Wealth Paradox by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten

The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes [Goodreads] is the right book at the right time. Short, succinct, and with hard data to prove their central thesis, The Wealth Paradox is worthy of a thoughtful read by policy makers, political operatives, academics, and in these troubled times, the general public.

The last few years have seen what Mols and Jetten declare in their preface to be a "perfect storm" in both Western liberal democracies and other countries that pretend to the democratic mantel. A combination of deep economic recessions and global crises have seen 21 million people earn the legal title of refugee and an estimated 65 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. A bit of political turmoil was bound to occur.

Readers might immediately think of Donald Trump's populist rise in the United States in the frantic few months following the British choice to Brexit. Mols was one of very few political scientists to foresee the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. His rationale forms the central thesis of The Wealth Paradox: The rise of far-right parties and political movements are not simply attributable to the poor and dispossessed but also to middle class voters with some modest degree of wealth to protect.

There are others. News watchers could not have missed the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's grab for dictatorial powers after transitioning from prime minister to president of that country. In the Philippines, strongman Rodrigo Duterte grabbed the presidency with his promises to murder drug dealers, street children, and, purely as a form of collateral damage, political opponents. Russia's Vladimir Putin, like Erdoğan a former prime minister of his country and now president, went several times better by being prime minister, then president, then prime minister, and now president again. One must give him points for consistency.

All of these leaders were democratically elected. Something to notice is how close these decisions have been. Trump became the second Republican president in a row to lose the popular vote on his way to the White House. Putin won his first presidential bid in 2000 with 53% of the vote. Erdoğan won his presidential bid with in 2014 with 51.79%. Duterte won with a minority 39.1%. The referendum deciding that Britain should leave the European Union was passed with 51.89% voting to leave. In all of these cases and many more, a populist platform was adopted with nearly half of the electorates voting for the opposite.

Invoking [Godwin's Law], it seems an excellent time to recall that at the time Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, he was head of a political party that had garnered a third of the seats in the German parliament by democratic means.

Why should people elect leaders who so often pursue unarguably unpopular policies, or who hold unpopular ideas? Mols and Jetten argue that enough middle class voters, those with above average incomes, do so in order to protect their own narrow interests. It is this point, and the data behind it, that makes The Wealth Paradox worth reading.

Recent votes in the Netherlands and France rejecting populist parties have left little time to celebrate. The combination of Byzantine political systems and continued strong showings by populist parties clearly show that history is not over. We may yet see a spread of their simplistic mixture of xenophobia and protectionism.

The authors of The Wealth Paradox are not, of course, the first scholars to note the connection between the middle class and populism, nor the odd (to the settled mind) desire to rip and replace an imperfect system with a new one.

The British historian George Dangerfield, writing in the 1930s about the pre-World War I actions of the Tory party then in opposition, made Mols' and Jetten's case for them. Dangerfield's crisis resulted in the partition of Ireland and the mutiny of a portion of the British Army:

The Tory Rebellion was not merely a brutal attack upon an enfeebled opponent - that is to say, political; it was not merely the impassioned defence of impossible privileges - that is to say, economic; it was also, and more profoundly, the unconscious rejection of an established security. For nearly a century men had discovered in the cautious phrase, in the respectable gesture, in the considered display of reasonable emotions, a haven against those irrational storms which threatened to sweep through them, And gradually the haven lost its charms; worst still, it lost it peace. Its waters, no longer unruffled by the wind, ceased to reflect, with complacent ease, the settled skies, the untangled stars of accepted behaviour and sensible conviction; and men, with a defiance they not hope to understand, began to put forth upon little excursions into the vast, the dark, the driven seas beyond.
(George Dangerfield. The Strange Death of Liberal England. Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 122-3.)

Dangerfield could have been writing about today's political challenges. We find ourselves coming off of an unprecedented post-war period of established security that, when buffeted by the "perfect storm", resulted in rejection. It is little wonder that his book became the archetypal modern history.

Worrying, too, is the lesson learned by unrepentant socialist Christopher Hitchens. Visiting his literary superhero Jorge Luis Borges in his unhappy home in Buenos Aires, Hitchens read at Borges' request Rudyard Kipling's "Harp Song of the Dane Women" whose opening verse:

What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker?

so beautifully gets to the beating heart of the human male's yearning for adventure, and the the acceptance of the accompanying risk. Hitchens was dismayed that his idol "heartily preferred" the "gentlemen" of the brutal and populist regime of Juan Perón who abused both his family and himself. Borges, for all his stunning illumination of human foibles, himself fell in his old age into a sort of populist Stockholm Syndrome.

Herodotus noted millennia ago how to react to those protective of their wealth. "Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in prosperity to the end... Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word 'happy' in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky." Those voting for populist leaders should carefully note the warning. Pursuit of short term interests must be carefully weighed with longer term consequences.

No, the The Wealth Paradox is not entirely new. It is up to date, well researched, and particularly timely.

The 191 pages of main matter make The Wealth Paradox a respectable size for an audience uncomfortable with lengthy prose. Forget War and Peace: One sometimes wonders how many years will pass before the last undergraduate slogs to the end of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at 55 pages, or the 64 pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No time have we in these days of Internet-connected pocket supercomputers for the massive 4,736 pages of Winston Churchill's The Second World War. Even our academics must adjust to doling out words short enough to absorb during a commute or a visit to the toilet. But perhaps I simply suffer from last century's skills. As Kurt Vonnegut so ironically juxtaposed his writing with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in his geriatric romp A Man Without a Country, "I am windy".

Book Review: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies [Goodreads] by Nick Bostrom is a big idea book. The big idea is that the development of truly intelligent artificial intelligence is the most important issue that our generation will face. According to Bostrom, it may be the most important issue the human race has ever faced. This view suggests that how we approach the development and response to AI will be more important than how we respond to nuclear proliferation, climate change, continued warfare, sustainable agriculture, water management, and healthcare. That is a strong claim.

The sale of Bostrom's book has no doubt been helped by recent public comments by super entrepreneur Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking. Musk, with conviction if not erudition, said

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.  In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

One almost wishes that Musk didn't live in California. He provided ten million US dollars to the Future of Life Institute to study the issue three months later. Bostrom is on the scientific advisory board of that body.

Hawking agrees with Musk and Bostrom, although without the B movie references, saying,

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

Bostrom, Musk and Hawking make some interesting, and probably unfounded, presumptions. This is hardly uncommon in the current public conversation around strong AI. All seem to presume that we are building one or more intelligent machines, that these machines will probably evolve to be generally intelligent, that their own ideas for how to survive will radically differ from ours, and that they will be capable of self-evolution and self-reproduction. 

Jeff Hawkins provides the best answer to Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Nick Bostrom that I have read to date:

Building intelligent machine is not the same as building self-replicating machines. There is no logical connection whatsoever between them. Neither brains nor computers can directory self-replicate, and brainlike memory systems will be no different. While one of the strengths of intelligent machines will be our ability to mass-produce them, that's a world apart from self-replication in the manner of bacteria and viruses. Self-replication does not require intelligence, and intelligence does not require self-replication. (On Intelligence [Goodreads], pp. 215)

Should we not clearly separate our concerns before we monger fear? The hidden presumptions of self-evolution and self-reproduction seem to be entirely within our control. Bostrom makes no mention of these presumptions, nor does he address their ramifications.

At least Bostrom is careful in his preface to admit his own ignorance, like any good academic. He seems honest in his self assessment:

Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions.

Beautifully, a footnote at the end of the first sentence reads, "I don't know which ones." It would be nice to see Fox News adopt such a strategy.

Another unstated presumption is that we are building individual machines based on models of our communal species. Humans may think of themselves as individuals, but we could not survive without each other, nor would there be much point in doing so.

We have not even begun to think about how this presumption will affect the machines we build. It is only in aggregate that we humans make our civilization. Some people are insane, or damaged, or dysfunctional, or badly deluded. Why should we not suspect that a machine built on the human model could not, indeed, would not, run the same risk? We should admit the possibility of our creating an intelligent machine that is delusional in the same way that we should admit the mass delusions of our religious brethren.

Is my supposition too harsh? Consider the case of Ohio bartender Michael Hoyt. Hoyt is not known to have had any birth defects, nor to have suffered physical injury. Yet he lost his job, and was eventually arrested by the FBI, after threatening the life of Speaker of the House John Boehner. Hoyt reportedly heard voices that told him Boehner was evil, or the Devil, or both. He suspected the Boehner was responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He told police that he was Jesus Christ. Is Hoyt physically ill, or simply the victim of inappropriate associations in his cortex? We have many reasons to suspect the latter.

Bostrom originally spelled his name with an umlaut (Boström), as befits his Swedish heritage. He apparently dropped it at the same time as he started calling himself "Nick" in place of his birth name Niklas. Bostrom lives in the UK and is now a philosopher at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. Perhaps the Anglicization of his name is as much related to his physical location as the difficulty in convincing publishers and, until recently, the Internet Domain Name System, to consistently handle umlauts. His Web site at nickbostrom.com uses simple ASCII characters.

According to Bostrom, we have one advantage over the coming superintelligence. It is a bit unclear what that advantage is. The book's back jacket insists that "we get to make the first move." Bostrom's preface tells us that "we get to build the stuff." I tend to trust Bostrom's own words here over the publicist's, but think that both are valid perspectives. We have multiple advantages after all.

Another advantage is that we get to choose whether to combine the two orthogonal bits of functionality mentioned earlier, self-evolution and self-replication, with general intelligence. Just what the motivation would be for anyone to do so has yet to be explained by anyone. Bostrom makes weak noises about the defense community building robotic soldiers, or related weapons systems. He does not suggest that those goals would necessarily include self-evolution nor self-replication.

The publisher also informs us on the jacket that "the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy." Bostrom, again in his preface, disagrees. He says, "I have tried to make it an easy book to read, but I don't think I have quite succeeded." It is not a difficult read for a graduate in philosophy, but the general reader will occasionally wish a dictionary and Web browser close at hand. Bostrom's end notes do not include his supporting mathematics, but do helpfully point to academic journal articles that do. Of course, philosophic math is more useful to ensure that one understands an argument being made than in actually proving it.

Perhaps surprisingly, Bostrom makes scant mention of Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, notionally designed to protect humanity from strong AI. This is probably because professional philosophers have known for some time that they are woefully insufficient. Bostrom notes that Asimov, a biochemistry professor during his long writing career, probably "formulated the laws in the first place precisely so that they would fail in interesting ways, providing fertile plot complications for his stories." (pp. 139)

To be utterly picayune, the book includes some evidence of poor editing, such as adjoining paragraphs that begin with the same sentence, and sloppy word order. I would have expected Oxford University Press to catch a bit more than they did.

Bostrom, perhaps at the insistence of his editors, pulled many philosophical asides into clearly delineated boxes that are printed with a darker background. Light readers can easily give them a miss. Those who are comfortable with the persnickety style of the professional philosopher will find them interesting.

Bostrom does manage to pet one of my particular peeves when he suggests in one such box that, "we could write a piece of code that would function as a detector that would look at the world model in our developing AI and designate the representational elements that correspond to the presence of a superintelligence... If we could create such a detector, we could then use it to define our AI's final values." The problem is that Bostrom doesn't understand the nature of complex code in general, nor the specific forms of AI code that might lead to a general intelligence.

There are already several forms of artificial intelligence where we simply do not understand how they work. We can train a neural network, but we cannot typically deconstruct the resulting weighted algorithm to figure out how a complex recognition task is performed. So-called "deep learning", which generally just means neural networks of more than historical complexity due to the application of more computing power, just exacerbates the problem of understanding. Ask a Google engineer exactly how their program recognizes a face, or a road, or a cat, and they will have no idea. This is equally true in Numenta's Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA), and will be true of any eventual model of the human brain. Frankly, it is even true of any large software program that has entered maintenance failure, which is almost always an admission by a development team that the program has become too complex for them to reliably change. Bostrom's conception of software is at least as old as the Apple Newton. That is not a complement.

We will surely have less control over any form of future artificial intelligence than it will require to implement his proposed solution. Any solution will not be as simple as inserting a bit of code into a traditional procedural program.

Critically, Bostrom confuses the output of an AI system with its intelligence (pp. 200). This equivalence has been a persistent failure of philosophy. To quote Jeff Hawkins again, who I think sees this particularly clearly,

But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on in your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines.

How will we know when a machine becomes intelligent? Alan Turing famously proposed the imitation game, now known as the Turing test, which suggested that we could only know by asking it and observing its behavior. Perhaps we can only know if it tells us without being programmed to do so. Philosophers like Bostrom will, no doubt, argue about this for a long time, in the same way they now argue whether humans are really intelligent. Whatever "really" means.

Bostrom's concluding chapter, "Crunch time", opens with a discussion of the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal. Bostrom quotes a colleague who likes to say that a Fields Medal indicates that a recipient "was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn't." This trite (and insulting) conclusion is the basis for a classic philosophical ramble on whether our hypothetical mathematician actually invented something or whether he "merely" discovered something, and whether the discovery would eventually be made later by someone else. Bostrom makes an efficiency argument: A discovery speeds progress but does not define it. Why he saves this particular argument for his terminal chapter would be a mystery if he had something important to say about what we might do. Instead, he simply tells us to get on studying the problem.

I find that professional philosophers often slip in scale in this way. One moment they are discussing the capabilities and accomplishments of an individual human, generally assumed to be male, and the next they switch to a bird's eye view of our species as if the switch in perspective were justified mid-course. I find this both confusing and disingenuous. It is as if the philosopher cannot bear to view our species from the distance that might yield a more objective understanding.

The actions of individuals, both male and female, are inextricably linked to our cognitive biases. We do not make rational decisions, we make emotional ones, even when we try not to. We make decisions that keep our in-groups stable, by and large. A few, a very few, spend their days trying to think rationally, or exploring the ramifications of rational laws on our near future. A few dare to challenge conventional thinking aimed at in-group stability. Those few are not better than the rest. They are just an outward-looking minority evolved for the group's longer term survival. But the aggregate of our individual decisions looks much like a search algorithm. We explore physical spaces, new foods to eat, new places to be, new ways to raise families, new ways to defeat our enemies. Some work and some don't. Evolution is also a search algorithm, although a much slower one. Our species is where it is because our intelligence has explored more of our space faster and to greater effect. That is both our benefit and our challenge.

The strengths and weaknesses of the professional philosopher's toolbox are just not important to Bostrom's argument. Superintelligence would have been a stronger book if he has transcended them. Instead, it is a litany of just how far philosophy alone can take us, and a definition of where it fails.

I could find no discussion of the various types of approaches to AI, nor how they might play out differently. There are at least five, mostly mutually contradictory, types of AI. They are, in rough historical order:

1. Logical symbol manipulation. This is the sort that has given us proof engines, and various forms of game players. It is also what traditionalists think of when they say "AI".
2. Neural networks. Many problems in computer vision and other sort of pattern recognition problems have been solved this way.
3. Auto-associative memories. This variation on neural networks uses feedback to allow recovery of a pattern when presented with only part of the pattern as input.
4. Statistical, or "machine learning". These techniques use mathematical modeling to solve particular problems such as cleaning fuzzy images.
5. Human brain emulation. Brain emulation may be used to predict future events based on past experiences.

Of these, and the handful of other less common approaches not mentioned, only human brain emulation is currently aiming to create a general artificial intelligence. Not only that, but few AI researchers actually think we are anywhere close to that goal. The popular media has represented a level of maturity that is not currently present.

The recent successes of the artificial intelligence community are a much longer way from general intelligence than one hears from news media, or even some starry eyed AI researchers. There are also good reasons not to worry even if we do manage to create intelligent machines.

Recent news-making successes in AI have been due to the scale of available computing. Examples include the ability for a program to learn to recognize cats in pictures, or to safely drive a car. These successes are impressive, but are wholly specific solutions to very particular problems. Not one of the researchers involved believes that those approaches will lead to a generally intelligent machine. These are tools and nothing but tools. Their output makes us better in the same way that the invention of the hammer or screwdriver, or general purpose computer, made us better. They will not, cannot, take over the world.

Bostrom is, at the end, pessimistic about our chances for survival. Perhaps this is what happens when one spends a lot of time studying global catastrophic risks. Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic previously edited a book of essays exploring just such risks in 2011 [Goodreads]. More information is available on the book's Web site. The first chapter is available online. These three paragraphs from Superintelligence anchor his position in relation to AI:

Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.

For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.

Nor can we attain safety by running away, for the blast of an intelligence explosion would bring down the entire firmament. Nor is there a grown up in sight.

One could imagine the same pessimistic argument being made about nuclear weapons. They must be reigned in before "some little idiot" gets his hands on one. Is that not what has happened? The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has been a major force for slowing the spread of nuclear weapons in spite of the five countries that do not adhere to its principles. Separate agreements, threats, and sanctions has so far worked just well enough to plug the holes. Grown ups, from Albert Einstein to the current batch of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks negotiators, have come out of the woodwork when needed. Not only has no one dropped a nuclear bomb since the world came to know of their existence at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even the superpowers have willingly returned to small, and relatively low-tech ways of war.

Bostrom urges us to spend time and effort urgently to consider our response to the coming threat. He warns that we may not have the time we think we have. Nowhere does he presume that we will not choose our own destruction. "The universe is change;" said the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, "our life is what our thoughts make it." Bostrom might learn to temper his pessimism with an understanding of how humans relate to existential threats. Only then do they seem to do the right thing. He might also observe that unexpected events should not be handled using old tools, as noted by the industrialist J. Paul Getty ("In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.") or management theorist Peter Drucker ("The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.") We will need new conceptual tools to handle a new intelligence.

Our erstwhile fear mongers seem also certain that any new general intelligence would, as humans are wont to do, wish to destroy a competing intelligence, us. People fear this not because this is what an artificial intelligence will necessarily be, but because that is what our form of intelligence is. Humans have always feared other humans and for good reason. As historian Ronald Wright noted in A Short History of Progress [Goodreads],

"[P]rehistory, like history, teaches us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide."

This raises the fascinating question of how we, as a species, would react to the presence of a newly competitive intelligence on our planet. History shows that we probably killed off the Neanderthals, as earlier human species killed off Homo Erectus and our earlier predecessors. We don't play well with others. Perhaps our own latent fears will insist on the killing off of a new, generally intelligent AI. We should consider this nasty habit of ours before we worry too much about how a hypothetical AI might feel about us. If an AI considers us a threat, should we really blame it? We probably will be a threat to its existence.

It is possible that a single hyper-intelligent machine might not even matter much in the wider course of human affairs. Just like the natural, generational genius does not always matter. The history of the human race seems to be more dominated by the slow, inexorable march of individual decisions than it is by the, often temporary, upheavals of the generational genius. How would human development have changed if the Persian commander Spithridates had succeeded in killing Alexander the Great at the Battle of the Granicus? He almost did. Spithridates' axe bounced off Alexander's armor. Much has been made of the details, but people would still spread through competition, and contact between East and West would still have eventually occurred. The difference between having a genius and not having a genius can be smaller than we think in the long run.

Bostrom's main point is that we should take the development of general artificial intelligence seriously and plan for its eventual regulation. That's fine, for what it is worth. It is not worth very much, really. We are much more likely to react once a threat emerges. That's what humanity does. Bostrom is at best early at delivering a warning and at worst barking up the wrong tree.

Book Review: A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

A Short History of Progress [Amazon, Goodreads] by Ronald Wright was published in 2004 alongside Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything [Amazon, Goodreads]. Wright and Bryson were hardly the first to summarize human history in a few short pages and will certainly not be the last. They do seem to have been at the forefront of an explosion of such books in the last decade. That outpouring has included such bestsellers as A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage [Amazon, Goodreads] in 2006 and A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor [Amazon, Goodreads] in 2010. This year has brought A Short History of the World by Christopher Lascelles [Amazon, Goodreads].

Most of these histories simply summarize the work of many others who have painstakingly wrested our past from the ground, from oral and written traditions, and from newer techniques like genetics and linguistics. Wright actually proposes a new theory of human cultural evolution. He analyses the very nature of our cultural progress from hunter-gatherer groups to our present global monoculture and comes to the conclusion that we are vulnerable for some very understandable reasons. He introduces his concept of a progress trap, in which an invention initially provides great benefits but its use at scale results in greater risk. "[W]hen the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress." His analysis is strong and, in spite of several nits that are worth picking, his conclusions stand firm.

Wright has summarized his book in a short film called Surviving Progress , directed by Martin Scorsese, which is available on popular video sharing sites such as Netflix. Wright's Web site is at http://ronaldwright.com/.

Wright, like Winston Churchill ("The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see") believes that the scrutinization of our past can guide us in our future: "If we can see clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behavior that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here."

I both agree and disagree with that, Wright's central thesis. I think we can and should, indeed must, gain the insight to see clearly who we are as a species. Wright says that our cultural history to date has been like "sleepwalking" from crisis to invention to new crisis, and he is correct in that our trajectory has been more an emergent feature of many individual actions than a clear-eyed macroscopic set of policies. Even now we struggle to scale our actions to match the scope of our civilization. However, I do not believe that we dare apply our newfound knowledge to impact only culture. Our stone age brains are just not suited to solving the problems that our sleepwalking has led us to. We have been sleepwalking to the edge of a cliff and should really wake up before we step off. Says Wright,

Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence that is so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown to small to afford us any big mistakes.

The problem is that, by Wright's own analysis, we are really very unlikely to operate efficiently for the first time in our history. We will need to upgrade our stone age brain for that to happen. We are now in a race to see which happens first, the end of our global culture or the application of our new-found scientific knowledge to change what we are as a species.

Let's reconsider a quote from Wright that I mentioned earlier: "[W]hen the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress." That statement is true in at least two conditions. The first is when human decision making is such that someone might actually decide to blow up the world. That was the worry during the Cold War with its literally insane doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). It is a worry still that the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War not only exist but are being constantly maintained and even upgraded. The only thing that has changed is that the nuclear forces are not routinely at their highest levels of alertness. We have made too much progress when our stone age brains have not caught up with our ability to create a bigger bang. This applies to politicians as much as suicide bombers.

The second condition in which we should worry is when a big bang might go off accidentally. We often put more effort into building a big bang maker than in ensuring that it is a safe and maintainable technology. This was the case when the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia disintegrated in mid flight, and when the RMS Titanic sank beneath the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

As far as I can tell, Wright explored neither of these two conditions. He simply noted that too much progress could be made. He didn't explain why. That would be a useful topic for a later book. I suggest that changing one or both of those conditions will require a change to the human animal.

Wright notes that our present idea of progress is tightly tied to the Industrial Revolution and its Victorian idea of a "ladder" of progress. Like the idea of a ladder of evolution, the very idea is flawed and illustrates a very basic difference between our human intuition of the world and the truth of it. We were not destined to develop in the way that we did, either culturally or as a species. Evolution may solve any given problem in a variety of ways.

The idea of progress has become a modern myth. "Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations...Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time." This is our stone age brain at work. We have a primitive need to establish myths as a tool to establish communities, and to promulgate those communities by living by the myths. The abstraction of reality by myth may be a useful technique for a limited brain, but we will need to see reality much more clearly than we currently do to navigate our immediate future with anything less than a societal collapse coupled with further mass extinctions and catastrophic global climate change. That is, of course, if we avoid both nuclear war and a complete ecological collapse.

Is the situation really that dire? We might like to think not. We might reasonably think that we can avoid catastrophe through continued technical advancement. This is the point made by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance [Amazon, Goodreads]. Levitt and Dubner open the sequel to their best-selling Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything [Amazon, Goodreads] by reminding us of the tragic state of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Large cities had reached a practical limit to their growth because horse excrement was created much faster than it could be removed. An amazing five million pounds of the stuff was generated by the equine bellies of New York every day. Levitt and Dubner paint a smelly picture:

In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-story parlor, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a home owner to rise above the sea of horse manure.

It was of course the automobile, and its distant cousin the electric streetcar, that removed the horse from the streets of New York. Levitt and Dubner trumpet our species' ability to solve every problem we face in a similar way. We can simply keep inventing. Wright, far from dismissing this idea, acknowledges it and also points to its built-in limitation: "A seductive trail of successes," says Wright, "may end in a trap." A progress trap. What will happen to our huge cities when we cannot solve the next challenge in time?

It has happened before. Ours is not the first society to face an existential crisis due to overusing resources. The others tell their stories only to archaeologists and historians. One instantly brings to mind Shelley's Ozymandias, written as an ode to the discovery in 1817 of a broken statue of Egyptian pharoah Ramesses II:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As Wright notes, "Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up."

We sometimes extrapolate poorly because we cannot see obvious solutions to the problems we have caused. We also sometimes look to the positive when we should not. This was likely the case when a group of climate scientists reported in 2012 that anthropogenic climate change would delay the next ice age. Much media coverage was given to the positive aspects of climate change. "It's an interesting philosophical discussion - 'would we better off in a warm [interglacial-type] world rather than a glaciation?' and probably we would,"said one of the authors, Dr. Luke Skinner of Cambridge University in a BBC interview, "But it's missing the point, because where we're going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate. The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can't cope with that." Indeed.

Wright's initial and most powerful examples of progress traps are hunting ("Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much.") and farming. Along the way he returns often to the one that scares him most: The prehistoric control of fire that led all the way to nuclear weapons.

He does not touch on the one that scares me the most. The so-called Green Revolution has tied the production of our food supply to non-renewable petrochemicals for fertilizer and transportation. I might temporarily look past that if the end result were not a dangerous increase in the number of babies born. Our population has spiked to match our food supply, and quite ignores other minor annoyances such as fresh water, and the limitations of fish, wild animals and non-farm plants. Feeding all the babies we can make is made obscene by the refusal of the Catholic Church to permit the distribution of birth control measures in the poorest countries. It is by the much lauded Green Revolution that we hasten our collapse.

Wright attempts to view our species from the outside, as if he were the mythical anthropologist from another planet. His objective stance shows us for the violent ape that we are, and suggests that we are likely responsible for killing off other intelligent hominids. "[P]rehistory, like history, teaches us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide." We are what we are, it seems, and culture can only go so far to clean us up.

Wright notes that two civilizations were quite long-lived, the ancient Maya and the ancient Egyptians. Recent evidence suggests that the Mayan civilization collapsed due to climate change. It would seem that their population was built, as with others, to the limit of their available resources. Climate change has also been suggested as a possible culprit in the demise of the Egyptian New Kingdom. These new findings support Wright's conclusions in a way that he could not have known in 2004.

Wright may or may not have been right about Neanderthal genocide. He acknowledges that he is not certain. However, his point is well taken about the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon war being "so gradual that it may have ben barely perceptible - a fitful, inconclusive war with land lost and won at the rate of a few miles in a lifetime." We no longer have the luxury of living in the nearly timeless wars of our ancestors. We are suddenly asked to adjust several times in a lifetime to complete cultural shifts - and we are ill suited for it.

Wright and I almost parted ways in regard to his description of early agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution, as the advent of farming has been known since the archaeologist Gordon Childe coined the phrase, has fallen on hard times in the decade since I spent time studying it.  My generation was taught in school that the revolution was a single event that occurred in Mesopotamia's  Fertile Crescent, and something that happened quickly, in the span of a single generation. Modern scholarship has disabused both notions.

Agriculture was indeed the single most necessary condition for the rise of civilization. Agriculture infers settlements. Our diet today consists of the same basic cereals that were farmed first. Wright uses current scholarship to point out that the Neolithic Revolution could not have been an isolated innovation, that it could not have occurred in a particular location, and that it was more likely to have been a strategy of desperation.

Our Neolithic forebears, modern humans in every sense of the word save culture, had an intimate understanding of plant life. They carefully observed the passing of the seasons. They knew when and where individual plants passed through their life cycles. There was no single moment of innovation that translated that knowledge into a decision to control the process. Scholars have agreed with this view for some years, starting with the popularization of the concept by the biologist Colin Tudge in his short masterpiece Neanderthals, Bandits & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began [Amazon, Goodreads]. They have been split until recently on whether farming started in one place and spread (the "diffusion" theory) or whether it was independently invented in multiple locations (the "parallel development" theory). I was a staunch diffusionist until reading Wright's book and following through his bibliography.

I have long held diffusionist beliefs for the simple and insufficient reason that I thought it somehow more likely that such an important invention required a sole genius. I must now admit that I was wrong. New findings in the Americas and elsewhere support Wright's contention that farming was a reaction to the end of the last ice age in many places at times that corresponded with the movement of the ice. The diffusion theory seems to have died the death that it deserved. That tells us something fundamental about human inventiveness: It strongly suggests that individual invention is not nearly as important in the course of human affairs as the environmental conditions in which a larger group of people find themselves. This is not simply "geographical determinism", but a recognition of the importance of the impact of geography on the development of societies. It also speaks to the capability of people to respond to environmental changes in the absence of a generational genius.

Diffusion wasn't necessary because hunter-gatherer groups already knew how to farm. They simply chose not to. They had intimate knowledge of plants, their timings and their ranges. They probably also understood that they could eat better by gathering plants than by growing a few. It would have been beyond obvious to them that hunting would be seriously curtailed by having a fixed settlement.

So why did agriculture come to dominate? Agriculture is a meme, in the sense proposed by the person who devised the word, Richard Dawkins. A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." (The Selfish Gene [Amazon, Goodreads]). Dawkins had in mind a unit of cultural transmission that was parallel to, and in some ways similar to, a gene. A successful meme spreads so well that it comes to dominate a culture.

Agriculture came to dominate for a very simple reason: Farmers do not need to practice infanticide to control their population. Hunter-gatherers and herders always do. Farming populations, no matter how sickly and limited in nutrition, have a lot of babies and keep as many as they can manage. They outbreed hunter-gatherers in a few generations.

The hunter-gatherer practice of infanticide by exposure keeps their numbers balanced with their environment. We hear echoes of infanticide by exposure and its justification as religious sacrifice in the earliest Western literature. The Pentateuch includes several (such as Exodus 1:16 "When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.") and the the Iliad (Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to gain favorable winds to sail to Troy!). The nomadic herders and early farmers of the Pentateuch and the Iliad had more in common with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than with modern farmers.

Tudge has suggested another important aspect to farming. He pointed out that farming changes the very nature of the predator-prey balance in an ecology:

Today, suburban domestic cats provide the perfect model. They are sustained by Kit-e-Kat and Whiskas, and remain thick on the ground even when the local song-birds and mice decline. Hence they remain a predatory force long after the prey species have become extremely rare. For prey animals in a state of nature rarity is a refuge. But when the predator has secure, independent food base, mere scarcity is no longer protective.

It was farming that separated humans from the rest of nature. We have considered ourselves separate ever since.

Wright has leaned rather heavily on the works of Gordon Childe, especially his What Happened in History [Amazon, Goodreads]. Childe, a lifelong atheist and dedicated Marxist, is rightly remembered for having placed archaeology on a purely materialistic basis. It was Childe's Marxism that led him to a material understanding of the past ahead of his peers. However, one might reasonably question his contention that human progress was essentially a class struggle from prehistoric times. It might have been better for Wright to have carefully read Childe's own 1951 treatise on human progress, Man Makes Himself [Amazon, Goodreads].

Wright might very well be wrong about "most" humans being familiar with constant struggle and starvation. That has certainly been true since agriculture began but is unlikely to have been true for hunter-gatherers and has rapidly become less true since the Green Revolution according to the United Nation's World Food Program. Today's population is both the largest in history by far and the best fed since agriculture began, as dire as the situation is for tens of millions of people in poor countries.

If hunter-gatherers had leisure time, we need to chip away at another long held presumption about farming's influence. Perhaps it is not so much that farming's surpluses enabled cultural specialists as it allowed them to build faster on their own inventions. Any inventor's shop is littered with earlier models. Farmers benefit from specialized tools and, critically, can afford to store them when they are not being used. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are, by every aspect of our current understanding, just as capable of invention as farmers, but eschew carrying extra tools in the same way that they eschew carrying extra babies.

"The modern human animal - our physical being - is a generalist." Wright tell us. "We have no fangs, claws, or venom built into our bodies. Instead, we've devised tools and weapons - knives, spearheads, poisoned arrows... Our specialization is the brain." This separates us from over-specialized species like the panda or the koala, both of which suffer from over-specializing on single foodstuffs. We are still not able to escape the judgement of history. Nothing does. History is not over for us. Even if we survive, we seem to be taking down most other species with us.

So among the things that we need to know about ourselves is that the Upper Paleolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all-you-can-kill barbecue. The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.

Wright's "all-you-can-eat barbecue" is known to anthropologists as the Pleistocene Overkill.

He also does a fine job correcting the historical record where it has been munged by the xenophobes of our recent imperial past. Evidence for some small amount of continued communication between Polynesia and the Americas, for example, serves to illustrate a larger point that trade between "primitives" was often denied out of hand as impossible.

Wright makes a strong case that humans live beyond their means whenever the conditions enable them to do so. It is only when environmental conditions make human life marginal that humans are forced to live close to the Earth. Extant hunter-gatherers live that way because they are forced to. Wright uses two particular examples of this phenomenon to make his case. He analyzes the environmental degradation caused by early farming in the (previously) Fertile Crescent and the religiously driven degradation of Easter Island. 

 The example of Easter Island is particularly troubling because it shows that, at least in one place and time, religious beliefs encouraged a people to bring their civilization crashing down. It is amazing that any of them survived. That, at least, is a testament to the tenacity of our ability to survive if not to prosper. Wright rightly points out that, whether or not the Easter Islanders saw it coming, the person who chopped down the island's last tree certainly did know what he was doing. 

 Two other examples, not in Wright's history, serve to reinforce his point. The harbor of Athens, Piraeus, was originally an island separated from the city by a salty tidal plain. The name of the plain, Halipedon, means "salt field" - showing some societal memory of the event. Although modern classical scholars sometimes debate whether ancient Romans and Greeks understood the impact their activities were having on the environment, I cannot understand why this is so. Both Plato and Aristotle recorded complaints about harbor silt and blamed it on agricultural runoff. Perhaps the situation was more like our own in relation to anthropogenic climate change: The situation was obvious to a few educated elite, but the powers that be were inadequately motivated to change the basis of their wealth and power. The similarity with our current situation is not lost on me.

My favorite example of the degradation of farming is the desert of Libya, once known with Western Egypt as the "granary of Rome". It's fragile grasslands briefly supported bountiful grain harvests. The removal of its loosened topsoil by the ghibli winds ended that description.

There are surely some who are working hard to balance our planet's environment. We are a distributed species, each of us taking our own actions. Some of us, for moral, ethical, philosophical, or religious reasons, would rather maintain our biosphere instead of using it up. They attempt to balance those more self-centered individuals who are out for number one. Unfortunately, the latter have wrested power since the halcyon days of Sumer. It is not by coincidence that environmental activists like Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), are considered to be radical and even dangerous by business and political leaders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body, was blasted in 2013 for using material prepared by Greenpeace and the WWF. In a fight between advocacy groups, businesses, and governments, one cannot reasonably expect advocacy groups to win.

There have been some significant environmental victories, most notably the US the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s. Unfortunately, there have been significant attempts to roll back that legislation by the Republican Party from 2002 to the present, including a bill passed in the US House of Representatives recently with an impressive, and depressing, majority of 262-152. Economics, it is said, is the science of incentives. Business interests will return to dominate whenever ecology is in anything less than absolute crisis.

Wright seems to have missed mentioning, and seeing the importance of, the Baldwin Effect. Evolution, that "universal acid" as philosopher Daniel Dennett called it, is the mechanism that created us, and the Baldwin Effect is the evolutionary means by which we acquired an ability to learn. The psychologist James Baldwin proposed the effect an 1896 paper. Learning, the type of learning gifted to us by evolution, is the single most important mechanism of cultural extension to future generations. It is the Baldwin Effect that allows culture to build upon itself. Wright notes the powerful ratcheting of culture without mentioning the key aspect of evolutionary theory that predicts it. Critically, once a child is born that has an advanced ability to learn, it can learn from its parents. This one fact is sufficient, in the extreme form taken by the human race, to create progress, and Wright's progress traps.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his 2014 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind [Amazon, Goodreads], blames our dangerous situation squarely, if indirectly, on the limitations of the Baldwin Effect. Wright, if he has read Harari, will curse the timing of his publication. "We tell each other stories", Harari said in a recent interview  following the book's release. "It does not matter whether they are true." Therein lies our greatest strength and our greatest failure.

Religions well illustrate how people act in the face of direction. Harari notes that Christianity became "the world's most successful religion" while being simultaneously "a complete fiction". Our ability to cooperate was greatly enhanced by the development of language, and language enabled us to pass down hard won lessons from generation to generation. Unfortunately, we cannot tell when someone is lying to us. We also have a difficult time passing down metaphor, which is often taken as literal truth by recipients and becomes religion. Our stories can thus lead us astray and become maladaptive. It is our belief in these stories, our culture, that can slow our reactions to new threats such as environmental degradation. Our stories and other aspects of group cohesion compete with our intellect to sustain a civilization. When the intellect is right and the stories wrong, we can find ourselves on the path to hell.

We really do sleepwalk through our lives. Modern neuroscience suggests that this should be no surprise, since we are not nearly as conscious as we think we are (c.f. The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood [Amazon, Goodreads]). We are conscious enough, though, to see that we are stepping off of a very high cliff. As Wright says, we have kicked out the rungs under us as we have climbed the ladder of progress. Our failure will kill billions. This now seems to be nearly inevitable - exactly the kind of bad news story that does not sell. Like the Sumerians, whose rulers died or moved when sediment salted their farmland, we flirt with total collapse. Like the Easter Islanders, we have nowhere left to run.

Wright correctly notes the large-scale similarities of civilizations worldwide. His depiction of the development of kingship, with its attendant supposition that some people's lives are more valuable than others, is intentionally and eerily reminiscent of extant governments, regardless of style, philosophies, or record of human rights abuses. His point that all post-agricultural societies share this concept, and all hunter-gatherer societies reject it, is well taken. It is odd, then, that he fails to contrast the daily life of a notional slave with an agricultural serf or the persistent underclasses of today's urbanity. He is too willing to suggest that legal slavery belongs to the past when recognizable forms are institutionalized in most modern states. For all of Wright's dire warnings, he is perhaps not as pessimistic as he should be.

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself". He very carefully did not say the way. It really is up to us whether we choose to continue to sleepwalk through our daily lives while we allow vast historical cycles to knock us back to the stone age, or whether, like Hamlet, we dare take arms against the sea of our troubles. That sea is all the more deep for being buried deep within what we are as a species.

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

The Testament of Gideon Mack [Amazon, Goodreads] by James Robertson has a single unambiguous theme: doubt. That is the only unambiguous feature of the book. Robertson manages masterfully to question every aspect of his own story until one is forced to question nearly everything. Upon finishing the book, I was almost certain that I had, in fact, read it.

The book's notional plot describes the fantastic story of the eponymous Gideon Mack, a Presbyterian minister in a small Scottish seaside village, and his encounter with the Devil. At least, it might have been the Devil. Mack thought so. Sometimes. He might have just been insane. Many of the signs were there, from the fantasies of his loveless childhood to his literal howling at the base of a standing stone that might, or might not, have been imagined. Mack wrote his testament and it supposedly made its way to a publisher who doubted whether he should publish it. The publisher's notes frame Mack's version and supply both context and, following Mack's death, a conclusion of a sort. In a nice twist in the endnotes, the supposed publisher assures us that each sale of The Testament of Gideon Mack will benefit an aged care home in the fictional town described in the story. Robertson leaves us little choice but to doubt his word from beginning to end. This is fiction that will demand that you think.

Mack himself is a classic anti-hero, a characterization that Robertson uses in a footnote to describe another author's character. Robertson draws on many literary references. His characters read, and are influenced by, novels and histories both real and fictional. The author himself holds a Ph.D. in history from Edinburgh University; His dissertation on the works of Sir Walter Scott, a fellow Scotsman and author of such famous early nineteenth century works as Ivanhoe , echoes in The Testament. The women in Mack's life, Jenny the unloved and now deceased wife, Elsie the lover, and diseased Catherine the disputant, find their archetypes in nineteenth century English and French literature such as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Lord Byron's Don Juan .

The real publisher, Hamish Hamilton in Scotland, part of Penguin Books, assures us in a standard disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." I would personally be saddened to think that our playful Dr. Robertson did not sneak in an intentional resemblance to a living person or two, just to carry his device to its logical conclusion.

Robertson authored two novels prior to The Testament and has authored two since. Hamish Hamilton is publishing a new short story by Robertson every day of 2014, each one 365 words long. None of the dozen or so I read included Robertson's broad Scottish vernacular. The Testament relies upon it. Having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy is critical for American readers and others who are unfamiliar with the meanings of hunkers, boaks, or a smirr of rain. He is forced to explain commonly used words such as kirk (church) and manse (minister's house). Where the Scots Gaelic becomes too thick, Robertson helpfully supplies footnotes from his fictional publisher. The scene feels Scottish, from the persistent rain and angry young men to the shale beaches and craggy topology. The result is a novel that is fresh and genuine in its love of setting.

Robertson is also a partner in the grant-funded Scots language children's publisher Itchy Coo. Itchy Coo's Web site proudly offers a Hame page and an Aboot Us description. A character in The Testament amusingly pokes fun at authors who try to set Scots down in print. In fact, The Testament fairly brims with jibes at authors. One character is a perennially unpublished novelist. Another complains that "everybody thinks they have a novel in them" before declaring that writing is "a refuge from confusion". The process of writing does facilitate a certain clarity of thought, in my experience, if only because one must decide what to say.

Robertson holds out much hope for the written word, as if warding off a merely spoken evil. Mack laments the premature telling of his story by saying, "if people could have read this full and honest account rather than heard me announce it amid the din and confusion of that day, then perhaps they might have reacted with more open minds." At least three of his characters are writers.

The core of the book, though, is our relationship to truth. What is it? Can we know it? Would we understand it if it were presented to us? Why do people believe as they do? What are the costs of their beliefs? The Testament asks the big questions, explores them from many angles, and leaves you to answer them as you see fit. Robertson explores truth from many angles, including the ability to trust "facts" as they are presented, asks what we can truly perceive, informs on the limitations of human thought, wonders about the wisdom of teaching fairy stories to children, and worries about passions left uncontrolled.

Mack's justification for writing his testament is repeatedly referred to as a drive toward truth. But the absolute truth can be amazingly harmful to a community, as Robertson explores. Mack is shunned by everyone by the end of his truncated life for his effort. Robertson's story does not lend credence to Sam Harris' more recent thesis that we should all just tell the unabashed truth at all times (in Lying [Amazon, Goodreads]).

Naturally enough for a book set in Scotland, the central pole around which the book swings in its discussion of truth is religion, and its antipode, doubt of religion. "What is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?" Robertson asks.

We are told, "Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." Could there be a more succinct description of the confusion of our times? Our Western civilization has advanced from an ego-centrism under the sky of the only world to one in which we are simultaneously the only intelligent life form we know and yet a mere speck in the vastness of an impossibly large universe. Robertson plays on our confusion from all angles. He gives us the character of Peter Macmurray, elder of the church and Mack's institutional nemesis, who represents the authority of religious institutions, and the character of Lorna Sprott, a fellow minister who is both a true believer and a sad alcoholic crushed under the authority to which she has submitted herself.

Robertson's tight writing shines in his description of Macmurray: "By day he is an accountant and by night, as Jenny used to say, he adds the saved and subtracts the damned, and always comes out with a minus figure."

Robertson deeply questions the role of the Church of Scotland and its relationship with Scottish culture. The nasty element of control in Western religions does not escape Robertson's notice. He has Mack speak of "the overwhelming weight that bears down on most people who enter a church - the weight of years of learning not to disrupt, not to object, not to speak out against authority." At one point he declares that, "The great age of religion had passed", only to suggest that the Kirk could still have a role in society. It is this Gaelic sensitivity to culture and identity that makes The Testament a wonderfully human book. Robertson recognizes and acknowledges non-traditional roles for traditional institutions but can only hope that they will come to see the world in the doubting way that he does. To not is tantamount to denying our recently-won knowledge and risks living with a permanently entrenched cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is clearly evident in America's science-denying evangelicalism. Robertson informs us that the same stresses exist within other societies.

Lest one consider Robertson's religious beliefs clearly defined, he dithers. His characters are true believers, agnostics, fakers, atheists, vacillators. Elsie's husband John exclaims, "There are no answers, don't you see?", but John is a troubled and desperately unhappy man. He has not replaced religion with a working philosophy that might, as Aristotle suggested, provide him a replacement comfort. Robertson subtly pokes at the religious who express belief in the Devil while steadfastly finding Mack's claims to have met him utterly ridiculous. "The whole religion thing - not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it", as Elsie says, seems to come closest to his position.

"The present", Robertson says, "was a mere waiting room for the future." That lovely observation is the exact opposite of the mindfulness of the present encouraged by Buddhism. It is also perhaps an unintended or unwanted consequence of our society's current affair with invention and discovery. The scientist or the engineer works toward a future in which theEureka moment will happen. The teenager waits for the new model mobile phone. The salaryman waits for retirement. We are a society of delayed gratification. Those who defer gratification until after death are religion's real losers.

There are many minor recurring themes in The Testament. Perhaps the most central to the book's exploration of truth is the tendency of people to see intelligent action where it is not. This is known to psychologists as hyperactive agency detection. If I suppose a tiger is responsible for the rustling of leaves I just heard and I am right, I might save my life by running away. If I am wrong, little harm is done. This instinctive survival trait causes no end of confusion for the modern person, living as we do with the distinct absence of tigers.

Gideon Mack's life is dominated by hyperactive agency detection. Upon seeing a bee fly out of a drawer, Mack "wondered if there was a message in it; any kind of meaning at all." When confronted with the appearance of the standing stone, he noted:

• "It seemed to me that the Stone had provoked this crisis, had engineered it in some way."
• "Because the Stone prevented it."
• "Perhaps the Stone was wielding some strange power over events and had brought her to my door at this moment."
• "The Stone did not want to be photographed. I no longer wished to share the Stone with anybody."

The last, of course, makes one immediately think of J.R.R. Tolkien's characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and the One Ring.

Later, in a museum exhibition, "I got up on the wooden step, and this seemed to trigger the tape." Mack jumps to unfounded conclusions quickly, seemingly just to avoid missing one. Robertson, whether consciously or not is impossible for me to say, seems to warn against such actions.

Failures of imagination, and another attendant willingness to jump to conclusions, similarly haunt Robertson's characters. Chance appearances of plot devices seem "incredible" to them. When faced with an experience that he cannot readily explain, Mack races to cognitive closure. He seems unwilling or incapable of keeping an open mind until additional facts are acquired. The unnamed being that he (possibly) encounters must be the Christian Devil. God must exist if the Devil does. All of this is wrapped in layers of tortured logic by means of justification. When Mack feels that he could not have reasonably survived his near death experience, he proclaims, "I was of the opinion, therefore, that I must be dead."

Robertson's characters are not an unrealistic stretch from everyday human experience. We have all met the gullible, but Robertson's exploration goes deeper than pedestrian gullibly. He probes the limits of humankind to judge likelihood. It is something that we do poorly.

Radiolab, a weekly radio show syndicated across the United States by National Public Radio, recently illustrated our intuitive problem with comprehending statistics in an episode called Stochasticity. Stochasticity is a florid academic word for randomness. The study of stochasticity provides techniques to understand events whose results can only be measured statistically. We cannot know whether a particular coin toss will result in a "heads" or a "tails", but we can know that, given a high number of tosses, the results should be about half of each.

My caveats (a high number, about half) are important and point to our difficulties in understanding the random world. Radiolab interviewed Deborah Nolan, a professor of statistics atUC Berkeley, who demonstrated how poor we are at understanding random acts. She asked a group of students to make up a list of 100 coin tosses. Simultaneously, the Radiolab hosts were asked to toss a real coin 100 times and record the results. Nolan immediately spotted which list constituted the real coin tosses. How? By choosing the list that contained a run of seven "tails" in a row. The students felt that such a run would not appear to be random, but real random sequences include such apparent patterns quite often. Our misunderstanding of randomness stems from the simple fact that the human cortex is a very effective pattern recognition engine. We seek patterns for our own survival. They guide our actions. Lack of patterns, randomness, confuses us. We seek, and often find, patterns that do not exist.

The phenomenon of seeing patterns that aren't there is common enough that there is a word for it: apophenia. Psychologists associate the onset of such persistent delusional thinking with schizophrenia - unless it is associated with an established religion.

Pascal's Wager appears and reappears throughout The Testament. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously argued that everyone should believe in God because "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it postulates a lack of cost to belief in a god. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Pascal did not acknowledge that belief requires a separation from reality, and that bad things happen to the human brain when it is forced to close cognitive dissonance based on too few facts. Wild leaps of the imagination or other mental gymnastics are required to make sense of nonsense. Robertson compares authorial leaps of imagination, which are the very basis of creativity, to leaps of faith. But in admittedly extreme cases, leaps of faith may also lead to anything from standing on a street corner with a sign reading, "The End is Nigh" to suicide bombing to the Toronto family that left a corpse in their house for six months expecting resurrection. We do ourselves no favors by encouraging delusion.

Or do we? We often think of evolution as a search algorithm that fits an animal to its environment. People have been around long enough to evolve to fit people-dominated environments. We have evolved to cooperate with other people. Sometimes, really quite often in fact, that means that we need to compromise our understanding of the world in order to get along with others. Robertson explores the prices of compromise and failures to compromise by presenting us with characters who span the gamut. 

Both real and fictional Presbyterian ministers make their appearance in The Testament. Their interests, with the single exception of the true believer Lorna, transcend those of traditional Christianity. Robertson neatly brings in the nineteenth century minister Robert Kirk and his book of folk tales, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies[Amazon, Goodreads] to make this point. The book makes a variety of appearances across the generations. Robertson intertwines folk myths, mainstream religion, doubt, love, lust, friendships, vanity, and self-obsession into a tapestry that approaches the complexity of real-life thought.

It is almost not worth bothering to mention the fatherhood obsession shared by Gideon and, more subtly, his father James. It is too obvious. However, this does lead to some brilliant foreshadowing with Elsie's daughter Katie and her imaginary friend. The friend seems to be Mack's Devil, lending yet another bit of support for the reality of an illusion that one had just decided was an illusion. Similarly, Elsie's eleventh-hour admission of the length of her affair with Mack, and the depth of it, questions Mack's veracity just after others had established it. Robertson's misdirection took some careful construction.

Robertson, while pillorying religious belief, does not spare non-religious thought. The atheists in The Testament are generally unhappy, and the one professed agnostic is depicted as physically crippled and verbally vitriolic. Robertson asks, but does not answer, what makes one happy to live one's life. Perhaps, being Scottish, he has no idea. More likely he simply was not aware of modern scholarship which has started to unravel this conundrum, such as this study of coping strategies of the irreligious.

Robertson employs some beautiful metaphors throughout The Testament. My personal favorite is this:

"Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Everything is familiar, and everything strange. It’s as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal."

Walking past the sleeping multitudes is a wonderful depiction of the atheist experience. One often feels the weight of the mass delusion that grips our world. Naturally, and very Robertson, true believers must feel the same way. One is left to make of it what one will.

My one substantial criticism stems from an experience that Robertson could presumably not personally explore. Mack's character undergoes a near death experience, but Robertson, it seems, could not pull from observation to make his description plausible. My own near drowning left me uncomfortable with Robertson's portrayal. Although I recognized Mack's reported lack of panic, I experienced no flashing of my life before me, nor a feeling that I had left too much unresolved. The immediacy of the situation dominated my mind, even as I began to think that perhaps I should try breathing water after all. Those who told me I could not could have been mistaken. I do not fault Robertson overly much for his reliance on clichés for this part of his story. I am glad for him that he has not gained the insight.

The Testament of Gideon Mack should not have been long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. It should have won it. Perhaps it didn't because some members of the review committee were themselves religious. The book is designed in a certain sense to offend. It would not offend a doubter, but it threatens the homey comfort of the believer. "How can it be blasphemous? It’s the truth. There isn’t a word of a lie in what you’ve heard." Gideon Mack tells his friend and fellow minister Lorna. She replies,  "Of course it’s blasphemous. It goes against everything we stand for. You simply mustn’t repeat it." I urge you to ignore her advice.