The Road to Character (Random House, NY, 2015) by David Brooks is a powerful analysis of the prevailing ethos of American society. Brooks contends that Americans have shifted from a primary moral ecology founded on a vision of human fallibility, self discipline and eulogy virtues to one based on human potential, self actualization and 'Big Me' virtues. He explores this shift through profiles of Frances Perkins, Ida Stover Eisenhower and Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne.

According to Brooks, most people attribute this shift to the baby boomer generation durning the period of the 1960's. However, Brooks asserts it was actually the greatest generation who made the shift as a reaction to 16 years of suffering from the Great Depression and World War II. Brooks also correctly asserts that the shift has some merit, even as he asserts the importance of restoring some balance to our social vision of human nature and a life well-lived.

I like this book a lot. It is my favorite read of 2020. The contrast between the traditional moral ecology rooted in a vision of human frailty and one rooted in human potential seems to mirror the dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions in Thomas Sowell's classic work A Conflict of Visions (see my review of Conflict).

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a classic story of WWII that is fairly easy to read and well worth every minute you invest in it.  Written as a work of fiction, it is nonetheless the testimony of a man who lived the days of which he writes.  So we, as readers, must absorb both the legal disclaimer at the front of the book (“Slaughterhouse Five is a work of fiction…. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.”) to the author’s opening sentences (“All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”) The author compels us to imagine.

Kurt Vonnegut and I have a lot in common.  Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was cut off behind enemy lines and captured.  My father fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was cut off behind enemy lines, but managed to keep an ad-hoc combat formation of 60 stragglers intact and mostly alive until the Allied counterattack pushed the Germans back and “liberated” them.  Well, okay, so maybe Vonnegut and my dad have that in common.  But I grew up listening to my dad’s stories, and a lot of what Vonnegut says resonates.

But back to Vonnegut and me.  He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and so was I. Of course, he was born in 1922 and I was born in 1961, but, at least according to Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, this business of seeing time as linear and important is a function of our human perception, and really isn’t very important at all.  The Tralfamadorians were the aliens who captured Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, and took him to their home planet.  As Pilgrim navigates the horrors of his captivity, and the hunger and freezing cold of the winter of 1944-45, he occasionally departs the confines of our home planet and describes his captivity on Tralfamador, where he is treated far more humanely than he is here on earth.

Now I cannot imagine my dad babbling on about space aliens.  He was a pretty “in-the-moment” guy, my dad. But then again, my dad didn’t experience what Vonnegut experienced as a prisoner in Dresden.  Dresden was firebombed in February, 1945 and 25,000 people died. That was the most people killed in that kind of bombing until a few months later, when the first atomic bomb killed six times that many people in Hiroshima. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not apologizing for Dresden or Hiroshima or anything.  No sirree. You have to do what you have to do to defeat evil in this world.  And we are all a lot better off than we would have been if Hitler had won the war.  Well, at least most of us are.  

And, as far as the space aliens go, well, maybe that’s just what PTSD looked like to a guy who was part of a generation that lived through World War II.  For a minute, I was going to say “a generation that fought World War II,” but then I remembered one of my favorite parts of Vonnegut’s book was where he was talking about how NOT everybody really fought in the war.  And how the “toughest” people he knew were the ones who spent the war as public relations officers in Baltimore, while “the nicest veterans… the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.” That resonates.

Vonnegut survived the Dresden raids because he and some other prisoners were kept in a meat locker in a slaughterhouse. But then he had to come out to help clean up the bodies and the city.  His description of what he saw is worth reading.  And then, eventually, he got “liberated,” too.

So maybe the whole time-travel-space-alien thing was PTSD, and maybe not.  Maybe, if you were Vonnegut, and you wanted to write something that would remind people how bad things can get and how quickly they can get that way, you would invent some aliens to remind us that there really isn’t much difference between 70 years ago and today.  Because, for the Tralfamadorians, it’s all the same.  So it goes.

It is no surprise that someone who has spent a good part of his adult life studying and teaching philosophy wholeheartedly endorses this book about Plato. But even those who struggled through a standard course in philosophy should admit there is something compelling about projecting Plato into the 21st century as an author on a book tour, and relating his encounters with an audience of the technical elite at Google’s headquarters, as a panelist at a public discussion in New York City, responding to reader questions about their lives, loves and careers with an advice columnist, and being interviewed on cable news by a somewhat hostile host.  Through this creative vehicle, Professor Goldstein highlights the relevance of Plato’s dialogues for us today and makes a compelling case for their stature as timeless classics.

For the most part, the expository sections of the book are also refreshingly clear and serve to underscore the book’s major assertions about Plato.  I would summarize and prioritize these assertions as follows:  (1) Plato’s dialogues describe the life and teaching of Socrates rather than present a system or theory we might be tempted to call Plato’s philosophy; (2) through his dialogues, we can see that Plato believed the perspective of all of us as individuals was inherently flawed and distorted.  The only path to reduce the distortion and approach truth more closely was through dialogue with other individuals and the rigorous use of reason to adjudicate the inevitable differences. Plato’s dialogues thus take the form of discussions among several people. (3) Plato believed that everything in existence reflected an underlying rational structure, even though we as humans might be unable to fully comprehend that rational structure; (4) Plato believed that the pursuit of knowledge about the structure of everything was the path to truth, beauty and goodness, that humans had a natural affinity to pursue knowledge, and that the best kind of life was one which indulged this individual and collective pursuit.

Professor Goldstein has given us a true gem.  There is a clear roadmap to how and where specific ancient dialogues relate to the issues whose relevance explodes from the pages of her book.  In the process, Goldberg takes pains to point out that  the parts of philosophy that have proven resistant to the scientific method form the foundation of our ability to claim any progress at all in the scientific arena.  Hopefully, the book is making its way into the classroom as an entertaining and edifying complement to the works of the famous old dead dude himself.

J.D. Vance, Marine veteran of the war in Iraq and Yale Law School graduate, has written a powerful memoir of growing up as a poor child of "hillbilly royalty".  His book focuses on four generations of his own family: he describes their roots in a poor rural community in eastern Kentucky, the post-war migration that briefly brought one generation a glimpse of economic progress as they moved to manufacturing jobs in Middletown, Ohio, and the economic and social despair that overtook the last two generations of his relatives and people like them in Rust Belt America.  Vance exemplifies hope by telling his personal story of escaping that despair by first enlisting in the Marines, and then becoming the first in his family to earn a college degree. But his story is inextricably linked with the tragedy of those around him.  Vance describes a kind of cultural psychosis that traps most of the book's characters in recurring patterns of domestic violence, substance abuse, economic failure, dependence on welfare, and denial of the role their own behaviors play in perpetuating this cycle.

One key takeaway from Elegy is that drug abuse, crime, violence, welfare dependency, and the inability to shoulder the basic responsibilities of raising a family are endemic among poor white people in “Greater Appalachia.”  “Thanks to the massive migration from the poorer regions of Appalachia to places like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, hillbilly values spread widely along with hillbilly people” (p. 21), and “…it is in Greater Appalachia where the fortunes of working-class whites seem dimmest.  From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction, my home is a hub of misery.” (p. 4) “This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior.  We spend our way into the poorhouse…. Our homes are a chaotic mess.  We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs—sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both.  At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; …. We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.  Our kids perform poorly in school…. We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs.  Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last.  We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.” (pp. 146-47)   In short, socially destructive behaviors that are stereotypically “blamed” on minority and immigrant populations are endemic among the majority white population of the Rust Belt.

A second key point Vance makes is that the hillbillies of Greater Appalachia are unable or unwilling to admit the truth about their own responsibility for their circumstances. “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” (p. 7)   The author contends the cultural inability to admit the truth is a behavior learned as a coping mechanism in childhood. “In a December 2000 paper, sociologists Carol A. Markstrom, Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon found that avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping ‘significantly predicted resiliency’ among Appalachian teens.  Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist.” (p. 20)   He cites a number of examples of people around him manifesting this behavior. “One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she’d blather on about the importance of industriousness. ‘So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,’ she’d say.  This is the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she—despite never having worked in her life—was an obvious exception.” (p. 57)

Vance is quick to credit his grandparents and the Marine Corps with instilling in him a sense of personal responsibility, and helping him escape the cycle that grips so many of the people in his extended family.  But he acknowledges that he was lucky, and that the odds are clearly against children growing up under these circumstances. “For many kids, the first impulse is to escape, but people who lurch toward the exit rarely choose the right door.  This is how my aunt found herself married at sixteen to an abusive husband.  It’s how my mom, the salutatiorian of her high school class, had both a baby and a divorce, but not a single college credit under her belt before her teenage years were over.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability.  Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.” (p. 229)

To his credit, the author resists the temptation to assert that there are any easy solutions to the widespread problems of this part of America. He resists the urge to vilify the people he describes.  He credits his success to several key people who intervened and influenced him at important junctures.  He never asserts any personal superiority of intelligence or discipline or character.  In fact, he claims that the biggest hindrance to success for most of the people he grew up among is the lack of positive encouragement and role models.  He loves his family, and he is proud of his heritage.  He is, it seems, painfully describing problems he has experienced at a deeply personal level out of a sincere desire to illuminate a complex set of problems and to move us all toward a meaningful constellation of solutions.
One hindrance to implementing meaningful solutions is a political climate that takes advantage of the people of the region by pandering to the myths they want to believe rather than focusing on positive paths out of the current quagmire.  “Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents.  Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.  I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration.  What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives.  Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” (p. 194)  Some things that could help Vance’s hillbillies include:   (1) a new generation of politicians willing to speak uncomfortable truths; (2) widespread and sustained development of the mental tools necessary to recognize the truth of their circumstances, resources and constraints.

There is something about the story of a castaway that lends itself to the written journal.  I mean, Tom Hanks did a great job in the movie Cast Away and all, but I there is something to reading the account of a person who is supposed to be stranded alone.  After all, if you are watching them, it is like they aren't really alone, right?  Anyway, The Martian is a great twist on the castaway theme, with astronaut Mark Watney left for dead on the surface of the red planet after a freak accident during an emergency departure.   Even though the movie is due to be released soon, I am glad I read the book, and I think you will be, too.

Author Andy Weir does a wonderful job telling the story.  The language may be offensive to some, but I think the tone, language and rough humor are realistic and human.  At least, Weir captures the atmosphere I have experienced throughout my life in barracks, locker rooms, and other shared spaces where groups of competitive people are pursuing big goals under intense pressure.  It is clear Weir has done his technical homework, as well.  The book offers a terrific insight into the equipment available today that make missions to Mars possible.  As most of us know, the only thing lacking to send people to Mars is the will to do it.  The exploration of conditions necessary to make agriculture possible on Mars was particularly interesting to me.

At the individual level, there is something uplifting about an individual facing overwhelming odds who refuses to give up.  Watney's continuous use of brains and brawn to meet seemingly insurmountable challenges is inspiring.  I guess this will be true for most of us.  After all, the storyline of people journeying to a distant, seemingly inhospitable place in order to build a better future for themselves is central to our national narrative.  

And face it, there are no shortages of challenges facing our societies here on earth that rise to the level of being a threats to long-term survival.  Some of them could quickly become short-term threats as well.  From the perspective the individual, these threats may seem remote or impossible for us to overcome.  Here is where we find one valuable lesson of The Martian for each of us:  Mark Watney doesn't wait for NASA or some government official or other supreme power to solve his problems for him.  He identifies his options, and the likely consequences of each, and relentlessly pursues the best solutions within his power to control and implement those solutions.  Ultimately, we should all do the same.  The solutions to our global challenges lie within the realm of behaviors we can control ourselves--our own behaviors--whether it be writing your own Accountability Citizenship or acting on the positive ideas gleaned from someone else's.

       I read Cry, The Beloved Country recently with my son.  He had to read it over the summer and write an essay on it as he enters 9th grade, and I wanted to be able to speak with him about the book and the assignment.  Although the story is of South Africa and was published in 1948, I found Paton's writing to be exceptional.  Cry, The Beloved Country is a work of art that illuminates timeless themes of justice, integrity, and human experience.
       The book starts slowly, but the beautiful prose is present from the opening lines.  The story gathers speed throughout Book I, and Book II is hard to put down. In my opinion, Paton connects the reader with the humanity of his characters in a compelling and artful fashion.  Throughout the book, as Paton describes some mundane task or ritual of one of the characters, I found myself thinking, "Ah, yes, that is what I do when I am trying to..."  The fact that this transcendent humanity appears in characters of all colors is powerful today, but must have been exceedingly so 70 years ago.
       The single point I found most powerful was the musing of a father over the murder of his son.  As he is confronted with universal testimony of his son's charity and striving for justice, and then contrasts that with the circumstances of his death, the father repeatedly reflects to himself and others close to him how he doesn't understand why his son--who had devoted his life to helping others--was murdered. Paton never directly relates how the father answers this question, but the reader can surmise what conclusions the father has reached by his actions throughout the rest of the book.  As if to underscore his point, the author comes at the same theme with a clear description of the role of the judge as opposed to the character of the law administered by the judge.  Without preaching, or departing from a compelling narrative of real people navigating a series of perplexing and tragic events, Paton leads the reader to see the contrast between justice and injustice at the level of the individual and of the society as a whole.
       Another compelling aspect of this story is the description of the destructive effects progress can have on the environment, and how environmental degradation hastens the destruction of other social structures.  He is careful to illustrate how these destructive effects are avoidable.  Again, though written a long time ago, there are clear lessons for the challenges we face today in both the social and environmental realms.  I hope this book remains required reading for a long time to come, and that those who have not read it make a point of seeking it out.  Reading Cry, The Beloved Country is time well spent.

The authors of Ghost Fleet claim Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising as inspiration, and the front flap states the book is a thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October, another Clancy classic.  This book falls short of both, but is still a good summer read.  Further, it may be entertaining enough to distract some politicians from their quest for re-election long enough to educate them a little on some potential implications of the chronic lack of fiscal discipline and efficiency in government at every level.  My primary disappointments with the book lie in its sometimes plodding narrative and on its insistence of projecting the community of nation-states in the future as an extension of 20th century paradigms, albeit empowered with the latest technical gizmos.

On the first count, I found myself reading narrative that served only to explain the author's vision of the future, rather than developing the characters or the plot.  That is something I don't remember from any Clancy book.  I don't fault the realism of the scenarios the authors project, but the book has moments that read more like a Pentagon policy paper than a novel.

My second criticism is that the nation states and the way they interact reflect a 20th-century paradigm that I think is unlikely to hold in the future.  At the outset, the only change is that the Chinese Communist Party has been replaced by an oligarchy of business, administrative and military leaders.  One could argue that a similar change--with true elective Democratic and Republican leaders being replaced by an oligarchy of our own--is underway and likely to be completed faster in the United States than in China.  The authors acknowledge the power of non-governmental organizations in a peripheral way, but I think miss an opportunity to explore the power of such organizations, in a true information age, to reshape the relationship between nation states and between people and their government.  

Given the choice to project cold-war international relations into this narrative, it perhaps is inevitable that the plot revolves around a scenario that portrays a monolithically evil China versus the United States.  Something as broad as "the next world war" may have to sacrifice some realism at the individual level from the pen of most authors, but I found myself hoping for some Boris Pasternak or Herman Wouk moments that never came.  So I qualify my conclusion--that this is a readable and entertaining book--with the observation that the authors care more about their geopolitical projection (and its ability to sell books) than they do about a realistic portrayal of individual human behavior.