This week I finished:
Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, by Christopher Ryan: This book covered a huge part of what I’ve understood about how our culture formed. I didn’t learn much anthropology in school, maybe none. I woke up to it starting with podcast guest James Suzman‘s book Affluence Without Abundance, about the San in southern Africa. It revealed to me that people I thought were living in the Stone Age weren’t suffering or hopelessly behind the times. On the contrary, they were living in tune with their environment. In many ways, they lived in ways many in what I thought of as modernity would envy.
Later I found the book Tribe by podcast guest Sebastian Junger, the book The Dawn of Everything, and the videocast What Is Politics? by podcast guest Daniel (who only goes by his first name), which woke me up to more that was relevant to my work on leadership applied to sustainability.
Eventually I realized I had learned some anthropology earlier, particularly Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, but I only found it interesting when I read it. I didn’t connect it to our challenges today. I think I read it around when it came out, probably the late 1990s.
Likewise the book Sex At Dawn. I read it around 2010. I found it interesting. It prompted me to think of relationships with women differently, but it didn’t change how I looked at humanity and the world. Oh yeah, I read a lot of evolutionary psychology around then.
Well, Sex At Dawn‘s author wrote this week’s book Civilized to Death. It’s not a scholarly book, though appears thoroughly researched. Instead, it’s fun to read and still comprehensive. It covers the main parts of how human cultures and societies developed. It dismantles many myths about how our ancestors lived, how far back human culture goes (a lot longer than human history), our potential to live with liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and security.
I expect I’ll refer to this book in mine. As comprehensive as his book is, I have a lot to add, particularly about what to do today to restore liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and security.
I highly recommend it.
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss: I came across Moss’s blog several times of the years. I don’t remember getting into it, but I think I liked it. I found a copy this book while picking up litter around Cooper Union, if I remember right. Someone just left it out.
I loved it! I didn’t agree with all of Moss’s views or points, but I loved the writing and observations. It’s passionate. It seethes with love for what New York City has had. It’s not nostalgic nor fatalistic. Moss wants to restore what it’s lost and return from a global culture that destroyed meaning, purpose, community, warmth, and more and replaced them with glass and steel, cold transaction, blandness, and less humanity.
He (then she) arrived in New York City around when I did. I also was drawn by the gritty Times Square of the 1980s I saw the first time my father took me to visit from Philadelphia in 1981, contrasted with limousines and what I saw as sophistication. Still, when my father took me there again in 1986 or 1987 to interview at Columbia, thieves broke into his car and stole my suitcase. We had to shop early the next day to buy clothes for me to interview in.
The book celebrates many ages of the city. It connected me with Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I loved and remain strongly influenced by) in contrast to Robert Moses (I also read The Power Broker, which I loved for the quality of the research and writing and remain strongly influenced by). I connected me with the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which he quotes. Come to think of it, I’ll put that opening here to illustrate a lot of what was in this book, though the book focuses more on politics.
I love that opening. Does everyone else recognize almost every scene in it?
I may be straying too far from the book, but since I found the text from that scene while searching for it, here it is:
Chapter 1: He adored New York city, he idolised it all out of proportion…emm, no, make that: “he romanticized it all out of proportion”. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin…
Ammmm…no, let me start this over.
Chapter 1: He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle, bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles…
Ahh…corny, too corny for a man of my taste. Let me try and make it more profound.
Chapter 1: He adored New York city; to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams…
No, no, it’s gonna be too preachy. I mean, yeah, let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here.
Chapter 1: He adored New York city, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitised by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage!… Hmm, too angry, I don’t wanna be angry…
Chapter 1: He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat…I love this!
New York was his town and it always would be.